Author: viviank

RESEARCHING MY HONG KONG FAMILY’S PAST: A FOURTEEN-YEAR QUEST, PART 2

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RESEARCHING MY HONG KONG FAMILY’S PAST:
A FOURTEEN-YEAR QUEST
PART 2

by an anonymous contributor

With the burden of the family research now in my hands, I decided I would put an enquiry about our family on the Hong Kong Genealogical Forum https://www.genealogy.com/forum/regional/countries/topics/hongkong/

Within 24 hours I had a reply from a totally unknown, distant cousin. It turned out that our respective branches of the family had fallen out with each other in Hong Kong and remained out of contact. This cousin believed that we shared a Chinese great-grandmother – a complete shock to me. He also had a different first name for our joint great-grandfather, than the one I had been told by my father.

My biggest disadvantage was that I had never been to Hong Kong. I decided I must go and walk the streets where our family homes had been. Of course, when it came down to it, all the numbering had changed and our family houses had been replaced by blocks of flats, but I had news of my grandfather’s last house, which had been used as a mess for Japanese officers. In the 1950s the neighbouring British children called it their “Castle” and used to pretend to bomb each other with stones down the chimney. The house survived until about 1960.

I decided to apply in person for a search of my grandmother’s birth and death certificates, for I had no idea of her birth or death dates. I have found that personal applications, or at least collection of the certificates in person, mean that errors can be sorted out on the spot.  Online applications for searches for births and deaths via the Hong Kong Government Offices site are advertised, but my own attempts to fill in the form have always failed. A telephone number is required, but a UK number seems to crash the form. It used not to be possible to pay by credit card. I’m not sure if this has changed.  Latterly I found it easier to download and print the application forms and send the appropriate bankers draft. A “Particular Search” can be carried out if you know the approximate date of the birth, death or marriage. Officially, a search will be carried out for the period two years either side of the specified date on the form. The current cost for a “Particular Search” is HK$140. A “General Search,” if the date is unknown, costs HK$360. The latter search may take several months. The search result will be returned as either positive or negative, but without any details. If positive, another payment is required for supplying a copy of the relevant certificate. I have three times challenged negative returns. On one occasion, my application giving the first name and surname alone brought a negative result, but when I suggested there might be a second given name, the result was returned positive. On another occasion when I challenged a negative return on a birth registration, the date in the register turned out to differ from the one that I had copied from the gravestone by only a single day. So much for assurances about searching within five years of the specified date!

I have now visited the crowded “Births, Marriages & Deaths” floor of the Immigration Department at Low Block, 66 Queensway in Hong Kong many times. On the first occasion, I applied for “General Searches” for both my grandmother’s birth certificate and death certificate. I was asked to supply a bankers draft for HK$720, but a more senior official finally agreed to accept cash when I couldn’t find a proper bank nearby. There was no record in Hong Kong of my grandmother’s death certificate, but after two months a positive result was returned for her birth certificate, for which I was invited to apply with a bankers draft for HK$140. Another surprise: my great-grandmother’s name was quite a different Chinese name to that of my cousin’s, and not the English one given to me by my father. My great-grandfather had therefore had children by two different Chinese women. From his first union, my grandmother was the only child to have survived. She was then brought up by my great-grandfather’s second Chinese wife, together with four younger step-siblings.

My subsequent search for my grandparents’ marriage certificate resulted negative and so did my cousin’s for our joint great-grandfather’s. There was no legal requirement to register marriages centrally, so records for marriages and baptisms were held at the churches where they took place. Many of these records were destroyed during World War 2. My grandmother would have needed a passport for pre-war evacuation to Australia, however, and a marriage certificate validating her married name would have been necessary. A passport photo of her still exists, so we know that she at least had a passport. Passenger lists also show her travelling between Hong Kong and England via Canada.

Screenshot of the St John’s Cathedral Records page on Gwulo.com by Vivian Kong

The St John’s Cathedral records of marriages, baptisms and funerals 1897-1937 have been published on gwulo.com although there are some gaps in the years. These were copied by a Gwulo contributor from the St John’s Cathedral Notes, held in the Public Records Office [PRO]. I was granted permission to consult the missing numbers that are relevant to my family but only in person. The PRO staff are not permitted to carry out research for enquirers – only to photocopy the documents applied for in their entirety. I was looking for the baptism and funeral of my grandparents’ first child and for a record of their wedding and had identified five church records covering the three years concerned. The five booklets came to 644 pages for which the PRO quoted me HK$1,352. 40 photocopying charge. Only one page turned out to be relevant to my family. Two of the booklets were duplicates, but with a different class mark. Would it really have been an infringement of the rules to tell me that?

