The Concubine's Daughter is a snapshot of a bygone era, depicting life in the British colony of Hong Kong in the fifties and sixties. It is the story Elizabeth Lee, beautiful, intelligent, and liberated, from the time she is a wide-eyed eighteen year-old studying English Literature at the University of Hong Kong, sharing girlish secrets with her two best friends, to her becoming an academic at the University, to just after her thirtieth birthday, when she leaves Hong Kong with her husband and young son for the US, frightened in part by the riots inspired by the Cultural Revolution taking place across the border in mainland China. After twenty years in the US she returns to Hong Kong in 1986, just ten years before China is to regain sovereignty over the colony. Educated in English Elizabeth is keenly aware of the conflict within herself between her love of certain aspects of Western culture and her Chinese heritage. Living in that period of the colony's history, and largely divorced from the cultural life of the Chinese mainland, she is conscious of a sense of isolation. Discriminatory attitudes and actions, whether based on gender, race, or language, are very much a fact of life in Hong Kong during this period. The subject matter is original. The narrative style is witty, mildly sarcastic, and humorous in places. The vivid depiction of social customs and manners and memorable characters from different strata of society contribute to make The Concubine's Daughter a book well worth reading.
Spanning almost a hundred years, this rich and evocative memoir recounts the lives of three generations of remarkable Chinese women. Their extraordinary journey takes us from the brutal poverty of village life in mainland China, to newly prosperous 1930s Hong Kong and finally to the UK. Their lives were as dramatic as the times they lived through. A love of food and a talent for cooking pulled each generation through the most devastating of upheavals. Helen Tse's grandmother, Lily Kwok, was forced to work as an amah after the violent murder of her father. Crossing the ocean from Hong Kong in the 1950s, Lily honed her famous chicken curry recipe. Eventually she opened one of Manchester's earliest Chinese restaurants where her daughter, Mabel, worked from the tender age of nine. But gambling and the Triads were pervasive in the Chinese immigrant community, and tragically they lost the restaurant. It was up to author Helen and her sisters, the third generation of these exceptional women, to re-establish their grandmother's dream. The legacy lived on when the sisters opened their award-winning restaurant Sweet Mandarin in 2004. Sweet Mandarin shows how the most important inheritance is wisdom, and how recipes--passed down the female line--can be the most valuable heirloom.
A selection of popular extant Cantonese children's songs, studying both their linguistic and non-linguistic aspects. The Chinese texts of the songs are printed together with their English translations.
A family held together with one lifeline – food. Helen has grown up in the UK, but always felt a piece of her story was missing. Amidst the skyscrapers and bustling streets of Hong Kong, she meets her grandmother, Lily Kwok, and steps into a past of shocking family secrets that will change her life forever. Based on Helen Tse’s bestselling novel Sweet Mandarin, this evocative new play by award-winning writer In-Sook Chappell tells the extraordinary story of the women behind the famous Manchester restaurant.
In Two Face, Sang Hee Kwak, Korean poet-novelist, opens her heart to the sufferings of people all over the world, not in polemic, but in fierce poetric imagery depicting the pain of an Arab baby seeking the teat of its dead mother, of Indian throwaway people left to die in the streets of Calcutta with “eyes open like caves,” of naked children on an Indonesian tsunami-ravaged shore. Yet, despite these horrors of nature, war, and indifference, Sang Hee rather lights a candle than cursing the dark, seeking “to live and die in innocence. Gathering all in [herself] “like a green tree in all seasons.” This is a book which takes the reader on an epic journey down to and through the nether depths but eventually rising out of them into the pure air of hope, peace, and harmony. —Stanley H. Barkan, Poet/Editor, Cross-Cultural Communications
Spanning almost a hundred years, this rich and evocative memoir recounts the lives of three generations of remarkable Chinese women. Their extraordinary journey takes us from the brutal poverty of village life in mainland China, to newly prosperous 1930s Hong Kong and finally to the UK. Their lives were as dramatic as the times they lived through. A love of food and a talent for cooking pulled each generation through the most devastating of upheavals. Helen Tse's grandmother, Lily Kwok, was forced to work as an amah after the violent murder of her father. Crossing the ocean from Hong Kong in the 1950s, Lily honed her famous chicken curry recipe. Eventually she opened one of Manchester's earliest Chinese restaurants where her daughter, Mabel, worked from the tender age of nine. But gambling and the Triads were pervasive in the Chinese immigrant community, and tragically they lost the restaurant. It was up to author Helen and her sisters, the third generation of these exceptional women, to re-establish their grandmother's dream. The legacy lived on when the sisters opened their award-winning restaurant Sweet Mandarin in 2004. Sweet Mandarin shows how the most important inheritance is wisdom, and how recipes--passed down the female line--can be the most valuable heirloom.
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