Hong Kong Stories

FUNG To-sun, Sunny, who turned 64 this year, once set foot in the limbo between justice and evil. Sunny’s father was once a prison guard of the Correctional Services Department, and thus he was raised at the Staff Quarters near the Stanley Prison since childhood. He was imbibed with his parents’ strenuous disciplines and was always reminded to live surefootedly and steer clear of criminal matters. Sunny applied to become a police officer when he was 18, and he said that he had worked painstakingly and solved many cases. Regrettably, he failed to withstand temptation when he was stationed at Wan Chai and became a drug addict, after which he even received drug injections. Later, he even knowingly violated the law and stole coins in parking meters for buying drugs, for which he was eventually apprehended by his colleagues and ended his career as a police officer with his own hands. During his fall into drug addiction, he even tried to end his life thrice. In 1981, the 27-year-old Sunny decided to take gospel drug treatment and fell from a law enforcer to a drug rehabilitee under supervision. The anguish detoxification process granted Sunny with mixed feelings. After the detoxification, he was determined to help other drug rehabilitees. Therefore, he established a rehabilitation centre in Sai Kung in 1989 all by himself and during the 28 years since then, he has rescued numerous young people who fell into drug addiction. Although FUNG seems stern on the outside, every student and tutor in the rehabilitation centre can feel his love and care. Through witnessing the once drug-abusing young people getting back on track, Sunny also affirms that his efforts have not been spent in vain. Looking back on his life so far, Sunny realises that there is only a fine line between good and evil, and he is grateful that he managed to return from evil and become an good father respected by both his students and his daughters!

While Margaret’s dark complexion and afro-textured hair do make her look completely like an African, she is indeed half Chinese and half African. She was born and raised in Hong Kong, fluent in Cantonese with a lifestyle no different from any other Hongkonger. Margaret’s father is of Nigerian descent and her mother is a Hong Kong local. Her father has encountered a lot of discrimination in the city, but Margaret never thought that she would too. During childhood, she was mocked and teased by classmates who called her “negro” and “afro-head”. In order to be accepted by peers, she had tried to straighten her hair and put on whitening face cream, appearing in a way that would fit in the majority. A life where African and Hong Kong cultures converge can sometimes be overwhelming for Margaret. Fortunately, with her encouraging teachers and close friends as well as her optimistic character, she managed to pull herself together, and even learnt to cheer herself up by creating artworks. Speaking of her future, Margaret’s family hopes she would be a policewoman, which is a stable job. Margaret, however, would like to be a fashion designer. She thought of being an obedient child who fulfills the expectation of her family and society. But the thought of giving up her own dream and wasting her potential in design has set her heart on breaking the ceiling society has for dark-skinned people, and on deciding her own future. Margaret may have attained this courage that allows her to face up to challenges from her mother, who died of illness. In Margaret’s childhood memories, her mother was always laughing heartily without fearing the ordeal brought by her illness, exhibiting the resilience in her. In Hong Kong, a city known for being an “international cosmopolis”, the dark-skinned races still seem to be treated unfairly. This resilience is precisely the most needed character for Margaret to rise to the challenges ahead.

Sho (Shouryu LEUNG), who was born a female, always has had a rather masculine personality ever since she could remember. She hated wearing skirts but loved playing robots and swordsmanship. As she was still too young back in the days, she did not ponder on her behaviours, thoughts, and sexuality. In the 80’s when she grew up, there were not many who talked about topics such as “sexual orientation” and “gender identity”, and her relationship with parents was rather estranged, that was why she could not find anyone to confide in. While recalling her puberty, Sho remembers the many awkward situations which she encountered – “My body was maturing back then, and I needed to wear female underwear which was a very unpleasant thing for me.” After entering secondary school, Sho had begun wearing unisex clothing and had started to grow her interest in the opposite sex. Fortunately, people usually do not gaze oddly at female who put on unisex clothing in the modern society. However, deep down in Sho’s heart, she could not help but wonder “What is my real gender?”, “Am I a lesbian if I like girls?”. Yet, the answers never emerged at the time. After treading through a period when she doubted her sexuality, Sho then jumped from being a secondary student to an undergraduate and acquainted with a group of friends who enthused about theatre, after which she began expanding her social circle. In 2013, she wrote a script about “gender identity” by which she gained a better understanding of herself and determined that she be a “He”. In the same year, she decided to make a momentous step in life - she visited a psychiatrist and had undergone a psychiatric assessment to seriously consider whether or not she would take a transsexual operation. “I did not know whether I would eventually complete the entire operation because there were so many things at stake, but I was sure that it was a significant experience for me to find myself.” Since 2013, Sho has undergone psychiatric and p