Another mystery has been my grandfather’s conversion to the Catholic faith in the wake of his first child’s death. As with my grandparents’ marriage, I have been unable to find that child’s baptism, which cannot have been in St John’s. There were several less prestigious churches than St John’s that I have approached, but whose records were destroyed in WW2. This search has been one of my failures. The records of the Catholic baptisms of my grandparents’ four subsequent children have been preserved. For Catholic baptisms I have had generous help from the Catholic Church Archivists who kindly consulted the Diocesan records for me and who can be contacted at stjosephs.hk@gmail.com.

The London Missionary Society’s handwritten register of baptisms within the Chinese congregation is held by the library of the Hong Kong Baptist University. Applications can be made to borrow it via the inter-library loan system. A Hong Kong contact generously did this on my behalf and found the entry for the baptism of my grandmother’s Chinese stepmother, described as having five children. The children had probably been baptised as babies, but not in St John’s, whose records are among the very few to have survived World War 2.

‘All Roads Lead to Hong Kong: Paths to Becoming a Hong Kong Historian’ Roundtable Discussion

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We are delighted to announce that, with HKU History Department, we will co-host a public roundtable entitled “All Roads Lead to Hong Kong: Paths to Becoming a Hong Kong Historian’ on the evening of June 5 at the University of Hong Kong. Four historians at different stages of their careers will share with us their experience of establishing an academic career with a research focus on Hong Kong.
 
After the roundtable, we will also launch the ‘Hong Kong Through the Lens: Historical Photographs of Hong Kong’ Exhibition. The exhibition features a collection of photos taken by a Scottish vet Francis Davidson, who worked for the Dairy Farm in Pokfulam in the early 1920s.
These events are free of charge and open to the public. For more details and registration, see: https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_hdetail.aspx?guest=Y&ueid=64573

Guest writer: ‘Researching my Hong Kong family’s past: A fourteen-year quest’ [Part 1]

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RESEARCHING MY HONG KONG FAMILY’S PAST:
A FOURTEEN-YEAR QUEST
(Part 1)

by an anonymous contributor

Vivian Kong has asked me to share my experience of researching my Hong Kong family’s past. As a graduate of Bristol University, I am more than happy to contribute to the Hong Kong History Project. My BA was in modern languages and my later PhD was in French. Eventually, with two published books, including a critical biography under my belt, I hoped that my academic training, despite not being in South East Asian Studies, would help me in the task of constructing a biography of my Hong Kong family. In the past fourteen years, I have had failures as well as successes and the failures will be a part of my story. Here I am going to set out some of the resources I have used in the hope that they will help other people. As websites improve, the element of human interface with Hong Kong officialdom – simple willingness to help – is deteriorating. It is important not to be deterred by that.

Family members, who could provide the richest vein of information, may prove impossible to unlock. If there is information that they wish to hide, they may refuse to share their memories. Because my father refused to discuss his Hong Kong past, I did not start my search until after his death. I was already in my forties before an older cousin, who had likewise waited until his parents were dead, made a start on our family history and asked me to review what he had written.

Four generations of our family lived in Hong Kong from 1866-1941, but were not spoken of. My generation only knew about our English grandfather, ninth child of a working class Northamptonshire family, who had arrived in Hong Kong 1895. We also knew that he had become an architect and created a successful business in Hong Kong, making enough money to build a magnificent house overlooking the Happy Valley racecourse. The story was that he had lost his fortune and that this loss had led to his premature death at the age of fifty-one. What we did not know was that our grandfather had married a seventeen year-old Eurasian girl, eldest daughter of a tavern keeper by his first Chinese wife (our great-grandmother). This is the secret that his children, including my father, successfully concealed. He and his brother and sister all married English spouses in England and revealed nothing to their children about their Eurasian heritage.

Racecourse, Happy Valley, Hong Kong, c.1890.
University of Bristol – Historical Photographs of China reference number: Bk09-29. Source: ‘Picturesque Hong Kong’ (Ye Olde Printerie Ltd., Hong Kong), c.1925.

