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Officer of Shatin, and was closely involved in a large number of negotiations with village groups affected by development of the New Town. I soon obtained a very clear understanding of the village society that was consistently being expressed and explained to me by the contacts of our own making. I became interested, without any background in Sinology or Chinese studies of any sort whatsoever. I had never read any books on Chinese social studies until after I had already worked out in my own mind what sort of society was being expressed to me by the village contacts. When I went to the books, I found that I was unable to recognise anything that I was seeing in my work.
It was then suggested to me by James that Shatin might be a good place for David's people to start work. I was very enthusiastic about this, on the grounds that it was quite clear that there was a major difference between the society that was there and the society that the classic works on China were expressing. I also very strongly support what James and David have been saying about the lack of support these new studies have received from all major institutions in Hong Kong, and in particular the two Universities in Hong Kong, most of whose senior staff seem to regard village studies as "irrelevant, minor and sub-standard dirty work".
Be that as it may, when I was shown some of the Chinese books that had been found and it was suggested that there might be some in Shatin, I used my position as District Officer to coax and encourage the villagers into letting us know what they had, and this drew me very quickly into an interviewing programme of my own. A District Officer attends many functions and almost all my interviews took place over lunch and dinner tables at official banquets, when there is nothing whatsoever to talk about, and you might just as well talk about this as about anything else. Over many months of seeing local village leaders at official banquets, we talked about the people around the tables' childhood and their memories of it.
This got me very deeply into listening to people talking about daily life in the Chinese village. Day after day, I was hearing things that I was later unable to trace any reference to in any book available to me, and almost every time I would come back with facets