53
1902 the Nga Tsin Wai market gardeners were in a sellers' market, this was emphatically not so twenty years later. Finally, the sudden stopping of traffic over the passes lost to Nga Tsin Wai the business opportunities the village had previously enjoyed with the passing trade: from being an important cross-roads, Nga Tsin Wai very suddenly found itself a back-water.
According to today's village elders, these economic reverses hit Nga Tsin Wai hard, but not disastrously hard. The contacts with the shipping companies and the Whampoa Docks remained, and more of the village youths now found work there. The village also established excellent contacts with the Royal Air Force at Kai Tak, and enjoyed something close to a monopoly in providing servants and general labourers for the small garrison there. Many of today's elders at Nga Tsin Wai worked at R.A.F. Kai Tak as boys in the 1930s. The relations of these village boys with the soldiers and airmen at Kai Tak were generally good. The airmen tended to treat the boys a little roughly, but without real unpleasantness.
One elder told me how, when he was working there as a boy of twelve, a group of airmen offered him a cigarette: when he said he didn't smoke, they said that that wasn't on - if he didn't smoke with them, he would be "tied hand and foot and thrown into the sea". So he took a cigarette, and another, and yet another, until he was, to the delight of the airmen, violently sick. Thereafter, the airmen gave him cigarettes every day, and insisted he joined them for a cigarette and a beer after work - he still today cannot rest unless he has a cigarette before he goes to bed. He says that he eventually became very good friends with these airmen.
Even the market gardens at Nga Tsin Wai still provided income, albeit not as easily as before. The produce now had to be carried on shoulder poles and sold in Yaumatei, which is where the market was - a heavy job for the women who had to do it.
In the long run, an even greater threat to village life was development. Prince Edward Road and Argyle Street were completed as far as Kowloon City by 1924 (Boundary Street was completed a little later), and the land on either side of these new roads was cleared and sold off for development shortly thereafter. By 1930 Ma Tau Wai, Hau Pui Long, Ma Tau Kok, and Yi Wong Tin villages had disappeared forever, replaced by new suburban housing. Redevelopment of Kowloon