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One day in late July 1978, I boarded the British Airways Boeing 747 at Kai Tak Airport that would fly me away from Hong Kong for the first time in my life. Although unspoken, I knew it was a special treat and sweetener for the inevitable rejection that was to come from my applications to medical schools in Great Britain. My grandmother, father, mother and sister saw me off at the departure lounge. It was to be my adventure of a lifetime. My school career and ‘A’ levels behind me, I was facing six weeks of touring the land of golden opportunity. I had set up my own travel itinerary, having written to friends, distant family and my mother’s fellow workers at the British Council offices. I had planned roughly where I wanted to be across the nation, and soon I had most of my accommodation needs sorted. I would stay half the time with complete strangers, affiliated to the British Council, who had generously offered to put me up in their homes. With one suitcase of luggage, a shoulder bag and a new camera not yet loaded with film, I waved goodbye to all those who were dear to me and faced the world alone. I was 18, and had never been out of Hong Kong. In fact, apart from a one-week residential school trip to an outlying island off the shores of Tai Po in the New Territories, and a handful of church choir retreats, I had never been away from home. I was acutely aware of a door opening before me. How strange, to suddenly have all this freedom thrust upon me – and for it to happen 6000 miles from home.
It is a memorable experience flying into and out of Kai Tak airport. It was considered one of the most dangerous and harrowing airports in the world, not just because of its single short runway jutting into Victoria Harbour but because the surrounding area in Kowloon was so densely populated, and with mountain ranges a few miles to the north, northeast and east of the airport.
The plane taxied up the short runway. Within seconds of the thunderous jet engines exploding into an acceleration of increasing energy, we were off the ground and the skyscrapers and residential tenements of my little homeland loomed so close beside me I could see into the flats and almost touch their walls. Their bamboo poles, hung with the daily laundry, waved us goodbye as traffic queued towards the cross-harbour tunnel. In those days one was not allowed to fly into Chinese air space, and the route was a rather tortuous one. The plane had to land twice for refuelling, once at Bombay’s Dum Dum airport and again at Bahrain. Passengers were required to disembark into the transit lounge, and had to return after being shepherded into little cubicles with curtains on either side, as we were frisked by customs and immigration officials. Before we could be airborne again, the plane was sprayed to kill off foreign bugs, as though we were travelling aliens from some strange land.
My first glimpse of London from the air as we began our descent into Heathrow International Airport was a sight I shall never forget. I could not believe the greenery; the patchwork quilt of meadows and farms, the trees, open spaces, expanses of land and woods and forests, individual houses so low on the ground. Everything was large and spacious, and very, very, English.
My brief diary entries during this time went like this:
Tuesday 18th July 1978: leave for London BA022 at 22.15
Wednesday 19th July 1978: arrive London 09.40. Staying with Sara.
Saturday 22nd July 1978: Stay in Colchester for Nick’s 21st
Monday 24th July 1978: Stay with Aunty Mary and Uncle Arthur in Croydon.
Tuesday 1st August 1978: Letter from Dean of LHMC. ‘with reference to your recent telephone call, the Dean can see you on Wednesday next, 2nd August, at 2.30pm in his room in the Medical College’
Wednesday 2nd August 1978: interview with John Ellis
Thursday 3rd August 1978: leave for Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Victoria Coach Station 9.30am;
Saturday 5th August 1978: leave for Edinburgh
Thursday 10th August 1978: Oban and Western Highlands trip instead of Glasgow
Friday 11th August 1978: leave for Liverpool
Sunday 13th August 1978: Return to London – stay with Westcotts in Catford.
Tuesday 15th August 1978: Depart for Cardiff
Saturday 19th August 1978: return to London
Sunday 20th August 1978: received my A Level results today by cable. Went to the Tate Gallery and St James’ Park.
Monday 21st August 1978: meeting Sara tonight for a celebratory dinner.
Tuesday 22nd August 1978: visit to Cambridge.
Wednesday 23rd August 1978: leave for Southampton. Staying with Aunty Dock.
Thursday 24th August 1978: lunch in the New Forest; dinner in Lymington.
Friday 25th August 1978: went to Bournemouth. Saturday 26th August 1978: return to London.
Cable and Wireless telegram: 30th August 1978 (sent to Hong Kong):
URGENT
A VACANCY HAS ARISEN IN MEDICAL SCHOOL FOR
OCTOBER 1978 PLEASE ADVISE IMMEDIATELY IF
YOU WOULD LIKE TO ACCEPT THIS PLACE DEAN
LONDON HOSPITAL MEDICAL COLLEGE
It was relayed back to me in London, presumably by telegram.
Saturday 2nd September 1978: saw ‘The Sound of Music’ in Croydon.
Monday 4th September 1978: Westcotts coming at 2pm to pick me up and take me to Heathrow. Plane for Hong Kong BA 021 17.00hours.
Tuesday 5th September 1978: arrive HK 17.45.
Sunday 17th September 1978: Moon Festival celebrations
Saturday 23rd September 1978: 7.30 dinner party – farewell and Dad’s birthday.
Wednesday 27th September 1978: collect visa, passport and air ticket. BA020 20.00hrs
Thursday 28th September 1978: arrive Heathrow 08.25
Monday 2nd October 1978: report to the London Hospital 10.00am.
