When Sam Chan tells people his family owns Wing Fat Cafe, a cha chaan teng on Canton Road in Hong Kong’s Kowloon district, he needs to specify.
“Most of the time they ask, ‘Is it in Tsim Sha Tsui?’” he says, referring to the glitzy strip of luxury shops and high-end malls at the south end of the road. “I used to have no idea about that Canton Road. I never go there – it’s too classy. Mine is the other one.”
The “other” Canton Road is the one that leads north from Jordan Road through the lively, sometimes hardscrabble neighbourhoods of Yau Ma Tei and Mong Kok. It is separated from its glitzy namesake by a stretch of motorway-like road filled with speeding buses and taxis, so Canton Road’s shopping enthusiasts may be forgiven for not knowing about its more salt-of-the-earth portion to the north.
But they are missing out. “It’s special,” says Chan, who has helped his family run Wing Fat since he was a kid. Its tiled interiors haven’t changed at all through the years; nor have the flaky egg tarts – baked fresh every day. It is the kind of place where you can find refuge from Hong Kong’s incessant change. “Mostly it’s the same customers as always,” says Chan. “Some people were there when they were kids, then they’ve grown up and they still come.”
This whole stretch of Canton Road has the same cosy atmosphere. Across the street is a butcher who waves hello to regular customers as they pass by. Old ladies sit around market stalls, chatting with the hawkers, and a row of colourful tong lau tenement buildings overlook a cheerful bustle that extends well into the night, when crates of fruit are piled high by vendors doing business at the nearby Yau Ma Tei Wholesale Fruit Market.
To the north is a row of construction supply companies that soon give way to one of Kowloon’s busiest street markets. To the south is the jade district, where traders gather in the morning to evaluate the last imports of precious stone. If you want a slice of quintessential Hong Kong, this is it.
The lower stretch of Canton Road was laid out in 1887 and was gradually extended north as Kowloon developed. Originally named MacDonnell Road, it was rechristened in 1909, along with a number of other nearby streets, to avoid confusion with roads on Hong Kong Island that bore the same names.
Many were renamed in honour of major regional cities such as Saigon, Hankow (Hankou), Haiphong, Peking (Beijing) and Nanking (Nanjing). But as the Post reported in 1978, “no one knows for certain why these streets adopted the names of some of China’s best known cities.”
Canton Road was located just a stone’s throw from the Yau Ma Tei typhoon shelter, a jam-packed floating village filled with restaurants, brothels, houseboats, seafood hawkers and walla-walla water taxis that took passengers across the harbour. In the 1950s and ’60s, jade merchants fleeing Communist rule in China took advantage of Canton Road’s busy waterfront location to sell their goods.
Many of them started small. That was the case for Yau Suk-fun, former vice-president of the Hong Kong Jade Association, who began selling jade with her husband in 1972.
“We laid our stock on a piece of newspaper or white cloth on the street,” she told the Hong Kong Memory oral history project in 2011. “In those days, the jade business was doing well and there was a lot of turnover, so many young people joined the trade. [When we started] there were several hundred street stalls.”
It was hard to compete for space, and Yau was often arrested by hawker control officers for selling in restricted areas. Eventually, Yau was able to rent a fixed-pitch stall and later expand to running her own jade workshop in nearby Ferry Point. “We made our own jade pieces with stones, a cutting machine and a handful of workers,” she said.
In 1984, the government decided to clear jade hawkers off the street, relocating them into an empty lot underneath the Gascoigne Road flyover. A tin roof was erected two years later. The market still stands there today, drawing a mix of locals and tourists hunting for bracelets and pendants that are meant to ward off bad luck. But there are plans to demolish the flyover in the near future, which will see the market displaced yet again.
There are a lot of old buildings in Yau Ma Tei and they just buy them and knock them down. Things will be gone and it’s sad – Cafe owner Sam Chan
Further north, a huge street market thrives along a 400-metre stretch of Canton Street between Shantung Street and Mong Kok Road. It’s a place where you can find everything from obscure root vegetables to local greens to fresh calamansi and galangal. One hawker on Nelson Street boasts that he sells “so many types of shrimp”, not to mention half-a-dozen varieties of clams.
The market emerged here because a ferry pier once stood at the foot of Nelson Street, bringing a regular influx of commuters making their way between Mong Kok and Central. The pier disappeared nearly 30 years ago due to land reclamation, but the market remains as busy as ever.
But Chan sees big changes on the horizon for Canton Road, especially his stretch towards Waterloo Road. An Urban Renewal Authority project on nearby Reclamation Street may usher in a wave of property redevelopment similar to what happened when Langham Place was built in Mong Kok in the mid-2000s.
“It’s the standard commercial model that you see in Hong Kong – there are a lot of old buildings in Yau Ma Tei and they just buy them and knock them down,” he says. “Things will be gone and it’s sad.”
But there is reason for hope. Just across the street from Wing Fat, a group of artists and activists have opened community-oriented market stalls like Kai Fong Pai Dong, which has events like film screenings and non-profit flea markets. Its name can be translated roughly as “Neighbours’ Market Stall.”
“Most kaifong grew up together and know each other very well,” says Irene Hui, a member of the cooperative that runs the stall. Last year, she helped launch another market stall around the corner, Hung Kee Good, that sells second-hand goods and recycled bags made by local seamstresses.
Hui says she has gotten to know many of the families that live in the area, including many who used to live on boats in the typhoon shelter before moving inland to Canton Road when the shelter was reclaimed in the early 1990s. “They can read the weather very well,” she says.
But it’s a fight to sustain the market life as it recedes due to government policy. Although the market around Nelson Street is thriving, around Wing Fat, many stalls are disappearing as the government buys back their licences, hoping to clear the street to accommodate more traffic.
Chan does not want his piece of Canton Road to become another generic part of the city. Every so often, after the cafe closes for the evening, he clears away its gold-trimmed chairs and Formica tables and makes room for local bands like David Boring and Teenage Riot to play live music.
“I had the idea after I watched a video from Pitchfork, the music website, where they had a special concert in a laundry in America,” he says. “Me and my friends thought, ‘Wow that is cool,’ and my parents said, ‘You’re free to do it.’ So I did.”
Chan calls it a “reinterpretation of the restaurant” – a way to do something different while keeping it pretty much exactly the same. And it’s a way to express his commitment to Canton Road.
“We’ve been working here for 30 years and we have connections and a relationship with people in the street – memories and stuff,” he says. “We like the people here, so we stay.”
