When my friend Raymond told me about Song of the Azalea: Memoir of a Chinese Son by Kenneth Ore and Joann Yu (Penguin Canada, 2005), I went online and bought it without thinking twice.
He wasn’t joking when he said it was a powerful story. I found it to be one of the best books I’ve read about Hong Kong during WWII and perhaps the only I’ve read about the colony during the Cultural Revolution.
Before reading Song of the Azalea last week, I had so many questions about Hong Kong during the Cultural Revolution. In his memoir, Kenneth Ore answers them.
Ore’s mother is sold at an early age to help pay off her father’s gambling debts. Lovely. But rather than selling her into prostitution or forcing her to become the concubine of Old Mr. Ore, the Ore family allows her to marry one of their young sons. That and her husband’s willingness to support her through medical school seem to be her only fortunes in life.
Young Kenneth is shuffled between Hong Kong and parts of mainland China during WWII and the civil war between the Communists and the Nationalists. After witnessing violence and murder, he decides to devote his life to promoting peace and equality in Hong Kong, where he moves back with his mother, sister, and brother before 1949.
As Kenneth reaches adulthood, he’s an underground Communist operative in Hong Kong and blindly follows the Party line. Sacrificing his salary and time with his family, he gives everything to the Party.
So I wanted to know if people in Hong Kong really knew what was going on in China in the mid-to-late-60s. (And for personal reasons, to better understand the climate when my mom’s family visited Hong Kong in 1966, the start of the Cultural Revolution.) Ore says some right-wing Hong Kong newspapers reported on the starvation and murders in China during the Cultural Revolution, but he and other leftists didn’t believe it because they didn’t trust the sources.
What I gathered from the book is that people knew what was going on, but maybe didn’t suspect the scale of the violence north of the border. (I don’t even think people in China got the full picture until fairly recently, but that could just be me.)
Ore’s depiction of Hong Kong and China’s complex political and socio-economic climates last century show how easy it would have been for someone to drink the Party Kool-Aid. As Mao once wrote, “Revolution is not a dinner party.” Sadly, as history has shown, it wasn’t even enough to sustain people on a daily basis.
lessons learned at that time from parents and school: NEVER pick up packages in the street, or kick random plastic bags, boxes, whatever as they could be booby trapped. we knew there was trouble in china but didnt have tv coverage like these days! we got lots of time off school too. my mother would buy our plimsolls and p.e. kit in china products. at that time, it blared out revolutionary music non-stop and had an absolutely massive display of red books and mao paraphernalia. there were also choice buildings decorated either with communist or nationalist flags – quite decorative really from the perspective of a nine year old 😉
Thanks, Vanessa! I love hearing about HK from that time. I even think in China many people don’t realize that Mao was as horrible as Stalin. Some would say he was even worse. I remember riding around in taxis and the drivers had Mao amulets hanging from the rear view mirror to protect them against traffic accidents. And his home in Hunan has become like Elvis’s home in Graceland. Pilgrims flock there and you can buy all sorts of kitschy souvenirs. No where else do people idolize someone who was responsible for the deaths of tens (or hundreds) of millions!
My apologies. Jonathan Chamberlain touched upon the Cultural Revolution at the end of “King Hui: The Man Who Owned All the Opium in Hong Kong” (Blacksmith Books, 2007)!
Thanks Susan. I’d never heard of this book.
There was plenty of leftist-inspired unrest in HK during the same time period, but public opinion seemed to go against it when an anti-communist broadcaster was murdered. I doubt much was known about events over the border in those days.
Thanks! I hadn’t heard of the book until a HK friend in the US told me about it last month. It was published by Penguin Canada and I don’t know how much they market their books outside Canada. Kenneth Ore was involved in the unrest in Hong Kong back then and wrote of that broadcaster’s murder. Ore was shocked when he learned that Liu Shaoqi was imprisoned by Mao, but he didn’t trust the HK media because much of it was right-wing, so he wasn’t really sure what to believe. The left-wing papers didn’t report things like that. Very interesting. At the end of the book, he tells where some of his Hok Yau colleagues ended up. Some went quite far!