The bads about not being a Catholic

Published at the Libertines Pub, Hong Kong


Recently, a weird phenomenon happens to a couple of my girlfriends. They suddenly converted to Catholicism with no early signs of being religious. They apparently did the you-know-what forbidden but enjoyable deed long ago. And within six months of their conversion, coincidentally, they end up exchanging vows with their fiancé before a big wooden cross hanging in a glass-laden high-ceiling greenhouse called church. The wedding scene is so sacred and beautiful that I always remember to shed some tears.

Admittedly, part of the tears are shed for the fact that I’m not going to get wed in a church, not like what the princesses did in fairy tales or what Dustin Hoffman tried to interrupt in The Graduate.

My jealousy is doubled by the fact that my newly Catholic girlfriends are married to sons from well-to-do Catholic families, one of them a doctor, the other a lawyer, then an heir to a family business. No matter how education and feminism tell us women to be independent and have it all, the talent of equating forever love with financial security (reads riches for high maintenance women) is still deeply rooted in our genes.

Being Asian makes you a 10

Published at the Libertines Pub, Hong Kong

When it comes to desirability in terms of race, I always heard Aisan girls and white guys are most wanted, and both tend to be attracted to each other.

Well, I was brought up in Hong Kong and none of my friends known from childhood, i.e. the most traditional Asian girls, ever got a white boyfriend or just a white guy friend in their life. They dress like ordinary Kong-girls, in baggy outfit, without makeup and probably in spectacles. They seldom need to speak English in their daily life, only read local gossip magazines and watch Cantonese soap opera. They are shy to meet new people, and usually knew their boyfriends from study or work. Once they got a boyfriend, they usually stick to the traditional Chinese romantic formula: develop a long-term sexually-exclusive relationship with him and get married.

The above proposition only comes to mind when I begin my work and after-work life in Central, where East truly meets West and the first language is English.