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Every morning my grandmother woke before the sun rose. As everyone else in the flat stirred to the distant hoot of vessels in the harbour, Grandmother would be found in the kitchen, brewing a fresh thermos flask of green leaf tea, or perhaps returning from the local market with freshly-fried dough sticks to accompany the tasty congee (rice gruel) she sometimes cooked for our breakfast.
I stood on the pavement in the Sheung Wan (Western) District, much of it reclaimed land. It is the oldest settled part of Hong Kong. The British moved out when the island was seized in January 1841, leaving the then malaria-infested area to the Chinese. I loved our trips to the nearby market and lanes. It was a web of balconied tenements, busy street markets, hawker stalls, traditional open-fronted shops and fascinating traders, from the craftsmen at work on soapstone or tusks of ivory and the flourishing snake shop just a stone’s throw away. Even though I knew the snakes were kept coiled in caged baskets outside the shop, the thought of walking too close to them frightened me. But as a young child, I watched, from a safe distance, a young man in a sleeveless vest pick up a long thin snake, and skin it, live, before my eyes. Bottles of wine made from snake gall bladders and bile were on sale, giving his customers the extra strength they needed to see them through the winter months.
The restaurants nearby were renowned for their snake delicacies and soups, whilst a little further down the road, glass cabinets fronting my home street displayed an array of Chinese medicinal ingredients, dried sea horses, birds’ nests, antlers and horns, and the highly prized ginseng roots. Tea shops with large gold urns served tortoise jelly; made from powdered tortoise shell, this bitter black jelly-like medicine is also served as a dessert when sweetened with honey or cane sugar. The tortoise is an auspicious creature, not only representing the beginning of creation but symbolising strength, longevity and endurance. My grandmother knew the owners, but I don’t remember ever stopping by to taste even a spoonful. I suspect it was outside our price bracket.
Along the tram way, we would often go to my grandmother’s favourite stores, selling various grades of dried Chinese mushrooms, salted and preserved fish, flat duck, dried scallops, prawns, seaweed and aromatic strings of sun and wind-dried sausages. All around me were hawkers, squatting on the roadside with their wares spread out on sheets of yesterday’s newspaper, or standing by their wooden carts brimming with fruits or vegetables, clothing, plastic sandals and reams of fabric. A few trotted past me, their flip-flops slapping against their heels, a bamboo pole across their shoulders as they balanced baskets full of goods at either end. Along Queens Road, red London double-decker buses spewed their exhaust into the humid atmosphere as private cars and taxis swerved in and out to avoid being caught in the inevitable traffic. On the tramlines of Des Voeux Road, rickety double-decked trams carrying advertisements for cigarettes and brandy dinged and clicked in constant succession, their regular stops allowing one to glimpse the working harbour just a few feet away. Riding a tram gave one the feeling of safety whilst travelling down the heart of a busy road, though I’m not sure about the trailers which were introduced for a short period during my childhood. They were somewhat of a novelty but didn’t last long.
Fruit stalls, with crates and baskets piled high, created the most tantalising aromas of delicious, juicy goodness. Large watermelons hung in carriers from the bamboo poles overhead. My eyes feasted on the guavas, papayas, mangoes, lychees, dragon eyes, pineapples, oranges, apples and bananas spread out before me. For fifty cents, one could choose whatever fruit juice one wanted, and have it freshly squeezed; heavenly, on a hot summer’s day.
My grandmother fingered the imported oranges in front of her. ‘Are these sweet? How are they selling’ she shouted to the fat hawker woman trying to tie up a paper bag with twine, one end gripped firmly between her decaying teeth. My grandmother never bothered with the prices displayed on small placards wedged between the fruits. They were there for the benefit of others who would inevitably end up paying more for their goods. After sampling a few soft fruits we ended up with a catty of lychees instead.
‘Now, I must stop by the letter writer, before he closes up for the morning’, she said, ‘and then, if we have time, I will buy you and your sister some roast pork, as a treat. Now come, let’s cross the road.’
