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Cheung Po Tsai was a notorious Chinese pirate of the 19th century who harassed the Guangdong (Canton) coastal area during the Qing Dynasty. At his height he had a fleet of over 600 ships. His pirates though were well disciplined, shared the booty equally, and were forbidden to injure or kill women. There are tales of legendary treasure, the most famous hoard involving a cave on Cheung Chau Island, a few miles from Hong Kong Island.
Going to these ‘outlying islands’ was a real treat when I was a young child. The ferry was more expensive than the frequent Star Ferry which crossed the harbour from Hong Kong to Kowloon for a few cents. It had an air-conditioned upper deck, with a refreshment counter selling the usual snacks as well as bowls of instant noodles. They were a real novelty and a special treat. One weekend, when my father was away, my mother suggested we go on a day trip to Cheung Chau to explore the dumb-bell shaped island. Cheung Chau at the time received few Western visitors. It was small and primitive, and a window to what old Chinese village life must have been like. Front doors opened freely into the main street, allowing anyone to wander in. Dogs and cats lay lazily in the shade, totally uninterested in strangers walking by.
After meandering through the winding cobbled lanes, too narrow for cars, we visited Cheung Po Tsai cave. Armed with a torch and in mounting excitement, we squeezed our way in. It was dark, very small and difficult to crawl into, and after all the effort there was actually nothing to see. At least nothing memorable to a small child. I have vivid memories of my petite grandmother waiting for us at the mouth of the cave, a rope at the ready, to haul us out should we need a helping hand.
Hong Kong (‘Heung Gong’ in Cantonese) means ‘fragrant harbour’, and relates to the production of incense in the region over a century ago. The incense tree was introduced from North Vietnam; wood would be collected from growers, assembled in Tsim Sha Tsui on Kowloon-side, shipped by junk to Aberdeen in Hong Kong island and loaded onto large vessels sailing into and out of China. The industry has long gone, having reached its height during the Ming Dynasty. My Hong Kong, in the 1960s, had a population of around 3.7million, 98% of whom were Chinese. It covered an area of 400 square miles, and was very much a British colony, as Hong Kong Island and Kowloon were ceded to the British Crown in perpetuity by the Treaty of Nanking. The New Territories, on the mainland, and Lantau Island, by far the largest island in the territory, were leased to Great Britain until 1997. The remaining 230-plus islands were mostly uninhabited. I do however, remember visiting the leper colony on Hey Ling Chau (the ‘island of happy healing’), and the rough boat journey we had there. It left from Queen’s Pier in Central District, now demolished, and must have taken about an hour to sail. The swell felt more intense as we sat in the little cabin below deck, having been invited to the island by the superintendent, who was the parent of a school friend. At its height the colony had over 500 inhabitants, but it closed in 1974 and relocated to Lai Chi Kok, which I also visited when I returned to Hong Kong as a medical student.
I walked alongside rickshaws, street pedlars, hawkers and beggars. Once I even rode a rickshaw. We were out to choose a roll of linoleum for the floor to the ‘loft’ we were having constructed, and it was so heavy we were unable to carry it home. My parents hailed a rickshaw, and I sat in it with my sister beside me, our purchase balanced upright between us whilst the adults walked alongside, all the way from Central District to home. The rickshaw puller, in shorts and a sleeveless vest, with a towel draped across his neck, trotted at quite a pace as we passed the many familiar landmarks. Lou tai gai (‘staircase street’) was one I knew well, being a stone’s throw away from our flat. This very early street in the colony’s history still makes an iconic picture featured in many postcards. It was built for sedan chairs, the only mode of transport long before I was born. Elegant ladies in cheong sams would transfer from their rickshaws at the foot of the steps to sedan chairs, in order to be carried higher. The street is still lined with a cornucopia of stalls selling everything from flowers to haberdasher’s supplies.
We went everywhere on what my father referred to as ‘the number 11 bus’, meaning we would be walking. On the rare occasion when we were taken to visit the Po Lin (precious lotus) Monastery, before the new temples opened in 1970, the journey involved a ferry to Silvermine Bay on Lantau Island, a bus ride to what I can only describe as some deserted cattle shed half way up the mountain, a long, exhausting, hot and thirsty trek up a narrow mountain trail. What a relief it was when we came upon the monastery grounds and were treated to a vegetarian feast washed down with tea or a cooled bottle of soda. The only snack that kept us going was a small packet of sour plums or a segment of orange. We had no water with us, my father saying that the sooner we got on with it, the sooner we could have a drink.
An embarrassing moment came one afternoon when we were returning from an outing organised by the church. It was something we did very occasionally, often being attracted to join in if it was to a destination which otherwise would have been difficult to get to under our own steam. At the end of the day the coach returned us, exhausted, to the Star Ferry pier on Kowloon-side. I had felt a little queasy with a belly ache I couldn’t quite understand, but the tension eased when I wet myself, just a fraction – enough to wet my knickers. It felt so much better, and I was convinced no one would notice because I was wearing my favourite dark blue cotton shorts. But as we approached the pier my parents pointed out that I had blood running down my legs.
