vintage hong kong – Susan Blumberg-Kason

Book of the week–A Trick of Light

July 15, 2018 By Susan Blumberg-Kason Leave a Comment

My friend Jacqueline recently told me about a new Hong Kong memoir, so of course I rushed to ask author Deborah Rogers for a review copy. A Trick of Light takes place in 1987-88 Hong Kong, but also includes a short part in 1978 when her family moves there from New Zealand.

When Deborah was six, her lawyer father found a job in Hong Kong and announced to the family that they were going to move there. Deborah had a younger brother and two older sisters, so her family of six packed up and flew in Kai Tak in 1978. When they arrived, her father pointed across Victoria Harbour from Kowloon to Hong Kong Island and pointed to Connaught Centre, or Jardine House as most of us now call it, and told Deborah that’s where he was going to work.

Not too long after the family settled into their flat on Hong Kong Island, it’s discovered that one of Deborah’s sisters has been writing love letters to a Chinese boy at school. Their mother took the older sisters back to New Zealand, leaving Deborah and her younger brother with their father in Hong Kong. But we later learn that Terry (Deborah’s father) has been having lots of affairs with women in Hong Kong. So I wondered if that was really the reason her mother left Hong Kong.

Terry is also a big drinker and that becomes a huge obstacle in relating to his children and wives. He and Deborah’s mother eventually divorce and he married a Cantonese woman named Celia. Terry and Celia have a daughter named Samantha or Chung Si. Every year, Deborah and her younger brother fly to Hong Kong to visit their father or he flies back to New Zealand to visit his kids. He and his ex-wife seem to get along well after both of them have remarried. So when Deborah starts rebelling (drinking, smoking, hanging around the wrong boys, and running away), her parents are on the same page when they decide she should move to Hong Kong to live with her father, Celia, and Chung Si.

This is the crux of the story and it’s now 1987. The Handover is still 10 years away, but Hong Kong is in its golden era where living standards are improving and the economy is on a continual upswing. Rogers writes about shopping at Chinese Products, which I think is Yue Hwa Chinese Products Emporium (I also love this store) and eating at The Spice Market at the Prince Hotel. Still, Deborah is not happy to be in Hong Kong because she never got to say goodbye to her friends in New Zealand and never wanted to leave in the first place.

I really felt for Deborah that year she was in Hong Kong. It was difficult to live with an alcoholic father who sometimes didn’t come home at night and often disappeared for days on end. Celia, her step-mother, had a difficult time, always worrying about Terry and were he was after work. Deborah asked her more than once why she didn’t leave Terry, but Celia said it wasn’t so easy. Once she even replied, “Where would I go?” It wasn’t easy for women thirty years ago to divorce and survive on their own. And it wasn’t like Terry had a lot of money. They lived in comfortable areas on Hong Kong Island, but Terry’s drinking bankrupted the family.

Deborah started to like Hong Kong when she made a friend at school. She also wrote about a trip she took with her father to Israel, Greece, and Italy before they met Celia and Chung Si in London and continued on to Los Angeles, Hawaii, and New York. Before the family left for Japan, Celia told Deborah that her father wasn’t going to join the family in Tokyo because he had another woman and was going to see her. Celia said a wife knows such things and it’s really heartbreaking to read this because both Celia and Deborah and even Chung Si are being abandoned by a man who isn’t participating in their family even though he’s the one that has brought them all together.

This book is short and Rogers wants to show the reader that teenage angst is normal and things do get better. Rogers is a beautiful writer and I really enjoyed her memoir. I thought her relationship with her step-mother was touching and they came to an understanding, as was her rapport with her father, despite his alcoholism. She writes about a special time in Hong Kong before the Handover. A Trick of Light is a quick read that will resonate with many.

Photo Friday

June 29, 2018 By Susan Blumberg-Kason Leave a Comment

Blast from the past: my first week in Hong Kong 28 years ago.

Photo Friday

June 15, 2018 By Susan Blumberg-Kason Leave a Comment

Here I am 22 years ago at the old Tiger Balm Gardens in Hong Kong. It was Christmas Day and I was with my mother, who was visiting me for a couple weeks that month. My dad had arrived earlier that month so they could spread their time out with me. I was married to the first husband then, but he was in China for a 3.5 months that fall and winter, so I guess my parents felt bad I was alone. It was actually all right to be alone then, but I always welcomed their company.

