https://www.scmp.com/rss/329661/feed Venus Wu is a senior reporter at Goldthread. Born and raised in Hong Kong, she wielded a video camera at Reuters for five years before swapping it for a pen. en https://assets.i-scmp.com/static/img/icons/scmp-meta-1200x630.png https://www.scmp.com Every night, for over three decades, Lam Chun-sang, 71, has set up his stall on a street full of fortune tellers in Hong Kong. Popular with locals and tourists alike, Temple Street is where soothsayers congregate to deliver advice on everything from the most auspicious day for a wedding to the best name for a newborn. But this normally busy block now falls quiet after foreign tourists were barred from entering the city in March and locals avoid outside leisure amid the coronavirus... https://www.scmp.com/culture/coronavirus-hong-kongs-famous-fortune-tellers-feel-left-behind-pandemic/article/3095561?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/culture/coronavirus-hong-kongs-famous-fortune-tellers-feel-left-behind-pandemic/article/3095561?utm_source=rss_feed Fri, 31 Jul 2020 10:38:20 +0000 “Roller derby is the exact opposite of the female oppression,” says Snooky Wong, co-president of the Hong Kong Roller Derby team. Started in 1930s Chicago, the rush and spectacle that is roller derby has crossed over to Asia. From the outset, the sport—which involves players circling each other on roller skates—allowed men and women to compete on equal grounds. And today, that egalitarian message is resonating with people halfway across the world. Wong has been leading Hong Kong Roller Derby for... https://www.scmp.com/identity/hong-kong-roller-derby/article/3044846?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/identity/hong-kong-roller-derby/article/3044846?utm_source=rss_feed Mon, 06 Jan 2020 12:04:40 +0000 Surrounded by pink paper cutouts of wiggling sperm, the young, soft-spoken woman in the video boldly declares, “I am a sperm seeker. If you are the one, please contact me.” Alan, the 28-year-old Beijing artist who made the video, always knew she wanted a baby. But after four unsuccessful attempts to find a partner online, she realized she didn’t need a man. All she needed was sperm. “Why do I have to get married before I can have a baby?” she says. Alan’s question is echoed by a small but... https://www.scmp.com/culture/single-mothers-china/article/3030094?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/culture/single-mothers-china/article/3030094?utm_source=rss_feed Tue, 24 Sep 2019 10:48:17 +0000 On screen, Li Ziqi’s life seems to defy the rules of reality. With 58 million fans worldwide, the Chinese internet celebrity is famous for her videos where she performs the work of a farmer with the grace of a fairy. In one video, she picks flowers on horseback in a red cape, invoking the image of Red Riding Hood. In another, she builds a bamboo furniture set using traditional Chinese techniques. While the videos have a cinematic quality to them, it’s her deep knowledge of food, nature, and... https://www.scmp.com/culture/exclusive-behind-scenes-li-ziqi/article/3027104?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/culture/exclusive-behind-scenes-li-ziqi/article/3027104?utm_source=rss_feed Fri, 13 Sep 2019 06:39:55 +0000 Every morning, Ren Jiuliang wakes up for another day of racing against time. The 28-year-old is a food deliveryman in Beijing, where takeout has become the preferred way to eat among white-collar workers. On-demand delivery is nothing new, with services like Uber Eats and AmazonFresh delivering food and groceries right to people’s doorsteps. But in China, it’s taken to another level. Apart from food, people can pay drivers to fetch medicine, run errands, and even deliver personal items left at... https://www.scmp.com/culture/day-in-the-life-food-deliveryman-china/article/3023099?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/culture/day-in-the-life-food-deliveryman-china/article/3023099?utm_source=rss_feed Fri, 16 Aug 2019 08:36:33 +0000 Elsa Tang, a zero-waste activist in Beijing, still remembers the look of confusion on the vegetable seller’s face when she turned down a plastic bag. “But it’s free,” Tang recalls her saying. “Why don’t you just take it? You want me to put these potatoes inside your clean tote bag? They’ll make it dirty.” Her anecdote is telling of the attitudes that many Chinese people still hold toward environmentalism. There is little stigma attached to single-use plastic, recycling bins are rare, and the... https://www.scmp.com/culture/china-zero-waste-recycle/article/3022000?