Lights on, lights off

Term is over. We have limped over the finishing line and the children have, predictably, all developed coughs and colds. I go in search of a pharmacy and find that it is half western, half Chinese medicine. In the window of the Chinese half are various dried remedies, most of which I am unable to identify although I am a bit dismayed at the sight of a large tray of dried seahorses. Fortunately the cough remedy I am sold does not involve stewing seahorses.

Grandma and Grandpa have arrived for Christmas. Despite some anxiety that at the time of their arrival not a single loo in the house was functioning we are overjoyed to see them. We have a packed schedule and are busy showing them our favourite haunts besides one or two of their own. This is not their first Christmas in Hong Kong for thirty years ago they lived here too. From our front deck we can see the block of flats up on the Peak that was their home for three of the four years they spent here.

On Sunday evening we attended the service of Nine Lessons and Carols in St John's Cathedral. As the choir entered the silent Cathedral lay waiting, wreathed in darkness. And as the soloist sang out the opening verse of Once in Royal David's City a single flame lit the first of many candles, each held by a member of the congregation, and was passed along the rows, neighbour to neighbour, until the Cathedral shone out with the light of over 500 candles. Out of darkness comes light. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.

The tall arched windows of the Cathedral stood open to the mild evening and with additional heating provided by the candles our two year old stripped down to her vest in protest that I had dressed her too warmly; old habits die hard. We heard the nine lessons including one in Tagalog, one in Cantonese and one in Mandarin, sung out the familiar carols and were amazed that our children managed to set neither each other nor their service sheets alight.


After the service, in a garden full of fairy lights beside the lovely old Cathedral we enjoyed mulled wine and mince pies in the lee of the HSBC building, the Bank of China Tower and AIG Tower. Old Hong Kong juxtaposed against new China. High on the tapered top of the AIG Tower an animated logo displays the building's name, occupier and joint owner. It stands today on the site of the first AIG office in Hong Kong which opened in 1930. The lights appeared to go out momentarily and the irony was not lost on us. Is this the end of the road for AIG in Hong Kong, just three years after the prestigious AIG Tower was opened? It was but a second's pause in Hong Kong's metropolitan light show and the lights of AIG lived to see another day, another night. And yet who can help but wonder how many more Hong Kong skyscrapers will be changing their names and their owners in the coming months of the new year?