Liu Ping Yuen

Liu Ping Yuen was born in 1946 in Tin Sam Village in Shatin to a Hakka family who came to Hong Kong from China’s Baoan County. His ancestors had lived in Hok Tau and Sheung Shui. Ping Yuen’s grandfather had three sons, the third being Liu Ping Yuen’s father. Back then, Liu Ping Yuen’s father and father’s two brothers had settled in Sheung Shui Village where they owned some farmland and houses. His clansmen subsequently moved to settle in Tin Sam Village in 1929 when his father and the two uncles bought land for farming and the three brothers built separate houses to raise their families. In those days, most village houses were mud brick-style dwellings. Stones were used as foundations on which bricks made by mixing straw with mud were stacked up to build the houses. To make the bricks, villagers laid a wooden grid on the muddy ground to act as a mold. They subsequently soaked straw in water and added the rotten straw into each mold. A cow was then pulled along, stepping onto the mud and straw until they mixed together. Once hardened, the blocks of mud were shaped into bricks and used to build houses.

Liu Ping Yuen’s family home covered an area of some 300-square feet and housed not only him, but also his mother and an elder brother and sister. When Liu Ping Yuen was born, his father had already sold the farmland and moved to the city to find his own  life. Ever since he was a child, Liu Ping Yuen had to look after cattle and farm for his neighbours to earn meals which were about HK$2 a day. Liu Ping Yuen did not go to school until he was around 10 years old. Sadly, as he was older than the other children there, they cruelly mocked him for being a “big cattle turtle”. To relieve him from being bullied, Liu Ping Yuen’s teachers agreed to fast track his schooling and allow him to complete Primary 1 to Primary Three within two years. After completing Primary 3, Liu Ping Yuen went to the city with his elder brother to find the means of living. His elder brother was a machinery apprentice then.

In post World War II years, villages in Shatin were very sparsely populated. Townships in the immediate vicinity of Tin Sam Village included Sheung Keng Hau, Ha Keng Hau, Hin Tin (now Hin Keng), Lau Uk and To Shek. Back then, Shatin consisted mainly of multi-surname villages and only Lau Uk and To Shek (resided with the Tsang families) could really be said to be single-surnamed villages. Liu Ping Yuen left the countryside when he was still a young boy to make his living and returned to live there at middle-age. As he was unaware of the changes in names and places in the locality, he was laughed at by the local villagers! Tin Sam Village was still a multi-surname village then and was occupied by villagers with surnames such as Liu, Wai, Choy, Fong, Leung and Lee. The village population was about 300 and was made up by roughly similar numbers of Punti and Hakka people. Most of the villagers were fluent in speaking both the Punti and Hakka dialects. Hakka people called the Punti dialect “Se Wah” (“the snake language”). While Liu Ping Yuen is a Hakka who also speaks urban vernacular Cantonese, his mother could not speak Cantonese.

In those days, Tin Sam Village was home to many immigrants from the mainland. Among them was Liu Ping Yuen’s family who had arrived here from Sheung Shui in search of a better life as farmers. The government later claimed back their land in order to build a new road and compensated them with a lot of 700 sq. feet in Fanling. Most villagers in Tin Sam Village made their living in farming. Some even had smallholding for farming. Those without land worked as peasants for others. Tin Sam Village’s main agricultural products included rice, sweet potatoes, sword lilies and lotuses. While the Liu family had owned land in the past, their smallholding was sold off by Liu Ping Yuen’s father who went to the city and never returned. When Liu Ping Yuen was nine years old, he looked after cattles for a neighbouring family named Choy, taking the cows to the nearby hills and streams to graze. His employer did not pay him wages, just provided him with daily meals and also allowances for haircut and new shoes and clothes at Chinese New Year.

Before Liu Ping Yuen was born, his father had already abandoned the family and went to urban Kowloon to make his living. Ping Yuen’s mother remained in the village, doing farming and masonry tasks for neighbours, sometimes also helping out in the nearby Kak Tin and Keng Hau villages. As his mother was illiterate and had no idea of the importance of education, Liu Ping Yuen was idle all day during childhood and often played in the open space for drying grains. When his mother did not need to work, he would follow her into the hills to cut forking ferns. When Liu Ping Yuen was just nine years old, a neighbour called Choy saw him hanging around in the village and asked him to do simple farm work in exchange for meals for the Choy family. A year later, the Choys arranged for Liu Ping Yuen’s admission to Tin Sam Primary School, even paying the tuition of HK$2.

