When you spend a lot of time on the internet archive, you sometimes get hit by this overwhelming feeling of loneliness. You visit digital ghost towns where time is standing still and it's a fascinating experience. Yet there is a sadness to these empty digital spaces, like a house that was once inhabited but now abandoned. One day people are in the middle of decorating their virtual spaces and the next day they've seemingly vanished. It makes me wonder where they have gone and how their lives turned out. It feels like reading a book and finding out halfway that the second half of the pages are missing.
When I visited the personal page titled Wonderland of Katherine I stepped into the house of a teenager living in mid-nineties Hong Kong. Studying at St. Paul's Convent Secondary school, she talks about her favorite Cantopop singers and how she dreams of them every night. She keeps an iguana lizard at home and loves eating sashimi and tempura. She also loves to tell other people about her dreams and she kept a sort of dream journal on her site. Katherine invites visitors to further explore her site. I like how she refers to the links to other pages as tunnels, which is a metaphor for navigating the web that I have never seen before. Her tunnels hub page was only archived for the first time in 1999. One of the pages contains an account of her experiences participating in an intercultural exchange program where she went to France for four weeks in 1997. There is also a page where she explains readers all about the Chinese zodiac calendar. As well as a page dedicated to her iguana lizard, who seems to have passed away somewhere between 1996 and 1999. He used to go outside through their apartment window to climb into the trees. One day while Katherine was on holiday, a tree branch broke and the lizard fell from the 12th floor to meet his maker. Katherine wrote a long and loving poem called "My Mate" to commemorate him. On the bottom of the page we learn for the first time of the webmaster's full name. Katherine Lau.
Katherine also kept a dream journal. Her first entry reads like a dystopian sci-fi novel, while in another entry she describes a dream where she was given an egg by a bird that visited her room. In yet another entry she talks about what it would be like to have magical powers and to be able to fly like a witch. She then drastically changes the topic and asks the reader if they would rather be a bird or a bacterium. Read the following excerpt, because it carries more meaning than one might expect.
Let me ask you a question, if you are to choose between a bird and a bacteria, which one do you prefer to be? Let me tell you! It's nice to be a bacteria! Why? Because a tiny little bacteria actually has really strong power! Think about it! You may not reach the places it can reach,but it can reach the places you can reach. I believe! Even things as petite as a bacteria can change the world!
If you think about them carefully, you'll discover that what I've written contains deep meanings!
Lastly there is a page where Katherine features her favorite models. She urges readers to look beyond the Kate Mosses and Cindy Crawfords of this world and appreciate models from Hong Kong. She mentions Ruby Siu and Tramy Wat as her favorites. At the bottom of the page Katherine suprises visitors by mentioning that she does modelling herself as well. She even entered and won a modelling competition in september 1996 in Planet Hollywood in Hong Kong (now defunct) and she has posed for several fashion magazines! The contest was organized by a magazine called Amoeba. When I was done reading all of Katherine's site. That dreaded loneliness veiled over me. I wanted to continue reading the story of this bright, sparkly teenager, but she seemed to have stopped updating her site around 1999. Where might she be today? Did she continue to pursue a modelling career? I had too many questions, so I went looking for answers.
I wanted to learn more about Amoeba magazine, but to my surprise there really is not too much information available online. Search engines will lead you for to most part to Instagram posts from nostalgic Hong Kong citizens who hold very fond memories of Amoeba. The magazine was only published for 8 years between 1994 and 2002, but had a profound impact on Hong Kong's youth culture. The magazine was co-founded by the now deceased Winifred (or Kin Hui) Lai. From all accounts I could find on her, she was a very influential person in the Hong Kong cultural scene. This article calls her the fashion godmother of Hong Kong. Already in 1999 Winifred started taking daily selfies of her outfits in a wardrobe diary, putting her lightyears ahead of the game. As the editor in chief of Amoeba, she poured her heart and personality into the magazine. People praised Amoeba magazine for having a distinct style and this seems to be largely through the creative control of Lai. She later went on to pursue other projects such as the fashion website Izzue.com which still exists today and has grown into a big fashion brand with locations in Hong Kong and Macau. Winifred Lai sadly passed away too soon, at the age of 46, to the complications caused by breast cancer.
Amoeba magazine was also influential in the acceptance and exposure of LGBT+ identities in Hong Kong. Artist Kary Kwok, fashion editor for Amoeba between 1997 and 1998, was a key figure here. He talks about his work for the magazine in this interview from 2022. He was given the freedom to "instill a sense of queerness in the magazine's aesthetic". His art for the magazine played with ideas like gender fluidity and drag costumes long before those concepts became mainstream even in the west.
