The Generation That Grew Up on the Estates

Shared corridors, metal gates, a whole floor that ate together. None of it made the history books.

After the Shek Kip Mei fire of 1953, Hong Kong began building resettlement blocks. Over the decades that followed, millions of people grew up in public housing.

That much is in the history books. But the history books record buildings, not people. No book conveys what it felt like to sleep in summer with every door on the corridor open, to know what the neighbours were cooking by the smell, to be told off by your mother in a voice the whole floor could hear.

A way of living that no longer exists

The flats were small, so life happened outside them. Children did homework in the corridor, women washed clothes at the shared tap, and every adult on the floor kept half an eye on everyone else's children.

Hong Kong does not work that way now. The door closes and that is the world. So this business of a whole floor behaving like one household did not move somewhere else. It ended.

The people who still remember it are between sixty and ninety.

"Hong Kong people have real heart."

On its own, a cliché. Said by someone who actually lived in one of those blocks, it is holding up a hundred specific incidents underneath.

Do not ask them what it was like back then

"What was it like back then" is too big. You will get "we were poor" and nothing else.

Specific questions produce actual material. How many families on your floor? Was the toilet shared? How did you bathe? What was the surname of the family next door? What was the first thing you did when you got home from school?

These are answerable, and answering them drags out names, smells, sounds, and a whole vanished set of daily habits.

Who is recording this?

A museum can collect a stool, a lunch tin, an old photograph. It cannot collect the sound of your father describing how he used to run up and down that corridor.

Hong Kong's oral history projects are few and could never cover millions of families anyway. In practice, your family's portion of it is your family's job.

It does not have to be grand. A recording of your mother describing the floor she grew up on is already a record this city has nowhere else.