In Larissa Lai’s new novel, The Lost Century, elderly Violet Mah wonders, “Why is it that the grandchild most distant from the history is the one most interested in it?” It is this question that frames Lai’s story set in Hong Kong just before and during the Japanese occupation. This question is also the basis…
All families have their stories, and for families scattered around the world, as Teresa Lim’s is, the stories often have a central pivot decades or generations back. Lim’s family story gets going, if not starts, with her maternal great-great grandfather who emigrated to Singapore from Southern China at the end of the 19th-century. Draught and…
Musica Viva has recently taken to doing a Mozart opera each year, and this year’s selection of Don Giovanni, when the composer was at the height of his powers, was at the other end of the scale from last year’s La Finta Semplice, written was Mozart was just twelve.
In The Last Tigers of Hong Kong, John Saeki presents what might best be described as a chronological anthology of tiger sightings in Hong Kong from its earliest days as a colony right through to the present day.
Don Pasquale is the last of Gaetano Donizetti’s great trio of comic operas which includes L’elisir d’amore and La fille du régiment. And it was to this classic that Opera Hong Kong turned for a lighter entry for this summer’s semi-staged production at Hong Kong City Hall.
Dung Kai-cheung’s A Catalog of Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On is an exercise in the influence of late-90s, mainly Japanese, popular culture on young women in end-of-the-century Hong Kong. The “catalog” consists of ninety-nine sketches, perhaps in an homage to Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style, where Queneau took an unremarkable short episode and…
The first diplomatic mission from Brazil to China took place from 1879-1882; it also included Brazil’s first circumnavigation of the globe (sailing east in this case). An account—Primeira circum-navegação brasileira e primeira missão do Brasil à China (1879) by Marli Cristina Scomazzon and Jeff Franco—has recently been published. This excerpt about the delegation’s stop-over in Hong…
Hong Kong figures both as an early childhood memory and sometimes as a what-if question in Dorothy Chan’s latest poetry collection Babe. What if Chan’s parents had stayed and didn’t take the family to the United States, where Chan was born? What if Chan could grow up with a grandmother who was always around rather…
Jacques Offenbach (1819-1880) is primarily represented in opera’s “standard repertory” by Les contes d’Hoffmann, but he made his name in operetta (opérette), a form which came into its own in mid-19th century Paris in large part due to Offenbach’s own contributions. Dating from 1873, Pomme d’Api is a one-act comic operetta from the latter part…
In a pair of school-day matinees on 25 and 27 May, Hong Kong’s Musica Viva—back in the operatic saddle as local Covid restrictions ease—presented an abridged version George Frideric Handel’s baroque masterpiece Giulio Cesare.
To keep a promise to his calligraphy teacher, JJ travels on the ocean liner “Le Cambodge” to Shanghai via Hong Kong in 1954. On board, he makes friend with Fred, and JJ’s longing for friendship will divert him from keeping his promise. After being stranded in Hong Kong with no money or passport, JJ agrees…
Hong Kong is almost impossible to explain to those not from the city. Too often, the city has had to struggle with shorthand used by those writing about the city from afar—for audiences with little understanding of what the place is actually like.
In 1864-65, it took Gustavus Farley Jr 123 days by ship to reach Hong Kong from Boston, USA, a journey which he diarizes in the last letter in this collection. Although only twenty years old, he already had several sea-miles under his belt. At 17, he had been sent to London from his home in…
Karen Cheung’s new book, The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir, about growing up and coming of age in a city she feels is like no other, is characterized by a narrative style both intimate and candid. It’s hard to avoid being swept up by her story from the beginning as she describes the day…
On Hong Kong’s Ice House Street, in the heart of the city’s Financial District, is Club Lusitano: one of the city’s premier social clubs, nestled at the top of an office tower. But the club’s roots stretch back over 150 years, when it was originally set up to serve the colony’s burgeoning Portuguese community—including many…