33
TSAT TSZ MUI ROAD
The story goes that Tsat Tsz Mui Road (literally, “seven sisters road”) was named after the tale of seven girls who took a vow of sisterhood. Ng Pa Ling (pen name of O Yeung Hak) describes the story in “The Legend of the Seven Sisters,” from the first volume of his Hong Kong Folktales, as “magical as well as erotic.” Once there were seven girls who were inseparable: they thought alike, they looked alike, and they loved one another dearly. They decided to make a vow to become sworn sisters and always “dress their own hair.”
“Dress their own hair” refers to a widespread custom in the Shun Tak countryside in Guangdong. In those days, unmarried women wore their hair in a long plait, while married women wore theirs in a bun. On her wedding day, the bride’s plait would be combed out and shaped into a bun by an elder relative; by adopting the term “dress their own hair,” these young women indicated that since they had no intention of getting married, there was no need for anyone else to do their hair for them.
It came about that the third sister committed suicide by throwing herself into the sea in order to avoid an enforced marriage arranged by her parents. Honoring their pledge that “though not born on the same day, month, or year, they would die on the same day, month, and year,” the remaining sisters also threw themselves into the sea. It is said that when their bodies were recovered, the sisters were holding one another’s hands.
It was also said that their bodies were never found, and the next day a reef appeared at the place where they had drowned, resembling seven sisters holding hands and standing in a row from the tallest to the shortest. People called it Seven Sisters Reef. Later, when Seven Sisters Reef was buried in the mud following land reclamation, the new site was called Tsat Tsz Mui after the sisters, and it became a popular bathing spot in the early twentieth century. After a string of accidents in which male bathers were drowned, some rumormongers claimed that they were sacrificed to the spirits of the seven sisters. However, other people pointed out that the young women had already attained their ideal of pure sisterhood, and there was no reason for them to make trouble for the detested male sex.
Another version of the story was the diametrical opposite (although not without similarities). There were also seven sworn sisters in this version, but they had vowed to wed on the same day, month, and year. In the end, they managed to get married on the same day to seven brothers. On their wedding night, each of the sisters lay in bed with her new husband, performing the same ritual, when suddenly the third brother became enraged. Since his bride had failed to bleed, he was threatening to cast her out. Tormented by her husband’s suspicions, accusations, and disgust, the unhappy young woman threw herself into the sea. The remaining six, resolutely abandoning their husbands, followed her dead body into the billows. In this version, Seven Sisters Reef on the coastline represents the seven brothers (including the third brother, overcome by remorse), who were turned into rock as they despairingly kept watch for their wives along the shore.
This version is recounted by the feminist scholar Chang Oi Ping in her Rereading Hong Kong Legends, published in 1993. Chang argues that the legend of the seven sisters was “neither erotic nor magical” but “a sorry and painful reflection of the social relationships between the two sexes in those days.”
Tsat Tsz Mui Road, located between North Point and Quarry Bay in the northeastern part of Hong Kong Island, was constructed only after World War II and had seven haphazardly connected sections. The last two sections were separated by the Model Housing Estate, leaving the final section in a state of lonely desolation.
Archaeologists once attempted to excavate the reclamation area along Tsat Tsz Mui Road to uncover the original site where the Seven Sisters Reef was buried. Going on imprecise rumors, they worked out seven likely locations, including one under a roadside postbox and another under a florist’s. Eventually they unearthed from the separate sites seven wooden combs, each with a long lock of hair entwined in it.
34
CANAL ROAD EAST AND CANAL ROAD WEST
Map readers have long felt perplexed about the existence of two parallel streets in Wan Chai on Hong Kong Island, one to the east and one to the west, both almost identical in length and breadth. But you only have to look at a map of Wan Chai from 1922 or earlier to understand why the street was divided into two down the middle. You will also learn why these twin streets running in the same direction are named for a canal although there is no canal in sight. (Their name in Cantonese is an approximation of the pronunciation of “canal”).
