Lau Wing Kwong

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.  

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. 

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.

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.  

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.

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.

In the 1970s, 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!