by Aidyn Austin
In the winter of 1987, my then wife Sarah, our newborn baby Hannah and I fled my parents’ Kowloon Tong home, where we were unwelcome, and went to Cheung Chau, for the simple reason that it was all we could afford. Sarah was 20, I was 22, and we were broke, but we found a brand new—in fact, barely finished—flat around the corner from the Don Bosco youth camp for less than $3,000 a month. We moved in without a stick of furniture or putting up a single blind, sleeping on foam mattresses on the polished concrete floor and waking up to the sunlight that poured unforgivingly through the naked windows.
It didn’t take us long to realise that we weren’t the only castaways. Our upstairs neighbour revealed (“because you’re bound to hear it from someone else, so I may as well tell you first”) that he had been fired from a top hong for sexual impropriety, become a heroin addict, and was sent to Cheung Chau by concerned friends to dry out. Crammed into the flat opposite were a soft-spoken New Zealand couple and their myriad beautiful, blond, shoeless children—rent refugees, if ever I’ve seen any. Supposedly the grandson, or perhaps the great-grandson, or it might even have been the great-great-nephew, of a famous historical figure was holed up in the spartan quarters above them, with his ferociously intelligent lawyer girlfriend, devoting himself to the full-time study of Chinese.
The island was generally populated with a cross section of the Hong Kong demimonde: exhausted writers, gruff musicians, destitute English teachers and cigarillo-smoking conmen. Black cobras and pit vipers glissaded through the vegetation, where ripening papaya hung off the trees. It was, as you can surmise, quite wonderful.
That Cheung Chau is gone now, or at least it seemed so to me, when I made my pilgrimage two weeks ago. Today, there are cafés where tattooed baristas will serve you a passable latte. A little place on the Praya Road offers vegan food. There is such a thing as the Cheung Chau Wave Arts Festival (the South China Morning Post has even referred to the island as “Hong Kong’s mini arts hub”). A couple of the crumbling old villas on Peak Road are being remodeled and the 25-minute ferry to Central makes the island an option for neatly shirted commuters—which it really wasn’t in the old days, when rusting hulks took an hour or more to get to town, and you fought for deck space with livestock, fish tanks and foul-mouthed septuagenarians playing Chinese dominos for $20 a hand.
But what hasn’t changed is the sense of release that comes with setting foot on Cheung Chau Pier, leaving the madness of Hong Kong behind. The deputy-editor-in-chief of the Sunday Examiner, Father Josekutty Mathew, knows this well because it is his great fortune to be the island’s priest. His rooms above the local church, Our Lady of Fatima, are really all that anyone would need to be happy—for here he has his books, a bright sitting room, a simply furnished bedroom and a roomy office. All is suffused with the aroma of good coffee, the smell and sound of the seafront and the voices of children floating up from the Sacred Heart school and kindergarten next door.
“In my heart, I feel that if you need to be a parish priest, it should be in a place like this,” Father Jose says. “Kowloon and Central are all so busy and, coming from a rural background in India, I felt Hong Kong was so hectic. But coming to an island like this with the seaside, the surrounding atmosphere—I fell in love with it.”
Because he must also edit a weekly newspaper and produce daily video reflections and other online content for the Claretian order, of which he is a member, Father Jose is surely relieved that the congregation of Cheung Chau numbers no more than 200, mostly elderly worshippers. But he wouldn’t mind seeing some younger faces in the pews at Our Lady of Fatima’s two Sunday Masses.
“One thing that worries me is that there are very few children—we don’t have a strong youth group or many children in the parish and this is a concern I have had ever since I came in 2019.”
To try to rectify this, he has allowed local youths to use the school grounds. “Most of these people are non-Christians and non-Catholics, they just come in for the sake of games,” says Father Jose. “Our volunteers try and do some evangelisation and pray together at the start and end of the sessions, just to introduce them to the faith.”
Besides these activities, there is the school to supervise, morning Masses to celebrate and the occasional evening Rosary. On October 13, the anniversary of one of our Blessed Mother’s apparitions at Fatima, there was a procession on the school grounds. But mostly, the weeks pass by in an agreeable routine of Sunday Examiner work, online ministry, parish duties, prayer and exercise in the salty air.
“I get up at 4.30am and start with coffee,” says Father Jose, sitting in his front room. “Then I go for a walk or a run or a swim at the beach, or I run up to the sports ground beyond the Warwick Hotel and do a few laps. I come back and spend some time in prayer and morning Mass is at 7.20am. Mass and prayers go up until 8.00am, then I come up here and have my breakfast—homemade bread.”
At his mention of bread, I make a mental note to stop at an island bakery on the way back to town for some coconut tarts, fluffy yellow pai bau and all the traditional confections I used to love grabbing in the morning when I lived here—impecunious and struggling. In those days, Sarah and I were figuring out how to be parents and pay the bills while being little more than kids ourselves. Shunned by my family, there was nobody to give a damn about us except our exquisite ex-junkie of a neighbour.
Later, I take a walk over to the southern part of the island, where we used to live. The old apartment is unrecognisable now, completely refurbished with a fancy black gate at the top of the stairs and a beautiful garden in place of the patch of raw jungle that we were never able to do anything with. I see the corners where our daughter used to play as a baby and the concrete yard where we’d lie on cheap, folding camp beds, reading paperbacks in the freighted heat of spring.
Then I take some photos, which gives me an excuse to contact Sarah. I send her the pictures, and other messages, and a couple of memories of Cheung Chau, and they spark our first conversation in more than a decade. Only much later do I recognise this as the action of grace.
