Yeung Bo Yee

Yeung Bo Yee moved to To Kwa Wan on 15 August 1960, at first living in a unit on the seventh floor of No.13 of Hung Wan Street. Back then, she was still studying at school before eventually starting work after her junior secondary graduation. (Editor’s note: Yeung Bo Yee originally studied at Wan Chai’s New Method College. When she moved to To Kwa Wan at the age of 14, she enrolled in Form 1 at New Method College in Prince Edward Road, finally taking a job after she completed Form 3.) Yeung Bo Yee’s first job was in a garment factory at a time when the plant still had no canteen. While there, she carried out thread trimming, embroidery and other processes. She then moved to an electronics company where she was responsible for inserting transistors into radios. She subsequently also took jobs in the assembly of plastic and velvet flowers.

In those days, the streets of To Kwa Wan were filled with factory buildings. Among them were the cattle depot and gas drums near Hung Wan Street, plus smelly cow bone plant and firecracker factories which were respectively located in Pau Chung Street and Mok Cheong Street. The area was also home to the offices of various government departments and the Hong Kong Society for the Blind which were both situated in Mok Cheong Street. Most of these buildings have now been demolished. The only two that remain are the Luen Ming Hing and Tung Ah factory buildings. (Editor’s note: “Tung Ah” may also mean the Tung Nam Factory Building.)

(Editor’s note: After graduating in 1963, Yeung Bo Yee first worked in a garment factory, then a transistor plant, eventually moving to a cleaning company and finally a watch dial manufacturer. After she got married, she mainly did outsourcing jobs such as clothes thread cutting and threading plastic beads which she took home from factories.)

After migrating to Hong Kong, Yeung Bo Yee’s father worked for ICI, a British company which made oxygen cylinders. She and her family originally lived in company quarters in Paterson Street at a time when her dad’s monthly salary was roughly HK$600. When the company premises at Paterson Street were later demolished, her family had to move. They learned from relatives that Tai Cheung Construction Company was constructing buildings in To Kwa Wan’s Thirteen Streets area. As the prices of the residential units there were affordable, the family took out a mortgage on an apartment at No.13 Hung Wan Street.

Their new home was around 400 square feet big which Yeung Bo Yee’s father partitioned into four rooms. In addition to two rooms in the balcony, they included one room in the sitting area with no windows and a square-shaped kitchen that also housed a bed. In those days, her father rented out two rooms. Before moving home, he often took the ferry from North Point to Kowloon City Ferry Pier while he decorated the new home in readiness for everyone to move into. Yeung Bo Yee’s elder aunt also bought a unit in Hung Wan Street which was very close to the family home. Her father’s cousin also lived nearby in Shim Luen Street. Around that time, the government introduced water rationing by restricting supplies to householders to every fourth day. To help her family out, Yeung Bo Yee often carried buckets of water from a standpipe in the street all the way up the stairs to their unit on the seventh floor. In addition to their home at Hung Wan Street, the family also bought a residential unit in Chung Ying Building of Tai Kok Tsui for rental purposes.

Yeung Bo Yee recalls often hearing the oink of pigs and the roar of aircraft taking off and landing at Kai Tak from the family’s Hung Wan Street home. Out of curiosity, she sometimes went to the rooftop to watch the planes flying overhead. On the street downstairs outside her home were located many different stores selling a variety of daily necessities and foods. Back then, there were two poles installed on every street corner in the Thirteen Street area. The idea was to prevent cars from entering the inner streets. Each intersection was also home to tent-style stalls selling fruit, incense, candles, liquor, rice and food. As a result, the district was always very noisy. Starting in the 1970s, the Government began taking back the streets, dismantling the two iron poles at the street corners, so that vehicles could pass through the inner streets. As a result, most of the tented stalls were forced to close down and the fixed shops eventually became garages.

