Days, even weeks may pass without my venturing to Hong Kong Island or Kowloon, but occasionally, even a taciturn artist needs more stimulation than staring out a window at egrets poking around a field of snow-white ginger lilies.

Urban Hong Kong, for me, was always stimulating without being invigorating, and after a few hours I’d hurry back, exhausted and irritated. Inspiration was always going to be in closer proximity, so I set myself the task of exploring my village, and only my village, as a weekly writing challenge. Anything beyond the village boundary was off-limits.

You’d think that living among 250 vehicle-free people there’d be little to write about, but the opposite is true. The narrower your subject, the closer you lean in to observe. Like a fractal image, whole worlds reveal themselves, and sometimes, whole worlds within those.

Book extract: new thinking about Marco Polo’s China travels, often doubted

A rusty mailbox, a giant snail, a notice pinned to a pole, a buried rice bowl, conjure up countless stories of people and history, wildlife and flora, and even some unwelcome intruders.

Where in the world?

No signs point to Wang Tong. You can’t drive here or take a bus. The paths are wide enough only for pedestrians and bicycles. And those paths have no names or markers. Even the local police don’t know where we are.

Their station is less than 2km (1.2 miles) away, but try calling them to report a missing bicycle or a downed tree blocking a path, and you will hear a vacant pause. So you tell them: “The village beyond the beach hotel – no, not along the beach, behind it – follow the stream, then around the bend after the green signboard …”

Fifteen minutes later they will call again, hopelessly lost, asking again which village you’re talking about. You tell them to start all over. Hotel. Bend in the stream.

“Then you walk past the Toilet Bar …”

The Toilet Bar

Yes, there really is a Toilet Bar. It’s located at the bend in the Wang Tong Stream where it empties into the bay. It’s our local, sort of, well, pub.

This establishment has no formal name, it’s simply Granny Mak’s little shop. In fact, it’s her home. Poh-Poh (Granny) strung a canopy out front, brought in a freezer chest and refrigerator, and for years has sold cold drinks and popsicles to passers-by.

People started hanging out there. It’s a mixed crowd: English, Indian, Chinese, Eurasian, and even once in a while a woman. There were a couple of fold-out tables and stools, and the rock-bottom cheapest beer on the planet. It was open air, everyone knew each other.

A modest place to hang out for a chat and a pint – well, a can. Except for one thing.

It was directly across the footpath from the public toilet, which you could smell from a quarter of a mile away. I held my breath every time I cycled past. What kind of powerful camaraderie there must have been that inspired people to socialise next to a cesspit!

Then the government replaced the old toilet with a new, modern hygienic one. No more stench. A few of the regulars tried out a new, classier name – but “Café Latrine” never caught on.

Wang Tong is for dreamers

In my heart, October is the best time of year for dreamers. Some might say spring is the best time, it being associated with fertility, perfume and lust. But they will change their mind if they visit Wang Tong on an October evening before sunset.

The ginger lilies blanketing the valley have been in bloom continuously for weeks, but as the weather has cooled, they have turned their blossoming up several notches, as if squeezing out one last push before gently retiring for the winter. The flowers are so white and fine that no details show up in photographs.

That’s why I urge you to come here now, before the sun goes down, so you can see them before the real treat begins.

About an hour after sunset, you’ll not only smell it, but feel it. For reasons I’ve never learned, the ginger flowers turn up the fragrance after dark.

That isn’t to say there’s no aroma while the sun is up. All day long I hear passers-by remarking about the wonderful spicy-sweet smell, to which I suppose I’ve become acclimatised.

But in the evening, a sudden crescendo of perfume pours through the open windows like a liquid wave of sweet, spicy, aphrodisiac, so thick you can almost scoop it with a spoon.

Though the flowers are white, at night you’d think they were a lusty flaming red, sweating with passion and musk. It’s an aroma both languid and erotic. It lures your attention away from everything else – dinner on the table, the evening news – and makes you think of tigers and gigantic luminescent butterflies, caressing bodies and melting candle wax.

Twenty or 30 minutes later it’s gone, and all of a sudden you notice the news is over and your food has gone cold.

You’ve got mail … if you’re lucky

This is how Wang Tong people collect their mail. You can buy your own mailbox – cheap! – at the local hardware shop. One size fits all.

If you live near a main footpath you’ll hang it by your front entrance. But people who live uphill along narrow, winding lanes, where the postman won’t venture, either hammer their mailbox to a tree near the foot of the path or, in this case of neighbourhood solidarity, find a plank of discarded plywood large enough to accommodate the entire block. Some people paint theirs, but why bother?

