Kit Fan transports us to Diamond Hill, a slum in Hong Kong and the larger-than-life characters than inhabited the area. It’s 1987, three years since Britain signed the Joint Declaration agreeing to hand over its last colony, Hong Kong, to China in 1997. With the declaration it was promised that the area would remain unchanged for fifty years. But everyone wants a piece of Diamond Hill.

Full review: https://westwordsreviews.wordpress.com/2021/07/25/diamond-hill-kit-fan/

This is a novel I really enjoyed. We get thrown into the story when Buddah, a recovering heroïn addict is on his way to a nunnery. We get to know Buddah, the nuns and some very vivid characters from the disappearing neighborhood. Well written, captivating with interesting characters.

The year is 1987. But in the rundown shanty town of Diamond Hill, once consider the Hollywood of the Orient, everyone is obsessed with one single date: July 1st 1997, the date of the Hong Kong Handover from Britain to China. The day that Hong Kong will be moving from one regime to another.

Buddha, the protagonist and narrator, is a heroin addict that came back to HK after spending some time in Bangkok, in a buddhist monastery.
In HK, he meets the most diverse cast of characters. Some dialogues and situations are so bizarre that everything feels like a fever dream. An actress that calls herself Audrey Hepburn and is obsessed with her past romance with Bruce Lee. A teenage gang leader named Boss that is escaping a death threat. A group of disturbing nuns with weird names like Quartz and Iron. A nameless property lawyer that has been attacked by bats. Everyone seems to be hiding their real identités behind made up names.
As the cast of characters tells Buddha the stories of their lives, the reader has the sensation that they seem to be living many lives in one. They are at the same time one and many (maybe that is the reason why they don't have proper names?) They are also a metaphor of a community that has to adopt a new identity and of the city that has to become a mass grave in order to leave room to progress
Buddha's lack of incentive takes him from one place to another, from one bizarre situation to the next one.

This book is the narration of a traumatic transition from a collective and an individual perspective. The language and the descriptions are beautiful in an unpretentious way that makes this slow paced book an honest and compelling piece of work.

Highly enjoyable. Not a fan of the cover

The run-up to the handover of Hong Kong from British to Chinese rule was a period of craziness, uncertainty, and a kind of 'fin de siecle transition that's perhaps being lived out again today as the Chinese move from a more 'hands-off' approach to a 'hands-on and hands in handcuffs' approach to governing the famous territory. Kit Fan's book 'Diamond Hill' captures a lot of that sense of transition and I couldn't help but play 'compare and contrast' with the changes being forced on Hong Kong today. It's always been a place that you feel could ignite in an instant and in 1987's Diamond Hill, there's plenty of tension and plenty of change.

An ex-heroin addict - I don't think he's ever named, people just call him Buddha - is sent back to Hong Kong by his Buddhist leader, the man who saved him by detoxing him and teaching him the Buddhist ways in a temple in Bangkok. We gradually learn the circumstances of his departure as the book unfurls. He arrives at a Buddhist nunnery in the once-glamorous district of Diamond Hill, to be hosted by a woman called the Iron Nun, another follower of his guru (forgive me, I'm not entirely sure if Buddhists have gurus or if I'm using the term incorrectly). Diamond Hill is about to change. The old decrepit buildings will be torn down and new high rises built in their place. Amongst the inhabitants of the district, Buddha finds a young girl, Boss and her mother Audrey Hepburn. Boss works with the Triads and is a successful young businesswoman. Her mother is a faded beauty who once slept with Bruce Lee - or so she claims.

The book gives us these great characters and then throws in a few more. A fragile nun called Quartz, an old man with a historic orchid collection, a strange beggar who throws out odd lucid phrases. The people are all multi-dimensional, fascinating, and every bit as colourful as their surroundings.

The writing is exceptional. You can feel the heat, the damp, the non=stop rain dripping through Buddha's hut, the mud sliding down the hillside, smell the bats in the cave, taste the forbidden chicken broths and congee. It's a great book. I'm slightly underwhelmed by the ending and not 100% sure I completely understood it, but I'd definitely be the first in line with my hand up when another Kit Fan book comes along.

With thanks to Netgalley and the Publishers. I hope this book will be a great success.

It's one of the best English novels about Hong Kong that I've read.

Set in the late 1980s, the debut novel of Kt Fan follows a former heroin addict who was sent back to Hong Kong after his two years' stay in a monastery in Bangkok. Haunted by his past and with no where else to go, the former addict took refuge in a nunnery on the Diamond Hill. Once the "Hollywood of the Orient", Diamond Hill has become a shanty town run by drug gangs and enveloped with poverty. Being the eyesore right in the middle of the Asian financial hub, the shanty town could not escape its fate of being bulldozed to make room for gleaming skyscrapers. The protagonist witnessed all the struggles and sentiments that was brought by the changing city to the residents in Diamond Hill...

