Hawker turned property tycoon called the ‘queen of Hong Kong harbour’, Old Mary, gets musical tribute
- For decades the story of Old Mary, the rags-to-riches Hong Kong hawker every foreign seamen knew, intrigued TVB actor Stephen Au. He has finally brought her inspiring story to the stage
Many years ago, as a child, Stephen Au Kam-tong encountered a woman called Old Mary. On a recent afternoon in his studio in Ngau Tau Kok, Kowloon, the actor, writer and director describes their subsequent relationship. A few polystyrene rocks are scattered on the floor in front of us; he has been rehearsing his forthcoming production, The Ten Commandments, in which he will play Moses. It is a suitable backdrop for the genesis of another righteous story.
“You know, more than four decades ago, I had the most terrifying experience for all children,” he begins. “I went to … the dentist.” While he was waiting, he picked up the March 1973 Chinese edition of Reader’s Digest. In it was a feature by Christopher Lucas about Old Mary, described in the first paragraph as “the best-loved woman between Singapore and Yokohama”.
Born in 1963, Au says he was always a fast reader. By the time he was called for “the torture” at the dental clinic, he had read the whole story.
The headline in the original English edition, printed two months earlier, was “A modern-day morality tale from Hong Kong”. As that version puts it, “She may have been only a half-starved hawker but deep inside she felt that honesty paid.”
It tells how Wong Po-lan, born in 1870 in Kityang (now Jieyang, part of Guangdong’s Chaoshan region), marries a gambler, has three sons, becomes skilled in embroidery and sells her wares locally until she hears about “the wondrous British colony called Hong Kong”. Relocating there in 1902, she begins to frequent Hong Kong’s ships, “another faceless hawker in a seething seaport of 700,000 people”.
One morning in 1921, on board the US freighter SS Diana Dollar while she is surrounded by laughing sailors, a voice booms forth from on high. It belongs to “a big man with a thick white beard”. This is Robert Dollar, owner of the Dollar Line shipping company, standing on the bridge. He summons her. He takes a shine. He suggests she call herself Mary. She agrees.