On a rainy day your letters are going to more resemble wood pulp than the bank statement or magazine they started out as. I myself have my mail addressed to a post-office box, the waterproof kind, inside the post office.

Teddy bears vs the birds

Magpies are considered good luck in Chinese tradition, harbingers of positive changes, but I doubt it was a Chinese farmer who came up with that superstition.

At first, we thought the holes in our cabbages were caused by snails, until one morning my wife pulled back the curtain and saw a black blanket of birds covering our vegetable patch. She opened the window and clapped her hands. A hundred magpies lifted off in a chattering boil and settled in surrounding trees, ready for another attack.

These black and white birds may be pests, but they’re also kind of cute. Maybe that’s why our next-door neighbour Ah-Po is fighting cute with cute.

Forget scarecrows. Her farm looks like an execution ground for plush toys: pandas, Hello Kitties, C-3PO, Disney characters and countless species of teddy bear, all gruesomely impaled on bamboo pikes or twisting in the breeze on wire nooses, as if to warn avian intruders: “See this Angry Birds toy with a spike through its bum? This could be you!”

Where does she get all those toys? Does she snatch them out of the arms of her grandchildren? Ah-Po won’t say. She claims they just kind of “show up”. Maybe she’s breeding them.

I mean, plush toys are obviously capable of pro­creating. The 5,000 stuffed animals in my daughter’s room came from somewhere, and I sure didn’t buy even a fraction of them.

Enemies

When a motley crew of village residents protested publicly against a concrete channel, both for being environmentally destructive and the wrong engineering solution, Mr Lam focused his ire not on the issues but on the “pro-flooding” foreign elements. (He meant me and Jenny, who lived up the hill, both of us non-Chinese.)

Lam won. He got his concrete channel. He could have gloated for a while and let the matter recede into history. But not Mr Lam.

Even though this upstart gweilo had lost the battle, I had committed a more far-reaching crime: I’d challenged his standing as a respected elder in the community. In other words, I’d made him lose face.

Now, whenever we happened to pass each other on the footpath, his head turned aside, leaving a ghostly chill in his wake.

One day I spotted him at a community gathering, one of the charity fundraisers where you listen to blathering speeches over chicken wings and beer.

It was time to make amends. I walked straight to the VIP table where I held out my hand and greeted Mr Lam in Cantonese. He looked a bit surprised, but took my hand and offered a firm shake. We made eye contact for once.

Seeing me plate-less, he insisted that I partake of the food. I thanked him, exchanged nods, and made a show of heading to the chicken-wing table. Mission accomplished.

The next time we crossed paths, I offered him the typical Cantonese greeting:

“Lei sik faan mei a?” Have you eaten yet?

He paused, sizing me up.

“Mei,” he replied. Not yet.

I grabbed my chance to break the ice further, and asked in Cantonese how long he’d lived in Wang Tong.

“I was born here,” he responded in impeccably enunciated English, a bit rusty from neglect, but clearly that of an educated gentleman. I remarked that I was interested in the history of the village.

I wasn’t sure whether he hesitated because he doubted my sincerity, or because he recognised my sincerity and was figuring out whether to waste time on me.

“You know the killing on the beach?”

No, I didn’t.

We walked together under the midday sun while he told me a story that completely upended my view of this placid little backwater and the man beside me.

The horrors they bore: Allied civilians at large in wartime Hong Kong

The Japanese finally wised up and sent soldiers around the island to root out the rebels.

Eighteen-year-old pig farmer Mr Lam wasn’t one of them, but that didn’t matter. In August 1945, just before war’s end, a group of resistance fighters swooped down from the hills and attacked a Japanese squadron in Mui Wo.

Revenge was swift and brutal. Imperial soldiers swarmed into Wang Tong and two nearby villages and rounded up all the men. One of them was teenaged Mr Lam.

They were marched to the beach. Village chiefs were beheaded. Twenty stakes were driven into the sand, and 20 men tied up to be tortured into confessing where the rebels were hiding. Young, tough-looking Mr Lam was shoved forward to be number 21.

He waited his turn while men he’d grown up with were beaten and slashed. The soldiers were occupied with the gruesome task as well as keeping hostile villagers at bay. For a split second, all Japanese eyes were turned away from him, and with two leaps, he dove into the swamp behind the beach, crawled through the mud, where itchy broadleaf plants gave him cover, and escaped into the nearby hills.

This all took place where the Silvermine Beach Resort is today, just outside Wang Tong. Thanks to a split-second decision, Lam was alive to tell his story.

When I heard that he passed away a few years later, I mourned the loss, not so much of a friend because we never became that close. But he was a link to the past. He’d faced opponents far, far greater than me.

Excerpted from The Village At The Centre Of The World, Earnshaw Books, 2023