Diamond Hill

Diamond Hill is a fascinating novel about a place disappearing and a city changing, set in Hong Kong in the late 1980s. Diamond Hill is a run down shanty town with a Buddhist nunnery, drug addiction, and a faded memory of being a place for making films. When a man, nicknamed Buddha and a recovering heroin addict, takes refuge in the nunnery when he returns to his home of Hong Kong from Bangkok, he meets a strange selection of people, like the severe Iron Nun, Quartz who has forgotten her past, and Boss, a teenage gang leader who dreams of her escape. All the while, Diamond Hill is under threat from the various people and power across it, and looming redevelopment.

Kit Fan really draws you into the world of the novel, Hong Kong with looming knowledge of the handover from Britain to China coming in 1997, and into the issues of colonialism, displacement, and self that run through the characters' lives. The characters in general are heavily tied to language and place—Cantonese and English, Hong Kong and England and Thailand, Diamond Hill and elsewhere—and this gives a sense of some of the kinds of tension at play. Power is crucial: who has it and who doesn't, but also how it can be a presence in different ways. Buddha, as a protagonist drawn into others' lives to avoid thinking about his own, is an interesting viewpoint into the narrative, suggesting how hard it is to ignore both the past and the future.

Both a look at distinctive characters dealing with their past and what they might do next, and a wider commentary on Hong Kong at this particular moment, Diamond Hill is an eye-opening novel that I found gripping and atmospheric. I enjoyed the chance to find out more about Hong Kong's recent history too.

I always think I prefer slow burn cerebral books, that ponder meta questions and not a lot else happens, but then I read a book like this and realise, when done with authenticity, plot really can be for me too.

It’s the 1990s and Diamond hill is changing, this shanty town in Hong Kong’s poorest district, once a Pearl of Asia’s Hollywood, is rampant with Heroin addiction, and prime for gentrification. Britain are about to hand the island back to China in a post colonial agreement, and everyone has something to say about it.

The iron nun rules the historic nunnery that sits atop Diamond hill, she reluctantly takes in a ex addict, now a reformed monk, and is ostensibly fighting to protect the nunnery from the business men who seek to flatten it, for high rise luxury apartments, but whose best interest does she have at heart?

Full of larger than life characters, an exposé of organised crime and evocative depictions of a town that’s crumbling in front of its residents eyes, Diamond Hill is a journey into Hong Kong’s underbelly, the legacy of colonialism and the nefarious powers that be.

Although a poet first, the prose are decidedly paired back, letting the narrative speak for itself, on occasion, a line or two will sing out, particularly the voices of our religious characters, or the ancient orchid man, relaying to the reader some much needed wisdom. It feels as though are characters are communicating a set of life philosophies they have chosen to live by, and we watch as they interact, failing to understand how the other party could think anything different. Very much a story of arbitrary moral lines.

Fan manages to toe the line of plot focused romp and a strong political engagement through prose that demonstrate a keen understanding of Hong Kong’s patchwork history.

For readers of America is not the heart, we are all birds of Uganda & the nickel boys. This is a debut you would be a fool to sleep on.

Diamond Hill is a captivating and culturally rich piece of autofiction in which award-winning Hong-Kong-born poet and writer Kit Fan tells the story of the place in which he spent his childhood years and uses it as the foundation on which to build the fictional plot. It is 1987 and three years since Britain signed the Sino-British Joint Declaration agreeing to hand over its last colony, Hong Kong, to China in 1997. With that declaration, signed by Chinese Premier Zhao Ziyang and UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, comes the promise that the city will remain unchanged for fifty years. Under the "one country, two systems" it was agreed that Hong Kong would not practise the communist system present in mainland China, and Hong Kong's existing capitalist system and way of life would be unchanged for 50 years until 2047. But upheaval is already happening in Diamond Hill, in the east of Kowloon. Once the ‘Hollywood of the Orient,’ a prosperous and glamorous locale in the 50s and 60s, it was once home to some of Hong Kong's most famous film studios where Bruce Lee movies were once made. It is now a ramshackle shantytown and an eyesore right in the middle of a glitzy financial hub and it soon became the last shantytown in the region.

Buddha is a recovering heroin addict who is travelling home to Hong Kong, from Bangkok, at the insistence of Daishi, a dying Thai monk who previously assisted him in getting clean and who had saved him from death many times. He returns home to find the shabby neighbourhood being bulldozed to make room for gleaming towers. Parts of the settlement continued to be demolished over the years and the final sections were demolished in 2001, the same year 21-year-old Fan moved to the UK. Daishi instructs Buddha to stay at a small Buddhist monastery; the dilapidated convent in the heart of Diamond Hill is managed by a woman known as The Iron Nun. There he sleeps in a damp, dark, uncomfortable shed where he meets and befriends a female teenage gang leader called Boss, who was employed by the Triad to oversee heroin distribution in the local area and sleeps with a prostitute, Boss’s mother, a faded movie extra who is stuck in the past and who calls herself Audrey Hepburn. Diamond Hill is an exhilarating, memorable and evocative read from beginning to denouement and it's immediately clear that Fan has placed as much heart and soul as he possibly can into his portrayal of the place he still calls home.

The author’s love, sadness and nostalgia for the now-extinct neighbourhood are striking as well as moving and his perfectly poetic prose, rich descriptions and acute observations had me feeling sorrowful over a place I have never had the pleasure to visit. It illustrates adeptly the intense locality of Hong Kong and you very much feel the east meets west fusion of cultures that comes from the amalgamation of British and Chinese influences. The novel begins in 1987 and shows Hong Kong in transition; it's 10 years before the British hands the Island over to China but Buddhist nuns, drug gangs, property developers, the government and foreign powers each have itchy palms, and all want a piece of Diamond Hill. Corruption and redevelopment are rife and year after year the lights on the Hill thin exponentially as parties clamour to bulldoze the makeshift dwellings. When Buddha discovers that The Iron Nun plans to allow the neighbourhood he loves to be bulldozed and destroyed, he begins to question everything and everyone around him. A thoroughly enjoyable, powerful and majestic reading experience and one I highly recommend.