It Takes a Village

In his new book, 'The Village at the Center of the World', celebrated Hong Kong author and cartoonist Larry Feign issues a heartfelt paean to a beloved home and a lost time

In his new book, famed Hong Kong author and cartoonist Larry Feign turns his focus from the epic stories of pirates and plunder in The Flower Boat Girl to the no less dramatic life in his small Lantau village of Wang Tong, where he lived for 32 years. In short vignettes, adapted from his blog posts, personal essays, and nearly 100 photos, The Village at the Center of the World portrays the true beauty and quirks of local life.

Your new book The Village at the Center of the World details your three decades of life in the small Lantau village of Wang Tong. My first question then is, why Wang Tong?

I was led to Wang Tong by the united forces of greedy landlords and guardian angels. It was 1991. Rents in urban Hong Kong were going up literally by the hour (not an exaggeration). Our 500 square foot flat in a characterless high-rise development was up for renewal at 120 percent of my gross salary and we couldn’t even dream of something larger to accommodate our new family with our first child. There was nothing available in the city that we could remotely afford, except cramped, filthy walk-up flats in dark, airless streets. I was so depressed that I told my wife we needed to leave Hong Kong, since we could no longer afford to live here.

The next day, an advert appeared in the newspaper for an entire house with a small garden on Lantau Island, for the same rent as we’d previously paid for our 24th floor shoebox in the city. I knew nothing about Lantau. The only way there was an interminable 70-minute boat ride. But the price was right. I rushed to the next ferry. I got lost three times trying to find the village, the house was in so-so condition, the garden was a narrow strip of weeds, but I knew within a day that I’d found the ‘Promised Land’. The rest of this story is in the book.

Fields of dreams… in sleepy Wang Tong

Did you live anywhere else before moving to Wang Tong?

I lived in a box on the 24th floor of a 20-block high-rise development, which had the word Garden in its name, despite the complete absence of living vegetation amongst the concrete. Every night our walls vibrated with the neighbour screaming and sometimes violently abusing his wife and children (despite our frequent calls to the police and social services). Rubbish from upstairs units regularly dropped past our windows. Home karaoke, the newest fad, echoed throughout the compound day and night. My wife commuted to her office standing on overpacked buses while stuck in traffic for over an hour each way. For me, working alone at home, the only place I could go for a short break was the sad little shopping centre in the middle of the development. In short, it was normal life in Hong Kong.

On Lantau, we were surrounded by flowering trees. It was a three minute walk to the beach where our infant son could play, or five minutes in the other direction to a gorgeous waterfall where we all could splash in the rock pools. We had as much privacy as we wanted, but also neighbours whose doors were always open to us (and ours open in return). Every shopkeeper knew us. At night, the only noise was the evening chorus of frogs… need I go on?

Nature finds a home in the garden

What do you think leads longterm Hong Kong expats to leave the city and seek out remote places like this to live?

I experienced three different waves of foreigners moving to Lantau. The wave I was in was largely people like me escaping city life and rents, such as teachers, musicians, and journalists, who all instantly took to the place. Then the development of Chek Lap Kok airport, the bridge, and Tung Chung in the 1990s brought in lots of overseas engineers and aviation experts for whom anywhere on Lantau was an easy commute, replaced later by pilots and other flight crew. The most recent wave, continuing now, is dominated by westerners seeking a comfortable suburban commuting lifestyle.

Living in such a rural, sleepy place, were there ever times that you missed the fast-paced busy life of downtown?

Of course. Sometimes, feeling restless in my self-imposed ‘beautiful prison’, once or twice a month I’d run into the big city for a dose of excitement and shopping (what else?). After a few hours I was always exhausted by it and dashed happily home, swearing I’d never do that again. Until two weeks later I’d feel a bit restless and…

Wang Tong welcomes (some) new arrivals

When you moved to Wang Tong, you were one of only four foreigners living in the village. Did you feel welcomed?

The fact that I could speak passable Cantonese made me stand out. Within a day, I needed something delivered and before I could give the woman my address, she said, “Everyone knows where you live.” By day two, shopkeepers offered me credit if I didn’t have the right change on me. Some people were less welcoming to westerners, but they kept it to themselves.

Did there ever come a time when you began to resent the arrival of other foreigners moving into ‘your’ village?

For the past five or six years, the new breed of foreign arrivals is less interested in the area’s natural beauty and more in living a suburban lifestyle. The local Chinese character of the region is gradually being buried. Okay, gentrification is inevitable, but cars, in a place like Lantau, are not. For my first 27 years there, hardly any motor vehicles existed there. And why should they? There’s hardly anywhere to drive to that you can’t reach faster and cheaper by public transport. Generations of children, including mine, grew up there spoiled for free space and never in fear of being hit by a 5-tonne hunk of metal. But the mentality of this new breed is the suburban “I have kids, therefore I ‘need’ a car.” Now, parked cars usurp every square millimetre of pavements and all other open space. Cars drive illegally on every formerly calm footpath. Areas where children used to roller skate and kick around footballs are now illegal parking lots, because there isn’t enough space to accommodate them.

Yes, I resent the people who have spoiled one of Lantau’s greatest benefits, that of a quiet, safe, pollution-free, pedal-powered paradise. Thank goodness Wang Tong is free of cars for now, because the footpaths are too narrow to accommodate them. But this seems about to change. It will destroy the character of the place.

A Lantau traffic jam

From the start of your blog, you set yourself the limit of only writing about the village - did you ever run out of topics?

You’d think that in a tiny village of 250 people there’d be little to write about, but in fact the opposite is true. The narrower your subject, the closer you lean in to observe. Like a fractal image, whole new worlds reveal themselves, and whole new worlds within those. A rusty mailbox, a giant snail, a notice pinned to a pole, or a buried rice bowl, conjure up countless stories of people and history, wildlife and flora, and even some unwelcome intruders.

Why did you decide that now was the time to make a book?

I was talking informally to the publisher, Graham Earnshaw, whom I’ve known for years. He read through the whole thing and said, “This is a love letter. Let’s publish it.” We both know this won’t be an international bestseller, but decided to go ahead and turn my love letter to my village into a combined labour of love.

The book is only around 60 percent from the blog posts, which was how I started writing about the village. The rest are observations and essays that I’ve written over the years, mainly for myself, and new material to kind of link everything together.

Local wedding march

In your book, you speculate that little Wang Tong might have actually once been the capital of China. Can you share more detail about how you came to this conclusion?

You can read my full explanation in the book. Let’s just say that from everything I learned about the movements of the last child Emperor of the Song Dynasty, there’s a good case to be made for Wang Tong having briefly been the imperial seat of power.

It might have been idyllic, but change comes to everywhere (especially in bureaucratic Hong Kong). How did Wang Tong change for good and bad over your three decades there?

Other than several new houses built over the course of three decades and government engineers uglifying a section of the stream, the appearance and character of Wang Tong has changed only subtly. More households are taking pride in creating attractive gardens, but also more high garden walls have been going up. At one end we now have a cheeky outdoor art gallery; at the other end, a local family is cutting down every living tree on the hillside behind their house. Call it a yin-yang balance of change.

Resident farmer Ah Po

I understand you’re working on the sequel to The Flower Boat Girl, Cheng Yat-sou – how’s that coming along?

It’s coming, slowly but steadily. Trying to write a readable story based entirely on so many dramatic and violent real events and research materials, without suffocating the reader in cannon smoke and detail, is a great challenge, and takes time to get it right. I hope to finish the first draft by the end of this year.

The Village at the Center of the World is out now.