Hong Kong After Hong Kong
By Wong Chung Wai
Published by GOST Books
London, 2023

At certain times, Hong Kong seems to carry with it an air of disaster (from the Latin des astrum, meaning ill-starred). It is a portentous feeling, a black expectation. Whether the bureaucrats in Hong Kong or Beijing care to reflect on it or not, hundreds of thousands have left the city since 2019. Some for economic reasons, in search of new opportunities, for reasons beyond the political, beyond the fractures that have begun to spread; most because of the machinations and the sense of deception.

It was your friend, your neighbor, your acquaintance, your colleague. Everybody knows somebody who knows somebody: wrenched from the familiar, ripped from one’s history and from one’s ancestry, often, if not always, there, into the unknown, away from here. One of those was photographer Wong Chung Wai. He left in 2021, or, more appropriately, given how the title of his book, Hong Kong After Hong Kong, is rendered on the front cover, he has “gone.”