All week, I’ve been hearing the BANGs and the POWPOWPOWs of firecrackers in the streets. I found it a nuisance more than anything else.

But yesterday, at midnight, I saw something very different: the most stunning fireworks display I’ve ever seen in my life. Hong Kong has a most elaborate and spectacular fireworks display over Victoria Harbour every year, but here in China, everyone sets off their own fireworks from the streets, from their driveways, from bridges, and from their apartment balconies.

In a town of densely-built apartments, the result is a fireworks show literally right before your eyes – so close, in fact, that you will have to shield your eyes with your hands and watch out for little bits of ash coming down at you from the fireworks explosions above your head.

It was like every neighbor was trying to “up” the other – from my vantage point on the 7th floor balcony of the family apartment, the town was like a war zone. The air was thick with smoke, the booming and blasting deafening, and the lights and hot ash in the air, thrilling.

Here, children have been setting off firecrackers all week, starting as early as 6 a.m., the booms echoing loudly off the dense apartments in town. I still yelp when I hear them – definitely not used to the racket. There are A LOT of people and traffic on the streets at all hours – the markets are PACKED with people buying chickens, huge cuts of pork, and lots of nian gao (sweet, sticky rice cake).

Prices in stores and businesses have skyrocketed (80 RMB – that’s $10 USD – for a haircut, when it’s normally less than 20 RMB) and everyone is in a good mood. Crime is on the rise. In this growing town near Wenzhou, a growing population and night life means walking home at night can be dangerous. An Aunt was attacked last week around 9 pm as she made her way home down a dark alley. The attacker wanted her purse, but when she fought back, he whacked her over the head. She screamed loudly and he ran off. But she was bleeding heavily when she made it back home and had to get stitches at the local hospital.

Yesterday I cooked everyone a meal of classic Cantonese dishes. The highlights: Braised fragrant mushrooms with bok choy, steamed pork patty with salted duck egg, soya sauce chicken, and of course, a radish and tomato pork bone soup.

Happy New Year Indeed!

On the eve of my departure from Hong Kong, here are a few things (in no particular order) I’ll miss about this great city, my home for the last year.

10) A most efficient city, connected by affordable and punctual buses, mini buses, double decker buses, a great subway system, trains, trams, underwater tunnels and ferries.

9) The signs that tell us to shout loudly in Cantonese at the speeding mini bus drivers, queuing them to let us off at the next stop.

Sai Kung, Hong Kong (Credit: Marc Kuo)

My neighborhood, Hung Hom, in east Kowloon. A quiet, pedestrian-friendly neighborhood filled with young families and the cutest babies in the world. Fresh markets, fresh seafood, all the stores within a few minutes walk from the apartment. Just a 6 minute mini bus ride to Tsim Sha Tsui.

7) Coming home on the iconic Star Ferry from Central – a 15-minute commute that will bring you past the stunning Hong Kong skyline for only $6 HKD (less than 1 US dollar).

6) Soft shell crab hand rolls

5) Enjoying the mountains and numerous hiking options in the region’s 23 country parks – which make up half of Hong Kong’s total land mass – and day trips to various outlying islands with fresh seafood and magnificent views of the South China Sea.

4) Kayaking in our favorite country park, Sai Kung, and jumping into clear, blue-green waters on a hot summer day.

3) Roasted Goose

2) Numerous parks across the city, teeming with healthy senior citizens practicing tai chi, using the public exercise contraptions available, and walking the stone pebble trails barefoot (for a free but painful foot massage).

1) The humble, hospitable and humorous Hong Kong locals. Thank you for a great year.

Until next time!

Reading Chua’s article, my Mom said, was like reading documentation of her own child rearing techniques.

“I still remember our fights,” she wrote in an e-mail to me before we spoke. “I was the terrible mom [who] always wanted my own way. We fought and we made up and we fought again … I remember the fights we had and yes, you did tear up a lot of things.”

I tore up piano sheets when my Mom – who had gone to take basic piano lessons herself so she could oversee my daily practicing – sat next to me, demanding I play the piece until it was perfect.

