in praise of trees

The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The next best time is now.

Chinese proverb.

If you mention Fanling to someone who is familiar with the place, they are most likely to comment about the trees. There are rather a lot of them, and they make the town more attractive than it otherwise would be, given the often horrendous traffic. In fact, they are what make Fanling such a pleasant place, especially in the springtime, when new growth and intensely colourful flowers combine to create the illusion of an urban woodland with high-rise apartments, factories and other buildings merely set down in the spaces between the trees (see the first photo to get an idea of what I mean). This post is a follow-on from Spring Fever.

The traffic seems almost incidental.

The cotton trees are always the first to flower, probably because they do so before bothering to poke out any leaves. They were in full bloom throughout March this year, which is up to ten days longer than usual. I believe that the explanation for this is a lack of rain during the month, because a heavy downpour soon dislodges wilting flowers.

I like trees. I like to look at them. I like to photograph them. I like the way they take their time. Of course, I’m not suggesting that we slow our lives down to keep pace with trees—we’d probably have to hibernate in the winter for a start—but they do provide a steady reminder that living life at breakneck speed means only that you will get to your destination more quickly than you intended. With this in mind, I offer the following photographs, to be perused at leisure:

The Chinese are tenacious in hanging on to their traditional cultural practices, and I imagine that this impromptu shrine among the roots of a venerable banyan tree, alongside the busiest road in Fanling, is to some local tutelary deity.

And this is the busiest road in Fanling. The tall, straight trees on the right of the picture are paper-bark trees (once used for that purpose by indigenous villagers), and they form the beginning of a majestic double avenue for the next half-mile leading off the picture to the right. I’ve not yet identified the flowering trees in the middle distance, but there are a lot of them around the place.

A cycle track running alongside the avenue of paper-bark trees.

Half a tree, half a tree, half a tree onward….

Among the many introduced species of ornamental tree in Hong Kong, none is more spectacular in bloom than the flame tree, originally from Madagascar. This is a relatively small specimen in a public basketball court in Luen Wo Hui. Eight of these trees are visible from our balcony, but only one was in full bloom when I left for the UK. I’m not going to come here so early next year. At least Paula has been taking some pictures, so I’ll know what I’ve been missing.

turf wars

I live in a village about a mile from the eastern edge of Fanling. Although I have frequently described the intervening area as ‘fields’, it would be more accurate to designate it a wasteland. Admittedly, it is a fertile wasteland, because it is part of the flood plain of the local river, but it is a disturbed landscape. Crops have been grown here sporadically, and still are, but the population density is extremely low, and most growers live in makeshift shacks of doubtful stability in bad weather.

The resident population is also transient. As one group of people is rehoused by the government, another group moves in to work the land. Once-cultivated plots are abandoned and are soon overrun by weeds, while fresh areas are cleared to grow vegetables. In the past year, the ranks of newcomers have been augmented by an evangelical Christian group from the city, whose plot has been named Ma Po Po Farm. This is not merely pretentious, it is also notably prudish: ‘Ma Po Po’ means ‘horse poo area’, but the area is actually known as and signposted as Ma Shi Po (‘horseshit area’).

Like many city dwellers, the Christians have an idyllic view of farming: although they spent a huge amount of time painting their shack—and very fine work it is, with images of bats and snails painstakingly rendered—nobody seems to have remembered that vegetables require constant weeding. Neglect this and planted vegetables, mainly cabbage, lettuce and other leafy vegetables, soon get choked out. Ma Po Po Farm is easily the worst-kept plot of those I walk past regularly.

This situation has almost certainly obtained for many years, although I’ve been observing it for only the last three. However, the status quo was interrupted at the beginning of April by the appearance of warning signs like the one pictured below. As a rough estimate, there were between twenty and thirty of these signs, although there aren’t as many now, because before I left for the UK I decided to uproot as many as I could find and discard them in inaccessible undergrowth.

“This is private land. No entry or use unless authorized. Trespassers will be sent to court”.

Then, a few weeks later, a series of countersigns began to appear. This is the first I came across:

“Farmland aggressor, give our land back and stay away from us”.

The old man pictured is Lee Shau-kee, the geriatric chairman of major property developer Henderson Land. Although it isn’t obvious, because the superimposed photographs cover the relevant details, Lee is pictured holding his three recently born grandsons. His response to this event is instructive:

I never felt so happy before, much happier than when I earn a lot of money.

He doesn’t look very happy to me. In fact, he looks distinctly uncomfortable: that smile must have taken some forcing, although this is not surprising. Uncle Four, as he likes to be known, is a typical Chinese box wallah, obsessed with making money that, at the age of 82, he is never going to spend. In any case, I’ve always been deeply suspicious of any local who goes by the self-styled sobriquet ‘Uncle’. It suggests benevolence while concealing a shark-like tenacity for exploiting his fellow citizens. Presumably, the manga horde in the lower picture is what Lee is up against here.

All the remaining countersigns are essentially messages of support, in most cases placed directly in front of the original warning signs. Here are some examples:

“Land for farming”.

