Teresa Teng was a beloved singer across the Chinese diaspora, enjoyed by millions around the world even if they didn’t speak Chinese. Pim Wangtechawat titles her debut novel, The Moon Represents My Heart, after one of Teng’s most famous songs and scatters Teng’s lyrics throughout her book, a story of time travel between Hong Kong and London, spanning this and last century.
Hong Kong
Issues of identity take center stage in Mary Jean Chan’s new poetry collection Bright Fear. Chan’s poems deal with a variety of uncomfortable personal experiences: growing up queer in a Chinese household, dealing with racism and racial prejudice when moving to the United Kingdom, and grappling with learning—and then eventually writing in and making a career out of—the “colonial language”, as Chan puts it, of English.
Given the opera’s relative rarity, Musica Viva’s recent production of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s La finta giardiniera must surely have been a premiere of some sort.
The legacy of the businessmen who built Hong Kong are all over the city. Bankers work in Chater House—named after Paul Chater, the Armenian businessman behind much of the city’s land reclamation (among many other things). The Kowloon Shangri-La Hotel sits along Mody Road, named after Hormusjee Naorojee Mody, a Parsi immigrant who helped found the University of Hong Kong. And that’s not including figures like Robert Hotung, the half-British, half-Chinese magnate who found more power in his Chinese identity.
Baritone Isaac Droscha and soprano Vicki Wu sang a selection of Sergei Rachmaninoff songs—including the well-known (and wordless) “Vocalise” and “Ne poi, krasavitsa, pri mne” with text from Pushkin—at a concert in celebration of the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth.
A comic opera double consisting of the Hong Kong premiere of George’s Bizet’s Le docteur Miracle and a new production Gaetano Donizetti’s Rita was presented by Opera Hong Kong in cooperation with HKUST on 15 May 2023 association with the French May Arts Festival.
The winner of Musica Viva’s 2018 inaugural Hong Kong International Operatic Singing Competition, Norwegian soprano Margrethe Fredheim, joined third place and audience prize winner, Chinese soprano Chen Yibao, in a return concert 17 June 2023 headlined by renowned Korean soprano Sumi Jo, who had been one of the competition’s judges.
Lily, living in London, receives a mysterious letter naming her in an inheritance from a stranger in Hong Kong. To claim it, she must travel to Hong Kong. Her older sister, Maya, has received the same letter but chooses to ignore it. A successful lawyer, Maya feels no connection to her mother’s birthplace and doesn’t wish to feel beholden to anyone, especially a stranger. Maya resembles their late father, Julian, with blond hair and light eyes, while Lily resembles their late mother, Sook-Yin, with dark hair and dark eyes. Lily is convinced she embarrasses Maya because she is a constant reminder that they come from a complicated background. Just how complicated is something that Lily will soon discover when she flies to Hong Kong in late June 1997 without informing her sister.
Kit Fan’s latest poetry collection, The Ink Cloud Reader, hinges on anticipation of change. In “Cumulonimbus,” which opens the main section of the book, Fan compares the current state of his writing career to the moments before a thunderstorm breaks.
The first half of May was been a busy fortnight for opera in the Greater Bay Area. The renowned Chinese soprano He Hui sang her first Wagner role, Senta in Der fliegende Holländer, at the Guangzhou Opera House on 5 and 7 May, a dramatic move (literally and figuratively) away from the Verdi and Puccini heroines for which she is best known.
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