This book is an ethnography of Tsuen Wan, a town in Hong Kong's New Territories, based on 50 years of research. The authors first lived there in 1968–1970 as graduate students (one in anthropology, the other in sociology), when the area had rapidly industrialized and was the government's first “new town.”

A Chinese Melting Pot has an autobiographical quality to it – focusing on why the authors made certain choices of topics, places and ways to study them – that makes it easy to read and especially interesting for students. It has four main topics. One is the historical background of Tsuen Wan up to 1968. The book describes how residents, Hakka farmers and agricultural workers, made a living before the Second World War and the horrific violence of the Japanese occupation. It also describes the enormous changes that took place once industrialists from Shanghai moved their factories to Tsuen Wan, creating a town that was so crowded and unsanitary that even Hong Kong's noninterventionist colonial government had to step in, creating Hong Kong's first “new town.” The authors describe how the village in which they lived was moved in 1964 from an overcrowded downtown location to a hillside spot where all three lineages could continue to live together. A second topic is lineage and family life, with multi-lineage villages of Tsuen Wan offering a very different model of Chinese and Cantonese culture from the more widely known Punti lineage villages of the New Territories. A sub-theme is the singing of mountain songs and laments by women, an improvised and very meaningful practice that was already dying out in the 1960s. The third topic is the creation and functioning of the many voluntary associations in the urban environment; the authors argue that these were essential for the large number of immigrants to adapt to the new environment and for dealing with the authorities and with residents of other regions and backgrounds. Finally, the book focuses on the changes from the 1970s to today, in particular the dilution of indigenous identity, the simplification of family and religious rituals, and the switch to Cantonese language among the original Hakka villagers. This part is useful but less ethnographically rich; it offers generalizations without the depth of detail and as many vivid examples as found in earlier chapters. It also does not deal with political issues like elections and relations with the Mainland that are prominent today.

This book is also useful as a general introductory description of Hong Kong society. No single community can represent a society as large and diverse as Hong Kong, but the specific features of Tsuen Wan make it a good lens through which to see many of the larger forces that affect the SAR even today. Tsuen Wan is in the New Territories, where villagers have special land rights as descendants of pre-1898 residents. The village is Hakka, and though Hakka are a minority in Hong Kong, 43 per cent of the 84,000 residents in the 1911 census were Hakka (p. 11 n12). They were outnumbered as waves of refugees moved to Hong Kong after 1947, including Shanghainese who opened and ran textile factories in Tsuen Wan, and other migrants from Chaozhou and Fujian. The Hakka villagers’ wholesale switch to Cantonese after the Second World War is part of the creation of the common Hong Kong culture and identity, which the book's title refers to. Tsuen Wan was an industrial and working-class town, and here again an ethnography of this community is very relevant for understanding Hong Kong more broadly.

Many ethnographies of the mid-twentieth century were synchronic snapshots of a culture, which led anthropologists to criticize such writing as totalizing, excessively coherent, homogenizing and objectivizing; it was argued this created a static, timeless and essentialized view of culture. The historical perspective of this book helps avoid these problems, as do the authors’ attention to differences of class, gender and ethnicity. There are rules that residents insist upon (e.g. matters of birth and death must be kept separate) and those that can be bent (e.g. only those aged over 60 can have their tablet in the ancestor hall) (p. 96). The research problem that inspires this book is the question of how residents of Tsuen Wan adapted to the area's rapid industrialization, and in answering this question, readers learn a great deal about life in Tsuen Wan, much of which helps one understand Hong Kong more generally. By presenting numerous cases, including variations and exceptions to dominant practices, the reader gains a deeper understanding of how tradition was refashioned and how urban Hong Kong culture works in practice. The book is a valuable introduction to Hong Kong for anyone who wants to understand the area's history, culture and diversity.