By the coast between Yau Tong and Lam Tin in East Kowloon is a forgotten corner. It is the Cha Kwo Ling Village, which is more than a century old, located on the outskirts of the urban area. The main street in the village is now disorderly cramped with squatter huts and entangled cables among them. The partly overlapping rooftops leave only narrow slits of the sky to be seen. In addition, the lack of main sewers means that flushing water is not available in most of the huts; therefore, many villagers rely solely on the public toilet near the village’s entrance. Everything there gives an impression of a fringe community where time stands still. About a century ago, Cha Kwo Ling Village was a major producer of high-quality granite and the home of many miners. The village had a population of over 10,000 in its heyday. As the mining industry lost its importance later on, the mines no longer exist even though you can still see the small hills. With only over a thousand residents in Cha Kwo Ling Village currently, there are merely several shops left on the main street. Among them is a cafe with the history of half a century. The décor inside is the same as it was fifty years ago, so upon walking into the cafe you feel as if you have travelled back to the 1960’s. The reason that keeps owner Uncle Keng and his wife running the old-fashioned cafe is to provide a place for fellow villagers to meet up. WU Lai-shan’s family has been living in Cha Kwo Ling Village for four generations, she is witnessing the village’s decline. According to her, the government has been speaking of developing the village ever since she was a child but it has been all talk and no action. Lai-shan feels there is nothing she can do about it. Although the village seems deserted now, she is still devoted to working as a tour guide in the village, introducing visitors to the past days of glory in great details. Having grown up in the village, the 18-year-old TUNG Kam-hei well understands how uns

NG Kwan-lun (Pasu) has a particularly uncommon profession, he is an embalmer. In Chinese society, coming across the deceased and handling bodies are traditional taboos after all. Therefore, such profession of his is indeed beyond the understanding of ordinary people, which has inevitably drawn misunderstanding and uncanny attention. However, Pasu stands aloof because he has his own mindset in this regard. Pasu is currently the Manager of the Dissecting Room at the Faculty of Medicine at Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). The bodies handled by him and his team every day are mainly provided to medical students for dissection, education and research purposes. For over ten years, Pasu has treated more than a thousand bodies without any sense of fear because he considers “the process of handling bodies an inward cultivation which allows me to understand death better and enrich my way to perceive life.” Although the mainstream voice of society reckons that Chinese must keep the bodies of the deceased intact; and death should be a taboo subject, Pasu raises an adventurous idea - "Silent Teacher" Body Donation Programme. Since 2011, he has been dedicating to implement this programme at CUHK by which he delivers the message of body donation to different sectors of society with novel and exceptional methods. Pasu’s concern for death stemmed from his good friend’s suicide, pushing him to contemplate life and death again - “From death, life is seen”. Pasu and his like-minded wife Winnie surmount traditional taboos step by step and endeavour to implement life and death education, with a view to turning marginal ideas about death into mainstream gradually, drawing more people to rethink the meaning of life and death.

“Seek medical treatment whenever illnesses strike” is a golden principle known by all, yet, there are still patients in Hong Kong afflicted by diseases which are difficult to diagnose. In return for spending large time diagnosing such diseases, they only discover that such diseases are out of the depth of doctors and get a conclusion of “It is untreatable at the current state.” These patients are suffering from “Rare Diseases”. According to the criteria set out by the World Health Organisation, there are only six to ten cases of rare diseases in every ten thousand people. America, EU, Japan and even Taiwan all define domestic rare diseases in line with similar criteria. However, rare diseases have never been defined in Hong Kong, hence the lack of corresponding health care arrangements, such as pharmaceutical research and development, funding support, and comprehensive treatments. Therefore, patients with rare diseases in Hong Kong can only explore and seek treatment options suitable for them in the ordinary health care system. The parents of TAM Wing-hang (Hang) noticed Hang’s health conditions were different from those of other children when he was six-month-old. Thus, they spent months to find out from a doctor that their son was suffering from a rare disease – “Spinal muscular atrophy (SMA)”. The muscles on Hang’s hands and legs have been weak since his childhood, limiting his mobility, for which he can only live in wheelchairs. He needs to rely on his family for everything, and even needs assistance from his maid for daily activities. However, he still leads a positive life. Not only did he endeavour to enter the university, but he also does respiratory exercises every day to stay healthy in the hope of the appearance of new medicine. Now, Hang is studying in his fourth year of Theology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Since his freshman year, Hang has been learning to live independently. He insisted on leaving his parents and living in the host

All along, it has never been easy to find a good place to nurture arts and culture in Hong Kong. Is lack of space and venues one of a variety of reasons why creation of art cannot develop comprehensively here? Born and raised in Hong Kong, MA Choi-wo, Victor, was the winner of the Artist of the Year (Dance) Award presented by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council in 1996. He and his wife, YIM Ming-yin, Mandy, are among the first batch of graduates from the School of Dance of the Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts in 1988. Ever since the two established their dance team in 1995, they have been exploring new dance language, form and direction. Over the years, they have created over 110 pieces of work, and they also have 120 productions of different scales and 470 performances. In addition to stationing in Hong Kong, they were also invited to participate and perform in the dance festivals around the world, from which they brought experiences back to Hong Kong. In 2009, they founded the Hong Kong i-Dance Festival, and successfully promoted dance education, which in turn, inspired artists in Taiwan, Korea and Japan, to held similar events in their own countries. Nonetheless, since they established their dance team, they have been constantly looking for suitable venues for their dance studio. Not only does an ideal studio need space, it also has to meet a number of conditions: safe and flexible parquet floor, spacious, no columns to block view, high ceiling, comes with windows, etc. Unfortunately, with the scarcity of land in Hong Kong, it is not easy to find an ideal dance studio without substantial resources. From farmland in the New Territories to factory buildings, they have been renting different places but were somehow forced to move out at the end because of different reasons. While their dance studio still does not have a permanent address, they have not been discouraged. From youth to middle age, they still continue to create, continue to find, and co