 

Family research is a mixture of tedious work and chance. In my teens, I had asked my father to draw me a family tree.[1] Thus I knew the name of his mother, whom I always imagined had died young. Imagine my shock, when, aged fifteen, I received a memorandum recording a recent payment by my father to an Australian nursing home in her name, mistakenly enclosed in my parents’ weekly letter to me at my English boarding school. I returned it in my own next letter home, but my parents lived far away in Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka) and I received no further explanation from them. I recorded the event in my 5-year diary and tucked it away in the back of my mind.

In 2004 my older cousin unexpectedly died, but not before sending each of his three surviving cousins, myself included, a typescript of his painstaking work, to which we had each contributed the meagre facts passed on to us by our parents.  After retiring from his job, my cousin, had begun by going through the copies of the South China Morning Post held by the British Library on microfiche (now microfilm). These give lists of passengers arriving and departing Hong Kong; weddings; obituaries; funerals; court cases; company advertisements; and lists of winners of sporting events. The British Library also holds the Ladies Directory of Hong Kong 1904-06. A supplement of the China Directory, it gives the residential addresses of the wives of all the Europeans living in Hong Kong. This can now be cross-checked against the Jury Lists partially published online by Gwulo and also available from the online Hong Kong Government Reports. The Government Reports also provide a wealth of information via a name search, if your relative had any official position whatsoever. It is easier to search for a man than a woman and, apart from three addresses listed against her name in the Ladies Directories, we found no information about our grandmother.

Screenshot of the Jurors List page on Gwulo.com by Vivian Kong

 

Screenshot of Hong Kong Government Reports Online (1842-1941) by Vivian Kong

[1] He gave me a false English name for his Chinese grandmother. It is therefore advisable to use ancestry.com or findmypast.com for a more accurate account of descent.

HKHP Conference: Draft Programme and Registration

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We are excited to announce that registration for our ‘“All Roads Lead to Hong Kong”: People, City, Empires’ conference is now open here. The conference will take place at the University of Hong Kong on 6-7 June. We welcome any colleagues, students, and members of the public who are interested in Hong Kong history to join us at the conference. Conference fees for non-speakers are £50 for both days, or £25 for one day (Please note that the option for ‘funded registration’ is only for HKU & University of Bristol students, as well as speakers who received HKHP travel bursaries). A draft programme (as of April 18) is available for your reference.

We are also delighted to announce that, with the HKU Department of History, we will host a public roundtable on the evening of June 5 entitled “All Roads Lead to Hong Kong: Paths to Becoming a Hong Kong Historian’. Four historians at different stages of their careers, Catherine Chan, Elizabeth Sinn, John Wong, and Ray Yep will share with us their experience of establishing an academic career with a research focus on Hong Kong. This event is free of charge and open to the public. More details and registration for the event will be available soon.

We look forward to welcoming you to Hong Kong in June.  In the meantime, do get in touch with us at hkhistory-project@bristol.ac.uk if you have any questions.

Introducing Stella Wang

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This week our guest writer is Meng (Stella) Wang, PhD candidate at University of Sydney. Stella’s research interests lie in the history of childhood, particularly on children’s everyday life, their use of urban space, and the formation of their identity in their lived spaces. Stella has kindly accepted our invite to write a reflective piece on how she uses visual materials in her project.

A Visual History of Colonial School Architecture in Hong Kong 1921-1941

Meng Wang | University of Sydney

 

This entry is a reflection on the use of visual materials in my project, which explores the history of colonial childhood in Hong Kong, particularly on the architecture of childhood and children’s everyday activity spaces and how that has changed over the interwar years. I trace the spaces that were designed for and used by children such as school playground and science laboratory and the transformation of these spaces. I am interested in, in particular, the coproduction of space, the child’s body, and identity, of how changes in childhood spaces transformed bodily experiences and produced identities.

 

I use visual images as sources to substantiate the narratives on colonial school architecture, and more generally architecture of childhood in interwar Hong Kong. In this entry, I will discuss the methods I use to approach visual sources, in relation to two research areas: architecture and the child’s body; space, body and identities. I will also address the importance of picture archives to the visual history of colonial school architecture.

 

I. Architecture and the Child’s Body

Part of my project explores the child’s body and school, I examine the transformation of the child’s body through addressing architecture in relation to curriculum. I look at the transformation of particular school spaces, such as school playground and science laboratory, through which I then trace the gendered history of curriculum, in relation to physical education and science teaching. I am also interested in how the transformation of the child’s body differed at government, grant-in-aid, and vernacular schools, which led me to a search on visual materials on schooling buildings of different types of schools, both their interior and exterior. I read these photographs, collected from different visual image database, including Hong Kong Memory, Hong Kong Image Database, and USC digital library, for the possible bodily movement enabled by the space, for example, the layout of the classroom and how child may possibly use this space, I then compare these among different types of schools. Throughout the project, I aim to trace the difference in school architecture of government, missionary and vernacular schools in relation to the different ideals of the child’s body, of what was considered suitable and capable of the child.

