To my future child

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A great leap forward

ReportageAs tens of thousands of refugees continued to pour south across the border and into shantytown settlements like the one he called home in Shau Kei Wan, Rong Guotuan went the other way – he went north. Ludicrous though it sounds today, Rong thought he had a better chance of achieving table tennis success on the mainland. And he wasn’t the first: a few years earlier, two other accomplished Hong Kong table tennis players, Fu Qifang and Jiang Yongning, had also crossed north...

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Young lady, that’s inappropriate

EssayAFTER GRADUATING FROM law school, I spent a full and disturbing year working as a judge’s associate in the District Court of Queensland. The role required silence and discretion, and each week I sat, mute and powerless, watching things unfurl in front of me – both in and out of court – that made me want to get up and run. Forever the youngest in the room, often the only female, things that were normal to the seasoned lawyer unsettled me. I used to think all the time: Is anyone else seeing this?

A modern epic

ReportageI MEET THE immortals on a Wednesday evening in January. We’re upstairs on Russell Street, in a workspace shared by a couple of tech...

Waiting our turn

EssayGENERATIONALISM IS A complex phenomenon. The concept of a generation is obvious: the social and economic contexts for a group of people born around the...