The gweilos at the Temple

1.  From David Johns, retired professor of the Chinese University of Hong Kong

I almost forgot to mention Ron and Veronica Clibborn-Dyer who lived in a temple in the New Territories. (Veronica sold her tea set to you if I remember correctly.) On one of their hikes in the NT they came across a temple with a notice posted on the gate requesting interested parties to apply to live and restore the temple. Ron who was fluent in Cantonese contacted the number and discovered a Chinese expat living in the UK who came back to assist in trying to get someone to live in the temple. There were ancestral bones in large earthenware jars stored for the return of loved ones to pay tribute each year so there weren’t too many takers to live nearby. Anyhow, Ron and Veronica expressed an interest and to this man’s surprise took on the job. 

The temple had been deserted for years and there was an enormous amount of work to be done to make it habitable. Over the years they did quite a lot of cleaning up but it was in no way a place where you or I would want to call home. They expanded their independent living by keeping goats, chicken and anything that would produce something useful for their consumption. When we visited we were in awe of their Spartan lifestyle but they seem to enjoy being away from the madding crowds of HK. 

What was most fascinating being their stories of intruders interested in their livestock. In particular, the appearance of some very large pythons who would regularly devour the odd chicken or on one occasion a goat! Literally opened up its throat and swallowed a goat. According to Veronica she caught the snake in the process of devouring the goat and retrieved the goat before it managed to get the horns past the point of no return. Not sure what the reptile thought of that but she assured us that the python was not aggressive but they always knew when a python had paid a visit as the hens went very quiet presumably mourning the loss of a friend or relative. Once discovered hiding in the chicken shed Ron and Veronica and their helper would bag the snake and record the markings under its chin and return it to the surrounding bush. We imagined that they gave names to the pythons all beginning with the letter “P" and accepted that the word got around among Peter, Penelope and Philippa that they could always rely on a good meal at the temple. 

2.  From Ian Wilson, retired professor of the Chinese University of Hong Kong

I read the message by David Johns on the nunnery and Ron and Veronica. We were friends almost from when we arrived at CUHK in 1990. We left in the Summer of 2002 when Ron was in the last stages of his cancer. I was one of the volunteers clearing the grounds and making the roof almost leak tight (Veronica never unpacked her boxes). Ron was an expert in the local Gods and the history of the local villages, looked after the bone shed and restored the waterways round the nunnery. We spent many a happy evening sitting in a pool he made by damming the stream sipping beer or on their balcony with wonderful views of the villages below, Tolo Harbour, the border hills, and Egret Island. We were there when the annual ant flight took place and I asked why he had not closed the windows, he told me that was because they were coming out from the inside. As a retired policeman he could not kill the protected pythons that fed on his stock, he took them away as far as he could and released them. We always thought there were python signposts guiding them back. Ron was also a keen gardener and was very proud of his lovely flowering ginger plants, bougainvillea, roses, etc.

It is great that he is remembered, a wonderful man.

 

3.  From the South China Morning Post

https://www.scmp.com/article/319779/keepers-temple-flame

Very interesting article from 2000.

 

4.  From the Royal Asiatic Society of Hong Kong

 

Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong 2018. Recent Activities Visit to the Wan Jing Jai Temple (蘊貞齋) & Garden of Veronica Clibborn-Dyer Written by Helen Tinsley

On this cool and cloudy Saturday, Hong Kong’s urban areas, including nearby Fanling MTR station, were full of hustle and bustle in preparation for the coming New Year Festival holiday period leading up to the Chinese New Year of the Dog. However, about 30 RAS members and guests chose to take this special chance to accept Veronica Clibborn-Dyer’s generous invitation and visit her beautiful temple based home and extensive gardens. These are situated in a quiet and peaceful New Territories setting, overlooking Starling Inlet (沙頭角海) and the start of the Wilson Trail, in the north east corner of Hong Kong not far from the border with mainland PRC. For most of us this was a first visit.

