There are scholars who object to the word Chinese as the description of one people, arguing quite persuasively that there are so many racial strains in China that no single label adequately describes them. The point is drawn a bit fine for the majority of Western observers, yet anyone who spends a few weeks in Hong Kong will begin to appreciate the racial diversity of the Chinese people.
By the unverified judgment of the eye, the colony’s Chinese people are two or three inches shorter than the American of average height, and noticeably taller than the average Japanese or Filipino. But that is perhaps the limit of any valid comparison between Americans and Chinese as far as appearance goes.
The Chinese one sees on the street range from jockey-sized runts to towering giants; from tiny women weighing perhaps 90 pounds to queenly six-footers; from the palest of white skins to a deep walnut brown. Many have features which seem more Slavic or Polish than anything classifiable as Chinese. There are almond eyes and pop eyes; slit eyes and bug-eyes. Noses tend to be a little less prominent and less sharply defined than European noses, but exceptions occur. The bloated red nose of the dedicated drinker never shows itself, except on a Caucasian face. Dark hair is almost universal and bald heads less common than in an American crowd. Pudgy types occur with some regularity, but tremendously fat people are rarely seen.
About half the people who live in the urban areas were born in the colony and most of their ancestors came from Kwangtung, the Chinese Province immediately north of the Hong Kong border. Kwangtung was also the birthplace of the majority of the recent refugees from Red China. Eight-tenths of the city-dwellers speak the dialect of Cantonese used in Canton City, where the British traders were based before Hong Kong became a colony. This dialect and others closely related to it are the lingua franca of the colony’s urban Chinese, but there are 96 Cantonese dialects in existence, many of them unintelligible to users of the Canton City dialect. The babble of urban tongues includes Hoklo, Sze Yap and Hakka, all from different parts of Kwangtung, Shanghainese (chiefly heard at North Point and Hung Hom in the colony), Chiuchow (in the Western District), Fukienese (at North Point) and Kuoyu, or Mandarin (near Hong Kong University and at Rennie’s Mill Camp).
In the New Territories, where even a Westerner can detect differences of dress and custom, the Cantonese hold most of the flat, fertile farmland and speak a dialect which puzzles city Cantonese. Ancestors of the Cantonese farmers have lived in the New Territories for nine centuries. The Hakka people, whose women may be identified immediately by their broad-brimmed straw hats with a hanging fringe of thin black cloth, settled the same area at about the time of the earliest Cantonese, but were pushed into the less desirable farmland and generally dominated by the Cantonese. They fought each other intermittently for centuries, but the feud has died down and they now share several villages peacefully, frequently intermarry, and restrict their warfare to husband-wife squabbles. The Hakkas of the eastern New Territories operate their own single-masted, high-hull boats for hauling farm produce and ferrying passengers.
The Hoklos, a smaller group with a knack for handling light, fast boats, once lived entirely on boats and worked as shrimp fishermen. They moved ashore many years ago and now have their chief settlements on Cheung Chau and Peng Chau, a few miles west of Hong Kong Island.
By the testimony of historians, the Tanka people, who dominate the colony’s fishing industry, are the oldest surviving group in Hong Kong. Antedating the Chinese, they lived in the area when the Cantonese came along to push them off the land and generally treat them like despised inferiors. They lived entirely on boats, and when the British traders arrived, the Tanka had no compunctions about dealing with them in defiance of the Chinese Emperor’s orders. Over 90 percent of them speak Cantonese, with a small number speaking Hoklo and other dialects. Hardy and conservative, they avoid city ways, live on their junks and sampans and follow their own distinctive festivals and religious ceremonies. Since World War II they have begun to send their children to schools ashore and to become more directly involved in the economic life of the colony.
World War II provided a turning point in the fortunes of those boat people who operated cargo lighters in the harbor. Heartily disliking the Japanese, they used false-bottomed boats to secrete food stolen from their cargoes and then distributed it among the half-starved population ashore. They were the only residents permitted to eat in the large hotel restaurants like those at the luxurious Peninsula in Kowloon. Most of them, wholly unfamiliar with chairs, ate by squatting on the chair-seats as they had squatted on deck while eating at sea. Nowadays, they are more sophisticated, and in spite of their non-Chinese origin, as intensely Chinese as any group in the colony.
Because of the floodtide of tourists which has swept into Hong Kong in the last few years, it has become a conversational bromide to say that the influx will soon destroy its colorful Chinese community. To accept such a doctrine is to overestimate the impact of tourism and underrate the resistance of the Chinese.
The Hong Kong tourist is a highly localized phenomenon. Except for a fast motor tour through the main roads of the New Territories and a short whirl around Hong Kong Island, he rarely wanders more than a mile from the island and Kowloon terminals of the Star Ferry. He shops, gawks, eats at a few restaurants which are more tourist-oriented than Oriental, and is gone, leaving nothing but the click of the shopkeepers’ abacuses to mark his passage.