BOOK REVIEW
Diamond reclaimed Diamond Hill by Feng Chi-shun
Reviewed by Kent Ewing
HONG KONG - Diamond Hill, now just another station along Hong Kong's
world-class mass transit system, was once full of gamblers, thugs and movie
stars.
No one hopping off a train at Diamond Hill today could guess at its rich
history during the 1950s and 1960s as a squatter village populated mostly by
poor refugees from the mainland. But tens of thousands of families struggled
and even thrived there, and many a rags-to-riches Hong Kong story started on
this rough patch of
the Kowloon Peninsula. And, of course, there were also some abysmal failures.
This lost world has been recaptured in Feng Chi-shun's book Diamond Hill:
Memories of Growing Up in a Hong Kong Squatter Village. Feng's memoir,
although uneven in quality, should nevertheless be celebrated as a valuable
contribution to Hong Kong's collective memory. So much of the old Hong Kong has
been destroyed, remade and forgotten as the city developed into one of Asia's
glittering, post-modern exemplars of wealth and sophistication. It is
comforting to know that, thanks to Feng, Diamond Hill - that is, the real
Diamond Hill - will live on, at least in these pages.
Today's Diamond Hill features the popular Plaza Hollywood shopping mall, whose
name is a token nod to the movie industry that once held sway there, and
towering apartment buildings - government housing estates as well as private
blocks for the middle class with names like Bel Air Heights. The Buddhist Chi
Lin Nunnery, founded in 1934, is still there, but it too has been rebuilt, with
an extensive garden, in the grand style of the Tang Dynasty.
The harsh but colorful world in which Feng grew up is no more, and the great
value of his book is that his story is also, in large part, the story of Hong
Kong. Once upon a time, Hong Kong itself, its British colonial rulers and
Chinese elite aside, was one big squatter village that transformed into a
manufacturing Mecca and then again into the financial center that it is today.
Over the course of these remarkable and frenetic transformations, the city's
leaders - the colonial governors of old and the Chinese "chief executives" who
have been at the helm since the handover from British rule in 1997 - lost the
plot.
In their rush to turn Hong Kong into Asia's "world city", officials have torn
down history and paved over the collective memory of its citizens. Feng's
memoir, without perhaps intending to, confronts this heedless bureaucratic
impulse at its core.
For example, of the nunnery, Feng writes: "When I was a kid in Diamond Hill,
Chi Lin was a scenic attraction. Now it is a tourist attraction, with
inevitable souvenir shops. Conservation of the Chi Lin temple has been more
about renovation than preservation."
The author goes on to describe how vanished villages with names like Tai Hom
and Sheung Yuen Ling live on as street names today, but only a few would know
their history.
"There is no more Diamond Hill the way it was," Feng writes, "and there never
will be again.
"Long live Diamond Hill, if only in our memories, and in our hearts."
Readers learn in the book's Prologue that Feng and his three older sisters were
actually born into a privileged family with roots in Zhejiang province. But
after his maternal grandfather lost the family fortune speculating on gold and
his mother died of meningitis, the family's circumstances changed dramatically.
His father remarried and took a job as a teacher, and the family found
themselves living in the slums of Diamond Hill. Feng was nine years old at the
time and would live there until, at age 19, he went off to university. He
describes these years as "harsh and impoverished" but also as "a
character-building experience" that was rich in challenges and, ultimately,
rewards.
While Feng certainly does not lament the physical loss of the ramshackle
villages in which he and other children of his generation came of age, his
memoir invokes a toughness and a can-do spirit that he finds lacking in the
Hong Kong of today. It is that spirit, not the slums of Diamond Hill, that he
would like the city to recapture.
It was the Diamond Hill ethos that motivated Feng, after some youthful
misadventures, to win a place at La Salle College, one of Hong Kong's elite
secondary schools then and now; after graduation from La Salle, Feng went on to
study medicine at the University of Hong Kong, to train as a pathologist at the
Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University in New York City, and
to enjoy a successful career in medicine both in the US and in Hong Kong.
Many of Feng's Diamond Hill compatriots went on to lead successful lives as
teachers, accountants, restaurateurs and, in one case, a stock-market-playing
millionaire; even the village bully, Ah Noun, later found a place for his
skills as a policeman. Of course, there were also those whose lives never
transcended the makeshift shanty huts that served as their homes. That was
Diamond Hill - life was what you made of it.
It was a world of fried dough and dai pai dong (food stalls), of street
soccer and kite-flying and of thugs and the "teddy girls" who clung to them.
Gambling ("the curse of the Chinese") was everywhere, and the notorious Walled
City was nearby for those who were interested in drugs and freakish sex shows;
Feng showed no interest in the former but did venture into the latter.
The chapter Feng writes on the movie industry in Diamond Hill is one of his
most fascinating - and a reminder that, at the time, Hong Kong was producing
twice as many feature films per year as Hollywood. But there are other chapters
- such as the one describing the various dogs he owned - where the writer seems
to run out of relevant memories in this already rather slim (193-page) account
of his decade growing up in Diamond Hill.
Despite its flaws, however, Feng's book will strike a chord with anyone who has
special memories of Hong Kong that, because of the ever-changing cityscape, can
no longer be anchored in a recognizable place. The timing of its publication by
Blacksmith Books is fortuitous, as a nascent heritage movement continues to
expand in the city.
That movement has been fired by angry protests among conservationists following
the government's demolition of the iconic Star Ferry Pier and clock tower in
2006 and the destruction two years later of the equally venerable Queen's Pier.
All this was done to make way for further land reclamation in Victoria Harbor,
now less than half its original size and itself, like the few poisoned fish
that still swim there, an endangered species.
To go along with Hong Kong Disneyland, which opened on reclaimed land on Lantau
Island in 2005, a Disneyfied version of the Star Ferry Pier has been
constructed, to widespread derision and a much-reduced passenger load, in a far
more inconvenient location along the rebuilt waterfront; the government has
also proposed rebuilding Queen's Pier.
While Feng is concerned entirely with the loss of the old stomping grounds of
his childhood and adolescence and not with these larger conservation issues,
readers who know something of Hong Kong's history cannot help but bring their
own feelings of loss to his story. Hong Kong has yet to discover a way to honor
its past - yes, even its grimy, indigent squatter past - as it propels itself
into the future. By the book's end, Feng's sense of loss has come to represent
the loss of everyone who, like him, has loved and mourned another vanished
piece of Hong Kong - whether it be physical, spiritual or both.
Diamond Hill: Memories of Growing Up in a Hong Kong Squatter Village by
Feng Chi-shun. Blacksmith Books November 2009. SBN: 978-988-17742-4-8. Price
US$13.95, paperback, 196 pages.
Kent Ewing is a Hong Kong-based teacher and writer. He can be reached at
kewing@hkis.edu.hk.
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Today's Diamond Hill features the popular Plaza Hollywood shopping mall, whose
name is a token nod to the movie industry that once held sway there, and
towering apartment buildings - government housing estates as well as private
blocks for the middle class with names like Bel Air Heights. The Buddhist Chi
Lin Nunnery, founded in 1934, is still there, but it too has been rebuilt, with
an extensive garden, in the grand style of the Tang Dynasty.