‘It must have been such a culture shock for you,’ my friends have often said when they learnt of my journey. But to be honest, I did not feel it was so at the time. My formative years had been such a rich tapestry of different experiences, cultures and expectations. My parents struggled to afford to send my sister and me to an English school, where the entry requirement was that one’s mother tongue had to be English. I am told that my father sat with me every evening when he returned from work, teaching me English words so I would qualify. The whole family was united in this effort, and as a result I never really learnt to speak Cantonese fluently, or to read and write the language. When I was at school, I was a true British subject – learning about the British Empire, reading the history and geography of countries thousands of miles away. I learnt French as a second language, and was indistinguishable from my fellow classmates who came from expatriate families, or well-to-do business classes from other Asian and Far Eastern countries. I went to church, sang in the choir, helped out at the Oxfam shop on a Saturday morning, enrolled on the Duke of Edinburgh Award scheme and joined the brownies. I even passed a badge which required me to make a bed; I had to guess what was required, as I had never made a bed with a mattress and bedsheets before, much less slept in one. I studied piano and ballet. As the years went by my parents became more successful in their careers and in their financial status, but it is only in retrospect that I can appreciate how much they and my grandmother must have sacrificed to put my sister and me through such an education.
When I was at home, I spoke with my grandmother in my fluent but rather limited Cantonese. I ate Chinese food, observed and celebrated Chinese festivals, and played my part in ancestral worship and offerings to various Buddhist and Taoist gods. I lived in very modest circumstances, with a shelf of toys and books and one drawer of clothes to my name, most handmade by my grandmother. We sat on a red plastic sofa, which had been scratched so badly by the cat it had to be covered by a rather unsightly length of lace. My cousins often caught cockroaches the size of an adult thumb, or used them for shot pellet practice as they came out of the floorboards or crevices. When the atmosphere is heavy, cockroaches fly. They were a common cohabitant with us, so we had to take care to put food away and keep everything clean. One year I remember my younger sister being heartbroken when she discovered her prized collection of soft furry toys had to be thrown away; she must have played with them with sweet sticky fingers, for ants had left a trail of destruction on her shelf of prized possessions.
As a school project, I bred cockroaches. We were meant to watch a caterpillar on a leaf, or something like that, but my cousin had caught a cockroach in his hands and challenged me, on a whim, if I wanted it. I said yes, just to show I wasn’t a wimp, and rushed into the kitchen to fetch an empty Robertson’s jam jar, with the label already soaked off. We soaked and peeled them off with care as we could exchange them for the little Golly badges, which were iconic and still very popular in the 1960s despite growing criticism. My mother even made me a black rag doll with big white eyes, as we couldn’t afford the real ones selling in shops. With the lid firmly screwed on, and the cockroach in it, I used a screwdriver and a handy weight to pierce a few air holes through the lid. Within hours my cousin had added a few other cockroaches to the collection, and before long there was an egg capsule. I was fascinated and convinced myself I wanted to see it hatch, but as the days went by it gradually dawned on me I would soon have a whole jar full of young cockroaches, perhaps 30 or 40 of them. Disgusted by the thought, I threw the whole thing out. Someone else’s problem!
Friends who visited were all Chinese; most were treated as kin even though they were not strictly blood relations. I do remember a handful of occasions when we received other visitors. The most vivid was one afternoon when I heard whistling outside our flat. It was so persistent I couldn’t ignore it. I looked through the peep hole in our front door and thought I saw a fair-haired boy. I rushed into our kitchen as the whistling continued, and there he was again, this time holding onto the fence which surrounded the back courtyard. How he managed to climb in, I didn’t know. He must have accessed it from the landing window, by the madwoman’s front door. He was a boy from my class at primary school. It turned out he had taken a fancy to me. Somehow he had got hold of my address and came to find me all on his own. Or maybe he followed me after school one day, I don’t recall. I was only 10. Naturally, we invited him in and gave him a cold drink. I think he only stayed for a little while before leaving. It was the talk of my family at the time.
On my eleventh birthday, he invited me out to dinner. His mother had made a reservation for us at a French/Italian restaurant in Wan Chai, and came along to chaperone and of course pay the bill. I remember they paid for a taxi to take me home too, but I don’t remember how I got there – just how excited and nervous I was that evening. It was a very special occasion. He was gorgeous and so handsome, with his mother’s relaxed and engaging manner (she was a television presenter) and his father’s good looks (he was in the Canadian Mounted Police). He gave me a birthday present – a golden musical jewellery box. It played ‘Für Elise’, and in the months and years after when I watched the little ballerina twirling on the glass top as the music played, it filled my heart with such joy.
The waiter came round with a basket of roses. His mother indicated it would be for her son to give to me a single red rose. It was such a perfect evening, and he gave me a little peck on the cheek when we parted. Sadly, he left Hong Kong soon after we transitioned into secondary school.
So it didn’t feel much of a culture shock after all. I feel, and I know, that I am both – a fusion of East meets West. I remember listening to a visiting American professor of psychoanalysis many years ago, who spoke about the psychodynamics of working with people from different cultures and backgrounds. He compared a person such as myself with a wooden chess piece. He said this is how he explains it to friends.
‘When I hold up this block of wood, what is it to you? It is a block of wood. But when I carve this block of wood into a chess piece, what it is to you now? It is a chess piece. But it is still a block of wood, is it not? It does not have to be one or the other. It can be both.’