Reporting recently on the Tai O residents who lost their homes in July's fire, I met a charity worker who suggested I interview a Hong Kong family living on the poverty line. He felt poverty was a growing social problem which wasn't attracting enough attention. Because this issue of the Post Magazine is devoted to money - how to spend it, how to budget, how to indulge in it - this seemed as timely an opportunity as any to find a household which has hardly any of it.
It wasn't too difficult to find one. I rang the Society for Community Organisation, and within an afternoon a social worker had suggested the Leungs, who live near Cheung Sha Wan MTR station. They agreed to meet me, and on a Saturday evening, with my colleague Vince Lung as interpreter, Leung Kai-pui and his wife Tam Wan-ching described for several hours what it was like to be have-nots in this city of apparent abundance.
The family lives on the fourth floor of a walk-up which took a while (and a worried phone call) to find, so hidden is its entrance amid the jumble of shops and stalls. The flat is sufficiently large that at first I found myself looking around it in a relieved, this-isn't-too-bad sort of way; it was only when I asked Tam if the elderly lady passing to and fro was her mother that she said no, she was the landlady. Then we adjourned to a room of 120 square feet, containing two bunk beds, which is where Leung, Tam and their children, Leung Tin-yan, 16, and Leung Ka-wai, seven, all live.
Leung sat on a stool next to a cupboard, on top of which stood a huge cardboard box bearing the words Superb Picture & Sound Quality Plus Elegant Design. Several glossy Hennessy cognac boxes were arranged on a small table where he occasionally rested his elbow to lean his head on his hand. I asked him what was in the boxes and he opened one: inside was a collection of drinking straws, but no drink. There was a calendar attached to the wall, still marooned in January, as if the year had not progressed.
In the boom days before economic recession, Leung, now 58, earned a good wage; in his best period, 1996-97, he made $20,000 a month. That was when he worked for a Sha Tin decorating company. Until he lost his job, he could do anything: sweeping the floor, sticking on tiles, plastering walls. He hasn't lost that flexibility (the day we met he had spent the morning fixing a blocked lavatory in North Point), but now he works on a haphazard basis, depending on whom he can persuade to employ him. His monthly earnings are about $7,500.
Out of that he must pay rent of $3,300, which doesn't include the electricity and water bills. Tam, who is 45 and whom he married in 1981, had been living in a village in Guangdong; until she joined him in Hong Kong in December 1995, he had been able to save money on accommodation by squeezing himself into smaller, cheaper spaces. Then the children came in 1998.