CHAPTER EIGHT Two Worlds in One House

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“Care must be taken not to confound the habits and institutions of the Chinese with what prevails in other parts of the world.”

British House of Lords (circa 1880)

Hong Kong has furnished the Sino-British answer to a universal question: What’s in it for me? Its progress from the earliest days has been more powerfully influenced by the lure of gold than by the Golden Rule, with its British and Chinese residents having little in common except their human nature and an equal dedication to the maximum profit in the minimum time.

“They don’t even speak the same language!” is a convenient expression of the ultimate separation between peoples, but while it is true that nine-tenths of Hong Kong’s Chinese do not speak English, the linguistic gap is only one of the many chasms that stand between them and their British rulers.

The British traders and fighting men who muscled their way into possession of Hong Kong Island in 1841 were looked upon with fear and loathing by the Chinese governing class, who considered them gun-toting barbarian brawlers. To the English, the Chinese seemed a docile subspecies of humanity. It has taken most of the intervening 121 years to convince a majority of both sides that the initial judgments may have been wrong.

The differences between nineteenth century Chinese and European civilizations were wide. Europeans, when they thought about religion at all, worshipped one God in a variety of antagonistic churches; the Chinese worshipped hundreds of gods, sometimes subscribing to several contradictory creeds simultaneously, without apparent conflict. Europeans were monogamous by law and custom; the Chinese, without odium, could be as polygamous as their means would allow.

None of these theological or moral disparities weighed heavily on the English while they were securing a foothold in China and building the opium trade. On the contrary, when they noted the willingness with which Chinese customs officials accepted their bribes, they felt they had established a kind of moral bond with the East. These people, whatever their eccentricities, were ready to do business in the accepted Western way.

When the British settled down to the business of governing their new colony, they collided at every turn with the language barrier. Except for a few conscientious missionaries and a minuscule number of lay scholars, the British were wholly ignorant of Cantonese, the prevailing Hong Kong tongue, and they were loftily disinclined to learn it. The extremes to which this arrogant insularity sometimes went were demonstrated by Governor Samuel George Bonham (1848-1854), who denied promotions to those subordinates who learned Chinese; he felt that the language was injurious to the mind, robbing it of common sense. In other respects, Governor Bonham was not so benighted as his linguistic convictions would indicate. Nor was he alone in his attitude toward the Chinese people; Governor Hercules Robinson (1859-1865) once wrote that it was his constant endeavor to “preserve the European and American community from the injury and inconvenience of intermixture” with the Chinese population.

Since all government business was (and continues to be) conducted in English, British officials frequently had to rely on Portuguese interpreters who had moved to Hong Kong from Macao. The Portuguese, facile linguists and unburdened by delusions of racial superiority, filled the role admirably. But in the colony courts, the simple task of swearing a witness in presented obstacles even to the best interpreters. Having never sworn an oath in the English fashion, the Chinese viewed it as just one more instance of outlandish mumbo-jumbo. At first the English tried cutting off a rooster’s head as a testament of the witness’s intention to tell the truth; then an earthenware bowl was broken to signify the same thing. A yellow paper inscribed with oaths or the name of the witness was burned in court as another form of swearing-in. Governor Bonham instituted a direct oral affirmation in 1852, but the complications that ensued must have intensified his conviction that the Chinese language was an insult to logic. If a defendant were asked, “Do you plead guilty?” the question was rendered in colloquial Cantonese as “You yes or no not guilty?” If the respondent answered “Yes, I am not guilty,” it could mean either “Not Guilty” or “Guilty.” Somehow the oaths were sworn, but not without a certain despair among the court attendants.

Although the European community seldom concerned itself with Chinese customs, it managed to raise a considerable storm over their “places of convenience” during the 1860s. These creations of the colony’s Chinese merchants were a sort of employee-retirement plan which consisted of taking one’s elderly or ailing workers to a crude shelter located on the north slope of Victoria Peak. There the faithful employee was rewarded for his long service by being given a quantity of drinking water and a coffin and left to die; if he were blessed with friends, they might visit him at this place, offer him an occasional scrap of food or a fresh ration of drinking water, and finally bury him. Often he died alone and without proper burial. This was too much, even for European opium traders, and Governor Richard Macdonnell stilled their protests by offering a free site for a Chinese hospital at Possession Point. This replacement of the terrible “dying-houses” was financed by the wealthier Chinese for their destitute countrymen. It became the first of the Tung Wah Chinese hospitals, now greatly expanded and modernized. The inevitable outcry that provision of the simplest medical care for the destitute would cause these facilities to be jammed by hordes of undeserving poor was raised—as it still is today—and proved false.

Sanitary conditions among the Chinese were horrible when the British arrived and remained so for the rest of the nineteenth century. The colony government made many attempts to improve them, but it was regularly stymied by the tenement dwellers who opposed any form of health inspection as an invasion of privacy, and by landlords who resented any proposal which threatened their profit margins. During the bubonic plague epidemics of the 1890s, the government provided a special plague burial-ground and offered the families of the dead quantities of lime to render the bodies of the victims noninfectious. The Chinese responded by abandoning their dead in the streets or throwing them in shallow graves; the donated lime was sold to building contractors.

The surviving tenements of the Western District of Hong Kong Island are still a shock to visiting Westerners. Still, their dark, dirty and overcrowded condition is a distinct improvement upon the disease-ridden pestholes of the last century. Sanitary inspectors, no longer detested and attacked by the population, can go anywhere and they carry full police powers for enforcing corrective action. The Chinese, never any fonder of dirt than the English, have been converted to the belief that the once-hated British methods can help them to achieve cleanliness.

