Lau Wing Kwong

Before he got married in 1957, Lau Wing Kwong lived in Fung Wong Terrace in Wan Chai. After his wedding, the newlyweds moved to To Kwa Wan to make life easier for Mrs. Lau who worked at Wyler Spinners. Before the move to To Kwa Wan, Lau Wing Kwong had been working at the Naval Dockyard at Admiralty for several years. While the dockyard did have a staff dormitory, rooms there were reserved for foreigners’ accommodation only. The main departments of the dockyard back then included Machinery, Shipbuilding and Maintenance. Lau Wing Kwong worked in Maintenance where he was responsible for vessels’ non-machinery repair earning a monthly salary and living allowance of around HK$200.

Lau Wing Kwong and his wife eventually found a sub-divided unit at No. 44 Kowloon City Road, near To Kwa Wan Municipal Services Building. They found their new home by looking at street bills. Back then, almost every lamppost and building wall was full of such notices. The second floor unit where he and his wife made their home consisted of an area of approximately 1,000 square feet with a total of five rooms each totaling about 60 square feet. The members of the various households all shared a communal toilet and kitchen. Lau Wing Kwong’s family rented a middle room from the principal tenant for a monthly rent of roughly HK$50. After moving to To Kwa Wan, he needed to get up at 6:00 am every day to cross the harbour to get to his job at the shipyard. After waking up, he set off from home, walking for about five minutes to Kowloon City Ferry Pier. After taking the cross harbour ferry, he arrived at the dockyard at around 7:30 am.

With his employer’s support and sponsorship, Lau Wing Kwong attended classes at Hong Kong Technical College (“HKTC”) (now Hong Kong Polytechnic University) in Wan Chai. As a result, he studied Mechanical Engineering for three evenings a week after work. Lau Wing Kwong was enrolled at the college for a total of seven years, only eventually abandoning his studies following the college’s 1957 move to Hung Hom. Since he had to leave home for work so early in the morning and only returned home around 9:00 or 10:00 pm after his evening course, Lau Wing Kwong had virtually no chance to get to know his neighbours. Barely even knowing their names, the best he could do was exchange the briefest of greetings and pleasantries when he bumped into them.

After living in Kowloon City Road for about two years, Lau Wing Kwong decided that the poor air quality and serious overcrowding problems there meant it was high time he and his wife moved to a new home. Street bills once again helped point the pair to a new apartment – this time on the fourth floor of No. 36 Tin Kwong Road. Their new home was located in an old-style four-storey building near Ma Tau Wai Road. The ventilation was good and shared by just three households, the unit was less crowded. As a result, his family’s new residence was far more spacious than before while the rent remained more or less the same as in their previous home. After living in Tin Kwong Road for about a year, Lau Wing Kwong and his loved ones moved to the Thirteen Streets area. (Editor’s note: Lau Wing Kwong was born in Xinhui, Guangdong in 1931 before coming to Hong Kong after the end of World War II.)

After Lau Wing Kwong and his first child was born in 1960, he decided to buy rather than continue to rent accommodation. The completion of the buildings in the Thirteen Streets area coincided with the emergence of the trend for selling property ownership through undivided shares. Lau Wing Kwong therefore spent about HK$13,000 to buy a 500-square-foot unit at No. 13-15 Fung Yi Street. The family chose a top floor flat, as Lau Wing Kwong thought that ventilation was better at the upper levels and that the flat’s interiors there were brighter as sunlight could directly shine in through the windows. More attractively still, the higher the floor where a unit was located, the lower its price. At first, just two or three households moved into the building. Having a home with a rectangular layout, Lau Wing Kwong used wooden boards to partition their apartment into two rooms of around 50 to 60 square feet each. As the unit had a ceiling height of 9 feet, he made a point of leaving a gap between it and the partition to make everyone feel more comfortable.

