As I See It

Funny Valentines 可笑的情人

2012-02-14T19:43:00.015+08:00

Valentine’s Day is one of most dreaded holidays on the calendar. Those who are already spoken for go along with it and pretend to enjoy it. They shower each other with expensive gifts, and for 24 hours, act as though their love were as sweet as Godiva chocolates and their lives as rosy as an Agnes B flower bouquet. Singles, on the other hand, are relegated to spending the night alone at home with a tub of Häagen-Dazs in front of the television, or meeting up with other singles to commiserate the way they watch their years go by. Those wall flowers and shrinking violets.

Valentine’s Day is a quintessential Hallmark holiday -- conceived, created and blown out of proportion by florists and chocolate companies. Originally dedicated to the Valentine of Rome, a martyred priest in the Middle Ages, the holiday was removed from the Christian calendar because there wasn’t much to celebrate. Historically, the day bore zero connection with love and romance, not until English poet Geoffrey Chaucer associated it with a pair of love birds in an obscure poem in the 15th Century. Chaucer would never have imagined the magnitude of harm he inflicted on mankind. Nor would he have guessed it was because of him that cash registers around the world are ringing non-stop on the horrid winter day.

Different cultures celebrate Valentine’s Day in their own unique way. While the Western world sticks to the male chauvinistic tradition of men buying women trinkets, most Arab countries ban Valentine’s Day merchandise as they are considered too Christian for comfort. In Japan and Korea, the gift giving customs are reversed, where women are obligated to give chocolates to not only their better halves but also every male co-worker in the office. A month later on March 14, dubbed the “White Day,” the tables are turned and men reciprocate with weightier gifts. Valentine’s Day is such a huge industry in Japan that February 14 accounts for half the annual chocolate sales.

In Hong Kong where everything and anything is measured with a dollar sign, lovers take Valentine’s Day celebrations to a whole different level. The clock has barely struck 9:00 AM when the first flower delivery arrives at the third cubicle in the first row, signaling the start of the intra-office competition. Then one delivery after another, expensive bouquets go to Mary, Susie, Cindy and Queenie, each one bigger and more impressive than the last. The contest of who-gets-what-and-how-big -- the contest of face -- continues throughout the morning. The winner, crowned the Mrs. with the Mostest, will get a day of bragging rights at the pantry while her lunch is being microwaved. And the losers – ladies who haven't received anything by lunch time – will keep their heads down for the rest of the day and make excuses for their negligent husbands or imaginary boyfriends. That explains why every year on February 14, a surprisingly large number of men are said to be “on a business trip.”

Another funny – and expensive – aspect of Valentine’s Day in Hong Kong is dining out. Restaurants are booked solid weeks in advance, tables by the window reserved six months ahead of time. If a miracle happens and you finally find a table, you are handed the special Valentine’s set dinner menu designed to trap silly love birds too smitten to notice the steep prices. Who could have guessed that cream soup with rose petals and heart-shaped sirloin on February 14 would cost five times more than cream soup without rose petals and regularly-shaped sirloin on any other day? This is what I say to every couple out there: if you really must celebrate the silly holiday, do it the day or even the week before. The same principle rings true for Ching Ming (清明節), the Grave Sweeping Festival in April. Why do we all show up at the cemetery on the same day when we have 364 others in the year?

Valentine’s Day is as contrived as it is an unnecessary source of stress for everyone, single or not. Until we realize that gift giving is only sweet when it is unexpected, all those obligatory flowers and chocolates are wasted in exchange for a fleeting moment of self-validation. In the end, the holiday serves as an important reminder that relationships are a double-edged sword: while we are grateful for the companionship that becomes especially valuable during big holidays, we are also pressured to keep up with the Joneses and meet unreasonable expectations. If you look at it that way, Valentine’s Day does have some meaning after all.

Incident at Heathrow 希思羅事件

2012-02-08T17:34:00.010+08:00

Beep, beep, beep.

The x-ray machine went off as I walked through the gantry. I was going through security at Terminal 3 of London’s Heathrow Airport, where I was to take a connecting flight back to Hong Kong from Geneva. I didn't understand why there was no direct flights between Hong Kong and Switzerland. I also didn't understand why connecting passengers who had just got off a plane and never left the restricted area would need to go through security again.

Airport security officer Patel* signaled me over and asked me to stretch my arms for a manual screening. He began waving a handheld metal detector over my body. “Lift your arms higher please,” he said. I complied.

I didn’t have any cell phone, loose change or keys on me. It had to be my belt. But I thought belt buckles wouldn't set off airport alarms. I am a frequent traveler and I don't remember ever removing my belt. And why didn’t the same belt give me problems at Terminal 5 when I passed through London just a few days ago?

Surely enough the metal detector beeped when it swished over my stomach. “Please remove your belt, sir.” Patel said.

I removed the offending belt and placed it in a plastic bin held by female officer Dolton.

What followed was a full body pad-down conducted by Patel. It was more invasive than a police frisk in a drug raid. He ran both the palm and the back of his hands down the arms, over the torso, up the thighs and into the groin. For all intents and purposes, Officer Patel was groping me. In any other setting it would have been considered sexual assault. But it was perfectly acceptable because I was at Heathrow.

When his hands began to travel from my sides down to the buttocks, I finally said to him, “is this really necessary? I have already taken off my belt, why don’t you just let me walk through the machine and see if it beeps again?” It sounded like a sensible suggestion; certainly more efficient than what he was doing.

“We can’t let you do that, sir. This is our procedure.” Dolton answered for her colleague. The two were playing tag team.

“I guess some passengers just don’t appreciate being groped because of a belt buckle, that’s all.” I stated the obvious.

“That’s the way we do things here. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to fly this airport.” Patel snapped, taking back the conversation.

“Is that your answer to every question around here: 'you don't have to fly this airport?'” I snapped back. Most passengers don’t get to choose which airport they connect at, and I certainly would have taken my business elsewhere if I could.

