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cimoreneI'm having an unexpected problem reading the second Karla trilogy book: it's mostly focused on British Hong Kong (in spite of a solid dose of George Smiley and Peter Guillam in London). I don't think I've ever read anything set there before, and I just keep getting distracted by the colonialism - not the attitude of the author or even necessarily the characters (not always), just the... plausibly realistic facts of it, I guess.
Obviously this isn't a new issue - colonialism is a familiar subject of literature! - so I assume it's the new-to-me setting, and the context that I know comparatively less about, which had given me less opportunity to get used to thinking about it.
On the other hand, after this book and recently seeing Crazy Rich Asians I'm eager to read more about the region and this history.
And finally there's an element of personal curiosity - my paternal great-grandfather, a Russian jew, was recalled from Oxford by his White Russian father to fight the first Russian revolution and then fled Moscow to Hong Kong, where he spent years amassing wealth as an opium smuggler, winding up in Chinese prison. He emigrated to Canada and then New York thereafter and used his prison connections to continue smuggling opium to North America for some time before switching to other forms of questionably legal import. My great-grandmother had the sense to divorce him after only a few years and we know fairly little about him as a result, but my grandfather had a Chinese junk ship in a bottle from him, and having now encountered smugglers and Chinese junks and Hong Kong White Russians in the novel, my imagination is fired up.
Obviously this isn't a new issue - colonialism is a familiar subject of literature! - so I assume it's the new-to-me setting, and the context that I know comparatively less about, which had given me less opportunity to get used to thinking about it.
On the other hand, after this book and recently seeing Crazy Rich Asians I'm eager to read more about the region and this history.
And finally there's an element of personal curiosity - my paternal great-grandfather, a Russian jew, was recalled from Oxford by his White Russian father to fight the first Russian revolution and then fled Moscow to Hong Kong, where he spent years amassing wealth as an opium smuggler, winding up in Chinese prison. He emigrated to Canada and then New York thereafter and used his prison connections to continue smuggling opium to North America for some time before switching to other forms of questionably legal import. My great-grandmother had the sense to divorce him after only a few years and we know fairly little about him as a result, but my grandfather had a Chinese junk ship in a bottle from him, and having now encountered smugglers and Chinese junks and Hong Kong White Russians in the novel, my imagination is fired up.
