B6 EZ BD THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 13 , 2022And before you ask, twelve blackberries, or
eighteen blueberries,” one person reports. “I
worry that large swaths of society cannot love
each other, but my relationship with my wife is
solid. She’s the little bit of the future that I can
still imagine,” says another. These gleanings
feel like the book’s freshest offering — a rich
supply of something very like gossip.
What fascinated Rose about marriage was
how it presents an observer with “parallel
lives”: The members of a couple build narra-
tives of their experiences which are sometimes
similar but also, inevitably, separate. A suc-
cessful marriage doesn’t hinge on these narra-
tives’ relationship to objective truth. But the
couple has to agree about what kind of story
they’re in. Havrilesky’s and Kipnis’s books
confirm this much, at least: There’s nothing
worse than losing your shared sense of plot.
There’s nothing more excruciating, and worth-
while, than the struggle to recover it. And
there’s always an outsider ready to eavesdrop.nections, our mental habits grooved by feeds
that algorithmically deliver whatever triggers
us.
You detect that crampedness in the book’s
small, comprehensively interrogated cast of
characters. You see it, too, in the skippable
second chapter, which rehearses provocations
familiar to readers of Kipnis’s recent work,
especially “Unwanted Advances” from 2017:
The campus left has abandoned liberation for
puritanism; society punishes sexual trans-
gressors too harshly; we villainize intergener-
ational pairings. Old dust-ups — a Jezebel
article she disliked, Jeffrey Toobin’s suspen-
sion from CNN — occupy bafflingly broad
tracts of real estate. Kipnis’s intellectual rest-
lessness is what makes her so fun to read. In
“Love in the Time of Contagion,” she seems to
be climbing the walls.
So it’s a relief to reach the book’s coda,
which collects short dispatches “overheard on
the internet” about relationships in lockdown.
It’s as if Kipnis has cracked open a window.
Here are entire unexplored worlds: “He counts
out how many berries he eats for breakfast.exhausting — feels like looking too long at a
hyperrealist painting. Objects are rendered in
eye-popping detail, but our gaze has nowhere
to rest.
The absence of a unifying narrative may be
the point. Kipnis believes that we overvalue
tidiness: The #MeToo movement primed us to
view physicality with suspicion, she argues,
and the pandemic only exacerbated our libido-
killing compulsion to police our interpersonal
boundaries. Kipnis’s best-known work may be
her 2003 anti-marriage polemic, “Against
Love,” but she shares at least this cornerstone
of Havrilesky’s worldview: True intimacy is
less glamorous and more laborious than any-
one admits.
Decades from now, we might view “Love in
the Time of Contagion” as, inescapably, a
“pandemic book” less because of its subject
matter than because of something more essen-
tial about its composition. Its circling obses-
siveness and sometimes-distorted sense of
scale feel like outgrowths of this moment: a
period when many of us have retreated, dis-
couraged from making unexpected new con-Book WorldHer lyrical book is part diary and part love
letter to her hometown, although she con-
cedes that she didn’t actually come to love it
until she moved away from her family’s
apartment to attend the University of Hong
Kong. She inhabited an entirely different
world than the one known to expats, starting
out cloistered in a working-class area called
To Kwa Wan on the Kowloon side of the
harbor, where, she recalls, “I don’t recall ever
running into a single white person.”
Cheung’s Hong Kong was far removed
from the power brokers and business types
who frequented the Mandarin Oriental hotel
coffee shop and the prestigious Hong Kong
Club. She hung out in the small bookstores
that doubled as coffee shops, the restaurants
atop the wet markets, the warehouses where
indie bands played, the record shops and the
waterfront parks. She had 22 different room-
mates in six different apartments from the
time she left home for university until she
met her partner.
Clifford had a close-up look at the 1997
handover events, from the rain-drenched
ceremony on the harbor front to the Chinese
border, where he watched thousands of
People’s Liberation Army troops pour over.
