Hong Kong (18 page)

But there is nothing remarkable to it. It is the norm.

The Chinese population of Hong Kong is young, a quarter of it less than twenty-four years old, and it exudes a curious mixture of fun and earnestness. In the New Town of Yuen Long I once came across a bubble-tent, with windows in it and a guard outside. An odd kind of whistling noise emanated from it, half-way between a hoot and a protracted squeak. I looked through the windows and found it to contain a trampoline, upon which a large number of very small Chinese children were bouncing up and down. They did it not casually, nor wildly either, but with a fierce concentration, as though they were undertaking some important family duty, but at the same time they were doing it with such extreme enjoyment that the peculiar noise I had heard outside turned out to be a kind of constant solidification of their laughter.

I spend a few minutes with my notebook at a Chinese café – not one of the well-known tea-houses, which are sometimes frowsty or aloof, but a common-or-garden,
ad hoc
kind of general café, not very new, not very old, and almost anywhere in Hong Kong outside the expensive centre. I sit in a corner below the television set, thus obliging other customers to show their faces as they peer at the picture above my head, and order a cup of tea as an excuse for observation. Nobody minds. On the contrary, almost everyone greets me with smiles, the men behind the counter with grave smiles, the young women at their bean-curd with comradely smiles, the small girls with smiles that entail a deliberate, stylized narrowing of the eyes, the boys in their school uniforms with very polite, diffident and prefectorial smiles (are they members of their class Triad group?).

Sickly is the music, chirpy the Cantonese dialogue that emerges from
above me. Sometimes the whole café breaks into laughter, and nods cheerfully in my direction as though to say that I really am missing something hilarious. Only the man at the corner table, who wears a jerkin inscribed
ROUTE SAISONAL GIRL CORRESPONDENCE
, and is reading the
Jockey Daily News
in Chinese, takes no notice. The counter is piled high with packets of tissues, a tin of Ovaltine, and a cardboard box marked
SHOWA SPAGHETTI
which is waiting to be turned into Chinese noodles. A couple of rather sinister youths push through the door, have a dour word with the owner, and go out again. An old, old man, the very image of a sage, creeps in and finds himself a warm place; he has a long crinkled Confucianist beard, very beady eyes, carries a walking stick with an ivory handle and wears a baseball cap.

As time passes the noise increases. The schoolboys break into argument. The small girls play merry games with chopsticks. The women talk very loudly with their mouths full. Outside the door an electric drill starts up, and the café owner reaches over my head to turn up the volume of the TV. It does not matter in the least. Noise is endemic to the Chinese, is part of the texture of their lives, and the now-deafening variety of affairs in the café is a true microcosm of the Chinese city outside. The frank untidiness of the establishment, its free-and-easy way, the feeling that it has not been there very long anyway, and may well have moved somewhere else next time I pass this way, is Chinese Hong Kong all over.

Yet there are Chinese families that can claim twenty-seven generations of residence upon the soil of Hong Kong. If the western presence here has been radical in most ways, it has been conservative in others. Elsewhere in China, including even Taiwan, the ancient Daoist, Buddhist, Confucianist and animist ideas have been challenged by three revolutions. The revolution of 1911, which overthrew the monarchy, laid emphasis upon western logic and efficiency, discouraged many an old tradition, and deliberately cut ties of custom that linked the people with the imperial dynasties. The Communist revolution of 1949 suppressed Daoism and most of its manifestations, discredited Confucianism and Buddhism and disintegrated the entire social structure. The Cultural Revolution of the 1960s did its mad best to extinguish everything old and interesting altogether.

The one corner of China which has completely escaped these convulsions
is paradoxically Hong Kong. The British promised from the start to honour Chinese custom, and by and large they did. Long after the abolition of the traditional marriage laws in China, for example, the Manchu laws prevailed in Hong Kong, so that into the 1930s married women could not sue for divorce and had no property rights whatever. Until quite recently the colony even allowed Chinese defendants the right to have their cases heard under Chinese customary law, a baffling prospect for young British magistrates who knew nothing whatever about it (though the writer Austin Coates, who was one of them, was quite happy when the Chinese system was invoked, knowing, he said, nothing whatever about English law either).
¹⁰
It is true that the predominant official language of Hong Kong has always been English, but this has only left affairs more firmly in the hands of local elders determined to preserve the status quo: even now the New Territories, for all their fantastically burgeoning townships, offer rich fields of research for anthropologists and social historians.

