by Aidyn Austin | @AidynAustin
Nobody calls Sham Shui Po beautiful, but it is, because the people make it so. The impertinent waitress, correcting my Cantonese as I order breakfast in a café on the Tai Po Road. The old men, yawning and shirtless in the torrid air. The druggy young couple outside the MTR exit, still talking with half-empty beers in front of them, oblivious to daybreak. Everyone is poor and desperate and struggling and beautiful. And if you climb Garden Hill early enough, and in the right sort of weather, you can look out over the rooftops as the sunbeams break through the clouds and slowly gild the entire nine square kilometres of slum, tenement by subdivided tenement.
The parish church, St. Francis of Assisi, sits in the northeast corner of the district, in a little pocket named Tong Mi after the village that once stood there, before the expanding city made its way up Boundary Street and engulfed it. You’re not going to fall in love with the cream-coloured edifice, which has all the mid-century dumpiness of a Taipei train station. But once inside the cool green lobby and up the curving staircase, it’s a different story. The cavernous interior of the church is topped with gigantic vaults and bathed in light from soaring windows coloured blue and green. The vast interior dimensions of St. Francis—quite unguessable from the street—are a genuine revelation, and the 25 of us at 7.00am Mass, scattered among the endless pews, make it seem even bigger.
The church was born in fire. After the 1953 Shek Kip Mei conflagration left 50,000 squatters homeless, the diocese decided to erect a place of worship at the scene of the heartbreak—and evidently decided to build the biggest one it could. It took its name from the church that stood in Kowloon City until 1943, when wartime Japanese occupiers demolished it to make way for an expansion of the Kai Tak airfield.
St. Francis of Assisi is famously the patron saint of animals, but he is also, of course, the patron of stowaways and merchants—quite appropriate for a parish where many people have gone to ground and live by their wits. More importantly, St. Francis’ emphasis on poverty has enormous resonance in a densely populated district with the lowest median income in Hong Kong.
“Here we have a lot of poor people, so one thing is to care for them,” says Father Paul Tam Wing-ming, who has been the parish priest for six years.
Weekday mornings are busy. There is an Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at 6.00am, followed by Mass, and rosaries and other prayers after that. On most days, Father Tam is up before dawn and won’t sit down to breakfast until well after nine o’clock.
Education for disadvantaged children is a significant part of his mission. Families in Sham Shui Po “do not have the money to employ private tutors,” says Father Tam, so the parish steps in with supplementary classes where it can. “We also have a school right next to our church and two other schools within walking distance.”
The homeless are also part of his ministry. “We go to the street sleepers on Tung Chau Street,” he says. “We give them bread and all sorts of items, like clothing. At festivals, we give them moon cakes and so on.”
‘During the pandemic, people have been very keen to continue their contributions,” says Father Tam. “They will come in and write a cheque and give it to us. We’ve had a drop in donations, but we can still, with God’s grace, continue’
Father Paul Tam
You might think, amid the deprivation and the impact of Covid-19, that the Sunday collections are modest at St. Francis—but not a bit of it. As ever, it is the poorest who are the most generous.
“During the pandemic, people have been very keen to continue their contributions,” says Father Tam. “They will come in and write a cheque and give it to us. We’ve had a drop in donations, but we can still, with God’s grace, continue. That’s a unique situation. I can see other parishes, because of the situation, going into the red—but for us, we don’t have this problem.”
There’s even a small, surprising luxury to be had. Anybody who has taken communion at St. Francis will know about its opulent, wholewheat wafers. “A parishioner does them for us,” says Father Tam.
Up until this point, he has been sitting back in a chair outside the sacristy, still attired in his vestments, and obviously fatigued from the morning’s activities. But now he is on his feet, eyes smiling above his surgical mask and leading the way to the shelf in the sacristy where communion wafers are kept.
“She grinds the flour, the wheat and then she uses the best water, Evian water,” he says, opening the box proudly. “These are homemade. Handmade. I joke that even the pope does not have this kind of service.”
But then, whenever there is poverty, whenever there is suffering, there are small treasures like this, for God is present. In the barking traders of Pei Ho Street, or in the stoic faces of the South Asian toughs, or the voices of the dog walkers nodding at and greeting each other at the top of Garden Hill—God is in them all. Even in the crummy café that I stumble into after Mass.
“Pineapple bun, with butter,” says the waitress a little sharply as she puts the pastry in front of me. “That is what you meant, right?” I nod appreciatively as I begin this breakfast of the streets. It tastes like a benediction.