Because of their tenuous contact with the Chinese residents of the colony, the British rulers tended to deal with them through intermediaries. This function was at first performed by the Mandarins, or members of the Chinese official class, who were as willing to gouge their countrymen for the British as they had been to do it for the Emperor; provided, of course, that they were able to deduct their usual cut. Governor Arthur Kennedy (1872-1877), who was the first to invite the Chinese to receptions at Government House, relied on the committee of the Man Mo Temple to control Chinese affairs.

Man Mo Temple, an ancient building still standing on Hollywood Road in the congested Western District, was a mixture of Buddhist and Taoist elements. Its leaders were Kennedy’s very potent allies, all working secretly to control Chinese affairs, acting as commercial arbitrators, negotiating the sale of official titles, and welcoming visiting Mandarins. Man Mo Temple, now administered by the Tung Wah Hospital committee, remained a respectable institution, but a number of other temples sprang up to challenge its influence.

In numerous cases the so-called temples were nothing more than a sanctimonious swindle. Privately promoted as a business speculation, they solicited funds from the public with fraudulent claims of divine or political influence. Abuses of this sort became so flagrant that the colony government, after long delay, enacted the Chinese Temples Ordinance in 1928, which provided for registration of the temples and an accounting of their funds to the Secretariat for Chinese Affairs. Certain long-established temples were exempt from various provisions of the Ordinance, but the founding of temples as a private business venture was forbidden. Surplus funds of the existing temples—the amount remaining after all maintenance and operating costs had been met—were transferred to a general Chinese charities fund.

The Chinese Mui Tsai custom, that of selling young girls as servants, troubled British and Chinese relations in Hong Kong for half a century. From ancient times, Chinese families had purchased little girls from impoverished parents and put them to work as household drudges. The colony officials raised their first strong objections to the practice in 1878, condemning it as thinly disguised slavery. Speaking of slavery, the Chinese retorted, what about the licensed brothels where 80 percent of the inmates had been sold into prostitution?

A committee appointed by Governor John Pope Hennessy (1877-1882) found that hundreds of the Mui Tsai, when they had outgrown their household enslavement, were being resold as prostitutes for shipment to Singapore, California and Australia. A species of Caucasian scum who lived in the colony were active partners in the trade. Governor Hennessy and Chief Justice John Smale forwarded the committee’s reports to the British House of Lords with urgent recommendations for tight corrective laws. The Lords, suddenly revealing an unsuspected concern for the integrity of Chinese customs, killed most of the proposed reforms.

Establishment of the Po Leung Kuk, or Society for the Protection of Virtue, helped to limit the kidnaping of women and girls, but the institution of Mui Tsai was to persist well into the twentieth century. The English eventually outlawed licensed brothels after decades of criticism from many countries.

Covert prostitution continues at a brisk pace in Hong Kong today, with sailors favoring the Wanchai district and the bars of the Tsim Sha Tsui section of Kowloon. The Chinese are more inclined to patronize the western areas of Hong Kong Island. The dance hall and cabaret girls of Wanchai, whose ranks include some spectacularly beautiful women, charge their eager patrons about four dollars an hour for the privilege of dancing with them, sharing a plate of melon seeds and drinking tea. The cabarets are murky dens, furnished in Chinese warehouse modern, with a third-rate jazz band dragging the tempo along in the semidarkness. There is no guarantee of intimacies—emphatically not on the premises—and the prospective suitor is obliged to continue shelling out his money for repeated visits until the girl decides whether he has the kind of bankroll she could care for. If he is too repulsive to her, not even that will do.

A cabaret girl can earn $300 a month or more, or about five times as much as a schoolteacher earns. Few of these girls speak English, but this ability has never been regarded as a prerequisite. Apart from the moral considerations of the job, its competitive aspects are becoming more intense all the time. Bar girls, who have little respect for the traditional preliminaries, may bestow their favors on five customers while the cabaret charmers are fencing with one.

The singsong girls, formerly held in great esteem as entertainers and prostitutes, have almost disappeared from the colony. Many of them were Mui Tsai who had been trained to sing seemingly interminable Cantonese songs in a falsetto voice for their tea-shop patrons, accompanying themselves on a kind of horizontal stringed instrument which they tapped with padded hammers. In the later evening, they moved about from one businessmen’s club to another in the West Point section of the island. Not all were prostitutes, and there is still at least one tea shop along Queen’s Road Central where entertainment is confined to music. Westerners who hear their music often find themselves thinking of older days.

Considering the fact that Hong Kong is a world seaport, the rate of venereal infection is surprisingly low. To a greater extent than in most Western cities, poverty is a basic cause of prostitution, but here too sheer laziness, greed and stupidity play their part in the provision of recruits. As usual, the greatest profits from the trade go to its protectors—Triad gangsters and corrupt policemen.

The entire subject of the status and treatment of women has provided a continual source of animosity and disagreement throughout the colony’s history. The rich Chinese Taipans, with their numerous wives and mistresses lodged in separate establishments, have remained the envy of many a Western man who could not emulate them without violating the laws of the colony and placing himself beyond the pale of polite Western society.

Since the founding of the Chinese Republic in 1911, well-educated Chinese women have not looked happily on polygamy. Their convictions were solidified and shared by millions of other Chinese wives when Red China tightened the marriage laws, making monogamy not only legal but practically mandatory. These improvements in the status of Chinese women have not gone unnoticed in Hong Kong, where a British, Christian, monogamous community finds itself in the embarrassing position of tolerating plural marriage among its Chinese subjects long after the institution has been outlawed in China.

