Migratory history

Most of the tenants in the housing schemes that were the focus of this study came initially from the New Territories in Hong Kong on the basis of being British passport-holders who then became involved in the catering trade (Baker Reference Baker1968; Ng Reference Ng1968; Taylor Reference Taylor1987; Watson Reference Watson1975, 1977). According to these authors, the New Territories rice farmers began to face competition from rice farmers in Thailand and vegetable farmers (refugees) from mainland China. A drop in rice prices coupled with a new demand for ‘exotic foods’ in post-war Britain caused many to leave for Britain between the 1950s and 1970s in the hope of making a fortune before returning to their lineage villages (Baker 1994; Watson Reference Watson1975). The term ‘catering’ is used here to indicate the various types of food businesses – Chinese takeaways, fish-and-chip shops, small and larger sit-down restaurants and food distribution – that the tenants had previously owned or worked in.

Most of the informants recounted how they had no intention of remaining in Britain and therefore had not learnt to speak and write English. However, with the government's effort to control migration (Bauböck Reference Bauböck1994), and especially after the 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, it became imperative for these immigrants to bring their families with them in order to ensure the successful running of their catering businesses. It was after this that the tendency to settle became more pronounced (Watson Reference Watson1975). At the time of fieldwork, the then imminent ‘return’ of Hong Kong to China in 1997 was another reason for the motivation to settle in the UK.

For most of these older immigrants, retiring in Britain had not been a sudden or easy decision. Respondents told of how they had tried returning to live in Hong Kong as many of their predecessors did. However, after more than 30 years in Britain one informant found it impossible to adapt to the heat and humidity of a Hong Kong summer. Another found it uncomfortable amongst the heaving crowds on busy Hong Kong streets. Given their frail bodies, with many needing the support of a walking stick, these were not minor irritations. Many also disclosed how the generous retirement benefits in the UK were a most attractive reason to remain in the UK, adding that they had paid their dues through endless hours of toil while dutifully ‘pasting their stamps’ (their euphemism for paying their National Insurance). They said they were merely claiming their entitlements. Also, many had adult children and/or grandchildren who either had their own catering and other businesses, or who had become professionals here.

Methodology and limitations

Data were gleaned mainly from participant observation amongst Chinese people and some of their family members between June 1997 and July 1998. The majority of these were tenants in the main housing scheme ‘Hung Won Lot’ (HWL) and their two related schemes (‘Roses’ and ‘Victory’) in a northern English city. Other participants were non-tenants who were in close association with these residents. This was made possible through my involvement in activities organised by voluntary groups such as the Women's Society, the Chinese Clinic, a Chinese church and through staying in the guest room at HWL. It is difficult to quantify the number of contacts. A Luncheon Club session run by the Women's Society, for example, normally involved 80–100 people. The intensity of contact varied greatly from one-to-one interviews and visits at their flats, to tea or lunch at a restaurant, as well as casual conversations in communal areas and on the streets around the housing schemes. There were also occasions when I acted as interpreter for the tenants (e.g. during visits to and by the optometrist). The number of significant contacts, defined as where repeated visits were made and where protracted conversations and interviews took place, could be placed at around 40. Research was conducted mainly in Cantonese and Hakka, though English was often used with the younger informants (e.g. community workers, children and grandchildren of the tenants). The effect of ethnographic research was such that towards the end of fieldwork some tenants were happy to let me sit in their flats to watch television or read while they took a nap. The focus of this paper is on three informants: 92-year-old Popo,Footnote ¹ to show how an older illiterate Chinese migrant had adapted to living alone in HWL; Ah-Ngoh, a new immigrant and tenant who was still adapting to HWL; and Onn-Sum, who lived alone outside the sheltered schemes but visited HWL almost on a daily basis.

A major limitation of this paper is its basis on relatively old data. As an English translation of Rhythmanalysis was not published till 2004 I could not have used the concept to analyse data in my PhD thesis (2000). Re-studying this sample to update the data is not possible as many of my informants are now deceased. However, it is hoped that this contribution will alert future researchers to the importance of noting rhythms amongst their informants. As Meyer (Reference Meyer, Goonewardena, Kipfer, Milgrom and Schmid2008: 149) noted, ‘The rhythmanalysist is all ears. He listens not only to words, however, but to everything happening in the world.’ Lefebvre (Reference Lefebvre, Elden and Moore2004: 27) himself had noted how ‘[to] grasp a rhythm it is necessary to have been grasped by it’ and it appears that social anthropologists with their preferred method of participant observation are well-placed to be grasped by such rhythms in the field.

