My Hong Kong

Preface

There is a Tao saying that to travel far is to return. I have travelled the world since my youth in Hong Kong but that early experience, in my formative years, left a mark on me which I have never lost. My roots are there.

In this book I return to the Hong Kong in which I grew up in the 1950s exploring the way a series of writers have seen it, following the story through to the latest, post-colonial period. My aim is to discover what they have made of Hong Kong’s mixed identity: was it British, was it Chinese, what else was it? How had it changed? Whose city was it?

The last half century of the colonial period was marked by a series of crises. The shadow of the Communist victory in China in 1949 hung over the city, bringing a flood of refugees from the mainland. While the threat of invasion was always there, it did not dampen the frenzy of economic activity with huge building projects on the Island and in Kowloon. The next crisis came in 1967 when the Cultural Revolution was at its height. Red-guard sympathisers roamed the streets carrying the Little Red Book; there were bomb attacks and attacks on police posts. It again seemed as if Hong Kong’s days were numbered. That feeling returned in the 1980s when the negotiations between Britain and China over the exact conditions of the handover due in 1997 dragged on, seemingly without conclusion. Some prominent citizens abandoned ship, not believing that ‘one country, two systems’ could ever work.

These events form the background and, in some cases, the foreground, of the narratives that I have collected here. They add a tone of excitement and uncertainty to the tales about people at all levels in society over this extended period. The writers I have chosen are a mixed cast: British, Chinese, Eurasian, Korean, American, and finally a Russian Jew; men and women of privileged and less privileged backgrounds. Together they paint a picture of every aspect of Hong Kong from the high life of the colonial elite, ensconced on the Peak to the struggling existence of refugees in the backstreets and squatter camps of Kowloon. In that way they provide a vivid portrait of every aspect of My Hong Kong throughout this turbulent period.

A First Word, Ah Lan: Malcolm Jack

Nina exuded good sense and reliability. Her sturdy features, set in a tanned face, her black hair swept back into a bun and sturdy, compact figure presented a reassuringly ordered appearance. Her manner was calm, guided by a practical intelligence which enabled her to cope with anything that came her way. How could any young child not feel safe and comfortable in her hands? Nina, or Ah Lan to call her by her Chinese name, was my amah or nanny; certainly, the most influential person in my childhood.

Nina’s character was the more remarkable given her background. She was from a Chinese Malay family who had come to Hong Kong as refugees. Unable to eke out even a bare living, they abandoned the young girl outside the gates of the Maryknoll Convent where she was found and taken in by the nuns as an orphan. It just happened that mater (as I always called my mum) spent some time as a pupil in the Convent later on, met Nina and was much taken by her. So, when I arrived in swaddling clothes and help was needed, Nina was the obvious recruit to our family home.

Although Nina spoke English tolerably well, we never used it between ourselves. She spoke to me in Cantonese so that Southern Chinese became, in a certain way, my mother tongue. My parents watched this happening without any qualms, knowing that somewhere in my head English was also forming and I understood everything they said to me. But the experience of being ‘Ah Mao’, the blonde-haired boy who spoke fluent Chinese marked me out for life as a semi-Oriental boy. Of course, it didn’t only involve talking. Central to Chinese culture, especially among the gourmet Cantonese, is food. Early each evening Nina interrupted her daily tasks to cook a meal for herself. When she was nearly ready with the food, she would place two wooden stools around her small, low table in the kitchen. Once I was seated on one of them, in a slightly squat position, she would swing over from the stove with at least two savoury dishes – often a fish dish because it was cheaper and a vegetable one, cooked very quickly in the wok. Both were accompanied by a steaming bowl of bac fan or white rice. Perched opposite her I used the wooden chopsticks to select tasty morsels from the two metal dishes, then in the local fashion slurped up the warm contents of my bowl. That daily ritual left me with very little appetite for supper with my parents which followed an hour later at the formally laid-out dining table.