“That’s a perfectly sound answer.” Dolton weaseled her way back into the conversation again, ever the faithful sidekick to her partner.

My friends were all waiting behind me on the other side of the x-ray machine just three feet away. They were getting impatient and rather concerned. “What’s going on?” one of them asked.

“Don’t get me started. It’s ridiculous.” I said to my friend, shaking my head.

As if I had just uttered the word “bomb” or “terrorist,” Patel aborted the pad-down as soon as he heard what I said. “Sir, you have now distracted my search with your talking,” he lied. “You have made it impossible for me to complete my procedure,” he lied some more. “And now I need you to step over to the private room.” That last bit was true.

“That’s right, the private room,” Dolton grinned. “That sounds like a good idea!” Her grin now turned into a laugh, and she began to snort like a common swine.

Ah, the private room! I had heard about it before. In the United States before an airport security officer conducts a full body pad-down, he or she will recite a scripted warning the way a cop does the Miranda rights. The warning goes like this: I am about to give you a pad-down. You have the right to request the procedure be conducted in a private room and you have the right to have the pat-down witnessed by a person of your choice.

No one knows what goes on in the private room. No one wants to know. Its name conjures up images of the Turkish prison in the movie Midnight Express or Room 101, the torture chamber in George Orwell’s 1984. If the sound of it doesn’t intimidate you, the delay of a potentially lengthy procedure should. The fact that Patel was already done searching me but still chose to escalate the situation suggests only one thing: the private room is routine punishment at Heathrow for passengers who talk too much.

At that precise moment I had two options: I either back down and apologize to the officer and get on with my journey, or violate the first rule of traveling – and the first rule of life in general – by picking a fight with a stranger who can make my life hell. Any sensible man would have chosen the first option. But I wasn’t a sensible man at that moment. I was caught in it. My flight wasn’t scheduled to leave for another 90 minutes and I was ready to play ball.

“Sure, let’s all go to private room." I said. "What little power you have, you abuse it the first chance you get.” There was venom in my voice.

“Would you like to say that louder so that my supervisor could hear you?”

“As a matter of fact, I would like to speak to your supervisor.”

Patel muttered something into his walkie-talkie. Within seconds, a disheveled 50-year-old woman in an oversized blazer appeared.

“Wait here, let me speak to her first.” Patel began whispering to the supervisor like a school-boy reporting to his headmistress. I couldn’t make out what he was saying, but I could guess as much.

“What seems to be the issue here?” the supervisor asked me with the same tone as Anne Robinson’s in The Weakest Link. I explained the situation and suggested once again that I walk though the machine without the belt.

“I don’t care what you think, sir,” the Supervisor barked. “My colleague believes the only way to satisfy his search is to perform it privately and that’s what he will do.”

I had to be fairly naïve to think that speaking to the supervisor would change anything. This wasn’t the Ritz Carlton after all. That’s why Patel wanted me to speak to his boss in the first place: they were all in cahoots!

By then all my friends had all gone though security and were standing next to me trying to understand what was happening. I asked one of them to follow me to the private room as a witness. I knew my rights.

The room was not far, just a few steps away. The walls were painted grey for effects and there were no windows. There was a desk, a chair and a spare x-ray machine that wasn’t plugged in. Patel closed the door behind him, locked it, and asked me to drop the pants. I proceeded to take my jeans off, but then he stopped me and said, “no, no, just lower them to your ankles.”

I did. He took a step closer to me and visually inspected the waistband of my undershorts. Then he said, “alright, thank you.”

That’s it? Are you serious? That’s the best you’ve got?

My anger and frustration were quickly forgotten, replaced by disappointment and bewilderment. I was disappointed because the private room showdown was thoroughly anti-climactic. I take more clothes off at the Zara fitting room! I was bewildered because I couldn't figure out what's in it for Patel. I didn’t feel the least humiliated if humiliation was what he was after. He, on the other hand, had to stare down another dude in his underwear. The punishment was as much for me as it was for him.

“Go and find another job, pal.” I said to Patel as my friend and I walked out of the room. My snide comment was unnecessary, almost childish. But by then there was nothing more he could do to me. There were no more bullets in his gun. He would return to the x-ray machines and harass the next unruly passenger. And I would rejoin my friends and get back on our journey to Hong Kong.

* * *

This is a true story. It happened after my ski trip in Chamonix, France, during the Chinese New Year holidays. What I did was rash and stupid. I should have dropped the matter when I still had the chance to, but instead I went against my judgment and let my disdain for authority get the better of me. I scoffed at Alec Baldwin when he got thrown off the plane for being, well, a smart aleck with the flight attendant who made him turn off his phone. Like Baldwin I could have ended up missing my flight altogether. And for what? Smart people don’t take uncalculated risks. Neither Baldwin nor I is very smart.

I don’t know why I did what I did. Was I defending civil liberties when they were trampled on in the name of national security? Or was I standing up against rules and policies that defy common sense, when most passengers would take it lying down to avoid getting into trouble? What I do know is that from now on I will avoid Heathrow like a plague. My incident at Terminal 3 has confirmed every horror story I have heard about the universally hated airport: passengers losing their baggage, flights cancelled at the first sign of snow, security staff confiscating alcohol still in a duty free bag. If Heathrow is symptomatic of what’s wrong with Britain, and if Britain is representative of the rest of Europe, then I am seriously worried about the global economy. The European debt crisis might just be as horrendous and hopeless as the airport itself. To those of you who plan on going to the London Olympics this August, I wish you good luck.

* The names in this article have been altered.

Hong Kong Hold'em 香港撲克

2012-01-12T23:56:00.028+08:00

The taxi got off the main road and pulled up at a cul-de-sac in an upscale neighborhood in Hong Kong. The street was deserted and yellowed by streetlights. A stray dog barked from the distance. I tiptoed up the stairs to the third floor of a post-war tenement building and checked the number on the door. Unit 3B. A middle-aged Australian man named James* answered the door.

