Lee Foo

Before the war, the Chans moved to Hang Hau.  Chan Shui Chuen’s household was the only ones left in Nga Tsin Wai. Uncle Shui Chuen (Chan Shui Chuen) was older than Lee Foo’s generation and knew a bit of English.  He often represented Nga Tsin Wai to talk with outside parties.  He spent the rest of his life in Nga Tsin Wai with his daughter.  Before he passed away, he got a coffin ready at home.  After his 60th birthday, Uncle Shui Chuen lived inside the village leisurely.  He liked to spend his days relaxing in his cane chair in Mau Chin.  When Lee Foo was small, he always got close to Uncle Shui Chuen to listen to old stories about Nga Tsin Wai.  The Sam Sing Tso used to live around Hau Wong Temple.  They were small in numbers, and often got “da ming fo” (“robbed”, as known before the war).  Later, they built a village in Nga Tsin Wai, fortified with blockhouses on the four corners and a drawbridge at the front gate.  To prevent the Red-turban robbers (remnants of Cheung Po Tsai’s pirate mob) from entering the village to rob, the villages took their pigs and cows back behind the village walls every evening at 6-7pm, and lifted up the drawbridge until the next morning.

Lee Foo was naughty when he was little.  He would always roam around Nga Tsin Wai, stealing apple guava and hawthorn from the confectionary or picking Chinese broccoli from the vegetable farms with other children from Law Sam Kee.  They would have fried rice mixed with diced vegetable, eggs, soy sauce and pig fat.  At the “mau” outside the village, there were fields of grass and vegetables.  Villagers let the chicken move about freely, and eggs were everywhere for one’s collection.  At age six or seven, Lee Foo already knew how to clean and cook rice.  There were two woks at his home’s kitchen – one big and the other one small.  In those days, people burnt grass for fire when they were cooking.  They used pig fat to stir vegetables because there was no such thing as cooking oil.  His mother regularly cut and gathered grass on the mountains.  Before she headed out, she would cook soup in the kitchen.  One time, Lee Foo added water into the wok himself when mother was away.  His mother later laughed at him for what he did. 

Before the war, kerosene lamp was the main form of illumination for villages.  Lee Foo’s second uncle bought kerosene lamp from the USA when he was working as a sailor.  Every day at 4pm, Lee Foo cleaned the lamp and got it ready for the night when he would do his homework.  During Japanese Occupation, villagers switched to the dirtier oil lamps, which gave out dark smoke when the cotton lampwick was burnt.  Since illumination was inadequate, the villagers usually had dinner at 5pm and went to bed before dark.  When Lee Foo’s mother did not have to take care of her children, she would play Hakka paper cards (Luk Wu) with other women in the village as a pastime.  Lee Foo still goes to bed and wakes up early after he got married in the 1950s.  He would get up before dawn to care for his baby.  With his wife, he would feed the child and change its diaper

Tea restaurants in pre-war Kowloon City were Lingnan Tea Restaurant, United Tea Restaurant, Brothers Restaurant  and Meng Heung Restaurant.  A “restaurant” was of a high tier than “tea restaurant”.  Lingnan and United were located on Sha Po, whereas Brothers and Meng Heung were on Prince Edward Road and Pak Tai Street respectively.  In the tea restaurants, guests were served at tables that had two levels.  The lower level of the table carried crispy dough twist and chess cakes   Lee Foo’s family was well-off when he was six to seven years old.  On Saturdays, he would go to have tea with his father.  To win the favour of Lee’s father, some people volunteered to let the young Lee Foo ride on their shoulders.  The main dim sum at the tea restaurants included barbequed pork buns, ribs, stick rice rolls and stick rice with chicken.  In winter, they served salted Chinese sausage rolls and Thunder Chisel (i.e. fat meat wrapped in pig liver skin, which oozes out oil when bitten).  Pre-war tea restaurants did not serve much beef, because cows were used to plough the fields.

