Is it my imagination, or are we experiencing a particularly long and tempestuous dragonfly season? I associate dragonflies with the heat of ...

"I've never seen so much garbage in my life!" That was my mother's first response on her visit to Wang Tong a number of...

The garden taps sputtered dry. That meant the village reservoir had filled with sand again. Once more all of Wang Tong went into water hiber...

The Ghost Tree is under threat. I'm not sure how it got that name, but that's what local people have always called it. It's a ...

Summertime, and the living is queasy. When we haven't had non-stop torrential rain and thunderstorms, the temperature has hovered in the...

The water buffaloes are back. Though their timing might have been a little better. My wife nearly missed the morning ferry because, as you c...

How do I explain three months away, when I've been here all along? Was the removal of the ill-fated Welcome sign, the day after the dead...

A notice taped to the village "Welcome" sign says it has to come down. What it actually says, in true government-speak, is that pu...

Chekhov's Madame Ranevskaya had her cherry orchard. Our village has its starfruit orchard, located on the eastern frontier, between the ...

I heard the lion coming ten minutes before it arrived. Cymbals crashing, drum pounding, wood blocks clacking, the lion dance sauntered along...

Wang Tong welcomed the Year of the Tiger at midnight with a barrage of firecrackers, followed by around an hour of barking from the frighten...

It's a light day for Ah- Wah , the village postman. A couple weeks ago he was complaining about the phone company. They used to distribu...

I found this note in the mailbox today. At least it was something. In the age of e-mail and texting instead of letters, and junk calls (at 2...

They're digging up the Wang Tong Stream. Well, that's a good thing. During typhoons and heavy rains a lot of coarse sand washes down...

I wonder whether one of those letters is for me. Yes, sometimes I still get mail there. I didn't risk finding out, for fear of contracti...

The other day, while walking past the graveyard behind the village, I noticed this little stone plaque on the side of a family tomb. It'...

Wang Tong is not a very photogenic attraction. That's the conclusion I came to after looking at the picture I took today. It appeared so...

News travels slowly out in the wild and remote hinterlands. There's a famous story of the Han Emperor Wu-ti sending an emissary to Centr...

Wang Tong is a tourist attraction again! In 1962 the restaurant on top of the hill behind the village shut down, signaling the nail in the c...

Yet another visit from a government posse to talk sewers and flowers. I'm starting to consider these guys part of the family. This time ...

While Ah-Po uses the anti-Disney approach of a twisted Magic Kingdom to keep the birds away, the two other significant vegetable gardens in ...

Can a stuffed panda save the world from magpie devastation? Magpies are considered good luck in Chinese tradition; they're harbingers of...

I'm delighted--surprised, even--to report that Wang Tong Valley did not burn to the ground today as expected. Today is the Chung Yeung F...

One of Hong Kong's basic laws of nature is: Any open green space is just a temporary absence of concrete. You see this law in action whe...

I think autumn, October in particular, is the favorite time of year for people who are dreamers, whereas pragmatists prefer spring. If so, t...

Feeling cooped up and agitated, I went out for a recuperative walk. Watching this Snowy Egret taking lunch in the stream, and playing tag wi...

I couldn't tell you when Autumn arrived. Traditionally summer ends on the night of the Moon Festival, the weather changing almost abrupt...

October 1 was the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China. There weren't any particular ceremonies to...