Sunset at Lion Rock - Paperback

by Matthew Wong Foreman (Author)

Sunset at Lion Rock is a coming-of-age novel set in the Aughts of a post-Handover Hong Kong, after the British returned the city to China in 1997. The son of a British father and a Hong Kong Chinese mother, Eric teeters between cultures, faiths, and histories, confused about everything. His childhood, shaped by his devoutly Buddhist mother, aunt, and grandmother-who believe he's the reincarnation of his dead uncle-haunts him at every turn.

Hong Kong is a place defined by collective amnesia about its own history and cultural significance. Amidst the chaos of his life in this fractured city, the one thing that Eric develops is his exquisite sense of poetry and pathos. When an unexpected relationship with a man at the mountain temple of Lion Rock Hill triggers in Eric a crisis of identity and faith, he begins to question his family, his beliefs, and, finally, the meaning of being a "Hong Konger."

Like Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous and Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life, Sunset at Lion Rock is by turns lyrical, probing, tragic, and disturbing. Eric's growing involvement in Hong Kong's 2019 pro-democracy protests and his eventual disillusionment with the rigid, homogenizing expectations placed upon him seem destined to collapse, but his refusal to accept his fate as cyclical and preordained lead to a way out he never could have planned.