How I wish I had got to know my tailor better. Now it is too late, because he has killed himself. His death warranted no more than a passing mention in some newspapers. It was a suicide, and readers here and elsewhere are, by and large, only interested in morbid details. He became another statistic in Hong Kong's growing list of suicides in these uncertain and hard economic times.
Nevertheless, I feel compelled to write about him, for the simple fact that he was an ordinary man in this community of 6.8 million. There are tens of thousands like him, ordinary working people who are not generally recognised for what they are: the backbone of Hong Kong. The story of Hong Kong is the story of their hopes and aspirations, their achievements and disappointments, and above all, their sweat and tears. Let it not be forgotten that ordinary people have contributed much to the Hong Kong of today.
My tailor was a craftsman, which was one reason I went to him for my suits. He was of the old school, taking great pride in what he could do with a creaking sewing machine, a pair of wickedly sharp scissors and a very soiled measuring tape. His surname was Tam, and I addressed him as 'Uncle Tam', in deference to the fact that he seemed old. With his death, I found out how wrong I had been. Approaching 65, he was not even old enough for a senior citizen's card. The fact that he wore a permanently woeful expression misled me. He carried too expressively his anxieties about work and family.
With a pair of glasses perched precariously on the end of his nose, he looked more like a school teacher. He had a tendency to speak just a shade above a whisper. But when conversation turned to making an honest living, he spoke in a strong baritone of the sorry pattern of life for the ordinary man in present-day Hong Kong. His litany is common among ordinary people here and gives one perspective of events that followed China's opening to the world and Hong Kong's business shift to the mainland.
Life was good for Uncle Tam when he arrived from a village across the border to become an apprentice to a master tailor shortly after the end of the second world war. He had a better life than the friends and relatives he left behind and was eventually able to save money and start a family.
The textile and garments industry used to be an economic mainstay for Hong Kong but rising property prices and spiralling wages prompted many manufacturers to look elsewhere. The mainland beckoned and there followed an exodus of capital, plant and machinery. Overnight, or so it seems in retrospect, Hong Kong lost its manufacturing sector.