Canal Road used to be the place where Wong Nai Chung, a mountain brook from a valley in the island’s interior, flowed into the harbor. Local people called it Goose Brook because it was narrow and curved along this stretch. The fourth governor of Hong Kong, Sir John Bowring, converted the farmland in front of Wong Nai Chung Village into a racecourse (afterward known as Happy Valley) in 1857. He also built a canal by widening the surface of Goose Brook and raising the height of the bank, so people then called the waterway Bowring Canal. The parallel streets built on either side of the canal became Canal Road East and Canal Road West. The canal itself was covered over in the 1920s as part of the land-reclamation project taking place on the foreshores of Wan Chai, after which no trace of the waterway was left above ground, apart from the two streets lined up together.
It was the fate of Canal Road East and Canal Road West (as with so many other places in Victoria) for a separation between sign and referent to take place in the course of successive stages of time and space. A more thorough deconstruction would be to take the argument one step further, that is, when the signifier for the sign “canal” no longer had a natural connection with its signified, then only the phonetic form remained in “canal,” acting as a place-name, while the content of “canal” was abandoned. The underground waterway no longer existed in reality, no matter whether on a map or in people’s comprehension. The street name not only made it impossible for anyone to trace its source, it actually tells us how the city deconstructs itself in its unceasing growth.
There used to be a wooden bridge at the intersection of the canal and Hennessy Road in those days; people called it Goose Neck Bridge, and the area around it was called Goose Neck District. A large number of banyan trees were planted along each side of the bridge, which led to it being designated one of the eight sights of Hong Kong with the name Goose Brook Banyan Grove, either because people used to cool down in the shade of the trees or because they went fishing along its banks.
Although the Western imagery of the goose that laid golden eggs has no counterpart in Chinese legend, “goose neck” is the name given to a strategically important narrow stretch of land or sea, and to cover over Goose Brook was tantamount to strangulation or beheading. After Goose Brook was buried underground, the local residents used to make sacrifices to the goose god outside the newly opened Goose Neck street market at Goose Neck Bridge. It was forbidden to sell roast goose at the street market, but on the fifteenth day of the lunar new year, a healthy live goose was selected for people to worship and then released afterward. If you set aside the superstitious nature of this activity and approach it from the perspective of cultural analysis, it is possible to see the goose worship as a positive (if illusory) strategy for preserving a link between a place and its name, not to mention a link between the name’s signifier and signified.
From this point of view, it is not difficult to understand the custom of “beating the scoundrel,” which it is said became popular afterward at Goose Neck Bridge without a goose neck bridge and Canal Road without a canal. In a city where a place, its name, and its meaning move inexorably toward dissolution, it is inevitable that a counterpolicy of reconstructing meaning will be implemented. That is, a completely unrelated sign (paper figures used in “beating the scoundrel”) becomes through a kind of wishful thinking the actual referent (the real-life target in “beating the scoundrel” is usually a person who provokes disgust or hatred). Further,
people obtain acute psychological relief and comfort in the course of this fictitious representation (the action of repeatedly and violently beating the paper scoundrel with a shoe, usually supplemented with vicious cursing).
It is therefore no accident that beating the scoundrel takes place under Goose Neck Bridge. The premise underlying the practice of beating the scoundrel is that the person thus represented is in reality beyond our grasp, so that its efficacy is operative only in a place where the referents are lost, and its result is by the same token destined to be ineffective.
35
ALDRICH STREET
Aldrich Street was situated in Shau Kei Wan in the northeastern part of Hong Kong Island. It was named after a section of the harbor called Aldrich Bay, since one end of the street went up to the waterfront. There also used to be an Aldrich Village on the hillside at the other end of the street.
