This week in PostMag: Hello Kitty creator Sanrio and a South African safari

South China Morning Post

10 hours ago

One of the first things I ever loved was a Hello Kitty diary. Yes, there were stuffed animals (Snuffy the bear, RIP), sticker books and an American Girl doll or two, but it's the red Sanrio diary from 1993 that's somehow become a core memory. The lock, shaped like Hello Kitty's head, was cute but flimsy at best. Inside? Kindergarten confessionals, scrawled in shaky handwriting and even shakier grammar.
Seeing a vintage Hello Kitty diary brings back memories for PostMag editor Cat Nelson. Photo: Etsy
Things escalated in Grade 2 when Miki moved from Japan to our sleepy California town. With her came a parallel universe of pencil cases, stickers and characters beyond anything our Lisa Frank-addled brains had seen. Keroppi erasers, Badtz-Maru mechanical pencils, pastel My Melody folders. Sanrio wasn't just cute, and it wasn't just a toy company. It was as aspirational and worldly as an eight-year-old could get.
So it's no wonder I devoured Sumnima Kandangwa's cover story this week, which explores
Sanrio's staying power across generations . She charts the company's shape-shifting fandom, from a collector with a 1,000-piece Hello Kitty stash to Zoomers swearing allegiance to Kuromi's soft-punk aesthetic.
And these characters aren't just merch. I was struck by this as our photographer, Jocelyn Tam, and I worked on the images for this piece. One young woman we photographed felt compelled to tell us, unprompted, that it might be a Hello Kitty charm hanging off her bag, but only because it was limited edition and her friends convinced her. Her real favourite is Kuromi. They may be cartoons, but loyalties run deep.
Elsewhere, Bernice Chan profiles Aqua founder David Yeo, who started out cooking for friends in his Hong Kong flat and somehow ended up with a 25-year-old international restaurant empire. He's the kind of obsessive who can, apparently, taste the seasonal shift in a bag of rice. I'm impressed.
And then there's the Karoo. Mark Eveleigh heads to South Africa's semi-arid desert for a walking safari, which is not something I plan to do any time soon but greatly enjoyed reading about. It's part travelogue, part nature thriller – lions, rewilding, the return of springbok. I thought of our Yellowstone feature from a few issues back and how the park has brought back nearly extinct wolves. Both reminders that not everything that disappears stays gone.
While you might not find me on the Karoo any time soon, you may run into me at Montana. Associate editor Gavin Yeung chats with bartenders Lorenzo Antinori (Bar Leone) and Simone Caporale (Barcelona's Sips) about their new cocktail outpost on Hollywood Road. It's a throwback to 1970s and 80s Cuban culture – and it sounds delightful. See you there for a drink?
Finally, August looms. Hong Kong might not stage a full European-style exodus, but the city does slip into silent mode and we're pausing issues on August 3, 17 and 31. That said, we're not very good at staying away. You can always find us online, and we'll be back on August 10 and 24 in print. I'm looking forward to it already.