It was before my 12th birthday, and I had started menstruating.
Quickly I got myself into the public toilets, cleaned myself up, stuffed a wad of toilet paper between my legs and went to join the rest of the family. It was slightly embarrassing sitting on the ferry with such dampness. My father asked if we should take some transport back – a tram, perhaps – but my mother decided there was no need and we would walk the two miles home. I was so glad to be back. A cousin nipped out to buy an elastic sanitary belt and a packet of sanitary pads for me from the lane of shops behind our building. Such products are very different from what is available today; thick and bulky, the pads would move and ride up, particularly if they had not been properly secured to the belt. My mother warned me, saying she had seen a soiled sanitary pad fall onto the pavement when she had walked behind some unfortunate woman. My grandmother referred to the menstrual cycle as a time for riding the horse.
One of the happiest memories of my childhood is the lunchtimes we spent on Victoria Peak. At the end of the primary school term, my mother would take time off work to meet my sister and me at the school gates, with a lovely picnic basket in her hand laden with homemade bacon and egg sandwiches, ham and marmite sandwiches, a selection of fresh fruit and little cartons of Dairy Farm milk. We would catch the Peak Tram, a funicular railway, from May Road station, to avoid having to walk down to the terminal just outside St John’s Cathedral. Ascending to the peak was an extraordinary sensation; the 27-degree gradient was tough on the neck, but we always got a seat. Once we reached the upper terminal, we sauntered past the peak café, not daring to even peek in, as we knew it was well beyond our means. We always found the most exciting trails off the main path of Harlech and Lugard Roads, as they wound around the mountain. There was greenery everywhere, including clumps of touch-me-nots which just invited the opposite, interesting insects, colourful butterflies and birds that seemed to sing all day long. The waterfall, amidst the banyan trees, was a favourite place to stop, and there was often a cool breeze which blew across my sweaty forehead as I sat cross-legged on the picnic mat, waiting for my food and drink.
In my grandmother’s day it must have been quite something to be up on the Peak. For a start, the area was out of bounds to the Chinese, unless they were domestic staff working in the large expatriate residences, or carrying produce or gweilos in their sedan chairs. There were many establishments in Hong Kong that reflected the territory’s colonial history – the Repulse Bay Hotel, the Hong Kong Club, the Ladies Recreational Club, the Country Club. The list goes on. To most of my friends at school they must have been part of their social lives; their parents were members, they made use of what must have been extensive facilities and often entertained in such establishments, but to me they were of a different world; a world in which I did not belong.
Often rising before dawn, my grandmother’s first thought would be to boil several kettles of water over our gas stove. She would pour one into a flask sprinkled with fresh Chinese Bo Lai tea leaves, and fill another with water to satisfy my father’s penchant for instant Nescafé coffee. The next lot of boiled water she poured into glass bottles that had been rinsed out and left them to cool for our daily consumption. A couple of bottles were destined for our little refrigerator which sat in the living room next to our tropical fish tank, filled with guppies. Next, she would brush her teeth with salt in the kitchen sink, splash water on her face and then wake up the rest of the family. We did not have a bathroom. Personal hygiene tasks were performed in the kitchen, over our big rectangular stone sink. Our toilet was a small enamel chamber pot, which lived under my grandmother’s dressing table, covered with a wooden lid. When it was full, the last person to use it would take it into the kitchen either to sluice it out or to transfer the contents into a large bucket which lived under the kitchen sink. There would be times, mainly at night, when the stench was so awful my mother would call out ‘chung chui fong,’ meaning ‘wash out the kitchen’, and often my grandmother or a cousin would rise to chuck water and disinfectant down the sluice. It became a running joke in the family, as the phrase bore some resemblance to my grandmother’s name, ‘Cheung Chui Fong’. Once or twice a week, the large red plastic soil bucket into which we threw all our human excrement would be carried from the kitchen, through the little flat, into the front room and out onto the landing, waiting for the night soil woman to empty it in the early hours of the morning.
Bathing for us as youngsters was in the kitchen sink, but for the adults it was a rather unenviable task. As a teenager, I remember bathing every day in the kitchen, before my grandmother began cooking the evening meal. We used a tin tub, filled it with cold water from the kitchen tap, put it on the tiled floor and doused ourselves with a ladle, taking care not to make too much of a splash, nor to wet the pile of newspapers sitting against the wall which served as a makeshift tabletop or handy seating area. It was cool and refreshing after a long day at school. Unfortunately, the last person to bathe also had the task of mopping the kitchen floor, leaving it dry enough for my grandmother to start preparing the evening meal.