(Editor’s note: Yeung Bo Yee added that in the past, the streets in the Thirteen Street area were cleaned by the stall owners themselves. After the Government took back the streets, it assigned cleaners to do this work. In those years, monthly rent for a street level shop was only about HK$5,000. With vehicles allowed to drive in areas where they were not allowed before, the number of garages gradually increased – a trend that has continued to this day).

Back then, there were two gas drums near Kowloon City Ferry Pier, one of which was later converted into the Grand Waterfront private residential estate. Yeung Bo Yee recalls now that whenever residents were cooking, the level of the gas drums would slowly rise up. A suspected gas leak incident had occurred in the 1960s, causing the residents in Kowloon City to panic as everyone thought that they would be dead if there were an explosion. The gas company subsequently discharged any gas that might leak from the gas drums into the sea, thus resolving any leakage problems.

Immediately adjacent to Hung Wan Street when Yeung Bo Yee and her family moved into their new Thirteen Streets home in 1960 was the Kapok Industrial Building. Right opposite was Mai Wah Industrial Building where Yeung Bo Yee’s mother once worked in a garment factory sewing jeans. Beneath the family’s new home were various plastics factories which later switched to manufacturing velvet flowers. At that time, each plastics factory had about six male workers whose main task was to put plastic raw materials into machines and press out plastic moulds. When the area in the middle of each mould was cut out, all the moulds could be threaded together. Plastics factories back then often outsourced this threading process to workers like Yeung Bo Yee who then brought the moulds home for stringing together. In those years, garment factories also outsourced the sewing of threads and thread cutting for jeans, as well as the stitching of buttons on clothes for children’s dolls. All factories in Mok Cheong Street offered casual workers a lot of outsourcing jobs. Often the plant owners posted street bills to recruit manpower. Some factories even sent trucks to designated places to collect finished goods. While at school and before she started her family, Yeung Bo Yee often undertook work such as sewing baby pants and diapers, trimming threads and embroidery. She seldom sewed jeans as bolts of denim cloth were far too heavy.

Yeung Bo Yee dropped out of school after completing Form 3, taking up her first full-time job sewing in a garment factory in industrial premises at the back of the Tung Po Building. The very old factory building had about 12 floors and was mainly occupied by garment and transistor manufacturers. There was no plastics factory there at the time. The garment factory where Yeung Bo Yee worked had an area of about 1,000 square feet and space for only a few dozen sewing machines. While there she was responsible for sewing shirts, sometimes using machines to sew buttons or create overlock stitching. Yeung Bo Yee had chosen this job because the garment factory was near Hung Wan Street and she wanted to learn different skills.

After making garments for a while, she decided to move to a transistor plant at the Luen Ming Hing Factory Building on Mok Cheong Street. At that time, she just tried changing jobs “for fun” and to cut her travel time to work, finding the new job via street bills downstairs from her apartment. The approximately 1,000-square-foot plant had about 10 workers, most of them women. While there, Yeung Bo Yee was responsible for inserting transistors into the radios and then putting the finished products on the conveyor for other workers to weld. While very fast, plugging in transistors was not a complicated task as long as one remembered to avoid inserting the wrong colour component! She left this factory after a few months.

Yeung Bo Yee did not really like working in factories very much. She loved to walk around and did not like being forced to sit at a production line every day for hours on end. She subsequently found a foreman’s job in a cleaning company from want ads in the newspaper. Her key responsibilities in the new job included overseeing cleaners’ work rate and quality plus various payroll-related tasks. Yeung Bo Yee started working at Choi Hung Estate and was then transferred to Tsuen Wan. After working two years in the cleaning company, she again changed jobs and began working at Asia Watch Dials Factory.

(Editor’s note: Yeung Bo Yee’s father did not have a job after the family moved to Hung Wan Street in 1960. Her mother therefore worked in Mai Wah Garment Factory to help make ends meet when it came to family expenses. At around this time, Yeung Bo Yee also dropped out of school to join the workforce. Later, her mother changed jobs to become a cleaner, but got injured and was no longer able to work after bumping into a games machine she was cleaning in a games shop.)

