Tong Lau high and low
Updated: 2013-09-27 06:59
(HK Edition)
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Those who know little of those bygone days get a glimpse of what it was like, from the film titled in English: Echoes of the Rainbow, and in Chinese as, Time, the Thief. The film won the "Crystal Bear Award" at the 2010 Berlin Film Festival. It is set in 1960 colonial Hong Kong and shot on Wing Lee Street, Sheung Wan. After the film's high acclaim, the government declared it would preserve the entire street. Many believe that decision was predicated on all the acclaim for the film and the public pressure that followed.
The story tells of the struggles of a working family whose elder son becomes ill with leukemia. The father makes shoes. The mother sells them. They live in a tong lau: shop on the ground floor, residence on the upper floor. The two sons have to climb the stairs when they want to study, chat, listen to the radio. To call his friends, the elder son uses the telephone next door at the clothing shop. Only a few families have phones in the neighborhood. In the evening, the families all set their dinner tables outside in the open air. Small children wander from table to table to be invited to taste the different dishes.
The vulnerable side of life in the tong lau was also depicted. When hard rains hit, the tong laus sometimes fell to pieces. British police officers would come round, demanding protection money or simply outright extortion, threatening to close the shops if they didn't get paid. The elder son's self-esteem took a hit, when he visited a girl he admired and stumbled into her family's ornate, Midlevels mansion through the servant's entrance at the back.
The film revealed in sharp juxtaposition the tong lau and its counterpart, the elegant European residences up the hill. Cecilia Chu, assistant professor of architecture, the University of Hong Kong, gathered the historical threads, drawing together an argument that racial segregation was behind the spread of tong lau in colonial Hong Kong. She authored a chapter of the book Colonial Frames, Nationalist Histories: Imperial Legacies, Architecture and Modernity. Chu cited documents like the 1888 European Residential Reservation Ordinance introduced by the colonial authorities. It was meant to draw a permanent boundary between the residences in the Midlevel district (for the colonizers) and the lower part of Victoria (for the colonized).
Although the property values of tong lau rose and fell over time, the tong lau remained a housing type associated with poverty and backwardness and a resilient native culture that evaded colonial domination, Chu said.
(HK Edition 09/27/2013 page3)