Initially, the family used a kerosene stove in the kitchen for cooking, later switching to LPG and eventually mains gas. Lau Wing Kwong pointed out that at that time residents in the Thirteen Streets area who wanted to use mains gas had to pay a high fee for having their homes connected. As a result, people back then tended to use kerosene or LPG. Families who wanted to enjoy a steady supply of water had to pay a deposit with the Water Supplies Department upon registration. Lau Wing Kwong subsequently hired an electrical company so the family could use electrical appliances at home, also applying for the installation of an electricity meter at the same time. In those days, residents only rarely turned on their lights because electricity was relatively expensive. Lau Wing Kwong remembers now that residents who wanted to install a telephone line back then had to go through the ‘back door’ by paying extra money to the telephone company’s staff. If applicants were honest and applied through the normal channels, it would take a very long time to complete the necessary formalities.

Knowing around 80% of those living in his building, Lau Wing Kwong enjoyed pretty good relationships with his neighbours. That said, he was not very well acquainted with residents of the building’s rear as he had far less time to socialise with them. Back then, numerous buildings in the neighbourhood had an interlinking roof. Although such areas’ utilisation was not high, residents sometimes liked to climb up there to enjoy the cool breeze or chat with their friends. During Mid-Autumn festivals, families often gathered on the rooftop while children played under the full moon. As Lau Wing Kwong seldom returned home from work until around 9:00 or 10:00 pm, he rarely enjoyed the chance to unwind like this while her mother had more opportunities to go up to the rooftop in the evening. Originally she did not live with the couple, but moved in to take care of their child after Lau Wing Kwong bought the flat.

While Lau Wing Kwong was acquainted with many of his neighbours, he knew little about their background except their surnames. In those days, there was a high turnover of owners and a large property transaction volume. As a result, some 90% of his neighbours were owners with very few tenants actually renting apartments. Almost every unit in the building had changed owners four or five times. By the time Lau Wing Kwong moved out in 2010, he was unique in that he was the only resident who had lived there for nearly 50 years. Back then, buildings in the Thirteen Streets area had only suite-type flats with no sub-divided units. Around 90% of these flats were occupied by one family. Only in recent years did Lau Wing Kwong find sub-divided units appearing in the area. At first he thought this was due to ordinary renovation works, but he later found out that owners were raising their flat’s floor to accommodate the ducting for the toilets in each sub-divided unit. Only then did he learn the apartments were being split. (Editor’s note: Each sub-divided flat had its own toilet).

In the early days, law and order in the Thirteen Streets area was never a problem. The situation began to deteriorate in the 1970s and 1980s with frequent robberies. Most were carried out by youths called ‘garage boys’ who used iron bars as weapons to terrify those they robbed. When gang members attacked Thirteen Streets’ residents, they used their bars to violently choke their victims within an inch of their lives. These crooks mainly struck between 2:00 and 3:00 pm – the quietest time of the day. Gold chains were their main targets. To counter the growing threat, residents began installing iron gates at buildings’ entrances and roofs. Only then did security improve. Lau Wing Kwong remembers he never saw a robbery personally but knew neighbours who lived opposite to his flat had been at the receiving end of thieves’ attentions.

There used to be a small floor-level church just beneath Lau Wing Kwong’s unit. The area was also home to a kindergarten of about 1,000 sq. ft. whose combination of units at the end of Fung Yi Street his children used to attend. This was just one of two or three such neighbouring kindergartens. Both the church and kindergartens eventually gave way to factories and garages. Once while he was walking past a neighbouring plastic flower plant, Lau Wing Kwong ran into the night school teacher who had taught him mathematics. It turned out the teacher eventually went on to become an engineer there.

In the 1970s, street-level businesses in the Thirteen Streets area were mainly small factories which made moulds and pressed plastic flowers. Some plants even rented units on buildings’ first floors. In addition to factories, the area also boasted several ground-floor electrical appliance repair shops and grocery stores. Since rentable units were not large, most employers simply used them to house machinery and not many workers would stay there. As these factories needed a lot of workers, Thirteen Streets’ residents sometimes took the chance to earn extra money by working there. More enterprising locals even used to take the plastic flowers home for assembly or cutting threads for clothes. Despite the chance to earn extra money, Lau Wing Kwong’s wife and mother never worked at such places. By the 1980s, the Thirteen Streets area was full of garages, with roughly 80% of all street-level shops servicing vehicles. Back then, such facilities often sold illegal diesel oil which many taxi drivers bought to save costs by evading tax. Such petrol was highly flammable and thus very dangerous. As a result, sellers tended to be quickly arrested by the police.