I threw books at my Mom, when she made me write book reports during the summer holidays while the rest of my classmates were away at overnight camps – camps I was not allowed to go to.

We were not the only ones discussing Chua’s book – due to be released on Tuesday. Her story is causing an uproar on blogs, on Twitter, all over the Internet. The excerpt is brilliantly timed marketing scheme. Love it or hate it, her book is now going to be a bestseller.

“Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” highlights the differences between Western parents and Chinese parents. Western parents are too overly concerned with a child’s self esteem, Chua argues, while Chinese parents will push their children to perfection – criticizing, not praising an A-minus grade. And what if a report card came back with a B? There would be “a screaming, hair-tearing explosion” followed by dozens of practice tests, Chua writes.

This kind of parenting apparently makes Chinese mothers “superior” to Western mothers. There’s no shame in threatening and punishing your child – it’s a way to make sure they are trying their absolute best.

And so Chua’s children, Sophia and Louisa (Lulu), were raised with these rules: no TV, no pets, no computer games, no sleepovers, no play dates, no grades under A, no parts in school plays, no complaints about not having parts in school plays, no choice of extracurricular activities, nothing less than top places in any school class except gym and drama, no musical instruments except piano or violin.

Myself and a lot of my friends could relate to having some of these rules imposed on them by their Chinese mothers. But Chua goes to all kinds of extremes.

In her book, she talks about the time she rejected her daughters’ homemade birthday cards, and the time she threatened to burn their beloved stuffed animals if their music didn’t show improvement. In the excerpt, she writes about the time she forced Lulu to practice a song on the piano called “The Little White Donkey.”

“Get back to the piano now,” I ordered.

“You can’t make me.”

“Oh yes, I can.”

Back at the piano, Lulu made me pay. She punched, thrashed and kicked. She grabbed the music score and tore it to shreds. I taped the score back together and encased it in a plastic shield so that it could never be destroyed again. Then I hauled Lulu’s dollhouse to the car and told her I’d donate it to the Salvation Army piece by piece if she didn’t have “The Little White Donkey” perfect by the next day. When Lulu said, “I thought you were going to the Salvation Army, why are you still here?” I threatened her with no lunch, no dinner, no Christmas or Hanukkah presents, no birthday parties for two, three, four years. When she still kept playing it wrong, I told her she was purposely working herself into a frenzy because she was secretly afraid she couldn’t do it. I told her to stop being lazy, cowardly, self-indulgent and pathetic.

In the end, after practicing over and over again, Lulu suddenly got it. And she was beaming.

Mother and daughter quickly kissed and made up. Afterward, they celebrated by snuggling and giggling about the whole thing.

“Western parents worry a lot about their children’s self-esteem. But as a parent, one of the worst things you can do for your child’s self-esteem is to let them give up. On the flip side, there’s nothing better for building confidence than learning you can do something you thought you couldn’t,” Chua writes.

I can totally relate to this model of parenting: Being forced to do something like piano or swimming until I got it right, and then being grateful to my Mother for pushing me to do so. But there were no threats made about giving away my toys to the Salvation Army, and certainly I was not deprived of food. Never would that happen. I don’t think my mother ever called me “pathetic” or a “coward.” That seems just too cruel.

Though the stories are lively and witty, the fights she describes and the words she exchanges with her daughters are horrifying.

Blog posts like this one titled “Parents like Amy Chua are the reason why Asian Americans like me are in therapy” questioning Chua’s assertion that her actions define the “Chinese way” of parenting and a seemingly premature conclusion that her own daughters are examples of her success.

And then a response by Taiwanese American Christine Lu, whose sister was a textbook case “success” story. But she killed herself in 2004 and Lu asserts that the pressure to succeed was just too much:

“Mine is an extreme example of course. But 6 years since her passing, I can tell you that the notion of the “superior Chinese mother” that my mom carried with her also died with my sister on October 28, 2004. If you were to ask my mom today if this style of parenting worked for her, she’ll point to a few boxes of report cards, trophies, piano books, photo albums and Harvard degrees and gladly trade it all to have my sister back.

