Anthony Lawrence (back row, sixth on the right) with Ian Stewart (back row, second left), Benard Kalb (back row, fourth left), and President Sukarno in 1955. Photo: Foreign Correspondents’ Club Hong Kong4
Leningrad, now St Petersburg. Lawrence had also made use of his German connec- tions and knowledge to produce an article in German, Chinese Kaleidoscope, dated 23 June 1968, commenting on the ‘chine- sischen Aussenpolitik gibt es nur ein ‘Für’ oder ein ‘Gegen’ (There is only a ‘for’ or an ‘against’ in Chinese foreign politics).
Understanding ordinary lives Lawrence had no experience of the Far East but he soon developed what would become a lifelong attachment to the region. In 1958, after two years in Singapore, he was moved to Hong Kong as the BBC transferred itS regional base. He spent much of the next 15 years on the road and immersed himself in learning to understand the lives of the ordinary people of Hong Kong. Since then he was a lifelong member and once the former President (2000-2001) of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club Hong Kong (FC- CHK), contributed to the development of Hong Kong as a media hub in Asia and as a bastion of the free flow of news and information. Since his retirement in 1973 from the BBC, he also served the International Social Service Hong Kong Branch (ISSHK) as a volunteer for almost 40 years. Lawrence and his wife lived in a modest flat, cluttered floor to ceiling with journals, newspapers and books. Memory, and forgetting, can serve a range of practical, cultural, political, symbolic, emotional and ethical impera- tives; they are central to power, identity, and privilege. With memory comes the inevitable privileging of certain records
46 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL
and records creators, certain functions, activities, and groups in society, and the marginalising or silencing of others.5 In an article dated 18 April 1969 enti- tled Chinese Families, Lawrence’s sharp opinions on the long-living tradition of conservatism towards women embedded in the Chinese culture manifested gradually in several of his reports on Hong Kong:
“What always strikes me about Chinese families is their feeling for continuity – the ancestors who’ve gone through this life and borne it nobly, long before you were born, and the grandchildren who will be living long after you are gone and will want to respect your memory, when they come to sweep your grave on the Festival Day of Ching Ming… I think that really is carrying the idea of family rather far.”
And in the article Safe Marriage dated 12 November 1969, it echoed:
“In former days it was not so unusual for the living to marry the dead. It was thought shameful for a woman not to get married... marrying a ghost was a way out, and in a way it reinforced the tradition of all the Chinese, dead, living and still unborn, as one huge, everlasting community.”
On 21 December 1970, shortly after the enactment of the Marriage Reform Ordi- nance, he reported in an article entitled Hong Kong Concubines that:
“Chinese people in Hongkong have been catching up with the twentieth century.
The ancient custom of a married man having officially recognised concubines besides his number one wife, that’s to be given up.
Five years later Lawrence commented in the article entitled Chinese Women, dated 5 January 1975, that ‘you will still find parents in the countryside (in mainland China) with six or seven daughters still hoping that next time it would be a son… still very few Chinese men who are going to do the housework and cook the meal. It would seem that liberation for women can be found in the cities of China but that it’s still rela- tively rare in much of the countryside. In his article Far East Humour, dated 22 July 1966, his colourful descriptions on the appearance of the older Chinese generations and Asian politeness illustrate the generalised, somewhat orientalist perceptions of the Far East among Westerners at that time.
“Most of the Chinese people I know are a jolly lot. I am well acquainted with many a set of gold filings, flashing in the tropic sun. Japanese are often smiling, and I have enjoyed a good laugh with Indonesians and Malays. And yet, I wonder, how much is really politeness a strenuous attempt to keep the party going, how much is there in it of real humour. How many times have I heard something so funny that I longed to remember it? Very seldom... well you never know, we might be in for a really hilarious morning. But I’m not counting on it.”
June 2023
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