Chinese New Year Break: Hong Kong 1983

Lynne Phoning Home at our Hong Kong hosts' Apartment (In Taiwan at that time, we had to go to the Telephone and Telegraph Office to make international calls)

Junks in Hong Kong Harbor

The visa situation in Taiwan was rather strange in the early 1980s. As students, we were still on tourist visas, but with proof of school enrollment, we could extend our visas every two months for a total of six months at a time. We had to leave Taiwan for several days in February, and then we could come back again for another six months. Now there are regular student visas, and you can stay in the country as long as you are enrolled in a legitimate program of study.

Our Chinese friends from church in DC had given us money to visit Hong Kong and mainland China during our winter break. Our school was closed for several weeks at the time of Chinese New Year, as was the entire city of Taipei. Our Chinese friends had given us extra money for the express purpose of purchasing Bibles in Hong Kong that were written in simplified Chinese characters. In 1983, the only legal version of the Bible in China was the old Bible from the 1800’s. It was written in traditional characters, and most young people could not read it.

We asked the deacons who helped with the student center in Taipei to make arrangements for us to stay with church people in Hong Kong because we did not have enough money to stay in hotels there. We did get a good deal on round-trip tickets between Hong Kong and Taipei. We had come to Taiwan with two passports because at the time, relations between Taiwan and mainland China were pretty tense, and we would not be allowed to stay in Taiwan and study with stamps from China on our passport. We could not have entered China with the evidence of studying in Taiwan stamped in our passports, either.

We stayed in an apartment of single women in the same high-rise as the church hall in Kowloon, Hong Kong. The women were very nice, and they took us sightseeing on the Star Ferry to the Central District and the Peak Tram. We also visited the harbor and saw the junks. We did not have money to buy much, but Hong Kong was even more crowded than Taipei, and it was different from anything we had seen before. It was under British rule at the time, so there was quite a bit of English spoken and on street signs. We were also able to buy cheese and Western food for the first time in six months.

We went to the mainland Chinese visa office in Hong Kong and signed up for a three day tour of Guangzhou and Guangdong Province. We also got reservations in a hotel in Guangzhou for three more days. We had to finish the tour, and then we could go back into China the same day to spend time on our own since it would be our second visit. We were only allowed to stay at five-star hotels which were pretty pricy. But we were traveling on American passports and spending American dollars, so the Chinese government only wanted to give us the best. After making our arrangements, we spent all the rest of the money given to us by Chinese-American Christians to buy Bibles. We each had fifty or sixty pocket Bibles by the time we were done.

The Christians in Hong Kong who sold us the Bibles told us that we would either get through customs with our luggage unopened or we would be caught. They suggested that if the Bibles were confiscated, we should try to retrieve them and take them in on our second trip. We were planning to enter China on the third day of the Chinese New Year, so after making all our preparations, we went with our friends to celebrate the Year of the Boar in Hong Kong.

Hong Kong is so tightly packed that each family cannot set off their own fireworks like they do in Taiwan. Instead, everyone runs like lemmings to the water to watch the fireworks over the harbor. All you can do is move with the crowd. If you try to fight against them and go the opposite way you will be trampled. It was a great fireworks show, and we certainly had our first experience with mobs. But no one was hurt. The entire city was out and about celebrating until one or two in the morning.

Late the next morning our hosts took us with them to visit friends for New Year. We put on nice clothes and took bags of fruit with us. Many of these people lived packed into tiny, tiny apartments. Most of the families had burned incense to their ancestors first thing in the morning, so the halls of every building were thick with smoke. Hong Kong means “Fragrant Harbor” in Chinese, and I wondered if the name came from all the incense. The apartments in Hong Kong were usually just one bedroom. There were bunk beds in the living rooms, and the kitchens were out on the balcony. Several generations were all crammed together in that little space. Lynne and I could not believe how much more densely populated Hong Kong was in comparison to Taipei.

Once again, we could not understand anything because the people in Hong Kong spoke Cantonese. Many of the better educated people had gone to English high school or college, but the majority of the Hong Kong Chinese just spoke Cantonese. At least, we had some familiarity with the Chinese characters, so between the English on the signs and our limited knowledge of Mandarin, we managed to get by. It was good to know that our hard work in Chinese class was paying off.

A Red-Carpet Welcome

Lynne's Bed in Taipei

My friend Lynne and I experienced many delays on our flight from Seattle to Taipei. We had been traveling for 20 hours without sleep when we were greeted at the airport by a group of cheering students from the place where we would be living. The vans transporting us seemed quite decrepit and had absolutely NO air conditioning. We were given the best seats in each van: the front passenger seats. These seats were directly under the small metal fans that had been bolted to the steel frame above the windshield in each vehicle. The fans moved the air, but it was so hot and muggy, they did not really cool anything.