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/culture/china-zero-waste-recycle/article/3022000?utm_source=rss_feed Thu, 08 Aug 2019 10:15:10 +0000 When Amy Cui opened one of China’s first online shops for plus-size clothing 11 years ago, the word didn’t even exist. “There was no such thing as ‘plus-size fashion,” says Cui, who also goes by Tang Tang. “You could only buy ‘mom clothes’ or ‘fat people clothes.’ And the only colors you could find were black, gray, blue, and white. It was unbearable for young women.” Walking though her maze of a warehouse is a reminder of how far she—and society—have come. Her store boasts 1.1 million... https://www.scmp.com/culture/china-plus-size-clothing-body-positivity/article/3020519?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/culture/china-plus-size-clothing-body-positivity/article/3020519?utm_source=rss_feed Mon, 29 Jul 2019 11:28:53 +0000 Some have called his animations “ugly,” but Hong Kong artist Wong Ping believes ugly can also be beautiful. His surreal, brightly-colored animated shorts tell witty, absurd stories that often make viewers uncomfortable. In one film, a man watches from a closet as his wife offers free sex to an undercover cop. In another, a man receives a fetus from his Tinder date, who believes that getting abortions will help redeem her of her sins. Wong’s provocative works have been shown at museums around... https://www.scmp.com/culture/wong-ping-hong-kong-animation/article/3017773?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/culture/wong-ping-hong-kong-animation/article/3017773?utm_source=rss_feed Mon, 08 Jul 2019 15:20:36 +0000 Every year in May, a small island in Hong Kong celebrates a bun festival, where tens of thousands of buns stuffed with sweet bean paste are stacked into towers several stories high. Many of them are made by hand at a small, family-run bakery called Kwok Kam Kee, which has been doing it for over four decades. About two years ago, Martin Kwok, the owner, left a cushy job in finance to take over the shop from his father. “I want to show my father and mother that they raised a good child.” Martin... https://www.scmp.com/culture/hong-kong-family-bakery-cheung-chau-bun-festival/article/3012066?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/culture/hong-kong-family-bakery-cheung-chau-bun-festival/article/3012066?utm_source=rss_feed Tue, 28 May 2019 10:08:10 +0000 Writing Chinese is hard, even for people who grew up learning how to read and write it. Almost everyone has an embarrassing account of how they started writing a sentence on paper only to stop in the middle because they forgot how to write a certain character. The problem is not unique to Chinese. Any English speaker can recall moments when they forgot how to spell a specific word. But with over 8,000 characters to memorize—the majority of which aren’t used in everyday life—Chinese people are... https://www.scmp.com/culture/are-chinese-people-forgetting-how-write/article/3011174?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/culture/are-chinese-people-forgetting-how-write/article/3011174?utm_source=rss_feed Tue, 21 May 2019 11:04:12 +0000 Hong Kong, one of the world’s most densely populated cities, is rarely regarded as a place for conservation. If anything, quite the opposite. The city is notorious for being a trading hub for smuggled ivory, shark fins, and pangolin skins. But one critically endangered parrot species has managed to find a home in this bustling metropolis. Globally, out of the 2,000 yellow-crested cockatoos left in the wild, 10% of them are in Hong Kong. One only need to walk through Hong Kong Park, an oasis in... https://www.scmp.com/travel/cockatoo-endangered-hong-kong/article/3009408?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/travel/cockatoo-endangered-hong-kong/article/3009408?utm_source=rss_feed Wed, 08 May 2019 11:49:08 +0000 Chopping firewood, cooking without a stove, and getting water from a creek—this is the everyday routine of Mok Ho-kwong, a 36-year-old man who’s chosen to live a simple and green life in the outskirts of bustling Hong Kong. Mok, who calls himself “Yeah Man,” a play on the Chinese words for “wild man,” started living off the grid 13 years ago. “I studied leisure management at the University of Hong Kong, but I learned a lot about nature and the environment outside school,” he says. “I realized... https://www.scmp.com/travel/living-grid-hong-kong/article/3005326?