Social worker devoted to ethnic minorities in Hong Kong tells her story
Her biography newly published, Fermi Wong talks about Mao, moving from China to a subdivided flat in San Po Kong and battling breast cancer
Year of the Dog I was born in 1970, though the date on my identity card is wrong; it says 1969. In China people don’t really remember the birth date, they remember the year, like dog year. When we arrived at Hong Kong immigration, when I was 11, my mother just remembered which year I was born – the dog! I went back to China to check my real birthday, which is June 15, 1970. I was born in Quanzhou, in Fujian province, so my first language is Fujianese.
No education necessary In the early 1970s, the Cultural Revolution was still in progress. My mother’s father was the only one in our family who had a university education. He worked as a journalist for the Kuomintang and later as a school principal. Of course, he suffered after the Communist Party came to power.
My grandmother then decided that her children would not marry anyone who was well educated. My mother tells me she fell in love with her teacher. But a marriage was arranged with my father, who lived two mountains away from our village. She was 19, he was 24. After the marriage, my mother realised that my father was mildly mentally disabled. It is genetic. My elder sister and my younger sister and brother are also mentally challenged.
Trouble with Mao As a child I was fascinated by Chairman Mao – was he a man or a god? Did he eat food like us? I asked my mother so many questions that one day she got annoyed and said, no, he didn’t eat food like us, he ate the poo of then Premier Zhou Enlai.
I was so excited by this secret news, I didn’t question how my mother knew. I went on the street and told everyone and the following day government officials visited my mother and told her to better discipline her daughter.
