Street Scene in Hong Kong

New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 134, 16 January 1942, Page 2

Street Scene in Hong Kong

ONG KONG is easy to live in and hard to forget. My memories of it will always be largely of Chinese things and people; of wealth and poverty, beauty and squalor, life, gaiety and wretchedness; of half-naked children, bright and _ healthy, Sprawling across the pavements, and at night destitute refugees sleeping on the same pavements, wrapped inadequately’ in

shabby rags of bedding. It is a city where people live out on the street, and shops spread out on to the pavement. I remember an old man being fitted for his coffin in a shop in Hong Kong; lying down in it and wriggling’ his shoulders uncomfortably, as though saying that he wouldn't have room to breathe in it. Wonderful manual dexterity is

taken for granted amongst the Chinese. You may see a pear-seller in the street pick up a pear from his tray with the point of a knife, toss it im the air and catch it again between two knives, and then peel it by spinning it between them. Children stood round my. feet as I watched him, the peel sliding curling down over his thin brown wrists; peeled and clean the pear is tossed in the air again, and caught on the point of a knife, untouched by hand. I remember the ivory-carvers patiently drilling those globes that in time show nine globes one within the other, and all free to move. I remember the way life crowds out on the pavements, where c@bblers squat under a square of canvas, a board on a nail over their head telling their name; where tinkers and china repairers work on the pavement, or chair coolies play a kind of domino game with little cards, the happiest and the poorest working men I know.-(" Hong Kong." A National Service talk prepared by Rev. David Rosenthall. 2Y A, December '23.)