The eccentricities of the island rub off on everyone, the greed is more palpable, the lust and caution ride herd on both the young and old.ĭespite British attempts to evacuate the Walled City, the population has resiliently grown by leaps and bounds. The liberation of traditional ideals are unleashed. It is also when China’s internal strife borders on chaos. The British now shape Hong Kong into the playground for free trade for which it becomes famous. The first leaps forward from Volume One, into the 1930’s. It's nearly impossible not to follow him. The exquisite pain of those who lose their children touches Song in deep ways, and his need to understand the larger mysteries behind it drives him deeper into the folds of the city. In the midst of this, a series of child kidnappings, both inside the Walled City and in Hong Kong proper, begin to occur. ![]() He finds himself at the Walled City, a former Chinese military barracks that has since become an isolated haven for refugees escaping the political instability in mainland China. Slowly he entreats his friends to see the dead letter office as the exotic and mysterious game it is. Song has been given a job at the postal office in Kowloon, in the new territories across Hong Kong harbor. Lu Song, Tang Yubo and Ling Xi, mischievous boys, have embraced magic, acrobatics and puzzles as antidotes to a place that offers little stability and no fatherly guidance. ![]() The profitable, destructive opium wars have fueled the transformation of a place that was once a sleepy tropical inlet into a bustling, exotic, corrupt Mecca. Volume One takes place in the colonial era, when Hong Kong aches and strains from growing pains.
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