Whenever there was a dispute between villagers of Nga Tsin Wai, the elders would come forward to settle it on most occasions.  The elders of the Ng Clan and Lee Clan had supreme authority and were well respected by the younger generations.   For disputes between villages, powerful people such as martial art masters would come forward to mediate.  One year, when Nga Tsin Wai was holding a qilin dance during a festival, some Po Kong villagers intercepted the dance and provoked conflict.  Before the war, there used to be one or two masters in each village to guide the children in martial art.   A lot of people in Lee Foo’s father generation practised master art when they were young, but the trend subsided during Lee Foo’s early years.  Martial art declined further after the war because people were busy making a living and, at the same time, practice venues were becoming increasingly short.

“Pok Sin” is the Chinese opera staged on the seventh lunar month and at Mid-Autumn Festival.  The host was Master Meng She.   Meng She lived in a house in Nga Tsin Wai and stayed unmarried till the end of his life.  He always hosted celebrations and funerals for the villagers for free.  He made a living by picking seafood and vegetables.  The village children also referred to Pok Sin as Pok San Ngau Tsai (Note: transliteration only).  When it starts, a villager is claimed by the village children to be possessed and shakes with sound of the percussion.  The possessed person would not even feel the pain of having burning incense on his or her body.  The objective of Pok Sin is to drive away evil spirits.  It attracted many village children to gather around the village gate to watch.

The seventh day of the seventh lunar month is the Qixi Festival.  Rural people usually burnt offerings on the street to honour the spirits.  Money would be cast after the burning, and children would fight to pick up the one-cent or two-cent notes on the ground.  When children asked for money from shops like Law Sam Kee, they would chant: If you burn offerings without casting money, your wife would be harassed by the spirits tonight.  Qixi Festival was a popular festival before WWII.  It was particularly important to the “Ah Ma” (maids) who stayed unmarried for their whole lives.

The Jiao Festival in the League of Nine of pre-war Nga Tsin Wai lasted for several days and nights.  Villagers would submit their registrations and donations upon the posting of a notice in the League of Nine.  League of Nine referred to the nine villages led by Nga Tsin Wai Villages, including Sha Po, Yuen Ling, Kak Hang, Shek Ku Lung and Ta Kwu Leng.  The villages would parade the statue of Tin Hau around the villages for several days in a row. The parade team was formed of Nga Tsin Wai’s villagers.  Elders who were over 60 years old could have the privilege of sitting on sedan chairs.  Taoist priests walked among the parade to performance Taoist rituals.   Some curious young boys and girls would join the team for fun.  Due to the conservative culture before WWII, women who passed by other houses too often would be ridiculed and denounced as “bitches”.  Therefore girls who were above 16 years old normally did not participate in the parade.  When the parade team arrived at a village, the elders of that village would arrange a reception at the village entrance, serving sugar cane, bread, large Chinese white sugar cakes, fried dumplings, soft drinks, lemonade, etc.  The children walking in the parade enjoyed the food and were in high spirit.  They would play a game called “Biting the cane’s core”

In the past when Lunar New Year approached, the wealthy families prepared a sumptuous portion of festive food, such as rice crackers, rice cakes and fried dumplings.  Fried dumplings and rice cake were cooked on different pans.  Traditional rice cakes are six inches thick and 18 inches long, and are steamed over a fire burnt out of pine wood.  The fried dumplings were mainly used for worship rituals.  On New Year’s Eve, villagers showered with grapefruit leaves and put on new clothes and shoes.  Just before New Year Day, people performed the custom of “Siu Nin Gan” (to play firecracker on the eve of New Year).  Nga Tsin Wai villagers would burn firecrackers at their doors till the fifteenth day of the New Year.  This custom was maintained until the 1960s.  There was a “Ding Dong Stone” inside the Walled City.  Before the war, villagers used to climb up onto the stone with a bamboo ladder and burnt firecrackers up there.  The wrapping of the firecrackers on the ground was up to 1 foot thick.  Kwong Man Lung on Pau Chung Street, To Kwa Wan, was the most famous firecracker shop.  Before the war, a lot of marine people would go and pay homage at the Hau Wong Temple, which received even more sacrifices and incense than Wong Tai Sin Temple in those days.

