澳門與利物浦之間的邊境

A few years ago, a dinner guest discovering I was part-Irish, as he himself is, asked me if I “vibrated” to Yeats. I told him that I didn’t, I don’t, which dismayed and upset him, as if vibrating to Yeats was in every Irish person’s DNA. I added that the first time I’d visited Ireland, a dozen or so years ago, contrary to my own expectations, my emotional chords had not been twanged by that experience either. My father was Irish, but I’d never known him, and had not been socialised into Irishness. At best, along with hundreds of thousands of others, I can lay claim to an Irishness at one remove, that of the Liverpool-Irish. For it was in that cosmopolitan port city that I grew up. And in my ethnic mix, there is also Liverpool-Chinese.