A passer-by spat. He missed the manhole cover by a fraction of an inch. I could hear the cursing of hawkers as they cajoled one another; cho hou or lann hou, literally meaning coarse or rotten mouth. Their curses and swearing were never translated for me, though there were times when I heard my grandmother shout similar expletives on the rare occasions when she lost her temper. From a short distance away, the dulcet chirping and twittering of birds, perched in their individual cages, ascended the mundane noise of the main road traffic. Only a few blocks away, hidden from view, was the site of my grandmother’s watch shop, long since demolished to make way for a modern financial building. Bamboo poles stuck out overhead, outer garments threaded along their length to dry in the sun. At street level, stalls piled with dried salty fish added their own distinct smell to the busy market district. Dai pai dongs (open air food stalls) were already doing a roaring business as manual workers and office staff stood side by side, slurping their soups and congee and shovelling fresh rice or noodles down their gullets. The stall holder, clad in a sleeveless vest and trousers, a half-apron round his flabby belly, tossed noodles over an open fire, whilst a cauldron of broth bubbled fiercely nearby. In his glass cabinet were freshly fried dough sticks, fishcakes, minced fish balls and stacks of clean bowls and plates. Clouds of steam wafted through the air, carrying with it the tantalising smell of spring onions and freshly cooked foods.
‘Ah, Mrs Mok. Jo-sun. You going out?’ called one of the newspaper sellers squatting outside a medicinal shop.
‘Ah, good morning. Have you eaten rice yet?’ my grandmother enquired politely, so as not to betray the fact that time was of the essence and that we were in a bit of a hurry.
‘Yes, thank you. And you?’
‘Thank you, yes,’ my grandmother replied, though we had not yet had our midday meal. ‘No problems with the big wind?’ she continued, referring to the typhoon we had had a few days before.
‘No, no. You are very kind to enquire,’ the man said with a toothless grin. I noticed then how long his left little fingernail was. At least an inch and a half.
‘I’m just on my way to the letter writer. See you again another day. Good business to you,’ and with that my grandmother forged her way back into the crowds, with me tagging along for good measure.
The letter writer was an elderly man, dressed in black trousers and a mandarin-collared shirt. Bronzed and wrinkled, he had the appearance of a learned old scholar. In fact, to my mind he was exactly how I had imagined a Confucian scholar to be: a studious, learned man who had successfully taken his examinations and earned his place as an official despite his humble beginnings. If it had been one of the traditional Cantonese films my grandmother was so fond of watching on television in the early afternoons, he would not have stopped there, but instead would have risen to the rank of a local district judge.
‘Lao Pak!’ my grandmother called, though she was not much younger. I knew that was not his real name; in fact, it was not a name at all, merely a polite form of address. Lao Pak literally means ‘old man of a hundred surnames’, and is used as a respectful address to an older man whose name is not known to you.
‘Mrs Mok, please, you are invited to sit down,’ he greeted her, reaching for his thick rimmed spectacles. ‘Haven’t seen you here for a while. Are you well?’
‘Much the same really, you know how it is at our age. And yourself? Good business?’
My grandmother rested on a low stool, her fingers brushing against the rough edges of an overturned wooden crate serving as a small writing desk. A pad of thin tissue-like rice paper lay in the middle beside two Chinese ink brushes and a small ink block. A short distance away, women were having their eyebrows plucked and threaded, their hairlines pulled back with tight bands to expose the forehead. I watched as the threader worked, expertly rolling a taut length of cotton thread over her customer’s eyebrows and forehead, pulling out unwanted hair from their roots in what seemed to be a most painful manner. My grandmother had had it done too, but ceremonially, on the eve of her wedding, almost sixty years before. She had told me how the elderly ‘good luck lady’ pulled two red threads across her forehead, in order to ‘hoi min’ (open up her face) as a way of blessing the new bride-to-be with many sons. This practice of threading had waned in popularity by the late 1960s, but could still be found flourishing in the back streets of Hong Kong Island. It has made something of a resurgence in recent times, or perhaps it has just been embraced by Western cultures, as threading services are now commonly found in shopping malls in the UK and offered in salons as fairly pricey beauty treatments.
