a traditional hong kong

I arrived to Beijing last Friday night, but we just now got an internet connection in our room. Still only one port works, so my roommate and I share, but we get by just fine. I didn't realize how difficult reading articles in Chinese can be without an electronic dictionary. Kinda pathetic. My roommate is a recent graduate from Bowdoin College; he is hoping to join the foreign service--and in the mean time, trying to improve his Chinese through this crazy summer program.

I wanted to make one more post about Hong Kong, though-- or rather, the backwaters of Hong Kong. 大澳 Tai O is a small fishing village on Lantau Island (one of the islands that constitutes the Hong Kong SAR and is home to the International Airport as well as a small Disney Land-- I wanted to go, but, well, no actually, I didn't want to go). My good friend and native Hong Konger, Vennesa, and I rode a ferry out to Tai O and saw some pretty neat stuff. I really wanted to see the Giant Bronze Buddha, but unfortunately there were very heavy rains the first few days I was in HK so there were mud slides that prevented us from taking a bus up to the summit.


Digging for clams or oysters.

Because the waters around Tai O often change with the rain and of course with the daily tide changes, all of the houses were on stilts:



This was quite an amazing site-- I've never seen a community quite like this. And perhaps the storms of the previous days had scared off all the tourists, but it seemed like we were the only visitors--so we truly got to see some of the daily activities of residents on the island--which included some seriously Mah Jong playing, in addition to playing cards and just sitting around chatting.

One of the things that was also very interesting about this community, and Hong Kong in general, was the overt religiosity as displayed in shrines to local gods, small shrines to Gong Yu and/or Guanyin (universal gods that bring in wealth/money and protect children, respectively), ancestral halls, and (on Hong Kong Island/Kowloon) Christian Churches.
A shrine to local gods. The divine bureaucracy reflects the existing bureaucracy on earth--so each township has a god, and then there is a god for the county, and so on and so forth.

The curator of a local temple let Vennesa and I burn incense and place it in front of the gods. This was a really awesome experience-- a big Thank You to Vennesa for translating everything he said to us. He was really excited to tell us about the history of the temple (it was from the Ming Dynasty, so very old) and some of the features/history of Tai O.
If you look closely, you can see graves on the side of the mountain. According to Geomancy (Taoist-ish), this type of funerary grounds is particularly good because having a mountain behind and water in front is believed to be very auspicious.


It's amazing that this community is only 30 - 40 minutes from the busy, bustling city life of Hong Kong--especially given that pre-economic-boom Hong Kong was probably very similar. The curator (that's not the right word) of the temple said that this type of change is inevitable, that it's not a bad thing. But he still chooses to live on the island in the fishing community--he was extremely proud to be from Tai O. At the same time, he said wouldn't want his nephews and nieces to go to school in this community-- their opportunities would be greater in HK.


Here in Beijing we're learning a lot about education opportunities and some of the obstacles children face both in large cities and in rural communities. It appears that almost everyone believes that an entire education reform needs to take place, but due to various reasons--one of the most common barriers that Chinese teachers/educators point out to us is just the Chinese traditional culture of testing into school-- any change will be a long, long process.