My mom and I thought this pig was funny. I hadn’t eaten pork in years at that time, so we were amazed by the girth of this swine. I miss the Tiger Balm Gardens. I’m sure some nondescript, luxe condo building stands in this space now. Why give the general public a park everyone can enjoy when you can make a killing from real estate?

Friday Photo

June 8, 2018 By Susan Blumberg-Kason Leave a Comment

I posted this photo on Instagram today, where I’ve been posting old travel photos for the last month or so. This is one I’ve had a love/hate relationship with. Hate because I always thought I was closing my eyes and that my posture could have been better. But I love it for so many more reasons: Hong Kong’s early 90s skyline, the different types of boats, the widened harbor (it’s much narrower now), and the view. I would take the train down to the harborfront in college and just stare across at the skyline and marvel that I was actually there, on the underbelly of China and in front of the most stunning scene I’d ever seen.

Second year of Chinese lessons, then and and now

May 27, 2018 By Susan Blumberg-Kason Leave a Comment

My older son just finished his second year of college Chinese and was showing his young siblings his textbook because they, too, are learning Mandarin, but at a slower pace. The little ones could understand come characters here and there, which was rewarding after several years of weekly Mandarin that I’m “strongly encouraging” them to take.

And it got me thinking about my second year of Chinese when I was in college. This is one of the books I used:

Jake’s is obviously much more attractive and appealing than the one I used. From his textbook’s cover, one can tell it’s somewhat contemporary because the photos of Shanghai are somewhat current. But back in 1990-91 when I studied my second year of Mandarin, my book wasn’t even from the previous decade. It was last copyrighted at the end of the Cultural Revolution.

In other words, my book was old even in 1990. There were also some other stark differences between the two. For one, Jake’s uses the pinyin style of romanization that is all-prevalent in China and around the world.

But mine didn’t even use pinyin!

It was the Yale romanization system, which is even less popular than Wade-Giles, which is used in literature that takes place before the 1950s. The difference between Yale and pinyin is pretty big. Take the third column, last character. In the Yale system, dzwo is the romanization for “left”, while in pinyin it’s spelled zuo. And the fifth column, second from the bottom, chywan means whole in Yale romanization, but in pinyin it’s quan. First column, second from the bottom, syau is small in Yale and xiao is small in pinyin.

It was confusing to the say the least. Not only that, but I’d started learning simplified characters with pinyin romanization in Baltimore in 1989 for my first year of Chinese class. The second year, in 1990, I switched to traditional characters with Yale romanization because that’s what my classes in Hong Kong used.

Jake’s book seems interactive with colorful photos and illustrations.

While mine only featured reprints of old short stories, plays and articles. And it read right to left, up to down, in the traditional way people read Chinese.

Jake’s lessons were about more contemporary matters, like famous sites in China and typical conversational topics. I’m not complaining about reading Lao She, Hu Shi, and Lu Xun, the latter two of whom are listed by their Wade-Giles romanized names in this book!

Another thing that’s different about Jake’s book is that it includes both simplified and traditional characters. If my books back then had included both, I might have had an easier time switching between the two. But I survived and was all right returning to the US in 1991 and going back to simplified. I continued with simplified for the next few years until I moved back to Hong Kong and have been using traditional characters ever since. This pocket dictionary was my bible when I was learning Chinese and I still have it today. I was trying to show my kids how to use it (it takes a few steps if one uses the Chinese-English part of the dictionary) and they were not amused. It’s so much easier to use an app these days.

Studying Chinese wasn’t easy all those years ago, but I’m glad I had the chance to learn more than one type of romanization and both simplified (used in China) and traditional characters (used in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and in Chinese communities around the world). Personally, I think traditional characters are more beautiful than simplified ones. But when Jake decided he wanted to study abroad in Shanghai, I advised him to learn simplified characters for the two years he would study Chinese before heading off to Shanghai.

好好學習 (study well in traditional characaters)

好好学习 (study well in simplified characters)