The Hong Kong Years...

I was born in Hong Kong, 1975. After living there for 12 years, we , as a family, immigrated to the United States. Since I was only twelve, I don’t have a whole lot of memories of Hong Kong to share with you.

School
I remember school was really disciplined comparing to the US school system. Good and bad I guess. I remember kids couldn’t even congregate to talk in a group larger than 5 (tell me if this is no longer the case). I was learning algebra in 6th grade. I didn’t retain much, but I was at least exposed to it. My impression of the HK education approach is that they force it into you brain as much as they can, as young as they can. Preschool is mandatory... I think- at least everyone I knew went to preschool. So, kids by the age of 6 already know how to read and write Chinese and English. We had Saturday school every other Saturday and homework during summer vacation. Was I glad to hear that there's no homework in the summer for American kids?! YIPPEE!

Favorite things to do
The things that I enjoyed doing was watching children's programs after school. On the same floor, we lived on the 13th floor, there were a few kids that were the same age as mine and my siblings'. But none of our parents let us out to play except on certain occasions such as moon festival and new year. So we didn't have that much outside activities. There was just no space for kids to play outside of their homes. We get to go to the playground only if our parents were available to take us there and supervise us. Or maybe we were just rotten kids!

Another favorite activity of mine was going to my grandparents house on the weekends. I especially liked playing with my 2 youngest uncles, uncle Alvin and uncle Fai. Uncle Alvin is 10 years older than me, and Uncle Fai is 8 years older. They were the ones who took care of us while the adults played mar jong. Uncle Alvin was always really generous. He bought us junk food and took us to the playground a lot. Uncle Fai was usually busy eating microwavable goods at Seven-Eleven. This was when Seven-Eleven first started opening their outlets in Hong Kong I think. Uncle Fai thought it was the best thing next to the invention of light bulbs.

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