Our one luxury was a small black and white television set, bought when I was about ten years old. At first we had one English-language and one Chinese -language channel, on subscription, and broadcast for several hours each day, the English channel for a much shorter length of time. Eventually we exchanged it for a new television set that allowed us to receive the free TVB Jade and Pearl channels too. One of my favourite television series at the time was the Japanese animation ‘Marine Boy’. Marine Boy was a slim, attractive youngster who dressed in a red bulletproof diving suit and saved the oceans of the world riding on a dolphin. Oxy-chewing gum gave him the ability to stay underwater for long periods of time, but for some reason he was easily knocked out and needed saving too. The tune was catchy and it became a very popular series. ‘Batfink’ was another favourite; a small grey creature in a yellow costume and red gauntlets, who used his supersonic radar and bulletproof wings to fight crime. Batfink teamed up with a rather oafish and clueless aide, Karate, who, though a martial arts expert, seemed to always make the situation worse. The main villain, Hugo A-Go-Go, ‘the world’s maddest scientist’ was often fun with his wacky inventions and fiendish ability to catch Batfink. Towards the end of each episode, Batfink would invariably be tied up and about to meet his doom. The action would freeze, and the narrator would ask ‘is this the end of Batfink – and Karate?’ Each episode was only about five minutes long, but I loved them.
If there were no visitors, my grandmother would enjoy a film in the afternoon, often just finishing when we returned from school. Sometimes it would be a Peking Opera, with all the high pitched wailing and period costumes that went with it. I was often amazed at how many of the songs my grandmother actually knew. The stories of course, were well-known classics, and grandmother had many favourites. They were all fairly similar though. The one I remember was about a woman and her children who had been thrown out into the streets when her husband died. They ended up being taken in by a nasty landlord. Those who lived on his land were abused and maltreated, beaten and starved by this heartless man who had cheated his way through life, taken from the poor and lived on the fruits of their labour. In a desperate attempt to stop the misery and hardship which had befallen his family, the eldest son bade farewell to his mother and journeyed far away to sit the series of open, competitive imperial civil service examinations. If he passed, it would allow him to rise above his social status. Regardless of birth, background, age or appearance, a man could leap from rags to riches overnight if he was successful. Children of mandarins did not automatically inherit their fathers’ titles. They had to sit the exams like any ordinary peasant or labourer. Education was the only way forward.
And this peasant had worked hard at his books, studying the four Confucian Classics.
During this young man’s absence, his mother and sister had been thrown out of their humble shack, and had been left to roam the streets, begging for their keep. I remember the tears in my grandmother’s eyes as she empathised with the peasant woman, reliving her grief and misery.
‘You’ll never know,’ she whispered to me during the film. ‘Your grandmother has so many sorrows and heartaches, buried deep inside. You are too young to understand.’
And I did struggle to understand. I was frustrated by my limited mastery of the Cantonese dialect. All I could have with my grandmother was a child’s conversation. I did not know the words or the language to comfort her; physical displays of affection were not customary. My educational career, rooted in the British school and university system, took me away from my Chinese roots, and I never acquired the language to say what I wanted to say, even as an adult. But intuitively I felt for my grandmother, and our relationship was deep and profound and unquestioned, but it was never verbalised. After all, it was she who looked after me as a child when my mother returned to full-time work when I was two weeks old. It was she who comforted me when I was in pain; who nursed me through illness. It was she who clothed and fed me, and who was there at home when I returned from school. I can see now how it must have hurt my mother to witness such a relationship and perhaps to feel her position somehow usurped, as a daughter and as a parent.
On the television screen, a peasant woman who was about to be stoned by villagers for some petty crime made a dash towards an official sedan chair being carried through the streets. She was crying out, begging for mercy and justice. A man stepped out from behind the plain curtains that shielded his world from the outside. He was robed in a fine satin gown, with cloth slippers on his feet and a thick ornate belt hanging loosely round his waist: the Hoop of Office. He had the authority to preside over decisions; he had the power over life and death. He turned to the woman, collapsed in a pleading heap before his path, and gently he helped her to her feet, asking her to tell him what she was crying about. As his gaze fell upon her he recognised her sallow features.
‘Mother!’ he called. In a spontaneous display of filial piety, he dropped to his knees and kowtowed before her, his fine robes soiled in the muddy tracks.
The story continued with him sitting in court, judging the wicked landlord for his deeds and passing sentence over his family’s worst oppressor, the wings of his black gauze hat protruding like the arms of the law. He had honoured his mother in the ultimate manner. He had succeeded in his imperial examinations, swimming with the persistence of a carp, forcing his way upstream against the rapids, until he had achieved the status of a dragon. He had made that transformational leap and passed through the Dragon’s Gate. His ancestors would indeed smile upon him.