'It was like going to heaven':
life as newcomers, and Hongkongers
When Hon Wai Tin, now 76, climbed over the iron fence heading for Hong Kong in 1973, his little finger got hooked by the metal and sliced off. But he couldn’t stop. He had to keep going.
Starting in Changpingzhen in Guangdong province, he and his companion had already spent five nights trudging through woods and rivers, finding their way by the sound of the trains to the south. As they crawled on the mountainside for a chance to cross the "finish line" in Sha Tau Kok, the military dogs from China's patrol were hunting them down. One bit Hon's heel, but, one of the cotton knee pads he had prepared for the jump over the fence, slipped down his leg and protected him from the dog’s teeth.
"I saw it. What a big wolfdog. We were desperados!" he said, adding that he gave the dog a fierce kick and ran for his life. Falling into the mud, he got trapped and the dog went to bite his butt, but he was so slippery from the mud that it lost its hold.
He leapt up to the fence. Fingers were clinging. His heart was pounding as the barking got louder. He gave it everything he had and jumped. Safely on the other side in Hong Kong, he saw his hand soaked in blood. His friend too made it. When they got to the urban area, Ho had to stay in Kwong Wah Hospital in Yau Ma Tei for a week to go through graft surgery. But the pain was set aside by his amazement over the prosperous city he had just arrived in.
"Because we have lived in villages for so long in Guangzhou, there wasn't much to eat,” he said. “In Hong Kong, the hospitals were like...the people were nice, like going to heaven. Apart from the two meals, breakfast and dinner, after dinner at 8 pm, there was even milk to drink. I was like, I had never drunk milk before," he said, still exhilarated over the experience 49 years ago.
Hon shows his scar on his little finger.
Like Hon, many Chinese refugees settled and embarked on a new life in Hong Kong. As years passed, the former newcomers and strangers to the land are now Hong Kong residents. They have seen the best - and the worst of the city.
"In Hong Kong, if your mind is nimble, it is easy to earn money and become wealthy,” said Hon, who retired from his wholesale business.
After he first arrived, he worked at his relative's hardware store for half a year. Then he started his own business as a hawker, selling hand-made electronic lanterns that he made with light bulbs and battery clamps from Apliu Street in Sham Shui Po. During the mid-Autumn festival, he sold them from a stand in front of a bank in Mong Kok.
"The sale was so good. The lanterns I made were good-looking. There're no lanterns like them in the market yet. It was not trendy at that time. Before that, people used candles. I used batteries," he said, adding he could earn as much as HK$400 a day, as compared to only HK$20 at the hardware store.
The easy success prompted Hon's determination to have his own business. Though he worked for a garment factory in Kwun Tong, in the ironing division, for a short time when the lanterns were no longer popular, he soon returned to the streets to sell his screwdriver and tool set, which also gave him good profits.
In the 1970s, Hong Kong saw an economic take-off and a boost in manufacturing, with the number of factories soaring from around 5,300 in 1960 to more than 16,507 in 1970, according to research by Mark Ng, assistant professor of the Department of Business Administration at Shue Yan University. Workers in the industry also surged from 220,000 to 550,000 during the same period. They were low-skilled labour earning just enough to live on, working long hours in crowded conditions. Among them, many were new Chinese immigrants, such as Chan Hak Chi and Lee, who swam to Hong Kong in 1973.
"We just arrived. There was nothing in our home. We needed to prioritise earning money," said Chan.
Chan and Lee were part of the "sent-down movement" that dismantled the schooling system and sent 17 million young people to the countryside to do hard labour between 1968 to 1980.
Behind the mass rustication was a combination of ideological, political and socio-economic motivations. This included the unsettling problem of the Red Guards, a paramilitary group of 11 million students who attacked, persecuted or killed tens of millions of teachers, intellectuals and other "class enemies." But as the struggle got out of his hand, Mao hoped the sent-down movement would diffuse some of the fanaticism of the young people.
Another justification was the lack of jobs in urban areas to accommodate youngsters unable to go to school and find work. They were "three graduation years," the high schoolers who were supposed to graduate between 1966 to 1968, but the Cultural Revolution interrupted their education. The official narrative said it was re-education of youngsters filled with toxic and un-communist thoughts.