After leaving the cleaning company, Yeung Bo Yee volunteered to help an illiterate friend to seek work and unintentionally ended up getting a job at Asia Watch Dials as a result. Located in Luk Hop Street in San Po Kong, the factory’s boss was a Hong Kong businessman who had returned from Vietnam. When she joined, Yeung Bo Yee was responsible for various tasks in the factory such as packaging, writing orders and making steel stamps. She soon became the boss’s indispensible ‘right-hand man’ and was involved in all plant matters except processes which required the use of dangerous machinery. There was insufficient space in the plant later on. Yeung Bo Yee also wanted to resign. Eager to keep her on, her boss rented half a floor at Pang Ching Street adjacent to Hung Wan Street and asked Yeung Bo Yee to hire workers to produce watches’ steel stamps, printing the factory logo, packaging and other processes.

The San Po Kong factory had an area of over 1,000 square feet and accommodated a large number of machines with two or three workers in each department. As workers like Yeung Bo Yee were involved in two or three processes, the factory only actually employed about 10 people. The various processes involved producing watch dials involved firstly die-cutting a copper plate into circular pieces. A layer of lacquer was then sprayed onto the dials and being washed with thinner. When the dials were dried, numbers were engraved onto them. Finally, the dials were again washed with thinner before being sprayed with lacquer for a final time. The steel stamps were made after the above processes had finished. Specific steps involved along the way included letting the steel stamps absorb the powder, covering it with a brand name and finally drying it with a large spotlight. Packaging was done once the dials had dried for the last time.

At first, all processes were completed at the San Po Kong plant. After the Pang Ching Street extension was set up, everything after the actual making of the steel stamp was moved there. Once the finished goods had been packaged, Yeung Bo Yee would complete the order by writing the information on a parcel and then visiting the Post Office to send it off to the client. The Pang Ching Street plant was located in a rented flat equipped with a wooden table whose owner was well aware of what the unit was being used for. At that time, Yeung Bo Yee only had to stick up a few street bills to recruit new staff. Often her friends’ daughters joined a very young processing plant team whose junior member was just 17 or 18 years old. Staff wages were paid on a monthly basis and worked out at around HK$10 per day. Sometime around then, the watch dial processing plant rented a fifth floor unit, while the second floor of the building was a plastic processing plant. After Yeung Bo Yee got married in 1968, she left her job at Asia Watch Dial.

After Yeung Bo Yee got married in 1968, she started taking outsourcing jobs from local factories and then doing the work at home. Her mother had worked in a garment factory at Tung Po Building and urged her daughter to learn sewing processes by taking a job at the garment factory. Once Yeung Bo Yee was comfortable working with the processes, she took materials back home for sewing. Operated by a husband and wife team, the Tung Bo Building factory consisted of four or five sewing machines which were located in the proprietor’s own residence. After receiving orders, the couple would personally buy the materials and do the tailoring themselves. Back then, Yeung Bo Yee had to personally collect orders from the garment factory, take them home and run them up on a sewing machine that had cost her around HK$1,000.

After her son and younger daughter were born and grew up, she continued to do outsourcing jobs at home, only stopping when she found work with a cleaning company in 1990. While working there, she helped clean garbage outside offices in Parkes Street, Jordan. Her hard work was subsequently recognised by the boss of one the companies who had an office there. As a result, she was asked to handle all cleaning inside the office. Later on, the boss even paid her to clean his house! For a while, Yeung Bo Yee also worked as a part-time cleaner, cleaning up residential homes in various districts introduced by her friends at an hourly rate of about HK$70.

Yeung Bo Yee married in 1968 after her relatives had introduced her to an eligible electrical engineering worker who worked at the military department at Tamar before he retired 20 years later. The couple began married life at a residential unit on Gillies Road in Hung Hom. As newlyweds, they did not have any special requirements of their new home as long as it was close to their parents. Shortly afterwards, they moved back to To Kwa Wan, living at Kam Tong Building for around a year. After Yeung Bo Yee’s youngest girl was born in 1974, she bought an eighth floor unit in Hung Wan Street together with a relative. Her decision followed her mother’s advice that such a move would make it easier for everyone in the family to look after one another.

