My mom just read in the local Chinese newspaper that the creator of Old Master Q comics, Alfonso Wong died on New Years day.
I’d forgotten how much I loved those comics as a kid, browsing through them at the Chinese bookstores in Flushing, NY while my parents got our weekly groceries. I never learned to read Chinese, so they really were the only books I could “read” while my older sisters checked out the text heavy mangas.
As a kid growing up on Long Island, having arrived from Taiwan at the age of 5 in 1980, the setting of 1960s-1970s life in Hong Kong depicted in the comics was an odd mix of something foreign yet sometimes more familiar than what I was adapting to in America.