ENG-1981 — Page 21

8

REVIEW

parks are, indeed, essential components in the latest designs for public housing estates that still grow like mushrooms.

But the most-prized possession of a Hong Kong Chinese is his own home for it brings respect just as the development of one's own human resources does. For it is his home his asset - that ties the family closer together. An opportunity to attain that respect through the development of family human resources is provided in the government's home ownership scheme. A public housing estate tenant who has been reasonably successful can, for a relatively small down-payment and on easy terms, move to more spacious quarters at a total cost 25 to 30 per cent cheaper than in the private sector.

The average number of economically active in the Hong Kong nuclear family of four is 1.9. The disposable income this figure produces contributes both to an active consumer society and a punishing pace of life. In Hong Kong's crowded streets the tempo appears aggravated. It breeds artful dodgers, bumpers and pushers. Courtesy tends to become a victim, but self-betterment is behind it. Mercifully, Hong Kong has a mild sub-tropical winter. The discourtesy that sometimes adversely affects Hong Kong's big tourist trade might be more sympathetically understood if critical observers realised what the average neat and tidy Hong Kong belonger had been through in our pressure-cooker. He or she shows no outward signs of heart-scars. But scars are often there.

The influx beginning in 1949 from China produced appalling hardships for the people who ran before the communist armies. Their Hong Kong belonger children, now adults in our community, are well aware of what they had to go through. It is still affecting their outlook.

Personal Experiences

I remember soon after taking over Reuter's Hong Kong office in 1952 a half-paralysed, pasty and puffy-faced Chinese in his twenties standing before my desk and handing me a letter with terror in his eyes. The letter was from the company's doctors. It said the bearer had suffered from beri beri, that his heart was permanently impaired and recommended I should give him a sedentary job. The office manager told me he was a messenger who starved himself to send half his wages to help his family on the other side of the border. He had been keeping his wife and family in a squatter hut on some hillside on $60 a month and gone without himself. The office manager wanted to know if I proposed to sack him because he was no further use. I then understood the terror in the poor fellow's eyes.

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I made a job for him sitting down, and increased his wages, though the company's revenue at that time, adversely affected by the United Nations embargo on trade with China that followed the outbreak of the Korean war, didn't justify my action. A few month's later that poor young man died on the office floor. He then became a figure in Hong Kong's monthly vital statistics return under the heading 'dumped bodies' meant the Urban Services Department, more notably responsible for garbage collection, took his body away and buried him because his family was too poor to afford a funeral.

I gave his widow the job of office amah and my head office in London contributed handsomely to the education of her children. Today, one of that man's sons owns a small factory. And I know he runs as he works.

As an employer of labour for many years in Hong Kong I have learned of many other cases of scars-on-heart who have those scars and keep it to themselves. It can only be dragged out of them when they ask for something without sufficient apparent reason. For example, a young employee once asked me for two days' off in Macau and I thought he must be a gambler. Eventually, the facts emerged under questioning. He wanted to attend