“Is this where the game is?” I asked with mock confidence. The host nodded and ushered me into the apartment. In the dining room, four other men slouched at an oval table. They sized me up before offering me a seat next to an Irishman named Howard. The rotund redhead took a sip of beer and began shuffling cards with the dexterity of a Vegas croupier, reeking of testosterone. It was Poker Wednesday at the Harrison's.

On any given night in Hong Kong, home games are hosted everywhere. Poker is a popular pastime in the expat community and Texas hold’em is their game of choice. Each player makes the best five-card hand by combining two private cards with three out of the five public cards placed face-up on the table, much like what we see on ESPN’s coverage of the annual World Series of Poker.

But on "amateur nights" like this one, there is no fancy green felt or dark sunglasses to hide poker tells. All you need are two cheap decks of cards from 7-Eleven, a set of chips and a stomach for free-flowing beer and trash talk. By the end of the night, the winner pays for pizza and the loser – pity the loser – goes home with a broken piggybank and a bruised ego.

I swear I went to the Harrison’s for research only. That’s what all gamblers tell their wives. Whatever my motivation was, I was certain to meet a menagerie of characters. There were five of them: the Screamer, the Sweater, the Rookie and his mentor Howard, and the host James Harrison, a.k.a. the Folder because he would fold every time he wasn’t dealt face cards. They were Caucasians in their 40s, all law firm partners who got together once a week to have a boys’ night in.

Then, there was I, the lone Chinese who stepped in as a last-minute substitute for a regular who called in sick. I knew enough to play but I still struggled to keep up with the game’s many rules and dizzying jargon. In hold’em, a player must call, check, raise or fold, and the dealer must burn and turn. There are the flops and the river, the big blind, the small blind, and the double blind.

The penalty for an error can be hefty. The minimum buy-in at tonight's game was HK$3,000 (US$385), which is modest compared to some of the serious games that can run up to several hundred thousands. Within the expat community, there is no shortage of high-rollers who are in it for more than week-night entertainment with the boys.

Gambling takes on many forms in Hong Kong. From the lottery to betting on horse-races and soccer games, gambling is legal only if it is run by the Jockey Club that has a monopoly on all gaming activities. A notable exception is mahjong, that beloved social pastime for Cantonese people around the world. Under Hong Kong law, mahjong can be played at licensed gaming parlors, restaurants or at home. Poker, on the other hand, has yet to catch on with the hoi polloi and its legality has remained ambiguous.

Until mid-2010, a handful of poker houses operated openly in Central and Causeway Bay, drawing hundreds of mostly expat players every night. To comply with gambling laws, they operated as private clubs where members played against each other on "social occasions" and the operators took no profit from the games. For all intents and purposes, poker houses were no different from the bridge room at a country club or the cluster of mahjong tables at a wedding banquet.

But a high profile police raid in the summer of 2010 put an end to the poker scene. On a sweltering August night, law enforcement swamped the Hong Kong Poker House on Hollywood Road and arrested everyone on the premises, despite vehement protest from the poker house that no law had been broken. Angry players, a majority of them lawyers, bankers and hedge fund managers with big egos and short patience, spent a sleepless night at the Sheung Wan police precinct and ended up on the front page of The Apple Daily like hardened criminals. In the end no one was charged, but the damage was done. Other poker houses in the city began to vanish and citizens became gun-shy about playing cards in public places. Those who want to get their fix, however, can still do so in the privacy of their own homes or hop on a ferry to Macau.

The police crackdown on recreational poker sparked an outrage in the expat community. As unjust and unjustified as the poker bust was to some people, it didn’t surprise those of us who understand how our city is governed. Indeed, the raid is every bit consistent with the police’s "one-size-fits-all" approach to issues they understand and those they don’t.

Drugs are a good example. In the eyes of the police, drugs are, well, just drugs. Never mind the distinction between soft drugs like marijuana and hard drugs like cocaine and heroin, users of all banned substances are arrested and prosecuted with equal fervor.

Likewise for gambling, any activity outside the purview of the do-no-evil Jockey Club is deemed harmful to society. Unlike mahjong, the worldwide hold’em craze is not something that law enforcement fully understands. And what they don’t understand they view with suspicion and distrust. In their heads, the idea of a poker house conjures up images of a seedy gambling ring run by tattooed triad members who prey on vulnerable citizens and turn the wholesome city into a modern day Sodom and Gomorrah.

The truth is, hold’em is a socialized form of entertainment just like mahjong, chess or karaoke. It is fun and it requires high skills. But don’t tell that to the police. With the way things are going, it will be years before Hong Kongers feel comfortable playing poker in bars, restaurants and other public places without inviting police harassment.

If the Harrison’s hideout represented the underworld of the expat gambling scene in Hong Kong, then I was in for a big disappointment. Tattooed gangsters were nowhere in sight. Neither were loan sharks lurking about ready to attack. At 11:30pm, Mrs. Harrison came home from the movies and poked her head into the dining room. “How was the game, hon?” Her question doubled as a cue for us to call it a night. The Folder heaved a sigh and said, “I’ve played better.” That night he lost a half month’s rent. And the Redhead, steady as ever, netted nearly ten grand and paid for pizza.

As for myself, like I said, I was there only for the research.

*The names in this article have been altered.

* * *

This article previously appeared in the January/February 2012 issue of MANIFESTO magazine under Jason Y. Ng's column "The Urban Confessional."

NEWS FLASH: Website Launched! 快訊: 網頁發放!

2011-12-31T20:25:00.002+08:00

Dear Readers,

My personal website
www.jasonyng.com
is now up and running.

Check it out and
I hope you find it informative!!

(if at first the site doesn't load, hit "refresh" on your browser)

The Hundredth Post 第一百篇

2011-11-29T22:34:00.035+08:00

This month marks the third birthday of my blog As I See It, a social commentary on the trials and tribulations of living in Hong Kong. The occasion coincides with the 100th article I have written under the banner. Having reached a personal milestone, I decided to take the opportunity to reflect on my still-young writing career and wallow in, dare we say, self-congratulatory indulgence.

