How A Celebrity Was Created: Watching Ella Koon In Action at Lam Kwai Fong

I was having a drink at California in Lam Kwai Fong. It was around dinner time on a Saturday evening. The bars were still half-empty but the crowd began to gather slowly.

Sitting right next to the window, I could get a pretty good view of the streets. I noticed a few photographers with cameras hanging under their jackets, which looked pretty strange on a hot summer evening. They don't look like tourists, businessmen working at Central or people came down for a drink on a Saturday night. I suspect they were paparazzi from one of the local tabloids. Then those camera-carrying people suddenly became fully alerted, pulled out their cameras and started to take shots. I turned and looked toward the direction they are filming, I saw Ella Koon, a Hong Kong celebrity just got out of a taxi. It's so obvious that these men are paparazzi. I thought Ella Koon would walk into one of the bars or restaurants at Lam Kwai Fong and avoid the paparazzi. But I was wrong, she deliberately stood at the front of bars and let the paparazzi took their photos, and then walked toward one of the photographers and called his first name. She then gave the paparazzi a story about how she was enjoying a party that was held a couple days ago. The conversation happened just out of the window we were sitting, so we had a pretty good idea of the content of their conversation. After she finished the conversation, she walked to the street, hired a taxi and walked away.

Ella Koon can be categorized as one of those celebrities who everybody knows her name, but just couldn't remember her in any memorable role in movies, television series or theatre. Somehow, whenever we open an entertainment magazine or celebrity session of the newspaper, we get to see photos or news about Ella Koon. Now I finally understand that being celebrity in itself is a carefully planned and executed initiative - taking a trip down to Lam Kwai Fong and get your photos taken by paparazzi is certainly one of them. While real movie stars would do anything possible to avoid paparazzi, somebody would do anything to get their photo into newspaper. Ella Koon is clearly a master of turning herself into a celebrity.