As part of our series on responsible travel writing, we recently spoke with Zabrina Lo, an arts and culture reporter for a storied English-language magazine in Hong Kong. We talked about the many ways Chinese and British legacies influence her hometown, her life, and her work.

You can also read the essay she wrote for us, “The Chopsticks and the Fork: A Hongkonger Walks You through the Culinary Day” here.

UNDOMESTICATED: What are some of the benefits and pitfalls of working with an iconic item like food as a way to help readers get to know location?

LO: I think some people can be a bit strong headed when it comes to defining what their culture’s food is supposed to be. All kinds of cultures make up the DNA of Hong Kong’s food scene—Cantonese food, Taiwanese food, American food, other international food. There are a lot of cross-cultural collaborations and people daring to experiment with different cultures and mixing up different ingredients, and maybe taking inspiration from some of the ways Western cultures brings in the tradition of Chinese recipes. Some people are offended, and some people feel like it’s good experimentation. It’s also a reflection of how the city is changing itself.

I’m inspired by my personal experience when I traveled to the UK to study for a year. I really missed home and thought that going to London’s Chinatown for an egg tart would give me that sense of familiarity and that’s the starting point of how I started looking at the significance of food and culture.

What you said earlier about folks being offended that one might insert Western cultures into Eastern food…Would you say that there are some topics that loan themselves more readily to conveying a complicated history like colonialism?

I was very small during the Handover [in 1997], so I don’t actually remember much of the colonial history of Hong Kong. That was socially significant to people who underwent that for a period of time, but when I was growing up, I would look at a menu and just think “this is an interesting dish,” but I didn’t think of the historical perspective of it. And when my parents told me some of their personal experiences of British Hong Kong, I didn’t really tie it all to the historical development of Hong Kong or the colonial history of Hong Kong.

I think I started to recognize and begin learning more about our colonial history after going to the UK. I was walking down the street and saw how the traffic lights and signs were so similar. And then I had a moment on a bus in West London and for a second, I actually thought I was in Hong Kong and had to remind myself, “no, you’re not.” Then later, I was walking by a place along the Thames, “this looks like Victoria Harbour.” And then I was like, “wait, hold on, the name Victoria Harbour says something about the colonial history of Hong Kong.”

That was the starting point when I began to really recognize Hong Kong’s tie with the UK and our colonial history. I would definitely say that has helped me learn more about my city.

What did that do for you as a writer, do you think?

I would definitely say that it has helped me learn more about my city, and a lot more from the historical point of view. After I graduated and started my job as an editor and writer, I realized it’s inevitable that I will look at the broader historical context of my city, whether writing about food, theatre, the arts, the landscape of Hong Kong. Especially to give that context to our international readers, people from Europe, people from America, people even from China.

And to a certain extent, I feel like the writing experience has encouraged me to be a lot more curious about who I am as a person, my identity and my cultural makeup.

You have lived almost all of your life in Hong Kong. It is an iconic city. As both a creative individual and as a public-facing editor and as a writer and as a resident of Hong Kong, do you feel an onus to represent it in some way, shape or form because it is so large and in our social zeitgeist?

It's definitely a lot of pressure because I'm only one person and my experience of the city of Hong Kong may be very different from my friend who say, for example, was born in the U.K. and then maybe she moved here for a decade. Her experience of Hong Kong is very different from mine, obviously, and she can also claim herself to be a Hong Konger. Despite the pressure, I feel like it can sometimes be very interesting to try to picture what the city of Hong Kong is to different people.

This makes me think of an example. I joined an exchange program called Semester at Sea, with a group of international university students on a ship going to 11 different countries in Europe, Asia, Africa, and America. But I don’t always count America because it was only three days in San Diego.

On the stop to Asia, we landed in Tokyo, and I remember that the first thing that one of my American friends said to me was, “Oh, my gosh, this is so Blade Runner. This looks so much like Hong Kong.” And I was like, “Wait, hold on. First of all, this is Tokyo. Second of all, this looks nothing like Hong Kong.”

I mean, I understand there are all these different shopping malls with neon lights and yes, the hue of the city is very much sci-fi as the cinema portrayed. But there are these different cultural city nuances that sometimes people who may not have been to Asian countries mix up because of how Hollywood sometimes will portray Asia.

What would you say to a writer who is trying to convey a spirit of a place or a location? What do you think are some good things that they might be able to do?

I think it really takes time. If I'm traveling to a place and I'm trying to write about the integral culture of a place…I definitely wouldn't spend like three days like I did in San Diego and write about San Diego. I don't think that's a very fair way to do a city justice. Spend a few months if you can. Try to broaden your network of friends and talk to locals and get their experience. Ask them what a day in their life would be like. If you come to a place like Hong Kong, get outside of the shopping malls and the glossy side of Hong Kong.

