I love every word of “A Tale of Two Cities.” The story, the characters, “it is a far, far better thing that I do” — all so dramatic and heartbreaking. I just wish Charles Dickens had come up with a different title. Yes, it’s brilliant, those T’s lined up rat-a-tat-tat; but in the 160 or so years since it was published, “A Tale of Two Cities” has become the speech- or opinion writer’s lazy metaphor of choice for the inequities of a particular city.
Every city, sad to say, in every age has had its haves and have-nots, its filthy rich and its desperately poor, and the divisions can go on endlessly from there. Cities can also be Black and white, male and female, green and concrete and — the silent assumption under all of these binaries — good and bad, however these terms are to be defined. Focusing on divisions, though, blocks constructive thought about cities, because in between is where the work of making and maintaining healthy cities is done.
The journalist Vaudine England’s “Fortune’s Bazaar: The Making of Hong Kong” explicitly rejects the tale-of-two-cities approach, and this is what makes it so illuminating. It is no small feat on the author’s part, given how easily Hong Kong’s history lends itself to the device: From 1841, when, as one legend has it, a seaman named Mohammed Arab raised the Union Jack at Possession Point, until China’s takeover in 1997, the British colonial rulers lived high up on Victoria Peak on Hong Kong Island, while down below their Chinese subjects swarmed Temple Street and packed into the Walled City in Kowloon. At the top, bridge and tennis; at the bottom, mahjong. And somehow, the story usually goes, Hong Kong became Asia’s greatest commercial port even though few residents could speak both English and Cantonese.
