PLOVER COVE VILLAGE TO TAIPO MARKET
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nity. They have not become, in any meaningful sense, urban residents. They are now basically urban villagers living in a ghetto rather far removed from contact with their new physical neighbors in Taipo market, no less in any other part of the urban world of Hong Kong.
This is an interesting finding insofar as these villagers, although physically isolated while residing in Plover Cove, were never psychologically isolated. The usual family travelled to Taipo once a week to buy necessary supplies and to cash the never-ending string of checks and postal money orders which sons and husbands have been sending and still do send from Britain. For about 11 percent of the villagers resided in Britain at the time of resettlement, according to the District Office census.
The basic isolation of the villagers is further revealed in their responses to a series of questions about their present social contacts. In almost all cases, they indicate that their friends come from the resettlement area or from small villages in the Sha Tau Kok area, most of which are related through marriage to these villagers. Indeed, some of the villages (Tai Kau, Kam Chuk Pai, Wang Ling Tau, and Chung Mei) appear to have had their origin in the migration from a multi-surname village in the Sha Tau Kok area, Wu Kau Tang*. Returning to these villages in the New Territories essentially represents returning to visit relatives and seems to confirm the general impression that it is relatives who are counted as friends for the majority of the villagers. Few of the villagers put it as cogently as one woman: "my friends are my relatives." One interviewer noted in another case, “She told me that she had no good friends. She didn't know how to discriminate between relatives and friends; she thought that they are the same." In response to the question as to whether they had made any new friends or not, 21 respondents indicated no, and only 8 said that they had made new friends who were not neighbors in the same building. Three indicated they had made friends among their new neighbors.
This should not be interpreted as meaning that the villagers have little social contact of any kind; there is lively social activity of an informal kind in the resettlement area. Only one person indicated that she never chatted with her former villagers,
*See Gazetteer p. 193.