PREE

Married couple, Sean Eav (left) and Gigi Chao (right), daughter of Hong Kong property developer, Cecil Chao.

In an open letter, open lesbian, Gigi Chao responds to her father, Cecil Chao's $130million offer for any man willing to marry her. This offer in January came after Chao Sr.'s initial $65mil (or HK$500mil) offering in September 2012 just a week after his daughter reportedly eloped with her female partner of then 7 years, Sean Eav, to get married in France (Same-sex marriage is not recognized in Hong Kong). Now that his offer has been doubled, his 33 year-old daughter has decided to release this letter through the South China Morning Post reaffirming her love and devotion for him, and her wife. It reads:

Dear Daddy,
I thought the timing was right for us to have a candid conversation.
You are one of the most mentally astute, energetic yet well mannered and hard-working people this humble earth has ever known.
Your confidence, quick wit, and charisma brightens any room you enter.
I love you very much, and I think I can speak for my brothers also, that we have the utmost respect for you as a father and role model in business.
I am sorry that people have been saying insensitive things about you lately. The truth is, they don’t understand that I will always forgive you for thinking the way you do, because I know you think you are acting in my best interests. And we both don’t care if anybody else understands.
As your daughter, I would want nothing more than to make you happy. But in terms of relationships, your expectations of me and the reality of who I am, are not coherent.
I am responsible for some of this misplaced expectation, because I must have misled you to hope there were other options for me. You know I’ve had male lovers in the past, and I’ve had happy, albeit short-lived, relationships. I found myself temporarily happy, buoyed by the freshness, the attention, the interest, of someone physically stronger than myself.
But it was always short-lived, as I quickly lost patience, and felt an indescribable discomfort in their presence. It usually made me frustrated, and I would yearn for my freedom again. I’ve broken a few hearts, hearts of good, honest and loving men, and I’m sorry that it had to be so.
But with Sean, a woman, somehow it was different. I am comfortable and satisfied with my life and completely at ease with her. I know it’s difficult for you to understand how I could feel romantically attracted to a woman; I suppose I can’t really explain it either. It just happens, peacefully and gently, and after so many years, we still love each other very much.
My regret is that you have no idea how happy I am with my life, and there are aspects of my life that you don’t share. I suppose we don’t need each other’s approval for our romantic relationships, and I am sure your relationships are really fantastic too.
However, I do love my partner Sean, who does a good job of looking after me, ensuring I am fed, bathed and warm enough every day, and generally cheering me up to be a happy, jolly girl. She is a large part of my life, and I am a better person because of her.
Now, I’m not asking you to be best of friends; however, it would mean the world to me if you could just not be so terrified of her, and treat her like a normal, dignified human being.
I understand it is difficult for you to understand, let alone accept this truth.
I’ve spent a lot of time figuring out who I am, what is important in my life, who I love and how best to live life, as an expression of all these questions. I am proud of my life, and I would not choose to live it any other way (except also figuring out how to be gentler on the planet).
I’m sorry to mislead you to think I was only in a lesbian relationship because there was a shortage of good, suitable men in Hong Kong.
There are plenty of good men, they are just not for me.
Wishing you happiness.
Patiently yours,
Your daughter, Gigi.

Very touching. One of the most bizarre thigns about it is that, Cecil Chao, before this, was infamous in his own right for being Hong Kong's most reknowned playboys and was reportedly claimed to have slept with over 10,000 women. Since the 1970s, he has been a perennial presence in tabloid magazines who run stories full of explicit details and photographs of his beautiful women.

Here, Gigi Chao speaks about her current situation with her parents and her life in general. She seems to just be a normal working woman, who aside from the responsibilities and gifts of being the daughter of a billionaire, is also an Executive Director at Cheuk Nang (Holdings) Ltd, Chairman at her charity, Faith in Love Foundation Ltd., qualified helicopter pilot and Vice President of the Hong Kong Aviation Club.

Sources: (Buzzfeed) (South China Morning Post)

A gallery depicting grand, monolithic, almost melancholic up-close photographs of high rise buildings in Hong Kong. It is an awakening depiction of what modern life is like for many people around the globe. It's interesting that the gothic scale of each photograph makes them seem fantastical, and very far off, yet in truth they are examples of the frank realism of many millions of people who live in modern megacities like Hong Kong today.

Many words came to my mind when I saw these pictures but the most gripping part of it was that each of these buildings is filled with human life and activity. I became curious about what the daily lives of each of these people in the tiny little dots and compartments in these photos were made of. A different life that we in the Western world take for granted. The photographer, Michael Wolf, who has been photographing images of Hong Kong for the past two decades, commented that: "Viewed from a distance, the photograph could be mistaken for a supermarket barcode," and maybe this was true. Maybe each building was like a barcode, and maybe each box, each room was like a fragment of data, and maybe that's what we are: tiny dots of data floating in the matrix.