Word: holdsworth
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...pseudo family for homesick expats, a place of endless sundowners and fluttering Union Jacks?as well as these characteristics, the archetypal Empire clubs, until the late-20th century, shared another: unwritten color bars. May Holdsworth, in her history of Hong Kong expatriate life, Foreign Devils, cites Anne Baker, a Eurasian whose white husband had to resign from the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club in the 1950s upon marrying her. Also quoted is Michael Wright, a former government architect, who remembers that at the Hong Kong Club "there was nothing in the rules to say that Chinese couldn't join...
...Nonetheless, Foreign Devils: Expatriates in Hong Kong (Oxford University Press; 298 pages), an oral history by May Holdsworth, isn't all eulogy. Rather than confine herself to the classic expats?the "merchants, ministers and mandarins," in her own phrase?Holdsworth casts her net beyond the Peak and allows her subjects to tell how radically expatriate Hong Kong changed, especially in the last 20 years of British rule. That was when a new class of expat arrived?lawyers, bankers, restaurateurs?who helped transform a far-flung colony into a cosmopolitan business center...
...Holdsworth does give the old China hands their due, but Foreign Devils is at its best when it allows the missionaries who have made Hong Kong their calling or the Eurasians who have climbed the social ladder to tell their own stories. One glaring omission: despite Holdsworth mentioning that Filipinos are by far Hong Kong's largest expat group, she doesn't include a word from them...
...Foreign Devils comes alive when Holdsworth finds subjects whose lives were changed by Hong Kong, such as Stacy Mosher, an American who arrived "during that golden period when Hong Kong was no longer a colony and not yet an SAR," changed from teacher to journalist and married a Chinese political publisher. Not every expat was as galvanized by Hong Kong as Mosher, but there were enough to make Foreign Devils more than mere nostalgia...