It all started in November 2008 on the heels of the last U.S. presidential election. I was getting ready to create a personal website as a platform to consolidate my interests and pursuits. To do that I needed content. That’s how my blog – or my “online op-ed column” as I prefer to call it – came into being. Before I knew it, I was banging it out in front of my iMac every night, going on and off the tangent and in and out of my stream of consciousness about the odd things I experienced in the city, the endless parade of pink elephants I saw everyday that no one seemed to bat an eyelid at. Though singing was what I wanted to do since a child and I always thought of myself as a singer first, in the past three years writing has taken over and, in the process, taken on a life of its own. I suppose things often happen when you least expect it. If self-indulgence is my favorite pastime, then serendipity must be the story of my life.

Since I started writing I have picked up a few new habits along the way. Because so much of writing is about reading and learning from what you read, each time I come across an interesting expression in a book or a quotable line from a movie, I will scramble to jot it down somewhere, before my 15 seconds of short-term memory run out. That explains why my desk is peppered with random scraps of paper with scribbling understood by no one else but me. The saying that “to a man carrying a hammer, everything looks like a nail” is an apt one for writing. At times it seems that even the most mundane of my daily experiences, from window shopping at Times Square to an argument with a minibus driver, is worthy of a blog entry. And because I never know when the next topic would come up or how long my creative juice would flow, I am known to get up in the middle of night and work my opposable thumbs on the Blackberry placed inches from my pillow.

I regard myself a perfectionist – a tattered copy of Strunk and White's The Elements of Style is never too far from my desk – and perfectionism begets revisionism. In the foreword to his famous sci-fi novel Brave New World, Aldous Huxley urged writers to “resist the temptation to wallow in artistic remorse” by revising their works to correct errors and defects. If serendipity is the story of my life, then chronic remorse must be my destiny. When it comes to editing my writing, I take notes from, of all things, instructions on the back of a popcorn box: stop the microwave when popping slows to two to three seconds between pops. In other words, I would keep editing until the revisions whittle down to a half dozen changes between versions. Until then the article is deemed unfit for public consumption, for there is always a better way of saying the same thing and what seems brilliant today can look painfully tedious the next day. Famous writers have their famous writing habits: Ernest Hemingway insisted on writing 500 words a day and Truman Capote was known to write lying down. I, on the other hand, choose to write the way microwave popcorn is made. It goes to show that every writer, even the most inexperienced and unskilled, is entitled to his own quirks.

As much as reading has made me a better writer, writing has made me a better reader, by heightening my senses to appreciate all the hard work that goes into crafting a sentence or making a scene come alive. All the secrets to be unlocked and the treasures to be hunted on a single page. Writing has also given me new found respect for those who make it their living. For the price of a single drink at a bar, the reader reaps what has taken the author years or even a lifetime to put together. Worse, half the book proceeds is kept by the bookstore and half of what remains goes to the publisher. Perhaps that’s why writer as a profession commands so little respect in Asia. In Hong Kong, where “freelance” often means “free,” whenever I tell people I am an author, they respond with anything from mild acknowledgment to complete disregard. But the moment I mention I am a lawyer by day, I am hit back with a sudden burst of interest. “So what kind of law do you practice?” he asks, while checking out the watch I am wearing. Respect and social acceptance, for what they are worth, are things I would have to give up alongside a comfortable living, if I were to quit my day job to write full-time. How many of us are brave enough to make those sacrifices?

Looking back on the past hundred blog posts, I see the best and also the worst. My two-part series Kowloon Complex, for instance, earned me a slew of scathing comments, with one reader branding me “prejudiced, pretentious and stupid.” Experiences such as that taught me not only to take criticisms as readily as I dish them out, but also to examine my views and listen to those of others. And listen I do. Because readers are slow to take to my political commentaries, such as my responses to the express rail link saga and the five constituencies resignation (五區總辭) campaign, I now make a conscious effort to steer away from those subject matters and focus on topics that interest both writer and reader. Over time, I have learned that my most popular articles are also my most personal, like Ah Gah and The Hill about my childhood growing up with my sister Margaret and A Tale of Three Cities when my comparison of Hong Kong to Shenzhen and Macao prompted me to reflect on who we are and where we are heading. Both articles made it into my first book and remain my favorite ones to date.

Writing satisfies my narcissistic tendencies and scratches my obsessive-compulsive itch. But it also makes me a better person. Whenever I write, I seem to take on a different persona, one that is far more reasoned and reflective than I otherwise am. The transformation both surprises me and delights me. In time I realize that writing provides a conduit to a good side in me I didn’t know existed. And if there is one thing, a single thing, that I would like my reader to take away from my blog, it is reflection. Before accepting someone’s opinion or forming your own, whether it is the right of foreign domestic workers to apply for permanent residence or the decision to visit northern Japan after the radiation leaks, ask a few questions and think the issues over. You may look to a friend, a co-worker, The Apple Daily or even my blog for a point of view, but ultimately it is you who must decide what position to take. Healthy skepticism and constant reflection are the stuff that separates the independent thinker from the intellectual couch potato. In a city inundated with half-truths, pseudo-science and outright lies, it is, as philosopher John Stuart Mill once said, better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. So keep reading and keep reflecting!

Unfaithfully Yours 愛偷吃的男人

2011-11-16T16:37:00.021+08:00

What do Bill Clinton, Tiger Woods and Arnold Schwarzenegger have in common? They are all American icons who use their celebrity status to make our world a better place. Yawn. They all have promising young daughters who are destined to follow in daddy’s footsteps and achieve great things. Yawn again. As if the column title hasn’t already given away the answer, all three of them are powerful men who, at the pinnacle of their careers, put everything they had on the line and cheated on their wives.

