Tam Oy-lun

We used to knot each strand of hair individually. The Shanghainese women were the best. They had that magic touch and could produce a complete handmade hairpiece in just four hours. I never learnt what their secret was, but they produced wonderful work. I used to sit there and envy their speed and agility. Knotting by hand was exacting, painstaking work.

Even then there were machine-made pieces, but these were cheap because once one hair fell out, the rest followed. You could tell immediately what you were getting. A machine-made wig cost about $200, but a hand-knotted piece on special netting was always more than $1,000.

We worked with these tiny hooks. You needed really good eyesight to do that sort of work. Each piece of netting had hundreds of tiny squares and each square required exactly four individual strands. Some people in our trade went blind from the strain on their eyes. Most of us now need glasses and not just for reading.

I can't remember exactly when I started doing this sort of work, but it was when it was new in Hong Kong. The first factory was opened in San Po Kong in the 1950s by a person from Toi Shan. It had several hundred workers. Those were the days when all the factories - clothes, firecracker, toy and plastics were all hiring. Life was very busy. At first we were paid $120 to make one hairpiece. It was miserable money for such intensive labour. Then another factory opened, also in San Po Kong and a lot of us went there. They paid $150 per piece. When I began, it used to take me a whole week to make just one. We were paid every two weeks and my first pay packet contained $240. I thought I would never be able to do it. All around me were women who were completing two, sometimes three a day. The other women were very supportive and encouraged me to have patience and learn. So I stuck with it and with time came speed and ability.

There was never a dull moment at work. Every day someone would burst into tears, because if there were too many knots in a piece, they had to be removed one strand at a time. If there was not enough hair, more had to be added evenly across the entire piece. The bosses didn't care how fast or how slow you were. All they cared about was the final product. They weighed the hair and the net before we started and weighed them again when the piece was finished. Adding to a finished piece was very difficult because once the knots were tied, they settled into a slot.

Later, we began to mix the real hair with nylon, which cut into the skin and hurt. With the introduction of nylon, we used the hooks more. The additional use of the hooks to pull the nylon into place led to some amusing accidents. Some women who didn't have such good eyesight, used to get up so close to their work that when they pulled the hook through, they got them embedded in their nostrils.