My home streets offered much more of which casual visitors were unaware, from the skinning of live snakes for winter soup to the circular tables with a hole in the middle. Monkeys would be chained to these tables, their heads secured into the hole so that there was no way of escape. I was told at night customers gladly paid for the privilege of scooping out monkey brains whilst the animal was still alive, and eating it as a rare delicacy. This was not a blood sport; it was supposed to release a massive flow of adrenaline in the poor animal, resulting in more tender and delicious organs. Some people now say that tales of this practice were just mythology, but I remember my parents pointing out where this took place, and it was not far from our flat.
The professional letter writer proceeded to set down, in formal Chinese script, what my grandmother wanted to say to her family back in Guangzhou. She spoke to him in common everyday language, explaining her thoughts and messages. He listened attentively, sometimes with his eyes closed, seemingly nodding in approval and understanding as he assimilated her sentiments. He then rephrased them for the written word. Half an hour later he was reading the letter back aloud, checking its accuracy and suggesting a suitable closing phrase. Now that it was written, my grandmother would be able to send off the sacks she had been preparing all week, having filled them with our unwanted or outgrown clothes.
The authorities in mainland China only allowed second-hand clothes into the country, so nothing was thrown out. Whatever we could send would be recycled. On this occasion, my grandmother was sending sacks to her third, seventh, eighth and ninth sons, to be shared amongst their families. Just prior to the Japanese invasion of Hong Kong in 1941 my uncles had taken refuge in China. According to my mother this was a shameful and unforgiveable act as they left my grandmother and my mother, their only sister, to fend for themselves. It was an action difficult to justify in the cold light of day, particularly during peace time, and I’m not sure if it was ever spoken of. Perhaps it was out of a feeling of retribution and anger, for my grandmother had decided to run the watch shop herself instead of giving it to her sons after her husband died a few months before. Or perhaps it was them taking advantage of the Japanese enforced repatriation because of the scarcity of food in Hong Kong soon after the occupation. My family never spoke about it, but whatever the reality, it was an act which divided the family for many years.
During the three years of Japanese occupation, and the following years of civil unrest as the Communists fought to gain control of China, my grandmother lost contact with many of her sons. Some were undoubtedly killed during the years of fighting, many having joined Chiang Kai Shek’s Nationalist army. We were told years later that two of my uncles were executed as spies.
My grandmother never laughed. Well, I don’t remember a time when she laughed out loud, with her face, yet her eyes danced. A lateral palsy on one eye, and early cataracts, served to restrict this for a while, but she still danced her laughter with her good eye. She never complained about her ailments but she did once say to me, ‘you will understand when you get older’. She looked forward to the peace death would bring, and was philosophical about it, but she also loved life and loved learning from and talking with others. One day, many years after I had left home and she was living with my parents, both busy with full time working hours, she described herself by saying: ‘I sit there like a grain of rice, with my mouth shut. I have nothing to say. I haven’t done anything all day. It was so much more fun when young people were around.’
She was never one to dwell in the past; she lived for the present and for the future. Gradually, over time, she began receiving more and more letters from her long -lost sons, pleading for help and financial assistance. To my mother’s chagrin and through much personal sacrifice and hardship, my grandmother scraped together money and clothes to send back to them from time to time. They, in turn, sent to her one grandchild after another, smuggled through the guarded borders of China, expecting her to raise them in the freedom and prosperity of Hong Kong. I suspect her sons must have thought she was well off, and perhaps in comparison she was, but in reality she often took in sewing from the local shops in order to supplement my parents’ income. Our flat became home to a number of cousins, sometimes for several weeks, sometimes for years.
I recall two hundred Hong Kong dollars being mentioned, equivalent at the time to about twelve pounds sterling (British pounds) . That sum was the budget my grandmother had to feed the whole household – me and my sister, four cousins, my parents, herself and the family cat – for an entire month, as well as to put my cousins through school.