In China, Chan and Lee, who attained secondary school and primary school education respectively, were sent to be "teachers" in a primary school. But all that meant nothing in Hong Kong since it ran a divergent schooling system. Starting from scratch, they found their first job in Hong Kong at a "shanzhai" watch factory, a small scale, family-run company with no specified labour division, where they punched holes in watch straps.
"We worked from morning to night. In the afternoon, when we were hungry, there was some Garden bread, eight cents per pound. We ate the bread and drank boiled water and continued to work," he said.
It was an era where the more one works, the more one gets.
The couple also worked in a plastics factory where they applied coating on radios. Later on, they shifted to a textile factory where their salary was based on how many times the spinning machine spun, demanding hard work and proficiency. They even took night shifts from their colleagues and would work continuously for 16 hours at a time. But health became a concern, he said.
"Because of the yarn, they need to control the temperature. Humidity is quite high. So even working in a textile factory in winter, they still wore one shirt. It was hot. When we were off from work, all over our faces and months was the dust from the yarn. We needed to let the fans blow them off before we get off."
In the early 1970s, most of the textile workers were locals, said Lui Tai Lok, the Chair Professor of Hong Kong Studies at The Education University of Hong Kong who specialises in class analysis, economic sociology and urban sociology.
But that changed in the mid-1970s as factories turned to Chinese immigrants. "Who could tolerate the noisy and dusty environment - immigrant workers most of the time, because they couldn’t find other jobs," he said.
"Their determination, motivation, [or the sense] of 'picking up what others discard,' were strong, because if the job was popular that locals wanted to do, a lot of people competed. If your competitiveness was low, of course, you find jobs that not many people would compete with you.”
So after a year, at the age of 27, Chan joined an elevator company, where he worked for ten years until he founded his own engineering company and became a contractor of elevator installations. Some of his employees were also Chinese immigrants. A high-risk profession, he said he had several industrial accidents at his first elevator company. One time Chan was working in a lift shaft when objects began to fall from the top of the shaft. He was hit and had blood dripping from his head to chin, but he decided to go back to work. Another time his hand was slashed by wires, but he didn't take work injury compensation because he needed the overtime pay.
"We shed blood and sweat to contribute to Hong Kong's take-off... You can judge - did we give to Hong Kong or give to ourselves? " Chan said.
By 1980, illegal immigrants - Chinese immigrants who arrived in Hong Kong without an entry permit - accounted for 10% of all jobs on construction sites, amid the economy undergoing an expansion of the property market.
As life got better, the couple moved house a couple of times: from an iron-sheet house to a rooftop apartment in To Kwa Wan to their own private flat with multiple rooms. Chan, 75 and retired, is a father of three and a grandfather.
One unfulfilled dream, he said, was that he never got the chance to go to university. For years, Chan has been chasing his survival and livelihood, and despite night school being available, he couldn't attend because he often worked at night.
When working on construction sites at night, he said, he heard the TV from nearby residents. It was airing Enjoy Yourself Tonight, a popular variety show of Hong Kong's television broadcasting company TVB.
Chan sang along with the theme song at the beginning :
"Worked so hard during the day till now to relax.
After dinner, [we] need to rest for a bit...'
Original lyrics in Chinese
[日頭猛做，到依家輕鬆下，食過晚飯，要休息返一陣]
"We worked so hard during the day till they relaxed and watched TV, and we continued working," he said.
And by the time the show finished with a "goodbye song," Chan said he had just started packing to get off work.
"I can't be mad. I always say I escaped from death when crossing [to Hong Kong]. It's destiny," Chan said when asked if he still resents all the disruptions to his life, adding his Hong Kong-born cousins all received higher education.
"They could stay with their parents...and didn't make their parents worry, but I didn't have that environment," he said. "Try to imagine what feeling it is?... I can only believe [this is] how destiny goes..."
After all the time in Hong Kong, Hon also said he only had his first formal English class last year, but he found it too hard. In the old days in China, he only learnt Russian, which wasn't helpful when he came to Hong Kong.
In 1974, in front of their first home, an iron sheet house in Sha Tin. (Photo courtesy: Chan Hak Chi)
Cheuk Pak Tong, the former and the founding Director of Academy of Film at Hong Kong Baptist University, is perhaps one of the more fortunate ones. It was 1962, during the Great Famine, when he walked from Dongguan in Guangdong Province to Hong Kong. He had just finished primary school. He was six years old.
"It was full of people on the road to Hong Kong anyway...so I followed them. All the way, there were people," he said.
