The Train to Lo Wu is a collection of short stories written by Jess Row, who spent the two years immediately following the return of Hong Kong to Chinese rule (1997-99) teaching English at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. The train to Lo Wu, incidentally, heads out of Hong Kong, towards its northern border with Shenzhen. This is the feeling I get from Row's stories. The seven here are intense psychological sketches, with Hong Kong as a backdrop for his mostly non-local protagonists. There's a sense of alienation, not belonging, not connecting, very at odds with the vibrancy, money-makes-the-world-go-round pragmatism, and consumerism I associate with Hong Kong, from which I just returned. However, the force of his writing made me not take arms against natives speaking in broken English and slightly off timelines and Cantonese. In short, an interesting set of short stories, but only superficially capturing the sense of Hong Kong.

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