Veronica Clibborn-Dyer

After some interesting car and taxi rides followed by a short walk along a path to reach our secluded destination, Veronica welcomed us warmly, with steaming mulled wine and open wood fire braziers in the courtyard. She then introduced us to the temple buildings (Kwun Yam (觀音) and Shing Wong (城隍) their gods and altars, and surrounding terraced gardens --with their history, along with the fascinating story of how she and husband, former policeman Ron, came to live there after 1996, initially with a menagerie of animals and birds. For years in the past the place had been used as a refuge- with very basic facilities- for retired amahs, once their working lives were over. Some of the Chinese character signage reflects this role. Wan Jing Jai ( 蘊貞齋 ) here ‘Wan’ means to gather/store/collect/accumulate/save/amass, ‘Jing’ means chastity, and ‘Jai’ means temple/ hall/ vegetarianism/ Buddhism. So putting them together, it literally means Gathered Chastity Temple.

After Ron passed away a few years ago, Veronica chose to stay on as custodian and continues to enhance this beautiful setting with help from her local gardener—truly a place of wonderful peace and tranquility. With some vivid story-telling and videos Veronica guided us around the buildings, before we enjoyed an informal but magnificent and delicious buffet curry lunch, catered by Shaffi’s of Yuen Long.

5.  Postscript

Ron Clibborn-Dyer retired as a senior superintendent of police and passed away in 2009. 

And my link to all this? The Clibborn-Dyer’s donated a lovely Noritake tea set to the Chinese University Women’s Organization’s annual auction, and I bought it. When I retired from Hong Kong, the tea set first traveled to Sri Lanka and then to my son’s home in the USA.

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[1] Gweilo - Cantonese term for westerners

Six years in the Heart of Dixie Part II

In 1989, while finishing graduate studies at the University of Texas at Austin, I accepted a teaching job in Alabama, where license plates proudly proclaim it’s the “Heart of Dixie”. Dixie is the nickname for the eleven Southern states that formed the Confederate States of America, which fought and lost the Civil War with the Northern Union states. These Southern states have a terrible legacy in terms of slavery, the KKK, and the murderous treatment of black people. These areas are also notoriously backward in terms of literacy, standard of education, and healthcare. 

Not all my friends in Austin were pleased with my move to Alabama. One, a liberal woman from New York, said that she would “not stop to change a flat tire in Alabama”. I was aware of the legacy of the deep South, but most universities are open minded communities, and English departments oases of liberalism, so I didn’t anticipate much prejudice. The job market was tight, and, as a foreigner, I felt fortunate to find a job.

The University of South Alabama in Mobile is a comprehensive university, with medical and engineering faculties, in addition to arts, sciences, business, education, computer science, nursing and social sciences. In 1989, the enrollment was about 12,000 students.

The English Department was, in every sense, traditional, dominated by White males and gracious Southern ladies, all of them White except for one Black female professor. James Dorrill, the chairperson, was a Jesuit priest and a Harvard man. To their credit, they hired me - the first from Asia (and the face, skin color, and accent not matching the name) - to teach English to Americans.

Mobile, Alabama

The city of Mobile was the epitome of a conservative, Southern city. During the Civil War, it was one of the last Confederate cities to surrender to the Union Army. Mobile port, used to ship cotton from large, slave-holding plantations during antebellum (pre- Civil War) times, became a leading dockyard during the two World Wars, two hundred ships having been built during World War II. When I arrived, the port had seen better times, although cruise ships would occasionally dock, and timber and coal had replaced “king cotton” as the main export.

Vestiges of Mobile’s halcyon days remained in the downtown area, dominated by the Greco-Roman style Catholic cathedral.  Gracious Southern homes, with their open verandas, large casement windows with wooden slats, tall Grecian pillars, and the weathered brick walls gave the area a 19^th century appearance. Streets lined with old oak trees that met in the middle enhanced this ambience. Some houses, in the Queen Anne style, had elaborately decorated exteriors. The gardens were full of flowering shrubs, shaded by magnolia, weeping willow, and ancient oak trees hung with moss. What these homes evoked was a leisurely lifestyle – iced tea, mint juleps - and old money. Uniformly, all these houses were occupied by whites.

Not far off, but in a world apart, lived the poorest Blacks. Their wooden houses - mainly of the one-room shotgun style - were near collapse due to neglect, and I wondered how people managed to live there. A scattering of discarded furniture, rusty appliances like refrigerators, and even vehicles raised on cinder blocks, filled the weedy yards. People sat on their porches, staring at the road, or hung around aimlessly, apparently with nothing much to do. A supermarket or even a 711 was nowhere in sight.