That leads really nicely into the question I was going to ask you about writing for a luxury magazine. How much has to do with appeasing the magazine’s bottom line, having to pay attention to the fact that you have advertisers who are buying pages, while also staying true to not only the magazine's editorial vision, but also to your vision as a writer.

When I was interviewed for the job in 2020, I asked the former chief content officer if it would be a suitable position for me because I’m more into writing about arts and culture. She told me that Tatler magazine was changing their editorial direction, and wanted to start offering quality content to people who are into arts and culture, as well as a younger generation in general.

I got really lucky because my beat is arts and culture. And my main job is to identify what is attractive for our readers. And nowadays it can also be young and upcoming artists as well. And that's why I feel like I'm working in a community of rising artists that my team, our audience and I can all identify with.

When it comes to the people we cover, we always ask if there is a way for us to explore new networks and to discover talents that we think really deserve reporting.

What I'm hearing from you is that your beat doesn't necessarily stray into controversial territory. You're not necessarily having to think about the advertiser and the publishing side of appeasing the advertisers. But you still do have to think about appeasing, obviously, the primary readership of Tatler?

I try to promote the Hong Kong culture and Hong Kong art scene to the world, both a local readership and a broader international readership. What I’m always considering is whether or not I’m bringing something new to the city when it comes to arts and culture. For example, I recently did a piece about Ginger Muse, a local homegrown music label. They thought that as instrumentalists, as musicians, they were not able to find a good agent that understood Hong Kong music, so they started their own label. They are really talented in their own regard already, but they are also doing something that may potentially have a good impact on the music scene here.

One of the editorial discussions that we had about your piece for us was whether or not we wanted to italicize the words that are translated from Chinese. We probably don’t need to italicize dim sum anymore, for example, but you did italicize some of the other words you used. We made the decision to take them out of italics, but I’m interested in your perspective working for a major consumer magazine. What’s your take on that discussion about keeping those words separate and exotic or making them normal?

This conversation happens again and again in our editorial office. If a term is used enough and English-speaking people actually already understand it, like dim sum, then they usually do not italicize it. And I would agree with that if it’s something that people in the English speaking world have never actually heard of, and it’s translated from a Cantonese term then, we usually do italicize. It tends to be a more organic approach like that, rather than anything that tries to delve into politics or cultural implications.

Actually that reminds me of a conversation I recently saw on Instagram. It involved a friend who does cultural tours in Hong Kong and teaches people to play mahjong. She posted asking whether or not we should be using the Cantonese pronunciation of words rather than the Anglicised version of it. So say, for example, instead of pronouncing dim sum, we’re going to say “deem sum” instead. Because the word dim sum is very much Cantonese, and if people are willing to put an effort into pronouncing it in Cantonese, instead of the English way, there would be a very different linguistic and phonetic understanding of the word. And I would want to see that.

When [Undomesticated editor] Susan proposed that I include siu yea, if I remember correctly, whereas in mainland China, they called it yeh xiao. So I'm from Hong Kong and I speak Cantonese, so I wrote siu yea in the essay and pronounce it siu yea. Compare that to people from mainland China. They would write it and pronounce it as yeh xiao. I think that would make it a cultural difference to the reader's experience.

You do most of your writing for Tatler in English. Do you ever want to write in Chinese?

This is also a very interesting question because when I was planning my dream project of writing the short story collection I’m working on, I’ve struggled with whether I'm going to do it in Chinese or English. In my primary school and in my secondary school, we studied both English literature and Chinese literature and the way that say, for example, a scene in Hong Kong is portrayed in Chinese. The way the language sounds is very different from English writing.

Here at Tatler, it's always about journalistic writing. It's very on point, objective, fact-checked with a lot of research. But when it comes to the Chinese language of describing a scene, it’s very poetic. It reminds me of the author Eileen Chang and the way she would describe the scenes of war-torn Hong Kong and Shanghai. There is a particular flair in how a scene is described.

I'm not even sure if I can give you a good example. So say for example, this morning I had pancakes. Maybe in English writing I would describe the taste of the pancake, describe the shape of the pancake. But there is something so emotional about the way I would write it in Chinese. Maybe it would bring me back to a childhood memory of having pancakes with my mother or at McDonalds.

So, yes, I struggle with this. I still don't have a conclusion. I actually had written in Chinese and published in Chinese before, but I don't think it fully allows me to exercise what I want to do creatively. And when it comes to the switching of writing between different languages, I think it's a very dramatic switch.

It’s also because I studied English literature, so sometimes when it comes to writing in English, it's almost like I would be inspired or influenced by the works that I've read in English and maybe European literature.

Also when it comes to writing in Chinese, I would definitely be influenced by a lot of the different descriptive writers in the Chinese language world, and that's why I think it's going to be a very interesting experiment.

I don't necessarily think it would be marketable if I write the collection in both English and Chinese, but it's definitely going to be very fun.

You can also read the essay Zabrina Lo wrote for us, “The Chopsticks and the Fork: A Hongkonger Walks You through the Culinary Day” here.