Popo

My first memory of Popo was of her eating a chocolate bar in the communal hall one evening when a group of tenants were enjoying their regular card game of Hakka pai. Popo sat at the side of the hall taking note of everything that went on without saying a word. Initially I avoided talking with Popo because she only spoke Hakka. While she understood Cantonese very well Popo refused to speak even a word of it. Several conversations had ended with my apologising buey hiao tarng (Hakka for ‘I don't understand’). Popo, however, seemed really curious about my ‘hanging about’, especially early on in my fieldwork when I stayed for short periods in the top-floor guest room at HWL. Popo's flat was nearest the first-floor communal hall which has a kitchenette attached. Whenever Popo saw me she would ask whether I had been eating or watching television in the communal hall. She always seemed annoyed that someone had left the lights on.

Popo seemed so keen to liao (‘talk’) and, despite the warnings of Rabinow (Reference Rabinow1977) against being seen to be aligned with marginal characters, I decided to experiment with interpreting what I thought Popo had said into Cantonese. I then let Popo affirm or dispute this interpretation. If Popo indicated that the interpretation was wrong, I would try a slightly different interpretation in Cantonese until Popo smiled in agreement. This way, we managed to keep a conversation going. This ‘bungling’ at Hakka helped to deepen our relationship. Many times we both ended up in laughter because of my erroneous interpretations, which managed to bring much cheer to Popo. Soon I was able to by-pass the multiple Cantonese interpretations as my understanding of Hakka improved. Later in the fieldwork I understood enough Hakka to interpret Popo's words into Cantonese for a community worker, but not interpret Cantonese back into Hakka for Popo.

Popo decided to call me ‘Lee Moy’ (‘Moy’ is Hakka term for little girl or unmarried woman) and always waved to me from her window when she saw me approaching the building. At some point she said I should ‘buzz’ her on the entry-phone if no one would open the main door to me, or perhaps just shout outside her window, ‘Popo, Lee Moy is here!’ I ended up spending a lot of time with Popo as she often insisted that I ate lunch with her. In fact I could always expect a welcome in Popo's flat should I have nowhere else to go. Sometimes, when I arrived after she had already cooked her lunch, I would buy some food from the shop across the road and ate it sitting on her sofa while we chatted together.

Popo lived quite a lonely life as she did not get many visitors. She called the woman in her fifties who visited most frequently her sim-kiu (daughter-in-law) even though this sim-kiu was actually the daughter-in-law of her late husband's secondary wife.Footnote ² As this sim-kiu, who worked in a grocery store across the road, was often seen to bring Popo her food and grocery shopping, medicines and so forth, Popo was viewed by the other tenants as being ‘very lucky’ to have such a filial sim-kiu. Popo managed to do most of her own cooking early in my fieldwork although this ability was clearly deteriorating, and by the time I left the field people supporting her (warden, Women's Society staff, etc.) were trying to organise cooked meals to be sent to her.

Marking time – standing still

After my first meal with Popo I made copious notes, not knowing at that point what observations an ethnographer should record and which were to become important ones. I could have focused on any number of points: the way Popo used the very last drop of oil, keeping boiled drinking water in a thermos flask, the way she rested her rice bowl on her thigh (indicating a farming or labouring background), or the look of utter sadness as she descended into silence during our meal. As it turned out what could have been a casual observation of how Popo hobbled over to the calendar, tore off the leaf indicating the previous day and used it as a receptacle to collect the fish bones she was spitting out, became an important focus later on in the fieldwork. I wrote in my notes how using the calendar seemed like a clever move as it also helped her to mark time. But Popo did not always have fish bones or other food debris to collect at lunch, and therefore might miss a day. On other occasions I noticed that she would also use a ballpoint pen to circle the day just past on the monthly calendar she had on the opposite wall. She seemed able to make out the English numerals, if with some difficulty. Sometimes, however, she forgot to circle the dates or missed one or two days. When I brought this to her notice, she would check with me to confirm what day it was, and then made sure that the right numbers and pages were circled and torn off, respectively (always keeping the paper handy on her table for later use).

