Ponson Sin Lam-yuk was only eight years old when he started hitting the streets of Hong Kong’s notorious Wan Chai red light district and he was looking for battle.
“We were always wanting to fight,” Sin recalls of his time with the tearaways he used to hang with in the early 1960s.
“When we weren’t on the streets, we’d carry this heavy leather punching bag up into the hills and hang it from a tree and we tried to teach ourselves how to fight that way. Sometimes we even practiced on the trees.”
Back then, Victoria Harbor-side Wan Chai still pulsed with neon by night.