In the 1980s, residents in Fung Yi Street began to pay more attention to the safety of their buildings by urging the installation of iron gates at entrances. Due to his work commitments, Lau Wing Kwong was spared from having to install such gates early on. When many owners subsequently moved out, he began taking up more and more responsibilities such as changing light bulbs and gate locks. Every time the main lock was changed, Lau Wing Kwong faced the headache of having to duplicate at least 28 new keys – one for each unit in the building. Later on, he proposed simply changing back to previously-used cylinders when locks were replaced in order to minimise hassles for residents. As Lau Wing Kwong had to combine these new responsibilities with his regular job, his wife who had more time at home began to undertake the tasks herself. Specific examples included paying in advance for the cost of light bulbs and then collecting the money back from individual householders. At the beginning, he collected two dollars in petty cash from each family, but this payment was increased following the advice of his building management affairs colleagues. The collection schedule was also changed from monthly to twice-yearly. Unless large repair projects were required, receipts were seldom issued to residents at time of payment. As many householders tried their hardest to default, Lau Wing Kwong sometimes had to knock on their doors several times before successfully recovering the money. If a resident had moved out, he sometimes even had to settle a payment out of his own pocket.

In those days, residential buildings used to have a light bulb at the corner of each floor. This meant there was a total of around seven light bulbs in each building. Frequent replacement was required as roughly one light bulb, costing HK$4-5 each, packed up every month. The situation improved after fluorescent tubes were introduced later on. Lau Wing Kwong was also responsible for switching on and off each light, having to turn on the lights at 4:00 pm each afternoon and switch them off again at 8:00 am the following morning. Some buildings used to turn their lights off at around 12:00 midnight to save money. Before the installation of an automatic switch, it was necessary for either Lau Wing Kwong or his wife to make special arrangements to turn on the lights each afternoon.

Back then, Lau Wing Kwong’s neighbours had considered forming an Owners’ Corporation (“OC”). That said, there were many matters they had no knowledge of and had to be careful about as they might even have to take up legal liability. As a result, the formation was left unresolved. When the building was later in need of repair, Lau Wing Kwong and another third-floor resident who shared his enthusiasm about management affairs felt no OC-type organisation could handle the matter. They therefore passed the work over to the Buildings Department (“BD”). The BD not only failed to send people to handle the renovation issues, they told residents that they had no right to interfere when they complained. Having sought the assistance of District Council (“DC”) members, residents decided to refuse to let BD staff handle the renovations and formed an OC instead. By this point, it was already 2010. The building’s small number of residents had almost never hosted any kind of social activity because they were all so busy with their daily lives. Activities – where there were any – were organised by groups such as the Federation of Trade Unions (“FTU”). Response to these initiatives was lukewarm at best. In the old days when Lau Wing Kwong was working, he had thrown parties with several colleagues, but never joined in activities while he lived in the Thirteen Street area.

As the Thirteen Streets area was a warren of factories and slaughterhouses, it had always been regarded as offering a poor environment in which to raise a family. Lau Wing Kwong pointed out that with different wind directions, different smells would be blown into his flat. Breezes from the Southeast would bring in gassy smells and the stench of slaughterhouse cow dung. When gusts blew from the West, he and his family would struggle to breathe air filled with disgusting bone odours. When the winds were from the North, everyone had to put up with tobacco smells from Nanyang Tobacco Factory at Ma Tau Kok Road. The only time when the air smelled fresh was when winds came from the Northwest. In those days, manufacturing facilities in To Kwa Wan spanned not only gas producers, but also tobacco and soft drinks plants and a monosodium glutamate factory (now Sky Tower). The most frequent unpleasneat odours were the town gas and tobacco. Formerly used to raise and transport livestock, the hill behind the cattle depot still exists today. Although the Lau family’s living environment was surrounded by many factories and the slaughterhouse was just on the right of their building, Lau Wing Kwong was spared most of unpleasantness as he was out at work most of the day.

