Undergraduate Page
HONGKONG REMEMBERED
By W. J. URMSON (Magdalen College, Oxford)
jUST before dawn a breeze begins to blow. Then, as the sun climbs, the massive bastions of the mountains begin to be brought into prominence, light lying on their eastern, and shadows of dark green and purple on their western, slopes. Over the flat ground below drifts of white mist float poised a few feet in the air ; there is mist, too, among the trees of Kowloon's outer bungalow-gardens. It is quiet. There is, to English ears, a notice- able lack of bird-song. But young swifts twitter under the caves, and their parents, flashing out in frenzied arcs, keep up a monotonous screaming.
As the sun rises, the mountains seem not to brighten but to fade in colour. Smooth and enormous, they stand clad in shabby green grass gashed with outcrops of tawny rock and battlemented with crags of a contrasting grey. They dominate the Kowloon peninsula below them, and stare over to Victoria Peak on Hongkong Island, across the narrow strip of sea where the warships lie. Even among the houses of Kowloon itself their broken foothills obtrude them- selves. Kowloon, on its northern outskirts, is a town of flat roofs. Here and there domestic ridge-tiles support fashionable versions of traditional Chinese dragon-shapes in bright -green or red, but for the most part the sun shines on the oblong tops of blocks of flats ; gaunt, ochre-coloured flats with deep balconies. It is among these sleek, civilised roofs that there rise the splinters of a primitive mountain ; tortured, indented, knife-edged, eroded by water and blasted by dynamite. On their lower slopes lie terraced fields, reeking of night-soil manure and crammed with vegetables. Around and below the fields there are graveyards ; thousands of small white stones, dated and numbered. As the day wears on, the foothills will echo from time to time with the explosion of crackers brought by pious relatives to honour the dead. Here and there among the rocks one comes upon skulls in earthenware pots.
A Chinese woman arrives outside one of the blocks of flats, accompanied by a girl of about thirteen, with a flowered coat and trousers and a wide-brimmed straw hat. She herself wears black. She puts down her burden, which consists of a big rattan basket and a petrol tin, and sends her daughter to the kitchen of the flats to collect the poles and sacking they are allowed to keep there. When the girl has brought them back, the mother begins to make a shelter against the sun. She sticks one pole in the earth, after which the child, darting to the top of an overhanging bank behind them, balances the other two poles across the intervening space, so that they meet in a fork at the top of the upright. They finish off the shelter with the sacking and an umbrella. The girl borrows a brush, and sweeps away the loose dust from underneath.
Now the mother, sitting on a low stool, puts on a hat fringed with black cloth that hangs down all round, and takes an enamel bowl out of the basket. She tips out three small chickens ; they run to and fro like rolling balls, scratching in the dirt. She then takes from the petrol-tin the few odds and ends that she has to sell, and arranges them in bowls. The tin also contains peanuts. Sitting under the shelter, she and the child wait in hope of buyers. There is traffic on the road now. Coolies in straw hats trot by with baskets of earth slung from their shoulders, on their way from some navvying job. Lorries snarl past with lean, brown-skinned labourers hanging over the sides. A big crane-truck clatters along on its way to Kai Tak airfield.
Down in the town, near the waterfront, the shops arc doing business. The homeless people who slept through the warm night under the colonnades have gone away ; the orphan shoe-blacks are sitting crouched under the shop-fronts chanting, " Soo-sine, soo- sine ! " in hopeless voices.. Behind them the windows glitter with goods—watches, lacquer, fancy cakes, coloured drinks warming in the sun. Thousands of wooden-soled sandals clatter over the pave- ments. But this is nothing to the scene across the water, in the back streets of Victoria, behind the smarter quarter where the Europeans, in white drill with sun-glasses, parade past the vast walls
of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank. Here the streets are narrower, broken by flights of steps, framed over by balconies full of washing, waved over by drooping banners splashed with ideographs, filled to the roof-tops with sounds and smells. Stalls bulge out into the roadway, loaded with flowers, fireworks or iced orangeade in glass tanks. Hawkers sit behind mats on which are spread buttons, Buddhist charms, statuettes and plastic belts. Men hurry past wearing white topces ; women shuffle along in floppy pyjamas. Chinese music hits you in blasts as you walk, surging out of the open fronts of a succession of dirty restaurants. A wealthy gentleman in a lounge suit is eased down some steps in a sedan chair, while the bearers shout to warn passers-by. The crowd parts as a great crate of greens, swinging on a surprisingly thin pole, lumbers by on its way to the market.
In the market the smell is appalling, yet fascinating. The ground is wet and black from hosing, and the water seems to reflect smell as a sounding-board reflects sound. It is a sharp, knife-edged smell which is basically that of the rotting outer leaves of vegetables, to which is added a bitter tang of fish and pigs. The fish arc sometimes dead ; sometimes alive in tanks and bowls. The pigs arc always alive. They lie in long, sausage-shaped baskets, their legs doubled up beneath them, unable to move. One sees the small red eyes peering between the rattan slivers, and the wrinkled snouts twitching.
When it is time for the mid-day meal, we can cat it in a restaurant where the air is refrigerated and the lady customers, Chinese and European, arc powdered to the same pale hue. Conversation is mostly in English ; one hears an occasional American or Continental accent. The lights are subdued ; electric fans turn lazily. We walk out into an oven-breath of hot, moist air. The well-known Hong- kong " humidity " has closed down. Perspiration pours from the skin, and clothes stick fast to the body. If you look at a man who is wearing no jacket, you can sec the sweat oozing through his shirt ; two long dark patches leading down from the shoulders over the chest, and another between his shoulder-blades.
It will be better to leave the town. We may, for instance, take a rattling tram through the long waterfront district of Wanchai, lined with dark, interesting shops and vividly-placarded cinemas. At the end of the tram-line stands a many-coloured pagoda that one secs plainly from a ship in the harbour. It has been built by a firm of patent-medicine manufacturers. One comes across advertisements for their product discreetly hidden within artificial caves. And at last evening comes, and the tiladows curl round the sides of the mountains. Out on the water spangles of light appear on board the warships and liners. Sampans glow with the brightness of hidden lamps in their caverns, lamps that seem to move surprisingly close to the water until one realises their source. In the Chinese quarter hawkers have lit their tapers, braziers and flares. In the European quarter heavy iron doors are being dragged across the entrances to the silk-stores and the jewellers' shops. A chain of lamps appears high up, strung out along the road across the Peak, far above Victoria.
In Kowloon the Chinese woman and her daughter have gone home long ago, but her son, who earns his living by carrying passengers on the padded carrier of a bicycle, is still at work. Beggars cluster round the lighted doors of the cafes, staring at the rice and the chop-suey, the poached eggs and the roast chicken. Under the colonnades the prostitutes begin to appear. Towards Kwantung, the mountains form a great wall of darkness.
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