Much further on in the fieldwork, after a short break, my notes (24 June 1998) indicate:

Popo said I had been away for more than three weeks. Why wasn't I back on Monday as I said I would – oops! … She also said, ‘So you are getting married in the “ninth month”. It is the “fifth month” now.’ I corrected her, saying it is the ‘sixth month’. Next week it will be the ‘seventh month’.

Actually Popo was correct. My notes also recorded how I realised that Popo's ‘ninth month’ and my ‘September’ were different times. By Chinese reckoning, my wedding was to be in the ‘eighth month’ which meant that Popo was correct in our being in the ‘fifth month’. Not only did this encounter reinforce the idea that Popo kept very close track of time, but as an anthropologist I had overlooked the need to view time from the informant's perspective. I had fallen into the trap of using ‘western time’ (Postill Reference Postill2002: 252) when I was also familiar with ‘Chinese time’. Still, whichever time/calendar it was that Popo used, she was able to say to me on another occasion, ‘You've been here two weeks, so you will be going home in two weeks.’ This was after I had only casually mentioned that I was staying four weeks for that particular visit.

On another visit (7 August 1998), now very conscious that Popo's calendars were to be scrutinised, I noticed some childish doodles near the bottom of one. Popo said they were made by her sit (great grandchild). ‘When did your sit visit?’ ‘Wednesday’, was her answer, with only the slightest hesitation, indicating that she was well aware of the day of the visit.

However, there were times when Popo did lose track of the days in the week, particularly when she felt under the weather, or during times when she would moan bo sim kee (no yearning/energy to do anything). I learned though how her weekly clock was always adjusted on Fridays. She told me that it must be Friday when the grocery store next door was closed. Having stayed in the same building I have observed, and other informants have also articulated, how Saturdays always meant a bigger crowd in the streets, with school children who came to the Chinese language classes boosting the numbers. Then on Sundays the whole area bustled with people stocking up for their food businesses and families descending upon the restaurants to ‘yum cha’ (literally to ‘drink tea’, but used as a euphemism by Hong Kong Chinese to mean ‘eat lunch’). On Sundays, too, a white van selling fish was often parked just around the corner, within view from her front room window.

The television schedules on weekends are also different. While Popo's front door was often left unlocked on weekdays, come weekends she made sure that her front door was securely locked, as visitors on weekends could potentially let opportunist thieves into the building. Marking time was therefore very important to Popo for security reasons. On other occasions I had seen her taking a slow but purposeful walk around the office blocks a few streets away on Saturday afternoons. She had chosen the time carefully to avoid the crowds.

Working time – how other elders mark time

Ironically, this preoccupation with ‘marking time’ is precisely because Popo was merely ‘marking time’ – a description also of ‘marching on the spot’ – because she had nowhere to go and little to do. During my fieldwork Ah-Ngoh moved into HWL. She had retired from teaching in Hong Kong and had only recently arrived as a dependent of her daughter who had been in the UK for a long time. She was well-known to HWL tenants and prior to taking up the HWL tenancy was often seen wandering around the Chinatown area. She lived with her daughter outside the city centre but made a point of being at a particular fast food chain restaurant early in the morning for breakfast, only returning home late in the evening. She also found refuge in the Women's Society where she participated in all sorts of classes ranging from English to martial arts. Though in her eighties, she dressed more fashionably than many of the younger women, and was rarely seen without a proper manicure. She was really pleased to move into HWL as this meant that she did not have to make her daily commute. She also made it a point to show me her flat, which she claimed was the only one that featured a desk in the living room, because reading and writing were important activities for her. Towards the end of my fieldwork she was often taking lunch orders from the Women's Society staff and filling these orders at the different restaurants in the area. She called this her ‘work’.

Onn-Sum, also a former teacher who had lived in the UK for much longer than Ah-Ngoh, was another woman who found it important to keep busy. There seemed to be a sort of rivalry between these two. Onn-Sum was not a tenant of the Chinese housing schemes and her children were professionals and not involved in the catering trade. She lived alone in a little flat a short bus ride away from the town centre. Whenever I phoned her I would be greeted with, ‘O, Siew-Peng, you cannot imagine how busy I have been.’ She would then detail all the various lo yan ga (old people) she had visited in the past few days. On other occasions she would be busy fund-raising for different community groups through selling raffle and/or dinner tickets. Onn-Sum emphasised how she must spend time visiting those ‘old people’ as if their lives depended on it. Tenants like wheelchair-bound Lum-Sook did seem grateful for these visits, to the extent that when Lum-Sook had to move temporarily into a residential home, it was Onn-Sum he rang to help him pack his clothes. Onn-Sum also visited Popo often but Popo had expressed the view that Onn-Sum's visits were pointless.

