14-04-20
We go back to the 60s. Yuen Long, far away from the city of Hong Kong by a 2-hour bus trip, was a quiet, beautiful and enchanting village town having a history of 600 years. At night, the shadows of the big trees fell across the only one main road and hid the infrequent cars and frequent bicycles. Soon, this huge plain of the New Territories, the out-of-mind countryside of Hong Kong, bathed in the moonlight and its centre Yuen Long glittered like a precious diamond dapped with blue rays which were in fact the TV screens looking out from the household windows.
My mother used to be a ‘town girl’ of Yuen Long. My grandmother, a widow, was a caring and generous soul healer for her neighbours. She ran a rice shop in Yuen Long. After marriage, mother moved to the city but Yuen Long was a shelter for her against any rainy day, for blessings and guidance from her great mother. This peaceful town had become my second home since my toddler days.
Yuen Long was a terminal market for agricultural commodities since it was a transportation hub for villagers of the New Territories. Cocks woke up early, flew and crowed in the morning for food. Birds sang in the afternoon. After supper, you heard dogs barking either at the strangers or every child who speeded down the narrow lanes on their bicycles. Before we went to bed, cats started to cry at night out of boredom, anxiety or want for love. In the small town of Yuen Long, animals did make an orchestra and their notes made a symphony. We enjoyed the music.
In those days, gossip was called ‘news’ in Yuen Long. Housewives found rumours useful and passed such onto one another as a social gift. Joy was to be valued more than the truth. Women were mostly uneducated and could not read. So, people loved gossip and it was the biggest way that kept them up-to-date.
The buildings at that time did not have toilets. Night soil was collected from buckets, and farmers welcomed housewives to carry such fertilizer and dump it into the narrow channel dug at the side of their fields. People walked a mile in pajamas for this wonderful dumping exercise. Farmers sometimes sold vegetables at a discount as a small gesture of gratitude to the donors of the unnecessary from their bodies.
That people became naked or exposed in Yuen Long in the 60s does not mean they wanted to be sexy. These men were just the way they were, denoting the character of the early stage in the evolution from the rural community to an urban city. Breast feeding by mothers was common, seen everywhere in Yuen Long, but perhaps keeping the baby healthy might be a relatively unimportant concern. Milk powder costed a lot in those days. The male farmers and labourers in Yuen Long usually worked without a shirt, not because YOLO made them desire to show off their chest but this would make them more comfortable with the sun. Parents let their kids play outdoors without clothes. Children saw their own bodies as something natural—as opposed to being ashamed of for the kids in the city. ‘Fat’ was not a mean word in those days and in fact, it was a word of admiration and compliment.
Things end but memories last forever. Our memories bring back stories, people, food, smiles and tears. Yuen Long grew and it did not remain the same as I left it. My senior family members and relatives there are gone. But, this old town still has 2 parts—its loss of the past and the re-making of it into a new place that now starts to reproduce memories for the younger ones again.
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