31-year-old WONG Ka-kit is a peer support worker in a psychiatric rehabilitation organisation and a schizophrenia patient himself. Ka-kit first experienced auditory hallucination after graduating from university. At first, he heard how the juvenile gang near his home harassed him, then a man and a woman gossiping. These “voices” all sounded so real that he once thought someone installed a tapping device in the air-conditioner in order to surveil his home. The “voices” cost Ka-kit his job and left him no choice but to receive Comprehensive Social Security Assistance. On one occasion when he was sweeping leaves in a park as part of community work, an old man said to him, “We are in the lowest stratum of society.” Ka-kit was thunderstruck and felt that life was frustrating – he was a university graduate but had descended into poverty. For a period of time, he marginalized himself, staying at home all day long and saying nothing every day except his food orders. In the meantime, he was obsessed with philosophy forums on the Internet, being desperate to do something to counteract the “voices”. He even imagined developing his own school of philosophy. After a 3-year torment by the “voices”, Ka-kit finally sought medical advice with the assistance of social workers, and understood that the “voices” were a symptom of psychiatric illness. He was actually relieved to be diagnosed as he believed he would recover. Since then, Ka-kit has become more proactive and joined various support groups in psychiatric rehabilitation organizations to share his experience of having auditory hallucination. In addition, he signed up to be a peer support worker so as to help those who had also been agonized by “voices”. In September 2017, he even left Hong Kong by plane for the first time to attend an international conference on psychiatric rehabilitation in Thailand, which gave him even more experiences and revelations. Although Ka-kit still experiences auditory hallucination now, he

When you looked up at the night sky, have you ever thought about that there might be some other creatures living on the stars in the galaxy which are hundreds of millions of light years away while they might also be looking at our planet Earth, wondering the same thing? Dr. David YU started to get interested in physics since secondary school. In 2009, David earned his B.Sc. in Physics & Astronomy from the Department of Physics of the University of Hong Kong. He believes that physics is the principle of all objects and a language to describe the world. Through it, human beings understand the interactions between substances and energy. Together with the physical observations and studies on the celestial bodies in the universe, tiny little humans like us who live on the Earth can have a grasp of the rules of operation of all things in the universe. Yet, as a financial city, Hong Kong does not place great emphasis on astronomical development. There is the lack of funding for scientific researches and thus the loss of talents. The dim prospect has made the number of students studying Astronomy continue to diminish. At the beginning of the year, the University of Hong Kong even scrapped its major in Astronomy and a joint Mathematics/Physics major, which gave people the impression that the academia no longer attached importance to Physics and Astronomy. However, the fact of choosing a non-mainstream major did not hold David back. After pursuing his bachelor’s degree and master’s degree in Hong Kong, David got his Ph.D. in Germany. Now he is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden. Although it is a precious opportunity to be engaged in scientific researches in foreign countries, at the end of the day, David knows that it will not be his long-term job. He just wants to grab every chance and see which direction his career can go. Apart from conducting scientific researches, David also spends time and energy on science populariz

Kwok Yat-long (Yue Jai) is gifted with high intelligence, but he also has more than one learning disability. Is his path of life destined to be more arduous than others’? Yat-long, who is currently 17 years old, had done two assessments of learning during primary school. The results found that he had dyslexia, attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder. However, he was identified as a “gifted child” as he got an IQ score of 140. Although Yat-long did not perform well on his academic results, he was able to develop his natural talents in one aspect – “I joined a scientific inventions competition for the first time at Primary 6 and won a prize. Since then, I have been passionate about scientific research.” Before he went to secondary school, he was diagnosed with another disease – Asperger Syndrome, which is a type of autism spectrum disorder. Despite the various learning disabilities, Yat-long still persists in his pursuit of scientific research. At secondary school, it came as no surprise that he joined the design and technology (D&T) club. He represented his school to join quite a few of competitions and got a lot of awards. As he was merely fond of learning through scientific research, the D&T room had become the only place where he wanted to go at school – ‘The D&T room was my “home field”. It’s so boring when I went back to the classroom. The difference was like heaven and hell!’ Yat-long believes that self-motivated learning is the most effective learning method for him and thus he had never been able to get used to the traditional, mainstream teaching method. Besides, his problem of autism had been the hindrance between him and other students. At senior secondary school, the pressure from assignments was getting bigger. One year ago, Yat-long finished Secondary 4. Nevertheless, he decided to quit school as he lagged behind other students academically and needed to repeat a year. During the year after he left school, Yat-long had not given up on lear