As a girl who was born and raised in Hong Kong, reading this book felt like home (particularly the local traditions and dialects). But what I love most about this book was how it explored colonialism, identity and the inevitable loss accompanied by the never stopping time. It's definitely a sentimental read.

Diamond Hill is a debut novel by Kit Fan, a born and raised Hong Konger, who moved to the UK at the age of 21. Diamond Hill is an area on the Kowloon side of Hong Kong and contrary to its name, Diamond Hill has never contained any diamonds. In Cantonese, the word “diamond” (鑽石) has the same pronunciation as “to drill rocks” and Diamond Hill used to be a stone quarry. Diamond Hill has a long history and is an area in Hong Kong that was settled long before the British arrived, as early as the 18th century. Diamond Hill was once considered the “Hollywood of the Orient” but it turned into an ungoverned slum of squatters and shanty homes. Hong Kong’s lack of public housing created slums all over Hong Kong from the 1950s to the late 1980s. During this time the Kai Tak airport was located nearby. Planes landing had to brush past both Diamond Hill and the infamous Walled City slums nearby making it one of the most dangerous places to land a plane back in the day. Today, most slums have been demolished, with both Diamond Hill and the Walled City having been refurbished into a stunning park and garden. The Nian Lian Garden has replaced the shacks and the Chi Lin Nunnery, which is likely the one referenced in the book as it was built in the 1930s as a Buddhist nun retreat and was rebuilt in 1998.

Diamond Hill takes place in the late 80s, just as demolition is starting to take place in squatter slums all over Hong Kong, all the while the current British government is working on handing Hong Kong back over to China. Diamond Hill is run by triad gangsters and drug dealers and is enveloped with poverty, yet there is a feeling of community within its shanty homes. The narrator, nicknamed Buddha, is a former heroin addict that has found himself back at his former home after recovering from his addiction under the guidance of a monk he befriended while in Thailand who has since gone missing. While not a full monk himself, he appears as one. As he arrives in Diamond Hill, he runs into an eccentric woman, Aubrey Hepburn, who insists she dated Bruce Lee and is aggressively cutting a teenage girl’s hair. Having prior experience as a hairdresser, Buddha assists in cutting the girl’s hair. Buddha then makes his way to the temple. The head nun, the Iron Nun as she is known, is in a fight to keep the temple in its place with the looming threat of demolition while a new nun, Quartz, aims to rid herself of her past. Buddha learns that the teenage girl he assisted, Boss, runs a drug scheme under the Triad gang and that Aubrey Hepburn is her adoptive mother who has ideations of a former time of ritz and glamour. Each character is attempting to escape their past while mourning for the change that is occurring in the city and the fear that is brewing with the city’s handover.

The book simultaneously explores colonialism, displacement, loss, and how the past always tangles with the future. It’s a testament of love to a changing city while exploring a compelling narrative of identity and the inability to escape our past. The story is a mirror of misfit characters in a misfit city that’s not been able to claim its own identity with others that are constantly meddling in its future. While its ending is ambivalent, each character has finally made choices for themselves and are moving towards a future that they will control, leaving the reader wondering about the outcome of each of the characters and the city that gets left behind. Kit Fan’s writing style has beautiful similarities to Murakami in terms of tone and unique character work but he brings them together in his own unique and poetic style. Kit Fan’s writing is visceral and raw, with its writing appropriately paired and complemented with Cantonese characters and translations, emphasising just how robust and expressive Cantonese is, deepening the story’s meaning and effect on the reader while giving off an undeniable Hong Kong feel.

This novel has been one of my favourite reads of 2021 thus far. I was enthralled with the plot, its characters, and the narrative style. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who has spent any time in Hong Kong or is interested in its robust history. I also think that those who are bilingual in both written Cantonese and English will especially enjoy this novel. Even for those who have never had the pleasure of visiting Hong Kong, this book holds a riveting tale with a historical premise that would be appealing to most.

I lived in Hong Kong at the time this story takes place, a short walk from a large hillside shantytown similar to the one at Diamond Hill. The vivid, exquisite writing in this book took me back there in all its sights, sounds, and smells, and its cast of characters, as vividly as if I'd stepped into a time machine. The setting might feel exotic, even exaggeratedly so, to someone who wasn't there. but I assure you that his depiction will transport you into a living, breathing, and very real world.

The author displays his poet's sense not so much in the prose, which is clean and straightforward, without excessive poetic flourishes, but in the masterful way he weaves themes of loss and transformation into everything. We follow five lost souls in a close-knit shantytown (Diamond Hill) being gutted body and soul, in a colony (Hong Kong) recently sentenced to the unwelcome fate of handover over to a monstrous totalitarian state. Through each of these elements the author explores various responses to seemingly unstoppable fate. Not everyone has a happy ending, but the books leaves one more thoughtful than depressed. A later scene sums it all up, as a minor character attempts to bury dying orchids, which keep popping back up through the heavy soil.