For every Bill, Tiger and Arnold, there are hundreds other famous men who got caught with their hands in the cookie jar. At times it seems that the more successful a man gets, the more willing he is to throw away everything for a fleeting moment of carnal pleasure. According to a 1950s study on American men by the Kinsey Institute, there is a one in two chance of indiscretion occurring during marriage. In the Information Age where you can download free porn, order Viagra and hook up with an old flame all at the click of a mouse while the wife is asleep in the other room, that estimate seems a wee bit conservative.

So why do famous men cheat? The notion itself seems to defy the basic principles of economics. Common sense tells us that those who have little or nothing to lose – the loser dude in a trailer park – would be more inclined to cheat. But studies suggest just the opposite. A recent New York Times article cites evidence that people who have more to lose are more prone to risky and self-destructive behavior. In much the same way best-paid executives are more likely to engage in insider trading, powerful men are more likely to stray. Is it ego, arrogance or the delusion of grandeur that makes men in high places cheat? Or does life on the fast lane demand a dose of clandestine thrill to spice things up? After all, high-stake politics and billion-dollar acquisitions can get a little stodgy if you do it day after day. We can psycho-analyze the cheating man all we want, but at the end of the day it might all come down to one word: probability.

Remember your high school science? Chemical reactions occur when particles collide. We all know that. We also know that only a fraction of these collisions can cause a chemical reaction. Increasing the concentration of the reactant particles, scientists argue, leads to more collisions and therefore more successful collisions, ultimately raising the rate of reaction. This Collision Theory, first proposed by German chemist Max Trautz in 1916, is seemingly applicable today in explaining why men who have it all are more likely to lose it all. Fact: successful men meet more women of higher caliber than the average Joe. Fact: women throw themselves at these men like moths to the flame and lemmings to the cliff. Result: more collisions, more chemical reactions. It is that simple.

If an eighth-grader understands this, so do politicians. That's why the sex snare remains the weapon of choice for politicians on the look-out for ways to destroy their opponents. Better still, the smarter the target is, the harder he falls. When the scandal of former chief of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Dominique Strauss-Kahn first broke in May this year, many in France suspected that the hoopla with the hotel maid was but an elaborate set-up to sabotage Strauss-Kahn’s bid for the French presidency. Within a week after his arrest, the disgraced 62-year-old bowed to mounting political pressure and resigned from the IMF. Even after he was cleared of all criminal charges five months later, he threw in the towel and walked away from the presidential race. Whether he was guilty or not, the damage was already done. The trap of infidelity did it again.

The epic fall of tragic heroes in the likes of Strauss-Kahn is not limited to the West. Here in Hong Kong, there is no shortage of public figures who have rolled the dice in the underworld of adultery and lost. From actor-comedian Jackie Chan to property tycoon Walter Kwok and even our chief executive heir-apparent Henry Tang, these powerful men have been known to keep mistresses, fornicate with movie starlets, impregnate domestic caregivers, and, in the case of one Stanley Ho, did all of the above. In truth, men looking for a booty call in Hong Kong are spoiled for choice, whether it is a guys' night out on Lockhart Road or a day-trip to nearby Macau or Shenzhen. For those who prefer to go off the grid, there is that three-day golf trip to Hainan Island where a visit to the massage parlor gets them much more than a backrub.

In a city known for materialism, even torrid affairs can’t escape a bit of commercialization. In Hong Kong, money is always part of the equation, even – or perhaps especially – when it comes to love and lust. Just a few weeks ago, a bar hostess was sentenced to seven years in jail for blackmailing a wealthy businessman, referred to as Mr. X by the local press. When their four-month affair ended on a bitter note, the accused demanded a whopping HKD140 million (USD18 million) in “break-up fees” and threatened to murder Mr. X and his family if he didn’t pay up. After the 1987 thriller Fatal Attraction scared the pants off male movie-goers around the world, random men reportedly went up to Glenn Close, who starred as the bunny-killing mistress Alex Forrester, and thanked her for saving their marriage. It looks like Hong Kong has just found its very own Alex Forrester to keep married men in line.

Male infidelity is a phenomenon that transcends time and culture. The question of why-men-cheat is a horse that has been beaten to death by psychologists, feminists and day-time talk show hosts. Entire shelves of books have been written about it. Ah yes, women are from Venus and men are, well, just pigs. Biologists tell us that male primates are hunter-gatherers biologically programmed to maximize sexual partners. Female primates, on the other hand, are nurturers who stay in the cave and raise the young. That’s why men and women behave so differently when it comes to sex. But does it excuse us or condemn us? And when the seven year itch creeps up, are men supposed to scratch it or ignore it until it festers into a flesh-eating ulcer? To all of that, America’s leading sex columnist Dan Savage offers yet another perspective and a badly-needed glimmer of hope. The writer urges all of us to re-examine the institution of marriage and stop pretending to be something we are not: monogamous. Couples should be upfront about their sexual needs, Savage argues, and once in a while they should let a bit of air out. That means an occasional stray by either spouse, if handled with honesty and an open mind, can be a good thing. Perhaps the guy has a point. Perhaps marriage is more than strict rules and prohibitions.

If all of that sounds a bit radical to you, that’s because it is. So before you rush home tonight and suggest an open relationship to your girlfriend at the dinner table like the characters in the Farrelly brothers’ comedy Hall Pass, you are well advised to take Savage’s advice with a pinch of salt and keep that wishful thinking to yourself. When it comes to the “M” word – be it marriage or monogamy – remember what a wise man once said: freedom comes not from the absence of restraint but the presence of discipline. Or was it a woman who said that?

* * *

This article previously appeared in the November/December 2011 issue of MANIFESTO magazine under Jason Y. Ng's column "The Urban Confessional."

Still Work to Be Done 同志仍須努力

2011-10-25T21:51:00.022+08:00

This past October 10 marked the centennial anniversary of the Xinhai Revolution (辛亥革命). Exactly a hundred years ago, rebels led a successful uprising against the Qing Court and toppled millennia of imperial rule in China. It was arguably the most pivotal moment in all of Chinese history. But pivotal as it was, the 100th anniversary went by in Hong Kong just like any other day. I asked some of my gweilo friends about it and none of them had heard of Xinhai. Even among the local Chinese, the word was little more than a vapid factoid they once memorized for history class but bears no relevance to their lives. Worse, the anniversary was upstaged by Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who had died just a few days earlier. When it comes to vying for attention, our Founding Fathers, for all the sacrifices they made and all the blood spilled, were no match against a gadget wizard in a black turtleneck.