“Land should continue to be used for growing crops. Land development should give way”.

“When the weather is fine, it is good for growing crops”.

“Support you for ever”.

The Christian operators of Ma Po Po Farm are probably behind this protest, given the content of one message:

The Lord said: “Land developer, please leave the land for people to have a life.”

Other messages include “The land developer’s action is despicable”; “We need to keep growing crops to continue educating our next generation”; and “Give us a way to continue living”. I detect youthful idealism here, but I’m on their side, as you’ve probably already guessed.

Unfortunately, this dispute has already taken a more sinister turn. The following picture is of a row of an unidentified leguminous vegetable. A few days before this photo was taken, the row appeared to be thriving, with luxuriant growth in every direction, but it now looks as if someone has been spraying the plants with a defoliant.

This is the current state of play. Any further developments in this story will be reported as they happen.

spring fever

I rarely use Americanisms in speech or writing, but when it comes to naming the seasons, I’m bound to say that I regard the American version as more descriptive than the British. I therefore have no hesitation in stating that my favourite season in Hong Kong is the fall, the time of year when the leaves fall from the trees.

There are few genuinely evergreen trees in Hong Kong, but most of the territory’s trees keep their leaves during the winter. However, when the temperature begins to rise at the end of winter, and new growth begins to appear, this is a cue for the old leaves to depart. When the northeast monsoon is blowing, the fall of leaves can seem like a blizzard, and were it not for the continuous work of a small army of roadsweepers, whose efforts can seem like trying to empty a bath using only a colander, large parts of rural Hong Kong would be knee-deep in dead leaves by Easter.

A windswept street in Luen Wo Hui (picture taken on 10th March 2011).

This year, February saw a reversal of the usual climatic conditions, which are that it always seems to be cold during the Chinese New Year period, regardless of where it falls in the Gregorian calendar. This year, however, the festival coincided with the only warm spell of the month, which was otherwise unrelentingly cold, wet and miserable. The house began to feel like a walk-in refrigerator.

Things began to improve at the beginning of March with the piecemeal return of the summer visitors that augment the local bird population. These new arrivals include all those species with distinctive calls, some of which I described last year in Birdsong. I noticed the ‘swanee whistler’ first, although I should point out that ‘noticed’ is too understated a word to be entirely appropriate here, because you would have to bury your head in a large pile of pillows not to notice if one was in the neighbourhood.

This year, I discovered the swanee whistler’s real name: it is an Asian koel. The male is glossy black, about the size of a jackdaw but much slimmer: in flight, it looks like a racing pigeon. The word ‘koel’ is Sanskrit in origin and is said to be onomatopoeic in that language, although I remain unconvinced by the claim on a website operated by Hong Kong’s Leisure and Cultural Services Department, that ‘it gives a repetitive and loud ko-el, ko-el call’. There is no l sound, although we do occasionally hear, but not see, a bird that sings “tweet! tweet!”, each consonant being fully enunciated.

The koel shares with the European cuckoo the habit of laying its eggs in the nests of other birds, which made me wonder why it advertises its presence so blatantly. It turns out that the swanee whistler is the male bird, but the female koel is just as noisy. I described it last year as ‘a malevolent cross between a kookaburra and a rooster’, while this year I gave it the name ‘laughing chicken’ before discovering its real identity. The most common victims of the koel’s parasitism are black-collared starlings, otherwise known as ‘stripeys’ (my description—the black and white stripes make this species easy to identify) and ‘noisy buggers’ (Paula’s description—they are the ones that sound as if they are arguing all the time).

However, this is where the story becomes complicated. Black-collared starlings have a range of calls, one of which is a passable imitation of the laughing chicken. Only a difference in timbre betrays the real origin of the call. The repertoire of these birds also includes an imitation of honking geese, while what might be described as its default call resembles that of another common local species, the crested mynah. Or are the mynahs imitating the starlings? I’ve not yet reached a conclusion on this question. There is a lot of scope for observation here, because a pair of black-collared starlings has constructed an enormous nest in the tree in front of our house, so there is much (noisy) coming and going.

Crested mynahs are among the commonest birds around San Wai. They are dull black in colour, with white patches on the underside of the wings that remind me of the roundels that once graced the wings of the aircraft of the Royal Air Force. The illusion is reinforced when an individual flies straight towards you, because the blur of white on the rapidly beating wings resembles the propellers of a twin-engined Second World War bomber such as the Wellington. When seen in large mobs, these birds are almost as noisy.

Perhaps the most interesting of the common local birds are the magpie robins, which, like the crested mynahs, are resident throughout the year. They are larger than European robins, to which they probably aren’t related, and as you might guess, they are black and white rather than brown and red. However, during the winter months, the only sound they utter is a cross between a rasp and a hiss. It sounds very threatening, and it could be mistaken for an insect, except that it is much too cold for insects to be abroad. Then, in March, I began to notice short songs that I hadn’t heard before. Each one was different, but I really should have spotted that the timbre and intensity were always very similar. The penny finally dropped when I caught a magpie robin in the act of singing its heart out on my television aerial.

