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W A S T E
I live in Cha Kwo Ling. I am getting older. I love being here. I have a lot of friends, my neighbours look after me, we have shops and restaurants. My parents were born here so I came back to our home. It is very safe here, our doors are always open. Long time ago, we had fishermen, people working in the stone quarry, and later in the oil industry on the docks. All of this is gone now. We have a recycling centre, waste materials everywhere, trucks come and go all day long, it is a good business but some people are complaining about the noise and the dirt ; I don’t mind. I take the minibus everyday in and out. When there is heavy rain, some roofs are leaking. We have mosquitoes, rats running around at night, sometimes even snakes, but we are used to it. We love it here. I don’t have much hope for Cha Kwo ling, I live day by day, trying to live a happy life. We are proud of our beautiful temple and festivals that attract people from all around.
Cha Kwo Ling
茶果嶺
C O N T E N T
SPACE flâneur PEOPLE inhabitants MATERIALS scavengers
Overview of Cha Kwo Ling, the village locates in the eastern New Kowloon of Hong Kong, sitting on the hill and facing the Victoria Harbour.
P E O P L E | inhabitants
Cha Kwo Ling is not a very convenient place for living. We usually do not have bathroom in every single household, so everyone would use the public shower and toilet, which is very inconvenient; and recently there has been incidents of people videotaping female toilet, I am very concerned. Another huge problem is the unbelievable amount of rats we have here, I always hear them running between the metal sheets at night. 50% of the neighbors in Cha Kwo Ling are actually renting the house with bad conditions. Some of us got sick because of the humid and hot environments. Mosquitoes are also a big problem to outsiders but not to us, for the reason that we have knowledge with bug control. My neighbor called ‘Ching fung’ obtained a certificate on bugs control in Kwun tong after completing 40 hours of teaching.
The young generation tends to move out of Cha Kwo Ling, they only come back every year on 23/3 for the birthday of Tin Hau, which is the same situation for most of the old neighbours who moved out. They will also come back on that day for celebration activities like parade. We enjoyed living in Cha Kwo Ling instead of the public estate because of the good relationship with neighbors. People like us mainly lived at the inner part of Cha Kwo Ling while new immigrants usually live in the outer part.
There are many many village celebrations, such as craftsman festival 鲁 班诞， or Tin Hau festival 天后诞 the whole village gather together to perform riturals and share food together, and during this time many of the neighbors that moved away would come back and help out, ah I love seeing old friends during these days. Our festivals used to have a much bigger scale, we would play fire works and you could always see the water front filled with boats. But since we were seperated from the waterfront, and start to be surrounded by tall buildings, things are not the same anymore. In the past Cha Kwo Ling had a much higher population, the village was formed of 4 big major family: Law, Tang, Yau, Wong long time ago, nowadays most of them moved away with unity in the village gradually falling apart, but the Law and Tang family still live here, whom are all Hakka. And we have a lot of immigrants moving in, but they always stay temporarily. But I still love the village, all the neighbors are my family.
The village used to be right next to the harbor before the government built the road which cut us apart from the water. Many differences happened during those years in the village. Memories in my childhood like insect fighting and fishing are now past as the environment changed. When exactly did the village start to change? There were days when quite a lot of restaurants and houses were burnt down and then the ruined land was taken over by the government, remaining abandoned and empty ever since. Fires are usually caused by short circuit and villagers have no effective means to deal with this by now except purchasing more fire extinguishers with the donation from the recycling company.
I have been living in Cha kwo Ling for my entire life. When I was young, my family never went to the market and bought food because we were self-sufficient, such as fishing fresh from the sea every morning, the village had farm lands and pig houses. Nowadays a lot of seafood suppliers who lives around Yau Tong are still continuing that lifestyle. Ah, did you see the paper factory on your way here? My brother owns it, we recycle cardboard boxes and transport them to Mainland China for further processes.
A lot of notices have been posted around the village, such as a notice about flooding that happened back in the end of 2015, during that time many volunteers came and helped the area by giving out bags of rice, cheap haircuts for elderly, drawing classes for children, and so on. Water is a big problem here; especially during heavy rains, there are always flooding happening here and there. In the waterfront, there are graffiti arts drawn by a pair of couples, aren’t they beautiful? We are very welcoming to the artists, you can talk to Mr. Ng (the head of the community center) to discuss the possibilities to exhibit artwork or installation in the future.
S P A C E | flâneur
M A T E R I A L S | scavengers
C R E D I T S
Documentation XinYi Zhang William Wong House 2016 Song Jia Rui Hao Jia Li Dai House 2026 David Tam Bobo Ngai Orlando Chan Pearl Cao Janet Choi Wen Nian House 2066 Venus Ng TingTing Ng Timothy Lam Ivan Chan Desmond Chang Mentor Cesar Jung-Harada Susanne Trumpf George Hoehne