It seemed that for both Ah-Ngoh and Onn-Sum, the need to be ‘in work’ stemmed from a fear of redundancy, that their status or self-worth would be reduced if they did not have a ‘job’. It was through the ability to spend their time ‘usefully’ or ‘purposefully’ that they could avoid being categorised together with the ‘old people’. Thus at nearly 80 years old herself, Onn-Sum always referred to the people she visited, often younger than herself, as ‘those old people’, painstakingly excluding herself from this group. It was possible that Onn-Sum had a very real fear of losing her mental faculties, thus becoming ‘useless’. My notes indicate how she seemed depressed when she had news that a friend had needed to move into a nursing home after a stroke. It appeared that Onn-Sum tried to keep herself busy in the hope that she might not become old in the mind.

Ah-Ngoh and Onn-Sum were not typical of the older people in this research who had retired from the catering trade. Most of the others seemed quite happy to accept their situation as being old and having time on their hands. While they might jokingly refer to their daily trip to the casino as ‘going to work’, they also knew that no one took them seriously at this. Others would embrace opportunities to participate in excursions organised by the Women's Society, such as visiting similar housing schemes in other cities and going strawberry or vegetable picking. Those from a younger cohort (mid-sixties to early seventies) who did not live in these housing schemes (although many were on their waiting lists) also derived great joy from attending English lessons and the chance for social interaction. Ah-Ngoh and Onn-Sum were two individuals who appeared to be fearful of disengaging and thus sought fervently to remain active by finding jobs to fill their days.

Enjoying time – with or without structure

Amongst the tenants there were opposing views as to whether older people should structure their lives around the 24 hours of the day. Some tenants did not have a choice as their days were structured rigidly around a strict medication regime; they needed to be awake fairly early to take their medication. Others suffered from insomnia and woke up late in the day because they could not fall asleep till the early hours of the morning. They often woke up in the early morning, at which point they might go into the sitting room to lie on the sofa where they drifted in and out of sleep.

These opposing attitudes were reflected when the local council sent letters informing them of planning applications for the extension of hours in the public houses nearby. Some tenants at ‘Roses’ were not happy, arguing that the longer opening hours would keep the old people awake till at least 3 am. However, Mr Chung from ‘Victory’ housing scheme, which is right next to a public house, said, ‘If it's young people who need to get to work, then they should complain. But us old people, we have nothing to do. It doesn't matter what time we sleep or what time we wake up. It is a waste of time objecting to these applications.’ His attitude was resonant with that of Deng-Tai who was happy to fall asleep at 3 or 4 am, and only woke up whenever she was ready to wake up. As far as such tenants were concerned, being free from the tyranny of time-keeping was itself a privilege of being old.

While their activities were not constrained by clock time, many tenants were particular about their routines. Several tenants walked regularly to the market, ostensibly to buy fish, quite early in the morning. Some spoke of their determination to walk to the town centre at least once a day, whatever the weather, in order to get some exercise. The more literate ones enjoyed visiting the local library at least once or twice a week, where they could get the latest instalment(s) of a serial novel (soap opera in print). Others, like Mui-Gu, enjoyed their daily trip to the casino. Interestingly, they all seemed to have become quite disciplined and there is a pattern of their returning to their flats by about 5·30 pm to cook their evening meals and then settle down to watch television in their own flats or in the communal hall. Patterns also varied according to the seasons. In the evenings, the communal hall at HWL was busier during the winter evenings than summer ones. On dry sunny afternoons which were not too hot, many of these Chinese elders were happy to just gather on the benches outside to have a chat with one another. Where afternoons were pleasantly warm in the spring, some tenants gathered to play the game mahjong in the communal hall in the afternoon, with the electric fan on full power. When it got too warm in the summer, however, the air-conditioned casinos and cafes at department stores were a refuge from the afternoon heat.

