Familiar faces
We all, emotionally, are in debt to our childhood. My heart is sweetened when this picture emerged somewhere on internet. 'I must be there!', I murmured to myself, then I spent another half hour looking for someone whose face is familiar to me, but my efforts are to no avail as it could be taken somewhere else in Tai Hang Tung or Shekipmei. All resettlement buildings were match-box-like, looked similar anyway.
Resettlement buildings
Resettlement buildings had once been homes of 1/4 HK's total population in early 70s. I guess the figure must be more than that. One million! I got this figure stamped in my memory that one million people were living in bare cubicles no more than 144 sq ft . It was normal at that time for a family of 5 or 6 jammed in such a tiny space with 2 double-berth beds. Privacy? It is totally out of the question.
A prison cell vs a godsend
Looking back, I will put it as a prison cell rather than a decent place to live in. Like it or not, given that there was no other choice, given that the living environment of the makeshifts built on hillsides were thousand times worse, many people regarded a small cubicle in a resettlement block as a godsend place to live in. Actually we had no reason to complain with as long as danger of typhoon and its accompanying disasters were no more a serious threat to us, and, the rent was, benevolently and reasonably, cheap. Hallilujah!
Life could be monotonous, but could be otherwise... all up to our street wisdom
The corridors like what is shown in this picture got chunks of time of our being there, eye-looking at the street aimlessly, picking on others with some `F' words high up in the corridors. Then some dirty and abominable words from the street, with the most extreme vulgarity, returned.
Such exchanges of verbal insults, which unexceptionally started from a quasi hide-and-seek game first and subsequently rolled into physical conflicts, were taking place everyday right here in the corridors.
Some rough, tough and wise street kids
The fun part was that kids got their own talents to invent something out of nothing. Passing a ball up or down from one floor to another was a much-loved past-time. To those extremists who dared to challenge the limits, trashing some empty glass bottles or plastic bags filled with their own urine down to the ground floor was kind of, they claimed, heroic act.
It was their intention to have this brand upon their visage--rough and tough. Pedantically speaking, I would say it was a self approving process leading to adulthood in their later days, or, at best, it was a simply mindless show-off of macho courage amid their peers.
People loved to bullshit anyway. What they claimed to have done, never proven, should not be taken for real in a serious and investigative manner. When hearing tales or hearsays like this sort, scarcely would the audience question about its authenticity and give out evidence contrary.
Why so? The truth is, as a discerning listener, it would be polite to appreciate the eloquence of the presentation part rather than pick up some minor faults which you think discording to the main plot of the story. Social etiquette for listening gossips and bullshits should be honored, and observed. Be a wise man on the street!
A vertical village
From a sociological point of view, a resettlement block like this one shown in the picture, with so many people nesting inside, can be regarded as a vertical village by whatever definition. Its people were loosely acquainted in terms of communal friendship, despite this, the WE-THEY concept emerged gradually among the youth with the advent of threats imposed by other delinquents from neighboring blocks.
THEY and WE
`THEY are the invaders and WE are the defenders!'. When the sense of gang consciousness came into being among the juvenile groups, and with the kicking in of the influence from triad societies, each block doomed to become an enclave, a fortress on its own controlled by different triad society, sooner or later.