So attached had I become to Nina that on her half days off, I kicked up such a fuss that my mother told her that she would have to take me with her on her rounds. Poor Nina – not even a proper day off! Those free afternoons of hers were given over to shopping, with an occasional visit at the time of the C’hing Ming festival to the cemetery to burn false money and light joss sticks in memory of her ancestors lest their neglected spirits came to haunt her. The visits to the cemetery, in the heat of the afternoon, were arduous, clambering up the steep sides of the hill where the graves were placed on platforms cut into the rock. I lurked behind Nina, sucking my melting popsicle as she scrambled up to the point where her own relatives were interred to lay a wreath. If any weeds had grown around the gravestones, they had to be cut out with a small, rounded knife that Nina had brought with her for that purpose. Only on the descent, when everything had been properly done, would she buy herself a Green Spot orangeade from the hawkers who stayed sensibly shaded at the entrance to the cemetery.

The shopping was done in the wonderfully messy Chinese backstreets of Yau Ma Tei in Kowloon where food stalls and hawkers’ stands blocked up all the pavements while the traffic streamed by dangerously close to the pedestrians walking on the roadsides. The noise and bustle were immense but nothing was foreign to me – neither the pungent smells from the food stands nor the vulgar, sometimes obscene Cantonese expressions that filled the air. But something was foreign to the locals. ‘Wah! Look at his hair – gum bak sik, so white! Wah!’ Old ladies would advance to try to touch my hair to see if it was real but Nina fended them off with a curt dismissal: "Don’t touch his tow fat, his hair, it’s real, ghow, go away."

I wasn’t put out by all the attention I got; it amused me and I enjoyed startling the advancing ladies by telling them to shoo off with a blunt, colloquial expression. They stopped and stared at this strange, foreign-devil of a boy who could nevertheless speak to them in their own tongue. One street Nina avoided was one where Sikh dealers hung out, claiming that they were engaging in criminal activities though not specifying what these were, something which naturally raised my curiosity. I wondered why she didn’t trust them and whether she was just put out by the strong smell of curry which wafted out of the shop fronts.

On the way home from Kowloon, we crossed the harbour on the Star Ferry, sitting on the lower, second-class deck where foreigners, the gweilos, were not usually found. It was crowded with noisy school kids and hawkers carrying baskets of goods. Nina kept an eye out for anyone who came near. ‘Not clean, Ah Mao. Don’t want anyone touch your hair’ she whispered to me as I sat on the bench undoing the crispy wrapper of the sour plum that she had bought for me at the terminal kiosk.

Those halcyon days of wandering in the bustling backstreets came to an end when my schooling started, up on the top of Victoria Peak. The daily trip up the mountain, with the high-rise city cascading below, took on the air of an expedition. Nina would prepare my rattan basket adding a bottle of lemon barley water and some biscuits to the notepad and pencils already in it. Then there would be the inspection – Nina swung me round to make sure there were no marks or creases on my white shirt and shorts which had been crisply ironed. If there were any patches, the clothes had to be changed. The Number 3 bus to the tram terminus in Garden Road was a short ride. Before long we were clambering into the bright green funicular carriage, me in the lead making for the seats at the front, reserved for the Governor, which were unlikely to be taken. Nina followed showing the conductor our tickets, carrying the rattan basket. Soon the tram was ascending the steep track – Kennedy Road, MacDonnell Rd until it lay almost vertical at May Road. I always had an impulse to leap out at that stop, just to test whether one could in fact stand up despite the steep incline that the station was built on. But the stop was brief and, in any case, I was jammed in near the window so could not get past Nina. Not long after that, the tram moved into its parking position at the summit of the Peak and we jumped out. From there we had to walk to school, perched on a hill further along the summit. How interminable that walk seemed to be along the road and up the steep path to the school, especially in the sweltering heat of summer! For an adult it wasn’t a long walk but Nina regulated her pace to mine. In the beginning I only attended in the mornings so that Nina waited for me at the school’s entrance and we walked back to the tram station together in the blazing midday heat. Lunch would be a bowl of noodle soup in the small shop which was situated just across the road from the station rather than in the more salubrious restaurant next to it. ‘Better than shop (she actually meant the restaurant)’ Nina would say to me ‘cook quick, tasty’. Slurping it up I hardly had time to agree.