To set things right, we start with a quick refresher on modern Chinese history. We go back to the turn of the 20th Century, a time when Qing Dynasty was dying a slow death from a double dose of domestic decline and foreign invasions, resulting in a series of humiliating and extremely costly military defeats. Across China, rebels and patriots in the likes of Dr. Sun Yat-sen (孫中山) turned their frustration into action and organized underground militias against the Manchurian establishment. After a dozen failed campaigns in Canton and Sichuan, the revolutionaries recovered and regrouped, and the movement began to gain traction. On October 10, 1911 (the Year of Xinhai under the lunar calendar), while Dr. Sun was still in exile in Denver, Colorado, rebels successfully overran the Qing army in Wuchang (武昌). A few weeks later on Christmas Day, Dr. Sun returned to China and was elected provisional president of the Republic of China. As is the case for all revolutions, toppling the corrupt regime was the easy part, while that far more critical question of “what happens the day after?” loomed large. Surely enough, the fledgling republic quickly plunged into an era of bloody warlord struggles, followed by an even bloodier civil war between the two dominant parties: the Communists and the Kuomintang (KMT). The Reds eventually prevailed and founded the People’s Republic on the Mainland in 1949, sending the KMT fleeing to Taiwan. Although Xinhai was every bit as momentous as the French Revolution and the American War of Independence, it wasn’t nearly as successful in establishing a new, sustainable regime. Ultimately Xinhai failed to deliver what Dr. Sun had intended for the New China: democracy and constitutional reform.

* * *

I spent this past weekend in Taipei, a city where the red-and-blue republic flag still flies high and the portrait of Dr. Sun hangs proudly in every classroom and government office. Taiwan might have been a renegade island in the eyes of communist China, but the country saw its first democratically elected president some 27 years ago and enjoyed decades of political modernization and economic prosperity. The island state is as close as it gets to the kind of republic envisaged by the Founding Fathers, albeit on a much smaller scale. Being in the capital city in October 2011, exactly a century after the birth of the republic, and seeing street signs with such names as Minzu (民族; nationalism), Minquan (民權; democracy) and Minsheng (民生; welfare) – pillars of Dr. Sun’s famous Three Principle of the People (三民主義) political philosophy – ignited a sort of renaissance in me and compelled me to raid the history section of the enormous Eslite Bookstore (誠品書店) with revolutionary fervor. It also inspired a few personal thoughts along the way.

First off, I was struck by how prominently Hong Kong figured during the revolution. Our city, geographically miniscule and historically insignificant, played an indispensible role in everything from fund-raising for firearms to recruitment of new members and harboring fugitives wanted by Qing police. Dr. Sun, a native Cantonese speaker himself, attended the Hong Kong College of Medicine on Hollywood Road and held secret meetings in SoHo and Sheung Wan with fellow revolutionaries. The faraway British colony provided a kind of catalyst for the movement no other Chinese city could provide. I realized that every day I get to walk on the same streets and climb up and down the same slopes once frequented by heroes and martyrs, as Hong Kong took its place in history as the Cradle of Xinhai. It made me very proud.

But my pride for Hong Kong was quickly replaced by a deep sense of bewilderment. On the evening news, I saw all levels of the Mainland government putting on great fanfare to celebrate the centennial anniversary. The city of Wuhan (武漢) alone reportedly spent RMB130 million (USD14 million) to build a brand new museum to commemorate the Wuchang Uprising. Why China would go through all that trouble, when everything that Dr. Sun and the revolution stood for – political reform, civil disobedience and popular uprisings – is precisely what authorities are busy snuffing out today. Perhaps Beijing too recognized the irony and in an attempt to cure the contradiction, they did what any autocrat would have done: rewrite history to suit their need. Overnight, Dr. Sun was rebranded as the avatar of economic growth and social harmony, a cult figure somewhere between Deng Xiao-ping and Confucius. His distinctly Western political values were stripped and handily replaced with the usual Communist refrain. Dr. Sun would have rolled over in his grave. It made me very sad.

Then there is Taiwan, poor Taiwan. 60 years after the KMT’s defeat, the island state is still denied its sovereign status, joining Palestine and Vatican City as countries perennially snubbed by the United Nations. Plans for China and Taiwan to organize joint celebration of the anniversary were scrapped last minute because officials on both sides failed to agree on one simple fact: does the Republic of China still exist today? The Mainlanders argue that the republic died in 1949 when the renegades retreated to Taiwan, while the Taiwanese insist that it is alive and kicking (and hence the initials R.O.C. in the country’s long form name). Both states now claim Dr. Sun to be their founding father and both consider themselves the rightful successors to the Xinhai Revolution. So who is right and who is the schoolyard bully? All we need to do is ask ourselves, were Dr. Sun to be around today, which side of the strait would he have picked to represent his vision of the New China? And the answer is pretty obvious. But just the same, the bully stumps his feet and waves his fist, for reasoned debate is not his thing. And so Taiwan's identity crisis continues. It made me feel very sorry for them.

A lot has happened this October. Muammar Gaddafi, the man who wrote the instruction manual on how to rule with an iron fist, was killed by his subjects emboldened by the Arab Spring. The 69-year-old dictator was captured like a common cur and died the death of a street rat. As history is being written in the Middle East, half way around the world the “Occupy Wall Street” movement against the growing wealth gap in America took the nation by surprise and sparked similar protests in over 900 cities worldwide. In Hong Kong, the “Occupy Central” campaign provided the post-80s generation with a welcome outlet to vent their frustration toward corporatocracy and social injustice. Revolutions are in vogue, and the people’s power is on the rise. In his will, Dr. Sun wrote his famous last words: the revolution has yet to succeed, there’s still work to be done. A century after the day that changed China forever, the twin political goals of democracy and constitutional reform still elude our country. In this global climate ripe with revolutionary zeal, I have a dream that when history calls, Hong Kong will answer it the same way it did a hundred years ago and do us proud once again.

