Memoirs of an Ice-Cream Lady
By Emily Ho
SINCE childhood, I dreamed of running my own business. Eventually, I became the “ice-cream lady” as nicknamed by children on Lamma Island, my home in Hong Kong. Now my interest in writing grows, and it’s time to start that.
Maybe you haven’t heard of Emily’s Ice Cream and Yogurt Parlor on the Main Street in Yung Shue Wan, Lamma’s largest village. I opened it in 2002, shortly before the SARS disease attacked Hong Kong. Earlier, I’d moved away from the skyscrapers to Lamma, which has no cars or buses and the tallest buildings stand just three storeys.
Definitely, I can’t operate the shop forever. When starting the business, I told myself, “No more than five years, whether it succeeds or fails.” Already, it’s the sixth year.
Few people know that I’ll write these memoirs. But to protect and respect many of the characters involved, I’ve chosen a semi-autobiographical format. What’s fact or fiction becomes a matter of imagination and judgment.
Maybe people will wonder who should care about the events in a small ice-cream shop run by a Chinese business-woman on an outlying island in Hong Kong. Well, there’s lots of self-actualization and self-destruction, love and betrayal, joy and heartbreak, not to mention more struggles than I could have predicted and the surprising powers I possessed.
For business teachers, my experience makes a good case study. For love searchers, it’s a good reference to avoid following in my many wrong footsteps. For ice-cream fans, well, visit my shop for a taste.
Please enjoy these anecdotes!
Helper Wanted
Emily placed a “Helper Wanted” poster on the shutter after closing her ice-cream shop for the day. It read: “Helper Wanted: Someone Punctual, Pleasant, Reliable, Honest and Courteous. Students or Housewives Are Welcome.”
Using a red sign-pen, she added the words “willing to show initiative, hardworking and loyal”. But was it idealistic to imagine hiring such a person? She, herself, might be the only person she knew possessing all these qualities (well, sometimes, because she is human).
Suddenly, she tore down the poster, muttering: “I’ll run the shop all by myself, for better or worse.”
Someone’s Closing Sale
One day when grocery shopping on the Main Street, Emily noticed a “Closing Sale” sign posted outside the so-called “toilet-seat” shop, a place she’d never patronized. True, she had a flushing toilet in her country flat on Lamma. (Luckily, it wasn’t the countryside on the Chinese mainland where people might have to pee and poo in front of other villagers.) But she’d never considered spending more than HK$1,000 for a fancy, fanny-cradling toilet seat decorated with gold fish or flowers.
Maybe she’d have one in gold if she ever married a rich guy from India or the Chinese mainland. Who’d want a cold bum then? She giggled at the thought.
Once closed, the former toilet-seat store would become the first site for Emily's ice-cream shop.
Coming soon:
Tasty Memories Stay Strong
(more Memoirs of an Ice-Cream Lady).
'Cool sweetness' sells by the scoopful.
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