CLOSING TIME: Owners of the Chinese shop Hop Yick, Michael and Marisa Yeung, which is closing after nearly a century of trading.
The shutters are closing on a spice-scented Chinese shop that has been trading in Christchurch for nearly a century.
Hop Yick owners Michael and Marisa Yeung blame the closure of the Welles St Asian import business, near South City Mall, on earthquake disruptions and their son's disinterest in the family business.
"And it is time for a change. We have been doing it for a long time," Marisa Yeung said.
The couple's 29-year-old son, a computer technician, did not want to take over the shop.
"He said: ‘I can speak [Mandarin], but I cannot read it. It is too hard for me'. He is not interested in the business."
The late George Wong, who came to New Zealand in 1927, bought Hop Yick Cheong off another Chinese family in the 1950s.
Wong died in 1984 and Michael Yeung - his grandson - moved with Marisa from Hong Kong to take over the shop two years later.
The Yeungs believe Hop Yick, which sells imported Chinese items such as spices, canned food, paper lanterns, and cane ware, first opened on Madras St in 1918 - or was at least trading by then.
Michael Yeung said his grandfather was a workaholic who "loved his business" and worked 24-7 until the day he died.
Jim Ng, a community historian and author of Chinese descent, said Hop Yick played an important role a century ago.
It served a community of Chinese immigrants, who first came to New Zealand during the Otago gold rush in the 1860s.
About 100 to 150 Chinese workers found themselves in Christchurch after the depletion of Dunedin and West Coast goldfields. "It [Christchurch] supported only a very small group of Chinese, and they were mainly in market gardening. They kept to Chinese food."
Ng, who grew up in Ashburton, remembers visiting Hop Yick on Madras St as a child, and the "shoddy old house" next door.
"It served as a lodging house for Chinese. I went in there when I was a kid and saw these two opium smokers.
"They were quite sleepy. They just looked at me, and I looked at them, and I bowed my way out."
Customer Rangi Downes, 72, said the shop used to sell ceramic pots so big, "you could hide your mother in one of them".
He first went there as a newly-married man in the early 1960s to buy Chinese kimonos for his wife.
"In those days people had never seen that sort of stuff. It was totally different to anything in Christchurch. It [the shop] had that dark appeal; you wondered what you were going to find."作者: lzh47 时间: 2016-5-15 20:48:33