Hong Kong culture dont miss it
my name is lindsay
i’m half british and half machines which
is a mix of chinese and portuguese
i have two passports and a bit of a
mixed up accent
but one thing i know for sure is that
hong kong
is my home now like me my parents also
grew up in hong kong
so as a young girl they wanted me to
experience
the real hong kong and have a more
authentically hong kong upbringing
so as young children they would take my
brother and i out on boats to see hong
kong’s outlying islands
to see local fishermen and women drying
their catch in the sun they would take
us to dai pai dong
hong kong’s outdoor eateries to try some
of the local delicacies
my favorite was always conchi with
thousand-year-old egg
groceries in our family were always
bought from the local wet markets where
the live
fish chicken and frogs never fazed me
my mom would always encourage me to
speak as much cantonese as possible with
the market workers
and to learn all the names of the
different fish and different cuts of
meat
but as i grew up i noticed more and more
of these markets
these stores and the people that run
them disappearing
dai pai dong were closing down wet
markets were being replaced by
supermarkets
shoe shiners were being cleared off the
street to make way for a new fancy
shopping malls
and even the little old man who sold
white decorative flowers from a paper
tray around his neck
was gone and they were gone forever
it was then that i realized that i
wanted to document these people
their industries and their stories
before it was too late
because for me they represented the real
hong kong
that my parents had referred to
as i started looking beyond hong kong’s
city skyline
and the fancy facade that it’s become so
famous for
i discovered a whole host of these
traditional industries
and these artisans none of them were
selling modern day essentials like
iphones or wireless headphones or
speakers
these were people handcrafting
bamboo bird cages bamboo dim sum
steamers
these people were face threaders knife
sharpeners
fortune tellers and more to me
these were the people that my my family
had recognized from their childhood
these were the people that i recognized
from mine
these people were running these sunset
industries as they’re called
which are industries that are
disappearing or fading away
like the sunset despite all the odds
despite the many changes that hong kong
has gone through they had persisted
so i decided to call them the sunset
survivors and to me
they represented the real hong kong and
made this city so special
and really contributed to its
wonderfully unique
cultural identity i spent the next
three years visiting different
traditional artisans
and craftsmen and women around hong kong
to get to know a bit more about their
industries and their stories
and i’d like to share a few of their
stories with you today
first up i’d like you to meet mr long
low yik
today mr loan sits shirtless and sweaty
in a dark corner of the yao mate jade
market
once in their hundreds he is now one of
just
six remaining letter writers in the city
letter writers were once in huge demand
in fact
in the 50s and 60s of hong kong there
was a literacy rate of just 60 percent
so there was a huge part of the
population that relied on the assistance
of letter writers
to help them correspond with relatives
friends or family
overseas in mainland china or elsewhere
they also relied on meteorites to help
them write employment contracts
or applications for government welfare
and not just hong kong people but even
british sailors
required the help of letter writers to
help them write
love letters for the women that they’d
fallen in love with
in hong kong soil mr learn
tells me that he refused to write any
sordid love letters between british
sailors and local hong kong prostitutes
though
he assures me of that
mr long is originally from vietnam where
he worked as an account secretary for
columbia pictures
he came to hong kong in the 1970s to
escape war
in search of a better life and he worked
here as a bartender
he can speak five different languages he
speaks
vietnamese he quickly picked up
cantonese and mandarin after coming to
hong kong
he taught himself english from reading
the scripts that used to land on his
deaths get his old job
and he also speaks absolutely fluent
french
being from vietnam so you can imagine my
surprise when in the middle of this
very traditional jade market in hong
kong there’s this little old man
hunched over a typewriter speaking to me
in french
he has never used a computer a day in
his life
and continues to use the 50 year old
typewriter
that he’s always owned mainly
because the carbon paper is much cheaper
than any
in cartridge you would need for a
printer today
as the number of illiterate people in
hong kong decrease
due to compulsory education and other
factors
letter writer’s work decreased too
today in his 80s mr lung is well aware
of the decline of his industry
and he rarely writes letters for anyone
anymore most days
he simply reads the newspaper at his
store and passes the time
the government no longer issues licenses
for letter writers in hong kong mr lone
said to me
it is essential for any society to
improve with time
there must be some jobs that are
replaced or even eliminated
and i think we are one of them
now next up i’d like to introduce you to
master chan lok choi
master chan is the very last bamboo bird
cage craftsman
in hong kong he started to make bamboo
bird cages at just 13 years old
today he works in the yun po bird garden
in prince edward
surrounded by thousands of different
types of birds and insects
it takes him roughly two months to build
a bird cage from scratch
he has learnt to delicately bend each
bamboo rod into place
to drill tiny holes in the base of the
bird cage to fit the bamboo rods into
he paints them engraves them
each bird cage he makes is completely
