preparing the string for kite fighting

just like kite surfing, there must have been a season for kite fighting in the past. i remember it as a seasonal activity, not something you would do all the year round. however, these days, if you go to west coast park, you can see children playing with kites at any time of the year. kite fighting in those days involved small, nondescript kites; some were home-made kites. they were not the kites that were seen at the kite festivals which used to be held at marina south.

i was never keen on kite flying as in my few attempts at it, none of the kites got higher than the tree top. i also did not enjoy rushing with the other children and adults for loose kites because of the rough tactics that were sometimes used.

but i would help my neighbour and friend to prepare the kite string to do battle. the cotton string came from an ordinary spool but it had to be coated with powdered glass mixed with animal glue. we would get the goo pey ka (cow skin glue) from the chinese medical shop. this came in two forms - either as bead or pearl or as a flat slab. the beads or pearls were easier to dissolve. as for the hardened flat slabs, we had to break them into smaller bits using a hammer.

the powdered glass came from discarded fluorescent tubes. first, we had to look for a tube. then we would break the glass tube into smaller pieces. we would use a pestle and mortar to pound the glass bits into a powder form.

the next step was to heat the animal glue in a container until the glue dissolved and became very sticky. then we would add the powdered glass into the sticky stuff and mixed them together.

when it came to coating the string, there were two ways of doing it. the first way was to wind the uncoated string to two trees which were quite far apart. you would have go around the two trees a few times. using our bare hands, we would grab some of the mixture - when it had cooled down sufficiently - and glide it over the string. every length of the string had to be covered.

the other way was to drop the spool of string into the mixture. then you secured the end of the string to the trunk of a tree and slowly let the spool unravel as you wound it around another tree and continued going around the two trees till the whole length of string was coated.

we had to wait until the glue had dried before we coiled the coated string onto an medium-size milo or ovaltine tin. some would have added colouring to the mixture, so you might get coated strings which were pink or blue, depending on the colouring used.

the finished product was something like a weapon, it was as sharp as a razor.