This week in PostMag: from Stuntman star Philip Ng to Tam Jai

What to expect from this week’s issue, from the new Doing Good series to Japan’s iconic Nakagin Capsule Tower coming to M+

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Hong Kong actor and stuntman Philip Ng fronts this week’s issue of PostMag. Photo: Jocelyn Tam

Cat Nelson

Published: 4:15am, 10 Nov 2024

This week’s print issue marks the debut of our new regular feature, Doing Good. I’m excited – perhaps unduly so for a single-page piece. But it encapsulates an essential part of what “how to live well” means for our team and in these times. Living well isn’t simply caviar and cashmere. It’s authenticity, creativity and curiosity. It’s engaging the world around us, creating community, building bridges, not walls – something it feels like we need now more than ever.

The Doing Good series shines a light on people making a positive impact, whether through charity work, social enterprises or sustainability initiatives. Dave Besseling spent an afternoon preparing meal boxes with the home-grown, Chai Wan-based organisation More Good (a lot of “good” in these paragraphs, I know), which has been distributing nutritious meals to Hong Kong’s underserved communities for the past three years.

Making a difference isn’t always the sole aim, but that doesn’t make it any less powerful. Gavin Yeung looks at popular rice noodle chain Tam Jai as an unlikely champion of female workplace empowerment. After reading it, I was intrigued enough to slurp down a bowl of crossing-the-bridge noodles at my local branch that afternoon.

Our features are wide-ranging, taking us into the wilds of West Bali National Park, where Ian Lloyd Neubauer encounters the island’s biggest native wildlife, and back in time as Paul French recounts the heyday of Hong Kong’s Repulse Bay Hotel and its high-society guests such as Wallis Simpson and Ernest Hemingway. Both are a welcome break from the unrelenting tidal wave of American political news that overwhelmed the world this week.

Charmaine Chan dives into Kisho Kurokawa’s ambitious 1970s architectural experiment in Tokyo. If you’ve ever had the pleasure of squeezing into a Japanese capsule hotel, you can thank the Nakagin Capsule Tower for serving as inspiration. While the Jenga-like building was torn down two years ago, several of the building’s capsules were preserved and M+ acquired one, recently putting it on display for the public.

Ambition often requires a leap of faith, too. In our cover feature, Patrick Suen speaks to Philip Ng, who went all in and moved from the United States to Hong Kong to pursue his dream of making it in kung fu flicks. Twenty years on, the actor is working to bring back the city’s golden era of action movies with his role in Stuntman.