Founded by the villagers, Tin Sam Primary School had a campus of its own with a room for the headmaster and three classrooms. Wooden benches were set inside the classrooms and wooden boards were used as desks. The school operated classes from Primary 1 to Primary 4, with about 50 pupils in the entire school. Three young teachers were employed from outside the village, one of whom rented a cottage in Tai Po and the other two teachers came to school by bus from Kowloon. An elder in the village served as the headmaster, but took no responsibility in teaching. Some 10 kids in each level studied in one of the three classrooms, and sometimes two classes of children were put together in one room. This meant that pupils of different levels sat side by side in the same room and were taught by the same teacher. Subjects offered at Tin Sam Primary School included Letter Writing, General Studies, Chinese, Arithmetic and English. Chinese language classes were taught using vernacular textbooks but no classical Chinese literatures were taught. The English language was only taught in Primary 4 when pupils memorised the alphabets and wrote in copy books.

Many children from Tin Sam Village attended schools elsewhere. For example, Choy Kan Pui studied La Salle College at Kowloon Tong which was a tradition of this clan for the clan’s children. Tin Sam Primary School started classes at 8:00 am every morning. Before attending class, Liu Ping Yuen tied up the buffalo with a rope so that they could eat grass in the vincity. He then led the buffalo back to the farm after school. As he was older than other pupils, Liu Ping Yuen had better progress in learning and his results were the best in the class. As a result, his teacher agreed to let him complete his Primary 1 and Primary 2 in one year. After he completed Primary 3, the school did not allow Liu Ping Yuen to promote to Primary 4. He therefore studied at Che Kung Temple’s Chi Hong Free School with other pupils. He dropped out from school after two and a half months, because went off to work in the city joining his elder brother who worked as a machinery apprentice. This brother had also  studied at Tin Sam Primary School for a few years.

Liu Ping Yuen worked in Kweilin Tea Restaurant for a short term because his mother thought that he should learn a trade that would allow him to enjoy a secured livelihood. Introduced by his uncle, Liu Ping Yuen subsequently began working as a garage apprentice at May Wah Motor Mechanical Engineering at No. 3 Fuk Wing Street, Sham Shui Po. The company was situated on the ground floor of an old building with a shop front facing the direction of Tai Po Road and a few family houses behind the premises. The old building had a wide verandah with several iron posts on the pavement to support it. Inside, the shop also had a cockloft which was reserved solely as the masters’ quarters. Apprentices like Liu Ping Yuen had to sleep on makeshift canvas beds next to the machines. There were a lot of small machinery shops around Sham Shui Po back then. Many of them were concentrated in and around Un Chau Street and Fuk Wing Street. On Fuk Wing Street, there were many old residential buildings, most of them four- or five-storeys high. May Wah’s adjacent shop at No. 5 and No. 7 Fuk Wing Street was a rickshaw assembling workshop who asked May Wah to supply them the necessary screws. In the 1960s, rickshaws were seen running on the streets of Sham Shui Po to deliver cargoes. Liu Ping Yuen and his mother once caught a rickshaw travelling from Fuk Wing Street to North Kowloon Magistracy on Tai Po Road. As they knew the rickshaw puller well, the fare was only 20 cents. From there they took a bus to return to their home in Shatin. In the 1960s, traffic on Fuk Wing Street and Fuk Wa Street was very sparse. As a result, Liu Ping Yuen and other garage apprentices could safely play marbles and roll 10- or 50-cent coins for fun in the middle of the road.

The boss of May Wah was a mechanical engineer who had studied in the UK and was fluent in English. He bought machines that were discarded by their owners in the UK, such as Gardner vehicles, tractors and aircraft engines. He then had the equipment packed in wooden crates and shipped to Hong Kong and then resold them to fishing boat owners. The German-owned Jebsen & Co., a local Volkswagen agent, was one of May Wah’s biggest customers and the company's German executives once personally came to visit the factory on Fuk Wing Street. Having found everything to be to their satisfaction, Jebsen subsequently agreed on a car repair order. May Wah had three plants in Hong Kong. In addition to Fuk Wing Street in Sham Shui Po, the other two plants were located in Aberdeen Old Main Street in Aberdeen and Yue Wok Street in Tin Wan. The company also constructed a warehouse with wood fence in Aberdeen promenade where it stored old machines sent from the UK. Liu Ping Yuen and other apprentices took turns to look after the branch plants and warehouse as assigned. There were eight garage masters and apprentices in Fuk Wing Street’s plant. Liu Ping Yuen and the other apprentices were all of similar age. The masters in general had a higher level of education and could read manuals and self taught to operate the machines. The masters focused on fine processes that required particularly high precision. A master had to know how to operate the electric oven and were familiar with the characteristics of metals, so that the service would meet the requirements of customers. The masters commanded a very high level of respect and authority among the apprentices. In the first year of employment, Liu Ping Yuen’s monthly salary was HK$10, increasing to HK$20 in the second year and HK$50 in the third year after he had completed his apprenticeship. Following a further two years of supplementary apprenticeship, he was then formally promoted to master level and his monthly salary increased to HK$150. The factory provided meals to the apprentices that cost a few 10-cent each. Everyday everyone had meals in the plant which was dirty, noisy and full of oily dregs and pieces of iron scraps.

