A mother who gave birth in a Hong Kong public hospital during the Covid-19 pandemic recalls a lack of communication and being denied basic comforts When Monique discovered she was pregnant during the Covid-19 pandemic, she expected challenges and restrictions. What she didn’t expect was to spend so much of her time in hospital arguing…
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Derek Currie, one of the first Europeans to play professional football in Hong Kong, came to the city in 1970 and quickly became a local celebrity I was born in Glasgow, Scotland, on February 8, 1949. I suppose I was fated to come to the Far East because 1949 was the year Mao Zedong declared…
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Face-mask wearing during the pandemic affected young children in various ways, from stunting speech to emotional development, according to a psychologist Marco was an energetic and sociable three-year-old just starting kindergarten when the Covid-19 pandemic hit in 2020. He stayed at home with his one-year-old sister and mother, who had switched to working from home….
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‘My mother was a typical Asian parent. She lost her dream because of the Cultural Revolution,’ says Yu Dan Shi. ‘I became the product of high expectations’ In 2008, Yu Dan Shi was 32 and a successful marketing officer for a global tech company. She had left her native Shanghai over a decade previously to…
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In 2019 Massimo Gavina learned he had stage 4 cancer. ‘I don’t want to die before I see my child getting a bit older. I still want to do things,’ he says In November 2019, Massimo Gavina woke up in the Discovery Bay, Hong Kong, home he shares with his wife and son and turned…
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Jeff Rotmeyer grew up in Canada, excelled at sports as a child, then moved to teach English in Korea, where he met his wife, who moved with him to Hong Kong I was born in Surrey, outside Vancouver, in Canada, in 1977, and am an only child. My dad was born in Holland and came…
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2023 Nobel Peace Prize nominee Mahbouba Seraj recalls growing up in Afghanistan’s ‘best years’, exile in the US and feeling compelled to confront the Taliban I was born in Afghanistan in 1948. My aunt chose my name. Mahbouba means “beloved”. If you take the “a” off the end, it becomes a man’s name. I didn’t…
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A date changed Rabi Yim’s life forever – the man who had just professed his love for her crashed his car, leaving Yim in a wheelchair My mother was a nurse and after she married, she began working with my father in his jewellery company. I was born in Hong Kong in the 1970s –…
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‘In Hong Kong, they put cable ties on the bus [door handles] to and from the hotel … Everyone was borderline depressed,’ says a pilot based in the city Hong Kong is emerging from the Covid-19 pandemic and there is a rush to welcome visitors – including through the Hello, Hong Kong campaign. But take a moment to consider…
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After Jennifer Bovard Kende’s son Ben suffered a devastating rugby accident in 2010, she went through her own post-traumatic stress and blamed herself When her 18-year-old son Ben suffered a devastating accident playing rugby for Hong Kong in Bangkok, Thailand in 2010, Jennifer Bovard Kende went through a parent’s worst nightmare: he was left quadriplegic.This…
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Clinical psychologist Ella Tsang struggled with depression and anxiety in her teens and saw a number of therapists As we mark World Mental Health Day on October 10, clinical psychologist Ella Tsang, who struggled with anxiety and depression in her teens and early 20s, hopes more people will take the time for self-care. “In Asia…
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The peace activist and international speaker recounts how she was torn from her happy childhood in Vienna and ‘saved’ from the concentration camp’s angel of death, Josef Mengele, by a hat Nazi invasion: I was born in Vienna, into a young family. My father was 21 when he married my mother, who was 18. They had…
The American scholar and conservationist recalls how a picture of a footprint in a newspaper sparked a lifelong ambition to solve a centuries-old mystery Rumble in the jungle My grandparents were cowboys in Kansas. They paid their way through medical school and after they graduated went to India to work as medical missionaries, just before the…
Philippe Grelon passed on his passion for sailing to his family, especially his youngest son, Cosmas When Philippe Grelon was a young boy growing up in Lille, in northern France, he dreamed of sailing. Aged eight, he constructed a makeshift boat complete with wooden mast and sail, and tested it out in the garden. “I…
A tour of the largest film studio in North Korea offers insights into the propaganda machine
Flight review: Kenya Airways B787-8 Premier World
Antarctica is best approached by sea. Only a slow, and sometimes rough, rite of passage can prepare visitors for this immense, dramatic and ever-changing continent of ice and its extraordinary wildlife