There is nothing in this thorny problem which lends itself to edicts and sweeping judgments. It is charged with the most delicate emotional considerations, involving not only the legality of existing marriages, the legitimacy of offspring and the fundamental rights of women, but also the division of property and the inheritance of estates. Colony officials are aware that the work of solving it must be approached with the greatest subtlety.

To begin with, there are six kinds of marriages to be considered, all with different premises. Two are classified as Chinese Modern Marriages; those contracted in Hong Kong under Nationalist China laws, and those contracted in China or any other place outside the colony under the same Nationalist laws. Marriages contracted under Chinese custom as it existed and was recognized in 1843 are Chinese Customary Marriages. Marriages under the colony’s laws, Christian or otherwise, are called Registry Marriages. There are also Reputed Marriages, which is the colony designation for common-law marriages, and, finally, a group called Foreign Marriages, which includes all those contracted outside the colony under foreign laws, particularly those performed and registered in Red China under its monogamous marriage law. Thus, the usually simple question, “Are you married?” when fully answered in Hong Kong, may take a considerable amount of the inquirer’s time.

Chinese Customary Marriages, still popular in the colony, are generally recognized as valid, but there is no single definition which covers them. There are any number of ancient prescriptions for them which contradict one another, but they are alike in that they follow the accepted rites and ceremonies of the families of the bride and groom. Chinese women with a modern consciousness of their rights have no affection for such unions, since they permit a husband to divorce his wife for any reason and give her no right to leave him if she really feels inclined to do so. Furthermore, and this is an equally sore point, it permits the husband to take concubines, though the notion that a wife might adopt a similar polygamy is quite inconceivable.

Chinese Modern Marriages in the colony far outnumber all other types—more than 200,000, by an official estimate—although Registry Marriages have recently gained in number. All that is required to make them valid is an open ceremony witnessed by two persons. The Nationalist laws applicable to such unions give the man no legal right to acquire a concubine, despite the fact that some husbands in the colony find it convenient to pretend they do. The “extra” girls are naturally flattered to be told they are concubines (i.e., secondary wives with full domestic rights), rather than mistresses with no legal or social standing.

In everyday relationships with the courts and the government, Chinese Modern Marriages are recognized as respectable unions. None the less, they have no legal validity when contracted in Hong Kong, for they are neither entered at the Marriage Registry nor are they celebrated according to “the personal law and religion of the parties,” as colony laws require.

Reputed Marriages are, in many respects, exactly like common-law marriages in the United States: two people live together, sometimes have children and are regarded by themselves and their friends as married, unless they should grow weary of each other and part. In Hong Kong, however, a concubine is sometimes added, making the institution look something like a house of cards with an annex. Foreign Marriages, or unions contracted abroad and according to the laws of the country where the couple formerly lived, present few legal obstacles. If they were married in Red China, and the marriage was registered there, the union is monogamous; when the couple move to Hong Kong, their marriage has the same standing as that of an American or European couple living in the colony.

The complications arising from this matrimonial disparity have been the subject of intensive study since World War II. In earlier days, the marital customs of the Chinese community were of little interest to the British. One did not associate with the Chinese unless it was required for the purposes of political window-dressing. But the glacial snobbery of old colonialism suffered a disrespectful mauling during World War II from which it has never quite recovered. At that time the Chinese penetrated all but the tightest circles of Hong Kong society, and hundreds of British and Chinese intermarried without loss of “face” in either group. This last was the boldest departure, for while it was true that outcasts of both races had intermarried since the founding of the colony, a socially acceptable member of either race who attempted it was snubbed by both English and Chinese.

British-Chinese intermarriages are monogamous, and in spite of the inevitable interference of aunts, uncles and cousins, have generally worked out better than either race would have expected them to two decades ago. Of themselves, these mixed marriages are not a social issue in the colony, but they have indirectly breached the barrier between the two racial communities. Marriage laws of all sorts have become the concern of the entire colony population.

The 1948 Committee on Chinese Law and Custom defined many of the marital contradictions which persist to this day. Then, as now, one of the most vexing questions was the legal status of the “secondary wife” or concubine sanctioned by Chinese Customary Marriages. The English meaning of “concubine,” connoting a mistress or secret paramour, was not applicable to the Chinese concubine; she joined her husband’s household, with or without the principal wife’s consent, and it was his obligation to support her. Her children were legitimate, but her husband could divorce her more readily than he could his principal wife.

But what were the rights of real and pseudo-concubines? Could they and their children be discarded without support? To what extent might they challenge the rights of the real wife? The 1948 Committee produced no definitive answers to these questions, nor did it urge any precipitate action to change the status of concubines. It did recommend that after a certain date, the taking of new concubines be declared illegal.

Sir Man Kam Lo, a Chinese member of the Hong Kong Executive Council, subsequently wrote a dissent to the 1948 report, saying that he believed the concubine should be allowed to remain in cases where the principal wife was ill or unable to bear children. As he noted, the birth of a male heir is of the greatest importance to the succession of a Chinese family. Very few families, he felt, would regard an adopted son as a suitable heir.

Arthur Ridehalgh, former Attorney General, and John C. McDouall, Secretary for Chinese Affairs, made a detailed study of Chinese marriages in the colony in 1960 and submitted a variety of recommendations intended to clear up some of the ambiguities and contradictions.

