Diamond Hill

February 15, 2021
A lost soul is stuck between the slums and salvation. It's 1987. The narrator is a recovering heroin addict, sent by a dying Thai monk to live in a run-down Hong Kong convent. There, he sleeps in a dark, leaky shed and has sex with a wannabe movie star who calls herself Audrey Hepburn. The world of this novel is a treacherous and liminal place to be. There are still 10 years to go before Britain hands Hong Kong over to China, but the preliminary corruption and squalor are well afoot. Diamond Hill, once a Hong Kong slice of Hollywood (Audrey Hepburn claims to have once dated Bruce Lee), is now a shantytown packed with makeshift dwellings that could scarcely be called homes. The towering cranes and encroaching real estate developers share space with heroin addicts and dealers, the latter including Audrey Hepburn's teen daughter, who goes simply by Boss. Amid this chaos our down-and-out hero sifts for salvation in a place where mere survival might be a more realistic goal. Fan's prose is both minimalist and highly descriptive; the darker the spiritual corner, the more light he shines. Here's the protagonist, fiending for a fix: "I scratched my arms until I drew blood, but seeing my blood only made me crave heroin more. The dried blood smelt like a rare steak. I kept licking the wounds for comfort." He's a compelling character with a passive streak; he would seemingly settle for being a keen observer. Instead, like Rick in Casablanca, he can't help but stick his neck out. Fan deftly mixes the sacred with the profane, often on the same page. Just when you decide there's no room for holiness amid the wreckage, you realize there may in fact be no other option. An introduction to a seamy slice of Hong Kong--plus a convent.

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March 29, 2021
Fan’s evocative debut portrays a Hong Kong in transition. In the 1980s, recovering heroin addict Buddha returns to Hong Kong from Bangkok at the urging of Daishi, an old Thai monk who helped him get clean. Daishi directs him to stay with the nuns of a small monastery in shantytown Diamond Hill. There, Buddha befriends a teenage gang leader employed by the Triad to run heroin distribution in the neighborhood, and Audrey Hepburn, a prostitute lost in the area’s glamorous past, when Bruce Lee movies were filmed there. The novel’s tension hinges on the redevelopment set to take place as the era of British control comes to a close (as one character puts it, “The whole city is in a state of violent change, moving from one regime we are used to loathing, to another one we are loath to get used to”). When Buddha finds out that the head of the monastery plans to allow the neighborhood to be destroyed, he questions what is truly worth saving. Fan brings poetic language and moving tributes to descriptions of the lost neighborhood (“Why couldn’t a paradise be built out of scrapped wood, cheap metal, and cast-offs...?”). As the characters try to flee their unhappy pasts, the novel’s aching beauty makes an effective argument for remembering. Agent: Matthew Turner, RCW Literary.