One afternoon, after a trip to Causeway Bay, perhaps to Victoria Park, as we were jostling with the crowd as we tried to board a tram back to our home district, my father was pickpocketed. That was a whole month’s salary gone, in one careless moment. I was not aware how we managed then, but as children I suppose many hardships were kept from us and we did not know any different.
The family must have sacrificed much to put me and my sister through what they considered the best education available in Hong Kong. After early years at the nursery school attached to the Cathedral Church of St John, we enrolled into Glenealy Junior School, which opened in 1959. It was designed to provide a modern liberal education for expatriate children, providing a curriculum based on the British curriculum for when they returned. It was also the first step in my parents’ plans to get us into a British university. But in order to be eligible, one’s mother tongue had to be English. My father told me he was therefore very worried when the first word I uttered was in Cantonese, in fact calling my grandmother. Accordingly my parents made a deliberate effort to keep us two children from learning Chinese, a decision I regret to this day. I was able to speak enough Cantonese to communicate with my beloved grandmother, but it became a language I reserved for her, and for our relationship, and I hardly speak it otherwise. It is as if it has been frozen in time, though over the years I have made many half-hearted attempts to be more fluent in the spoken language.
Initially we had a little carton of milk during morning break and the usual school dinners, where I remember the fuss so many children made about eating all their greens. After the first few years we took packed lunches into school. These were in Thermos flasks with boiled rice at the bottom, and a portion of steamed meats and vegetables at the top. My grandmother often made them from food she had prepared for dinner the evening before. I felt very special carrying my little flask into school. My sister was not so appreciative; she chose instead to feed much of her lunch to a small dog we saw almost every day at the bus stop before we began our steep walk up to the school gates. As we got older, we travelled to primary school together but I was allowed to walk the few miles home alone on the return journey. After school, waiting at the gates, would be an ice-cream man on his bicycle, with an icebox at either end filled with ice cream cones such as nutty nibbles, tubs of Dairy Farm ice creams, ice Popsicles and little packets of frozen oriental fruits; papaya being my favourite. ‘Icey-cream! Icey-cream!’ he would call out. I watched with envy as my classmates crowded around him, buying their afternoon treat in the hot sunshine and dearly wished I had money to do the same. It was around this time that my friends asked me to fold origami creations for them. My entrepreneurial self surfaced, and I charged 10 cents for labour! If I was lucky enough, I was able to afford an ice lolly once a week.
The walk home took us close to the Botanic Gardens, one of the oldest zoological and botanical gardens in the world.
Sometimes I would walk through it to catch sight of the small mischievous golden lion tamarins at play in their rather outdated enclosures, or the large but handsome Burmese python, coiled and looking deceptively innocent. The space wasn’t big enough to house larger mammals, and I didn’t much care for the birds, but the gardens were full of indigenous tropical and sub-tropical plants, like camellias, magnolias and bauhinias as well as the Hong Kong orchid tree. There were Victorian gas lamp posts too and a fine bronze statue of King George VI, erected in 1941 to commemorate one hundred years of colonial rule.
As children we were actively discouraged from inviting anyone over to play after school, let alone stay the night, and as a consequence we were hardly invited over to theirs either. I do remember one occasion when a primary school teacher ‘happened to be in the neighbourhood’ with her children and called in on us unexpectedly over the school holidays. I think it was a visit she was quite unprepared for. They didn’t stay long. After all, it was basically a small one-bedroomed flat; we had no bathroom, went to the toilet in a chamber pot kept under my grandmother’s bedside table, and slept on straw mats on the floor in the living room. I was pretty apt at carrying the chamber pot, filled to the brim with stagnant urine, to our kitchen sluice and cleaning it out. Although I felt different at school, I didn’t make a big deal of it, and it certainly did not dominate my world. I felt fully accepted by my peers, and was never bullied or made to feel in any way inferior. But then again, I never talked about home, and particularly our limited sanitation, and I don’t remember friends and school mates ever asking either.
