1001 Nights Cast

‘Hide in Tuen Mun until things quieten down’, he remembered one of the characters saying in Infernal Affairs II, as the KCR sped along the river channel from Siu Hong past Affluence Garden and all the high-rise housing developments towards Tuen Mun. He’d just seen the movie for the fifth time, and tried to imagine the place as the sleepy fishing village, where Tanka fishermen sheltered from typhoons and where pirates and smugglers hid before the New Town was built and the public housing estates afforded a different kind of shelter for people escaping the future, just across the border. Eighteen months earlier, Tuen Mun, or at least the hospital, had figured in a strange episode which seemed even more disconnected from reality than any movie he had seen, though the newspapers were filled every day with incidents as strange as this, stories which were themselves only readable from within a time-warp in which especially Western readers themselves were located, expecting to encounter strangeness and difference.

At first it was the local supermarket staff who noticed the fretful behaviour of the girl and the bruising on her face, head and legs, as she limped through the aisles, supporting herself on the trolley. Initially she refused their help because she was afraid things would become worse for her, if she was reported, and she did not want to disappoint her parents, but the staff found the situation intolerable and brought the case to the attention of the police. The girl was hospitalized and treated for multiple injuries and bruising over her entire body, which had gone untreated for some time. Probably the most serious of her physical injuries was a healing fracture of the femur, though no-one could clearly say how she had sustained the break, and how she could have continued working without treatment.

It turned out that she had come from Guangdong, aged ten, about a year earlier to help care for her father’s sister, a single mother with three teenage children in the house in Yuen Long. The girl was the third child in a family of four, with two elder brothers and a younger sister and she had been working in the homes of relatives since she was eight to help support the family. The aunt was a schizophrenic on social security, and she had paid her brother about 160 Australian dollars for the child, who was required to work from about 5am until 10pm every day, cooking, cleaning, buying food and sleeping on the floor. All the family members regularly punished her, hitting and torturing her with slippers, folded chairs, pliers and she had blisters and peeling skin on her hands from scalding. The aunt was prosecuted but the parents resided outside of the jurisdiction of the local authorities and so were unavailable for investigation. As the girl herself was a mainland resident, she was repatriated to her parents after a month’s hospital treatment. No follow up was possible, but her case was referred to an international agency for monitoring. About four months later she briefly visited the supermarket and the hospital and was back at school, but no-one had any information on what had become of her since then.

It was admittedly a very extreme case, likened to the practice of mui tsai, literally ‘little young sister’ in Cantonese, a form of bonded labour in which children, usually girls, from poverty-stricken families were sold to become domestic servants in middle-class families, where they remained until they reached marriageable age. In the best of circumstances, it was believed to be a charitable act, rescuing the children from hard labour or even death and the girls often became part of the family—and even adopted daughters. The practice continued after the British took over Hong Kong because it was accepted as part of Chinese custom—although with the establishment of the Republic, it was made illegal on the mainland after 1911, which meant the British too had to get rid of it because they were embarrassed to find the colony was less progressive than the mainland in this regard, after all the anti-slavery rhetoric of the nineteenth century. The last reported case had occurred in the mid-fifties, when a farmer was prosecuted for importing a child slave, at the same time that smugglers were still active along the waterfront here and the land hadn’t yet been reclaimed for the Gold Coast Resort along Castle Peak Road.

Now, you can stroll along Golden Beach, with its palm trees and imported sand from Hainan and on Sundays, along the fake French Riviera and the ‘Gold Coast Montmartre’. Performance artists compete with the general street art, but are no real competition for the Filipino and Indonesian maids, filling the squares on their one day off, spreading out their picnics and socializing in this visible register of their presence, outside of the private houses and apartments, where they have no space to themselves.