Fiction

Memoirs of an Ice-Cream Lady (Part 32)

By Emily Ho

Editor’s Note: The author runs an ice-cream parlor on Hong Kong’s Lamma Island. When time allows, she draws caricatures and writes. The following are semi-autobiographical anecdotes blending fact and fiction.


The Worst Was Yet To Come

At first in the period of the SARS illness, businesses on Lamma Island prospered as more than triple the usual numbers of visitors arrived to enjoy fresher air. In the city, business prospects went the other way.

Soon many people faced layoffs or “unlimited” no-pay vacations as companies closed down. Some Lamma gweilos lost their jobs and had to leave the beautiful place for their home countries.

Jobless Hong Kong people with time to kill began to “take trips” to Lamma with barely enough money in their pockets for the round-trip ferry fare. Many ate “fish-balls”, the only “seafood” affordable to them, and carried beverages from home, but not for environmental reasons.

A few people lost all hope in their lives. Some bought one-way tickets to Lamma and chose the normally joyful island to end their miseries once and for all!


Sad, Sorrowful SARS

“LIFE IS PRECIOUS. PLEASE THINK TWICE BEFORE YOU ACT!”

This printed warning appeared on every charcoal bag in a local grocery store. Sold as barbeque fuel for holiday-makers, the charcoal inside easily turned lethal.

Amid the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, an unlucky family “invented” charcoal-burning-indoors as a suicide method. The family members may have wanted just to stay warm on a winter day, but died from inhaling the resulting carbon dioxide. Soon extremely miserable people deliberately did the same, largely because Hong Kong’s economy had collapsed from the deadly SARS disease.

Some individuals planning drastic actions chose to die in the pleasant holiday homes on outlying islands like Lantau, Cheung Chau and even Lamma. Wary holiday-home owners began to reject single occupants and install smoke detectors. A few cases on Lamma weren’t widely reported because Cheung Chau had more.

Even a “cheerful” acquaintance and neighbor of Emily’s took her own life by burning charcoal. That shocked Emily to the core, so much that she considered moving her business.


Coming Soon:

Drug Use Injects Fear in Family (more Memoirs of an Ice-Cream Lady)

ARCHIVES