On a recent trip to Hong Kong, I visited the Aberdeen Chinese Permanent Cemetery. The ashes of a friend, who died eight months ago, are interred there. I had not been able to attend his funeral. Our last encounter was a distressing video call from his hospital bed a few days before he passed away.
Standing before his niche, I recalled the good times we had shared in Hong Kong and on holidays abroad, and how kind he had been to me. He was also a window into a world that I was never privy to – a mid-century Hong Kong of gentler sensibilities and slower, more deliberate comportment, before much of it was bulldozed by the grating brashness of the 1980s and 90s.