Ah Lan was my Chinese mother.

Chapter 1

Myself A Mandarin: Austin Coates

In his account of his time in Hong Kong, or more precisely in the New Territories, Austin Coates begins by telling his reader that at the tender age of twenty-six, he was directed by the British Government to serve in Hong Kong as a magistrate and that to do so, he would need a sword. He adds the droll comment:

Never having had any direct dealings with a government, I found this communication surprising.i

Austin was the son of Eric Coates, the composer of light music and a viola player who performed under the baton of Henry J. Wood, founder of the Proms concerts. Austin says that he was born into a world of music and theatre where everyone, ‘regardless of race or tongue, in a sense spoke the same language’. iiThis cosmopolitan approach was enhanced by his education in France as well as in England. It explains a great deal about his openness to other cultures which is very evident in his attitude to China and the Chinese when he eventually got to Hong Kong.

During the war Austin, like many other bright young things, worked for British Intelligence, in his case with the RAF. In that capacity he visited many parts of the Far East including Burma, Malaysia and Indonesia. His time in the Hong Kong Government Service was from 1949–56 after which he left for Sarawak to take up the post of as Chinese Affairs Officer and later moved to Kuala Lumpur and then Penang. In 1962 he resigned from the Colonial Office to become a full-time writer and returned to Hong Kong as a private resident rather than in an official capacity. He later divided his time between Portugal and Hong Kong. In Portugal he lived in the bucolic surroundings of Colares, near Sintra, the old royal summer residence.

His most highly seminal book was Myself A Mandarin (1968) which is the memoir of his time in Hong Kong as a magistrate. A later novel, The Road (1959) is set in Lantau and draws on his experience as a magistrate. In the City of Broken Promises (1967), although set in late eighteenth-century Macau, he focuses on the relationship between Chinese and foreigners very relevant to his observations about Hong Kong. For that reason, it was featured in the Hong Kong Arts Festival 1968 in a musical form. As a historian of Macau, he wrote a history of the British involvement there; as a biographer he brought to life the Filipino national hero, José Rizal. Other books on the Western Pacific Islands and Basutoland indicate what we would now call his global range.

Austin joined the Hong Kong Government service at a particularly turbulent time. The backdrop was the war in mainland China between the Communists and the Nationalists with the Communists gaining ground and eventually reaching the border with Hong Kong, presenting a threat to the British Crown Colony. In other parts of Asia there were also insurrections and violence. A large number of refugees – possibly as many as 700,000 – came into Hong Kong from China swelling the population to over 2.3 million. Some of these later returned to the mainland; others stayed bringing considerable entrepreneurial skills and money to the expanding and booming city. Among the refugees were Nationalist soldiers who had escaped capture by the Communists.

In the event the Communists did not invade Hong Kong but the massing of the Red Army on the Chinese side, meant a closed border which had to be manned day and night. On the other hand, the Chinese presence ended some of the pirating that had previously taken place from mainland bases and menaced shipping in the whole area. What Austin found remarkable was the lack of interest among Hong Kong people (the term ‘Hong Konger’ is of much more recent vintage) in what was going on across that border. Despite the shadow cast from China, the general public in Hong Kong seemed unperturbed. Austin speculates that they had inherited something of the small village mentality that had co-existed with the growth of the Victorian port-city, remaining almost entirely absorbed with local problems. Yet the most pressing of these problems, such as pressure on resources, was the direct consequence of the turmoil in China and the refugee crisis it created for Hong Kong. He observes:

Never was Hong Kong’s separateness from China, and events there, more manifest. iii

Austin took up his duties as the Special Magistrate in the New Territories. The New Territories was largely rural, as he puts it:

A delightful relic of the Ching dynasty which, avoiding any direct experience of the Revolutions of 1912 and 1949 has come almost unscathed into the world of television and transistor radios.iv

Cases brought before him were settled on principles of Chinese custom and practice rather than on English common law, similar to adaptations found in many British colonial territories. He comments wryly that following Chinese custom and practice was just as well since he knew little about English common law.