While Liu Ping Yuen started work at 9:00 am sharp, there was no fixed time off and he was only able to rest after finishing his day’s work. Able to down tools at exactly 5:00 pm, Liu felt that lives as a master were easier. The apprentices worked 365 days a year, often staying there overnight to guard over the plant while they played Sap Sam Cheung (“Card 13”) for fun. Liu Ping Yuen sometimes got up early in the morning and went to swim in Lai Chi Kok amusement park with his workmates before going to work. He also went to Kowloon City to roam around in the evenings when it was not his turn to guard on the plant. In all, Liu Ping Yuen worked at May Wah for eight years and got along well with his workmates, describing it as a happy experience for “play and food”. Sadly, the boss of May Wah closed the business in the late 1960s, disposing all machinery in the end.

After spending eight years with May Wah, Liu Ping Yuen eventually left and began looking for a new job after a fight with other workers at the factory. At that time, Liu Ping Yuen’s elder brother was installing railings, iron gates and window bars at customers’ places. After leaving the garage job, Liu Ping Yuen joined his elder brother at Cheung Lok Mansion, No. 222 Wan Chai Road. After leaving May Wah, Liu Ping Yuen also moved to live with his elder brother’s at his partitioned room in an old building on Nga Tsin Long Road, Kowloon City. Later on Liu Ping Yuen also worked as a casual labourer on construction sites, repairing and installing generators, ventilators and other equipment on-site. Liu Ping Yuen normally accompanied the masters to various districts throughout Hong Kong and Kowloon, working from 9:00 am to 6:00 pm. He had breakfast and lunch in teahouses with cheap meals that cost around HK$1 each. Casual workers at construction sites earned a daily wage of HK$10 and generally worked every day. As construction work required much physical strength, Liu Ping Yuen was generally so exhausted by the time he returned home that even the noise of the airplanes flying through Kowloon City would not disturb his sleep.

Later on, he began working for a meal kitchen in Kim Shin Lane, delivering food and cutlery by bicycle to factories around Castle Peak Road on weekdays. Kowloon Motor Bus’ maintenance plant in Camp Street was another very popular delivery point. Since the meal kitchen did not have a business name, customers just ordered by telephone. Delivery workers also had to do shopping, chopping food, cooking and other chores. Since working at the meal kitchen , Liu Ping Yuen moved to Lo Fu Ngam sharing a flat with his brother-in-law and several others. After a month or so, he moved out due to clashes with his brother-in-law. Liu Ping Yuen felt that meal delivery work was harsh and soon took another job in a  knitwear home factory in Tai Nan Street. As this company did not provide accommodation, Liu Ping Yuen moved back to Tin Sam Village to live with his mother, taking bus to and from work everyday. While employed at the factory, Liu Ping Yuen slowly learned about wool weaving. Workers who had not mastered the basic skills were not provided with free meals by the company and had to pay for their food. Once they had improved their skills and could make money for the owner, meal benefits were provided. Unfortunately, in 1967 West Germany began restricting the import of Hong Kong-made sweaters. This greatly impacted on Hong Kong’s knitwear industry. As a result, Liu Ping Yuen had to change to another trade, formally joining the catering business that same year.

