Hong Kong's grandparents welcome handover

By Jason Szep

HONG KONG, June 26 (Reuter) - Tang Fai looks up from a stack of vegetables in the makeshift stall she has worked for over 30 years, grinning at mention of the country she fled in the 1940s.

Her smile broadens when asked about the future. She stops pruning the end of a thin stalk of "gai lan", a sinewy mustard green vegetable, and says with an air of defiance that it's about time China takes Hong Kong back.

As Hong Kong's younger generation warily enters a new era under Chinese rule from July 1, many grappling with anxieties over Beijing's human rights record, the territory's oldest residents seem to offer a far more sanguine outlook.

"The change will be good for Hong Kong. I don't think Hong Kong should be worried about the change," said 72-year-old Tang, a native of southern China, from her stall in Hong Kong's western district.

CHINESE HANDOVER SEEN AS OPPORTUNITY

Cheung Sing, a 67-year-old retired kitchen worker, sees the prospect of China's red flag rising over Hong Kong as an opportunity to regain something long lost.

"It's just like a house. You don't want to share one part of it with foreigners," he said. "Now all the rooms will belong to one family again."

Tang and Cheung share a point of view that appears widely held among their generation in Hong Kong -- that the handover offers a chance to finally embrace a nationalism that has been elusive during 156 years of British colonial rule.

Cheung came to Hong Kong from south China's Guangdong province in 1946 and worked in a tailor's shop. Later he worked for 20 years in a restaurant near the city's Central district.

He wants soon to visit his children and grandchildren who are all still in China and he hopes the end of Britain's colonial rule of Hong Kong at midnight on June 30 will make trips back to the mainland easier.

Cheung is not alone. Many of the Chinese who moved across the border to Hong Kong after Japan's surrender in World War Two viewed the territory at that time as simply an extension of the mainland. For them, the handover makes practical sense.

"Before 1949, people could move into Hong Kong from China freely. There was no sense of Hong Kong as a different place. It was just another area, another county, another part of China," said Elizabeth Sinn of the University of Hong Kong.

After China's civil war ended in 1949, with Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist government fleeing to Taiwan and the mainland falling under communist control, Hong Kong imposed border curbs drawing a psychological line between the two areas.

For Hong Kong's younger generation, that division became more and more pronounced through the years as China's communist leaders reshaped the country.

But the territory's oldest residents look back at a time when Hong Kong's identity seemed to mix with China's, where one could walk the streets of the city equipped only with the language of China's neighboring Guangdong province.

HANDOVER REVIVES MEMORIES

For that generation, a return to China's fold revives the flavor of the time when they arrived in Hong Kong.

"They didn't have to know the English language. There was great fluidity between Hong Kong and China at that time," said Sinn, a historian on Hong Kong at the university.

Corners of Hong Kong still evoke the gritty flavor of old Shanghai on the east China coast or Guangzhou -- formerly Canton -- in the south.

A walk through the western district's dense food markets, adorned with flayed meat from fresh kills, or by sidewalk restaurants in Wanchai can be a step into history.

On Cat Street, one of the city's oldest areas and just west of the Central business district, Dai Wai sells watches in a stall he has worked for over 20 years.

Dai, who says he's in his late 60s, has no fear about China resuming sovereignty from the British government. He says his chief concern about the future is ensuring he continues to receive health benefits.

"I know China, when it takes control of Hong Kong, will take care of that," he said.

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