There’s a mountain in Kowloon called the Lion Rock which has come to embody the spirit of Hong Kong. It’s a spirit that had yet to rise in February 1967, when my family disembarked from […]
My father Jack Spackman was never terribly good at looking after his finances and his role as militant unionist in the China Mail industrial dispute was never going to contribute to an improvement in the […]
Every child needs an extraordinary aunt. If Nature fails to provide, one must invent or appoint one. Mine was Aunty Joan. Strictly speaking she was my dad’s cousin, and therefore an Aunt by Appointment. But […]
On Saturday 17 August 1974 a newspaper died but she did not go quietly. The China Mail was in her 130th year and was Hong Kong’s oldest English-language newspaper. A hastily-organised protest led by my […]
Journalists’ dollars alone had been unable to keep the Blue Sky Bar afloat after the end of the Vietnam War and so the opening of the Hong Kong Press Club was a huge risk. But […]
The numbers of foreign journalists in Hong Kong ebbed and flowed to the tides of the war in Vietnam so it’s fitting, and not entirely uncoincidental, that the Hong Kong Press Club was opened in […]
It will shock you, I know, to learn that Your Girl Reporter is not averse to the occasional act of thievery. Every so often I am reminded of past misdeeds which trouble my conscience to […]
David Bowie is dead. Weeks after the event it’s a phrase that still carries an air of incomprehensibility, no matter how many times I say it out loud. Each morning I’m asked, “How are you […]
On 16 January 1973 Australian Francis James emerged from three years’ imprisonment in Canton (now Guangzhou) with just a brief announcement from China to herald his expulsion to the border and into the waiting arms […]
Part Three of a Special Report on China Watching, based on a three-part feature written by my father Jack Spackman on the mysterious disappearance of Francis James, who was imprisoned in China on suspicion of […]
Copyright: Maria Spackman
