Much has changed in Hong Kong since Your Girl Reporter departed this fair city in 1987, but its beating heart is as strong and vibrant as it ever was. It’s good to be home. “Congratulations,” the agent said, as he handed me the keys to our flat. “You’re a Lamma girl again.” Yes, Your Girl Reporter is now filing from Lamma Island – just a few hundred yards from where I first struck out into independent living back in the early 1980s.
Regular viewers will know that at the end of March 2018 I left my native Australia to return to Hong Kong, the city where I grew up. I arrived with my family in 1967 and lived here for 20 years. I did not in my wildest dreams expect to be living here again.
The first month back in Hong Kong has been a disconcerting clash of the very familiar and the utterly new. But it was delightful to fall in, without a thought, to the pace of the crowds.
Hong Kong does not rush. It moves at an almost leisurely amble, with people forming currents around trolleys laden with goods or garbage, the elderly and the smokers gathered around the bright orange bins.
Mo man tai – no worries – we’ll all get to our destination in good time. And, along the way, there’s still time for a joke and a smile, a chat to a stranger, a pause for a street snack and, for Your Girl Reporter, the odd moment of reflection.
I have been walking, sometimes with purpose but often not. The streetscape holds little to guide my feet – gone are most of the familiar landmarks, while the few remaining are dwarfed and bedazzled by glittering towers crammed with the latest in luxury labelled goods.
There’s nowhere easier to buy your designer fashions and your gold watches, but where these days can you get a good bowl of wonton noodles? An early success out at Sai Kung lulled Your Girl Reporter into thinking nothing had really changed.
Food has been an obvious casualty of Hong Kong’s extraordinary growth surge in my absence. There’s still plenty of it about but finding the simple street food that was once a staple of every district in the city has become a challenge.
I’m told this is the result of soaring rents and changing tastes. Milk tea and instant noodles are an easy find, but the more traditional noodle shops and roast meat dai pai dongs have been relentlessly squeezed into back streets and alleyways and a thick-walled glass of hot black tea is no longer a prerequisite.
The most surreal of my walks was a meandering one which began with some official business in Wanchai. With no familiar sights to guide me, I had to turn to my mobile to find out whether to turn left or right for Central. Trust me, it doesn’t get much more basic than that.
And yet, once I got my bearings I took a sure-footed ramble into Central, up to Hollywood Road for a poke around the antiques and then decided to head down, through ladder streets and winding back ways, to the Wing On department store at the western end of Des Voeux Road.
It’s 30 years since I’ve wandered around that area and yet I was just one street off when I hit the main drag, with my destination in sight. Mo man tai.
I was shopping for bedding and towels for our new home in one of Lamma Island’s oldest villages. Wing On is where I sourced my first ever stock of household goods, so it was the obvious place to go. It was closer to the ferry in those days but it’s the ferry terminal which has moved, not the department store.
There has been quite a bit of retracing of old steps in recent weeks. I have not gone too far out of my way in search of the past. My goal has been to familiarise myself with Hong Kong as she is now, but the past keeps popping up and nowhere more so than on Lamma.
It’s a conqueror’s conceit to think that history begins with the planting of a flag – my home country Australia is still in an embarrassing struggle with that one. Similarly, in Hong Kong it can be tempting to think that its story begins with the Opium Wars and the ceding of this pretty harbour to the British in 1842.
In fact, here on the north-western end of Lamma, not far from where I sit, archaeologists have found relics dating back to the New Stone Age. Some of these old villages have been here since time immemorial, home to generations of farmers and fishing folk.
The farming is largely gone, the fields turned to a crazy patchwork of two and three storey buildings unblessed by the benefits of town planning, and the fishing fleet much diminished.
The main street of Yung Shue Wan is crammed with bars and pizza places. You’re as likely to meet a family of professional Europeans with their children and ‘helper’ – as servants are called these days – as a local.
But through the window comes the sound of drums and cymbals as a lion dance progresses through the narrow streets. Cabbages and lettuces hang in doorways to attract the attention of the lion as it passes and win a blessing for the household on this, the birthday of Tin Hau, Queen of Heaven and beloved protector of fishing folk and all those who live by the sea.
Through all the changes in Hong Kong’s recent history the old ways continue just as they always have. The offerings are burning in old petrol containers on the village streets, the red and gold incense sticks fill the air with their perfume and at little shrines all over this island the young still bow three times as they pay their respects to the generations who came before them.
Whatever the next few months should bring, there will be much that’s new and unfamiliar. But I’m an island girl again and it’s good to know that some things about home are the same as they ever were.
Oh those memories. beautifully portrayed