The Moose, The Gap and the Apple 麋、溝、蘋

2011-09-23T23:00:00.035+08:00

Determined to reclaim Hong Kong from European powers, the Americans are sounding their battle cry and marching into the city to pomp and circumstance. I am not talking about the type of invasion unleashed on Qing China by the Imperial West; I am referring to the almost contemporaneous arrivals of heavyweight American retailers in our city beginning this fall. Abercrombie & Fitch, Gap and the Apple Store are all set to squeeze into the city’s already crowded retail space, promising to shake up our cityscape and transform our shopping routine. The good news is that we no longer need to travel to Tokyo or New York to get our hands on anything with a moose logo. The bad news is, any Joe Blow – make that Joe Ho – in Hong Kong will soon be able to walk into these new stores and walk out with the same pair of jeans you had once begged a co-worker to bring back from the States. Globalism can be such sweet sorrow.

Not since the coming of European apparel giants Zara in 2004 and H&M in 2007 has there been so much buzz about casual wear. Earlier this year, Abercrombie & Fitch (A&F) broke commercial real estate records by agreeing to pay a whopping HK$7 million (US$900,000) per month to rent two floors at the iconic Pedder Building, replacing long-time tenant Shanghai Tang. The store is slated to open early 2012, but A&F’s first foray into the Greater China region has already roused local shoppers into a tizzy. And for good reason. Visiting an A&F store is like walking into the middle of a rave party, where head-bobbing, hip-swaying sales clerks blur the line between runway models and Greek Gods; where the good, the bad and the narcissistic succumb to the deafening dance beat and empty their wallets willingly at the under-lit cash registers. During my New York years, I would make regular pilgrimages to the retail temple on Fifth Avenue just to soak up the other-worldly shopping experience. I would buy something, anything, just to get my hands on a shopping bag racier that most soft porn.

But for all its glamour and godliness, A&F has had more than a few brushes with the Asian community. Under the guise of a so-called “Look Policy,” the all-American, lily-white label was accused of workplace discrimination by banishing minority store clerks to non-customer facing tasks. In 2002, a serious lapse in judgment landed A&F in the center of a nationwide controversy, when they put out a t-shirt design featuring Chinese cartoon characters with stereotypical slanted eyes emblazoned with the slogan “Two Wongs Don’t Make It White.” The t-shirts were quickly pulled from the shelves but the damage was done; and the label became a perennial stable for Saturday night sketch comedy on American television. It remains to be seen, however, whether Hong Kong shoppers will be more forgiving and forgetful, and take the label’s checkered past in stride.

Another American household name in casual wear is expected to open in Hong Kong this November. After Queen’s Theatre closed in 2007, Luk Hoi Tung Building (陸海通大廈) in the heart of Central has been boarded up for an overhaul. The redevelopment was barely finished when Gap swooped in and snatched up two floors of retail space. Next to Calvin Klein and across the street from Coach, the new location promises to make the American retail royalty feel right at home.

For half a century, Gap Inc. – which also owns Banana Republic and Old Navy – dominated all segments of the American apparel market. In the U.S., Gap stores are more than just a place for ringed tees and khaki slacks. They are urban oases where citizens take a breather from the daily grind and blow off steam with a healthy dose of retail therapy. Walking on the oak hardwood floor, rummaging through the piles of feel-good fashion designed to hide the imperfect body, and invariably ending up at the discount rack where prices are slashed by up to 60%, can really hit the spot. I still miss those lazy Sunday afternoons browsing in the midtown store on 42nd Street and Broadway the way I would drop in to see an old friend. But my long wait is finally over.

2011 will mark the year when Gap re-enters Hong Kong, after an unsuccessful stint in the 1990s that left the retailer with red ink and injured pride. Vanity sizing might have something to do with Gap’s failure to connect with Hong Kongers, for its catalogue was catered primarily to the ever-expanding waistline in America, callously snubbing the petite Asians and ignoring our insatiable appetite for all things slim-fit. This time around, however, with the influx of Mainland Chinese visitors willing to drop serious dough in exchange for a piece of Americana, Gap’s second act is shaping up to be a big hit, enough to make up for slumping sales back home.

From fashion to nifty gadgets, the American retail invasion knows no bounds. Apple, that lovable maker of all things cool, whose very name is a term of endearment, is scheduled to make an official landfall in Hong Kong at the upscale IFC Mall this month and at the spanking new Hysan Place in Causeway Bay by mid-2012. Because their stores are designed with every bit the same perfectionism that goes into their electronic products, it is not surprising that the bill for the renovation alone is running up to HK$160 million (US$20 million) per store.

For years, Apple products have been the birthday gift de rigueur for all ages, and the Apple Store has become the 21^st Century version of the candy store with walls of life-changing gadgets. That’s why every holiday season, shoppers and staff (called “Geniuses” and “Creatives”) pack the flagship store on Fifth Avenue, turning the famous glass cube into a man-trapping fish tank. Today, Apple boasts four locations in Beijing and Shanghai, all of them among the highest grossing stores worldwide. The two new stores in bustling Hong Kong are certain to earn new superlatives by luring local iPhanatics and the growing middle class from nearby Chinese cities. What is uncertain, however, is the fate of those authorized Apple dealers scattered around the city after the real deal comes to town.

The Hong Kong retail market is not for the faint of heart. Savvy and deep-pocketed as these first-rate American retailers are, they will eat humble pie as they come face to face with the city’s twin evils: sky-high rents and rampant piracy. According to a recent survey by CB Richard Ellis, retail rents in Hong Kong rose nearly 50% compared to last year, placing the city in second place -- ahead of Sydney and London -- among the world’s most expensive retail bases. It makes you wonder how many tight-fit Henley sweatshirts and vintage straight-leg chinos they would have to sell to turn a profit. And what happens when greedy landlords jack up the rent in a couple of years?