Two roads lead away from the downtown area, westward. One was Old Shell Road, where the houses and vegetation resembled the downtown area. Spring Hill College, an old liberal arts university, was on this road. It even owned an 18-hole golf course. The newer parts of Mobile were along Airport Boulevard, which ran parallel to Old Shell Road and was the main thoroughfare. Here, Mobile resembled a typical American mid-sized city, with a few department stores and numerous strip malls, McDonalds, Burger Kings, and other fast food outlets. Typically, affluent subdivisions, housing spacious, stately homes, were set far back from the road. The less affluent houses - flat, single storied, ranch homes - lined the roads. Apartment complexes catering to tenants of various income levels were scattered throughout the city. The most prominent tree was pine, not of the coniferous Christmas-tree variety, but unattractive, with thin, long needles. These pines grew along the roads and alongside the houses. Fallen pine needles and cones smothered the grass.

Mobile’s population was about 200,000. Religion triumphed over everything: more than 200 churches, mainly Baptist, served the community. Catholic churches were also numerous. Typical of conservative societies, rich people and businesses paid low taxes, and the result was the erosion of funding for public education and health services. For lack of permanent classrooms, some classes met in converted mobile homes. This problem was often discussed on TV and in the newspaper, but no solution was in sight.

Air pollution was high. A number of paper factories operated nearby, and when the wind blew towards Mobile, a foul odor of sulphur dioxide enveloped the city. I would get up some mornings to this odor and a thin sheen of polluted mist, which might last till midday.

Teaching

I taught writing, what Americans termed rhetoric and composition, both at the freshman (first year) and senior (fourth year) levels. In addition to Americans, the freshmen classes had international students coming from a range of countries in South and Central America, Asia, and Europe, the latter mainly from former Soviet republics. As a result, in terms of accents, varieties of English spoken, and cultural features, my classes resembled a mini-United Nations. I found this delightful. In a class of 25, I could have students speaking 15 different languages.

At the more advanced class, the students came mainly from engineering and computer science. Many students were older adults, either returning to university after taking years off for full-time work, or starting university after raising a family. I had interesting conversations with some of them – about their jobs, their struggles to meet tuition payments, growing up in the South, pros and cons of American cars - and gleaned much about American life. One topic never touched upon was race relations.

My classes were taught in a computer lab, for which I had raised funds. For some students, this was their first use of a computer. Teaching composition is my forte, and I received positive evaluations from most of my students. American students could be blunt and confrontational at times, but, despite my “foreignness”, I never heard a racial slur in or out of class, or read a racist comment in the anonymous end-of-term evaluations that students provided.

Among my colleagues in the English Department, my favorite was Patricia Stephens, not the typical Southern belle by a long shot. Pat, who taught American literature, had a smoker’s rough voice, and a no-nonsense, direct manner. She had attended college in Memphis when Elvis Presley was performing at the clubs there. I introduced Pat to V.S. Naipaul, and she told me his travelogue “A turn in the South” was the best book about the South that she had read. Later, we team taught a graduate course titled “Rushdie and Naipaul”.

 

My wife and I also had a close friendship with Prof. Dorrill (we called him Father Dorrill), the Chair of the English department. Once in a while, we invited him home for a Sri Lankan meal, which he enjoyed. We kept in touch over the years, and, in 2016, I returned to Mobile to see him when Father became feeble after his health deteriorated.

 Race relations

Since arriving in the United States in 1984 for graduate studies, I had lived in Washington DC, Philadelphia (for one semester) and Austin, Texas. In Washington DC and Austin, I had met Black students and professionals, studying or working confidently alongside Whites and apparently being treated equally. In Philadelphia, where the University of Pennsylvania was in the downtown area, I often saw down and out Blacks, some homeless and others perhaps addicted to alcohol or drugs. Raggedly dressed, trundling a shopping cart that held all their belongings, they would sometimes wander around campus, and even walk disruptively into lecture halls. In Alabama, a state where Blacks people had been persecuted since the days of slavery, and where Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s struggle for civil rights that had been met with violence, I did not expect to observe smooth relations between the Blacks and Whites.