Remembering time – placing memories

When tenants and their elderly friends discussed remembered places, and this was often as they watched news of Hong Kong on satellite television in the communal hall, they also inevitably remembered historical time. Such nostalgia could be triggered by very trivial events or observations such as a name on a map shown in a television news report, a phrase used in conversation or the name of a certain food. For example, Mr Ma was sitting on a bench across from HWL, minding his own business and enjoying some melon seeds. Ah-Keng came along and engaged him in conversation. Suddenly we were told how melon seeds were ‘not as tasty as they used to be’, because they were ‘harvested much too early in order to be exported’ instead of being left to ripen on the branches. While there appeared to be a sense of yearning for something that was ‘lost’, there were also reasons to celebrate change. On several occasions I was told about the lack of equality between sons and daughters which was reinforced every time there was a celebration in their ancestral villages. Food, particularly meat which was in short supply, was distributed according to the number of sons. Daughters did not receive anything. In particular, tenants felt that the availability of education to young girls in the UK was definite progress.

Unlike the housing schemes studied by Percival (Reference Percival2000, Reference Percival2001), where tenants came from diverse occupational backgrounds, the tenants in the schemes studied here were predominantly Chinese migrants who were involved in the catering business. The most frequent reminiscence they shared with me was of how they had to work long hours to keep their businesses afloat. It was a non-stop routine of cutting up vegetables, chipping potatoes, cooking rice, making sauces, cleaning the premises, and so on. For many, this shared memory of leaving a familiar village, arriving in a bitterly cold country, becoming the only Chinese household in the town,Footnote ³ sometimes facing great discrimination, and living a tedious routine which sometimes required sending their young children home to Hong Kong, had become the most significant factor in their identification. The few tenants at these housing schemes who did not share this history were marginalised, to the point of being despised. Included in this group were three females, Ah-Ngoh (retired teacher), Wai-Po (retired as supervisor in a Hong Kong textile factory) and Ann-Ling (retired sales assistant from mainland China and now married to a retired Hong Kong chef), and two single males (a Cantonese opera singer and an English-speaking former waiter). Despite their literacy and achievements in their own working lives, these individuals were considered to be of lower status than the tenants from a long catering background. Remembered time, indicating a shared experience, a cognisance of the rhythms (and therefore pain) of the catering business became an important criterion, a badge of honour, in including and excluding people from their ‘inner circle’ and establishing the hierarchy.

Rhythm of ageing

A significant difference between a ‘resident’ at a nursing home and a ‘tenant’ in sheltered accommodation is that the latter does not need to ‘conform to an institutional division of time’, while for the former ‘every aspect of the resident's environment is shaped by care staff’ (Hockey Reference Hockey1990: 99). Living in HWL had given tenants a sense of freedom from, for example, the routine of the catering business to which they previously conformed. Many of these tenants lived with their adult children after stopping work, but found that it was not possible to break free from the catering business routine. At the sheltered housing schemes, tenants now had complete freedom to do what they like, where they like, and with whom they like, at whatever time suited them.

One notable feature of Lefebvre's concept of rhythmanalysis is that it transcends all the constraints of clock time and social time. The ‘theory of rhythms is founded on the experience and knowledge [connaissance] of the body’ (Lefebvre Reference Lefebvre, Elden and Moore2004: 67). Rhythm is thus derived from an individual's body and its own constituent rhythms. While every rhythm takes a cue from nature and society, the rhythms are at the same time individually ‘owned’. This explains why, within the same cohort of tenants ageing together, individuals could prefer different rhythms. Clearly the rhythms had been tempered by past experiences, which had marked the body or mind (via aches and pains or memories and aspirations), but still there was an element of agency – within limits – in that the tenants here had chosen to live their lives in one way or another.

Looking at Popo's life, one could see the rhythm being played out on a daily and weekly basis. When she saw Mui-Gu walk towards the casino, Popo deduced that it was just past 2 pm. She looked out of her window to check that the activities she expected went on as usual. When the rhythm was disrupted, as when she assumed that the tenants being picked up by mini-bus were going to the Luncheon Club, she experienced arrhythmia. Even if I had not arrived that day in time to explain to Popo why the change took place, she would have seen the tenants also being picked up the following day and would then realise that the rhythm had been broken. She would have sought answers from the other tenants in the same way that she questioned why I had not visited on the Monday that I said I would return to this city. Popo would have attempted to return her rhythm to ‘normal’.

