Bai Xiong's very first real girlfriend(cctv.com)

Faith is a great singer and he and Simon gave me lots of Chinese music tapes back in the university days. My first tape was from Lin Yi Lin singing Ai Xiang Yi Ge Bu Hui Jia De Ren. I used to fall asleep every night listening to Jacky (Zhang Shui Yo) and Andy Lao (Lu De Hua) singing in Cantonese!! Maybe that’s why Chinese language is so comfortable to my ears.

Later when I moved back to my home town of Hamilton in 1994 I still continued to study in school and attended Mohawk College to study Environmental Science Technology. It was so great because I applied to and was accepted by a special Canadian Government program and they PAID me a salary to go to school and PAID FOR my school fees and even books!!!! Wow SO SO great!! During that time I made more friends at Mohawk college and my very best friends were from Taiwan and BEIJING!!!!!

Amy, Sue and John were from Taiwan, and the boy on the far right is Gary Cai and Gary is from………..BEIJING!!!!!!!! I think that Gary was my very first Beijing friend in Canada. Back in those days I really loved to practice cooking Chinese food and really wanted to be able to make a good stir fry dish. I also loved to invite my friends over to my parents house to cook and eat together. One strong memory I have is about HOT POT!!! house and the told me that they we were going to have a wonderful time together that day. They had brought over a bunch of different vegetables and other ingredients but told me we only needed on big pot of hot water for cooking all these different foods. I thought hmmmmm this is quite a strange thing but sounds ok with me so long as it tastes good! WELL……..we boiled that water for about 4 hours and just kept eating and eating. So much fun that time and it was my first experience with hot pot.

I began my study of Wu Shu in Hamilton in 1994. And my teacher’s name was Rick Hsu and he was a disciple of the great Master Pan Qing Fu (you may find master Pan’s movie named “Iron and Silk” which was filmed in Beijing and is one of the very few martial arts movies which is very realistic and believable) And my best friend from the Wu Shu club was named Sam. He was great at the “Lion Dance” and this was my first exposure to it. The other nice thing was that Sam’s father owned a Hong Kong restaurant and we often ate there together. So delicious food!!

I was also very active with the Chinese community in Hamilton and belonged to the Chinese Cultural Association in 1996.

                     By Bai Xiong