So, I was surprised to observe the two main races getting along without any visible friction. Black professionals appeared to be respected - we had Black professors and even my doctor was one – and a few could be seen managing department stores and other businesses. But, on Sunday mornings, when everyone attended church, the racial division became clear. Most Blacks  people attended their churches, while the whites went to theirs. Although a few Black folks attended church alongside the whites, I could not imagine a white person in a Black church.

From my readings and observations, I gradually began to realize how matters stood. As long as the Blacks knew their place, and stayed there, the society could be harmonious and functional. When these invisible boundaries were crossed, trouble could erupt.

In this milieu, how could my family define ourselves? We were clearly not white, and had no Black roots either. The term Asian was for Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, and Koreans. My wife Fawzia had a Muslim name, but hardly anyone realized that. Americans are notoriously ignorant of world geography. When asked, I told them that Sri Lanka was the little island below India. But, how many of them could even point to India on a world map?

Fawzia worked for a while as a librarian at Spring Hill College. Not once did Fawzia or I face any type of racial discrimination in Mobile. But, when our son was attending high school there, a clash broke out between students from the two races, which turned into a minor riot. When we went to pick our son up, the area was surrounded by police cars and armed policemen.

Two incidents provide evidence of the acute racial discrimination that had existed in Mobile before my time. In 1958, Jimmy Wilson, a Black handyman, had been condemned to death for stealing $1.95 (yes, less than two dollars) from a white woman. The jury may have been influenced by the woman's testimony that Wilson had spoken to her in a disrespectful tone. (Fortunately, due to an international outcry, including a plea from the Pope, Wilson's sentence was commuted). Second, the last recorded lynching in the USA had occurred in Mobile in 1981. A young man was killed elsewhere, but brought to Mobile and hung from a tree. During my 2016 visit, I was shown the tree.

After six years in Mobile, in preparation for a move to Hong Kong, I had advertised my house and car for sale. One day, a Black family came to see the car and later came into my house to discuss the deal. After they left, my neighbor, a middle-aged White woman, rushed in, saying “I hope you are not selling the house to them”. She didn’t mind Sri Lankans, but didn’t want any Blacks in the neighborhood.

Coping with the siege on our planet

 A few weeks ago, 470 pilot whales beached themselves in Tasmania. Although this phenomenon has been observed for years, no valid explanation has been offered, but the depletion of fish stocks, noise made by ships, rise in water temperature - all caused by humans - are suspect.  

Humans have been killing whales for centuries. According to The New Yorker magazine, traditional whale hunting was for subsistence, using whale body parts for food, shelter, and amulets. But, in the sixteenth century, Basque whalers changed whale hunting into a trade with the use of harpoons. Using larger ships, they killed more than 40,000 whales near the Atlantic coast of Canada between 1530 and 1610.

By the late 18^th century, the Dutch, the Danes, the British, and the Americans had joined in. First taken for food, whales were later hunted for their oil. In the 19^th century, about 230,000 sperm whales were killed. Male sperm whales grow to 70 feet in length, and, in the 20th century, the slaughter of these magnificent mammals exceeded 700,000. The total number of whales killed from various species was nearly three million. Miraculously, they escaped extinction. 

Now, let’s turn to the humble pangolin. They are elusive creatures. When one was found in Pannala, NWP (in Sri Lanka), recently, it made the news. Pangolins are hunted for meat, for their scales (for use in traditional Chinese medicine), and for their skins. At one time, about 150,000 pangolins were killed in China each month for their meat and scales till they became nearly extinct in the mid-1990s. From 1975 to 2000, about 613,000 pangolins skins, mainly from Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand, were traded legally in the international market.

As for pangolin scales, between 1994 and 2000, about nineteen tons of scales (amounting to 47,000 pangolins) were exported from Malaysia alone. When Asian pangolin numbers declined, African pangolins became the target. Just one seizure of scales in the Cameroons weighed more than five tons. In April 2019, Singapore seized two shipments of pangolin scales, of 14.2 tons and 14-tons, both from Nigeria, from an estimated 72,000 pangolins. In fact, the scales have no medicinal value, consisting of keratin, the same substance as in hair and nails.