It was their proposal that the government set a definite date for outlawing Chinese Modern Marriages and to validate all marriages of this type which had been previously contracted as monogamous unions, provided that neither spouse was lawfully married to anyone else. The so-called concubines of husbands who had been parties to a Chinese Modern Marriage would receive no further legal recognition, and in fact they had never been entitled to any.

Regarding Chinese Customary Marriages, the study favored the recording of these marriages to establish their validity, and the banning of all future marriages in which either partner is under sixteen years of age. As to Reputed Marriages, the study advocated remarriage of the couples under colony law with the right to back-date the marriage to the time they had begun to live together.

The Ridehalgh-McDouall report also favored several changes in the divorce laws. One change would permit a principal wife in a Chinese Customary Marriage to get a divorce with maintenance until her death or remarriage if the husband, after a date to be set by law, acquired a concubine without the principal wife’s consent or knowledge. Another recommendation, after a date set by law, would bar divorce in a Chinese Customary Marriage without the free consent of both parties.

The study warned against any all-out banning of concubines in Chinese Customary Marriages, but supported gradual restriction of the right to take concubines. As for mistresses in other types of marriages who posed as legal concubines, the study urged the government to expose the practice as a popular fallacy with no lawful basis. It also gave its backing to laws which granted a legal concubine full rights to seek a divorce and obtain maintenance for her children, and legislation which empowered a principal wife to sue a husband for divorce and support of herself and children.

Other recommendations proposed added protection of the rights of wives in Chinese Modern Marriages against infringement by pseudo-concubines, and legal provision to assure the support of illegitimate children.

All these findings are still being weighed by the colony government and quick action on them is unlikely. To a large degree, the proposed changes in marriage laws represent a new offensive in the long war for women’s rights, and it might be noted that the women of this century have compiled an impressive list of victories in this regard. With enough nagging and prodding, they should be able to carry the day in Hong Kong too.

In the discussion of such pervasive issues as the difference between Chinese and British marriage customs, it is convenient to view the Chinese as a single group of people constituting 98.2 percent of the colony’s population. Since 95 percent of the population speak Cantonese, it would seem to follow that Hong Kong is a homogeneous community, except for a light top-dressing of “foreign devils.” But this superficial impression is as wide of the mark as the saying “All Chinese look alike.”

There are scholars who object to the word Chinese as the description of one people, arguing quite persuasively that there are so many racial strains in China that no single label adequately describes them. The point is drawn a bit fine for the majority of Western observers, yet anyone who spends a few weeks in Hong Kong will begin to appreciate the racial diversity of the Chinese people.

By the unverified judgment of the eye, the colony’s Chinese people are two or three inches shorter than the American of average height, and noticeably taller than the average Japanese or Filipino. But that is perhaps the limit of any valid comparison between Americans and Chinese as far as appearance goes.

The Chinese one sees on the street range from jockey-sized runts to towering giants; from tiny women weighing perhaps 90 pounds to queenly six-footers; from the palest of white skins to a deep walnut brown. Many have features which seem more Slavic or Polish than anything classifiable as Chinese. There are almond eyes and pop eyes; slit eyes and bug-eyes. Noses tend to be a little less prominent and less sharply defined than European noses, but exceptions occur. The bloated red nose of the dedicated drinker never shows itself, except on a Caucasian face. Dark hair is almost universal and bald heads less common than in an American crowd. Pudgy types occur with some regularity, but tremendously fat people are rarely seen.

About half the people who live in the urban areas were born in the colony and most of their ancestors came from Kwangtung, the Chinese Province immediately north of the Hong Kong border. Kwangtung was also the birthplace of the majority of the recent refugees from Red China. Eight-tenths of the city-dwellers speak the dialect of Cantonese used in Canton City, where the British traders were based before Hong Kong became a colony. This dialect and others closely related to it are the lingua franca of the colony’s urban Chinese, but there are 96 Cantonese dialects in existence, many of them unintelligible to users of the Canton City dialect. The babble of urban tongues includes Hoklo, Sze Yap and Hakka, all from different parts of Kwangtung, Shanghainese (chiefly heard at North Point and Hung Hom in the colony), Chiuchow (in the Western District), Fukienese (at North Point) and Kuoyu, or Mandarin (near Hong Kong University and at Rennie’s Mill Camp).

In the New Territories, where even a Westerner can detect differences of dress and custom, the Cantonese hold most of the flat, fertile farmland and speak a dialect which puzzles city Cantonese. Ancestors of the Cantonese farmers have lived in the New Territories for nine centuries. The Hakka people, whose women may be identified immediately by their broad-brimmed straw hats with a hanging fringe of thin black cloth, settled the same area at about the time of the earliest Cantonese, but were pushed into the less desirable farmland and generally dominated by the Cantonese. They fought each other intermittently for centuries, but the feud has died down and they now share several villages peacefully, frequently intermarry, and restrict their warfare to husband-wife squabbles. The Hakkas of the eastern New Territories operate their own single-masted, high-hull boats for hauling farm produce and ferrying passengers.

The Hoklos, a smaller group with a knack for handling light, fast boats, once lived entirely on boats and worked as shrimp fishermen. They moved ashore many years ago and now have their chief settlements on Cheung Chau and Peng Chau, a few miles west of Hong Kong Island.

