Leo Kwan: How Tea Has Chosen Me

A Cultural Revolution propagation poster depicting Mao during a visit in Guangdong, where Zhongshan is a county of. It is almost satirical to see the healthy skin tones and happy expressions on the folks, having witnessed the actual physical deprivation that the people of Guangdong had suffered since I was a small boy. Artist: Chen Yan Ning, poster printed in 1972

Escaping the Japanese, and then Mao

A young scout in resistance area during the Sino-Japanese | Second World War. We could not find any pictures of my father during his war years, but this is probably how he was like too, though he said he was a drummer and had no helmet.

My father used to be proud to talk about his bullet wound in the chest from the Sino-Japanese War during WWII. He was lucky to have lived through such an injury in a time when food, medicine and even bullets were in extreme scarcity in the Chinese KMT Army. A young teenager amongst the recruits of poor villagers, he had joined the army so he could have something to do and did not have to starve.

He came to Hong Kong after Mao declared his reign in 1949. He should be glad that he did, China was soon becoming hell. Political movements during the political idol’s rule caused over 30 million deaths through the resultant starvation and disasters, and 2 millions ( some say 7 ) through brutality. That was more than the world’s casualties combined in WWII, including the Holocaust and the two atomic bombings in Japan. The apocalypses had great names though, Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward.

Invaders, crooks and the Communists

My mom was smarter. She attended St Mary’s College in Tsimshatsui, Hong Kong, albeit for only two years, soon after the War. She had arrived here in the colony before the Japanese occupation, thinking that it was safer under the protection of the British. She was in her early teens then, bringing with her a wicker suitcase filled with cash. Her elder brother wanted her to hide some of the family’s money in a safer place should the Japanese take their village and all their money. He might not have expected that crooks could take advantage of such a teenage girl. The invaders did take most of their money anyways, but it was the communist who robbed them of everything, and put my mother’s family in China through hell, because they had been landowners.

Right before my parents married, my father had only a plank to sleep on and relied on my mom for however little money she had remained. He had a respectable job for his background, cleaning for offices and commercial buildings, but the habit of gambling was taking a lot more than his salary.

Tea in the Thermos

So I was born to a negative income family and the strongest sensation since the earliest memory was the smell of food, particularly the cooking of rice from neighbours. I still remember standing at someone’s door at the sight of the family gathering round the table for dinner, hoping to satisfy my eternal hunger through what came through the nose, only to have the door shut in my face.

Tea came much later when I was five or six, when I was taken to dimsum restaurants in some rare occasions. The drink was not as attractive as the steamed chasiu buns, though I had only little of both. The thermos flask was our family teapot throughout my childhood. My father, however little he had come home, would brag about which was a better tea and the price of it. To us, it was something to make drinking hot water a slightly more substantial routine. We used whatever tealeaves that came by.

My mother took on private tutoring in the beginning to support us. Influxes of immigrants from various parts of China, all having difficulties in adapting to the languages in Hong Kong, needed assistance so there was business for some time.