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are, as they may have been "adopted" when hardly
more than infants in some famine stricken family in
a remote part of China.
(3) Being young children for the most part
(anything from 5 - 15 years old) they obey their
employers.
The Kedah debt slavery problem was possibly capable of Weatment
a simpler one, but in any case was rightly handled
by methods inapplicable to mui tsai.
In their effort to abolish the mui tsai
system in the Colony the Hong Kong Government have
enacted the 1923 Ordinance, and will now take the
further legal action mentioned at the beginning of
this note; they have also published proclamations
to mui tsai informing them of their liberty to leave
their employers and to go to the Office of the
Chinese Affairs Secretariat for advice and help.
Doubtless the real difficulty is the fact
that virtually all mui tsai are young children to
whom "liberty" and the "Office of the Chinese Affairs
Secretariat" means very little.
Food and a home,
however bad they may be in a few cases,are practical
things within their experience and as soon as they
reach their "teens" when they might begin to
appreciate their status, there is the prospect of
marriage as against the apparent hopelessness of
cutting themselves adrift into a world of strangers.
Complicating the problem also is the fact
that great numbers of the Chinese population of Hong
Kong are perpetually going to and fro into the
neighbouring