I am typical of many Hongkongers who have recently returned to the city from a life overseas. My mother was a first-generation immigrant to Australia and struggled with alienation because of poverty, culture and language in the early years in her new country. But she brought her family through with resounding success.
I find myself in a similar situation but in reverse. Having been brought up in Australia, I am acclimatised to its culture and language. I have explored its vast landscape, and lived on huge cattle ranches and distant dairy farms. I have experienced its post-colonial culture and that of the indigenous people, having lived with Aborigines in Darwin.
To give my mother credit, my situation returning to Hong Kong is vastly better than what she found herself in when she was a new immigrant. I arrived back in Hong Kong with support and a university degree, with good prospects.
I have had the luxury of exploring Hong Kong and the mainland not through the struggle of survival, but through intense curiosity about my past and my family's past. Having established a stable financial foothold, in recent years I have been researching the roots of my family. I have found out a lot by talking to older family members and visiting the sites where we used to live. Through this search I have found my identity and revealed the mysteries of my past.
When I was nine my mother divorced my father and we emigrated to Australia. My father had left work to become a monk. I didn't know much about him, apart from the eternal bond that exists between father and son. We lived in Kwun Tong in the late 1970s, in a musty old public-housing estate. We rented rooms to vagrants to help make ends meet, but there was always a room that was kept empty. The only noise from it was that of the crickets my father bred for fighting. Beautiful, ornate, mysterious wooden boxes lined this room. They hadn't been opened for years but must have had sentimental value because they were taking up much precious space. It was a scary, dark room with an odd smell caused by the crickets and their fermenting food.
I was afraid to go into the room. But I did open one of the boxes once, and what I found was hardly believable. It was a magician's box, with cloaks, top hat, fabric flowers and wands. I didn't get a good look at the rest because when I dug further, hundreds of cockroaches scared the daylights out of me, and I never looked again. This discovery always baffled me - until a few days ago, when I met my father's oldest brother's daughter, my cousin, for the first time.
My cousin told me a story that my father told her father on the latter's death bed. It was a tragic love story. It was 1955, the year the Communists took over the Tachen Islands from the Taiwanese, shortly after the Chinese civil war and the Kuomintang retreat to Taiwan. China was reinvigorated and people had hope again. My father was 21 years old and had returned from Vietnam to study in Hangzhou .