Han Suyin's borrowed time, borrowed place

 

Life, International edition, vol. 27, no. 12, December 7, 1959.

Han Suyin, "Hong Kong: Ten-Year Miracle"

The city that was doomed is today more alive and prosperous than ever

Always go to Hong Kong for the Chinese New Year, which may happen any time from mid-January to the end of February. 

...

No cooking can be done during the first three or five days of the New Year; no fires are lit and the servants have all gone. So each housewife stocks up beforehand - with New Year cakes made of sticky rice, barley, sago, with meat or fruit stuffling, meat dumplings which require only boiling water to cook, and mounds of crystallized fruit, dates, kumquats, lotus seeds and watermelon seeds, not counting the dehydrated lacquered ducks and sausages which are sent or received as presents, as well as pomelos, oranges and other round fruit, the signs and symbols of fullness and content. New Year puddings are boiled and put away. As evening approaches, work becomes more frantic: the laundries and the drycleaning shops stay open till 3 in the morning, and so do many shops, discharing their accounts, and cleaning their floors, and their walls, taking the furniture out and sousing it in water. And then everybody must have a bath; all the girls and women have had fresh permanents, and their hair washed and dressed; all nails are trimmed, for no knife or scissor may be used on the first day of the New Year for fear of bad luck. When the houses are clean, then they are decorated in and out. No household, not even the most tumbleddown refugee shack, omits two things; above the lintel of the front door and on both side red paper scrolls with painted characters wishing happiness and luck to all; and inside, flowers bought at the flower fair.

...

[to be continued]

[P.S. cover: Blackie Kronfeld of Pan-American Airways. Chester 'Blackie' Kronfeld, a Pan Am photographer, Norman Rockwell, a painter, and Bill House, an art director of an advertising agency, travelled around the world under the commission of Pan Am in September-November 1955. They stayed in Hong Kong for three days residing at Peninsula Hotel in mid October. Kronfeld died in an American Airlines plane crash after taking off in New York killing 95 people on March 1, 1962]