As a responsibility to herself as a “superior Chinese mother”, I think Amy Chua should do a bit of research outside her comfort zone and help readers understand why Asian-American females have one of the highest rates of suicide in the U.S.”

There’s a difference between wanting the best for your child and wanting the best for yourself, my Mother said to me on Skype this morning.

“Did I want you to learn how to swim for my sake?”  My Mom asked. “How about your math tutor? Did I enroll you in those courses so I could feel better about myself?”

Clearly, the answers are ‘no.’ Swimming is not a hobby, it is a life saving tool that every child should learn. My Mom never learned to swim growing up in Hong Kong. She wanted to make sure I had such a skill. I even ended up being a lifeguard and swim instructor in high school. As for math, it’s never been my forte, but the tutoring prepared me for high school math classes that I otherwise would have struggled with if not for the extra curricular classes my Mom signed me up for.

So perhaps the most disturbing question that lingers is one about Chua’s motives. She claims to love her children, and I’m sure she believes she does. But a glimpse into her past reveals seeds that were planted long ago, perhaps influencing Chua’s methods today.

A review published by the Associated Press today tells the story of the author as an eighth-grader placing second in a history contest. She had invited her family to the ceremony where another student was given the first place award.

“Afterward,” Chua writes, “my father said to me: ‘Never, never, disgrace me like that again.’”

A child’s successes and failures are ultimately their own. For a parent to make pride and face the most important factor in a child’s motivation to achieve is selfish and pathetic and self-indulgent and all those things Chua said about her daughter when she worked so hard to play “The Little White Donkey” on the piano.

I can play the piano, I can skate, I can ski, I can swim and I passed Grade 12 Math. This is thanks to huge investments, emotionally, mentally and financially, from parents who cared about me and not about face. Thanks Mom and Dad.

from silkroadproject.org

Hong Kong public schools all kind of look the same. There’s a gated entrance and the guard will ask you what you’re doing at the school before he or she will let you in. Inside the school, there’s a sort of open-air lobby. It gets drafty in here on a cold day because there’s an open courtyard no more than 10 metres away – that’s where the children queue up, ready to be taken to their classrooms.

As a volunteer teaching assistant for HK’s Council for Early Childhood Education (CECES), I met my first graders in the courtyard. I was going to teach them how to fold origami – a paper candle – in English.

The children were tiny. I bent down to chat with them and zip up their jackets.

“Are you our teacher today?” they asked in Cantonese.

“Yes,” I replied in Cantonese.

“But last week we had an English-speaking teacher.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well we’re going to teach you in English today, too.”

The children’s faces fell.

“Look, it’s going to be fun,” I promised.

The first graders don’t really have a command of English at all. They know their ABCs, but aren’t yet able to read. A few of the better students will know some basic words.

Cute but a heavy burden for HK primary school children

As we walked up to our classroom on the second floor, I noticed the children, on top of carrying heavy, over-sized backpacks, each lugged around a large plastic bag stuffed with a total of 18 soft-cover textbooks.

“What’s this?” I asked, taking some of the bags off the little ones’ hands. The children were literally dragging the bags up the steps with them.

“Our new books,” they told me.

The plastic bags were damn heavy, even for me. I don’t know how the children were expected to carry so much on their own. I took on a few more bags on our way up.

The public school system in Hong Kong has been described to me as “rigid” and “boring” – there’s a lot of lining up, a lot of memorizing text books and loads of homework. I’m told primary students in Hong Kong have to do about three to four hours of schoolwork nightly. When it comes to learning English, a second language, memorizing just isn’t going to do it.

Here I am reading to Primary 1 students in Kowloon City

That’s where CECES comes in – CECES has been developing English programs to teach the children with more “informal” techniques – a paper folding class in English, for example, a sports and theater class, and an eco-phonics class (just to name a few), where children learn English phonics through ecology-themed lessons.

