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Lamma Island

first person

Reading Time:3 minutes
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Chan Kam-tin, 82, has been a resident on Lamma all his life. His family has lived on the island for six generations

I am spreading out last night's leftover rice to dry in the sun. I'll leave it out for three days, then, once it's dried, I'll mix it with wheat and roll it into small balls to feed to the chickens - they don't like to eat the rice on its own. Our friends from Sok Kwu Wan give us their leftover rice too, so there's quite a lot here.

Normally, I buy chicks from Yuen Long for $7 each and feed and look after them for about three months until they weigh over three catties. Then I sell them to others on the island for about $30 each.

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But I have no chickens at the moment because of the government's ban on imports from China. So I'm just going to put the dried rice in plastic bags, and use it when I can buy chicks from Yuen Long again.

It's not a problem not to have the extra income I normally get from selling chickens because, luckily, my children are filial and they give me money.

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I have two sons and a daughter. They've all moved to live and work in the city now but they come back to visit me every weekend, which makes me very happy. I have three grandchildren - two girls aged seven and eight, and one boy who is 12 years old.

I have lived on Lamma ever since I was born and so did my father, grandfather, great-grandfather ... going back six generations, for a couple of hundred years. We used to farm and grow vegetables, beans and melons, and keep pigs as well as chickens. But we stopped having pigs about 15 years ago because their feed became too expensive to buy and we started to lose money.

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