Waistline: How a Starving Rickshaw Puller Found the Triads#

I should tell you how I know any of this.

The honest answer is: I don’t. Not really. Not the way a historian knows things, with footnotes and primary sources and the comfortable fiction that documents don’t lie. I know the way a grandson knows—through stories told at kitchen tables, through silences that said more than the stories, through the particular way my father’s voice would shift when he was repeating something his father had told him, like he was handling a piece of glass that might shatter if he squeezed too hard.

Some of what follows comes from interviews I did in the 1990s, when I was old enough to ask questions and the people who remembered were still young enough to answer. Some comes from colonial records—police reports, court transcripts, immigration files—that I dug up at the Hong Kong Public Records Office, a building so aggressively air-conditioned you could store meat in the reading room. Some comes from my own family, and family stories are the least reliable source of all, because families don’t preserve truth. They preserve the version of truth that lets everyone keep eating dinner together.

I’ve tried to separate what I know from what I think I know from what I want to believe. The boundaries between those categories are less clear than I’d like.

~

Here’s what I think I know: Namchoi arrived in Hong Kong sometime in late 1940 or early 1941, on a fishing boat that smelled like death and diesel, carrying nothing but a body trained by the army and a mind trained by Ah Juan.

Here’s what I want to believe: that he stood on the dock in Aberdeen and looked up at the Peak and felt something—hope, maybe, or at least the absence of despair. That the city hit him the way it hits everyone who arrives by water: as an impossible vertical fact, a place that shouldn’t exist but does, clinging to the side of a mountain like a barnacle with ambitions.

Here’s what I actually know: he was hungry, and his first priority was food.

~

Colonial Hong Kong in 1940 was a city of layers. The British lived on the Peak, where the air was cool and the views were panoramic and Chinese people weren’t allowed to live unless they were servants. The wealthy Chinese—compradors, merchants, professionals—lived in the Mid-Levels, in houses that were almost as nice as the British ones but perched at a slightly lower altitude, which was the colonial way of expressing hierarchy through geography. Everyone else lived below—in Wan Chai, in Sham Shui Po, in Yau Ma Tei—in tenement buildings where twelve families shared a floor and the toilet was a bucket in the stairwell.

Namchoi ended up in Sham Shui Po, on the Kowloon side. He landed there because that’s where the fishing boat docked, and because he didn’t know enough about the city to go anywhere else. A man on the dock—a tout, a fixer, the kind of guy who materializes wherever desperate people show up—offered him a bed for twenty cents a night. The bed was a wooden plank in a room with sixteen planks. The room smelled like sweat and garlic and that particular fungal sweetness of clothes that never fully dry.

He took it. Twenty cents was nearly all the money he had. He needed work.

~

The waistline—let me explain the title. When my father told me about Namchoi’s early days in Hong Kong, he didn’t measure time in weeks or months. He measured it in waist sizes. “When he arrived, he was a twenty-six-inch waist,” my father said. “By the time he got the rickshaw job, twenty-four. By the time he started working for Ah Fuk, back to twenty-eight.”

My father measured the world in bodies. How much space a person took up, how much weight they carried, whether their clothes fit or hung loose. He was a tailor. That was his language.

So: twenty-six inches when Namchoi stepped off the boat. Thin, but not skeletal. The army had kept him fed enough to function, and the three-week walk had burned off whatever softness was left. He was five-four, average for a Cantonese man of his generation, with the kind of face people described afterward but never noticed at the time—regular features, dark skin from the sun, eyes that watched without seeming to watch.

Invisible. Again.

~

I found a record of him in the colonial immigration files—or rather, I found a record that might be him. A card dated February 1941, registering a “Luk Nam Choi, male, approximately 17 years of age, occupation: coolie, place of origin: Taishan, Guangdong.” The handwriting was a British clerk’s, confident and slightly contemptuous in the way colonial handwriting always was, as if the pen itself looked down on the person being registered.

The card listed his address as 47 Apliu Street, Sham Shui Po. I went to Apliu Street in 2003. Number 47 was an electronics shop selling counterfeit phone chargers. The shopkeeper didn’t know anything about the building’s history. Why would he? Hong Kong has never been sentimental about its own past—the city tears itself down and rebuilds every thirty years, treating history the way a snake treats its skin. Even the Museum of History, recently reopened with a revamped permanent exhibition, tells a version of the Hong Kong story that depends entirely on who’s doing the telling. The colonial narrative got peeled away; a new one was stitched on. The bones underneath stayed the same.

