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BARBARA E. WARD
than cubicles, were furnished with wooden beds, mosquito nets and chests for clothes and so on, while the "cockloft” (gok tzae) upstairs was used for storage and might contain another sleeping cubicle (often used especially for the unmarried daughters of the house). The wooden partition facing the entrance in the front room downstairs was usually decorated with family photographs and carried also a small shelf with ritual paraphernalia and red paper hangings. In 1970 every house contained at least one radio (normally pouring forth a steady stream of Cantonese opera at full pitch) and an electric fan, all had electric light, most had an electric rice cooker or two, and two had refrigerators.
In 1950 no house had glazed windows, and most of the unceiled pitched tile roofs dripped muddy patches on the earthen floors on rainy days. The old houses covered a somewhat larger area than the present ones, and were taller. They were divided internally in a somewhat similar way, but were far less comfortably furnished. They were used differently, too. Women, children, and sometimes pigs, were the normal inhabitants. Pigs scavenged the paths by day, and were shut up in the pig-sties at night. Children went to school a little, played a little, helped their mothers. Women cared for pigs and babies, and cultivated sweet potatoes and occasionally ground-nuts on small patches of hillside, chopping and boiling the leaves for pig fodder. They also cut wood and grass for sale as fuel to the Boat People. They cooked, with wood and sometimes charcoal, in great flattish iron bowls set into stone-built stoves on the right-hand side of their front doors. They bought their rice and most other dry goods from one of the village shops, begged or took fish from the drying grounds, and ate (rather shamefacedly) their own sweet-potato leaves and tubers. The little money they made from the sale of fuel was augmented from the wages of their menfolk and the sale of pigs, which was also usually conducted by men. But husbands and sons came home only intermittently from their wage employment in Kowloon, stayed for a few days and then returned. The only permanent male residents on land were the senile and the very young, the shopkeepers and the old man who looked after the temple, where the school teacher also lodged during term time.14
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