For the best "dim sum" around, Li Sing-kee has to walk from Hong Kong to China. Fortunately, it's just across the road.
Three generations of Li's family live in Sha Tau Kok, where the Hong Kong-China border runs right down the middle of the main street. When British soldiers tried to push the villagers across the somewhat randomly laid borderline in 1899 after winning Hong Kong from China, one history has it that the people "resisted vigorously" with shovels and hoes.Today, the town has become an island between two countries. But the 11,000 people who live there are separated only by eight stone boundary markers.
"We feel like we're more a part of Hong Kong than China, but we live like it's one big village," said Li, who lives above his clothing shop. Chinese soldiers are posted on one side; Hong Kong police stroll the line of gold shops on the other. "But people are always to-ing and fro-ing across the borderline to this restaurant or that gold shop," Li said. "We just treat each other as neighbors."
While the integrated town could have been a model for Hong Kong and China's impending merger, the two territories are expected to remain as distant as ever. On July 1, when Hong Kong becomes part of China, the barbed-wire double fence marking much of the boundary won't be dismantled as the Berlin Wall was; rather, the border authorities on both sides quietly have been strengthening it.
And in doing so, they emphasize the central irony of the much-celebrated "glorious reunification": that after July 1, Hong Kong still will not be China. The gash of razor fence along the area's rolling hills distinctly underlines the separation.
The decision to keep Hong Kong walled off from China is partly political: Beijing leaders want to keep Hong Kong's freewheeling ways and ideas from seeping into the mainland and undermining the government's carefully crafted control. Many Hong Kong magazines and newspapers - to say nothing of political activists - are banned in China.
But bolstering the border is mostly practical. "The Chinese authorities are well aware that if you made it any easier to get into Hong Kong, Hong Kong would quickly sink under the weight of the people," said John Ashton, the leader of the British team that negotiated the boundary.
To walk the border is to see the result of a mapmaker's random hand. When the lines first were drawn in 1898, a handful of people ended up on the other side of the border from their traditional family farm plots or ancestral graves. And so every day, a few of these "tolerated border crossers" can be seen, barefoot and straw-hatted, cultivating the no man's land between Hong Kong and China, cursing the illegal immigrants who trample their tender shoots and steal their vegetables as they search for a way to get through the border fence.
Along the double fence is evidence of creativity and desperation in the attempts of "non-tolerated" crossers to reach Hong Kong. Homemade ladders of bamboo or branches lashed together with vines lean against the fence poles. Behind ragged holes cut in the wire are nests of trampled bamboo, carefully folded newspapers, Styrofoam bowls of instant noodles and many cigarette stubs.
"We watch them sitting and waiting for hours for their chance to cross," said Chief Inspector John Holmes, who has been supervising border patrol for three years. The Royal Hong Kong Police share patrol duties with the army, and they are equipped to detect an invasion. The fences are lined with motion-triggered sensors.
In a control room, officers can see the huddled bodies of waiting crossers on a heat-detecting infrared scope.
The Hong Kong police repatriate about 80 illegal immigrants a day. Many more make it across, although a few don't make it that far. At the Man Kam To vehicle crossing, while guards peer in ground-level mirrors to see underneath delivery trucks, officers nearby give chase to a one-legged man hobbling through a banana plantation. He had stowed away with his crutch in a truck's undercarriage and clambered out just 400 yards beyond the border.