As a second line of questioning, I am interested in gendered difference in schools, and how architecture functioned as a social technology in constructing gendered identities. This focus on gendered history led me to explore the boarder architecture of femininity and masculinity in colonial contexts, which required an interweaving of visual and documentary sources. I use visual sources to substantiate documentary evidence, and I evaluate the pictures base on their potential to answer the key research questions: gendered differences produced by architecture. I collected pictures on school buildings, school children, playgrounds, and school publications, through which I aim to trace the architectural history of schools and the changing use of school spaces, such as access and use of playground. Visual source is an essential piece of this project on colonial school architecture and the child’s body, not only because its potential to add evidence to the argument, but also that the compiling of picture archive on colonial school life lends itself to the analysis of lived experience of schooling and enables comparison on school life in other colonial contexts.

The absence of colonial school architecture in Hong Kong in current historiography makes the compiling of its archive a fascinating opportunity to consider how colonial architecture interacted with the history of education, of femininity, of masculinity. This project will therefore reconfigure understanding of colonial architecture by developing knowledge about the lived experience of its key users, and specifically on the coproduction of colonial educational space and the feminine and masculine body.

I further argue that colonial school architecture is an emerging field in the history of colonial education, particularly in relation to the history of femininity and masculinity, to explore the role of colonial school architecture in the production of the female and male body, therefore, opens up new discussions on the construction of femininity and masculinity in education contexts, and how imperial gender ideals were produced through the choreography of the body.

 

II. Space, Body, and Identities
When I first approached the existing picture archives in Hong Kong, it was not immediate clear the importance and potential they carry for the project. To get a glimpse into the lived school life in the interwar years, I searched the oral history archives in Hong Kong, and through the reading of oral histories, I traced the memories of school buildings. The second step was to group the school buildings chronically, and based on the school types, as government, grant, or vernacular. Schools built in the interwar years shared common features such as sports and science facilities, which led to a read on curriculum.
When read school photographs, I start by asking the location of schools; the use of space within schools; and methods of learning and teaching. Although not a prime focus of my study, the location of the school suggests the potential liminal spaces the child travelled to and from school, and whether boarding facilities was necessary. The use of space within schools is where I analyse the function of the space. Corridors, gates, verandas are transitional spaces between activities, where interactions and encounters took place, that transforms the individual body to the social body. I am particularly interested in how the space produced experience, and how changes in space reconfigured everyday sensorial experiences.
As another potential line of inquiry, the materiality of schooling, captured in school pictures, also lends itself to the analysis on school architecture and children’s health. The layout of classroom, the size of windows, the height of desks, all had an impact on the users experience of the learning space and children’s wellbeing in particular.

The last point I want to address in this entry is the need to use innovative approach to develop visual archives that lend itself to the collaboration with other types of sources, such as oral, documentaries sources. And to classify the content in the archive temporally and spatially, for example, to map school architecture chronically, and in selected geographic regions. Picture archives on school architecture is only emerging, and quite often for individual projects, the need to collect visual sources from multiple existing archives that were not designed for the specific research on history of education is common, in which case, the interweaving of diverse types of sources becomes necessary, and often with an interdisciplinary research design. The lived experience of schooling, and the everyday life of children at school is not an extensively research area in the history of education, and it is also an area that would benefit from the development of picture archives, and with specific research focuses, the connection between architecture and child’s body could be addressed in a more nuanced manner, and join larger discussions on gendered history of education, modern architecture, as well as order and discipline in modern institutions.

