The singsong girls, formerly held in great esteem as entertainers and prostitutes, have almost disappeared from the colony. Many of them were Mui Tsai who had been trained to sing seemingly interminable Cantonese songs in a falsetto voice for their tea-shop patrons, accompanying themselves on a kind of horizontal stringed instrument which they tapped with padded hammers. In the later evening, they moved about from one businessmen’s club to another in the West Point section of the island. Not all were prostitutes, and there is still at least one tea shop along Queen’s Road Central where entertainment is confined to music. Westerners who hear their music often find themselves thinking of older days.
Considering the fact that Hong Kong is a world seaport, the rate of venereal infection is surprisingly low. To a greater extent than in most Western cities, poverty is a basic cause of prostitution, but here too sheer laziness, greed and stupidity play their part in the provision of recruits. As usual, the greatest profits from the trade go to its protectors—Triad gangsters and corrupt policemen.
The entire subject of the status and treatment of women has provided a continual source of animosity and disagreement throughout the colony’s history. The rich Chinese Taipans, with their numerous wives and mistresses lodged in separate establishments, have remained the envy of many a Western man who could not emulate them without violating the laws of the colony and placing himself beyond the pale of polite Western society.
Since the founding of the Chinese Republic in 1911, well-educated Chinese women have not looked happily on polygamy. Their convictions were solidified and shared by millions of other Chinese wives when Red China tightened the marriage laws, making monogamy not only legal but practically mandatory. These improvements in the status of Chinese women have not gone unnoticed in Hong Kong, where a British, Christian, monogamous community finds itself in the embarrassing position of tolerating plural marriage among its Chinese subjects long after the institution has been outlawed in China.
There is nothing in this thorny problem which lends itself to edicts and sweeping judgments. It is charged with the most delicate emotional considerations, involving not only the legality of existing marriages, the legitimacy of offspring and the fundamental rights of women, but also the division of property and the inheritance of estates. Colony officials are aware that the work of solving it must be approached with the greatest subtlety.