By the testimony of historians, the Tanka people, who dominate the colony’s fishing industry, are the oldest surviving group in Hong Kong. Antedating the Chinese, they lived in the area when the Cantonese came along to push them off the land and generally treat them like despised inferiors. They lived entirely on boats, and when the British traders arrived, the Tanka had no compunctions about dealing with them in defiance of the Chinese Emperor’s orders. Over 90 percent of them speak Cantonese, with a small number speaking Hoklo and other dialects. Hardy and conservative, they avoid city ways, live on their junks and sampans and follow their own distinctive festivals and religious ceremonies. Since World War II they have begun to send their children to schools ashore and to become more directly involved in the economic life of the colony.

World War II provided a turning point in the fortunes of those boat people who operated cargo lighters in the harbor. Heartily disliking the Japanese, they used false-bottomed boats to secrete food stolen from their cargoes and then distributed it among the half-starved population ashore. They were the only residents permitted to eat in the large hotel restaurants like those at the luxurious Peninsula in Kowloon. Most of them, wholly unfamiliar with chairs, ate by squatting on the chair-seats as they had squatted on deck while eating at sea. Nowadays, they are more sophisticated, and in spite of their non-Chinese origin, as intensely Chinese as any group in the colony.

Because of the floodtide of tourists which has swept into Hong Kong in the last few years, it has become a conversational bromide to say that the influx will soon destroy its colorful Chinese community. To accept such a doctrine is to overestimate the impact of tourism and underrate the resistance of the Chinese.

The Hong Kong tourist is a highly localized phenomenon. Except for a fast motor tour through the main roads of the New Territories and a short whirl around Hong Kong Island, he rarely wanders more than a mile from the island and Kowloon terminals of the Star Ferry. He shops, gawks, eats at a few restaurants which are more tourist-oriented than Oriental, and is gone, leaving nothing but the click of the shopkeepers’ abacuses to mark his passage.

It may seem incongruous to characterize nearly one-fourth of the human race as clannish, but it is undeniable that the Chinese, no matter where they have lived, have retained their home ties, customs and culture. They are rock-ribbed individualists rather than nationalists, but when they live abroad, whether in Hong Kong or the Chinatowns of San Francisco and New York, they remain distinctly and unalterably Chinese. In Singapore and Manila they are resented for their commercial shrewdness and their stubborn insistence on remaining Chinese. If their next-door neighbors can’t change them, what reason is there to believe that the tourists of Hong Kong can do so?

There are certain comic aspects to the relations of the British and Chinese in Hong Kong. Living side-by-side for 121 years, they have told each other—sometimes directly, more often by implication—“You can’t change me!” To a large extent, they have both held out, like a silent couple eating at opposite ends of a long dinner table. Lately the table has been contracting, but the prospects of a cozy twosome are still somewhat distant.

Meanwhile, the Chinese go on living by their own calendar, celebrating festivals and family events according to their traditions, and following their ancient religions. The rural people cling to their belief in fung shui (literally, wind and water), a form of geomancy which guides them in locating their houses and burial places on the particular site most pleasing to the living and the dead. On the other hand, the old superstitious fear of Western medicine has been overcome; in the 1961 Hong Kong cholera outbreak, 80 percent of the population flocked to government centers for inoculations.

Neither the British, the Nationalist Republic, nor the Chinese Communists—all of whom favor the 12-month Western calendar—have been able to wean the colony’s Chinese people from their ancient lunar calendar. The old calendar was supposedly devised in 2254 B.C. by astrologers working under the orders of Emperor Yao, who wanted it to serve as a crop-planting guide for his predominantly agricultural subjects. It is the gauge by which all festivals are set and varies in length from 354 to 385 days. The years proceed in cycles of twelve, each being named for a particular animal such as the rat, rabbit, rooster and horse until the twelfth animal is reached and the cycle repeats. Each year is subdivided into 24 solar “joints and breaths,” which being based on close observation of weather and the growing season, tick off the seasonal changes with remarkable accuracy.

Because of its variable length and its nonconformity to Western ideas of what a calendar should look like, the Chinese calendar causes endless confusion for foreigners. Most of them cling firmly to the Gregorian calendar and keep a close eye on the colony’s newspapers to learn when the next festival is due. The religious significance of the festival means nothing to them and it does not need to; the ceremonies and celebrations attending the day are so animated and colorful that they can be enjoyed for their spectacle alone.

Chinese New Year, generally occurring between the middle of January and the third week of February, is celebrated on the first three days of the First Moon. It marks the beginning of spring, and gives the Chinese population sufficient time to recover from the shock of seeing the Westerners booze it up on New Year’s Eve. Chinese employees receive a bonus of an extra month’s pay, the shops close and firecrackers, permitted by colony law for a two-day period, keep up an unending cannonade. A tourist wandering into the uproar feels like a dude in a frontier saloon; everybody seems to be shooting at his feet.

Red papers lettered with gold are stuck on boats and the doors of shops and houses inviting the lucky spirits to lend a hand. The fearful din of the firecrackers is a pointed hint to malicious spirits, advising them to get out fast. All debts are paid, finances permitting, and the past year’s feuds and grudges are wiped out, so far as human nature will allow.

The heart of the observance takes place in the home, with all members of the family dining together on the last night of the old year and the children receiving “lucky” money in red envelopes to assure them of safe passage through the coming year. After dinner, everyone adjourns to the courtyard where branches of sesame, fir and cypress have been strewn; these are stepped on and burned as a symbol of the departing year. Firecrackers are set off to discourage the prowlings of the Skin Tiger, a kind of reverse-action Robin Hood who steals the cakes of the poor to give them to the rich; as the Skin Tiger views it, the poor have lived off the wealthy all year, so isn’t it time to square accounts?