~

Work in Sham Shui Po meant pulling rickshaws, hauling loads at the docks, carrying water, cleaning fish, sweeping streets—the economy of muscle, where your body was your only capital and you spent it daily, the way you spend a currency that earns no interest. Namchoi pulled a rickshaw for a man named Cheung, who owned six rickshaws and rented them out to pullers for forty percent of the fare. The math was simple and cruel: you ran until your legs gave out, gave Cheung his cut, and whatever was left bought you rice and a place to sleep. If you got sick, you didn’t run. If you didn’t run, you didn’t eat. If you didn’t eat, you got sicker.

The economy of the body. Twenty-four-inch waist.

Namchoi pulled the rickshaw for three months. His route ran from the Star Ferry terminal to Nathan Road, about two kilometers of flat road followed by a slight incline that, after twelve hours of running, felt like crawling up Victoria Peak on your hands and knees. He ran in the rain. Ran in the heat. Ran behind trams and between cars and around the legs of British soldiers who were drunk and amused by the sight of a Chinese kid straining under the weight of their pink, sweating girlfriends.

He didn’t complain. Complaining needed an audience, and he didn’t have one.

~

But he watched. He was very good at watching.

He watched how money moved through Sham Shui Po—not the legal money, the visible money, the coins that changed hands at the market. The other money. The invisible economy running underneath the visible one like a river under a road. Protection payments from shop owners to men who stood on corners smoking and never seemed to work. Gambling debts settled in alleys after dark. Women who walked into buildings in the evening and came out in the morning with cash tucked into their waistbands.

He watched the men who collected the protection money. Most of them weren’t big. Weren’t physically intimidating. What they had was something else—a quality of presence, a way of taking up space that said: I belong here and you exist because I allow it. They wore their authority the way other men wore hats—casually, but you noticed.

These men worked for someone named Ah Fuk. Everyone in Sham Shui Po knew the name. Nobody said it loud.

~

I need to be careful here. I’m telling you a story about how a starving rickshaw puller got connected to the triad system, and the danger is it sounds like a movie—the plucky underdog discovers the criminal underworld, rises through the ranks, grabs power. That’s not what happened. What happened was slower, dirtier, and way less dramatic than any movie would allow.

What happened was this: Namchoi pulled a rickshaw past the same corner every day for three months, and the man who stood on that corner—a low-level collector named Brother Yip—noticed that the rickshaw kid never looked at him. Every other puller on Nathan Road shot Brother Yip a glance when they passed. Quick glances, nervous glances, the kind that says: I see you, please don’t hurt me. Namchoi’s eyes stayed forward. Not defiantly—no chin up, no challenge. His eyes just didn’t move. Like Brother Yip was a lamppost. Like he was part of the scenery.

Brother Yip found this interesting. In his world, everyone looked. Fear made people look. Curiosity made people look. Even bravery made people look—the brave ones stared longest, proving they weren’t scared.

Not looking was something else entirely. Not looking meant either you were dumb or you’d learned, somewhere along the way, that looking was dangerous. Brother Yip didn’t think the rickshaw kid was dumb.

One afternoon in April, Brother Yip stepped into the road and flagged down Namchoi’s rickshaw. Namchoi stopped. Brother Yip climbed in, which was odd—men like Brother Yip didn’t ride rickshaws. They had people who drove them around.

“Take me to Apliu Street,” Brother Yip said.

Namchoi took him to Apliu Street. When they got there, Brother Yip didn’t pay. Instead he said: “You don’t look at people.”

Namchoi said nothing.

“That’s good,” Brother Yip said. “Come to the tea house on Shanghai Street tomorrow morning. Ask for Ah Fuk.”

He got out and walked away. Namchoi stood there holding the handles, shoulders aching, feet bleeding inside his shoes.

Next morning, he went to the tea house on Shanghai Street.

Twenty-eight-inch waist within a month.

~

My father told me this story three times over the course of his life, and each time the details shifted. In the first version, Brother Yip was impressed by Namchoi’s silence. In the second, Brother Yip was testing him—the ride to Apliu Street was a loyalty check, to see if the rickshaw kid would demand payment. In the third version, told when my father was eighty-four and had stopped caring about consistency, he said: “Brother Yip thought your grandfather’s friend was handsome. That’s why he stopped the rickshaw.”

I asked what he meant by “your grandfather’s friend.”

My father looked at me the way old people look at younger ones who ask obvious questions. Then he said: “Eat your congee.”

Three versions. Three truths. The historian in me wants to triangulate, to find the single accurate account buried in the contradictions. But the grandson in me knows better. The truth isn’t hiding between the versions. The truth is that there were three versions—that the story was alive, and living things change shape.

This is oral history. You hold it like water. The tighter you grip, the less you keep.