Aldrich Bay itself was named after Major Aldrich, who after signing the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842 was sent to Hong Kong by military headquarters, charged with the task of drawing up a detailed plan for stationing a British garrison in Hong Kong. Major Aldrich devised a grandiose scheme that included a military cantonment occupying spacious grounds in a marvelously symmetrical design as well as an impregnable defense strategy. The cantonment was to cover the area of what afterward became Admiralty Barracks, Central District, Government Hill, and the Botanic Gardens. In Aldrich’s imagination, this huge invincible fortress would become the center and symbol of Hong Kong Island. However, the governor at that time, Sir Henry Pottinger, firmly opposed Aldrich’s plans and insisted that Central be reserved for commercial purposes. In the end, Major Aldrich’s dream of a military city was never realized.
Major Aldrich’s main contribution to Hong Kong, it was said, lay instead in overhauling army discipline. Morale among the soldiers was low, in part because the British forces failed to adjust to the environment in those early years and malaria was rife. It did not help that the men were generally of low character, who regarded looting and pillaging in occupied territory as a normal occupation, while drunkenness and brawls were common. Major Aldrich transferred soldiers who committed disciplinary offenses from the urban area to A Kung Ngam, a remote outpost that afterward became the Lei Yue Mun Battery. The new regulations and severe penalties he also introduced eventually brought the soldiers under control. Presumably to commemorate Major Aldrich’s achievements, the government named the bay at Shau Kei Wan after him, and the name Aldrich Bay appears on the map of Hong Kong drawn up by Lieutenant Collinson in 1845. The characters chosen to represent the major’s name in Chinese, which translate literally as “cherish order,” are highly appropriate.
Major Aldrich observed a stringent self-discipline in his personal life, down to the details of his daily routine. For example, even under heavy fire on the field of battle he still insisted on taking afternoon tea every day at four o’clock. His manner of speaking was very precise and carefully articulated, and he never permitted anyone to interrupt him. In some respects the major could be considered an antimilitarist, because his fierce detestation of chaos was such that he could not tolerate the disorder of war, which left dead bodies strewn everywhere.
It is not known when the apotheosis of Major Aldrich took place. It could have been at a fairly early stage when local villagers were subjected to repeated pirate raids. Major Aldrich’s zealousness in stationing massive numbers of troops on garrison duty protected the security of the area, with the result that villagers regarded him as a godlike figure to whom they could pray for peace. As the story was passed down from generation to generation, Aldrich became mantled in mystery. Eventually some people built a temple consecrated to Aldrich along the foreshore to make offerings to “Lord” Aldrich (whose image was impressive enough to rival the ancient warrior-hero General Kwan), and it became as splendid as the nearby Tam Kung Temple at A Kung Ngam. It was said that the spirit of Aldrich appeared several times at the height of the rioting over the Star Ferry fare increase in 1966, admonishing people to obey the Royal Hong Kong Police Force.
Aldrich Bay has disappeared from 1997 Hong Kong street maps as a result of land reclamation, and nothing remains of Aldrich Temple or Aldrich Village.
36
POSSESSION STREET
There is an extra layer of meaning to the name of Possession Street that is usually concealed by its historical significance. Its English name comes from Possession Point, where the British occupying forces first landed on Hong Kong Island’s northwestern shore. Local people called it Shui Hang Hau (literally, “the mouth of a water course”), marking the spot where a stream flowed down the hill and into the harbor.
In January 1841, following the First Opium War, while Captain Charles Elliot, the British plenipotentiary and superintendent of trade, was negotiating the Convention of Chuanbi with Qishan, the Qing emperor’s personal representative, the British man-of-war Sulphur went ahead and occupied Hong Kong Island. Its captain, Edward Belcher, has given the following account in his Narrative of a Voyage round the World Performed in HMS Sulphur:
We landed on Monday, the 25th, at fifteen minutes past eight, and being the bona fide first possessors, Her Majesty’s health was drank with three cheers on Possession Mount. On the 26th the squadron arrived; the marines were landed, the union hoisted on our post, and formal possession taken of the island, by Commodore Sir J. G. Bremer, accompanied by the other officers of the squadron, under a feu-de-joie from the marines, and a royal salute from the ships of war.
