3. My Parents
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Mother - 陳玉屏 / CHAN Yuk Ping / Lena Yee (1922-2003) "Ma Ma"
Father – 余欽美 / YEE Ham Mee (1915-2008), Ham in Taishanese dialect "Ba Ba"
Mother (first on the left, standing) and her classmates and teachers. Mother has started her schooling at the new Maryknoll Convent School in Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong. The girls in different uniform continued their schooling in Chinese school.
My parents were born in their respective home villages. My mother and her parents moved to Hong Kong when she was young. She attended Chinese primary school and next Maryknoll Convent School in Kowloon, Hong Kong. Because most subjects at Maryknoll were taught in English, she became fluent with the English language. She also attended classes at other institutions about human health. I remember her giving injections to grandparents when they got sick. In those days, people believed, and I think it is true, that injections cured the sick faster than oral medicine. Luckily, I escaped her needles.
My father completed his university education in January 1943 at Kwong Tung Kuo Min University in Licki Wan, Canton (Guangzhou), major in Political Science. Licki Wan does not show in today's map but the present Liwan District might have been at one time called Licki Wan. While his main subject would later earn him a civil servant job with the provincial government, his main interests were also Chinese history, literature and poems. In later years, ball-room dancing was added to his list of interests.
Father passed away in 2008. By his bedside was a photo of him and mother at Hong Kong's Royal Botanical Garden.
He also kept several books close to him. One of them was 300 Tang Poems / 唐詩三百首 - a collection of 300 popular poems from the Tang Dynasty.
Another book was a collection of quotes and phrases about how we govern ourselves as individual, as parents, when dealing with friends and neighbours, in business. One chapter is about governance - how government works, its relations with citizens, the good and the bad, how to earn trust and support from citizens, why some governments succeed and others fail. This book (or similar books) is a good read regardless of time and place.