Cheuk Pak Tong, the former and the founding Director of Academy of Film at Hong Kong Baptist University.
His father and siblings had all gone overseas, and his mother passed away after giving birth to him. Alone, Cheuk only bought a bottle of water. It took him a couple of hours to walk over the mountains and arrived in Sheung Shui in Hong Kong.
"If you're little, the family don't eat to let you eat. The starving wasn't unbearable," he said, "But the large group said they had to go, everybody was leaving, the old and the young were leaving. You just follow them…I kind of know [Hong Kong] is freer, [you] can do anything, buy anything."
In 1962, Chinese authorities had relaxed their exit control, resulting in thousands of starved and desperate refugees pouring into Hong Kong. In response, the colonial government "decided to give up on settling refugees" and announced a policy of immediate repatriation that came into effect on May 14, Journalist Chen Bingan wrote in The Great Escape to Hong Kong. On May 21, the New York Times reported more than 4,000 illegal immigrants were sent back to China in trucks in one day, but the detention camp in Fanling was still "filled to capacity".
Before the “open-door” policy in 1967, Chinese people needed a permit to enter the city. Stuck at the border between China - a living hell where millions were starving to death - and Hong Kong which refused to accept them, the refugees chose to keep walking to the city in an attempt to sneak in. They eventually hid from the Hong Kong patrol in the mountains of Wa Shan in Sheung Shui that spread across the borders.
Local media called on Hong Kong people to rescue their relatives trapped there. Some even followed the trucks and threw them food, and others lay on the road to stop them from leaving.
A starved refugee with a sheet of food paper, 25 May 1962
Photo courtesy: oldhkphoto
The government plans to set up new fences.
"British soldier use violence to arrest refugees"
A soldier grab the arms of a Chinese refugee to catch him.
"Refugees pushed over the iron fence to enter the territory"
"People giving out food occupy roads; loses order."
"10 something refugees take the opportunity to jump off trucks to escape; European general in front of concentration camps swings his whip; crowds resent and shout to stop him.
Unfortunate events in Wa Shan.
"British soldiers beat up two arrested 'fellows'; crowds resent, leading to unrest."
"A hundred citizens finding relatives gather and make an uproar
The Kung Sheung Daily News reports on the Wa Shan incident, 21 May 1962
Scholars estimated the wave in 1962 added 200,000 people to Hong Kong's population, adding up to 3.5 million, despite many deported.
Cheuk made it before the restrictions came into place, he said. And it was so smooth that he went through no checkpoints. His casual, almost accidental departure from China later proved to be a life-and-death moment.
After arrival, he stayed with his aunt and continued his secondary school education. It was a "rooftop school" first and then a local school in Kowloon City for six years until graduation. A fan of books and magazines from Taiwan, Cheuk went to National Chengchi University and studied journalism, but soon he lost interest and got involved in movies and clubs.
In 1971, he and other university students co-founded the groundbreaking magazine Influence, the first of its kind that focused on movies, sometimes literature and poems. Those editors later became prominent media workers and film producers.
Though Cheuk had long left China and found an ordinary yet charming life as a young adult in Taiwan, he was never detached from the turmoil and calamities across the Strait. Between 1973 and 1974, as the assistant director, he joined the production of Shu Shuen Tong's China Behind, the first movie in Chinese cinema that depicted the Cultural Revolution from a critical and reflective perspective.
China Behind, with English subtitles.
Cheuk and his classmates in Taiwan. Photo courtesy: Cheuk Pak Tong
It tells the story of five youngsters from Guangdong going to Hong Kong over the sea in 1966. Each has different motivations: the anxiety about the future because of "bad" family background, the reluctance to be separated from lovers after graduation and the yearning for the capitalist world. Only three of them make it: One is caught by the Chinese patrol, and the other doesn't make it to the meet-up for unknown reasons.
Indeed, the plot is a raw portrayal of the escape of Chan and Hon - and many others - and the pain the generation shared.
The movie was banned in Hong Kong due to its potential "damage to good relations with other territories." In Taiwan, under the rule of Kuomintang during the White Terror, it faced censorship since it contains a portrait of Mao and his Little Red Book.
"On Saturdays and Sundays, they closed National Chung Hsing University for shooting the film. We hung slogans of the Cultural Revolution over the university. It was forbidden...Once the shooting was done, [we] immediately ripped them off," he said.
