On Java Road plot tagged posts

The Ennui of Age and Empire: Lawrence Osborne’s “On Java Road”

An aging expat journalist, British-born and bred but now 20 years in his country’s last colonial outpost of Hong Kong, is battling his own sell-by date while ostensibly trying to report on the historical forces that had long been unleashed by the island country’s 1997 handover to communist China. Largely student-led protesters make nightly appearances in the streets, trying to evade tear gas and police batons as they decry the oft-predicted reality that China’s promises of a hands-off policy toward Hong Kong’s mostly democratic rule are proving empty.

Meanwhile, the journalist’s pal from his university days at Cambridge, scion of a wealthy Hong Kong family, is up to his ears in the duplicity and semi-recklessness peculiar to a certain kind of privilege. The journalist ultimately makes the decision to report on that recklessness when it leads to deadly consequences.

Or did it?

This is the basic setting for ...

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