EVERY SUNDAY evening, from 6.15pm to 8pm, prisoners all over Hong Kong gather around radios to listen to their Little Angel. Some inmates exchange up to three packets of cigarettes just for her photograph. Others save money from their meagre earnings to buy stamps for the letters they send to her.
'She is very popular among inmates,' says Ng Chi-kuen, 28, recently released from a two-year sentence at Lantau's Ma Po Ping Prison for a gang fight. 'In prison every Sunday before 6pm, everyone left what they were doing and picked up their radios to listen to her. I couldn't sleep without listening to her. We felt that she cared for us - the ignored people.'
'Little Angel' is Vivian Yip Wan-yi, a 28-year-old RTHK presenter who fronts the weekly music request show Devoted To You. The final half hour of the show is called The Blue Books and dedicated to reading prisoners letters - in Cantonese and English, depending on the language in which they were written - and taking calls from their families, friends and, in some cases, even from their victim's relatives.
Every week, Yip gets 40 to 50 letters from male and female prisoners, local and non-local. They range from a first-time prisoner in his 70s who was jailed for selling pirated CDs, to rapists and murderers. They write about friendships, family and in many cases - such as a drug smuggler sentenced to 40 years - make appeals for others not to end up in their position.
In one case, a man wrote saying that since his imprisonment seven years ago, his wife hadn't forgiven him and had never visited him. 'I am sorry, please forgive me,' he pleaded to his wife in the letter. A few weeks later, the man wrote back to say his wife had visited him. 'He was very happy and asked me to continue helping prisoners,' Yip recalls.
'Some wrote to request songs for their triad 'brothers' I couldn't read them and asked them to stop. Now they dare not make such requests,' she says, laughing.
