From 1952, I worked in small Chinese newspapers; the ones printed on one sheet, meaning each edition consisted of just four pages. Some were notorious, such as the Hung Luk Pao (the Red Green Daily) and Chiu Yin Pao. They were called 'pocket newspapers' because they were easily folded and stuffed into pockets if someone approached and you didn't want to be seen reading a naughty sheet. I also worked for 'mosquito papers' - news sheets that appeared unannounced and disappeared a couple of days later - and entertainment sheets. The newspapers paid very little in those days and turnover was very high. We worked 12-hour shifts, beginning at 4pm or 5pm and were paid $4 a shift. We were paid at the end of each shift. When the Korean War erupted more newspapers started publishing.
The Chinese papers sold for 10 cents and cost less than five cents to publish.
We worked for them because we were not on staff and were free to do other part-time work, if we had the energy after a 12-hour shift. At times it was really desperate. The $4 a shift broke down into 60 to 70 cents per thousand Chinese characters. And we worked from handwritten scripts, trying not to make mistakes. Labour was plentiful and it was easy to get fired. Some reporters had impossible handwriting and we used to dread being given their stories to work from.
What we did was sort individual Chinese characters and place them in proper order on printer's blocks. We worked back to front so the characters came out the right way round when printed. Once a block was ready, we covered it with a wet cloth and applied printer's ink with large brushes, before the blocks were heated. Each block could print up to 5,000 sheets.
I spent my entire working life as a printer - from the time I was 16 until I retired in 1997 aged 69. In the 50-plus years I spent in the profession, we went from hot metal to computers and from beating characters into place on printing blocks to photographing entire pages ready for printing. My wage when I started was one bar of soap and $5 in cash a month, and the boss paid for haircuts. This was during the war, when we were also given cash coupons.
My first real pay after the war amounted to between $70 and $80 a month. I was working for the Sun Wah Printing Company at the time. It sounds a small amount but it was enough to support my mother and myself. By the time I retired, my salary had increased to $7,000 a month.
When I started I worked only in the Chinese language. Later I worked in English for commercial printers. I never learnt English, but it wasn't difficult as there were just 26 letters to choose from and individual printers used the same words over and over, so you got to recognise and reproduce them without difficulty. We were paid 10 cents a line for English lettering. We printed anything and everything, books, copybooks, office papers, notepads - whatever was going, whatever we could get in stationery shops. I enjoyed this type of printing work best, because we got to do all sorts of jobs.
