This week: malaria
Although I am a Hongkonger born and bred, I was in Australia for 17 years to study. Since my return I have improved on my Cantonese and can now speak fluently, and have well and truly been absorbed into the nation's culture and causes.
But my family's background is much blurrier. I am a first-generation Hongkonger. My parents were born and raised in a rural, almost pre-industrial area. My father was raised in Punyi, Guangdong province. It is now a bustling urban industrial centre, but when my father was young, it was dominated by rice and vegetable fields. Life was a constant struggle to meet the quotas set by the government.
My mother was raised in rural Vietnam. She was forced to leave the country due to war and strife. It was as a refugee that she met my father and emigrated to Hong Kong, where they had my sister and me.
I grew up listening to my father and mother's stories of their past. Their stories seemed so foreign and out of this urban world, more like past lives rather than a continuation of their current ones. They would tell me how simple life was back then, but their simple lives always had an undertone of tragedy. My mother saw her home bombed three separate times in her life, and my father's psyche was very much affected by the imperial Japanese war in China. Even at the end of his life he was paranoid about the Japanese.
Even though my parents grew up in different impoverished countries, there was always one constant in their stories - disease, in particular malaria. Malaria causes poverty and poverty is a cause of malaria. My parents saw many of their family members and friends die from this horrible mosquito-borne disease, which is common around rice paddies and swampland where there is standing water.
The disease has been eradicated in rich urbanised areas, where sustained campaigns of treatment and destruction of mosquito breeding grounds have been successful. But in rural areas all around the equator it lurks and waits for its opportunity.