Being illiterate, Popo kept track of this rhythm partly by her use of calendars, partly by the television schedules, and partly by what she observed being played out in the street outside her window. In that sense she used a combination of rhythms, or polyrhythmia, to help her mark time. When any two of these rhythms were not synchronised, Popo went in search of an answer to get her back on track. For example, towards the end of my fieldwork when it became increasingly difficult for her to cook, attempts were made to supply her with cooked meals during Luncheon Club days. Popo was then able to avoid cooking for those two days a week. She had to adapt to a different rhythm, or eurhythmia, cooking on some days and waiting for meals to be delivered on other set days. However, this arrangement was unsuccessful on a practical level because she did not have the strength to unscrew the cap of the thermos that held the soup, and the vegetables were too crunchy for her. Until her support workers were able to resolve this issue, Popo faced the prospect of arrhythmia for some time. Meanwhile Popo was keen to return it to the state with which she was familiar. To this extent, one could equate that steady rhythm of life to a sense of equilibrium.

What about Onn-Sum and Ah-Ngoh who could not bear to be seen to be out of work? Why were these two former teachers so focused on doing ‘work’? This was in contrast to most of the other tenants from a catering background who were happy not to be busy, to ‘drift’ in and out of activities without any planning or care. This was where their migratory history – another imposed and disrupted rhythm – played a significant part. Catering, as noted above, was physically demanding work. When physiological ageing made it difficult for the tenants to carry on working, when there was dissonance or arrhythmia between the rhythms of biological ageing and catering work, these tenants were only too pleased to stop. Finally they could cease that tedious and relentless rhythm of Chinese restaurant work, where most workers generally did not get to sleep till about 3 am and so wake up very late in the day. Retired teachers did not face such dissonance between their body and their work. They stopped because bureaucracy required them to stop. Their dissonance or arrhythmia arose from the fact that although their minds were still intellectually as strong and active as before, they were not allowed to continue to do what they enjoyed doing most: teaching. The quest to remain useful, therefore, could be seen as a refusal to accept a different rhythm of life, a rhythm (of retirement) that their catering contemporaries were happy to accept.

An interesting ‘in-between’ (‘proof’) case was that of Mr Wong, who was literate in Chinese and English. He worked as a court interpreter in Hong Kong before succumbing to the pressure to emigrate and went into the catering business in Britain. Though an intellectual at heart, evident from the English and Chinese literature he was often seen reading in the HWL lobby and the conversations we had, he was happy to be relieved from the tedium of catering work. Like Onn-Sum and Ah-Ngoh, he was well-read and intelligent, but unlike these two he had no wish to remain ‘at work’ because catering work had taken its toll on his physical body. Periodically he organised meals at restaurants in the neighbourhood by negotiating excellent prices for the other tenants and delighted in seeing his friends enjoy a meal together. Other than that he was happy to read his books.

Tenants like Mr Chung and Deng-Tai said they were pleased not to have to worry about any kind of structure to their day. They were pleased to be freed from the tireless rhythm of work. Yet in fact they had developed a new rhythm in their life, although they seemed either unable or unwilling to articulate it. For many of these tenants there was a certain recognisable routine, such as going down to the communal hall every evening for a game of Hakka pai, but this was very different to their working lives and was not seen as a routine insofar as there were no penalties involved if they missed an evening or two. These rhythms were often not articulated or even acknowledged until they were disrupted, as Lefebvre (Reference Lefebvre, Elden and Moore2004: 16) pointed out – ‘when they [were] discordant’ – as when someone became too ill to get to the communal hall, or if tenants had gone to stay with an offspring. Only then was the rhythm (or disruption) recognised and the tenants would talk about the missing tenant for a few days and welcomed him or her back when they returned.