A lighted lamp is placed before the shrine of the Kitchen God, who is expected back from his trip to divine headquarters. Every door is sealed and locked until 5 A.M. the next day, when the entire household gets up to see the master of the house reopen the doors, remove the seals and extend a welcome to the New Year. Incense sticks are lighted, Heaven, Earth and the family ancestors are honored and the Kitchen God, now returned from his journey, is properly greeted. New Year’s Day is the occasion for a complete family reunion, with outsiders being excluded. No meat is eaten, since the use of a knife on this day would imply cutting off a friendship, and no sweeping is done, for a broom might sweep away good luck. Later, gifts are exchanged, with baskets of food being rated as thoroughly acceptable. The season’s greetings—“Kung Hei Fat Choy”—ring out everywhere.

In Hong Kong, a local newspaper and the radio promote a Fat Choy Drive to provide a New Year’s feast for even the poorest families. When the family phase of the celebration is over, there is a day for visiting friends, and with true Chinese practicality, a final day to worship the God of Wealth, making certain that he does everything divinely possible in the year ahead to boost the family’s fortunes. In former days it was customary to prolong the observance for fifteen days or more, but the demands of modern business limit it to three or four days in most instances.

The birthday of Kuan Yin, the Buddhist Goddess of Mercy, is celebrated on the 19th day of the Second Moon, and she is regarded with such affection that practically all of the Taoist temples honor her as well. Legend describes her as the youngest daughter of an ancient prince who attempted to force her into marriage to perpetuate the family line. She objected, was murdered by her father in some ambiguous fashion and descended to Hell, where by sheer charm she transformed the place into a paradise. Returned to earth, she found her father dying of a skin disease and cut off parts of her own body to preserve his unworthy hide. Women are especially devoted to her, bearing birthday gifts of food, paper clothing, chickens and roast pig to her image in the temples. Until the thirteenth century, Kuan Yin was often represented as a male divinity, probably with the connivance of early defenders of male prerogatives, but she has become exclusively female since then, for only as a woman could she possess an ear sympathetically attuned to the troubles of mortal women.

The Ching Ming Festival, occurring toward the end of the Second Moon or at the beginning of the Third Moon (late March or early April in our calendar), provides an occasion to honor one’s ancestors. The worship of ancestors is the keystone of Chinese religious beliefs, as well as the strongest link binding them together as a single people. Its profound influence on every phase of Chinese life is seldom fully appreciated by foreigners, who regard it as morbid, backward-looking and intellectually sterile. But even foreigners in Hong Kong share some of the Ching Ming spirit by using the day to tidy up the graves of their own departed and place flowers by the headstones.

The Chinese do no cooking and eat no hot food on the day preceding Ching Ming, acting in deference to a long-gone official who was accidentally burned to death by his dunder-headed confreres. Women and children wear a sprig of willow on the day itself to safeguard themselves against the posthumous horror of returning to this life in the form of dogs. The family visits its ancestral graves, makes any needed repairs and sets out a feast for the dead. Paper replicas of money and clothing are burned to let the deceased know that their interests are being looked after, and a little diversionary fire is lighted nearby to distract evil spirits and keep them from butting into the main sacrifice. Having made its gesture of feeding the dead, the family then falls to and eats the feast itself.

Because land is scarce in the colony, graves are rented only for a limited period. Six or seven years after a member of the family has died, his survivors obtain an exhumation permit and visit the grave on Ching Ming to dig up his coffin. The bones are removed from the coffin, carefully sorted and cleaned with sandpaper, and packed into an earthenware urn with the skull on top. The undertaker, accompanied by members of the family, then removes the urn to a hillside site in the New Territories, selecting a location with a favorable fung shui, where the deceased presumably will be able to enjoy a pleasant view.

Chinese coffins are a massive, rough-hewn product, resembling a four-leaf clover in outline; if they are still in sound condition after their first tenant is evicted, they may be resold at a discount for rehabilitation and put to use again.

Many Occidentals would pale at the thought of sandpapering and reassembling the last of Aunt Matilda, but the Chinese entertain no such qualms. They take a calm and realistic view of death, handling the bones of the dead with complete respect, but without morbidity or gloom. Ching Ming is a time of remembrance rather than lamentation.

T’ien Hou, the Taoist Queen of Heaven, celebrates her birthday on the 23d day of the Third Moon. For the boat people, it is the most important festival of the year; T’ien Hou is their chief patron, keeping her benign eye on such matters as a good catch and fair weather. Her shrines are in the cabin of every junk, and her 24 temples stand in every village that overlooks the sea. In her earthly days, the story goes, she was a fisherman’s daughter. Once she fell into a trance while her parents were far out at sea. Dreaming that a storm was about to drown them, she roused herself and pointed directly at their boat. It was the only one in the fleet to return safely.

Her ship-saving talents led directly to her deification, and she has since acquired two invaluable assistants, Thousand-Mile Eyes and Fair-Wind Ears. Her principal temple is at Joss House Bay on Tung Lung Island, about two miles east of Hong Kong Island. On her birthday, an all-day ferry service brings her worshippers from the main island, and the boat people arrive in sea-trains of junks towed by a launch, flying dozens of flags and Happy-Birthday banners. Every boat is packed to the gunwales with men, women and children jostling one another as they reach for sweet cakes, tea and soft drinks. At Joss House Bay, the passengers swarm ashore as if the boats were about to sink and climb a wide granite stairway to the temple. Incense sticks are lighted, roasted animals and red eggs are placed before the Goddess and a small contribution is handed to the temple attendant.