The children are bright and enthusiastic. The key is to make the lessons fun. The goal is that when we show up for their after school English classes, they won’t be disappointed.

It’s also important that the children can actually see what’s being written on the chalkboard.

Over the past few months, as I’ve volunteered at a number of schools in Hong Kong, I’ve noticed children who are falling behind because they cannot see the board at the front of the classroom. They have either 1) forgotten their glasses at home 2) don’t have glasses 3) been told they shouldn’t be wearing their glasses all the time.

It reminded me of a story my Mom shared with me about growing up in Hong Kong’s public school system. My Mom had a classmate who had beautiful eyes. This classmate needed glasses, but her mother didn’t want her daughter covering up her pretty lashes. She hoped that her daughter’s vision would simply “adapt.” My Mom had two pairs of glasses, so she always lent one pair to her friend. This went on for a year until finally, the girl with pretty eyes got a pair of glasses herself.

Yesterday, I encountered yet another child who could not see the board. We were already on question 9, but this student’s worksheet was blank.

I asked him where his glasses were.

“At home,” he said. “Teachers don’t allow us to wear them in class.”

“That’s not true!” piped in his spectacled friend who sat behind him. “You can wear them in class, it’s okay.”

I told the student that I agreed. “You should be wearing your glasses whenever you’re in class,” I said.

“But my Mom said not to wear them too much,” he protested.

That’s when I thought about my Mom’s story.

Whatever miscommunications are going on, they fact is that there are children who need glasses and they should be wearing them if not all the time, but whenever they are in school.

And as for those new textbooks, well, I hope the children won’t be hauling them around everyday.

“When do you think you’ll finish reading all of them?” I asked the class playfully.

“When I’m 90!” one girl said giggling.

Volunteer with CECES

Contact:

Daniel Chan
CVC Chairperson
http://cecesvolunteers.wordpress.com
Email Daniel

I visited him the last two times I was in China. He was very frail, bedridden and unable to hear very well or speak. Most of the time he was unresponsive. But we are grateful for that one time that he looked up from his bed and all of a sudden recognized my boyfriend – his grandson whom he hadn’t seen in a few years and whispered: “Ma-li-cky”, Marc’s nickname among his Chinese relatives.

That’s when I was introduced to him for the first time.

I was introduced as “Shan Shan”, my Chinese name. My boyfriend told him I was a writer. He asked if Grandpa thought I was pretty.

Grandpa worked hard to raise his bony arm up from the bed. His skeletal hand was trembling as he stuck his thumb up.

“OK!” he said rather loudly, surprising us. He then titled his head back and seemed to laugh, his toothless mouth curving in what looked like a smile.

This was my one, brief conversation I shared with Marc’s grandpa.

When he died early last week, and we found out via that email, we tried to change our plane tickets and cancel our hotel bookings in Taiwan immediately. Expats aren’t able to get Chinese visas in Taiwan, so we had to get back to Hong Kong.

We were able to schedule a flight back from Taipei to Hong Kong for Wednesday. We hoped that we could apply for a rush visa at the airport and be able to leave for China on Friday afternoon, making it in time for the early Saturday morning funeral.

It should have worked. But when we got to the airport and approached the people at the China Travel Service desk, we were told that there were new requirements for applying for a Chinese visa at this time. Because of the Guangzhou Asia Games, the Chinese visa office was requiring a booked return flight to China as well as proof of a hotel booking.

“We’re going to stay with family. There’s been a death and we are trying to make the Saturday funeral,” I said.

We were told they wouldn’t accept our application – unless we booked a flight and hotel. Conveniently, they were ready and willing to do that for us on the spot.

What about getting our visa in Wanchai, directly from the Chinese visa office? Yes, the CTS employee told us, you can do that but Wanchai has the same requirements – flight and hotel booking required. But, he said, they aren’t doing rush service anymore – because of the rush of tourists going in for the Guangzhou Asia Games – you can only do this here.

In the end, we were not able to book a flight and hotel in time. We couldn’t get our visa and we missed the funeral on Saturday.

