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and landsmen as "people of our bay".
The significance of these differences will have to be discussed at length in later chapters. For the present it is simply a matter of record that, whereas both liners and seiners claimed to be domiciled in Kau Sai, the seiners were the more obvious and effective residents.3
Most of the Hakka speakers moved in a totally different sphere. Their places of work being in the cities of Hong Kong (Victoria) and Kowloon where they spent by far the major portion of their time, the men were in no way connected with the territory in which all Kau Sai's (Cantonese) Boat People passed their lives. Their women stayed in the village, oriented almost exclusively towards it, to their memories of their natal homes (which they never visited) and to their absent husbands and children. There were one or two old men in much the same position. Only in the case of the so-called "headman" and his shopkeeper brother did the spheres of movement of landsmen partially overlap those of the Boat People. Like the Hakka women they lived in Kau Sai (or at least stayed there very frequently) and like the fishermen they looked to the market town of Sai Kung. Neither of them was oriented at all towards the other market, Shaukiwan, however, nor, before the move which took them and all the other landsmen to Pak Sha Wan, did they have relationships within the fishermen's territory as a whole. Like the other land villagers of the Sai Kung peninsula and islands, their movements are most usefully to be understood in terms of Skinner's now classic model of a standard market area: they were villagers exploiting a fixed resource (land and house property) and travelling at intervals between their place of residence (Kau Sai) and the market town (Sai Kung) in which nearly all their significant extra-village social contacts were made (including those with other villages).
A comparison between Hakka patterns of spatial mobility and the fishermen's patterns will at once make it obvious that interaction between members of the land and water sections of Kau Sai's population as they existed in the early 'fifties (and for at least a century before) was likely to be limited.