Profile | Chow Yun-fat’s English coach, Hong Kong’s go-to Cantonese-speaking white actor for decades – what’s next for Gregory Rivers aka Ho Kwok-wing, Australian country boy?
- Gregory Charles Rivers, recognisable as the Cantonese-speaking foreigner in many TVB television dramas, moved to the city in the late ’80s
- He had discovered Canto-pop legends like Alan Tam as a university student in Australia, was a driver for Leslie Cheung and polished Chow Yun-fat’s English
I was born in 1965 in Gympie, a small town two hours north of Brisbane, Australia. My grandfather grew pineapples and my father grew up on the farm. Later, we bought some of the land off him, and we lived right next door. I have two younger sisters and as kids we’d ride our bikes on the dirt tracks around the farm. It was great fun.
In 1980, we sold the farm and moved to the Blue Mountains, where my parents went to Bible college. Apart from studying, my dad worked as a handyman in the college. We were on the edge of Katoomba and if you walked five minutes down the hill you could see the Three Sisters (an outcrop of three eroded rocks) and the bush.
I went to the University of New South Wales to study medicine. In the first year, I lived off campus and studied hard. I met the Hong Kong students in my class and we clicked. My best friend, Albert, was from Hong Kong and to get extra pocket money we delivered newspapers.
We had to put the newspaper in the postbox rather than just toss it on the lawn, so one of us drove the car and the other ran along beside it delivering the papers. We’d get paid as soon as we finished the job and spend it all on pinball machines and hamburgers.
Bonnie and I are not going to get vaccinated and we know it’s possible that soon only vaccinated people will be allowed to fly