Still more disturbances were caused by the sound of aircraft taking off and landing at Kai Tak Airport. There was a trial flight by Britain’s Concord supersonic aircraft there. The plane sent out a huge sonic ‘boom’ just after taking off. Indeed, so powerful was the sound that it cracked the windows in many flats! Fortunately, Lau Wing Kwong had been living in Fung Yi Street for many years by then and so had fully adapted to such occurrences. Despite the fact he lived on the top floor, aircraft movements never affected his sleep. Interestingly, the day after the airport was relocated to Chek Lap Kok, the whole Thirteen Streets area was as silent as during the immediate aftermath of a typhoon.

Most of Lau Wing Kwong’s working life was spent on Hong Kong Island. To get to work on weekdays, he took the ferry to Wan Chai from Kowloon City Ferry Pier which also transported cars bound for North Point Pier. If he went to Wan Chai by ground transport, he would catch a bus at Ma Tau Wai Road. During holidays, Lau Wing Kwong took his kids to Sung Wong Toi Park to play and take pictures, occasionally even venturing as far as Shatin. As there were few facilities where youngsters could run around, the family seldom stayed in the Thirteen Streets or To Kwa Wan areas. Lau Wing Kwong was well used to crossing the harbour to go to work each day using his HK$10 monthly ferry pass to do so. As a result, he had never seriously thought about moving. When he subsequently moved to C&W in Central and later in Wan Chai, he continued to cross the harbour on a daily basis.

Lau Wing Kwong initially moved into the Thirteen Streets area for the sake of his wife who worked at Wyler Spinners. She arrived at the factory very early and rarely returned home before 11:00 pm. After living in the area for many years, he and his family members were so accustomed to life there they rarely even went beyond To Kwa Wan. While he was working at C&W, HSBC staff told Lau Wing Kwong and his colleagues about new units at Tai On Building in Sai Wan Ho. To sweeten the deal, they even offered to let new buyers pay by installments. The Lau family wound up staying in To Kwa Wan because C&W refused to help in the transaction and the kids were all settled in nearby kindergartens and primary schools.

Lau Wing Kwong had three children who attended Ma Tau Chung Government Primary School and Holy Trinity Primary School. His eldest son went to a Muslim secondary school in North Point while his other daughters studied at New Method College. As the kids’ educational arrangements were looked after by his wife, Lau Wing Kwong never really had to worry about them. After Wyler Spinner closed down, Lau Wing Kwong’s wife took jobs with similar facilities. Having lived in Kowloon City Road, Tin Kwong Road and the Thirteen Streets area, Lau Wing Kwong points out that there were few differences between each as residents mainly worked in nearby factories. Very few people ever left their neighbourhoods to earn a living. As everyone’s daily schedules were similar, their leisure times were also roughly the same. After retirement, Lau Wing Kwong co-operated with the staff of a nearby community center in organising a course on the history of Kowloon City. In it, he talked about how the area’s once flat landscape had developed from a simple salt field into a teeming urban metropolis.

Back then the Federation of Trades Unions (“FTU”) was a very sizeable organisation to which all labour unions were affiliated. As a result, almost everyone joining a union would automatically become a member of the FTU. The FTU Workers’ Club originally intended to build a headquarters soaring over 10 storeys high, but eventually abandoned the plan as Hong Kong’s then British-run government vetoed their proposal. While Lau Wing Kwong had donated money to help construct the new facility while still working, he was not over-enthusiastic about participating in FTU activities. So much so that he had never even been to the FTU Workers’ Club. It was only in 1992 after his retirement that Lau Wing Kwong became a volunteer worker under DC member, Wen Choy Bon. In his role, La Wing Kwong assisted the councilor in organising various districts’ FTU Executive Committees.

