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Dec. 9, 1998
SS Lau

Of the many postcards provided by the Singtao Daily that Wong Yu-Kai sent me, this Lighter chose the "Tears of Sadness" to share with the Lighters first. The photo shows the last governor of HK waving goodbye to HK on that slow boat to England, with his daughters sobbing. From this picture alone one can generate a thousand stories. As I discussed with Dennis Su privately by e-mail, one can imagine the young ladies are shedding tears because of the sad feeling of losing HK to the lowly Chinese, the loss of prowess of the British Empire, hopelessness of leaving a young man behind, saying goodbye to a life with servants, maids and butlers, or something entirely different from the above. The last governor, Fat Pang, appears undisturbed. Is it because he is British, and therefore, nothing touches him? Or it is because he can't wait to go back to his writing of the million-dollar book that got published recently? This picture tells any story you want it to tell about that fateful day of July 1, 1997 in the South China Sea.

Since I "published" my first "paper" entitled " Sunset for the Union Jack " on the Lightnet journal in Sept. 1997, I have not changed my opinion on either the British or on the Chinese. I think the British have left 150 years of colonial tradition and a reasonably sound governing system that the Hong Kong people should be thankful for. I think the Chinese will do their best to dismantle the system, in spite of themselves. It is just in their nature, as I have argued in "The fish and the Scorpio". The dismantling process will take some time to take hold. In HK, the barristers still address the judge as " my lord", the Hong Kong University faculty club still has an old Englishman as the butler, and the HK government still honors certain human rights. It will take sometime before corruption, under the table deals, behind the back door way of doing things become the way of
life in Hong Kong for good. So, goodbye, young maidens, tell us for whom the tears shed?