At the beginning of the Royal Navy’s occupation, when the British troops were stationed at Possession Point, their quarters were no more than a collection of tents and mat-sheds. The area became known in Chinese as Sai Ying Pun (literally, “Western barracks”) and in English as West Point. A combination of poor sanitation and difficulties in acclimatization led to an epidemic of fever with a very high death rate, and a state of panic set in. A rumor even began to circulate that the local inhabitants had laid a curse on the water supply. This rumor subsided after the barracks were moved to an area east of Central, but the curse lingered. As the city developed, a stretch of open ground near Possession Street, popularly known as Tai Tat Tei (literally, “large bamboo-mat ground”), was taken over by all kinds of riffraff, from entertainers to herbal doctors and fortune-tellers. One of the latter, who called himself Spiritual Diviner, proclaimed that the fung shui was detrimental to the British. The British, for their part, also kept their distance from this disreputable native quarter.
In the early days, the Chinese name for Possession Street was a phonetic transcription of its English name. As it happens, the word “possession,” apart from meaning ownership or control, also has the meaning of being possessed by spirits, or madness. The Chinese name was eventually changed to Shui Hang Hau, and it became the haunt of Chinese high-class courtesans before the government moved the brothels to Shek Tong Tsui in 1903. A government sanitation officer by the name of J. A. Davidson defied the foreigners’ taboo on this area; forsaking the red-light district for Westerners in Lyndhurst Terrace in Central, he would visit the Chinese brothels in Shui Hang Hau, where he fell madly in love with a local prostitute named Butterfly. One day, after a night of passion (and in the grip of a hangover), he lost his footing on the embankment, fell into the harbor, and drowned. It is said that his demise was caused by his “possession” by the spirit of Butterfly’s late father.
Professor S. Clark, who taught in the Department of History at the University of Hong Kong prior to World War II and was also a student of Chinese fortune-telling in his spare time, maintained in his The ABCs of Chinese Fortune-Telling and Its Application to Hong Kong that the English word “possession” was highly inauspicious. He proposed changing the name to Exorcism Street in order to restore good fung shui. The Chinese equivalent of “exorcism” is gon gwai, literally meaning “expelling ghosts” or “expelling devils”; it is not known if Clark was aware that foreigners are referred to colloquially in Chinese as “foreign devils.
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37
SYCAMORE STREET
Sycamore Street is located in Tai Kok Tsui on the Kowloon Peninsula. On the map it looks like a bow, with Maple Street intersecting it at the center of its curve, and another, smaller bow-shaped street, Willow Street, running parallel with it.
There are several different stories about the name of this street. The generally accepted explanation is that the street was originally given its English name that was then transposed into Chinese as Si-go-mo Gai (literally, “poetry, song, and dance street”). It is said that when Tai Kok Tsui first underwent development, the authorities decided to name the newly built streets after trees, so that Pine Street, Oak Street, Beech Street, Elm Street, Ivy Street, Cherry Street, Maple Street, Willow Street, Poplar Street, Cedar Street, and so on all appear in this area. These streets were originally named in English and their names were then translated into Chinese. Sycamore Street should have been no exception. Yet why is Sycamore Street rendered phonetically rather than according to its meaning?
One explanation that has a certain persuasive force is that the sycamore was taken to be a kind of fig tree known in Chinese as mou-fa-gwo, which literally means “lacking flowers or fruit.” However, Tai Kok Tsui had a population of local people with a firm belief in the magical properties of names. Since the words “lacking flowers or fruit” are diametrically opposite to the traditional Chinese well-wisher’s greeting for “blooming flowers and plentiful fruit,” the name of the street was transposed phonetically out of respect for the local culture. The words “poetry,” “song,” and “dance” are not only very fine in themselves but strung together also have the associated meaning of putting on a show to celebrate peace and prosperity.
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