Amoeba's progressive attitude does not stand on its own. Kary Kwok mentions in the interview that when he returned to Hong Kong from London in 1996 there was a "paradigm shift in social attitudes" going on. 1996 was the year when Katherine Lau won her modelling contest at Planet Hollywood. It was also the last year before the reunification of Hong Kong with China. According to Kwok, there was a lot of uncertainty among residents regarding the future of Hong Kong. This may have temporarily created a cultural free state. A power vacuum in between two rulers of the small but wealthy city state where people felt the freedom to express themselves and publicly explore their sexual identities. A more pessimistic person might argue that this power vacuum was seen as a last chance for people to be themselves before Hong Kong would be integrated into the autocratic People's Republic of China. Below one of the works Kwok did for Amoeba magazine.
Katherine mentioned winning Amoeba's modelling competition in september 1996. Given the scale of the event, my guess is that the event must have made it into the magazine and if Katherine won, so did she. After looking at magazine covers using the photo translation tool, I came to the conclusion that the contest was probably covered in the November 1996 issue. The cover mentions the "arrival of new blood" as well as a party. I was however not able to find any digitized copies of Amoeba. Some people on Ebay are selling old Amoeba issues, but I have not been able to find the November 1996 one so far.
The Amoeba trail went cold, so I went looking for Katherine Lau herself. As I expected Googling her name provided me with too many Katherines to work with. I looked at some Linkedin profiles, but nobody beared a clear resemblance to the Katherine from her old photos. Keep in mind that Katherine Lau is going to be at least 25 years older than she was while making her personal website. I followed the lead of the St. Paul's convent school where she used to go in Hong Kong. The school still exists in the heart of Hong Kong today and its building looks like this.
It is said to be one of the three best performing secondary schools in Hong Kong and it boasts a list of graduates who went on to become famous politicians and actresses. Katherine does not feature the list, which means she probably did not become a famous model. Other than this the website did not give me much else to go by. I was back at square one. I took another look at her Geocities page and fast-forwarded the Wayback machine a few years to 2002 to see if she made any further updates on her site and that's when I noticed that Katherine updated her homepage for the last time when she was 18 years old. She changed her interests from Hong Kong celebrities to Björk and Pulp Fiction, but more importantly she mentions that she is now studying at Wyvern college in the United Kingdom! I went back to check some Linkedin profiles I was looking at before and sure enough, I found the page of a Katherine Lau, living in Bristol UK, who went to Wyvern from 1999 to 2001. This perfectly with the timeline on her site! Ladies and gentlemen, I present you Katherine Lau, PhD!
The first thing you notice when reading Katherine's profile is that she did not pursue a modelling career. Instead she went the polar opposite direction to become a scientist. After her graduation from Malvern she studied Developmental Biology in the University of Edinburgh, followed by a Master in "Biomedical and Forensic Studies in Egyptology" which sounds incredibly fascinating. In a twist of faith, Katherine spent the last 10 years in the microscopics industry, working for major players in the market such as Carl Zeiss and Nikon. She is currently the vice president of business development in relatively young microscopics company based in Delft in the Netherlands. In 2014 Katherine hosted a workshop in the Festomane Festival of Manufacturing and Engineering in the town of Stroud. The goal was to inform and excite young girls to pursue a career in science. With the benefit of hindsight Katherines dream journal entry on the ability of bacteria to change the world was not a random thought, but a foreshadowing of what she really wanted to do with her life. She did mention her writings to contain deep meanings!
Regardless of her having a succesful and demanding career, Katherine never stopped being a netizen. She has also never stopped loving fashion and maintained a fashion blog for a proper decade! On her blog she confesses to being a hopeless fashion fanatic and she has a tendency to not want to wear outfits more than once. She is kind enough however to sell her barely worn outfits for a fraction of the original price to her blog readers. Like Amoeba founder and "Fashion Godmother" Winifred Lai before her, Katherine created a journal of her favorite outfits, marking her trips, the changes of the seasons and the milestones in her life at the same time. Even though I am probably the last person you should ask for fashion advice, even I can see that Katherine has a great sense of style and her passion shines through in her blog posts.
Having found the missing pages of the book of Katherine's life was a great relief. I am happy to see Katherine living life to the fullest, chasing her ambitions and meanwhile staying true to her fashion loving self. I wish her all the best as I move on to the next abandoned homepage with lifted spirits, hoping to find more inspiring people like Katherine Lau.