Both vans pulled up in an alley beside a cement wall with broken glass embedded along the top. One of the girls pushed an intercom button next to a red metal door, and we were all buzzed in. The girls pulled us upstairs while our luggage was driven away with the vans. We were herded up three flights of narrow stairs to an apartment. All we wanted was a bed; we could even wait until morning for a shower, but no, there were even more people crowded into the living room of this apartment at 12:30 am, singing a special welcome song to us and plying us with tea, fruit, cookies, and cakes. We would later learn that we were being given the red-carpet welcome as honored guests, but all we really wanted to do was get some sleep.

Finally, a gentleman named Peter, who spoke intelligible English, entered the room. Peter informed us that we were in the church student center of which he was the manager. He lived in the apartment where we were sitting. The students living in that building were day students at NTNU and all spoke some English. We would not be staying in the student center; we would live in an apartment around the corner with the Yeh family and 8 night-school students, who didn’t speak any English at all. The church leaders were enthusiastic about helping us learn Chinese, so they took great pains to give us an environment of total immersion. Peter droned on for quite awhile, and then he invited us to give speeches. He suggested that we encourage the Chinese students to study English with same dedication that we were giving to our study of Chinese. Lynne and I looked at each other and then at Peter; we told him we really just wanted to get some sleep. Peter’s wife then pressed us to eat a cookie before we left so we wouldn’t wake up hungry. As we nibbled on the cookies and pretended to drink the tea, the students sang their welcome song to us again. Finally, we were dismissed to go home with our new housemates.

We learned that we would be sharing a small bedroom furnished with a metal bunk bed, two small wooden desks with folding chairs, two arm chairs, and an end table with a fan on it. Lynne took the bottom bunk, leaving me the top. When we opened our suitcases to get out our pajamas, there was no place in the room to walk. The beds were just boards covered with a straw mat, a pillow, and a towel in lieu of blankets. An English-speaking Malaysian girl from the student center came to help us settle in; she told us that since no one used sheets in the summer, we needed to shower every night before sleeping or the ants and cockroaches would be attracted to our sweat and infest the beds. The jolt of adrenalin produced by that statement woke us up enough to shower before we tumbled into bed. We had been going for a full 24 hours without sleep, but the board bed was hard and my rear was sore. Despite my fatigue, I did not sleep very well. All too early, it was morning, and we were awakened by music that sounded like an ice cream truck at a little before 6 am.

Transpacific Marathon Flight

Laurie, Teresa & Lynne in Colorado the week before Lynne and Teresa leave for Taiwan (August, 1982).

Lynne and I were so excited. The Office of International Students at Georgetown had gotten us into the Fall term of Chinese classes at the Mandarin Training Center in Taipei. National Taiwan Normal University had agreed to give Lynne a one-year ESL teaching contract. We had our passports and our visas. Our friends from church had arranged for us to live with a Chinese family in church-sponsored student housing. We were able to afford plane tickets from DC to Taiwan with week-long stops in Denver and Seattle, so we could visit our families before leaving the country. And we had the logistics down for getting the gamma globulin shots that were strongly recommended for travelers to Third World countries.

Lynne got her gamma globulin shot on our last day in Denver. She said it wasn’t too bad. I waited until we were in Seattle because it would be free for me there. I don’t know if the nurse in Seattle was less skilled at giving shots than the nurse in Denver or what, but that gamma globulin shot was the most painful shot I have ever received. I got it 48 hours before we were scheduled to fly, and my rear was still sore when we boarded the plane. Maybe that was a warning that the adventure upon which we were embarking was not going to be what we were expecting, but I was 21 and naïve. I just wanted to fly.

We flew on Northwest Airlines from Sea-Tac to Taipei via Seoul. The plane took a polar route and for some reason, we had to stop in Alaska. I was so excited I couldn’t sleep on the plane, but I didn’t care. Even with the extra landing our flight wasn’t supposed to be that long. Then when we got to Seoul, our plane was late and violated some military taboo. All passengers had to deplane with their carry-on luggage while the South Korean army searched the plane. Then we had to go through a strict security check before being allowed to re-board. We spent an hour in a stark waiting room furnished with hard plastic chairs. They were designed to prevent lounging, and they rubbed against my sore rump. We finally made it into Taipei more than two hours late. By this time we were walking zombies (and my rear was still sore). We sleepily got our luggage, went through customs, and exited to the waiting area to find our hosts. As we walked out of the air conditioned customs area, we were enveloped in a steam bath of hot, muggy air. We could see the drops of moisture suspended in mid-air. To our surprise more than 10 people were waiting to pick us up even though it was already midnight. They began to cheer wildly when they saw us, and several of them started waving signs with our names on them.

We were dead on our feet, our minds were rapidly melting in the heat and humidity, yet we were hugged exuberantly by strange women, while the men wrested our luggage from us. The women dragged us outside where it was even hotter and muggier than inside, and they separated us so that each one got the front passenger seat in one of two old, beat-up white vans. They were chattering away, but we didn’t understand anything that was said. This did not phase them; they split the luggage between the two vans, divided themselves among the back seats, and we went careening off down the highway from the airport to Taipei. Fortunately, it was so late at night that there was very little traffic.