Category Archives: International

I found myself feeling peckish after waking up from my hour-long nap on a sofa in a mall (yes, I was that tired), and didn’t know what to get, having already had fast food twice that day.

It was then I recalled that I was in Metrotown, and there was a Maxim’s bakery on the floor below me. Maxim’s, a bakery chain in Hong Kong that I rarely visit because there are so many other, better-valued bakeries all over the city, and also the only Hong Kong-style bakery I knew of within the vicinity of my napping-place on Friday afternoon.

Hong Kong bakeries: what I miss most from the place I spent my childhood and adolescence in.

As I picked up a tray and a pair of tongs by the entrance, I remembered how much I loved doing the same ever since I was little. Eyeing the trays of buns and pastries in their individual cases, reading their English and Chinese names on the displayed cards, lifting the clear lids of the baked goods I’d chosen, and piling delicious morsels on my tray: two egg tarts, a pineapple bun (that has nothing to do with pineapple in terms of flavour), a sausage bun (or wiener bun, as it’s called here), and three pieces of garlic toast—all for $4.20.

The garlic toast might sound like a strange selection, since it’s not hard to make that at home. But there is something unique about the garlic rolls and toast that are sold in Hong Kong bakeries I’ve never found duplicated anywhere else, and it’s one of my favourite kinds of breads. This summer, when I was home, I went to the nearest open-space marketplace and made a mental map of all the bakeries in the area: which sold garlic toast, which sold what kind of egg tarts, and for what prices. Egg tarts and garlic toast. These are my measuring sticks.

And it is something of sheer loveliness to be able to catch the shuttle bus down to the marketplace in the morning to buy freshly baked breads, as many as I want. Even if I didn’t do it most of the time, it was the possibility of being able to do this that gave me the greatest pleasure.

I often didn’t do this—didn’t need to go down in the mornings unless I felt like walking around early—because I didn’t need to. Not when there are at least one, if not two, bakeries at every train station. On any street that conducts any kind of business, you will invariably pass by yet another bakery tucked away on one side of you. I miss this.

Of course there are other bakeries here too; Cobs and Terra Breads are among the first that come to mind. But they are not the same, and sometimes it is the familiar you yearn for the most. Not that I am still unused to the breads sold in Vancouver bakeries; indeed, I’m probably more bored than anything else, sometimes, and find myself craving something just a little bit different, just a little bit similar to what I’ve never stopped loving.

Sometimes I think I should go on a quest for all the HK-style bakeries I’ve heard or read of in Vancouver, and learn where they are. But this always gets left behind in the flurry of studies, working, volunteering and general daily business of living; I don’t often have time to go out of my way to search for the answers to longings I can usually manage by ignoring.

Tell me, is there something you miss from the past that you try to bring into your life now in some new way? How do you do this?

I was reading up a little more on the Biafran war on Wikipedia for this book we’ve been reading in one of my classes — Half of a Yellow Sun is an absolutely fabulous novel, by the way, that I highly encourage you to read — and you know how one thing leads to another on Wikipedia.

From there I learned that this was the event that started Médecins Sans Frontières, and then I read James Orbinski’s speech upon accepting the Nobel Peace Prize for MSF in 1999. It’s an interesting speech that differentiates between the humanitarian and the political, in what is in itself, I think, a curious mixture of the two.

I found it particularly interesting because I’ve been having conversations lately with folks about the Responsibility to Protect, and it’s fascinating to see the many different, nuanced opinions that a group of apparently similar people have…

Dear China,

I am not impressed. 南天一柱 was a perfectly good name and it was pretty; “Hallelujah Mountain” is just a kind of cultural appropriation that is not out of sync with all the other appropriations going on in that movie.

And then, of course, I feel bad, because who am I to prevent someone who may be desperately poor benefitting from the little extra cash that this might bring in?

Though I have my doubts as to whether that’s what the tourist officials were really thinking…

In less than ten years’ time, Avatar will be largely forgotten, remembered, perhaps, as the first 3D movie of what has now become the norm.

I only hope you’ll change the name right back.

Love,

Lillienne

So back during the run-up to the Beijing Olympics, the media thought it was a wonderful idea to bash China on its human rights issues.

Now what I want to know is why we aren’t doing the same to Canada. Is the way we treat First Nations peoples any credit to our so-called human rights record?

This is written more out of frustration than because I think there’s any real literary merit in it. There isn’t. But I’m so angry it has to be expressed somewhere.

—

I hated the news running up to
the oh-eight Olympics—that need to search
in the crevasses of another language,
or the stretch across an ocean
for the English papers back in the old
home, for the simple acknowledgement
of the pro-China protests happening
next to the anti-ones. What happened to
reporting both sides of the coin? A feature
never seen in the media of this country
that I so want to proudly call mine.

This was supposed to be about sports,
not politics. So I believed until my
Canadian friends persuaded me
otherwise. Here was a forum for speech,
a chance to hang the dirty laundry
and maybe make some change!

Except now it’s oh-ten, and everything is again
lopsided, now in the other direction.

No one points a finger at the plight of our
First Nations, the one that we put them in.
No one questions the state of the homeless
in the host city of the most beautiful place on earth.
No one calls us out on our hypocrisy of being
a peacekeeping nation refusing to stop pumping
the greenhouse gasses destroying our world.

CTV anchors keep asking me, with smiles
on their faces and merchandise on show, do I believe.

What can be said but that I tend
not to commit myself to unstated blanks?

I’ll believe when we hang the dirty laundry.