Unsettling Exiles: Chinese Migrants in Hong Kong and the Southern Periphery During the Cold War By Angelina Y. Chin. New York: Columbia University Press, 2023. xiii + 302 pp. $35.00 (paper)

Roman Tam's 1979 Cantonese song "Beneath the Lion Rock" (shizishan xia ) paints a hopeful portrait of Hong Kong's postwar generation: comrades sharing one boat (tongzhouren ), overcoming tears, hardship, and sadness to "conquer difficulties," "chase their dreams," and, collectively, make Hong Kong what it is today.The song, the opening number to a television series of the same name, evokes a particular narrative about Hong Kong's post-war population, one in which war-torn refugees, through grit and hard work, created a robust collective community and one of the world's most successful economies.Angelina Chin's new book Unsettling Exiles opens with the series Under the Lion Rock, explaining how the "Lion Rock Spirit" at the heart of the series reflects what so many believe to be the city's core values.Yet to Chin, the typical migrant's story at the heart of the Lion Rock Spirit is more mythos than truth.Chin's book, instead, tells a Hong Kong story that is "less easily celebrated" (1), one that accounts not only for the willing migrants who are readily accepted by Hong Kong society, but also for the political exiles-the temporary migrants en route to elsewhere, the victims forcibly taken to Hong Kong, the bodies that arrived in Hong Kong dead, and other people rejected by their homes-in essence, those who were not always eager participants in the "Lion Rock Spirit," whether because they did not "desire to settle" or because they were not "permitted to settle" (3).These people, Chin contends, were as central to the making of Hong Kong and its neighbors as the tongzhouren about which Roman Tam crooned.While centered on Hong Kong, her true subject is what she calls the "Southern periphery": the "vast territory at the southern frontier of the PRC beyond its administrative border" (6) that includes Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macao, and the waters that surround them.This recentering, she argues, helps to "destabilize the popular perception that Hong Kong was a unique colonial city devoid of regional politics" (7) and to bring Hong Kong's history into conversation with broader regional trajectories.By bringing to light the intersection of histories often portrayed as separate, Chin brings into sharp relief stories and structures that existing insular histories often ignore, but which materially affected the realities of everyday individuals navigating and living in the region.