The fishermen’s wives were at first so naïve about living on shore that they tried to furnish their houses with a piled-up heap of boards and braces resembling the poop deck of a fishing junk.
After a time, the seagoing ladies learned to adjust themselves to conventional tables and chairs. Using sewing machines supplied by CARE, they took instructions from the government teacher on the island and learned to sew their own curtains. Their husbands took carpentry instruction at the same school and produced some acceptable furniture. Ultimately, the entire project will become self-supporting.
A similar cooperative settlement has been launched at Sai Kung, a market town in the New Territories. Lawrence and Horace Kadoorie, Hong Kong industrialists and philanthropists, donated pigs to bolster the domestic economy of Sai Kung. Three other allied ventures have been okayed by the government for construction at Tai Tam, on Hong Kong Island, and on the outlying islands of Tsing Yi and Po Toi.
Numerically, the most extensive of all private welfare groups in Hong Kong are the Kaifongs, or Chinese neighborhood welfare associations, with 665,000 members. Operating on slim budgets, they have nevertheless managed to provide medical care, distribute emergency relief supplies, conduct hundreds of free classes, set up noodle factories and give anti-cholera shots.
The Kaifongs are a departure from the older Chinese practice of limiting charity to your own family or clan; they branch into such community-wide interests as traffic safety and antinoise campaigns. Once they even put on a drive to persuade Kowloon kids not to fly their kites in the path of airliners approaching Kai Tak Airport! (This last one sounds a bit overzealous, but not to anyone who has stood in the streets of Kowloon Tong while the jets roared overhead, all but untying his shoelaces with their vibrations.)
Although the United States government has conducted no regular foreign-aid program in Hong Kong, it has given the colony almost $30,000,000 worth of aid, either as surplus foods or as part of its Far East Refugee Program.
The main burden of relief falls, as it should, on the colony government. The Hong Kong administration spends $10,000,000 annually on social welfare work and more than $55,000,000 a year on every form of direct and indirect aid to its millions of poor residents.
The problem of what to do about its refugees had been with the colony throughout its history. Whenever China was afflicted by famine, unrest or revolution, thousands of its people sought temporary haven in Hong Kong.
Perhaps the most noted refugee of the pre-British era was Ti Ping, the last boy Emperor of the Sung Dynasty, who was driven out of China by the Mongols in 1279 A.D. He encamped on the Kowloon Peninsula for almost a year, then resumed his flight to the west, where he was defeated and drowned in a sea battle with the Mongols. An inscribed rectangular rock called the Sung Wong T’oi, or Terrace of the Sung Emperor, stands near Kai Tak Airport to commemorate his stopover.