 

 

Introducing Tim Yung

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Happy new year everyone! We are delighted to have Tim Yung as our first guest writer in 2019. A PhD candidate at the University of Hong Kong, Tim’s research concerns South China Anglican Identity in the early twentieth century. Here’s Tim telling us how and why he works on this fascinating project:

When walking around Hong Kong, I could not help but notice a curious abundance of schools whose names involve Christian themes or names of saints. Another such curiosity occurs in common conversation: upon learning that I attend church, the follow-up question is frequently whether I am a ‘gei1 duk1 gau3’ or ‘teen1 zyu2 gau3’. To the best of my knowledge, the question refers to whether one is a ‘Protestant’ or a ‘Catholic’, though many opt to translate the former into ‘Christian’. In contrast, during my undergraduate studies in the UK, schools tended to be named after localities rather than saints, whilst in common conversation, I would be asked to which ‘denomination’ my church in Hong Kong belonged. It was striking to see the vast difference in local experiences of the Christian faith despite the professed unity of the worldwide church. It is upon the backdrop of this wider question that I began my doctoral studies on South China Anglican identity. What does it mean to be both ‘Chinese’ and ‘Christian’? It would take a lifetime (if not longer) to answer the question properly. Consequently, it hardly would have been ideal to try this as a PhD project. The next best thing within the given time and resources was to reduce it to a smaller area and scope – and so the research on South China Anglicanism began. To facilitate this journey was the timely establishment of the archives of the Hong Kong Sheng Kung Hui (Hong Kong Anglican Church) as well as a recent series of historical studies of Anglican Christianity in China.

 

I wonder if there exists a term that describes my experience – namely, that of Chinese who grew up in Hong Kong but attended international school then studied abroad. It is, therefore, rather difficult to answer the question, “Where are you from?” These days, I take the liberty to tell a story that goes around the world in a few minutes. There was a time when such a question would tap into my insecurity and lead me into further confusion about my identity. Turning pain into gain, it turns out that the experience of cultural entanglement has enabled to become a researcher with an enhanced awareness of historical agents caught between cultures. This very entanglement characterized the process of Christianity in China in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially as Protestant missionaries grew in number following the 1842 Treaty of Nanjing.

When observing sources about foreign missions in Hong Kong or Chinese clergy in Guangdong Province, it is never simply a case of ‘East meets West’ or ‘imperialism’. Instead, one sees the unfolding of a relationship where historical agents thoughtfully pick and mix aspects of Christianity that are consistent with the main creeds yet practicable in their cultural context. For instance, entire treatises were written on the integration of Chinese marriage customs with Christian theology. Go-betweens and betrothal gifts were maintained, but personal freedom and monogamy were adopted. “It will be an excellent plan if in future parents will consult with their children before betrothing them”, said Bishop Frederick Graves of Shanghai. In effect, my research merely involves what all historians do: to listen carefully to the voices of the past and to present it in a coherent way. A novelty of my research is how the sources are scattered from Lambeth Palace to Lan Kwai Fong (the Sheng Kung Hui archive is just above it!), from Yale Divinity School to Worcester Cathedral Library. It never ceases to amaze me how interconnected the world was in the early twentieth century, especially within the Anglican Communion and how contemporaries understood their place in the world.

 

For the wider enterprise of historical research, learning about South China Anglican identity enriches one’s understanding of how Hong Kong is best understood in connection with China and with the world. To see things as Chinese Christians and missionaries in the early twentieth century saw them provides a whole new perspective on what Hong Kong was – and is. Equally, a study of South China Anglican identity acts as a regional point of comparison to the growing field of World Christianity, where researchers from around the world go about discovering not only what makes churches worldwide unique, but also what unites them.

CFP: HKHP Postgraduate Workshop, ‘Hong Kong and Beyond: Mapping the City’s Networks’, January 2019.

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Call for Papers
Hong Kong History Project Post-Graduate Workshop
University of Bristol, January 2019

‘Hong Kong and Beyond: Mapping the City’s Networks’

The Hong Kong History Project at the University of Bristol is pleased to announce its third Postgraduate Workshop, which will take place on January 14-15, 2019, and which provides an opportunity to network and the share ideas. We welcome proposals for participation from postgraduate students and early career scholars working on Hong Kong history and related disciplines in the UK and overseas. This year we are looking to explore the transnational contexts of Hong Kong’s history. We seek proposals for 20 minute presentations on current research that can address this broad theme from any angle, and which relate to the wider political, social, cultural, and commercial networks that have helped shape Hong Kong’s history. Presentations will be organized into small panels, followed by question and answer sessions.

Candidates are invited to submit a 200-word statement briefly outlining their area of research and motivation for attending the workshop, along with their Curriculum Vitae. Please submit all applications to Jason Chu (waili.chu@bristol.ac.uk) and Thomas Larkin (thomas.larkin@bristol.ac.uk) by November 26, 2018. Accepted participants will be notified by December 3, 2018. Two nights’ accommodation in Bristol and some meals will be provided. Although priority will be given to history postgraduate students and recently completed PhDs, applications from other disciplines will be considered provided an appreciation of history is shown.