Bursting firecrackers, lion dances and processions enliven the celebration until the men of the various fishing guilds wind it up with a hot scramble for “the luck,” a bamboo projectile with a number inside. It drops into the crowd like a bride’s bouquet, but the free-for-all that follows is no place for a bridesmaid. The winning team makes the year’s luck and gets possession of an elaborate portable shrine to the Queen of Heaven. Rich and poor, humble and great join without class distinction in having a gossipy, boisterous holiday.

The people of Cheung Chau feel obliged to say a kind word for all the animals and fish who were executed to feed mankind during the past year, and this debt is squared by the four-day Bun Festival on their dumbbell-shaped island. Its date is set by lot, and usually falls in the last few days of the Third Moon or the first ten days of the Fourth Moon. No animals are killed and no fish are caught during the festival. Troupes of actors are imported to perform in an enormous temporary theater, with its roof of coarse matting supported on a bamboo framework tied together with rattan strips. Daily and nightly presentations of Cantonese Opera are put on with the performers in elaborate costumes, shrilling their lines above the tireless clamor of cymbals.

The festival centerpiece consists of a triple-peaked bun mountain, or conical framework covered with varicolored buns from its base to its 60-foot summit. As soon as it is completed, it is covered with a tarpaulin to protect the buns until the climactic ceremony on the final day of the festival.

The various guilds on the islands compete in a long procession which passes under floral arches on the village streets. The perennial feature of the procession is a series of tableaux enacted by children on platforms borne on the shoulders of several men. The subjects are mythological, and by the ingenious use of a well-concealed steel framework, make a mere toddler appear to be dancing nimbly on the tip of a fiddle held by a child standing beneath the dancer. It’s all an amiable fake, understood as such by the crowd, but executed with such aplomb by the children that it never fails to delight the spectators. Images of Gods and Goddesses are also carried in the line of march, with lion dancers and clowns to add further excitement. A mass for the recently departed fish and animals is celebrated on the final night, and their hungry souls are permitted to take a few ghostly nips at the bun mountain. An officiating priest decides when they’ve had enough, takes a careful look around to see that no latecomers from the Great Beyond have been neglected, and signals the slavering bystanders to pitch in. The young men of the island scramble up the bunny slopes in a mad dash for the topmost bun, but there are thousands of edibles at all levels, so no climber need go hungry.

The Dragon Boat Festival, coming on the fifth day of the Fifth Moon (late May to late June), probably attracts more attention from the foreign population than any other Chinese celebration. It is hotly competitive, pitting large teams of rowers against each other in all-day races at Aberdeen, Kennedy Town, Tai Po and elsewhere. The individual heats are short, close together and accompanied by loud cheers and the booming of the pace-setting drums in every boat. A carved dragon’s head ornaments the bow and the stern is a simulated dragon’s tail; in between lies 80 to 100 feet of low, fairly narrow hull, with the rowers flailing away in a fast circular stroke. The crews, who train for three or four weeks before the annual races, also keep the boats in shape, and one European crew that includes a number of government employees competes at Tai Po.

It was a government employee who gave rise to the festival in the fourth century, B.C. He was the honest Chu Yuan, an official who tried to persuade the Chinese Emperor to correct the corruption of his court; when his pleas were ignored, he drowned himself by leaping into the Nih Loh River. A group of sympathetic villagers rowed out to the site and cast silk-wrapped dumplings into the water, hoping to attract his wandering spirit, or in another version of the legend, to lure the fish away and protect his body from their attack. The bow man of today’s Dragon Boats preserves the tradition by casting rice cakes or dumplings wrapped with bamboo leaves from his craft. The principles of cleanliness exemplified by Chu Yuan are practiced a few days in advance of the races, when every family cleans house and sets off firecrackers to stampede lurking cockroaches into panicky flight. The races themselves exercise a purifying influence, for most of the rowers are thoroughly drenched by the splashing paddles.

The Mid-Autumn Festival, celebrated on the 15th day of the Eighth Moon, belongs entirely to women, and is marked by them in the privacy of the home. The feminine principle in nature is in the ascendant and the moon, which is considered a female deity, is at the apogee. A table is set in the courtyard, and the moon is offered gifts of tea, food, burning incense and the seed of the water calthrop. The service takes place at night, illuminated by lanterns and moonlight, and includes a prayer to the honored satellite, who is also quizzed about the matrimonial prospects of her devotees. Fruit and moon cakes are essential to the feast that follows, and as always, firecrackers are exploded. Wealthier households may set up a midnight moon-viewing party, with a banquet and a group of blind musicians singing an ode to the moon. These blind musicians, numbering about 100 in all, have their own colony at the west end of Hong Kong Island and earn about $12 for a party booking. Recorders and lutes are their usual instruments, giving their music a quaint Elizabethan flavor.

Ancestral graves are visited for the second time each year on the ninth day of the Ninth Moon; summer weeds and grass are cleared away and sacrifices of money and clothing are offered to keep the deceased wealthy and warm through the coming winter. The date coincides with that of the Cheung Yung Festival, when it is said to be lucky to climb to a high place. Burial urns rest fairly high on the hillsides, so it is easy to combine both celebrations and top them off with a picnic in the open.