On the surface, and in the tourist brochures, all this means that Chineseness in its most fantastic forms is honoured in the everyday life of this British colony. Hardly a month goes by without the celebration of some effervescent festival. Wild dragon-boat races are rowed, the full moon is honoured with picnics in high places, the spirits of the dead are placated with five-course meals in cemeteries, flotillas of toy ships with candles on them are launched into the sea, immense dragon-trains wind their way through shopping streets, and at the Chinese New Year the entire city gives itself up to eating, drinking, parading, lighting lanterns, exploding illegal firecrackers and saying to one another in Chinese in the best Hong Kong convention, ‘Respectfully hope you get rich!’

Some of the shrines and memorials of tradition have long since become tourist attractions. Everyone climbs the 500 steps to the Buddhist Temple of Man Fat, above the New Town of Shatin in the New Territories, to see the gilded corpse of the holy monk Yuet Kai; he died in 1965, and now sits bolt upright for ever in a tall glass case, covered in gold leaf and looking alert but blotched with what I assume to be preservative. Then high among the hills of Lantau is the immensely rich and gaudy Buddhist monastery of Po Lin, which is besieged all day by tourist buses. Its large enclosure contains
computerized offices and a popular vegetarian restaurant, and beside its gates they have erected the largest of all images of the Buddha; this was made in China by the satellite and rocket manufacturers China Astronomical Industry Scientific and Consultative Corporation, and looms copper-sheathed over the island as a new wonder of the world.
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Since Victorian times every visitor has been taken to the Man Mo temple (‘the Civil and Martial temple’), which is about as old as the colony itself, and is a dim-lit, smoky, gilded, cluttered and cheerful distillation of everything one supposes a Chinese temple to be. And for so long have sightseers frequented the Tang clan’s walled village of Kat Hing Wai, at Kam Tin in the New Territories, that it has become hardly more than a permanent exhibition. Its inhabitants are descended from Tang Fu-hip, who settled in the district in the eleventh century, but shoddy souvenirs now fill the shops within its narrow geometric streets, children demand payment for having their photographs taken, and outside its gates dreadful old women in traditional costume, smoking traditional pipes, pose beneath umbrellas for profitable effect.

Among all these spectacular public manifestations, let us choose one to suggest the flavour of them all: the festival of Ta Chiu on the island of Cheung Chau, which is not only among the most popular of Chinese celebrations, but a red-letter event on the tourist calendar too, when half the launches, ferries, sampans and private junks in Hong Kong are pressed into service to take the gweilos to see the show. It is dedicated to the Pacification of Departed Spirits, including those of animals, and in former times during its celebration the people of Cheung Chau forbore from eating any kind of flesh.
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The festival happens every year some time during the fourth moon, but the exact date is variable and apparently unpredictable, making it an unsatisfactory occasion for the organizers of package tours.

Cheung Chau is about two and a half miles long from end to end, and used to be called Dumbell Island because of its shape. There are no cars on it, and it consists largely of a single cramped and crowded fishing-town, extending from one shore to the other. For the three days of Ta Chiu it is entirely given over to the festival, as Rio de Janeiro gives itself up to Mardi Gras. Chinese operas are performed in the
town square, dragon-dancers display themselves, and on the afternoon of the third day a marvellous procession weaves its way through the sinuous streets. There are banner-men, lion-dancers, stick-dancers, percussion bands, all strangely dominated by elaborately dressed and heavily made-up small children, apparently balanced magically on the tops of poles or the handles of axes; stalking stately above the crowds, they are really held up there with wires and struts, but look so permanently immobile, so artificial and so rigid, that they are rather like the monk Yuet Kai in his container.

The grand climax occurs later that evening, in the compound of a foreshore temple. This is dedicated to the Daoist divinity Pak Tai, Supreme Emperor of the Dark Heaven, and is the island’s chief institution. Before the Second World War, according to the District Officer of the time, its finances were ‘inextricably mixed with those of the market, the ferry, and the electric light station’, and it is still the focus of various social, charitable and community associations, and contains wonderful things like swordfish beaks, and ancient swords, and armour, and signed photographs of English royalty.

