Wang Tong People: Our Postman

It's a light day for Ah-Wah, the village postman. A couple weeks ago he was complaining about the phone company. They used to distribute their printed phone directories at the Rural Committee office in the next village. Everyone received a letter which entitled them to pick up a free Hong Kong & Outlying Islands White Pages and Yellow Pages in either Chinese or English (if you wanted the Kowloon and New Territories editions as well, you had to special order them). No one uses phone directories anymore, so there are no more White Pages, and the Yellow Pages is reduced to a thick wad of advertisements. It's still pretty hefty, though, and last time the phone company simply put them in the mail. The poor postman could hardly balance on his bike. As for making it up the steep hill to the houses at the top and just over the ridge, forget about it. For once he parked at the bottom and walked up.

He shouldn't complain. I assume that every year his job gets easier. No one sends personal letters anymore. Junk mail is giving way to online spam. It's mainly the old-timers who still receive printed utility and tax bills. Occasionally his basket is weighed down by a package containing someone's online shopping. He hardly ever stops at our door.

Today he had to stop. The other day he saw how well our pomelo tree was doing, and mentioned to my wife that he had planted that tree thirty years ago, as a favor to the farmers who originally lived on our lot. The tree was neglected by subsequent tenants, so for years it bore no fruit. But after careful pruning, fertilizing and tender loving care, it has been bursting with sweet, juicy fruit for months. Today she flagged down the postman and made him wait while she plucked a few to give him. Fortunately he had room in his basket. (I took the picture while he was waiting).

Tsui is his surname, but everyone knows him as Ah-Wah. He's been delivering the mail on Lantau for 31 years: 20 years in Tai O, the fishing village at the extreme other end of the island, and 11 years peddling the paths of Wang Tong and neighboring villages. Whenever I see him coming up the path, I silently wish that maybe he's carrying something for me. Instead today I watched him go, with three pomelos from a tree that's been a part of the Lantau scenery as long as he has bouncing behind him.

The Rarest Time of Year

I couldn't tell you when Autumn arrived. Traditionally summer ends on the night of the Moon Festival, the weather changing almost abruptly, as if a glassy carpet of cool air unrolls across the heavens. That prediction has come true, I think, eighteen out of the twenty-one years I've spent in this corner of the world, the weather changing noticeably within 48 hours either side of mid-autumn night.

This year the change hasn't been so abrupt. More like a car descending a mountain on a series of hairpin turns. First, a day or two before the scheduled time, there was a faint hint of coolness in the late evening, like a drop of peppermint in a hot bath, and a touch less humidity. By the night of the full moon on October 3, the nights were cool, followed by pretty hot days. Since then the temperatures have see-sawed: one evening a bit warmer than the last, the daytime a bit drier and veering toward warm instead of hot. Today, it seems, the weather gods have made up their minds at last, and we're firmly into Fall.

There are no visual clues that Autumn has arrived. No leaves change, not until much later into the winter. The only hint is a few seasonal fruit, such as the pomelos finally turning yellow.

In temperate zones of the world, Fall signals the time to start battening up the hatches and preparing to retreat indoors. Here it's the total opposite. Autumn is the only time of year when it's actually pleasant to go outside. The only time of year when it's neither too hot nor too cold and damp, and the humidity is low enough that you can turn off the air conditioners and dehumidifiers and actually leave the windows open to sleep (if you live in a quiet place like Wang Tong).

Actually, there are some who prepare for winter. Ah-Po reminded us that right after the Moon Festival is snake season. This is the time of year when snakes are the most active, hunting mice, frogs and lizards, for one last gluttonous meal before they curl up somewhere and hibernate. She's had a couple venomous ones in her garden--though not cobras like our recent visitor--and another neighbor spotted a long one, which he identified but I can't remember, heading up the hill.

The Autumn weather lasts only two weeks, three if we're really lucky. I'm gulping it in like a refreshment, bloating myself in its splendor, trying to stuff in as much of it as possible before the long artificially heated and cooled hibernation until the next Moon Festival.

Heat Wave

The Hong Kong Observatory announced yesterday that August has been very hot. Well, duh! It's the hottest August on record since 1974. If it gets any hotter, the earth's crust might melt back into magma. They didn't say the last bit, but that's how it feels.

Nobody is outside unless they have to be. Even this frog is desperately avoiding the sun in the perfect-fit shadow of a baby hibiscus.

