EdUHK Hosts Hong Kong’s First “One City, One Book” Campaign

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The Centre for Popular Culture in the Humanities  (CPCH) at The Education University of Hong Kong (EdUHK) announced Hong Kong’s first “One City, One Book” campaign today (11 December), revealing that The Arrival, an award-winning wordless graphic novel by Chinese Australian graphic novelist Shaun Tan, has been chosen as the “one book” for the year. To kick start the campaign, an open, free exhibition titled “A Foreign Land, A New Home: Shaun Tan’s The Arrival” will be held at the Hong Kong Arts Centre from 5 to 13 January 2019.

“One City, One Book” is a community reading initiative, popular around the world for many years, which aims to encourage as many people as possible to read and discuss a single book at around the same time. Each year, students, scholars and readers of all kinds focus their attention on one single book. A series of activities related to the chosen book are held, including discussions of the book and its themes, along with exhibitions, film screenings, school events, cultural performances and library events. The goals of the initiative are to build a sense of community and to promote reading, discussion, and civic engagement.

 As a wordless graphic novel, Shaun Tan’s The Arrival transcends language barriers as it tells the story of an immigrant in an imaginary country. It portrays a man who leaves his family and hometown to seek a better life in a foreign land. With only a few possessions and mementoes, the immigrant struggles to survive in his new home. Tan’s richly evocative images, reminiscent of a sepia-tinted photo album, show how sympathetic strangers, each with their own unspoken stories, make a new life possible in a new world.

The Director of the initiative, Dr Bidisha Banerjee, Assistant Professor in the Department of Literature and Cultural Studies of EdUHK, said, “Hong Kong is a city of migration. It has a multicultural society bringing together people of different ethnic backgrounds. This book deals with the strangeness of arrival, the challenge of new people, new places and practices. Through this book, we hope to build a stronger sense of community and draw attention to questions of identity and belonging. The Arrival is perfect for Hong Kong.”

To tie in with this initiative, an exhibition titled “A Foreign Land, A New Home: Shaun Tan’s The Arrival” will be held in January, along with a series of events, including discussions of the book and its themes, film screenings, school events, cultural performances and library events, in the coming months. Details of the exhibition are as follows:

Curated by Dr Zoran Poposki, Assistant Professor in the Department of Cultural and Creative Arts of EdUHK, the exhibition will showcase more than 30 original drawings and prints from Tan’s internationally acclaimed graphic novel The Arrival. 

For more information, please visit the official website of “One City One Book Hong Kong" at https://www.onecityonebook.hk/ or its Facebook Page at www.facebook.com/onecityonebookhk.