In those days, Yeung Bo Yee’s mother was living on the seventh floor below their upstairs apartment of roughly the same size. Having bought the eighth floor unit, Yeung Bo Yee’s relative subdivided the flat into two units. This made it difficult for Yeung Bo Yee’s family to live in. At that time, Yeung Bo Yee’s father had built a hut on the building’s rooftop. Once her parents had moved there to live, Yeung Bo Yee sold the eighth floor flat and settled in on the seventh floor. Eventually her parents could no longer bear the disruption caused by Hong Kong’s summer typhoons and Yeung Bo Yee let her mum and dad move back in. She then proceeded to buy another home in the Tien Hung Building. Approaching an age where she could no longer work, Yeung Bo Yee had planned to apply for retirement migration. But considering that her parents were now so ancient, she was unwilling to leave them behind in Hong Kong. As her own children had already grown up, she reluctantly abandoned the idea.

When Yeung Bo Yee’s family moved to Hung Wan Street in early 1960, they rented out two rooms in their unit. Back then, there were no real estate agencies, so they posted red paper street bills downstairs to find tenants. Initially, the rooms were occupied by two couples who were attracted by the cheap rents. As the buildings in the Thirteen Streets area had no lifts, rental prices there were generally much lower than in other areas. Because everyone was busy, Yeung Bo Yee did not talk much with the two couples, only knowing that one husband was employed at a hair salon in Jordan, while both women also worked. After Yeung Bo Yee’s family had paid off their mortgage, they no longer needed to rent out the rooms to make ends meet. As they were on good terms, they stayed in touch with the family whose husband was a hairdresser after they moved out to the Chin Chau Building. By that time, the husband had begun working in Tai Wai, whereas his wife no longer worked. This couple was eventually allocated a low-cost housing unit in Tsz Wan Shan where Yeung Bo Yee sometimes brought her kids for visits.

After Yeung Bo Yee’s father quit living on the rooftop in Hung Wan Street, the family sold the hut they owned there to the son of a key stall proprietor who operated downstairs in Hung Wan Street. When Yeung Bo Yee’s father built the hut, the son of this stall owner had helped him out. This rooftop unit has subsequently been rented to mainlanders right up to the present day. The culture in the Thirteen Streets area back then was that once people saw that rooftop huts had been built on an adjacent building, they would erect similar structures on their own properties. The result was that rooftops as far as the eye could see were full of illegally constructed shacks. As the rooftop of a building belonged to all households, no one really cared overmuch about this. Only when the Owners Corporation was formed much later, did such matters begin to be dealt with more systematically. The Buildings Department sometimes also sent staff to investigate.

Yeung Bo Yee wanted to find a new home after her marriage. She and her husband subsequently saw a street bill by chance and found a dwelling in a building on Gillies Road which had its own lifts. After their eldest daughter was born, the living space here became insufficient and they therefore moved back to the Kam Tong Building in To Kwa Wan where they rented an apartment owned by a domestic helper of her elder aunt. Constructed in the 1960s, Kam Tong Building was located in Mok Cheong Street, opposite to what is now the Sky Tower. Each floor of the building was home to about 10 flats and there were many garages at street level. Yeung Bo Yee’s family’s unit was about 400 square feet spread across two rooms. One of these was occupied by Yeung Bo Yee’s elder aunt’s domestic helper who came back there to live every once in a while. The other room was occupied by Yeung Bo Yee’s family. Back then, her elder aunt’s domestic helper only charged them a few hundred dollars for rent – roughly the same as they were paying in Hung Hom.

