The Generation That Made Hong Kong Is Leaving, One at a Time

Each obituary closes a public archive. The one in your own family was never opened.

The list from the past two years is longer than anyone wants to read.

December 2023, Kathy Chow, 57. March 2024, Stephanie Lai, 58. July 2025, Suet Nei, and days later Chow Chung at 92. October 2025, Benz Hui at 76, and at the end of that month Stanley Fung at 80. November, Lam Sheung Mo at 75. July 2026, Patrick Tse at 89.

Each time, social media does the same thing: a wall of screen grabs and a wave of posts about the end of an era. Three days later it goes quiet again.

But a great deal of them remains

Patrick Tse acted for over seventy years. Chow Chung started in 1955 and appeared in more than eighty-five films. These were people who spent their whole lives being filmed, recorded and interviewed.

So after they go we can still watch and still listen. The face, the voice and the speech rhythm of an era were preserved as a by-product of the job.

In a strict sense they have not entirely gone. The person has. The record has not.

The several million ordinary people of the same generation have nothing

Hong Kongers of exactly that era also came through the fifties and sixties, also lived in squatter huts, worked the factories, paid off a flat and raised a houseful of children.

The only difference is that some of them were on camera and several million were not.

So when a veteran actor dies we pull up the films. When someone's grandmother dies, what the family can pull up is a few photographs and some voice notes asking whether they have eaten.

"The one thing I did best in this life wasn't surviving all that hardship. It was becoming your mother."

Not said by anyone famous. What survives has never depended on how well known someone was. It depends on whether anyone asked, and whether anyone pressed record.

What "the end of an era" is actually describing

When we say it, we do not only mean one performer. We mean a way of speaking, a register, a way of carrying yourself that nobody has any more.

Your own elderly relative has all of that too. They are from the same era, speaking the same period Cantonese, still remembering why things were done the way they were.

The only difference is that nobody is recording them.

The famous had studios. Your family has you.

Patrick Tse's voice survives because a film industry spent seventy years recording it. Whether your parents' voices survive is a decision exactly one person gets to make.

This kind of news arrives every few months. Next time it does, and you get that flicker of I really should ask my mother about that, it does not have to become a project.

Ask her one question that evening and record the answer. That is the whole beginning.