Chan Wai, perhaps contemporary Hong Kong’s most talented storyteller and scriptwriter, first came into the public eye working on TV and film production teams during the colony’s “glory days” of film and television. She was a member of the writing team behind the fondly remembered Hong Kong film Comrades: Almost a Love Story and other projects as well as a firsthand witness to the “golden years” of Hong Kong cinema.
If Han Banqing’s The Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai and Jin Yucheng’s Blossoms can be said to capture the essence of Shanghai, then The Memory Keepers in Ashes surely encapsulates Hong Kong’s late-twentieth-century verve. The best years of Hong Kong are beautifully told through the lens of the lives of fortune led by Lin Shing, Song Wan, and their ten children. However, these halcyon days of spectacular growth and prosperity face an inevitable end, with a clock already winding down to zero.