Colorful Vendors of Hong Kong by Bill Yim

Hong Kong is probably the only place in the world where you can find vendors who play music in the street and send olives flying "like an aeroplane" to their customers standing on the balconies of the old colonial buildings.

They are affectionately known "Fei Gei Larm vendors" or "Aeroplane Olives Men."

Though there are only a few of them left, these popular vendors were seen in almost every residential district in the lean days of Hong Kong in the 1950's when most of the old four-storied tenament buildings had balconies on each floor and streets were never too busy as trams and richshaws were the major means of transports.

Wearing a straw hat and carrying a tin box that was shaped like a three-foot long olive around his waist, these colourful vendors stopped in  the middle of a street playing a catchy Cantonese tune with a Chinese trumpet known as the "dee-da"  to draw attention from people in the neighbourhood.   "Me! The Aeroplane Olive Man is here!" was the message.

People, mostly house-wives, children and even their cats would excitely rush out to their balconies for the man's happy music and toss a five-cent or ten-cent (Hong Kong) coins down to the musician as a token of appreciation.

In return, the dee-da player would open the lid of his tin box, fish out several small packets of olives and, one by one, he pitched them high, sending them "flying like an aeroplane" to his customers on the second, third and fourth floor. He seldom missed a target.

I was living in one of those four-storied buildings on Johnston Road in Wanchai when I was a child. Standing on the balcony, listening to his music and watching the olive man's amazing throwing skill was the highlight of my day.

At a time when television was totally unknown to most people in Hong Kong, I, like most children, was easy to please.

Jobs were hard to find in those days. Many people, especially those who had fled to Hong Kong as refugees after the Communists' takeover of Mainland China in 1949, had to live in make-shift wooden huts on the hill-sides.

To make a living many turned themselves into street vendors or hawkers like the olive man. Carrying a bamboo pole on their shoulders with two basket loads of goods on each end, they walked the streets and lanes selling soy sauce, peanut oil, salt, sugar, pickled vegetables, rice, bananas and even  toilet papers.


There were also junk collectors buying  old newspapers, broken pots, cracked kettles, useless lamps, rusty can openers, handleless hammers or anything metal from residents at low prices. They then sold them to recycling factories for a small profit.

As none of those old buildings were equipped with elevators, almost every family had a basket with a long rope tied to the handle. To buy a bunch of bananas for instance, the house-wife would walk up to the balcony, bargain with the vendor on the street from upstairs.

On making a deal, the house-wife would place the money in the basket and swing it down to the vendor. The banana woman (men wouldn't sell bananas in those days) would pick up the money and place the fruit on the basket so the house-wife could pull the rope and bring the "shopping" home.

It was a big production to buy a bunch of bananas in those days but at least the poor house-wife didn't have to walk downstairs from her fourth floor apartment and climb all the way back up again.

Was it Confucius who said: "Food is indispensable and so is toilet paper"? These two items might not go side-by-side on a house-wife's daily "shopping list" but the toilet paper hawker was somehow more prominent than other vendors when he vocally plugged his goods. He made sure he was loud and clear when he repeatedly yelled; "Toilet paper! Cheap high quality toilet paper!" as he walked up and down the street with everyone staring at him. This was one obvious reason why women would rather stick to selling bananas.

By the way, toilet paper didn't come in rolls like what we get in supermarkets these days. They were large sheets of light brown paper measuring 3 sq. ft each. People didn't buy them by the sheets. The vendor, who always carried a Chinese weight scale, sold them by the catty, a Chinese weight slightly heavier than a pound.

Though some people used the whole large sheet in the toilet for some strange reasons, most users had them cut into small squares measuring about 3X3 or 4X4 inches, depending on the individual's physical preference.

Only wealthy families could afford the more expensive high quality sheets which, let's face it,  were quite tender and absorbent and  definitely good enough for their children to practise Chinese caligraphy on.


My mother used to pay for the cheaper ones. They  were as rough as  sand paper and tough as cardboards with the occasional woody pieces the size of a toothpick on the surface. This cheap quality paper was  obviously not suitable for babies though I had been wounded a few times myself. 

When I told an old friend about this painful experience recently, he said:

"Bill, you should count yourself lucky when I tell you what we had to use to solve this sticky problem in old days in China."

He said it was in the 1940's when he and his parents were living in a farm in Dongguan (Guangdong Province) and the toilet was an outhouse  about 15 minutes walk from their farm house.

"As we were too poor to buy toilet paper, we had to use fallen leaves to do the job. We only used leaves the size of the palm and there were heaps and heaps of them on the narrow lane leading to the outhouse," he recalled.

"leaves. as you know, are neither soft or absorbent but we had no other choice. Going to the toilet in those days was a real pain in the butt," he laughed as he drew his conclusion.

Perhaps that was Nature's original solution to man's natural problem back in the days of Adam and Eve. But to tell you the truth: I would bring my cat with me and use it's tail to do the job if I had to walk so far to an outhouse to answer the call of nature.

Now, let's change the subject and go back to hawking.

What about people who didn't have the capital to deal in trading to make a living like the olive man, the banana woman the toilet paper hawker? Well, they'd just have to sell whatever skills they had.

There were travelling barbers walking around with a pair of scissers and a comb, kitchen knife sharpeners with portable sharpening tools, plumbers with spanners and screw-drivers, fortune tellers with books of Yin and Yang ...... and lots of others.

They walked up and down the street announcing their trades and, at the same time, smiling at potential customers looking at them from the balconies.

On agreeing to the prices offered by the customers who had called for their services, they would happily climb up to the aparments, do their jobs there and earned their dollar or two for the day.

Come of think it,  with all these lovely people doing all the walking for you, who needs the Yellow Pages !?

Note: Bill Yim, the writer, is also a party caricaturist specializing in entertaining guests at corporate events and private functions in Hong Kong and overseas. For a glimpse of his performance, please visit:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpBmvuAU37g

or email: bycartoon@yahoo.com.hk for more information or booking.