Liu Ping Yuen had tried many different trades during his entire work life. He enjoyed his time in the catering industry best of all and especially the five or six years he spent serving at Mui Kong Restaurant in Wan Chai. As the cost of living was low in those days, Liu Ping Yuen never had to worry about food or lodging for himself and easily had enough left over to support his ageing mother. Kitchen workers at Mui Kong Restaurant also enjoyed free meals in house. Except the expensive food like shark’s fin and abalone, they had much autonomy to serve themselves any food in the restaurant. Sometimes Lai Ping Yuen finished work at 4:00 or 5:00 am in the morning and took the walla-walla (“small electric boat”) at Queen's Pier back home in Kowloon. The fare in those days was HK$2 per person and walla-wallas would start moving once they had three passengers on board. At that time, a shampoo and haircut at salons cost just a few dollars. Sadly, Mui Kong Restaurant’s kitchen workers had all become addicted to gambling. Things got so bad as they “finished work to start gambling and finished gambling to start work”. They played and bet in Sap Sam Cheung, Mahjong, Pai Kau and other games. On one occasion, their gambling noise proved so bothersome to neighbours that the police came to investigate and confiscated the restaurant's liquor licence. Liu Ping Yuen took the initiative and went to the police station to redeem the licence on behalf of the restaurant’s owner. The matter was eventually settled in court by paying a fine of just HK$20. At that time, Mui Kong Restaurant’s managers turned a blind eye to the gambling activities among the workers, only warning them not to produce disturbing noises. Once while delivering meals in Castle Peak Road, Liu Ping Yuen was charged of overloading his bicycle. He eventually paid a fine of HK$5 in court. In those times, going to the court paying fines was pretty much a routine of his job.

When Liu Ping Yuen worked at Mui Kong Restaurant, he continued to reside at Yuk Shing Building in Mong Kok as rent was cheap and the place was easily accessible. Mui Kong also provided male and female quarters for its workers. Workers there had a two-hour afternoon break every day and usually slept in their dorms. It implied that restaurant workers worked for many hours a day. As Liu Ping Yuen spent most of the time at work, he hardly ever saw his neighbours. When labour legislation subsequently required that all workers were entitled to a mandatory half-day’s leave each week, Liu Ping Yuen used his holiday to get to know them better by joining their mahjong games. As a new building, the living environment in Yuk Shing Building was satisfactory and the security in the area was also quite good. Liu Ping Yuen had lived in the building for around 10 years.

Looking back to his work life for several decades, Liu Ping Yuen recalls that he had engaged in several trades including machinery, engineering, construction, catering and driving. Since starting work in the urban areas after dropping out of school, his living conditions gradually improved over time, because he had a strong desire to find better living. Liu Ping Yuen’s mother was illiterate and spent her whole life working on farming. As she understood that farming had no real future, she encouraged her son to learn a skill. Referred by his uncle, Liu Ping Yuen began working as an apprentice in a machinery factory – a trade that attracted many young people at that time. As small workshops combining accommodation could be found all over Hong Kong at that time, anyone who were proficient in operating machines were regarded to have secured a stable life.. When work processes in machinery industry became more computerized and automatic, factory operation depended less on manpower. For example, new lathes had high precision and were controllable by a simple push of button. Liu Ping Yuen feels sad that machines had destroyed people’s livelihoods and largely causedled to the decline of machinery factories.

After leaving May Wah, Liu Ping Yuen briefly worked full-time on construction sites before joining the catering industry in the late 1960s. Initially Liu Ping Yuen wanted to work in dim sum department. Subsequently, under the advice of some cook masters, he worked in the kitchen.. While being a kitchen worker, Liu Ping Yuen obtained a driving licence for taxi. After leaving Mui Kong Restaurant in the mid-1970s, Liu Ping Yuen tried different jobs at the same time, working in engineering, on construction sites, at restaurants and also as a driver, in order to increase his daily income to prevent from being unemployed and to secure better protection in livelihood. Incase there were no jobs in restaurants, Liu Ping Yuen could find a living in construction sites or by driving taxi. By working at different trades at different times, Liu Ping Yuen counted himself as fully employed despite economic ups and downs. In those days, work hours in the catering industry were unstable so there were often vacancies for temporary workers. As Liu Ping Yuen was a member of the Kan Sang catering trade union and knew many other kitchen workers, he was frequently referred to do casual jobs in the restaurants. In the late 1980s, Liu Ping Yuen obtained a driving licence and began driving a Mercedes Benz saloon for a rich family who lived in Clear Water Bay. As he often received generous tips when escorting well-off guests, his income was much better than that of a taxi driver. Liu Ping Yuen drove private cars for a decade and enjoyed the work much. Today, he feels that he had made accomplishment rather than “achievements” in the trades he had engaged in. That said, as working helped support his family, he felt contented with his lot in life.