Introducing Vivien Chan

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We are glad to have Vivien Chan as our contributor this week. Vivien is a design historian based in London. She is currently a PhD candidate on the Cultures of Occupation in Twentieth Century Asia Project at University of Nottingham, and holds an MA in History of Design from the Victoria & Albert Museum/ Royal College of Art. She is also an Ambassador for the Design History Society, and continues her practice as an illustrator/animator/filmmaker. 

My research topic is consumer cultures in Hong Kong New Town public housing estates, 1950s – 1980s, and my PhD is part of the Cultures of Occupation in Twentieth Century Asia Project (COTCA).  Responding to ‘spaces of occupation’, I wanted to explore the public spaces in Hong Kong that encapsulate the mundane and ordinary aspects of life in this period. The 1950s – 1980s in Hong Kong is a time of transformation, known for its miraculous regeneration after the war through the success of its global manufacturing industry, and reconstructing the shape of the urban landscape to accommodate the increasing needs in the city. In other words, Hong Kong was creating and filled with stuff to be bought and sold, but this was mostly for the export market – so then, what was the consumption practices of those living and working in the city? Rather than the malls that dominate the landscape now, local, everyday consumption took place much closer to home. Consumption, in the form of buying newspapers and sweets, meeting friends for tea, picking groceries for dinner, renting mah jong tables, choosing a new pet goldfish from a hawker’s bucket, or celebrating with a family meal, was largely conducted in the neighbourhood, on your journey between home and work. Shops, markets and hawker stalls were intrinsic modes in the community networks of support, and such spaces of consumption would increasingly be designed into later versions of public housing.

Researching this kind of space reveals a different side to the everyday life in Hong Kong. Neither the ‘dangerous’ fictional stories depicted in movies, nor the privileged journal entries of expatriates and elites, exploring the mundane routines and spaces during a period of great change – in values, way of life, moving through the city, in self-identifying – puts the everyday tactics for surviving and thriving in these conditions at centre stage. A huge community of people made the renewed industrialisation and urbanisation physically happen, but yet their role is little found in the history of the city. In the present day, where the nuances in the experience of history are increasingly eliminated or simplified, it is all the more urgent to locate history in the personal and subjective experiences of the city, and re-interpret the histories that have been written. The necessary and continuous negotiation of identity, culture, memory and heritage in the city can be further diversified through these new perspectives on Hong Kong history.

I became interested in this topic during my research street food stalls for my Master’s thesis, ‘Assembling the Dai Pai Dong: Living and Occupying the Street in Hong Kong, 1950s – present’. While I was in Hong Kong conducting research, I discovered that dai pai dong existed in several different structural forms – one of these forms was the dong gu ting, semi-structured stalls that are mostly found at the outskirts of Hong Kong’s urban centres as part of the facilities at public housing estates. Central (socially and architecturally) to the everyday life of working-class people, then isolated in the New Towns, dong gu ting highlighted the dynamic between the regularity of the formalised prefabricated public housing estate and the seemingly chaotic ways that the community used it. No longer simply for food, or a space confined to men, the dong gu ting was, and still is, an extended dining room for familial connection and remembering. Dai pai dong served as an example of how people changed and manipulated the urban landscape, not explicitly as acts of political resistance, but as everyday negotiations of space. With the PhD project on consumer culture, I hope to extend this further into other spatial forms of consumption.

Photo assemblage of Wo Che Estate, Vivien Chan, 2016, photographs author’s own.

Such ephemeral subjects can be difficult to trace in traditional archives. Although with this topic I can access documentation, architectural plans and photographs related to public housing estates and neighbourhoods, an interdisciplinary approach will be necessary to fill in the missing links. In my work on dai pai dong, I relied on oral histories conducted by the Hong Kong Heritage Project and Hong Kong Memory to inform the lived experience of the street. I also used my background in design, as an illustrator/animator/filmmaker, to visualise the space, by using photography to document my ethnographic research in the city. I hope to develop these methodologies in my PhD project to give further spatial depth to the research. Objects are also a really valuable, underused resource in research of Hong Kong. Drawing from my work researching objects at the V&A, using the collections in Hong Kong’s museums could provide the tactile, material elements to the research, where in many cases objects in everyday consumption spaces may no longer exist in their original environments.

