- Description
- About the Author
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After four years as a war-tossed refugee in Australia, David T. K. Wong set out in 1947 on a Messageries Maritimes ship for his family's adopted home in Hong Kong, that little rump of alienated China flying the Union Jack.
He found the place edgy, rambunctious, anachronistic and anomalous, trying to survive the misfortunes and hardships imposed by forces beyond its control, like the refugees fleeing civil war in China, the Korean War and the United Nations sanctions against China. Such tests of its survival instinct were to come again and again over the next 22 years.
As the territory struggled, so did Wong. In his second instalment of a multivolume family memoir, he details with astonishing candour and wry humour his own encounters with poverty, racial discrimination and a fracturing marriage. His plight, however, was redeemed by the exceptionally kindness, affection and generosity of relatives and a cast of international friends.
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David T. K. Wong was born in Hong Kong and received his early education in China, Singapore and Australia. He has degrees in political science and journalism from Stanford University in America and a post-graduate diploma in public administration from the Institute of Social Studies at The Hague. Later, he also became a Fellow in Economics at Queen Elizabeth House at Oxford.
He is the founder of the annual David T. K. Wong Fellowship in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia in the UK. The Fellowship awards £26,000 to a successful candidate to write a serious work of fiction set in the Far East.
He worked as a journalist in Hong Kong, London and Singapore for a number of years before joining the Administrative Service of the Hong Kong Government. After retirement from public service, he became the Managing Director of an international trading firm for eight years before emigrating to London to embark upon a writing career.
He has published four collections of short stories and two novels. His short stories, some of which have earned him a number of awards, have appeared in various magazines in the United States, Great Britain, Hong Kong and other Asian countries.
Many of his stories have been broadcast by BBC Radio 4 in Britain, RTHK in Hong Kong and other stations in Ireland, Holland, Belgium and elsewhere. A number of his short stories have appeared in anthologies.
He is now resident in Malaysia where he is currently working on a multi-volume family memoir, of which this is the second volume.
Cover Type: Paperback
Page Count: 464
Year Published: 2015
Size: 152mm x 225mm