“Kai Tak Heart Attack” – if you know what this nickname stands for and why, you are among the ones who flew into the old Hong Kong airport. Faith Dea, a missionary kid, reflects on her memory of the first time flying into this airport and the new life that would influence who she is today. This personal essay is used with permission from one of the chapters from Faith’s memoir, Unraveled.
May 6, 1982. My family and I had just landed at Kai Tak International Airport in Hong Kong. We were a family of six: Mom, Dad, my two older brothers, my younger sister, and me. Arriving at Kai Tak marked day one in my consciousness. This was the first day, the first chapter of a new beginning as a daughter of foreign-missionary parents. Someone was writing the story of my life, but who? Someone was nudging me to notice certain things and tuck them away in my memory bank. It wasn’t my parents, nor my siblings. It wasn’t anyone else physically present. My family and I had traveled halfway around the globe, over an entire ocean—a very indirect, interconnected route from a modest American city of about 150,000 people to a metropolis off China’s coast. We arrived at what was then a British Colony of five million. Its urban density averaged over forty-five thousand per square mile.
At four and a half years old, I couldn’t quite grasp what it all meant to be there and whether I felt good or bad about it. Once we emerged on foot at our final destination, my understanding of what was happening in my life slowly lit up. It was as if I had tunneled through the experience blindly, and once I was deposited at Kai Tak, the light switch came on, and with it, childlike wonder and awareness of my new surroundings. All memory of what we had just left behind meant nothing. All I could see and hear was the largeness of this strange, new place uniformly closing in on me. There was no looking back, no ability to connect what just happened from point A to point B.
Everyone on the scene before me became them versus us. No one felt familiar. People around us looked different from where we’d come from. Most of the people coming and going appeared to have a clearly defined resemblance—something that made me feel different from the crowd, like I’d entered a herd of a different breed, and I didn’t quite belong. The reason for that resemblance was incomprehensible to me at four years old. I stuck close to my mother, clinging to the semblance of who I was within the context of my whole family. I had no reason not to trust and proceed.
Coming in for landing just moments before, every person close enough to peer out one of the many windows on our jumbo jet likely would have been in awe, feeling a heightened sense of emotions ranging from thrill to sheer panic. Palms would have been gripping the ends of every armrest as our plane made a dramatic, low-altitude turning maneuver. Our plane, like all the others, had to make a sharp turn and begin its descent toward Kowloon Bay while flying over the surrounding mountains and then the city skyscrapers. It looked as though the rooftops of those buildings were at an arm’s reach. We had flown over dozens of high-rise buildings, so close that it was possible for passengers on board to see people watching television inside their apartment homes. It would have felt too close for comfort for first-timers like my family. Kowloon Bay was not a convenient location for landing large commercial aircraft, by any stretch of the imagination. Kowloon interestingly means “nine dragons,” for eight mountains and an emperor. Avoiding all the natural and man-made structures was one thing, but also making sure the plane lined up with that tiny landing strip, where it jutted out onto Victoria Harbor on all three sides in any type of weather, was another level of skill. The strip was the one and only “Runway 13,” and incoming pilots had to first look for the “checkerboard” to aid in navigating this approach. The well-known checkerboard was a vivid orange-and-white-checkered pattern painted on the side of a mountain. Our pilots and perhaps many of the passengers may have known that this airport had been nicknamed “Kai Tak Heart Attack.” Pilots of any size plane would have needed specific skills and piloting experience to attempt flying in or out of Hong Kong in those days.
For each passenger who took mental note, I would imagine coming in for landing was a hair-raising experience, followed by a huge sigh of relief once the plane touched down and came to a safe halt on solid ground. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, this one remarkable event left no imprint on my mind at the time. In all of my parents’ prior research, preparation, and correspondence regarding Hong Kong, did they know they were taking me and my three siblings to land on a piece of concrete ranked as the world’s sixth most dangerous landing strip? My parents’ choices led us into a very humid and environmentally polluted—yet exotically industrialized—port colony off China’s southeast mainland.
All I knew was I was with my own small Texas tribe, and it felt as if we had uniformly landed on a completely different planet. I like to think of it as life beginning for me at age four, three months, and three weeks short of my fifth birthday, to be exact. I had entered a world I only understood as being different. That difference would begin to change and reshape me, whether I liked it or not.
Faith lives in the United States with her husband and three children: the eldest by birth, the younger two by adoption. She holds a Master of Religious Education in Biblical Studies. Faith published her first book in 2024. Besides writing, she enjoys gardening, hiking, and getaway trips with her family to enjoy restful seclusion. Faith has lived all over the United States, Hong Kong, China’s Hainan Province, and South Korea. Recently she published Unraveled: A Memoir.
You can find Faith on Facebook and at her website, Faith2Dea.