An inter-disciplinary approach to history means that I can access subjects that have been overlooked by ‘official’ forms of documentation. As a design historian, I’m looking at things and histories that have always been present, but disregarded – the stories told and object kept by ordinary people (rather than elites) are just as legitimate narratives of life in Hong Kong as those kept in archives, and fundamental to contextualising the socio-political climate of the time. By flipping the weight from macro, and largely colonial, narratives to the microhistories, directly from the voices of those experiencing the city, and the material construction of the city itself, we can tell an alternative history of Hong Kong. Design history has the potential to rewrite the power-hierarchy found in the current historiography, and shape the discourse of what ‘design’ and ‘history’ mean in the city.

 

Introducing Shuang Wu

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Our guest writer this week is Shuang Wu, PhD student at the University of Hong Kong and King’s College, London. Shuang’s research explores lives of Chinese mothers in colonial Hong Kong and the United Kingdom after the Second World War. Here she shares with us how stories told by her grandmother, an illiterate woman born in Shanghai and moved to Hong Kong in the 1950s, inspired her to conduct a research that thinks about migrant mothers and the meaning of ‘motherhood’. She’s also looking for oral history interviewees for her research (details please see below), so do get in touch with her if you or anyone you know would be interested in participating in her fascinating research!

Growing up I never really understood history. History was just stories told to me by my maternal grandmother, Ah Bu. She was a matriarch. An illiterate dragon lady, born in Shanghai during the worst period of prewar political upheaval, and forced into a largely subterranean existence during the Japanese occupation.

 

Ah Bu traveled across the PRC-Hong Kong border at the age of 18 during the 1950s to marry my Ah Gong, her former next-door neighbour in Shanghai. He had migrated to Hong Kong four years previously and was now working as a mechanic. They were married while my Ah Bu was still referring to him as ‘the guy from next-door’. Even so, my Ah Gong was a romantic. He pawned their wedding bands, gifts from their parents, and bought tickets to the movies. One movie and a dinner later, they were in love. I am still trying to find out the title of that movie. It was a turning point in her life, starting her on a journey that would lead her to become a devoted wife, mother, grandmother, and great grandmother of 23 proud individuals.

Ah Bu and Ah Gong were not alone. As a result of the significant influx of Chinese migrants during the period, a pronounced demographic shift altered family and community dynamics in numerous ways, including the introduction and expansion of new languages, in addition to different provincial cultures, traditions and perspectives. Domestic overcrowding was particularly challenging for migrant mothers and ‘mothers-to-be’ when they first arrived in Hong Kong. During the 1940s and 1950s, wives and mothers continued to be perceived as the main housekeepers of families and primary carers. Consequentially, domestic space became an immediate concern for women, and many families were forced to live in poorly-built squatter settlements. Housing shortages and a lack of income meant that my grandparents survived a largely transient lifestyle on the outskirts of the colony. They lived in houses that were poorly built, with no bathrooms, and nothing but empty space as a sleeping area, as well as a wood stove for cooking. Since my Ah Gong was always busy at work, it became my Ah Bu’s duty to undertake all childcare and domestic responsibilities.

As there were no bathrooms, Ah Bu would be in charge of emptying the night soil. There were also no electricity or running water, so she would have to fetch water everyday, from a communal tap on the other side of the settlement, making at least ten trips a day to cater for the entire family. The rural setting of their new home meant there were always various insects and animals in close proximity. She fought off rats, red ants, and even deadly snakes in her own home. At one point, she defeated a five-inch centipede with only a pair of chopsticks! While women ruled the domestic space, the term ‘domestic’ is perhaps misleading as it was necessary for women to move outside of the home, to the market for food or other locations for household goods, in order to perform their duties as wives and mothers. Such activities portray the reality of a paradoxical domesticity, and a focus on mothers’ roles reveals the challenges and triumphs of everyday life.

Ah Bu did not find her daily activities easy. Born and raised as the closet daughter of an affluent Shanghai family, she spoke no Cantonese and found it extremely difficult to communicate with anyone who were not Shanghainese, causing her to be bullied by vendors at the market. As she was illiterate, she could not read any of the price tags or names of products at any of the stores. As she was uneducated, she had to learn from the very beginning on how to do mathematics so that she could help Ah Gong manage the books of the family finance. Ah Bu’s perseverance, in the face of this grueling start, led her and became the resilient old lady I know today.

