Transgender transcendence: RTHK presenter's memoir of transition after leaving Hong Kong

There is a passage in Nicola Jane Chase's memoir, Tea and Transition, that has a particular resonance for Hong Kong readers. It is the spring of 2013 and she is sitting in her home-recording studio in Queen's, New York. She is about to play the last track in the final episode of her long-running radio show for RTHK's Radio 3.

"The civil servants in Hong Kong were surprised at my seemingly irrational decision," Chase writes of her decision to stop broadcasting. "Especially as I had fudged the specifics of why I needed to do this. I said that I needed to take an extended break, but that maybe I could work for them again at some time."

The show had played every weekday night on the government broadcaster from 1995 to 2005, and then reappeared on Saturday nights in 2007. For that final night, she played The Cure, The Charlatans and Teenage Fanclub - the kind of pioneering bands that had won the show something of a cult following back in the 1990s, before the internet, before iTunes.

"I signed off on air and closed the mic for one last time. I wasn't emotional but I felt the finality. There was relief, too, at not having to maintain a part of me that had left the building a long time before.

"A final track from New Order [ Dream Attack from their still scintillating 1989 album Technique] and I was gone."

What Hong Kong listeners may not have been aware of as they tuned in to that final show was that Neil Chase, the male host, had almost dissolved by that point. In his place sat Nicola Jane, a woman with long blond hair who lived in an apartment that contained only women's clothing. And this radio show, based on a male voice, had become her liability.