Pop-ups and toilet rolls: Great new literary takes on a city

Remember those pop-up books when you were a kid? Turn a page and a little paper cut-out of a lion, a train or a Smurf would jump out at you. It made reading so much more fun.

But it is a fine art as well. Last year, artist Kit Lau released "Hong Kong Pop Up," a painstakingly illustrated book about Hong Kong architecture, based around the experiences of Lau's own family. With pop-up shophouses, shantytowns and public housing estates, "Pop Up" is one of the most richly-imagined books about Hong Kong that we have seen.

That got us thinking about some of the other unconventional books about Hong Kong that we have read in recent months. Whether it approaches its subject from an unusual angle or, like Lau's book, takes a decidedly unorthodox form, each of these books is full of new and unexpected insights into Hong Kong's life and culture.

ToilMap Paper

It has often crossed our minds that Hong Kong's free, 24-hour public toilets are among the city's greatest public services, right up there with public housing and health care. If you disagree, try spending some time in New York or one of the multitude of cities where public washrooms long ago disappeared. We even thought about somehow doing an homage to public toilets.

Turns out four young designers are three steps ahead of us: not only have they made a book about public toilets, they sketched them, incorporated them into a map and -- wait for it -- published it as a roll of toilet paper. The rolls were lovingly hand-crafted by Cheung Man-ling, Tse Yan-lam, Chong Shan-yung and Cheung Hoi-lam and published by Hulu Culture earlier this year.

The "book" was a hit at this summer's book fair, where 500 of 1,000 hand-rolled copies were sold. "People were so amazed," says Hulu Culture co-founder Simon Go. "They wondered whether it was really a book. They also asked if you could use it as actual toilet paper. I said, 'Up to you.'"

ToilMap Paper, HK$80, Hulu Culture, only available online.

Grandpa Grandma Cook

While this new recipe book is hardly unconventional in its presentation -- it neither rolls out or pops up -- it certainly is in its approach to food.

"It's not just a cookbook -- it's a book about the people who migrated to Hong Kong in the early days," explains its publisher, MCCM Creation's Mary Chan.

For two years, the artist Evelyn Liang collected stories from Hong Kong's elderly and discovered that, often enough, they had to do with food. She collected recipes for over a hundred home-style dishes and realized the best way to pay homage to them would be to publish them, accompanied by the life story of their creator and a portrait by the photographer Michael Wolf.

"I love to watch people preparing food -- it's an art," says Liang. "If you ever watch your grandparents making food, it's like they change into a different person. They're not just sitting on the couch complaining about getting old."

The result is at once a practical guide to cooking some fast-disappearing traditional Chinese dishes and a social history of the migrants who build modern-day Hong Kong after fleeing here as refugees from China. "Food equals home," as Liang puts it.

Grandpa Grandma Cook, HK$190, MCCM Creations, available at bookstores and at www.mccmcreations.com.

Nathan Road

Kit Lau might have the market cornered with "Hong Kong Pop Up," but Kenneth Lo has done a pretty good job of portraying the city in its fold-out version.

"Nathan Road" is a photographic documentation of the entire length of Nathan Road, from Tsim Sha Tsui right up to Sham Shui Po.

"It's about the process of discovery," says publisher Mary Chan.

Lo grew up in Kowloon and walked on Nathan Road almost every day as a student, but it wasn't until he returned from a stay in Canada and went for a late-night walk that he saw the street in a new light.

"There were few people and cars on the road, it was not the bustling place I knew," Lo  says.

"It was peaceful. Since then, I have wanted to record my feeling towards it."

To capture the serene moments he experienced, Lo returned to the street early in the morning and took more than 2,000 photos, which he stitched together into one enormous panorama.

His goal was to give the quirks of Nathan Road the attention they deserve.

"We are always in a hurry and rarely pay attention to the street we are walking on. We miss many things around us," he says.

Nathan Road, HK$175, MCCM Creations, available in bookstores and at www.mccmcreations.com.

Old Shops Limited Edition Prints

One of Simon Go's photos in "Hong Kong Old Shops."

We were impressed by Simon Go's book "Hong Kong Old Shops," which documents traditional businesses like apothecaries, tailors and joss paper stores, and we were even more impressed when Go took us on a tour of some of those shops earlier this year.

Now the man behind Hulu Culture has released a limited-edition box set of 24 old shop photos printed on 35x30-centimetre heavyweight paper.

"I’ve already got the book, but I wanted to present my photos in a different way, so that people put them on the wall or do what they want with them," he says.

Old Shops has sold well, considering that Hong Kong is a notoriously difficult place to sell graphic books, in large part because it has struck a nerve with many young people.

"They're looking for memories but also self-identification," says Go.

"They want to know who they are as Hong Kong people and the style and stories of these old shops really appeals to them."

Hong Kong Old Shops Limited Edition Prints, HK$180, Hulu Culture, only available online.