Slow Boat to Hong Kong

By Marianne MacKinnon
May 2009
Book Guild
Distributed by Trans-Atlantic Publications Inc.
ISBN: 9781846242885
160 pages, Illustrated
$34.95 Cloth

---

In 1961 Marianne MacKinnon’s husband, a Ministry of Defence Intelligence Officer, receives a posting to Hong Kong, then a Crown Colony in Britain’s fast-dwindling empire. Instead of flying to their destination, the couple and their three small children opt for the slow route, travelling by cargo boat through the Suez Canal and across the Indian Ocean, calling in at one exotic port after another.

Entertaining the then popular image of Hong Kong as a place of opium dens, Suzie Wong bars and all the mysteries of the Far East, Marianne is looking forward to their first great sea voyage and life in the Colony. This enchanting, beautifully written memoir takes the reader on a nostalgic journey into the past, to the days before global tourism and packaged holidays. A Slow Boat to Hong Kong summons up the vanished, floating, privileged life of British expatriates. It also recalls scares, violent storms and a period of civil unrest.

In the line of her work as a translator, Court interpreter and consular VIP hostess, the author met local and foreign dignitaries, commercial icons, criminals and Chinese actors. Above all, the story evokes, with great warmth and humour, the joys of motherhood and the author’s inner passage to wider horizons.

Return to main page of Trans-Atlantic Publications