Cheung in 1997 watched the handover
unfolding on television as an unknowing
4-year-old kindergartner enjoying steamed
fish. When planes took off from the nearby
airport, rattling her home as they whisked
away Hongkongers anxious to flee Chinese
rule, Cheung professes that she was “oblivi-
ous to it all.” Later, she says, “Post-handover,
my life is exactly the same.” She was still
eating her pork and egg congee and enjoying
Japanese anime cartoons.
She writes about joining the protests in
2019 but never feeling entirely a part. She
went to work most weekdays and on week-
ends donned her yellow hard hat and protec-
tive gear, not really knowing many of her
fellow protesters. “It feels as if those two
worlds do not converge,” she writes.
She has considered leaving, like many of
her friends. But “for now,” she writes, “I’d like
to stay as long as is possible, knowing one day
it won’t be possible anymore.”
While coming from different vantage
points, both books end on a similarly bleak
note. Clifford concludes, “Hong Kong as a free
city is no more.” Cheung writes, “This book is
about the many ways a city can disappear, but
also the many ways we, its people, survive.”saying, “May the Lord’s peace and grace be
with you and your family.”
“This is the man China wants to destroy
because of what he believes,” Clifford writes
angrily. “Why is China afraid of Jimmy Lai?
Why is China afraid of the Hong Kong people?
Why is China afraid of freedom?” He later
answers his own question, saying, “Hong
Kong is a key battleground in China’s cam-
paign to extinguish free thought,” which, he
argues, has global consequences.
“China wants to decide what can be said,
what slogans can be shouted, even what
songs can be sung. China wants to decide
whom presidents and prime ministers and
parliamentarians can meet,” Clifford writes.
He argues for the West to totally decouple its
“economic, cultural, and personal links” to
China — without explaining how such a
separation could feasibly occur given the
world’s interlinked economies. And in a bit of
hyperbole, he adds, “Anything less may
amount to an American death wish.”
Cheung spends little time on political
analysis or colonial history. She even offers
what sounds like an apology, writing, “I did
not want to write a book ‘about Hong Kong’”
and adding, “Maybe this isn’t the book you
expected to read.” But through her graceful
writing, especially about her early years, we
learn about Hong Kong’s many different
worlds and social strata, and her struggles to
find her place.
She went to an expensive international
primary school run by Singaporeans — not
because her father could afford it but out of
his “wounded pride,” suggesting she was not
accepted to the elite public schools because
she was born in mainland China. In the
primary school, she barely understood Eng-
lish, and her native language, Cantonese, was
forbidden on campus, with Mandarin being
the medium of instruction. When her friends
from the Singaporean school went off to even
pricier international high schools, she ended
up back in the public school system, where
she was “smack in the middle between the
kids on social welfare and the ones who get
sent off to English boarding schools.”
When Cheung’s old primary-school friends
later called her “local,” it wasn’t as a compli-
ment. And while other high school students
set their sights on prestigious universities in
the United States or Britain, she knew
nothing about applying for scholarships and
stayed home. “To the world I am in then,” she
writes, “the University of Hong Kong is the
holy grail.” She excelled in English and was
drawn to writing and journalism, even
though her teachers called it a “waste”
because she didn’t choose to study law.and prompted a wave of emigration.
Karen Cheung’s “The Impossible City: A
Hong Kong Memoir” is a more personal work,
detailing her search for identity, struggles
with depression and political awakening,
which came about around the time of the
most recent protests. The unrest serves
primarily as a backdrop to her biography as a
young Chinese woman who came of age in the
post-colonial years when Hong Kong was
under China’s sovereignty; initially little
changed, and there was general optimism
that the territory would be allowed to
maintain its separate, autonomous system
unimpeded for 50 years, as China had
pledged in the handover.
While Clifford is angry and unsparing in
his criticisms of China’s communist leaders
and Hong Kong’s local officials, Cheung offers
more of a sad lament for a city that she has
called home since the age of 1 but that she
only recently grew to love.
