The Malaysian Insider

MARCH 21 — There’s a new celebrity in town and its name is Wing Lee Street. It has been to Berlin and back and is now basking in the warm glow of the media attention.

I am referring to the 12 tenement houses on Wing Lee Street, in Sheung Wan, that have finally reclaimed the right to remain thanks to the success of local film Echoes of the Rainbow which was shot on location there.

Echoes of the Rainbow won the Crystal Bear award at the Berlin Film Festival last month. The storyline revolves around a young boy from a working class family who observes a changing society in vibrant 1960s Hong Kong.

MARCH 14 — There is a woman, her spine curved, hair cropped short and a shade too dark for her pale, wrinkled complexion, who sometimes catches the bus back to Ap Lei Chau from the Times Square bus stop in the late afternoons.

A long-strapped handbag dangles from her neck, swaying widely as she climbs on board and makes her way to her seat.

I used to wonder what she did, where she went, as I have seen her on more than one occasion heading home at the same time. Her mind is alert, for sure, as she carries out conversations loudly (perhaps she is hard of hearing) with other passengers who seem to know her.

MARCH 7 — I have a new sworn enemy. Its name is mould.

It is early spring yet the grouting in my bathroom is erupting in ugly black spots.

I looked up at my kitchen ceiling in horror yesterday and realised the entire surface was covered with pale grey spots of varying sizes. There are also the white fluffy spots on the dish drainer. The two-day-old comb of bananas has started sporting white fuzz.

It is like the mould mardi gras in my apartment.

FEB 28 – Education kills. Someone should put that warning on the back of a school enrolment pack.

To be more precise, I am referring to the pursuit of education. So great is the pressure to perform that the race to enter the best school sometimes ends tragically.

Earlier this month, a mother threw her four-year-old girl from the seventh floor of a shopping mall before jumping off herself because the girl had not qualified for a place in the school of choice.

FEB 21 – If a stranger had walked along Raub’s main street last Sunday, he could have mistaken it for a ghost town.

It seemed as if life had come to a grinding halt on Saturday night. Businesses typically shut on a normal Sunday but, because it was also the first day of the Lunar New Year, it was doubly quiet.

But at an uncle’s house, there was plenty of chatter and titbits, rowdy laughter and the clatter of mah-jong tiles as everyone gathered around his tailor’s work table located at the heart of his home.