Yeung Bo Yee believed that moving back to To Kwa Wan would be beneficial for her three young children as they grew up. She also thought that transportation to and from To Kwa Wan was convenient, with a good school network and sound law and order. What’s more, having lived in To Kwa Wan for many years, the whole family was very familiar with the local way of life there. Yeung Bo Yee and her husband had two daughters and a son, all three of whom studied at Tung Koon District Society School, opposite today’s Heep Yunn School. (Editor’s note: What was then Tung Koon District Society School is now the Farm Road Government Primary School.)

After growing up, her son attended Amoy College in Tin Kwong Road, while her youngest daughter went to Our Lady’s College in Tsz Wan Shan. In addition, Yeung Bo Yee thought that To Kwa Wan was near to Kowloon City Ferry Pier and its transportation links were convenient. Sung Wong Toi and Hoi Sham Temple are also located in this area. The smell from the cattle depot and noise from the airport did not really bother her that much. So much so that when Kai Tak Airport was relocated to Chek Lap Kok in 1998, she actually felt a little unaccustomed to the lack of noise caused by aircraft landing and taking off! Back then, a lot of friends used to visit her just so they could all go up on to her building’s rooftop to watch the airplanes fly by overhead!

After her retirement, Yeung Bo Yee teamed up with the Home Affairs Department to form an Owners’ Corporation for the building at No. 13 Hung Wan Street. Establishing such a body was of huge benefit when it came to matters such as the installing of metallic security gates at the building’s entrance. Applications for general funding could also be handled more efficiently. Back then, the Chairman of the Owners’ Corporation needed to take the title deed and make a declaration at Cotton Tree Drive. Yeung Bo Yee however thought that as a female she was not suitable to be the chairman. As a result, the male owner of an electrical appliances business in Hung Wan Street became Chairman instead. Yeung Bo Yee did, however, take on several other roles. She subsequently not only oversaw management of the Owners’ Corporation, but also took responsibility for liaising with the owners in issues such as applying for electricity bills, maintenance and other everyday matters. She was involved in almost every aspect of the property’s running. Thus, whenever there was any news at No. 13 Hung Wan Street, everyone would ask her about what was happening first.

Handling installation of the building’s iron security gates was her initial task after establishing the Owners’ Corporation and her tasks included duplication of keys for the gates and then contacting the tenants in all 32 households to distribute them. The building subsequently also installed night lights, the monthly electricity charge for which was just HK$700 or so back then. Today, the Owners’ Corporation continues to collect a nominal annual fee of around HK$500 from each owner. Patrolling is another important task for which Yeung Bo Yee listed the items security guards must bring with them on their rounds. They included a flashlight, a phone and a pen and notebook. If there was any incident, Yeung Bo Yee made it a policy that she had to be notified immediately. Until recently, Yeung Bo Yee used to sometimes personally patrol the building herself. She eventually had to leave such jobs to her neighbours due to her bone spur.

As she was always busy working, Yeung Bo Yee rarely had the time to take her kids out to play when they were small. Sometimes they all visited the park at Chi Kiang Street, but seldom went to Hoi Sham Temple. Compared to other old districts like Sham Shui Po, Yeung Bo Yee thinks that law and order were relatively good in To Kwa Wan, but that the former district had more places to gather. For example, Yeung Bo Yee often went to Sham Sui Po’s Pei Ho Street market to shop or snack on red bean and sesame cakes that were unavailable in To Kwa Wan. (Editor’s note: She now says that law and order around the Thirteen Streets area was also better than in Sham Shui Po as there are no one-woman brothels and less theft, drugs and related problems.)

Apart from Sham Shui Po, Yeung Bo Yee sometimes also went strolling in areas such as Tseung Kwan O, Tsz Wan Shan and Sai Kung. Sometimes, she even ventured as far afield as Tsuen Wan. That said, she would not join in other groups, organisations or centres’ activities, the only exceptions being when she and her father went to a Buddhist center in Tam Kung Road to attend some lectures there. After she retired, Yeung Bo Yee also paid a couple of visits to an elderly center in Ma Hang Chung Road to visit friends.