We Three @1963

This book is the sequel to Contrasts @1963 and the second volume in the "@1963" series. Yang Zhao (Taiwan), Ma Ka-Fai (Hong Kong), and Hu Hongxia (mainland China) were all born in 1963. Since 2011, they have taken turns writing for the "Contrasts" column in Shenzhen's Jingbao: each installment selects a single word, and the three each write an essay of about 1,500 characters, starting from the cultural soil and personal experience of their own upbringing to write about different lives under the same topic. The columns were first collected as Contrasts @1963, and this book continues the same format with thirty more keywords, covering topics such as mobile phones, stocks, bell-bottom trousers, Sun Yat-sen, bookstores, elections, filling out forms, going to the movies, dreams, childhood foods, New Year, elementary school classmates, the first photograph, New Year greetings, Mandarin, fortune-telling, Jin Yong, hospital stays, and sisters, spanning half a century of everyday change in Chinese-speaking societies. Readers have summed up the three writers' styles as follows: Yang Zhao is refined, Ma Ka-Fai is sly, and Hu Hongxia is sincere. Under the same topic, Yang Zhao recalls discipline and reading life in Taiwan, Ma Ka-Fai writes of mischief and wit in the streets of Wan Chai, and Hu Hongxia moves from the countryside of Hebei to the workplace in Shenzhen, with the three regional experiences illuminating one another. The "contrast" is both a look back at one's own youth and family affection and a re-identification of oneself and the era in the mirror of others' memories. The book features prefaces by Dong Qiao, Zhang Dachun, and Mao Jian.