The family, most of them now settled in Europe, all made it to China on time. Meanwhile we, so close in Hong Kong, were unable to make it.

Even though we had missed the funeral, we went first thing Monday morning to Wanchai to apply for a rush visa. Not only were we able to get a rush visa, but they never asked us for a hotel and flight booking, which we had in hand just in case.

On Tuesday, we picked up new visas and today we are flying into the mainland to visit Marc’s family. All of them are still there and we would like to pay our respects.

It’s China Travel Service that doesn’t have any respect. The man at the CTS counter lied to our faces. He knew we had to get to China for a funeral, but that didn’t matter. I’ve used CTS many times before, but now I’ll publicly say that I’ll never go to them again. This is no way to run a business.

But it’s a good read. Most importantly, there’s no bull shit.

I am a trained breaking news reporter. At DNAinfo, we were constantly updating our website – I staked out murder scenes, chased fire trucks, rushed to press conferences in Chinatown, and sat through community board meetings that went past midnight (which then meant I got home at 1 a.m. and had lots of coffee as I wrote my stories in the wee morning hours).

This half year, a departure from all that. I’ve been transitioning to long-form reporting – something I’ve wanted to do for awhile – with an emphasis on (of course) China and news analysis. My latest story is one of the first pieces I’m really proud of.

Breaking news serves a purpose. It’s very practical. People need to know what is happening, and they need to know it NOW. Whatever is happening at the 14th Street subway station could affect your commute home. That murder down the block from your house? You want to know if your family is safe.

But there’s another aspect of breaking news that I’m not so fond of. Journalists – and their readers – are always looking for trends, patterns, some way or some expert to explain WHY things are happening. Often, because of tight deadlines and a rush to come up with an explanation, speculation trumps fact and a simple answer is always favoured over the complex, but more accurate one.

Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan, has written about this. He calls it the “narrative fallacy” which is a fancy way of saying the news media takes the facts at hand and weaves together a story line that either a) they think readers/viewers want to hear or b) reinforces the reporter/editor’s point of view.

International or not, all breaking news reporters – this one included – are guilty of this. Even magazine journalists can make such mistakes – Maclean’s magazine’s “Too Asian” story is a recent, ripe example.

Taleb writes in his book:

The way to avoid the ills of the narrative fallacy is to favor experimentation over storytelling, experience over history, and clinical knowledge over theories. Certainly the newspaper cannot perform an experiment, but it can choose one report over another – there is plenty of empirical research to present and interpret from … Being empirical does not mean running a laboratory in one’s basement: it is just a mind-set that favors a certain class of knowledge over others. I do not forbid myself from using the world cause, but the causes I discuss are either bold speculations (presented as such) or the results of experiments, not stories.

So with my most recent piece on China’s scientific publishing industry – and in a forthcoming analysis on China’s mental health problems, I am steering clear of narrative fallacies and striving to produce more analytical stories, backed up not by anecdotes but by empirical research. But empirical research takes time, you see. It’s not something a political scientist, doctor or economist can always drum up in time for a reporter’s deadline.

These days, this reporter is enjoying a more flexible deadline. The result, I hope, is for a better, a smarter and a more accurate story for you, dear readers.

By Suzanne Ma

China produces over 5000 mostly Chinese-language science and technology journals, but many an article is unread and rarely cited. Photo credit: ©2010 Jupiterimages Co

China’s scientific journals are, simply put, plagued by mediocrity.

The country has over 5000 mostly Chinese-language science and technology journals, but many of the articles they publish are unread and rarely cited.

For good reason, says Sun Jianzhong, a doctor in Qingtian People’s Hospital in the southeastern province of Zhejiang. “Many Chinese scientific journals are neither scrupulous nor scientific. Articles published in these journals are not intended to impact or influence scientific research. They are used for the sake of promoting one’s career.”

Sun’s opinion is far from rare.

In fact, even the Chinese government acknowledges that a measure of quality control needs to be introduced and to that end, it has announced that it will severely whittle down the number of journals published in the country and implement a measure of quality control. But some say it will take more than that to revitalize Chinese journals to the point where its own academics and foreign researchers might submit blue-chip papers.