unique and handcrafted
he is a self-proclaimed perfectionist he
tells me
of course today factories in china and
elsewhere can produce these bird cages
at a much faster rate
and they are much cheaper too than mr
chan’s
handcrafted version struggling with the
competition
so much today he finds it very difficult
to find anybody that asks him to build a
bird cage
so mainly he just helps people fix their
bird cages rather than makes new ones
most days he says he just goes to his
stall again
to pass the time and give him something
to do with his life
along with factories challenging master
chan’s work he has also battled with the
changing of cultural traditions
whilst it used to be very common to see
typically elderly chinese men in hong
kong’s parks early in the morning
taking their birds for a walk in their
cages hanging them in the trees whilst
they sit
underneath reading a newspaper or
playing marshall
this tradition was largely damped
dampened by about a bird flu in hong
kong
and today a lot less people wish to keep
live birds in their home
master chen is incredibly proud to be
hong kong’s last bird cage maker
and whilst he was not sad that his own
shop or he would pass away
he was most concerned that the art and
the skill
the ancient practice of bird birdcage
making
would be lost from hong kong forever
i would love to have an apprentice he
told me
but no one with a school education seems
interested
in learning these handicraft skills
anymore
now the next person i would like to
introduce you to
is master ao yong ping chi and his job
might not be immediately obvious to all
of you
he is in fact a paper effigy maker
now there’s a common belief in chinese
religion that when someone closes
close to you passes away you can burn
these paper recreations of real-life
material objects
that they will be received in the
afterlife as offerings and gifts to your
deceased relative
master alyong is the fourth generation
owner of his family business
and is incredibly proud what he and his
family does for a living
his job involves delicately banding
bamboo rods
covering them in joss paper painting
them
to make them look incredibly life-like
and incredibly alike to the real life
objects which they are imitating
each effigy can take weeks to make and
can cost
thousands of hong kong dollars to buy
in the past a simple pair of shoes
perhaps a mansion
or a servant for the afterlife would
suffice
but today the majority of items that he
gets requested to make
are you may have guessed it
iphones ipads gucci handbags and prada
boots
these are the order of the day
and not just iphones and electronics too
but even the charges
mr ao young told me that he spent a lot
of his time
hand making these beautifully
sort of paper mache iphone chargers
with so many requests for iphones and
ipads
china’s factories opened up to this
market too and started producing
not the beautifully crafted paper
creations that mr alyong makes
but cardboard nets that you can fold
into these objects
much quicker and much cheaper of course
so today master ambassador young focuses
mainly
on the more unique and more intricate
requests that he gets asked me
in fact he has made a life-size massage
chair
he has made an electric guitar
he has made even a nintendo game console
which you can see here
you can see how incredibly realistic and
lifelike these objects are
in this picture the game console on the
left
is real the game console on the right
is the paper recreation that master ao
young has done
so you can see just how incredibly
realistic these objects look
after our chat about how materialistic
the world had become
i asked master alion what he might want
when he passes away
when i die he says i would like some
cars
houses and a hi-fi system a super deluxe
seven foot long mercedes-benz and
porsche
will do whilst it made me chuckle
i also learned that the main aim was to
keep the deceased relative
up to date with modern society so that
they didn’t lose touch
so perhaps it made sense after all
so often we wait too long to appreciate
things
it’s often tragically only after the
death of a grandparent
that we come up with a thousand
questions that we’d wish we asked them
we can’t force people to continue these
age-old traditional industries
their demise like all things is
inevitable
pushed out by rising rents replaced by
modern technology and a change of
cultural beliefs
and the main thing a total lack of
willing successes
these industries will vanish from hong
kong
because be honest how many of you
want to become bird cage makers and work
very long days for minimal pay for the
rest of your lives
with your 14 years with your seven to 14
years worth of education
i would imagine very few of you
even the people that i interviewed the
face threaders the shoe shiners the
many of them in their 80s and 90s none
of them wanted their children to follow
suit
they were incredibly proud that their
children had gone to school had gone to
university
and would not have to live the difficult
lives that they had led
we’re not losing hong kong culture hong
kong culture is all around us
but ever evolving hong kong culture is
everything from
going for dim sum with your family to
crazy cab drivers
to modern buildings alongside ancient
temples and ferries
it’s knowing to hand your business card
over with two hands and not one
it’s a place where burping out loud is
completely acceptable in public
we’re not losing hong kong culture it’s
evolving
but certain parts are disappearing so my
message
is this let’s get out let’s recognize
respect and
celebrate these old industries for their
contribution to hong kong’s unique
cultural identity i urge you
to reconnect to old traditions to
explore
your own city and embrace your own
culture and identity
because to me this is the real hong kong
not in a museum not in a textbook
but right here right now so don’t miss
it
thank you