As 1979 progressed, I kept producing my ten minutes long film every Monday, while RTHK’s new deputy director, Stuart W., was planning a new programme he wanted us all eventually to make for him at RTHK, a one hour weekly magazine, Here and Now, which would go to air in September.
One week filming I was led by a news report involving my recent past down to some warehouses on the western wharves, the godowns as they’re called, where boatloads of Vietnamese war refugees from South Vietnam arrived one after another. These arrivals were kept down there in pretty dire circumstances, and you smelt the distress immediately you walked onto the wharf.
Boats would come into harbour by themselves or be towed or ushered there by British patrol boats, where they would tie up to begin the process overseen by representatives of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) who would deal case by case of their plight as being “refugees” from post-war-torn South Vietnam, each hoping the UNHCR office in Hong Kong would resettle them in a third country..
Getting from where they were into Hong Kong was hard, waiting for resettlement often harder. When boats arrived in the British Colony few local people were understanding. Many Hong Kongers thought most of these boats did not come across the South China Sea from Vietnam, but refugee scammers after entering China by land then somehow finding a boat to get across the water from China to Hong Kong. Some in Hong Kong even thought some arrivals might even be Chinese mainlanders who wanted to get into Hong Kong.
Deep background to all this was the 99 year 1898 signed ‘unequal’ treaty signed between Britain and Qing China to lease mainland Chinese territory to the British, who had already acquired the island of Hong Kong ‘in perpetuity’ from the Qing empire in 1842 after the Chinese lost the First Opium War. Britain said it needed a land ring of protection for the island, so leased some of southern China land to the north of Hong Kong Island.
The treaty lasting 99 years was an insult mainland Chinese would never forget. Forced on China in an age of extreme duress when China was a weakened nation facing internal troubles and seeing foreigners setting up ‘concessions’ on Chinese soil.
China wanted to end British occupation of Hong Kong in 1997, an expiry date that was non-negotiable.
So there I was at a steaming godown in July. (TBC)
Swimanög 