SOCIAL RESEARCH IN THE N.T. OF HONG KONG, 1963 239
a travel agency with its main office in Tai Po which, since 1960, has arranged loans for the bulk of the fare, the travellers being required to pay a small deposit and discharge the balance of the sum out of their earnings abroad over a period of one or two years. (There is a close relationship, evidently, between migration to the United Kingdom and the rise of banking in the New Territories. Banks are now to be seen everywhere, but the first to open began business in 1960). To incur an expense of about $1,500 and pay off the bulk of this sum at interest in the course of working in Britain has not, in general, been a heavy burden, since earnings in the restaurants have been fairly high, even for the lowly dishwasher. But the initial capital outlay, amounting perhaps to only a few hundred dollars, has represented a barrier to many would-be emigrants, and it is clear that there have been many men who wanted to go
but who could not, either in the form of cash or security, put down the starting sum. Naturally, before 1960 the problem of raising the fare was even more difficult. It follows from this that the poorest layer of the population has not been very much affected by the movement to Britain. True, some poor men have managed to get away, but they have done so because they were members of families or communities in which men of means were willing to stand behind them. In one of the villages I got to know, the Village Representative some years ago put up a sum of money ($7,000) to encourage workless men of his community to emigrate. Repayments of loans were made to a revolving fund from which further emigrants were financed.
76. Earlier forms of emigration, because they were largely bound up with sea-going (a man might make one trip and then jump ship), seem to have drawn on the poorest areas and communities of the New Territories. The modern movement to the United Kingdom, while certainly being general and in many cases recruiting in the communities from which men used in the old days to go as seamen, seems to have been biased in favour of the better-off settlements, pumping money back into communities which, to begin with, were the ones suffering the least economic hardship. Traditionally the large and powerful Punti settlements were not emigrant areas; now their men play an important role in the restaurant trade in Britain. It may seem to us that to be a waiter or dishwasher in a restaurant is no advance in social status on being a small farmer, but in fact the incentive to undertake strange and menial tasks has lain in the