A typical magpie robin song consists of six to eight notes and is a very piercing but not unpleasant whistle (the poor buggers are popular as caged songbirds in Hong Kong—a barbaric practice that is out of step with the sophistication of the rest of Chinese culture). Once an individual has secured a suitable perch, its song is repeatedly reprised, with only minor improvisation, until it decides to fly off and sing somewhere else.

Once I was able to identify a song as that of a magpie robin, I found that I could also identify individuals, especially if there was some element in the song that stood out. One in particular caught my attention because it added a distinctive “beep! beep!” coda at the end of each iteration of its song. The day after hearing this performance for the first time, I was describing it to Paula when suddenly we heard it being repeated from the large tree alongside our house. Since then, we’ve heard it from time to time, and the question I now want to answer is whether this really is the same individual, or whether individuals construct songs from elements they’ve heard others use in their songs. However, further research will have to wait until my return to Hong Kong in the fall autumn.

an apology

If you have been a regular reader of this blog, you will not have failed to notice that it has not been updated in almost three months. For this I offer an abject apology. During this period, I’ve written at least a dozen posts, some long, some much shorter, but I’ve found it impossible to round any of them off satisfactorily. I found myself thinking about things I didn’t want to write about and as a result struggling to put together the words needed for those things I did want to write about.

Well, that’s my rationalization of the problem, but there have been other factors. I had quite a bad accident just before Christmas, losing control of my bike on what appeared to be a completely innocuous surface. Usually, when a wheel slips, you have time to adjust, but the interval between my realizing that something was wrong and my head hitting the concrete cannot have been more than half a second. I described the experience in emails to friends:

I fell off my bike last week: it took me completely by surprise, the bike simply disappearing suddenly from under me while I was turning a corner. There was nothing near, it wasn’t wet, and there was no reason to suspect that the surface would be slippery. I’d probably be on life support now if I hadn’t been wearing a helmet, because I still felt one hell of a bang through the helmet. The police were on the scene within a minute (impressive seeing as how we were on a cycle track, some distance from any road), and an ambulance was called, but then the copper said that if I had to go to hospital, they would take my bike—and I could collect it from the New Territories police headquarters in Tsuen Wan. [Although Tsuen Wan is technically in the New Territories, geographically it is contiguous with Kowloon, with a mountain range between it and the rest of the New Territories]. I thought, fuck it, I don’t fancy that, I think I can ride home. Only about 12 miles, and after being patched up by the paramedics (bad abrasions to my knee, elbow and shoulder, which took several weeks to heal), I set off rather gingerly, for about a mile, then I felt I was up to riding at our normal pace. In any case, we had only an hour or so of daylight left. I managed OK, but I think I’ve buggered my shoulder. Nothing broken or dislocated, but it doesn’t feel comfortable when I pull or push anything.

I decided that I wouldn’t get back on the bike until I felt no more discomfort in my shoulder, which turned out to be three weeks. My main objective first time out would be to take a closer look at the place where I fell off. If I had made a mistake, I would want to know what it was. Unfortunately (you can’t make this stuff up), the entire area had been resurfaced using high-friction materials. I wonder whether this was merely coincidence. I should add that despite these improvements, I pay extra attention when negotiating the corner in question.

For some time, the experience dented my self-confidence, but since the end of March Paula and I have been doing a lot of cycling. The route options are quite limited, but the moving hazards (pedestrians and other cyclists) are infinitely variable, so there are very few dull moments and plenty of opportunities to test your skill. One such is the footbridge hairpin, on the route south from Fanling to join the main cycle network. It’s harder when coming off the footbridge, with a four-foot drop-off if you don’t turn sharply enough, and hardest of all if you have to avoid an old woman and her dog, a singular hazard that I’ve encountered only once. The woman kept shouting instructions to the dog that were the opposite of what would have made life easier for me. Of course, I could have simply put my foot down, but where’s the fun in that?

The footbridge hairpin. Paula can be seen disappearing into the distance.

Meanwhile, I’ve been distracted by the environment around our house and in the rest of Fanling, which is always at its most interesting during the slow unfolding of my favourite season in Hong Kong. I’m currently in the UK, but unlike last year I have an internet connection, so I expect to be able to provide an account within the next few days of some of the notable discoveries I’ve made during the past three months.

Another interesting story, the first hints of which appeared at the beginning of April, involves attempts by someone claiming to own the land to force ‘farmers’ on the outskirts of Fanling to abandon their fields. Some skullduggery appears to have taken place already, and I suspect that the story has some distance to run yet, but I’ll provide an overview next.

I also intend to resurrect some of the posts that I’ve been struggling with: Future Imperfect will be my assessment of the prospects for the human race in the twenty-first century, and The Village Idiot will be a denunciation of the views on climate change of former UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel Lawson. Explanations should be self-explanatory, while Three-Card Monte will be my analysis of the well-known street con and its connection with modern financial services.

While I’m here in my home town, given that I shall be here now until October, I will probably write a few articles about the place. Just don’t expect any tourist guff.