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MAURICE FREEDMAN
pressions do not support this view. Certainly, in line with the traditions of their society, the successful make themselves prominent. They build new houses or renovate old ones; they contribute to communal works; they make their voices heard in local affairs, moving, if they were not already in it, into the small elite of 'elders'. But their experience of the world is in fact generally very limited, and the social ideas they bring back with them are largely the ones they took away. They tend to be traditionalists whose traditionalism has been strengthened by their newly acquired power and prestige. They seem to me, to take a telling case, enthusiastically for fung shui. So that if they appear to be outstanding and exceptionally difficult it is precisely because they have acquired so little from their experience. Riches and high status have come to them, but it might as well have come from other sources. (There are a few men who have added to their education in Britain, but all the evidence points towards the great majority of them showing little interest in the new culture around them while they are away. Alongside the restaurant migration, however, there is a small movement of New Territories boys and girls to the United Kingdom for further education. But the two migrations are closely connected, and it is not uncommon for the profits being made in the restaurant trade to be used in part for keeping members of the family at technical and commercial colleges in Britain.)
80. The economic consequences of the movement have been great. The data on postal and money orders cashed in the New Territories show that money has been sent back on such a scale as to form one of the major sources of New Territories income. The remittances have been mounting on an extraordinarily steep gradient during the last five years, roughly doubling themselves from one year to the next, and reaching the sum of $16 million in 1962. Some three-quarters of this money was sent from the United Kingdom. But they tell only part of the story. Considerable sums have been coming in through the banks in the New Territories since 1960. Cash has been sent home in the post. Money has been brought back by returning migrants. Traveller's cheques, not always presented personally, have been used. I was alerted by a chance encounter to another way in which incoming money in the form of United Kingdom postal and money orders may be left unaccounted for by the available statistics: on a visit to a New Territories branch of my bank I saw one of my acquaintances paying in a thick wad of