During fieldwork in the 1960s and 1970s, James and Rubie Watson lived as a couple in San Tin and Ha Tsuen—two existing, everchanging villages in the New Territories of Hong Kong—and interacted with neighbors. Since the previous volume of Village Life in Hong Kong published in 2004, the Watsons have continued to research and write about “their” two villages. Many of the village people have become highly accomplished professors, government officials, and business leaders, while certain lineages have evolved into a very successful international diaspora.

As the villagers faced social transformation, their physical landscape was being transformed by unplanned, sometimes chaotic “development.” The structure of village life explored in this book is a fading memory for the village residents. New tensions and preoccupations dominate life in the New Territories, much like contemporary suburbs surrounding American cities.

The Watsons extend their discussions to include the decidedly gendered aspect of village life that conditioned their research in Ha Tsuen and San Tin—on women’s lives and subculture, events and rituals unseen to male, and on young men who survived anti-Japanese battles back in the 1940s, becoming vanguard-emigrants to Britain.