The whole world of Wang Tong feels lethargic in the heat. Including the plants. Fruit on the trees--papayas, pomelos and sugar apples--haven't grown or shown any signs of changing color for the last couple weeks, as if the trees themselves are exhausted.

Which human ancestor, so greedy for real estate, came up with the idea of living in the unbearable temperature and humidity of the tropics? Which sadist--whose brother was probably a cement merchant--determined that all houses built on Lantau Island should be made from solid concrete, which rather than shielding occupants from the sun, soaks up its rays and redistributes the heat inside like a stone-bake pizza oven?

It's a choice now between the metallic-tasting breeze from an air conditioner, or asking that frog to move aside and share the shade.

Wang Tong Geography

Wang Tong isn't exactly in the middle of nowhere. But it isn't in the middle of somewhere either.

Imagine a right triangle. The right angle sides, on the east and south, are bounded by the Wang Tong River (actually a babbling brook) as it emerges from a razor-cut gap in the hills, cuts a straight path along the foothills, then veers sharp right just as it strikes a line of trees bordering a wetland. The river passes another hill on its way to a mangrove swamp and the sea, leaving Wang Tong behind.

The hypotenuse of the triangle is formed by Butterfly Hill on the northwest. It got its name from the reputed 200 species of butterflies that have been reported on its flanks. Butterfly Hill is densely wooded, its only structures being a few houses at its ankles and the ruins of an old watchtower on its crown. Hong Kongers being notoriously uninterested in any history longer than the 3-year profile of a stock's selling price, no one is exactly sure of the age or even the purpose of the old watchtowers which are found all around Lantau. Some say they pre-date the British, erected by local chieftains to guard against pirates. Others claim they're from the 1930s, built when Lantau was still a backwater as distant as the Moon. The rest of Butterfly Hill is an informal conservation area--one government agency says it is one, while another agency says it isn't. It's home to eagles owls, rare barking deer, the even rarer Romer's Tree Frog, and that Burmese python I mentioned yesterday. I've seen kingfishers darting in and out, presumably to build their nests, as do bulbuls and many other local resident birds.

The majority of the human part of the village is along both sides of the first section of the river, literally Wang Tong's Lower East Side. The Upper West Side, where I live, closer to Butterfly Hill, has only a few houses built before zoning put a limit on development.

Most of Wang Tong Valley is blanketed by an unbroken stretch of ginger fields mixed with tall grasses and broadleaf shrubs. It isn't the kind of ginger you can eat. But, man, its flowers! They're whiter than snow, loose waxy petals which give off a intense spicy fragrance. Twice a year when the ginger is in bloom, its perfume saturates the valley, intoxicating anyone who passes through. This is one of those times of year.

The photo above shows the ginger field in bloom directly behind my house, framed by our pomelo tree, almost ready for harvest.

The valley is also a wildlife haven. There are dozens of insect species I've never seen before in my life. Baby praying mantises often land on your shoulders and dragonflies which look they were painted with blue, red, and purple fluorescent marking pens dart in and out of open windows. Hidden in the brush are turtles, frogs, snakes and skinks, many of whom provide food for the egrets, herons, moorhens, curlews, coucals, grebes and other funny-sounding birds who visit during the day.

The area's main attractions are beyond the village in opposite directions.

If you take the footpath past Butterfly Hill, it leads you up a steep incline, through a gap and into the next valley, which contains a single farmhouse and a forest of bauhinia trees. Another five-minute walk beyond that brings you to the spectacular Silvermine Waterfall and the abandoned silver mine which gives the area its English name.

In the other direction, south of the village, I mentioned a wetland and a mangrove swamp. It's a small mangrove, too small for the government to declare a Coastal Protection Area according to their stubborn regulations, but it's stuffed full of creatures: mudskippers--fish which walk on land, covered by thick coats of slime which serve the same purpose in reverse as air tanks for human divers--fiddler crabs with enlarged right claws, fluorescent blue kingfishers, snowy egrets, Chinese herons, and a rotating population of migratory birds.

Beyond that is Silvermine Beach, a sandy beach framing Silvermine Bay, whose water is, well, if you grew up here like my kids and develop the right antibodies, potentially swimmable.

I'll bring you to some of these places in more detail later. But right now my eye is distracted away from the keyboard and toward the panorama of the ginger field in exuberant bloom outside my window.