Many Chinese journals are now driven by a dynamic in which many grad students and professors, under pressure to publish, churn out unoriginal, low-quality papers. Some even turn to a burgeoning black market of ghostwriters and illegitimate journals — an industry worth one billion Chinese Yuan in 2009, or about $151 million, (Joint Conference on Digital Libraries 2009; 443-444).

So endemic is the misconduct that Zhang Yuehong, managing editor of the Journal of Zhejiang University- Science recently told Nature that 31% of submitted papers included plagiarized content.

The Chinese government recently stepped into the fray, announcing that as of January 2011, new regulations will be rolled out to “terminate” weak journals. Li Dongdong, a vice-minister of state and deputy director at the General Administration of Press and Publications, a powerful government agency responsible for regulating and distributing news in China, said in a September address that the scientific publishing industry needed major reform because of “a large gap between quality and quantity.”

Under the new regulations, scientific publishing will be concentrated in “five-to-ten large publishing groups” that will compete with each other, Li stated.

Higher standards will be used to assess the quality of submissions, while tax breaks will go to journals deemed to be strong, and increased penalties will be slapped on those producing fraudulent work. But the agency declined to discuss further details.

Ironically, the overhaul is coming at a time when Chinese science appears to be burgeoning and attracting ever more international attention. That’s in part because the Chinese government has adopted policies that encourage and reward publication in major international journals, particularly ones that are included on the Science Citation Index, which covers more than 6500 significant journals across 150 disciplines.

Universities and research institutes now offer financial rewards to scientists who publish in Index-listed journals and as a consequence, China has tripled the number of papers published in leading international journals between 1999 and 2009, according to a press release from Nature China (www.naturechina.com.cn/nchina/press_releases/20090624_double_impact_eng.pdf). According to China’s Institute of Science and Technology Information, the country’s researchers have published 95 500 papers in international journals and in 2008, accounted for 6.6% of world share, behind the United States, Britain and Germany (www.istic.ac.cn/EducationDetail.aspx?ArticleID=88101).

Where does the race to publish abroad leave Chinese journals?

“At this point, few Western academics are likely to publish in Chinese English journals so it is difficult for these journals to become truly international [and] making it difficult for them to increase their impact factor,” says Paul Weldon, former English language editor for the Journal of China University of Geosciences in Wuhan.

“Few Western academics have heard of many of the journals, even those published by the large publishers, so readership is low and citations lower,” he says. “There is, therefore, little incentive to publish in the Chinese language or in Chinese journals — regardless of language — and so such journals find themselves competing at something of a disadvantage on the world stage.”

More than 200 science and technology journals in China have switched to the use of the English language and more are in line to follow suit by publishing in partnership with foreign companies. Neuroscience Bulletin began publishing in English in 2006; ACTA Genetica Sinica became the Journal of Genetics and Genomics in 2007 and was included on the Science Citation Index in 2008.

In 2009, ACTA Zoologica Sinica, the second-oldest journal in China, became Current Zoology and quickly saw the proportion of papers published from non-Chinese scientists leap to 42% from 16%, and this year, was listed in the Science Citation Index.

Such successes, though, are rare, leading some academic experts to say that the solution lies in a consolidation of campus journals, which are often run independently are often duplicative. Others have suggested a push toward open-platform publishing, in which authors pay a fee to have research published and made freely available on the Internet (a concept that remains foreign to many Chinese academics).

Economist David Zetland suggests the solution lies in a publishing model featuring auctions using “academic” dollars. Authors would write papers and post them for auction. Editors would then bid for the best papers using academic dollars and assign the purchases to referees (peer reviewers). After review and publication, the academic dollars would be redistributed to authors, editors and referees of cited articles as a reward for quality.

