Revived memories of a Gweilo - Rated 
Having spent 3 years in Hong Kong in the early 80's it brought back so many memories granted lots had changed but so much had not. Kowloon Walled City the open sewers, the electric cables winding from building to building. The ferries to Lantau, Chung Chau and Lamma. My youngest son was blonde and the same age as Martin would have been.He was always having his hair touched but neither he nor us felt imtimidated. My wife leaving the hotel in Causeway Bay at 8pm to go shopping and never being worried or frightened. Wonderfully written and a great trip down memory lane. JL
Wonderful mémoire of a Hong Kong childhood - Rated
I need not add much to the very positive reviews already given to this book. Gweilo was one of Booth's last works before he sadly died of cancer. Those who are interested in Hong Kong history will find the descriptions of 1950's Hong Kong fascinating. As a constantly changing place, it is helpful to have a snapshot in time preserved through the memories of a young boy. Highly recommended.
delightful, a joy to read - Rated
this book details life for the author and his parents during difficult times, amusing in places, a lot of Hong Kong history worth remembering, although some is best forgotten, shocking almost, but at least the author tells it like it was.
A beautiful portrait of a boy, his mother and the place they both loved - Rated
This delightful memoir is doubtless mainly of interest to people who know Hong Kong and want to know about, or remember, the very different Hong Kong that existed in the early 1950s. But it also stands on its own as a very touching piece of writing about childhood, a portrait of a feisty, loving mother, and an intimate gift by a man on his deathbed to his children. Martin Booth wrote this because he knew he was dying and because he was sad that his own father had never told him anything of his boyhood. In fact, after reading Gweilo, one's picture of Booth Sr is one of such a grotesque and narrow-minded philistine that it is hardly a surprise to hear he never sat down with his son and related the stories of his early life.
Gweilo is the story of the author's adventures in Hong Kong as a child, between the ages of seven and nine. It contains nothing about young Martin going to school, but describes instead his adventures and discoveries and the people and places he encountered, from coolie rickshaw drivers to the disturbed demobbed British officer Nagasaki Jim (presumably the model for Booth's 1985 novel Hiroshima Joe), with gangsters, cooks, colonials and lepers all thrown into the mix. Young Martin was an explorer and a curious child, but distinguished himself from the likes of his awful father by learning some Cantonese and seeing ordinary Chinese as real people rather than soul-less colonial subjects. Martin (and to some extent his mother) was open to trying almost anything new and always poking his nose into other people's business. The result is an often hilarious series of adventures, gathered into a rare and affectionate portrait of the lives of Hong Kongers of the time.
If you know the modern Hong Kong, it is intriguing to see just how much has changed, and how little. The place is physically unrecognisable, and sovereignty has passed from colonial Britain to Communist China. Beyond my laptop screen, the sun struggles to conquer a forest of skyscrapers and a mist of pollution. But Gweilo still rings many bells and the characters from the book still haunt Hong Kong, and at street level much remains the same.
It would be easy to carp that the author could not possibly have remembered all his young adventures in such detail, and to suspect that he embellished a few things, filled in gaps here and there and left out details he preferred to forget. But that would be mean-spirited, because this is the book he wanted to leave to his children to tell them of his early life, so although he has recreated a lost world, it must be as true as he could make it. This heartfelt tribute to old Hong Kong is his legacy.
not his best - Rated 
I have always enjoyed Booth's writing, and the period he writes about here is fascinating, and as always he picks out detail that seem to hold the imagination and evoke the picture, but this sometimes appears like 'Oedipus meest the cliched Hong Kong guide' with a bit of pidgin English thrown in
|