Many female migrants shared similar recollections to those of my Ah Bu during the interviews I conducted as part of my initial PhD research. During the 1950s, many women, wives and mothers crossed the border from the Mainland to Hong Kong. It was also the first time that female migrants had the ability to move between the borders of the Mainland to Hong Kong as independents, unlike Chinese women in prewar Hong Kong, who were made of largely trafficked female labour, working as prostitutes or mui tsais. Consequently, the narratives of mothers are of particular significance as they allow a deeper understanding of what life was like for citizens in the colony. Migrant mothers provide the private side of a very public act, since mothers’ domestic activities took them beyond the boundaries of the inner quarters, revealing the challenges and triumphs of everyday life.

The use of oral testimony in exploring the meaning of ‘motherhood’ in my current work is essential, as women, especially mothers, are often neglected in official documentation due to prioritisation of men in history and society, as well as the fact that many women were illiterate. Chinese migration stories are also often focused on male ‘sojourner’ stories. In addition, the female presence in state-controlled press was very limited, and the personal lives of women only appeared in the press or official reports and documents when they touched on areas of concern to the government. Since my PhD examines the rights, health, legal position and daily lives of Chinese motherhood in colonial Hong Kong and the United Kingdom, many of whom were migrants from Mainland China in the postwar period. As such, oral testimonies are an important way to bridge the gap between state recognition of mothers’ lives, ideals and representations. Yet, at the same time, uncover the private lives and feelings of mothers.

The purpose of this study is to address the experiences of Chinese migrant mothers, as well as female historical experiences, during the 1940s to 1970s in colonial Hong Kong and the United Kingdom. I would love to hear from you if you, or your family and friends, know anything about migrant mothers in the two locations during the proposed time period. If you have any questions about my research project, please also feel free to contact me via shuang.1.wu@kcl.ac.uk. I sincerely look forward to hearing from you!

[HKHP 2019 Conference CFP] “All Roads Lead to Hong Kong”: People, City, Empires

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“All Roads Lead to Hong Kong”: People, City, Empires
Hong Kong History Project Conference

6-7 June 2019, University of Hong Kong

Keynote speaker: Henry Yu, Associate Professor, Department of History, University of British Columbia

Ellen Thorbecke, Hong Kong (Shanghai: Kelly & Walsh, 1938).

Under the auspices of the ‘Hong Kong History Project’, the Departments of History at the University of Bristol and the University of Hong Kong are jointly organizing a two-day international conference at the University of Hong Kong on 6-7 June 2019. Hong Kong has been described as its own cultural-historical place at the edge of the Chinese and British empires, and as an ‘in-between place’. But can we also consider Hong Kong beyond the edge of these two empires and as more than an in-between place? Our aim is to encourage work that will consider the city’s history within a global framework that includes, but is not restricted to, networks of people, goods, communications, ideas and culture.

The conference aims to enrich discussions on the connections between Hong Kong and the world by drawing together international scholars and students to share their research on the history of this city and its people, and to encourage participants to consider the city’s history within a global framework. We welcome papers exploring a range of themes and approaches relating to Hong Kong and its wider networks, including its diaspora in a historical perspective. We also encourage proposals for panel sessions of three papers.

Specific conference themes to be explored may include:

  • Migration, communities, and diasporas
  • Environmental history
  • Culture, identity, and belonging
  • Colonialism and post-colonialism
  • Hong Kong’s international relations
  • Globalisation
  • Mobilities, transnational spaces, and port cities
  • Modernity and cosmopolitanism
  • Hong Kong’s economic transitions

Proposals are invited for individual papers of 20 minutes, or for panels including three such papers. To submit a proposal for consideration, send an abstract of 300 words (maximum) and 1-page cv by 5 January 2019 to hkhistory-project@bristol.ac.uk. Accepted participants will be notified by January 30.

We expect to be able to make a significant contribution to the expenses incurred for participants to attend the conference. Additionally, a  limited number of travel bursaries will be available to postgraduate students and ECRs. To be considered, please submit with your application a short statement outlining your research interests, purpose in attending the conference, an estimated budget of expenses, and availability of funding from your institution.

Conference Committee
Robert Bickers, University of Bristol
John Carroll, University of Hong Kong
Vivian Kong, University of Bristol
Nathan Kwan, University of Hong Kong & King’s College, London
Joyce Lau, University of Hong Kong
Chris Wemyss, University of Bristol

The conference is funded by the University of Bristol’s ‘Hong Kong History Project’ and the Faculty of Arts, University of Hong Kong.