While working at the dockyard in Admiralty, Lau Wing Kwong had joined the Naval Dockyard Chinese Workers Union (“NDCWU”). Since the NDCWU was affiliated to the FTU, he was also signed up for the FTU. At first Lau Wing Kwong was dead against joining the NDCWU, but finally decided to seek membership after the constant nagging of his colleagues. Although monthly membership fees back then were just a few cents, Lau Wing Kwong was not an active member and sometimes paid his monthly union dues once every three months. In those days, the office of the NDCWU was located on the top floor of a tenement building in Wan Chai’s Lockhart Road. Whenever the NDCWU held meetings on the rooftop, the police’s Special Branch detectives were on hand to undertake surveillance of everyone present. As Lau Wing Kwong was just a young worker at that time, he hadn’t a clue what was going on. The NDCWU’s then Chairman had repeatedly been deported by the British government because of his involvement in strikes.

Lau Wing Kwong subsequently transferred to C&W’s Building Maintenance Department where he was responsible for the maintenance of C&W premises such as office buildings and dormitories. During his time with C&W, Lau Wing Kwong had gone on travel tours organised by Hong Kong Union of Chinese Workers in Western Style Employment (“HKUCWWSE”). As such, he also joined the HKUCWWSE which, like the NDCWU, was affiliated to the FTU, and had its office in Wan Chai at O’Brien Road. While Lau Wing Kwong worked in C&W, staff staged a work-to-rule protest demanding hourly pay. The action made HSBC’s senior managers very unhappy with their C&W counterparts as the latter’s telegraph operators made only minimal effort to send important account holders communications.

In the past, casual workers at the slaughterhouse often cheated money from residents in the Thirteen Streets’ area. Since most buildings had not yet been installed with iron gates at their entrances, these workers were easily able to go upstairs carrying official-looking clipboards. Knocking on the door of every householder, they claimed to have painted the resident’s mailbox and requested a 50 cents fee from each unit they visited. Back then, 50 cents was quite a lot of money as a bowl of plain congee could be bought for just 10 or 20 cents. As each building’s floors had two stairways housing a total of 28 units, workers who collected money from every home they visited could go home with over HK$10.

As the mailboxes were hung on the wall at the main entrance, they were a long way away from Lau Wing Kwong’s unit on the 7th-floor. As a result, the first time his box was ‘repainted’, he did not bother to go downstairs to check. Next time he left the building, he saw that no work had been done and instantly knew that he had been cheated! Lau Wing Kwong shrugged the loss off, thinking that as the casual worker had volunteered to help and the mailbox was very old, he could afford to lose 50 cents. As a result, he never felt he had been cheated. Instead, he simply resolved to be more careful and less trusting in future. Lau Wing Kwong also points out that during the years he worked on Hong Kong Island, he often saw junkies begging for sums of just 10 to 20 cents in the tram stations every day.

Due to his deteriorating health, Lau Wing Kwong finally moved out of the Thirteen Streets area in 2010. Heart problems meant there had been several occasions when 999 had to be dialed and ambulance service summoned to take him to hospital. Since there was no lift in the building where he lived, the ambulance crew had to struggle to carry him downstairs. Lau Wing Kwong himself was so weak, he had to stop and rest every two flights of steps. As a result, the ambulancemen urged him to move to a building with a lift as soon as he could. They warned that failure to do so meant that one day the journey downstairs might prove so slow they would not be able to get him to hospital in time to save him. Although his wife also proposed relocation, Lau Wing Kwong did not really want to move, thinking that the burden on his family would be very great if they had to sell their home and rent another flat elsewhere.

When his wife’s health also started to fail, Lau Wing Kwong finally decided to move. (Editor’ note: A daughter then helped him to sell up their flat in Fung Yi Street and find a new home in Pak Tai Street where Lau Wing Kwong continues to live to this day.) Before the 2010 move, Lau Wing Kwong had a big collection of commemorative T-shirts which he could not bear to wear or part with. When other people advised him to chuck them all out he refused to do so. After he initially moved to Pak Tai Street, Lau Wing Kwong was quite sad and was filled with a longing for the past he found hard to put into words. He eventually likened it to the feeling a student has upon graduation from a class with whose students he had studied for many, many years. To Lau Wing Kwong, the greatest impact relocation had was on his relationships with his family and friends. Moving away meant he was forced to integrate into an entirely new community. As many objects had been thrown away during the move, old memories soon became very difficult to recall. As he looks back over his life, Lau Wing Kwong has no real way to remember the things that he misses, for which he feels relieved.