CLASS OF 64

A Hong Kong prep school student grows along with his peers in Hung’s autobiographical novel.

Fifteen-year-old James has already led a migratory life. When he was young, his family fled Communist mainland China for the safety of Hong Kong, then spent five years in Malaysia. Now they have returned to Hong Kong, and James finds himself enrolled at the prestigious La Salle College prep school. He arrives in the middle of the school year, his Chinese rusty, and his tuition waived on the understanding that he will run for the track team. His classmates are an assortment of students from all walks of life—Michael Sze, a native Hong Konger who becomes James’ social guide; Juan Chu Trujillo, who is Mexican and Chinese on both sides, and whose sister Julia becomes an object of James’ affection; Danny Tong, who experiences racism for his partial Jamaican heritage. The novel follows the students through the upper forms and into post-school life. The LaSalle Old Boys—as alumni are known—keep in touch, even as they disperse across the globe. Many, like James, end up in the U.S. and Canada. As James builds a family and a career as a surgeon in California, he always looks forward to high school reunions so he can check in on the developments of the LaSalle class of ’64. Hung’s prose is clean and leisurely, recounting the many characters and their particularities with the polite curiosity of an alumni newsletter: “Our most famous old boy was Phillip Chan, who became a popular TV star as a detective and later a movie star. He appeared in a few Hollywood movies, usually playing the role of a Hong Kong police inspector.” As a work of fiction, the book leaves a lot to be desired. There is no real plot or narrative tension, only updates on this person or that, all of which Hung relates as if it happened long ago. The book is more valuable for the portrait it paints of Hong Kong in the 1960s—a melting pot of cultures, settling refugees, and immigrants from across the world that’s fending off the looming menace of mainland China.

A fictionalized memoir that is equal parts charming and dull.