This finely crafted epic novel centering on a large well-to-do family in Hong Kong works both as a gripping tale of generational fortunes and as a microcosm of Hong Kong’s fate from the mid-twentieth century through the 2010s.

The Memory Keepers in Ashes is the second published work by Hong Kong-born author Chan Wai since her move to Taiwan. Volume I was first published in 1998, with Volume II first released as an online serial publication under the name Tale of an Outsider from 2015 to 2017. Taken together, these two volumes work as one novel spanning seven decades of time.

Volume I opens on the story of Lin Ten Fragrances’ parents journeying out of China to build a new life and business in Hong Kong. Ten Fragrances, a young woman in her twenties and the first-person narrator, reveals from the start her status as the youngest of ten children and that she knows she has not long to live. However, despite her sharing the least amount of time with the Lin family, she confides she is privy to more inside goss than most. Ten Fragrances wants nothing more than to spend her final time on earth detailing memories of her other siblings and sharing how major events such as the leftist riots of 1967, the 1973 death of Bruce Lee, the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989, and the deadly Garley Building fire of 1996 touched her family. More than just a part of Hong Kong, the Lin family is woven deeply into this city’s modern DNA.

The narrative in Volume II adopts a magical realism approach, switching to and fro amongst various protagonist perspectives. Despite her death, Ten Fragrances very much lives on the memories of her loved ones, while the story picks up nearly a decade and a half later, after the SARS epidemic in 2003 and through the Umbrella Revolution of 2014. The emotions and conditions facing the characters in this volume empathically capture the turmoil felt by most in Hong Kong through the first decades of the twenty-first century.

Chan’s keen sense of observation and refined writing skill capture brilliantly the vagaries of life experienced by Ten Fragrances and her loved ones, laying down for posterity an emotive picture of a Hong Kong now lost to the mists of time and the love and relationships that held an entire era together.