Clifford lived in Hong Kong long enough to
gain status as a permanent resident with
voting rights. But he still at times writes
about the city as an expatriate outside
observer looking in. He sprinkles his chapters
with a few characters — his barber, a financial
professional, an art gallery owner and his
Cantonese teacher, whose goal was to com-
pile the first dictionary of Cantonese. But
these characters are rarely fully developed
beyond a few pages, and most quickly
disappear.
He also devotes surprisingly scant atten-
tion to the protests that erupted in early June
2019 and continued into early 2020. “The
2019 summer of democracy descended into
an increasingly bitter and violent autumn of
discontent,” he notes in a chapter called “The
Endgame.” He talks about how “police vio-
lence... sparked violence on the protesters’
side.” But he hurries through or skips over
major events in the timeline.
Clifford, now back in the United States, is a
former board member for Next Digital, the
parent company of the popular pro-democra-
cy newspaper Apple Daily, which was forced
to close in 2021 when its top editors were
arrested and the paper’s assets frozen. Its
publisher, Jimmy Lai, was arrested in 2020.
Clifford does not hide his admiration for Lai,
who messaged the author “I’m being arrest-
ed” just as Clifford was on the way to meet
him for breakfast. “The arrest of Jimmy Lai
Chee-ying in February 2020 marked the
intensification of a more sinister approach by
Hong Kong authorities,” Clifford writes.
Lai, who is Catholic, wrote to Clifford from
prison, apologizing to the author for causing
him trouble because of their association andC
hina’s communist authorities in Beijing
and their handpicked leaders in Hong
Kong have been busy lately trying to
rewrite the recent tumultuous history of this
former British colony turned Chinese “special
administrative region.”
In the government’s revisionist narrative
of the 2019 protests, espoused repeatedly in
official pronouncements and the state-run
media, no mention is made of the unpopular
extradition bill that triggered the unrest or
the heavy-handed police response that fueled
citizens’ anger. Instead, the near-daily dem-
onstrations were “violent riots” by pro-inde-
pendence separatists and were orchestrated
by anti-China “foreign forces” intent on
undermining communist rule. China’s lead-
ership insists that the new national security
law has restored peace and stability and that
China’s drastic overhaul of the city’s electoral
system has improved its democratic develop-
ment.
Fortunately, a plethora of new books
published or in the pipeline is offering a
corrective, with journalists and authors pro-
viding a contemporaneous record of the
sweeping changes that have convulsed Hong
Kong since the Occupy Central protests, also
called the Umbrella Revolution, in 2014. But
most observers writing about Hong Kong use
1997 as their starting point, the time when the
city ended a century and a half as a British
colony and began an uncertain future under
Chinese sovereignty.
Two recent books cover roughly that same
period, from the handover through the
Umbrella Revolution and up to the 2019
protests and the imposition of the security
law. But the authors come from widely
different backgrounds, experiences and sen-
sibilities.
“Today Hong Kong, Tomorrow the World:
What China’s Crackdown Reveals About Its
Plans to End Freedom Everywhere,” by Mark
L. Clifford, is the more polemical of the two.
Clifford, an American former journalist,
spent almost three decades in Hong Kong,
first for the now-defunct Far Eastern Eco-
nomic Review magazine and later as editor in
chief of two of the city’s surviving English-
language newspapers, the Standard and the
South China Morning Post. His is a journalis-
tic book in the traditional sense, offering
readers a rapid-fire recounting of the key
events from the Occupy movement to the
arrests of prominent politicians and journal-
ists in 2020 and 2021. He also takes time to
delve into the history of the handover
negotiations between Britain and China, as
well as the Tiananmen Square crackdown of
1989, which plunged Hong Kong into crisisFrom a local and an expat, two stories of Hong Kong — and similar worriesFOREIGN AFFAIRS REVIEW BY KEITH RICHBURGTODAY HONG
KONG,
TOMORROW
THE WORLD
What China’s
Crackdown
Reveals About
Its Plans to End
Freedom
Everywhere
By Mark L.
