EUROPEAN WORKING CLASS IN 19TH CENTURY
89
explore the lives led by members of the European working class and to develop some ideas about the nature of social stratification among Europeans and Chinese in nineteenth century Hong Kong.
The documentation on working class Europeans in Hong Kong is not extensive. They were often barely literate. Even if they wrote well, they were not inclined to record on paper their thoughts and experiences for posterity. If they wrote letters home, such correspondence was not usually preserved (there are some exceptions) for future generations. It is extremely difficult, therefore, to obtain a clear picture of their social perceptions, of what they felt about Hong Kong. Most accounts of this class must come, inevitably, from middle-class Taipans, colonial civil servants, travellers, journalists, writers of one type or another, many of whom were class-ridden and decidedly unsympathetic to the European hoi polloi of the China coast.
A great deal of information is to be found, of course, in the English language newspapers printed in Hong Kong; but much of it deals solely with court cases, providing only indirect clues to the problems facing working class Europeans and to the social attitudes of their superiors. We do not have much material on their social and private lives for they were not clubmen or members of prestigious associations. Consequently, their everyday activities are not recorded normally in the social columns of local newspapers. Only intermittently, when they acquired local notoriety for delinquent or deviant behaviour, were their lives memorialised in the annals of the press.
Scarcity of primary source material and lack of documentation should not stultify all efforts to write about the European working class in Hong Kong, for questions raised by its existence are important sociologically and some attempt must be made to answer them. For example, members of the European uniformed supervisory staff—those whom Cantonese call pong-paân (help-manage)* - had frequent face-to-face contacts with ordinary Chinese and often lived cheek by jowl with them in Chinese residential areas; this fact would suggest that Chinese stereotypes of the European may have derived from, or been heavily influenced by, such contacts. Such a question directs the sociologist to a further problem,
* For this term, and for the maai-paån or managers see Marjorie Topley's definition at p. 105 below.
EUROPEAN WORKING CLASS IN 19TH CENTURY
89
explore the lives led by members of the European working class and to develop some ideas about the nature of social stratification among Europeans and Chinese in nineteenth century Hong Kong.
The documentation on working class Europeans in Hong Kong is not extensive. They were often barely literate. Even if they wrote well, they were not inclined to record on paper their thoughts and experiences for posterity. If they wrote letters home, such correspondence was not usually preserved (there are some excep- (ions) for future generations. It is extremely difficult, therefore, to obtain a clear picture of their social perceptions, of what they felt about Hong Kong. Most accounts of this class must come, inevi- tably, from middle-class Taipans, colonial civil servants, travellers, journalists, writers of one type or another, many of whom were class-ridden and decidedly unsympathetic to the European hoi polloi of the China coast.
A great deal of information is to be found of course in the English language newspapers printed in Hong Kong; but much of it deals solely with court cases, providing only indirect clues to the problems facing working class Europeans and to the social attitudes of their superiors. We do not have much material on their social and private lives for they were not clubmen or members of prestige- ful associations. Consequently, their everyday activities are not recorded normally in the social columns of local newspapers. Only intermittently, when they acquired local notoriety for delinquent or deviant behaviour, were their lives memorialised in the annals of the press.
Scarcity of primary source material and lack of documentation should not stultify all efforts to write about the European working class in Hong Kong, for questions raised by its existence are im- portant sociologically and some attempt must be made to answer them. For example, members of the European uniformed super- visory staff—those whom Cantonese call pong-paân (help-manage)* - had frequent face-to-face contacts with ordinary Chinese and often lived cheek by jowl with them in Chinese residential areas; this fact would suggest that Chinese stereotypes of the European may have derived from, or been heavily influenced by, such con- tacts. Such a question directs the sociologist to a further problem,
* For this term, and for the raai-paån or managers see Marjorie Topley's definition at p. 105 below.
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