Air Mail Olives & A Basket Of Toilet Paper

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 Olive 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 1950's Hong Kong, when most of the old four-story tenement buildings had balconies on each floor, and  streets were never too busy as trams and rickshaws were the major means of transport. 

Wearing a straw hat and carrying a tin box 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", they drew the attention of people in the neighborhood. "Me! The Aeroplane Olive Man is here!" was the message.

People, mostly house-wives, children and even their cats would excitedly rush out to their balconies for the man's happy music, tossing 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, pitch them high, sending them "flying like an aeroplane" to his customers on the second, third and fourth floors. He seldom missed a target.

I was living in one of those four-story 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 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, handle-less hammers - 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 to the balcony and 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 their own 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; definitely good enough for their children to practice Chinese calligraphy on.

My mother used to pay for the cheaper ones. They were as rough as sandpaper and tough as cardboard, 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 the 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 nor absorbent, but we had no other choice. Going to the toilet in those days was a real pain in the butt!”

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 its 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 or 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 scissors 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 apartments, do their jobs there and earn their dollar or two for the day.

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