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/travel/living-grid-hong-kong/article/3005326?utm_source=rss_feed Tue, 09 Apr 2019 04:17:49 +0000 Macau, a city on the southern coast of China, is best known today for its casinos, but until 20 years ago, it was a colony governed by the Portuguese. During this period of colonial rule, which lasted more than 400 years, many Portuguese traders married Chinese women, and their children developed their own distinct culture, food, and language. Aida de Jesus is one of them. As a child in Macau, she grew up hearing Portuguese in the alleyways and speaking Patuá, a creole language, with her... https://www.scmp.com/identity/shes-103-and-speaks-dying-language/article/3001732?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/identity/shes-103-and-speaks-dying-language/article/3001732?utm_source=rss_feed Thu, 14 Mar 2019 12:05:26 +0000 This Chinese New Year, I could hear my heels click as I paced across my grandma’s unusually quiet apartment toward her embroidered sofa. This was where she would usually perch herself on the big day, surrounded by dozens of chattering relatives in Hong Kong. Whenever new visitors arrived, the packed room would burst into a boisterous chorus of New Year’s greetings. She would smile as they wished her many more years of beauty and health. With her thick black wig and impeccably manicured hands,... https://www.scmp.com/culture/how-my-grandmas-death-changed-chinese-new-year/article/3000794?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/culture/how-my-grandmas-death-changed-chinese-new-year/article/3000794?utm_source=rss_feed Wed, 13 Feb 2019 08:12:13 +0000 This is the virtual money gifting game that got millions to sign up for WeChat’s mobile payment platform a few years ago. Fast forward a few years and this game is still huge—768 million people sent and received virtual red envelopes last Chinese New Year. But there’s more to it. These millions of users started using WeChat Pay in their everyday lives. Its parent company, Tencent, now goes head-to-head with Alibaba in carving up the mobile payment market, and transforming China into a cashless... https://www.scmp.com/videos/game-got-millions-hooked-mobile-payment/article/3000729?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/videos/game-got-millions-hooked-mobile-payment/article/3000729?utm_source=rss_feed Wed, 06 Feb 2019 16:56:12 +0000 If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a meme says millions. In China, the online world is as rich as any other, despite the Great Firewall blocking platforms the West is reliant on, such as Google, Facebook, and Instagram. Because of its partial separation from the rest of the world, the Chinese internet has its own set of unique memes. When an image manages to tap into the collective conscience of 1.3 billion people, we know there’s something there. (WATCH our meme recap of 2018.) Here... https://www.scmp.com/culture/internet-memes-changed-chinese-society-2018/article/3000374?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/culture/internet-memes-changed-chinese-society-2018/article/3000374?utm_source=rss_feed Mon, 31 Dec 2018 06:04:53 +0000 An Asian superhero is finally going to kick some ass in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The latest news that Marvel Studios is fast-tracking a film centered on Shang-Chi, a Bruce Lee-inspired kung fu master, comes on the heels of Black Panther and Crazy Rich Asians blowing up at the box office. It also comes as China has grown to become Marvel’s No. 1 overseas market. But before the studio can make cinematic history with Shang-Chi, it must reckon with the character’s origin story—and tackle an... https://www.scmp.com/culture/marvel-wants-do-asian-superhero-movie-it-has-reckon-his-racist-past/article/3000296?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/culture/marvel-wants-do-asian-superhero-movie-it-has-reckon-his-racist-past/article/3000296?utm_source=rss_feed Mon, 10 Dec 2018 11:06:15 +0000 My friend, a gay Taiwanese man, had long feared coming out to his parents. But he made a promise to himself: he would do it when Taiwan legalized gay marriage. So last year, when Taiwan’s top court ruled that a ban against same-sex marriage was unconstitutional—a first in Asia—he rejoiced, he cried, and he kept his word. His parents struggled at first, but they eventually accepted him for who he was. The celebration didn’t last long. Fast-forward one year to last weekend, when 7 out of 11... https://www.scmp.com/identity/why-same-sex-marriage-taiwan-might-end-being-separate-equal/article/3000276?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/identity/why-same-sex-marriage-taiwan-might-end-being-separate-equal/article/3000276?utm_source=rss_feed Fri, 30 Nov 2018 09:55:23 +0000