There were places in the book where the gloom might have gone on a bit too long, but overall, this is one of the best English language novels about Hong Kong I've read.

Diamond Hill, Kit Fan’s debut novel, is that rarest of things in fiction: both a timely and compelling narrative in its own right and a love letter to a disappearing city that becomes an enduring metaphor for individual identity, power and transformation.

Set in Hong Kong in 1987, four years after the signing of the Joint Declaration, it follows the ironically named Buddha, a recovering heroin addict, sent back to Hong Kong by his dying mentor in Bangkok to live in a dilapidated nunnery in the eponymous Diamond Hill. Once known as the Hollywood of the Orient - mainly due to its associations with the actor Bruce Lee - the area has since become the last shanty town in Hong Kong, epitomised by its nihilistic descent into poverty but kept financially afloat - in a knowing nod to the historic Opium Wars - by its outflow of drugs, controlled by the charismatic teenage girl known simply as Boss.

Diamond Hill’s real value, however, lies in its status as a piece of prime real estate for the encroaching developers and the novel’s outward plot, at least, centres on this David and Goliath struggle as the disempowered but enterprising residents battle to protect their homes against the relentless onslaught of colonial and national greed.

Amidst this larger battle, however, civil conflicts and betrayals are rife as personal interests come to bear on the characters, setting the stage for a complex, poignant descent into the war for individual recognition.
The exploration of disempowerment is nothing new in fiction, of course, but Fan’s focus on Hong Kong at this particular point in history, and specifically the fate of Diamond Hill, gives perfect voice to the complexity of a theme which continues to resonate today in the city. Many of those in Hong Kong see themselves as children of the UK, albeit adopted ones, and the fear of change and transformation as 1997 approaches is reflected in the microcosm of the novel’s plot and its characters alike. Both Boss and her mother - the wonderful Audrey Hepburn - identify themselves as British, although their outdated and stereotypical allusions to the culture (the heavy gold jewellery; the Laura Ashley faux Victoriana of Boss’s slum bedroom) are rudely revealed as merely a pastiche when set against the white colonial property developers in their very real Bentleys.

Both the willing and unwilling suppression of memories is an ongoing theme in the novel and plays out at both a personal and wider level, most notably through Buddha himself and the fascinating Quartz, a novice at the nunnery whose lack of memory before joining the order becomes central to the story. But it is important on a political level, too, most specifically regarding the question of agency through history. Here too, however, Fan offers a nuanced and convincing argument. It’s not that Hongkongers have forgotten the stick for the carrot, but that their identities have been shaped over generations into something unique and individual that is now under very palpable threat. I was reminded at times of Fruit Chan’s “Made in Hong Kong” which similarly deals with themes of disenfranchisement amongst the lower classes under the shadow of the Handover, and the way in which without power or money to secure their fate, characters are forced to find agency through the sheer will of human spirit and communal values. Though not as pessimistic in its outlook as Made in Hong Kong there is something equally inevitable about the fate of the players in Diamond Hill and the note of uncertainty that the novel ends on which perfectly captures the mood of the moment.

Fan’s genesis as a poet and short story writer as well as his personal investment in the story is evidenced in his elegant prose which is, by turns, muscular and beautifully lyrical. His language skillfully achieves that sweet spot peculiar to Hong Kong in its mix of poetic, idiosyncratic metaphor and street slang, including its liberal use of inventive and frequently hilarious profanities.

Neither is the apparent smallness of Diamond Hill’s plot an accident, for this is a novel which strives and wholeheartedly achieves more than the sum of its parts. Structured around the lunisolar calendar, and set over the course of a year, the largest character in Diamond Hill is Diamond Hill itself, whose physical changes over the novel become both the crucible and the mirror of the events within it. In writing the novel, Fan has crafted both a fascinating story and a poignant memory of himself which will endure as a record of history. I can only hope it receives as wide a readership as possible both now and in the years to come. Highly recommended.

I really enjoyed this accomplished debut - it reminded me of Lawrence Osborne filmed by Wong Kar-Wai. It's a very evocative portrait of a grimy, rainy Hong Kong shanty town in 1987 under the shadow of Handover, Black Monday, redevelopment, a glamorous past and Kai Tak Airport. The characters and themes are complex and well-drawn, with an engaging plot featuring teenage drug dealers, Audrey Hepburn (kind of), nuns and copious Cantonese profanity. I particularly enjoyed the characters' reflections on what Handover would mean - a very timely theme. What more could you want? A really engaging read, thank you for the ARC.

Kit Fan's novel is absolutely engaging, enjoyable and fast-paced; I loved the eccentricity of the characters and the progression of the plot.