Hong Kong

Our first stop in Hong Kong took us to the Chi Lin Nunnery, a place of silence, peace and overwhelming beauty. This Buddhist-Daoist monastery is surrounded by an exquisite reproduction of a ninth-century Chinese garden. At first glance, this complex seems more Japanese than Chinese one until one remembers that much of Japanese culture, their written characters, and even their bonsai trees were borrowed from China in the ninth century. The gardens are an excellent example of feng-shui (wind and water), the Daoist notion of natural harmony. An oriental garden should represent the whole of nature by including water, mountains, vegetation and buildings. Each of these elements is represented symbolically with ponds, stones or dirt, plants and pavilions. The garden is a place of unbelievable peace and tranquillity. Inside the monastery are a number of enormous golden statues of the Buddha—very impressive and beautiful—however, we were not allowed to photograph them. The woodwork in the buildings was magnificent. The whole temple is built without a single nail or screw. Rather, the wooden beams and walls are constructed by mortise and tenon. Each piece is carved to exact dimensions, then fitted together like a tightly fitting jigsaw puzzle. If the builders of this temple complex intended to represent a kind of oriental heaven, then they certainly succeeded.

As different from the Nan Liang Garden as salt is from pepper is the Wong Tai Sin temple. Though it is also a Daoist temple, the crowds, the smell and the noise here are more reminiscent of a county fair than a religious sanctuary. Thousands of devotees pack its precincts to ask for favors from the deities. Some come to practice kau cim, which involves lighting incense sticks, kneeling at the altar, and shaking a bamboo cylinder until a fortune stick falls out. Others come to make an offering to the god of love to seek a mate. A red string of yarn must be held between properly folded hands before approaching his altar. After the prayer, the string is tied to the altar. Still others bring offerings of food to curry favor with the gods. We saw offerings of fruits, cooked chicken, roast beef, even a whole suckling pig brought as offerings. They remain at the altar for an hour or so until the deity enjoys the offering, then the food is taken by temple personnel to nearby nursing homes for residents to consume. The sights, sounds and smells of the Wong Tai Sin temple definitely convince one that this place certainly ain’t in North Carolina.

Finally we visited a place that has a special significance for me—the Walled City of Kowloon. When the Communist Chinese came to power in 1949, there was a misunderstanding with the British government in Hong Kong about the area lying just off the end of the runway of the Kai Tak Airport on Kowloon Island. The Chinese believed it was retained by the British, so their police would not go into this area. The British believed that it belonged to China, so they would not enter either. The result was a no-man’s land that was completely law-less. Prostitution, gambling, drugs, human trafficking, gangs and criminality of every type flourished. There were a half-dozen 15-story buildings filled with apartments, serving not only as residences, but also as the site of every imaginable type of cottage industry. One apartment housed a physician, or an opium den, another a print shop, a brothel or a tailor. The next contained a grocery or a barber shop. There was no law. There was no regulation. There was no licensing. There was no police. In Kowloon one could buy any item, any product, any service—legal or illegal. Without any humor intended we used to say that from Kowloon you could buy anything from a haircut to a hit-man. Residents built bamboo breezeways to connect the buildings at several levels, making a city within a city. My awareness of Kowloon began in 1971 when I was a Chinese Mandarin linguist in the Army during the Vietnam War. There is a large standard Chinese-English dictionary that we linguists needed. Some of my co-workers acquired a catalog from a publisher in Kowloon that sold this dictionary at an absurdly low price. It was cheaply made, and obviously pirated in violation of copyright agreements, but it was inexpensive and many of us bought one. A buddy of mine had the catalog and asked what books I would like to get. I told him that they didn’t have the book I wanted. He asked which book I was interested in. I told him I wanted the complete set of the Summa Theologica by Thomas Aquinas in English, knowing the catalog would not list it. He flipped through the pages for a second then said, “Yeah. Here it is. Seventeen bucks.”

By the 1980’s the Hong Kong government decided to demolish the buildings and to build a lovely traditional park there. It is similar in style to the Nan Liang Gardens, though not as large nor meticulously groomed. Kowloon‘s residents were all given government apartments and they have gone elsewhere. By now many have probably died. Interestingly, our young Chinese guide said that she regretted that the old buildings of Kowloon had been torn down, though from her superficial explanation of its history, I suspect that this young lady has only received a sanitized version of what went on here. Following her explanation, many of our fellow tourists couldn’t even understand why we stopped here. Nevertheless, there was a small flag someone had hoisted at the park that had an emblem and the words, “Kowloon Independent Area.” A Hong Kong resident told me today that many people avoid the new park, beautiful though it may be. He says that there is still too much negative energy surrounding the place, too many unhappy spirits, too many sad memories. He may be right. Maybe the earth does have a memory. Maybe the very soil under this place remembers. If so, it will take a long time for the dirt here to forget what happened at Kowloon.Read more