He later earned his master's degree in Cinema from the University of Southern California in the US in 1977 and went back to Hong Kong right after. In TVB, as a senior producer and Telemovies Division director, Cheuk produced a range of popular drama serials. During the heyday of Hong Kong cinema around the 1980s, he directed several movies, becoming a member of the New Waves, a movement distinct by its new generation of filmmakers, innovative ideas and themes and the use of technology. He joined HKBU as a professor until his retirement.
Back then, the environment for filming was open and unrestricted, Cheuk said, as producers needed not to overlook audience measurement but solely concentrated on "doing their best."
One time, Cheuk filmed a TV documentary on illegal immigrants and interviewed an Indonesian-born-Chinese who returned to China soon after its establishment at a young age to "build a great motherland." But when the Cultural Revolution swept through China, he was denounced for his "overseas relationships" and jailed for years. He decided to leave the country for Hong Kong in the end.
Cheunk couldn’t help but burst into tears as his interviewee spoke about his misery in China. It echoed with him that, if he stayed behind, he might have endured similar hardships.
"Luckily [I] came out of there. It can be said that I have carved out a niche..."
"Think about it. Luckily at that time, in the freer environment, I could do whatever I liked to do, and learn whatever I liked to learn. No one objected to me. [My] family said as long as I studied, it was alright," he said.
In 1974, the authorities adopted a new "touch-base" policy, meaning those who reached the urban areas of Hong Kong would not face repatriation. The following years saw a significant drop in inflow, with around 6,000, but it climbed to over 88,000 in 1979. The colonial government faced pressure to take action.
In an address in October 1980, Governor Murray MacLehose told the Legislative Council,
"... Far from being welcomed by our people, the illegal immigrants are now more and more resented as they are seen to be eroding the improvement in standards that the people of Hong Kong have worked so hard to achieve. I described all this in detail to you in my address on 1 October―the effect on our prospects over housing, medical provision, education, social welfare, and public security, and its implications for further economic development of this territory. There is also the constant diversion of Police from combatting crime, which is what really matters, to combatting illegal immigration, and crime committed by illegal immigrants is on the increase and out of all proportion to their numbers. Short-time working in some industries, some rise in unemployment, fear of recession, have all given an added thrust to the general demand for new action by the Government to halt this flow― a demand of which I have been increasingly conscious of during the past months."
Between the mid-1970s to the late 1970s, 500 thousand Chinese illegal immigrants flocked to Hong Kong, about 10% of the city’s population, said Lok.
With no housing provided by the colonial government, many squeezed into squatter villages filled with houses built of wood and iron sheet. Lok, who was then a university student, saw them spreading across the hills in Kwun Tong and Wong Tai Sin within a short period of them.
But as railway constructions began to take place across Hong Kong, the government took back the lands and resettled the squatters in temporary housing areas, where they stayed before getting public housing. If their temporary housing areas were demolished for other development projects, they might move to public estates faster than local Hongkongers, Lok said.
“That’s why a part of people think Chinese immigrants came here to lessen the resources they shared, so they started to have - not clashes but an ill feeling - like, ‘you people are slow and don’t work as hard as I do, why do you gain more?” he said.
.jpeg)
Lau, his patrol dog and an illegal immigrant appear in newspapers. (Photo courtesy: Louis Lau)
"The influx of illegal immigrants was the craziest during the three years. So every night, I had no spare time and ran up and down non-stop," said Louis Lau, 64, a soldier of the British army in the Hong Kong border patrol from 1978 to 1981 who was responsible for catching illegal immigrants. At his highest record, Lau and his patrol dog, with the help of other soldiers, caught 20 Chinese illegal immigrants at once.
Once the operation towers saw people coming from the other side, they would send Lau and his military dog to chase after them, alongside British soldiers and Gurkha soldiers. He had been on duty at the various border crossings, patrolling the sea, the Shenzhen River and the land: Mai Po, Lau Fau Shan, Sha Tau Kok and islands like Tai O and Tung Ping Chau.
Sneaking over in darkness, the refugees usually hid in fishing ponds and bushes. Once captured, they pleaded and told Lau "not to arrest them, and they were very poor." In one instance, an illegal immigrant panicked, resisted, and had him in a chokehold, but he soon got rid of it, he added.
