-
Amid the frantic economic reform that swept across China, Ting Cheng was born in Zhuzhou City in Hunan Province, South China, the first kid of a typical Chinese family of the 1980s.
-
-
Months ahead of the Tiananmen crackdown, Cheng immigrated to Hong Kong with her parents, a tide of the century-end immigration wave as China just started to extend its arms to the world.
-
Cheng's family chose to settle down in Cha Kwo Ling. With the help of other Hunan immigrants, they built a house in the squatter village, where the natural, open, unrestrained space became Cheng's playground.
-
Because of government intervention, Cheng's family had to leave the crude but sweet home in Cha Kwo Ling and rehoused at a desiganated Temporary Housing Area, adjacent to the Public Housing Estates. They could not move in as Cheng and her monther were not due for permanent residence. The improvized house was shabby and poorly-equipped. Later in the year, Ting had a little brother.
-
Shortly after Hong Kong was handed over to the PRC, Cheng and her family ended the long wait for a public housing estate. The new home, a cubicle piled among thousands of other apartments, however, squeezed off the sense of community that brightened her childhood in the squatter village.
-
Cheng and her family live in the public housing estate at Tsz Wan Shan ever sine, paying a rent of more than HKD 2,000 for a 400-square foot apartment. Although sanitation and ventilation conditions improved a lot compared to the temporary housing, people here are aloof. It does not matter any more who lives next door because people in different cubicles barely talk to each other.