On Cheung Yung, thousands of Chinese ride up Victoria Peak on the tram, buying toys and other presents for the children at improvised stalls along the way. Picnickers cover the top of every hill in the colony. Kite-flyers observe the day by the curious sport of kite-fighting, which involves manipulating one kite so that it knocks another out of the sky or snaps its string. The hill-climbing custom supposedly began when a Chinese father of long ago saved his family from a plague by taking them into the mountains.

A veritable regiment of gods, ghosts and spirits—some beneficent, some wicked—have their special observances during the year. Buddhist and Taoist deities have a tendency to overlap, just as followers of Taoism may be equally ardent Buddhists. Once the two religions battled and persecuted each other like the religions of the West, but they have long since settled down to peaceful coexistence. There is no reliable count of their membership in Hong Kong, though the Buddhists claim around 500,000 adherents. An unspecified, but probably small number of Chinese are Buddhists, Taoists and Christians simultaneously, or at least they consider themselves so.

Confucianism also has its following in the colony, but its places of worship are generally merged with Buddhist and Taoist temples.

Roman Catholic and Protestant missionaries have been at work in Hong Kong from its beginning as a colony, founding schools and caring for the poor. Neither group made much headway in attracting converts until the late 1940s, perhaps because of the ironbound Chinese resistance to every form of foreign influence. But the Communist regime on the mainland has proved a stimulant to Christianity in Hong Kong.

The well-financed and highly effective work of Protestant churches, particularly among refugees from Red China, has won them many converts, and the number of Protestant parishes has greatly increased in the last few years. Anglicans, Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, Lutherans and other denominations have made substantial gains.

The number of Roman Catholics, who are equally active in educational and welfare fields, has grown from 43,000 in 1951 to 180,000 in 1962. They are currently making about 15,000 converts a year, and 12,000 of these are adults. Some of their mission priests, who have found conversions much more difficult to achieve in Japan, believe that the terror and hopelessness of life under the Chinese Communists have turned many Chinese refugees to Christianity. Enrollment in Catholic schools of the colony is well over 100,000, and two-thirds of their enrollment is non-Catholic. Like every other Christian group in the colony, the Catholics have given help without drawing denominational lines.

The Portuguese, of whom there are about 2,000 in Hong Kong, are the descendants of former Macao settlers who arrived with the first wave of British traders, acting as their interpreters. They were adaptable, quick with figures and gifted linguists, establishing themselves as clerk-interpreters in business and financial houses. A few invested wisely in land and became millionaires. In more recent years, they have turned to professional work, becoming lawyers, doctors and engineers. Starting with J. P. Braga in 1929, the Portuguese community has had several representatives on the Executive and Legislative Councils. Its present outstanding leaders, in addition to professional people, include exchange brokers, importers and exporters and manufacturers’ agents.

A second wave of Portuguese came to the colony from Macao after World War II, hoping to discover the business opportunities denied by the sleepy, static little overseas province of Portugal. But they faced stiff competition from young Chinese women who had entered office work and had received superior English education in the colony schools. Few had been to college and they lacked the drive demanded by the rough-and-tumble economy of Hong Kong; before long, most of the new arrivals moved on to Canada, Brazil or the United States.

Indians, including Parsees, Bhohras, Khwojas, Sindhis and Sikhs, came to Hong Kong in the early days as traders, soldiers and policemen. Today they are primarily merchants and traders, although there are still a few Indian and Pakistani residents who preserve their uniformed role as policemen, soldiers, or private guards for banks and financial houses. The Indian community is about the same size as the Portuguese—between 2,000 and 3,000—and like it, has produced a few top-level government officials, doctors and lawyers, and millionaire merchants.

Americans are still a very small minority, but they have money and a keen appetite to make more. If they also have ability, they fit smoothly into the competitive economy of the colony. The importance of American aid, both private and public, in caring for the colony’s refugees is deeply appreciated by both the government and the Chinese population, and the effect is only slightly marred when some Yankee tourist tries to give the impression that it all came out of his personal funds. Such tourists, it may be noted, are exceptional.

Despite their historical background of anticolonial insurrection, Americans have been well received in Hong Kong during most of its existence. It was once said that a young Hong Kong Englishman could not marry outside the charmed circle of the British Isles, Canada or Australia unless he chose an American girl; otherwise, he would lose his social position and probably his job. This has not been true for some years now, but it leaves a lingering question in the minds of some Americans: Why did they include us rebels?

Another question that occurs to almost every American who has seen the colony is: How do 15,000 British run this place? (Actually, there are about 33,000 people from all parts of the British Commonwealth living in Hong Kong, but the ruling group comes from the British Isles and barely exceeds 15,000.) It is evident from the most perfunctory glance around the streets that the British do run Hong Kong; autocratically, efficiently, firmly, sometimes unimaginatively, never with any pretense of popular rule, but almost always with strict justice. There is contained corruption, but less of it than anywhere else in the Far East. At times an unwonted conviction of Britannic righteousness roils the overseas visitor. This reaction is often encountered in one type of American who insists he does not want to run the world, and means he wants it run his way—by somebody else.

Americans are quite surprised when they strike the unexpected vein of iron that lies under the polished surface of British manners. These British are tough people; disciplined, well-educated, capable of decision and resolute action. Because they possess these qualities to a degree unexcelled and perhaps unmatched by any other country in the world, the British in Hong Kong are a corporal’s guard commanding an army.

But one might pause here to consider the young American woman who stood at the rail of an excursion boat in Hong Kong harbor, looking wistfully up at Government House, the seat of majesty.

“If only they were a little more lovable!” she said.


                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

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