Your Hong Kong weekend drinks guide for March 14-16
Thursday, March 13
Bar Without x Opposites
The Opposites has partnered with Pedison Kao from Taipei's Bar Without. Photo: Handout
What: The Opposites looks to ease you into the weekend courtesy of host Pedison Kao, brand director of Bar Without in Taipei, and partners Johnnie Walker, Don Julio, The Singleton and Tanqueray. Kao was the Taiwan bartending champion, placing in the top three globally in the Diageo World Class competition 2024. Bar Without offers contemporary, high-concept cocktails using ingredients such as kaoliang, tea, burnt miso, tobacco, shio koji, pineapple chips and more.
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Where: The Opposites, LG/F, Hilltop Plaza, 49 Hollywood Road, Central
When: 8pm-11pm
Friday, March 14
Art Month sips at the Mandarin Oriental
The Aubrey's Angry Girl, available throughout March to celebrate Hong Kong's art month. Photo: Handout
What: With some of the year's biggest art fairs including Art Basel and Art Central just around the corner, the Mandarin Oriental is unveiling an array of dishes, menus and cocktails that dazzle in both style and flavour. The Aubrey is offering the Angry Girl Highball, which focuses on coffee-infused shochu, cacao and barley, and is based on the Angry Girl series of paintings by Yoshitomo Nara.
The Chinnery's Self Portrait, available through March to celebrate Art Month. Photo: Handout
Elsewhere in the MO, the Captain's Bar is serving The Comedian, which adds banana, marsala and coconut to the classic Negroni, inspired by the viral piece of the same name by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan. At the Chinnery, the Self-Portrait pays tribute to – you guessed it – painter George Chinnery, in the form of a gin sour riff.
Where: Mandarin Oriental, 5 Connaught Road Central, Central
When:
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The Aubrey, noon-9.30pm
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Hong Kong's English literature has found increasing recognition over the past decade. Thanks to those writers, there is a growing interest among academics in this literary genre to understand how residents feel about the social and political changes in the city. 'They paved the way for writers like me who write about Hong Kong,' she said. However, save for a quip or two in English, Cheng's interview was conducted fully in Cantonese – reflecting her in-between cultural belonging. Cheng grew up in a working-class family in a public housing estate in Tin Shui Wai, in the northwestern New Territories. She was raised by her Indonesian-Chinese great-grandmother and grandmother, who moved to the city from Fujian. She never learned much about Hong Kong from them or her Cantonese-Hokkien parents. 'When I was younger, I wanted my English to be perfect, so I avoided Chinese books. 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These hybridities and in-betweens have left Cheng feeling like something of an outsider, never involved enough in one place or one language. But her plans to live between Hong Kong and Glasgow have necessitated acceptance of that identity. 'If I'm writing about Hong Kong from the position of someone who's outside the city, there comes a point where I have to accept that my understanding can't fully represent the experience of people who are here,' Cheng said. 'This collection actually isn't very 'Hong Kong,'' she said about her new book. There are just too many niche aspects of the city that would still feel foreign or unknown to the broader public at home, she explained. 'Hidden Agenda – who the heck would know about that?' Yet, Cheng, who references specific policy issues in her work, is anything but detached from the city's affairs. Hong Kong's cutthroat property market, a whale that succumbed to a gash on its back two summers ago, and a stalled reclamation megaproject appear as short vignettes in her poem 'Lantau (Rotten Head),' a reference to the archaic Chinese name for the city's biggest island. Cheng admits she was a bit 'reckless' when picking out her subject matter. 'After I got the contract from the publisher, I realised I could write anything,' she said. It got to a point that Cheng received reviews saying that her poems were incomprehensible or that they were too reliant on gimmicky Chinese characters. On the one hand, she dismissed the criticisms, saying that her critics would have understood her writing better if they had resorted to Google. On the other hand, she had a positive reaction. 'I actually like seeing these comments, because I started out writing with the intention of serving an audience that knows what happened, to write in our own language,' she said. It was a matter of balancing 'which people you want to reach and the scale you want to achieve.' Diaspora When discussing the locales that shape her work, she is hesitant to identify herself as part of Hong Kong's diaspora. Indeed, she hasn't completely settled overseas. Cheng, who now lives – and writes – between Hong Kong and Scotland, is already preparing to start teaching at the Chinese University of Hong Kong's English Department in September. Before flying back to Glasgow for a four-month stint in May, she spent a little under half a year in Hong Kong: teaching, holding book talks, editing, and supervising master's projects, scraping together funds to pay for a five-year talent visa, student loans, flights, and rent in the UK. Yet she is somewhat wary of Hongkongers overseas. 'Some Hongkongers here don't want to hang around other Hongkongers because they're worried their children won't be able to integrate and become a 'real UK Citizen,'' Cheng said, with an air of contempt. Cheng recalls attending a Lunar New Year fair, where Hongkongers – those 'who had decided they weren't going back,' she said – printed out Hong Kong road signs, mailboxes, and vending machines as decorations, as if to preserve an image of the city they knew. 'But maybe Hong Kong's streets have changed so much that they're no longer the same image,' she said. 'I still want to know what's happening on both sides; I'm a bit nosy like that.' Slow to pigeonhole herself into overseas publishers' cliches of what a 'diaspora' poet might be, Cheng doesn't feel the need to idealise Hong Kong, as some self-proclaimed diaspora poets might do for their home countries. 'You left for a reason. Your origin might not have given you enough, so why talk about it like it's something great?' she asked. For Cheng, translating is also a way to put Hong Kong writers on the map, without overtly caving to the Anglospheric gaze. 'I want to catch up on Chinese stuff that I missed out on, but I don't want to deviate too much from what I'm currently doing,' she said. She recently began translating Hong Kong writer Lee Ka-yee's essay collection Exposure, under the mentorship of literary translator Jennifer Feeley, who translated the works of the city's late literary icon Xi Xi. 'It's also a way of putting my understanding of Hong Kong to the test,' Cheng added. 'A lot of writing that comes out of Hong Kong, especially work that can make it into the English-speaking world, always has this vibe that it was made with the expectation of being seen by other people. But Ka-yee and other local Hong Kong writers just approach writing simply in terms of how they see the world, how Hongkongers see the world. And I want to bridge those gazes through translation,' she said. 'Maybe it's also a way to tell my younger, 12-, 13-year-old self: You actually can flow between Chinese and English.'