I have gone from whales to pangolins, but, for the sake of brevity, will not describe the devastation humans have caused to fellow creatures. Suffice to state that the UN estimates 1,000,000 species are threatened with extinction. Please see https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2019/05/nature-decline-unprecedented-report/

Turning to vegetation, the Amazon forest, the world’s largest, is losing more than 150 acres every minute, and 78 million acres every year. Fires are also burning there as I write. Brazil is also home to the world’s largest wetlands, the Pantanal, which is on fire. So far, more than 25,000 sq. km. have been destroyed. Meanwhile on the West coast of the United States, unprecedented fires have devastated more than 4 million acres of forest, which included precious Redwood trees. Closer home, in Indonesia, an estimated 2.4 million acres of rainforest is cleared and lost every year.

Watching a forest burn or another majestic tree falling before a bulldozer on TV is becoming stressful for people like me. Rage, helplessness and utter despair come in waves, enough to make one physically ill. The mantra for many years has been “Think globally, act locally”, but thinking globally has its costs.  

Jane Goodall, the well-known primatologist and anthropologist, perhaps has the answer. She said "People say think globally, act locally. Well, if you think globally, it is overwhelming and you do not have enough energy left to act locally. Just act locally and see what a difference you can make!"

 

"Kai Tak Heart Attack"

 In the mid-1990s, when I began to play casual cricket in Hong Kong, some games were at Mission Road grounds, in Kowloon. Cricket was a low priority sport, so football was also played there, and the grass was somewhat patchy. Kowloon is a crowded part of Hong Kong, and we could see mid-rise buildings and a multi-storied public school nearby.

Chinese U cricketers with supporters at Mission Road, 1996

Cricket at Mission Road was dramatic, but not due to the prowess on the field. The ground was right beneath the flight path to Kai Tak airport, only about two nautical miles away. Kai Tak was one of the busiest airports in the world, and jets landed every five minutes or so. And some of them flew over Mission Road.

A thundering noise of a low flying aircraft would signal another approaching flight, and a great shadow would glide across the field as a giant 747 flew past. The noise drowned everything, and perhaps only the batsmen, the bowler, and the wicketkeeper (not even the umpires) kept their eyes on the ball. I, for one, in the outfields, couldn’t help but gaze upward, trying to identify the airline: Cathay Pacific, United, Northwest, JAL, ANA, Korean, Malaysian, Thai, Singapore, Qantas, British Airways, Air France, KLM, Lufthansa, Air Lanka - all flew past. This process - the ear-splitting roar, the massive, gliding shadow – was repeated over and over again during a game.

 

Even more dramatically, as I watched, the aircraft would bank sharply to the right just as it passed the grounds, and disappear from sight. I read that a checkerboard painted on a hill just past the grounds was the sign for a plane to make that sharp, 47 degrees right turn, while descending from 600 to 150 feet, so that it could line-up and level off for landing at Kai Tak’s only runway. All this had to be done within a few seconds, manually, because the maneuver wasn’t possible on auto-pilot. If you turned too late, the aircraft would plough into a hill. They said the ride would “give a Valkyrie the heebie-jeebies”. No wonder pilots nicknamed the descent “Kai Tak Heart attack”!

As I began to travel in and out of Kai Tak, I learned a little secret: the most dramatic views of the landing were from the economy class, in a seat above the right wing. When I did manage to get the right seat, the experience was beyond belief.

As the aircraft descended rapidly over busy Victoria Harbor, skimming over ships and ferries, then onto the crowded Kowloon side, over a vast cemetery, almost touching high-rise rooftops, a speck of greenery here and there, the engines reviving up and reviving down, and the sound of landing gear being lowered. The runway was not yet in sight, but I knew we had just passed Mission Road grounds because the plane made the sharp right turn, and lined-up for landing through a canyon of housing blocks. I could see the residents going about their lives - cooking, sitting down for meals, watching TV - quite nonchalantly, as if unware of the gigantic flying object passing by their windows. Would the wings snag the drying laundry – T shirts, pants, underwear - from the balconies? Would the plane spotters on the flat roofs be dragged along? As the plane came to a stop, spontaneous applause might break out in the cabin. A mixture of exhilaration and relief.

Beloved Kai Tak shut down on July 6, 1998. A little bit of Hong Kong’s magic died with it. And cricket at Mission Road was never the same again.