I Am Hakka

From the infamous Triads to the deadly Delayed Death-Touch of Kung-Fu legend, I Am Hakka is the autobiography of Ming, a country boy displaced from abject peasantry in rural Hong Kong to the streets of Chinatowns in Britain. From the humblest of beginnings to straddle two proud cultures spanning four decades, Ming experiences the vicissitudes of life and death, crises of faith and identity, and much soul-searching against the backdrop of a British society steep in modern xenophobia.
The greatest journey we all partake is the one from birth to grave. Many prosper, most flounder. Proud and venerated are the prospered whereas the floundered fade away without a voice. This is the compelling voice of Ming in a lifetime of conflicting cultural values, family ideals and age-old traditions amidst the woe of missed opportunities, unfulfilled expectations and twisted fate.
Born in 1961 of Hakka Chinese heritage, Ming enjoys a peaceful rustic existence on a small island on the fringe of the affluent British colony of Hong Kong before arriving in London with his mother in 1971 to join a father he hardly knew. The subsequent reunion enslaves his mother as a house slave and subjects Ming to a similar fate.
Forged in the cauldron of emotional bondage, Ming’s moral compass goes awry and embarks on a personal perdition of confronting every confrontation and fighting every fight. Armed with a death wish and a bad mood lasting over twenty years, he faces the unenviable prospect of either ending up dead in a gutter or doing time for a life sentence.
As the saying goes, the good ones die young. But the bad ones, Heaven doesn't want them and Hell has yet to take them, so ostensibly bestowing them lengthier earthly tenure till judgement day. This is the story of Ming, an elegiac existence of little cachet in a world not entirely of his making.