from Kan Kit Keung
Dear Friends,
How are you?
This spring, our son Min-Yen and his wife Alicia came to visit us from Singapore. We went to Catskill State Park in the state of New York as a getaway. Our daughter Min-Ying and her husband Matthew also joined. The skiing season had just ended. So, the six of us could live in a vacation house with a very reasonable price. Min-Ying had a professional development training in a natural center in the park the year before. This time, she led us to visit the center and told us many fun stories in her training.
The park features a waterfall called Catskill Falls. We could see a few cascades on the highway when we drove by. The cascades were quite impressive thanks to the melting snow. We walked up the hill along the trail for about twenty minutes and saw a tall waterfall hanging over the cliff. The fall consists of two stages. The top stage is about forty to fifty feet tall and is in the form of a single column, while the lower stage is substantially wider and taller. The water flew down the vertical cliff in several columns. Flanked by the ice on its sides, the fluttering water formed a beautiful view.
We visited Hong Kong in April. The main purpose of the visit is to work on the book of Kit-Keung's art, which Chung Chi College is going to publish. The college had arranged to have us lived on campus. Besides the nice environment, it was also very convenient to interact with the editorial staff in the college administration office. My brother Tai-Keung squeezed out time from his busy schedule and gave detailed advice to his graduate student at Shantou University to do the book's graphic design. We stayed in Hong Kong for six weeks. When we left, the main part of editing and designing work was fortunately completed.
Many things happened in Hong Kong when we were there. There were the excitement of the passing of the Olympic torch and the disturbance caused by the Tibet separatists. All these were silenced by the calamitous earthquake that hit Szechuan. The whole Hong Kong stopped and people were glued to the TV for the latest news from Szechuan. We saw the Chinese army and ordinary people racing with the clock to reach the earthquake regions, saving victims from rubbles and transporting food and medicine. Release funds were set up in Hong Kong immediately. We were deeply moved by the tremendous help that Hong Kong people had delivered.
Kit-Keung worked diligently on his paintings after we returned to Maryland in May. He had to prepare for his one-man show in Grotto Fine Art in Hong Kong in November. Therefore, we stayed put most of the time. We only spent a weekend in Pittsburgh with Min-Yen and Min-Ying when Min-Yen came to US for meetings. In August, our old college friend Choi Man-Duan visited us when he came to Virginia for a conference.
In October, we packed our luggage for Hong Kong again. This time we went via Minneapolis so that Kit-Keung can run the Twin City Marathon. We stayed in our good friend Wong Chui Ping's home for a few days. We visited Kwok Ka Ying and Pat Hui's art studio and spent some time with our classmate Ho Yui-Tim whom we had never seen after graduating from Chung Chi.
In Hong Kong, we participated in the activities of Chung Chi's fifty-seventh anniversary. That included the thousand people dinner, the around the campus run and the planting of plum and pear trees as gifts from the class of 68 at their fortieth reunion. We also used Hong Kong as a base and took a trip to Singapore to see Min-Yen and Alicia. We also toured Detian Falls in Quangxi.
The week before we went, Quangxi suffered from several days of heavy rain. When we were there, the sky was still drizzling. From Nanning to Detian, the bus went through a scenic corridor that filled with steep mountains and lush vegetation. The mountain cliffs edged towards our road with no shoulder to spare. We encountered numerous fallen rocks lying on the pavement. With the rain, it was quite a hair-raising trip. However, when the bus was in a clearing, the road was lined with trees. Sugar cane and banana fields filled the area to the horizon. It was a peaceful and prosperous region.
When we reached Detian, we saw the torrential waterfall stirring up mists rising high to the sky. There were new falls that were created by the excess of water and were not in any of the tour books. The tour guide said he had never seen such plenty of water in the falls in his past visits. It is truly our luck to see such majestic view in the usually dry autumn season. We also visited Tongling canyon not far away from Detian. More than three hundred meters high, Tongling Fall is said to be the tallest water fall in China. This fall sped down the cliff in one wide column. It was a very memorable scene especially when we had to descend eight hundred steps to the bottom of the canyon in rain to see it.
While in Hong Kong, Chung Chi had the budget for the art book past and selected the printer. Kit-Keung then worked with the printer to adjust the color of the plates and worked on the loose ends in editing and design as time allowed. Although it is not yet printed, the publishing day is very near.
We wish you good health, to ride the global economic storm smoothly and a very happy and prosperous New Year!
Sincerely yours,
Yuen-Han and Kit-Keung
Email: kk.yhkan@gmail.com