Lai Hing Fan, another soldier at the border areas in 1981, said he once caught an illegal immigrant that was pregnant. "I was thinking, why did she come here despite this? I asked her, [she said] the life over there was so hard and wished for a better and freer place."
"When I heard this, of course, I was sad. At the end of the day, I am Chinese...Why did it come to this?... If not that difficult, they wouldn't take this step. It's their own country, right?" Lai said.
Seeing them exhausted, naked and freezing from swimming in the sea, Lau said he and his colleagues would give them blankets, bread, hot milk tea and coffee.
.jpeg)
A British general visited the unit and to help him understand their work, Lau's coworker dressed as an illegal immigrant for demonstration. Lau stood in the middle(Photo courtesy: Louis Lau.)
.jpeg)
Then they sent them to the colonial police for detainment and a swift return to mainland China.
"We are Chinese. [I] knew due to some reasons or a poor living in the mainland – at that time, China was quite poor, [they] helplessly came to Hong Kong... It was only for a living...," Lau said. "But we have our work. We need to defend the interest of Hong Kong, and we, as soldiers, had a responsibility. The responsibility is to catch IIs [illegal immigrants]. It is impossible to let them go once caught."
My cousin Ming, 60, was one of the very last entrants who successfully touched base in 1979 before the abolishment of the policy in 1980. At 16, he sneaked into a direct freight train through the windows and hid in piles of goods with four others, which went all the way to Hung Hom. It was a "trend" to go to Hong Kong, which, in their perception, was an open and making-money society, he said.
On the first day after arrival, he dressed in a pair of fashionable flare jeans and had breakfast in a restaurant. "Beef mince congee, rice noodle roll and Chinese Ox-tongue pastry. We ate them all at once. I had never done it before in the mainland," he said.
The neon lights set the city ablaze, and double-decker buses wandered on busy streets - all that was intriguing to him.
But discrimination was prevalent as Chinese immigrants like him could only do inferior jobs, he said. He had his first job at a jewellery factory and second job as a hairdresser.
With the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976 and the Open Door Policy in 1978 led by Deng Xiaoping, China's economy, especially in southern cities where the Chinese refugees were from, has seen an unprecedented boom. In 2020, Guangzhou's GDP reached RMB2,501.9 billion (HK$2,918). The service industry occupied 72.51% of the GDP, in contrast to 1.15% of agriculture, forestry, animal husbandry and fishery.
Hong Kong, which used to be a shelter for hopeless immigrants from rural Southern China, is now a city "capitalising" on the opportunities brought by the Greater Bay Area Development and "integrating into the National Development," as officials have vigorously promoted in recent years.
"I don't regret it," Ming said, "because when we were young, [Hong Kong] was always better than the mainland. Now it has caught up. What is it I should regret? It has been a long time."
He will soon retire and doesn't think about pursuing a career back in the mainland, though it is possible. "Left that to the young people to consider," he added.
Hon said he heard that those who remained have gotten wealthy. But his wholesale business selling household items and agents for health supplements was difficult during the Asian financial crisis of 1997, with some closing down. Now venturing into engineering, Ho said he doesn’t regret coming to Hong Kong because it is a place of "freedom."
He added some people approached him for cooperation when he went to the mainland, but he refused.
"In terms of my personality, I can't get along with the mainland. Their policies...I have come to Hong Kong for 50 years, no way to adapt to theirs," he said.
In 1973, Chan felt indifferent about his first Christmas in Hong Kong despite the glittering displays, because he never celebrated the holiday in the mainland. Then the second year, he started to enjoy it.
"After coming to Hong Kong, I have my family, particularly my children were born. I said I came from Guangzhou. Now I am Hongkonger. I said it naturally. It's not like a political statement,' he said.
"I came to Hong Kong, although it is tougher than when I was in the mainland as zhiqing...I think it's worth it. Working hard in Hong Kong like this has more dignity. I can rags to riches, build my own family and feed my children," Chan said.
A notable scholar in films, Cheuk has visited the mainland regularly to give lectures in universities. Having lived in mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and the US, Cheuk said he would spend his retirement in Hong Kong and Taiwan, though the transformation in China is progressive.
"I won't say I have to go back to where I come from. My thoughts are different: I go where I like to go. Don't [follow] the saying: "you born Chinese, you will be a Chinese soul when you die."
"Of course [I'd live in] a place I feel comfortable, a society I agree with and with people who share similar thoughts - this is how it should in the modern world."