I was going to leave Julie for the last piece of sisterhood since she is so high-profiled among all the women I want to write about. And most of us have met her and known her fairly well. But she is my staunch supporter through and through. Whatever we talk about in the past and present, she has a knack of understanding what I say instantly. There is no need to repeat what I said, and you know how fast she talks.
One particular scenario that has stuck to my mind was her walking down a long alley in school uniform towards her piano’s teacher’s flat. The apartment building was located on Earl’s Street, a short street off Prince Edward Road and Boundary Street on both ends very near Maryknoll Convent School. I was living on 280 Prince Edward Road. There were three building blocks owned by one of the heirs of the Kowloon Motor Bus Company. We were on the second floor of one of the blocks behind and our balcony behind the kitchen opened up a view of that alley I mentioned. In that three-story apartment building lived a famous Cantonese child star on the ground floor. I had a view into her living room. She was Siu Fong-fong and she used to hide in a corner in the living room and pretended she was not at home when her fans rang her bell. I used to hide in the maid’s room to check her out and was one day surprised to see Julie walking briskly in the alley. After finding out why she was there, I remember asking my mother why she didn’t send me to learn the piano like other mothers.
Julie also lived on Grampian Road, a bit closer to the school than where Miriam lived at the time. Her brothers and sisters were also Munsang graduates so she started out very young skipping kindergarden after she arrived Hong Kong from Shanghai. I guess a student life was uneventful for her for she left the school early and arrived late. That’s why she claimed nowadays to have dementia as she had forgotten most of what happened. My theory is she wasn’t that active then because she was the baby in the family and her mother must have watched her every movement, so her contact with classmates might have been limited and she only got to know the few sitting very close to her. Her conversation with me then would always be about school and whether she had studied before a test/exam or not. I sometimes suspected she was the kind of student who often claimed not to have studied at all yet they spent a lot of time preparing. Will she ever tell us the truth now?
We studied French together in the summer of 1971 at Alliance Francaise under a Vietnamese lady called Madame da Cruz. The place was mentioned in another piece when I talked about Teresa, so the location had already been mentioned. On several occasions, Julie’s mother came to pick her up and Julie asked me to ride along even though it was not a great distance for me to walk home. Not knowing her way well, her mother often did not know where to drop me off and I sometimes ended up walking a fair distance home in the opposite direction. The lessons we had together were fun. There were classmates who were teachers or students from famous girls’ schools. Madame was an excellent teacher so after the ‘debutante’ course, we both enrolled in the ‘intermediate’ course during our studies in F6. The ‘professeur’ was not great and his name was quickly forgotten.
In the summer after the School Certificate Exams, we, as a group (Carmen, Miriam, Julie, Cindy, Petula and myself), went out several times. We were all dressed up to go eat at restaurants, to see movies and to shop for clothes. Again I remember one time Julie was trying on different dresses and the girls were all around giving their two-cent opinions. Then the results came out and all of us could study together in F6.
Julie had her study path cut out for her. She would follow her elder brothers to America. I had my TOFFLE when I was in F5 and was going to take my GCE A-levels in preparation for Canada. She and Carmen did not have to worry other than their TOFFLES as America only looked at results from F6 on top of the Cert results. Strangely with nobody they knew studying in the universities they had chosen, I often wondered then why these two girls did not choose to go to the same schools.
Anyway, off we went our separate paths after F.6. She was traveling with China Airlines and I was going with United Airlines and we departed more or less the same time so we said we would meet up at Tokyo airport when the planes stopped for refill but her plane was delayed and we didn’t get to say goodbye again.
Julie kept up with her letters but I remember they were mostly lists of what subjects she took in that particular semester and not much about her student life or interactions she had with the locals. She sent me pictures she took with Carmen visiting her in the dorms. Of course we invited each other for visits but we didn’t see each other until August 1980 at Miriam’s wedding. Miriam had provided us a motel room near by where she lived and we arrived at least a day or two before the wedding so we could have our fill of conversations together. She was also to be married off soon so I took my wedding gift, which was a piece of soapstone sculpture by the first nation people in Canada, to her.
I already talked about our time in San Francisco so there is no need to repeat here. Over the past years Julie came back to spend some time with her parents and then when her mother passed away unexpectedly she spent a longer time with her father here every winter. We tried to see as much as possible of each other but her goal here was to look after her father and not to run around with her friends. Also I was often away during Chinese New Year and so at the most we saw each other a few times only. But we can talk without feeling there is a time lapse. It’s very easy to pick up from where we left off and it’s always such a comfortable feeling talking and laughing out loud at nothing in particular. The best thing is we do not need a majong game or a glass of wine to get us in the mood.
Julie is in no way hyperactive like some of you might think. She is just impatient and doesn’t want to lose one second when she is with friends she hasn’t seen for a long time. She just wants to know each and every one in details or to catch up with time lost. My advice to all of you is ‘practise to speak quickly and have your life’s info ready whenever Julie is around. Do not dawdle and go around in circles. Give her your facts straight up. .
