Today marks the 15th anniversary of Hong Kong's return to Chinese sovereignty, which is a good occasion to remember "The World of Lily Wong," a cartoon done by an American ex-pat, Larry Feign, who lived in Hong Kong under the Union Jack and, like Lily's husband in the strip, was married to a Hong Kong Chinese woman.
Like "Madam & Eve" in South Africa, Lily Wong was a tongue-in-cheek strip that commented on society and politics and was looked upon in troubled times as both comic relief and as a type of commentary whose innocent comic-strip persona allowed it to go further than a more conventional political cartoon might have.
But, even so, the situation in Hong Kong was not all that conducive even to gentle mockery and the English-language South China Post cancelled the strip in 1995. (It had begun in 1986.)
It was picked up for a limited run in 1997 to document the handover of Hong Kong from Britain to China, and there was an attempt to resurrect the strip in the early part of this century, but it remains primarily a record in strip form of the last years of British rule.
And a good record it is, as can be seen in the generous archives at the web site and in the books that are still available. I gave one of those books at Christmas one year to a Navy uncle who had spent several years in the Pacific and he was delighted, the strip having had enough impact in its heyday to have reached beyond the coast of the island and into the world of people who knew the region.
Here are a few samples, but you really need to go through the archives to get the full effect:
(Nice thing about his archives -- and his books --is that you get full story arcs. Here's another from the "novelist" arc. The fellow on the couch is Lily's useless brother, Rudy, who often provided commentary on corrupt practices by joining in them with disastrous results.)
Not all of the commentary was overtly political, but, then again, everything ultimately is political in a place like Hong Kong:
... and sometimes it was overtly political, as in this arc in which Rudy applies for a job that would put him on the mainland:
This isn't so far-fetched. I knew a Cambodian diplomat who told me of a trip to Beijing with his wife in the late 60s or very early 70s (before the fall of the Lon Nol government to the Khmer Rouge), where, when they got to their room, they realized they had forgotten the keys to their luggage. They had only discussed it for a few minutes when there was a knock on the door and they found a smiling porter standing there with a screwdriver to help them.
He also told me with a laugh that, when they started to put things away, they opened the closet door and a tangle of wires from the listening devices fell from the overhead shelf.
Sometimes a complete lack of subtlety sends the desired message.
Here's one of the last strips of Lily Wong's original run, which anticipated the handover. I wish the strip had continued, but maybe there wasn't much more left to say anyway:
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