A few years ago, after moving back to her home city of Hong Kong from New York, Erica was walking around her new neighbourhood of Sheung Wan. The residential area, set close to the finance district Central on Hong Kong Island, is known for its array of dried seafood shops, with dried scallops, prawns and much more lining jars and trays in shop fronts.
But it wasn’t the food that immediately caught Erica’s attention. Looking down, she saw a tortoiseshell tabby cat relaxing amid the bustle of people and traffic under the area’s high rises. “I stumbled across one of the biggest stars of the shop cat community,” she recalls. “Fei Zai, which translates to ‘Chubby Boy’ in English – the term can by used endearingly, or offensively, but this was obviously endearing – we all thought he was so cute.”
Fei Zai is a local celebrity – a particularly well-loved cat in a shopping area teeming with them, where most of the longer-running shops are fronted by their own feline guardians. “He is basically the king of the area,” she says. “He’s very sociable, he likes to patrol around the area. It’s not a busy street in terms of car traffic, so he loves to walk around and was not involved in any car accidents.”
Inspired by photographer Marcel Heijnen’s groundbreaking series Shop Cats of Hong Kong and Instagram accounts including Bodega Cats of New York, Erica began taking pictures of Fei Zai and other cats in the area, posting them to the Instagram account she created, Sheung Wan Cats. On her feed, which also features shop cats from the nearby Sai Ying Pun, there’s ginger tabbies lying on counters, kittens peering round doorways, and tabbies watching over dried squid and eels. “Sheung Wan is one of the oldest areas in Hong Kong, there have been lots of Chinese merchants there since the 19th century,” Erica says. “It’s where merchants trade all sorts of things, like dried seafood or Chinese herbal medicines.”
In recent years, as the Central business district has begun to sprawl out to Sheung Wan, new artisan coffee shops and gleaming food joints have popped up in the area, but minus the cats. Erica points to health and safety regulations as to why cats are the preserve of more traditional shops, but historically there has been good reason for shop owners to keep them.
“You might think that there are hygiene problems with having animals in shops, but they really have a function,” she explains. “Dried seafood is really attractive to rats, but the dried seafood is actually a delicacy [in Hong Kong] – they’re very expensive. So if rats are all over them, it’s big losses for the shops, so the cats come out at night to catch them – one shop owner found a cat abandoned on a street in a box, so he took him back to his shop and all the rats disappeared.”
Usually shooting photos and videos with her iPhone, Erica has struck up close relationships with shopkeepers of the area, as well as the different cats, learning about their unique personalities and quirks. “Overall, it’s the connection that I made with the community,” she says. “I’m normally an introverted person, but now I’ve started getting to know some of the shop owners, and they will tell me about their cats: ‘Oh, these days he’s not eating so much, or he’s getting a little thin.’”
But she also found that the account had practical value that went beyond sharing warming portraits of cats. When cat-related emergencies have occurred, she has been the most natural port of call. “Sometimes people send me cats that are missing, or if there are cats wandering around but look like they belong to a shop, they would take pictures and send them to me so I can share them,” Erica says. “A few times we found the cats’ owners because of the connections on the page.
“These are the most valuable things I’ve gained from the whole experience,” she continues. “The sense of community.”
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