The Evergreen Tea House: A Hong Kong Novel （David T. K. Wong）

Memories of the colonial past are fading. This new edition of David T. K. Wong’s sweeping historical novel brings the past vividly to life.
 
The Evergreen Tea House is a deftly crafted, provocative and poignant tale which blends mismatched love and twisted ambition with political intrigue and diplomatic mendacity. Set in Hong Kong during the twilight years of British rule, the characters live through tumultuous events – the Japanese occupation, the Korean War, the Cultural Revolution – and the emotional trauma associated with the Sino-British Joint Declaration, which precipitated Hong Kong’s handover to China.
 
The unique and noteworthy element of this novel, beyond its strong evocation of time and place and its careful melding of facts with fiction, is its interpretation of historical events through a Chinese perspective.
 
David T. K. Wong — who started his working life as a dishwasher in a Chinese restaurant before becoming a journalist, teacher, colonial bureaucrat, international businessman, and a writer of short stories and novels — is a man of many parts. At the ripe old age of 89 he has publicly exposed for the first time — in Hong Kong Confidential — some of the shadier insider dealings in the colonial administration during the governorship of Sir Murray MacLehose.
 
He has now completed the fourth volume of his family memoirs, dealing with the goings-on in the Hong Kong commercial sector during the 1980s when he was the managing director of Li & Fung, an international trading company. Wong is the founder of the annual David T. K. Wong Fellowship in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia in the UK. He is now resident in Malaysia.