Editors would presumably, bid highest for those papers they deem strongest and most likely to be cited, thereby bringing more academic dollars to the editor’s pocket for future bidding. “Since papers do not generate [academic dollar] income unless they are cited, authors have an additional incentive to write well. Since referees and editors share [academic dollars], they have incentives to improve papers — rather than reject them — and to speed up the review process,” wrote Zetland and Dutch economist Jens Prüfer (www.springerlink.com/content/2q80214867370564/).

“It’s a way of using the market to replace the bureaucratic process,” Zetland says.

The auction market “would give everyone a fair chance to survive.”

Although there is no indication that the Chinese government is considering the model, Zetland believes it could work in the country, as it is “one of the world’s centres for organizing pilot projects. It is very efficient at getting things done. You start with one auction, one village, one province, and roll it across the whole country.”

For its part, the government says it is motivated to make Chinese publishing an international leader.

In her September address, Li said she hopes China’s scientific and technological periodical publishing industry can one day become the “vanguard of reform and development.”

“We must enhance our sense of responsibility and our mission to assert the international influence of China’s science and technology journals to truly become a major force in science and technology development,” she said.

Most of the locals here are already wearing jackets, wrapped scarves around themselves, and taken out the knee-high fashion boots (lots of boots and short shorts here). Even when it’s sunny and 25, the girls are sporting the boots. Meanwhile, this Canadian is still in her t-shirt, leggings and flip flops. I will stay this way as long as I can.

Pumpkin, carrots and a cob of corn

My favorite part of autumn has to be the appearance of pumpkins at the grocery store. The sight of a round, sturdy, orange pumpkin just makes me smile.

Surprisingly, Halloween was a big deal here in Hong Kong. People were really into the holiday, dressing up in elaborate costumes and going out to parties or to Ocean Park for the annual Halloween bash (the entire amusement park becomes one giant haunted house, it’s pretty cool).

“Hong Kong people started to celebrate Halloween maybe about 10 years ago when Ocean Park first starting holding their annual celebration,” said my hairdresser, Larry Ho, whom I often consult when trying to understand local culture.

“We never grew up celebrating Halloween, so we really embrace the chance to dress up and be someone – or something else – for the day.”

I bought a little pumpkin just before Halloween and I put it on my writing table. For a couple of weeks, it was my muse.

Then, one day, I decided it was time to chop up that pumpkin and use it in a soup.

I grew up having the privilege of sipping, slurping and savouring delicious and healthy Chinese soups thanks to my most talented Cantonese Mom (Thanks Mom!) and as I have my own kitchen now, I’ve decided to continue that tradition.

I’ve made a variety of soups since moving here. Two favorites have to be Green radish and carrot soup 青红萝卜汤 － good for curing sore throats and phlegm – and Winter Melon soup 冬瓜汤 – a cooling summer soup that  is good for clearing “heat” in one’s body, according to traditional Chinese medicine.

Simmer simmer simmer

These days, I’ve been making a great autumn soup called 南瓜排骨汤 Pumpkin Pork Rib Soup. Here, try it at home:

Ingredients

500g pork ribs

1 small pumpkin or 1/4 Chinese pumpkin (these are bigger and more squash like)

2-3 carrots

1 corn on the cob

Directions

When I make soups, I usually start the process first thing in the morning so that by evening, all the flavours have had time to simmer and mingle in the pot. Plus: I don’t need to add salt.

If you’re on a time constraint, this can be done just a few hours before dinner; just know it won’t be nearly as flavourful.

1. Wash all ingredients

2. Boil a big pot of water

3. As the water is heating, chop up carrots, corn on the cob and pumpkin into small chunks. (Some people cut the skin off the pumpkin, but I leave it on. When it’s simmered in the soup, it will become soft. If you’re strapped for time, cut the skin off.)

Sweet, soothing, delicious Chinese soup - and healthy, too

4. When the water comes to a boil, put pork ribs and allow to cook for several minutes. (5 minutes or less)

5. Add carrots and corn into the pot and bring to boil. Then simmer on low heat for 10-15 minutes.

6. Add pumpkin. Pumpkin is added last as it cooks more easily.

7. Simmer all the way until dinner time!