杜葉錫恩五六十年代的所見

英籍教育家、社會運動家兼前立法局議員杜葉錫恩 (原名葉鍚恩) 在 1951 年來港，當時是傳教士的她與木屋區居民住在一起，她難忘這些難民家庭為了生計胼手胝足的苦況。杜葉鍚恩憶述，許多這些家庭中的婦女是繡花工，即使她們從早到晚工作，掙的錢也不夠養活一個人。男人還得到別處找活幹。要想全家有口飯吃，孩子也得去掙錢。他們的小屋裡只能點盞小油燈，天黑以後根本幹不了活。所以他們只好坐在門口，眼睛湊近細細的絲線，竭力捕捉最後的亮光。有些女人四十歲就幾近失明。即使年幼兒童也得久久地坐在那裡，努力掙口飯吃。……由於營養不良加之居住環境濕熱難耐，大多數孩子，包括最小的娃娃在內，都患有大塊的疥瘡和皮膚感染。

Elsie Tu (formerly Elsie Elliot), a British educator, social activist, and former member of the Legislative Council who arrived in Hong Kong in 1951 as a missionary and lived among the squatters, recalls how hard life could be for these refugee families, in which many of the women were embroiders. Even though they worked "from dawn to dusk," these women "could not earn enough to feed one person. Father had to work another job, and the children had to earn their coppers if the family was to eat at all. They used only small oil lamps in those huts and could scarcely work after dark, so they would sit at their doorways to catch the last ray of light, straining their eyes over the fine silk strands." Some of the women "were near blind at forty years of age." Even young children "sat for all those hours trying to earn their rice....Most of the children, even the tiniest babies, suffered from enormous boils and skin infections, due to malnutrition and hot, sticky living conditions."

Carroll, J.M. (2007). A Concise History of Hong Kong. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.

譯者︰林立偉

The tiny, overcrowded apartments in the new public housing units were often little better than the squatter huts they were designed to replace. Elsie Tu recalls how the rooms in these "rabbit warrens" (野兔洞) averaged only 120 square feet for a family of five and 86 square feet for smaller families. Small children "were counted as half person" and were allocated only 12 square feet each." A flat consisted of a square or oblong (長方形的) room, with concrete walls, without decoration, and with neither kitchen nor bathroom. Cooking was usually done on the narrow verandahs (走廊) that surrounded each block, though that was supposed to be illegal. Communal (公用的) toilets and bathrooms were situated in the center of each block of flats, along with a washroom for laundering. With no full-size doors, it became a nightmare for women to use the bathrooms, and they usually had to be accompanied by another person, because of the prevalence of 'peeing toms.' (有窺淫癖者) The toilets themselves consisted only a narrow channel that run through the whole row of toilets. At regular intervals water flowed through the channel to flush it."