Childhood Memory and Communal History

During my trip in Pipestem, West Virginia, an Appalachian folk song singer came perform. He juxtaposed local music with folk tales, history of Appalanchia, and stories of his own. Although he was long-winded at times, the prosaicnss of his stories and songs still intrigued me. (The last song he sang about the heartache of a coal mining family made me teary. I wanted my parents to be right beside me.)

It made me ponder what I would tell if I was asked to speak about Hong Kong.

Pieces of high school history lessons, influential historic figures, dates of important historic events--all plain facts; no those are not what I am looking for. I want to talk and write about stories that are singular but not particular, stories with personal memory intertwined with shared experience of the community. The people in Hong Kong deserve a representation that goes beyond numbers and clinical data.

I remember Pooja Makhijani, the author of Under Her Skin: How Girls Experience Race in America, tells us that "if you survived childhood, you have enough materials to write a novel." It strikes me that maybe by remembering and commemorating the memory of my childhood, I would be able to render the common emotions and circumstances we as Hong Kongerers have experienced.

I remember Lai Yuen--a shabby amusement park with broken rides and scrawny, malnutritioned animals. My mother used to buy a lot of cheap vegetables from the market and took me to Lai Yuen and fed the goats.

There were cages of chickens in the wet market. The cages were so packed that chickens could hardly move. When my mother went for grocery shopping, I would squat beside the chickens and talked to them, until I saw the butcher held a chicken by its neck, killed it, and removed its feathers with hot water. The shriek on the verge of death made me shiver. I was then afraid of chickens and most kinds of birds.

Several years later when the Bird Flu hit Hong Kong and the government ordered to have all chickens slaughtered, I was happy. They could not scare me now.

I remember holding my mother's hand in Central. I wanted to become a successful businesswoman in power suit.
There were a lot of Japanese families in my neighborhood. When I was in kindergarten, I used to hate the Japanese kids . "I don't want to play with the Japanese because they invaded my country and did horrible things to my people in the Massacre of Nanjing."

The surge of Chinese nationalism, however, was not consistent. As a child, I was always overtly eager to please any white people I met. Once, I approached the daughters of my father's American boss. My English was not fluent and those girls look annoyed.

Each morning before school, my mother would give me English lessons. She always said my spoken English was poor because it was fused with Cantonese accent. But now, I take pride in my accent. I do not want to be assimilated.
My neighbor was an Indian family. My parents always commented that those "Ah Cha" smelled weird.
There were a lot of Indian men with their hair wrapped up. I was afraid of them because I was convinced that there were swamps of bugs in their hair.

When my aunt decided to hire a muslim domestic helper from Indonesia, she first made sure that the woman would remove her headscarf. My parent approved of this and my aunt took pride in being able to do so. At that time, I did not have a clear idea of what freedom of religion was, but I was sad to hear that.

It was in the news that the government had just lowered the minimum wage of overseas domestic helpers. The maid at my home showed me photos of her family. She had to mail them money each month to support the education of her children. I asked my mom not to lower her wage. She scolded me and said that "my finger points outward instead of inward."