The New Territories – ceded to the British for ninety-nine years in 1898 – was very different from the increasingly urbanised areas of adjacent Kowloon. Austin notes that the city/country divide left young men in the rural villages with the feeling they were left out of the progress and prosperity of neighbouring Kowloon. Their exclusion fuelled a sense of inferiority which led some of them to join the Communist party. Being side-lined was a loss of face which dented their pride even more than their poverty. Officials working from central government departments took the view that the industrial and residential expansion of the city was the most important thing happening; to them the village dwellers appeared to be mere yokels whose preoccupations were parochial and against the spirit of progress that pervaded the rest of the colony. Pandering to their customs would be a retrograde policy. In a curious sense, the New Territories was not really Hong Kong and not really China. Much of the area and the islands around had never been administered by any authority other than that of the village elders. The local, patriarchal system remained in place until population growth and urban expansion gradually changed the rural character of great pockets of the area.

The cases that came to the magistrate’s court were very much village-level business – problems arising from the continual erosion of rural life as the city expanded; disputes about land and tenancy; parochial and personal tiffs. Austin quotes the administrator-philosopher, Hsun Ch’ing who, in the third century BC, gave a job description of a District Magistrate which still applied in the mid-twentieth-century New Territories. The great sage said:

The Duty of the local official is to adjust matters between town and country, to harmonise clashing interests (i.e., mark out land etc.): to control the building of houses, to train stock, superintend arboriculture. He should advance morality, encourage filial and fraternal piety, all in their appropriate times – and urge people to obey the government and live quietly and at ease.v

Promoting general peace and harmony was a duty the young magistrate expected but superintending moral standards of the community came as something of a surprise to him. But that was what was expected of him in his role in the New Territories where the traditional Chinese way of settling disputes, which had been in place for thousands of years, was understood and accepted by the local people. Nor was there any written guide he could consult except for an ancient, Jesuit manuscript gathering dust in the university library. For a young man of Austin’s age to pose as a figure of wisdom and authority was no mean challenge. His memoir charts his progress in becoming a fair adjudicator; his innate sympathy with the locals and their way of settling things stands out on every page of his account. As his time in office continues, he takes up the mantle of protecting the less favoured rural communities from urban encroachment.

One of the key persons in the magistrate’s story is Mr Lo, the court’s clerk/ interpreter. We are told that he is a very experienced, middle-aged man who is not given to outbursts of expression. But he is an effective guide whose hints that the magistrate is not going along the right path in settling a case are given in slight changes of expression on his face. Austin begins to appreciate Mr Lo’s long experience and expertise and wonders whether it would not be better if he were the adjudicator of the cases coming before the court. But he pulls himself together: the British Government service must not be let down.

Mr Lo has to make clear decisions in translating from Chinese to English. When a farmer is asked if his cow grazed on a disputed field, Mr Lo has to decide whether the man’s ambiguous answer means a ‘Yes’; ‘a little’ or ‘No’. He decides to take the middle path of ‘a little’. Although Austin came to form his own views about the cases that came before him, he soon realized that Mr Lo was endowed with a practical wisdom, as well as being very experienced, which was an invaluable boon for the Special Magistrate. He also began to understand that what appeared to be the interpreter’s abrupt manner, sometimes almost shouting at the litigants, was a necessary check on proceedings which would otherwise drag on indefinitely.

The first observation Austin makes about the nature of Chinese culture is that it is unfathomable to a foreigner. Whatever appears to be the explanation for any behaviour turns out to be only a scratch on the surface, the inner significance of which is totally different from what a Westerner would expect. Anyone who wants to understand the Chinese way of thinking needs a Mr Lo to guide him. On the other hand, if an