Before the war, a large number of Nga Tsin Wai villagers went out to work and left the houses vacant.  The villagers mainly concentrated in the first, second and third lanes.  Each lane lived four to five families.  The number of households declined in the fourth and fifth lanes, and it was almost totally deserted in the sixth lane.  The children dared not get near the fourth to the six lanes, fearing that the area was haunted.  Meng She, a Taoist priest who hosted rituals for the villagers, lived in the fourth lane, while Meng Po, an insane woman who sometimes undressed herself for no reason, lived in the firth lane.  The war in the mainland against the Japanese did not affect Hong Kong much because the food and daily necessities were mainly imported from Southeast Asia. 

After the fall of Guangzhou, many refugees arrived in Hong Kong, resulting in a rise in rents and food prices.  Nga Tsin Wai alone received 200 to 300 new immigrants.  Houses within the village appreciated in value, and the monthly cost for a room and a bed rose to 12 and 3 dollars respectively.  A hundred catties of rice cost only 20 dollars in those days.  Many villagers abandoned pig farming, and instead rented the pig houses out to earn the “big money”.

Lee Foo belongs to the second branch of the Lee Clan in Nga Tsin Wai.  His grandfather Lee Kwun Fuk had three sons.  The eldest son, Lee Kam Chuen, was the father of Lee Foo and Lee Wing.  The second son married a woman named Koo.  He fathered a boy and a girl, named Lee Kwai and Lee Kan respectively.  Koo later died of pneumonia.  His uncle married another woman, Wong, from Shek O, and had two more sons, Lee Wah and Lee Lin, with her.  Just before the fall of Hong Kong in WWII, his uncle died of pneumonia.  Wong left with the two sons during Japanese occupation of Hong Kong, and was never heard again.  The two children of Koo starved to death, while Lee Foo’s own brother was taken away by his mother and was never found again.  The third son of Lee Foo’s grandfather was childless.  Though he adopted a son, Lee had lost contact with him as well.  Lee Foo was sad that most of his childhood companions had passed away.

During the Japanese Occupation of Hong Kong, Lee Foo's family moved to Model Village. Lee’s mother raised chicken when his father took up work at the Blue Bird Dockyardin Aberdeen.  The father stayed with relatives in Aberdeen on weekdays and only returned to Model Village in the weekend.  The Lees were given three acres of land in Model Village.  They allocated one acre for vegetable farming and another acre for growing sweet potatoes.   The sweet potatoes yielded three crops, with harvest periods of 30 days, 60 days and 90 days respectively.  They also planted a breed of sweet potato from Japan (with harvest period of 60 days) which contained higher nutritional value.  Apart from using sweet potatoes as their own food, the Lees sold the surplus or used it as a kind of currency.  Each load could be exchanged for over 100 dollars worth of military yen.  Lee Foo, who was infected with malaria, would go to see Dr Yu Chiu Kwong in Kowloon City Market.  He paid the consultation fee each time with a load of sweet potatoes.  Eventually, Lee was healed by applying mugwort and taking ginger soup.

In the 1960s, Lee Foo moved out of Nga Tsin Wai village with his family to the civil servants quarters.  His mother and brother continued to live in Nga Tsin Wai until they sold their residence in the 1980s.   After moving out, Lee Foo still had dinner in the village with his wife and children every day.  His wife would pick up the children from school every afternoon, and helped with the chores and cooking in the village.   They only returned to the quarters for sleep after they finished dinner.   In 1980, Lee Foo’s family moved out of the civil servants quarters into their current unit in Choi Wan Estate.   Lee Foo’s living condition has continually improved since he left the countryside many years ago.  He did not have any adjustment problem.   Houses in Nga Tsin Wai had no toilets, so the residents to use spittoons, and emptied them in early morning each day.  There were toilets in the quarters and the estates, which greatly enhanced hygiene conditions.  In the early years, residents of Nga Tsin Wai had to fetch bath water from the wells each day.  After the completion of the seven-storey building nearby, people could boil tap water for their baths.  When Lee Foo moved to the quarters and then the estate, he could boil water more easily by making use of liquid petrol gas and the gas stove.