There at the sea’s edge the procession is welcomed by some strange constructions – four fat pillars, half-illuminated in the twilight, sixty feet high and each made entirely of some 5,000 half-pound buns. No wonder Europeans call this the Bun Festival. The towers stand there enigmatic against the night sky, offering sustenance it is supposed to the spirits beyond; but when midnight comes, and a priest has inspected the pillars through a jade monocle to make sure the ghosts have done, young men climb up there and take all the buns down, one by one, like corn coming off the cob, for distribution to the villagers. People keep them in airtight jars, and bits of them soaked in tea or water are said to be remedies for several ailments.

Such are the more publicized signs of Chinese tradition in Hong Kong, but in fact no announcements are necessary. It must be obvious to the least sensitive foreign visitor that in this territory we are experiencing the presence of a culture all-pervasive, all-enduring; despite the symbiotic overlap we earlier observed, fundamentally it seems oblivious to history.

In a thousand ways old tastes, habits and techniques resist all challenge. Here in the heartland of the solar-powered calculator, where virtually every household has a television set, and every schoolboy can
write a computer program, the abacus is still a common commercial instrument. Skyscrapers go up in frameworks of bamboo scaffolding. Chinese harmonics easily withstand the assaults of rock and European classical music. The clatter of mah-jong, which the Chinese have been playing in one form or another since the Song dynasty, is still far more common a sound than the ping of electronic games. Side by side with the western calendar the lunar calendar is observed, and everyone in Hong Kong knows what Chinese year it is (1997 is the Year of the Ox).

After 140 years place-names often resist westernization. To Chinese people Stanley is still Chek Chu, as it was before the British came, Aberdeen is still Hong Kong Tsai, Little Hong Kong, and Mount Davis Road is Moh Sing Ling To, the Hill From Which We Can Touch The Stars. Into our own times the Chinese have called the Governor of Hong Kong Ping Tao, ‘Military Chief’, and the Botanical Gardens, across the road from his palace, are still known as Ping Tao Fa Yuen, Military Chiefs Flower Garden. As for Chinese personal names, they defy all western practice still, since in the course of a lifetime a Hong Kong Chinese may have five or six different aliases – milk name in babyhood, proper name in childhood, school name, class name, business name, marriage name …

The Chinese of Hong Kong have a powerful aptitude for belief. They believe in gods and ghosts, signs and auguries, and supernatural faiths of one kind or another permeate every facet of the territory, ranging from sophisticated theological dogma to everyday superstition – the small mirrors so often to be seen hanging outside shops and houses are not there for decoration, but to ward off evil spirits. Half a million Hong Kong Chinese are Christians or Muslims, but many, many more are Daoists, Buddhists or animists, and many pursue an eclectically layered combination of religions – what Peter Fleming once called ‘the marzipan effect’.
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The gods of their pantheon, not so much worshipped as supplicated for favours, are innumerable – monkey gods, sea gods, earth gods, kitchen gods, martial gods, water gods, gods of affluence, of mercy, of happiness, of justice, of long life, of wisdom, of literary aptitude and conversely of wealth. When in 1980 the New Territories village of Fanling held a festival, seventy-eight different divinities were honoured; houses and apartments have private shrines to their own hearth gods, and almost anywhere you may come across the gypsy-like little sanctuary of stones, ribbons, red paper and
candle stumps which marks a holy site of animism, with a couple of elderly ladies perhaps fiddling around with joss-sticks, or pulling cabalistic papers out of carrier bags.

Nor are these mere rural archaisms. The most thoroughly urbanized parts of Hong Kong are among the most powerfully religious. Many small Buddhist hermitages, sometimes housing a single holy man, are actually on upper floors of high-rise blocks, and the best-known of the myriad urban temples are as thronged as supermarkets – look in at any time of day, and there will be the caretakers at their dusty desks, surrounded by holy texts and pictures, and before the gaudy altars women will be shaking the
chim
, the box of bamboo fortune-sticks, while incense smokes, bells tinkle and the blackened god-images peer down from their altars. The vivacious temple of Wong Tai Sin, rebuilt in the grand manner in 1973, serves the new residential quarters of eastern Kowloon, and is surrounded by tower-blocks. Used mainly as an oracle for the foretelling of the future, it is a positive powerhouse of the transcendental: bright with colour, attended by arcades of soothsayers and charm-sellers, with occasional flute-players too, haunted by beggars with tin cups and conveniently served by an adjacent station of the underground railway. The fortune-sticks that fall from your
chim
are interpreted for you by the soothsayers, and if they recommend a prescription for some ailment, you can get it made up at the temple’s own clinic.