Time and ageing theory

McDonald (Reference McDonald2011: 1184) describes activity and disengagement theories on ageing as ‘rather threadbare’ and both have been found inadequate for different reasons. Activity theory suggests that those who continue to pursue activities they enjoy would have a happier retirement (Havighurst Reference Havighurst1961), which overlaps with the notion of ‘successful ageing’ (Litwin Reference Litwin2005), and Cumming and Henry (Reference Cumming and Henry1961) theorised that disengagement becomes inevitable as a consequence of physical ageing. However, despite the many criticisms levelled against these theories, both continue to feature regularly in the literature on ageing. Seen outside of any specific context, both theories seem to suggest an ‘all or nothing’ rule of uni-directional travel, when in fact as this study has shown, older people engage, disengage or re-engage within different contexts and within different time-frames (or over their lifecourse). In cultural contexts (usually welfare states) where there is a definitive retirement age, the people approaching retirement often talk of doing the things that they have longed to spend more time on (golf, gardening, travel, etc.) even as preparations are being made for them to disengage from work. However, eventually there might be a need to disengage slowly and in degrees from golf, gardening and travel when physical deterioration makes these pursuits increasingly difficult. This is not to say that the same individuals could not then engage or re-engage in other activities that are physically less demanding (e.g. writing poetry or singing in a choir).

After a near-drowning incident,Footnote ⁴ Lum-Sook seemed to have resigned himself to having to depend on others to look after his physical needs in a residential home. However, he returned to HWL after a few weeks, having found it difficult to cope with the other residents whom he considered ‘not as mentally alert’ as he was. His return to HWL showed that he was not yet willing, or ready, to disengage to that extent. In contrast, 80-year-old Baat-Leung, though still very capable of looking after herself, had acknowledged that she was unable to see and hear and get about as well as she used to, and had thus applied to go into a residential home in another city where her son lived. These tenants showed verve and determination in maintaining some control over their own lives (choosing the time they would go to a residential home) rather than resigning totally in complete disengagement.

In the everyday life of a small sheltered housing scheme, there was a lot of disengaging, engaging and re-engaging in the relationships that were observed between tenants: they became friends, fell out, and avoided talking to one another, but often in due course refreshed their friendships again (cf. Percival Reference Percival2000). More significantly, as this paper has attempted to demonstrate, an analysis of these rhythms of living provides a better framework in understanding how some elderly people coped with ageing, compared with the overarching and mutually exclusive theories of activity or disengagement. Taking account of rhythms in the body, nature, history and social conventions, rhythmanalysis helps us to understand better how people might choose to live by one rhythm instead of another (e.g. work instead of retirement), and how when a rhythm is disrupted (through illness, change in routine, etc.), they do all they can to return to the rhythm they are familiar with, to a state of equilibrium. At times when this previous rhythm or state of equilibrium cannot be reached (e.g. when someone is no longer able to cook their own meals), a different rhythm (or two or three different rhythms) is accepted and this becomes the new rhythm until such a time when this new rhythm is once again disrupted. Lefebvre's concept of rhythmanalysis, when superimposed on theoretical frameworks of ageing, shows that ageing is not a simple straightforward question of engaging or disengaging.

Summary

This paper has explored how time, in terms of rhythm, is marked and remembered by Chinese tenants in sheltered housing. Older migrants, as ‘time-travellers’, had learned to apply and adapt skills from how they previously marked time (rhythms in an agricultural environment) to cope with modern-day living in a foreign urban context. Time for older people could be structured or unstructured, depending on the rhythms of their health and sleep patterns. While some older people had accepted the rhythm of retirement and were happy to do as much or as little depending on the circumstances, we saw individuals who experienced dissonance between the rhythms of mental alertness and social conventions, and who then tried to retain a rhythm of busy-ness, by for example visiting tenants or running errands. Time was valued not just for what one could currently do with it, but also according to whether one had the privilege to share in the experience of a disrupted rhythm (migration) at a particular stage in life, in this case the rhythm of the catering business, in order to qualify for membership in informal groups within sheltered housing.

By superimposing Lefebvre's concept of rhythmanalysis on the ageing paradigms of activity and disengagement, the paper has demonstrated that there is sufficient flexibility in this approach to help us understand how these Chinese ‘time-travellers’ coped with the often-changing rhythms by which they must learn to live. Lefebvre intended rhythmanalysis to be a transdisciplinary theory that could be used to theorise everyday life, ‘from the most natural (physiological, biological) to the most sophisticated’ (Lefebvre Reference Lefebvre, Elden and Moore2004: 18). This paper has attempted to apply this approach within the context of sheltered housing for a group of elderly Chinese migrants in relation to activity and disengagement theories. It is conceivable that rhythmanalysis can also be used to interrogate other theories and that, by doing so, we can make a substantial contribution to the understanding of ageing and older people.