When my parents and their five children first moved from Canton, China to Hong Kong in mid 1949, we moved into a second floor of an old, two-story house that was rented by my second maternal uncle whose family had been living in Hong Kong for some time.\u00a0 There were many people living in this house, with about twenty people after we moved in.\u00a0 There were eight in my uncle\u2019s family, my maternal grandmother, the widow of my oldest maternal uncle, one or two step-brothers of my uncle, my uncle\u2019s house-helper to help take care of the old, the young, and his large family, plus seven members of my family.
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This old house had very high ceilings, and there were really no rooms with enclosed walls.\u00a0 The house was just partitioned into three or four subparts with panels attached to the floor and extending about six or seven feet high to provide a little bit of privacy. Comparing to the housing that we are now enjoying in the U.S., it was like a shack in a ghetto. However, we should count our blessing that we had such a place to live in, considering that we, together with many tens of thousands, were escaping from China before the Communist Chinese took control of the whole country in 1949.\u00a0 As a matter of fact, thousands and thousands of people in Hong Kong at that time were literally living in quickly-made shacks off various hillsides away from the established neighborhoods of Hong Kong, Kowloon, and the New Territories.\u00a0 The more fortunate ones had a roof over their heads and some sort of \u201cwalls\u201d to protect them from the cold and the rain.\u00a0 The less fortunate ones had to survive living on the streets.<\/p>\n
This house had one toilet and one wash basin for washing face and brushing teeth.\u00a0 There was no bathtub or shower; we used a large metal wash basin to take our baths.\u00a0 There was always a long waiting line for the toilet.\u00a0 To make matters worse, my uncle liked to read newspaper while he was sitting on the toilet, which was especially a problem on Sundays, due to the thickness of the Sunday newspaper.\u00a0 To help alleviate the problem of one toilet for 20 people, we, especially the children, used spittoons.\u00a0 Facing and solving this basic human need was always an adventure each Sunday morning.\u00a0 Use of spittoons instead of toilets was a common practice in Hong Kong at that time.\u00a0 As a matter of fact, the small apartment of my paternal aunt\u2019s family of seven did not have any toilet at all.\u00a0 They used spittoons, and each morning they had to empty the smelly contents of the spittoons into a garbage container to be emptied or hauled away by the garbage company.<\/p>\n
We had to give up essentially all our belongings and uprooted ourselves from China to Hong Kong.\u00a0 Since my father had to re-establish from scratch his civil engineering business, we were poor and life was harsh and routine.\u00a0 However, the old house we were living in had one feature, a large open balcony on the back of the house, that provided a lot of entertainment for us.\u00a0 The house was located right behind the large Happy Valley Horse Race Track, the only horse race track in Hong Kong at that time.\u00a0 Horse racing (and gambling) was (and still is) a very popular sport among Chinese.\u00a0 Our house was separated from the racetrack by just a fence.\u00a0 From our second floor balcony in the back side of the house, we had an unobstructed view of the large, oval-shaped racetrack that was over a mile long.\u00a0 \u00a0In many ways, we were closer to the action than the grandstand spectators, since the horses literally raced right below us, except that the grandstand spectators had a closer view of the start and the finish of the races than we.<\/p>\n
The scenes from about 60 years ago are still almost as vivid as yesterday.\u00a0 Under a clear, blue sky, the normally almost empty, large horse racetrack would fill up on weekends with thousands of anxious and hopeful gamblers.\u00a0 You could sense the excitement and hopeful expectations of the gamblers who before and during the races would be talking and rooting loudly for their favorite horses which were usually the horses they bet on.\u00a0 Even though we couldn\u2019t hear their conversations, we could hear the background noises that were generated.\u00a0 These background noises were then interrupted periodically by moans of disappointments or loud cheers of joy depending on how well the horses they bet on performed.<\/p>\n
