Dear Friends,
How are you? I hope this letter finds you in good health and success in all your endeavors.
At the end of last year, we went to Singapore for our son, Min-Yen's wedding. The Chinese customs in Singapore are more traditional than those in Hong Kong. The groom follows the tradition of bringing a well decorated box of gifts to the bride's home. He has to taste foods in sweet, sour, bitter and hot, then is tied up in golden ribbon and gives out red packets before entering the door. The old saying goes, "when tradition is lost, find it in the remote areas." When the Chinese immigrated to a new place, they bring the traditions of their time with them and carefully preserved them. Meanwhile the Chinese in the homeland are influenced by the Western culture and habits. Many old traditions were changed and forgotten.
The wedding in Singapore is also simplified due to the busy life of nowadays. In one day they went through the ceremonies of welcoming the bride, worshiping Heaven and Earth, serving tea to the elders, visiting the bride's mother back home, going through the modern legality of registration, and having the banquet. Min-Yen and Alicia were blessed to have many friends locally and from the States to help them. It was a very joyful but busy day.
From spring to summer, we did not go to any trip far away from home. Kit-Keung was busy in preparing his exhibitions in the nearby Black Rock Arts Center in August and in Shenzhen Art Institute, in Shenzhen, China, in October. The show in Black Rock center is an installation show using Kit-Keung's calligraphy in cooperation with Howard and Mary McCoy's found rocks and tree branches. Kit-Keung executed the calligraphy beforehand using mostly cursive and semi-cursive scripts. There are also some pieces in which he experimented with a combination of Chinese and English calligraphy. The collaboration resulted in beautiful, unique pieces with the help of the center's spacious gallery. The front of this greeting card is one of the installations in the show.
The Shenzhen show is with Kit-Keung's elder brother Tai-Keung. The exhibition hall is very large and consists of two floors. They had to come up with sixty pieces of work. For this show, Kit-Keung did an eight-paneled piece (26 ft. wide) and a four-paneled piece (13 ft. wide) in the White Water and Falling Water series. With those two and other new works of painting and calligraphy, he worked continuously from the beginning of the year to the middle of September, just in time to meet the deadline.
Shortly after the Shenzhen show, we joined the reunion activities of our Chung Chi class of 66. With our classmates, we toured Xiamen and Wuyishan. In one of the meals in Xiamen, we had a dish named "earth shoots." It is a variety of sand worm and is said to be very expensive and can help people live longer. Our lady classmates were all scared to death upon hearing the word "worm". So, only a few of us tried. Actually, the taste is not bad; it is crisp, somewhat like squid. Wuyishan is a famous scenery spot in China, with many vertical cliffs and peaks. Unfortunately, the haze was very dense. We could not see far when we ascended to the peak.
Right after we came back from the tour, we participated in some of the celebration activities of Chung Chi's fifty-fifth anniversary. We observed the inaugurations of the Chung Chi History Archive and the "People" sculpture. Kit-Keung participated the Round-the-campus Run, and we attended the Thousand People Dinner at Chung Chi's Ling Nam Athletic Field and the Celebration Banquet in the Intercontinental Hotel.
It has been four years since Min-Yen went to Singapore. He and Alicia have been quite busy after the wedding. We went to visit them following our stay in Hong Kong. Our daughter Min-Ying and her husband Matthew are busy too. Min-Ying had completed her two year service in New York City's public school. The teaching had been quite difficult for her, so she is taking a year off from the position and is looking into other job possibilities. We have been playing badminton often. In addition to that, Yuen-Han's exercise routines include Tai-Chi and walking, while Kit-Keung does running. He raced marathons in South Bend, Indian and Portland, Maine this year.
We wish you a joyful holiday season and a happy and wonderful New Year!
Yours sincerely,
Yuen-Han and Kit-Keung
email: kk.yhkan@gmail.com