I guess they all assumed that the world they knew and inhabited was the world everyone knew and inhabited. We all unintentionally make assumptions about others, their life experiences or their political persuasion just because they happen to be our peers. Both my primary and secondary schools were multi-cultural, with students of every race, colour and creed treated as equals, but I don’t recall ever discussing or considering difference. It was only when I came to the United Kingdom in 1978 that I became aware of difference and indeed experienced the undertones and unspoken effects of racism.
‘Okay, let’s go home now,’ my grandmother called, ‘or I shan’t be able to cook lunch in time for your mother and father’s return.’
Across the street, an elderly man was checking through a pile of invoices, the sharp clacking of his abacus resonating on the glass counter. A cigarette hung innocuously from one corner of his mouth.
Our return route took us along the tramway, with a brief detour down onto the waterfront. I watched out for young boys fishing with their tackle, squatting precariously on the edge of a short wooden jetty. Further up the street, a mass of colourful placards and signboards hung from our local restaurants, many four or five storeys up and famed for their hospitality. One displayed a huge flower-board, announcing the wedding party it was hosting that day. Next door, workmen had begun setting up scaffolding outside the building, long bamboo poles tethered together with lashings of reed.
Approaching the corner of our little street from the west gave me the first reminder that we were so close to the financial centre of Hong Kong Island. In the midst of little shops and hawker stalls stood the imposing Bank of China, its gold-coloured gates swung wide open. It was like entering the portals of a different world. The building was air-conditioned, yet there was a sparsity about it, and I never ceased to be struck by the simplicity of each teller’s window, such was the contrast to the other banking halls of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, or the Chartered Bank in Central District. And inside, hanging on the main wall was a large framed portrait of the great chairman, Mao Tse-tung. Dominating the adjacent wall was an enormous mural, which literally spanned the whole width of the banking hall. Its two-dimensional perspective was quite striking. It featured a crowd of young people, grouped together in one corner and spreading out all along the lower border, giving the impression of hundreds of thousands more just like them. Their faces were a glowing bronze, their black hair blown back over their ears and their eyes fuelled with a sense of determination and purpose. Their fists were clenched and held above their shoulders. Rising out like a phoenix from the ashes were red flags waving in defiance against the ceaseless wind that blew against them. Poetically, as if ordained from above, the image of the Chinese leader became the focus of the picture, a halo of radiating glory and promise emanating from his presence.
I had been taken to see films at our local cinema, able to afford to sit only in the front stalls. They were filled with loud, stirring and emotionally-charged music, with choruses of peasants singing about their patriotic duty and the glory of the motherland. Powerful dancers leapt effortlessly in brightly-coloured costumes, offering leadership and hope. I could not follow the story line in any detail, mainly because it was all sung in a Chinese dialect, but it was always the same. The hero and heroine of the film end up having to make a choice between personal, and often marital happiness or fighting for the good of the country. China always won.
Such films were not the only cinematic experience to make an impact on my childhood. One very different experience happened when I was about five years old. In fact, it was my first experience of being taken to the cinema, with its enormous auditorium and massive screen, unlike the multiplexes of today. As the auditorium darkened, tantalisingly gentle music filled the crowded space, and immediately I was transported into a world of majestic natural beauty. I had never seen such a world before. The film was ‘The Sound of Music’, and the opening sequence with Julie Andrews coming up over the hilltop has become one of the most powerful images in my life. I fell in love with the film immediately: the scenery, the music, the story and most of all, its gentle and breathtaking beauty. It seemed to transcend my humdrum everyday life, the protagonist and heroine bringing to seven emotionally-deprived children the love they had longed for and the joy of music and childhood. Of course, we were only able to see it once – videotapes were unheard of at the time – and it was a one-off treat my parents could ill afford. But it filled my young heart with promise and hope, love and inspiration. I remain a passionate fan of the film, and of Julie Andrews, its star.