Before each race, the horses always trotted around the track to warm up.\u00a0 The horses\u2019 steps were slow and gentle, a slow trot most of the time, and occasionally changing to a fast gallop but only for a short distance.\u00a0 The jockeys would be sitting in a relaxed, upright posture on their saddles.\u00a0 During the races, the jockeys would be leaning low and forward, and partially standing on the stirrups of their saddles, occasionally striking the horses with their whips.\u00a0 The frequency and the hardness of the strikes would increase as the finished line got closer and closer, as the jockeys tried to squeeze out the last reserved energy of the horses.\u00a0 The horses were no longer taking slow, gentle steps or a slow trot, but their feet were galloping furiously during the whole race, and increasing their speed even more in the last stretch, Their mouths and nostrils were opened trying to suck in as much oxygen as possible to refill the rapidly consumed fuel in their lungs.\u00a0 After crossing the finished line, the horses would huff and puff, as they tried to regain their breaths during their cool-down lap around the racetrack.\u00a0 We could see the disappointments on the losing jockeys\u2019 faces and the exhilaration on the winning jockey\u2019s face.<\/p>\n
For the part of the racing season during the usually hot and humid summer months of Hong Kong, a gentle, pleasant breeze would occasionally blow by, and that was so welcome by everyone.\u00a0 The weather of course was not always sunny.\u00a0 Sometimes there would be rain, and sometimes there were even low grade typhoons.\u00a0 Unless the typhoons were high grade, horse racing continued as scheduled.\u00a0 When there were downpours, the racetrack became a muddy mess.\u00a0 Under those circumstances, the jockeys had to be especially careful because a stumble by their horse could result in serious injury or even death, and could end their racing career.\u00a0 On those bad weather days, our open but covered balcony was like a luxury box in modern major league sports stadiums, and definitely provided better seats than the most expensive grandstand seats of that time.<\/p>\n
Since there were always more losers than winners, you could see the disappointments on the spectators\/gamblers’ faces as they were leaving the racetrack.\u00a0 The atmosphere was much more subdued and there was no “electricity” in the air as compared to only a few hours earlier when they were entering the racetrack.\u00a0 Sometimes the effects of the gambling bets during the weekend horse racing carried over into the weekdays of the following week.\u00a0 In some of our classrooms, usually we could sense the more subdued mood of those regular-gambling teachers who lost during the past weekend, and once in a while we could sense the exhilaration of those teachers who won during the past weekend.<\/p>\n
During weekdays, although there was no horse racing, the balcony in our house still provided some entertainment for us.\u00a0 During the weekdays, the horse racetrack provided a large playground for various other activities.\u00a0 For many years, there was free access to the horse racetrack.\u00a0 So people went there to play soccer, walk or jog around the track, play on a giant rock inside the racetrack which was a favorite pastime of the young children, or practice Taiji.\u00a0 As a matter of fact, my first exposure to Taiji happened during this period.\u00a0 An old man, in his sixties or seventies, practiced Taiji every day, rain or shine, on the grass field inside the part of the racetrack\u00a0 that was close to our house. \u00a0I didn\u2019t know anything about Taiji at that time, but I saw him every day doing his slow, soft, and rhythmic movements.\u00a0 That image has remained in my mind so that almost 60 years later, I can still visualize this old man practicing Taiji, even in the rain.\u00a0 Although he wasn\u2019t frail at first, after practicing on a daily basis for many months, he definitely looked much healthier and more fit.\u00a0 It was an eye opener to a young child to see the dedication and commitment that one could have toward a particular activity.\u00a0 That experience could have planted a seed in my mind that later sprouted my interest in Taiji and martial arts, which is now an integral part of my life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When my parents and their five children first moved from Canton, China to Hong Kong in mid 1949, we moved into a second floor of an old, two-story house that was rented by my second maternal uncle whose family had been living in Hong Kong for some time.\u00a0 There were many people living in this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dontow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1765"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dontow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dontow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dontow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dontow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1765"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"http:\/\/www.dontow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1765\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1797,"href":"http:\/\/www.dontow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1765\/revisions\/1797"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dontow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1765"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dontow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1765"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dontow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1765"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}