Clifford
St. Martin’s.
306 pp. $29.99THE
IMPOSSIBLE
CITY
A Hong Kong
Memoir
By Karen
Cheung
Random House.
320 pp. $28Keith Richburg is the director of the University of
Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Center.
He covered the Hong Kong handover as a
correspondent for The Washington Post.ing me with his nerves and his bad judgment.”
At their wedding: “I looked like an over-
wrapped present — hormonal, overwhelmed,
underslept, jittery, full of dread.” But for every
complaint about his throat-clearing (“like the
fussiest butler in the mansion”), there are
some exquisitely simple moments of recogni-
tion: “Bill is my only friend,” she thinks when,
at a tense moment, he puts his hand on her
knee.
At some point over the years, Havrilesky
explains, “my love had started to take the
shape of sleepwalking.” In her view, a marriage
that depends on peacekeeping through silence
and studious ignorance might as well be dead;
paying attention is an unalloyed, romantic
good. So is self-expression: She won’t settle for
one descriptor when she can have six. The
prose tumbles out in helpless run-ons, earnest
asyndeton: An infant is “a cloud, a ball of white
light, a sweet duckling that smells like vanilla
beans, a giggling monster, an angry rabbit.”
Recounting their lives together, she overex-
tends her metaphors so far it’s like she’s
hoping to hear the joints pop.
When that verbosity swamps their fights,
her husband wades in: “Thankfully, Bill is Bill,”
she writes. “He boarded a boat and sailed
down my river of words until we reached dry
land, together.” He listens not just with pa-
tience but also with interest. Havrilesky won’t
win over everyone with her high-saturation
comic style. But to readers receptive to that
kind of swashbuckling bluster — Bill, I sus-
pect, among them — the sheer effort of her
prose is a kind of valentine.
Readers who crave that warm feeling of
being taken into someone’s confidence will
also find a lot to like in Laura Kipnis’s “Love in
the Time of Contagion: A Diagnosis.” (Apolo-
gies to The Washington Post’s copy desk,
which, not long into 2020, unofficially banned
all forms of the phrase “in the time of” in
pandemic-related headlines.) Like Havrilesky,
Kipnis, a social critic and film professor, styles
herself as a teller of unflattering truths, em-
bracing life’s messes, completely uninhibited.
She doesn’t disclose as much about her cur-
rent relationship. But her book, taking stock of
the pandemic’s effects on intimacy, does go
deep into her conversations with friends.
One chapter, exploring the concept of “code-
pendency,” grows out of Zooms with a recent
divorcé, Mason, in which they dissect his
20-year marriage to an alcoholic. Another
maps the dense entanglements of a former
student, Zelda — “queer, Black, and very
online” — who acts as our field guide to a new
lingua franca of hookups, screenshots and
DMs. (Young adults, Kipnis marvels, are “cre-
ative geniuses at using their phones and
screens to create unbelievable romantic chaos
and misery.”) The commentary about various
interpersonal dynamics never quite resolves
into a particular thesis. Reading these chap-
ters — juicy and repetitive, absorbing andMARRIAGE FROM B1Peeking into other people’s relationships for enlightenment and gossipANTHONY WALLACE/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGESIn their books,
Heather Havrilesky
and Laura Kipnis
offer intimate
examinations of the
state of modern love
— Havrilesky in
tales from her own
marriage and
Kipnis through the
lens of the
pandemic.Sophia Nguyen is an assistant editor for Outlook
and PostEverything at The Washington Post.FOREVERLAND
On the Divine
Tedium of
Marriage
By Heather
Havrilesky
Ecco.
304 pp. $27.99LOVE IN THE
TIME OF
CONTAGION
A Diagnosis
By Laura Kipnis
Pantheon.
224 pp. $26