And that’s not all. These foreign labels, despite their best efforts in brand protection, will bear the full brunt of China’s lax copyright enforcement. With Shenzhen just a 45-minute truck ride away, new designs and the latest innovations can be replicated and distributed in a matter of days, from the products themselves right down to the shopping bags and authenticity cards. Even an entire Apple Store can be cloned, as bloggers exposed one particularly uncanny replica in the Chinese city of Kunming a few weeks ago. All the media fanfare resulting from the store openings in Hong Kong will only rekindle demand for knock-offs and copycats in the region. When that happens, it will bring international attention to one of Hong Kong’s many contradictions: the co-existence of the first world problem of over-valued real property and the third world problem of undermined intellectual property.

* * *

This article previously appeared in the September/October 2011 issue of MANIFESTO magazine.

I Was There When the Sky Fell 當日我在場

2011-09-01T02:33:00.030+08:00

The No.2 train slowed to a halt. Inside the subway car, the overhead florescent lights went out for a moment and flickered back to life. The middle-aged Caucasian man standing next to me heaved an impatient sigh, bemoaning the frequent interruptions of an antiquated transport system. Suddenly the train doors parted and the crackling PA system issued a dispassionate instruction: an emergency has been reported in Lower Manhattan, all passengers must exit now.

I climbed two flights of stairs and came out of the 14th Street station. It was one of those beautiful September mornings in New York. Cloudless blue skies and a few falling leaves. I looked to the south and there it was, the reason why my train had stopped: plumes of heavy smoke were billowing out of the World Trade Center. I walked into a nearby Citibank branch to find out what had happened. “Some fool flew their plane right into the building, sweetheart,” the heavyset African American woman paraphrased what she had heard from the radio. In my head I had this image of a spoiled brat flying daddy's biplane and accidentally slamming it into a building. Now what am I supposed to do with my plane ticket? I grumbled to myself as I tried to call Mei Lin to cancel our lunch. My friend and I were supposed to meet up on Wall Street after I finished my errand at the American Airlines ticketing office at the WTC. But my cell phone had no signal. It wasn’t my day.

By the time I walked out of the bank onto the streets, one of the Twin Towers was gone and the other one was burning furiously. Convinced that it was just the angle that put one tower behind the other, I walked from one side of Seventh Avenue to the other to get a different vantage point. That’s when I noticed that every car as far as the eye could see had stopped, and the drivers were all standing in the middle of the streets listening to the car radio. Approximately an hour ago, two commercial airliners crashed into the World Trade Center. The South Tower has collapsed, casualties unknown at this point. I realized how wrong the bank teller and I both were: this was no accident. If I were in a Hollywood disaster movie, that would be the moment when the soundtrack came on and the brass instruments beat out a heavy chord. I looked around and saw people crowding around at every public phone, for cell phones were as good as dead. I rushed back into the bank and asked to use its land line. The Hispanic woman waiting in front of me stared unseeing at a blank wall, mouthing ay-dios-mio, ay-dios-mio non-stop. 20 minutes later I finally got to call Mei Lin, but I still couldn’t get through to her. By the time I came back out on the streets again, the North Tower had also fallen. The World Trade Center was gone, destroyed, erased from the skyline. There were simultaneous attacks on Washington D.C. and the Pentagon. The car radio continued to deliver bad news, and the situation got worse with each report. There were now gaggles of people on the streets, steadily walking to the north, away from the suddenly unrecognizable Lower Manhattan. My survival instinct kicked in and I made a quick detour to a corner store where I bought two bottles of water and a few Snickers bars. And I began walking north, like everyone else.

* * *

In spring 2001, I accepted an offer from a reputable New York law firm for an associate position, not bad for a Canadian law school grad whose knowledge of American law was limited to a course in U.S. constitutional law. On September 9, I arrived in the Big Apple to spend two weeks looking for a place to live. On the second day of my apartment hunt, my broker found me a one-bedroom in a pre-war walk-up, not bad for a budding lawyer with massive student loans. I was to sign the lease three days later, on September 13, at the broker’s office in midtown Manhattan. Having accomplished my mission well ahead of schedule, I had no reason to hang around in New York and risk over-staying my welcome – at the time I was crashing rent-free at my friend Mei Lin’s apartment in Queens – and so I decided to fly back to Toronto a week early. Since every major airlines had an office at the World Trade Center, I thought it was only appropriate to pay a visit to the famous skyscrapers – designed by Japanese architect Minoru Yamasaki (山崎實) and known for their stunning symmetry and understated grace – first thing Tuesday morning to change my flight reservation. And since Mei Lin’s office was just across the street, I figured I would take her out to lunch to thank her for her hospitality. That series of unremarkable decisions was what put me on the southbound No.2 train at 9:00am on that fateful day. If only I had left my friend’s apartment half an hour earlier, I might have been buried under 220 floors of concrete and steel, and my name might have been inscribed around the edges of the 9-11 Memorial along with the names of the other 2,975 victims. The extra 30 minutes of snoozing on my alarm clock had probably saved my life.

* * *

I continued my trek up Sixth Avenue. There were now thousands in the Great Migration to the north, some were sobbing but no one made a sound. Silence was the security blanket that wrapped around us and allowed us to keep it together until we found safer shelter. Mei Lin’s apartment was on the other side of the East River and so my only option was my other friends Ivan and Sarah, who lived in the Upper East Side on 82nd Street and York Avenue. But that was 70 blocks away, or approximately five miles northeast of where I was. I had just passed Madison Square Park when I spotted a northbound city bus on the corner of 24th Street taking passengers. I ran toward it and became one of the 60 or so lucky souls on board a bus designed to carry half that number. Some of the people who couldn’t get on became agitated and started to pounce on both sides of the bus, causing it to rock from side to side. The more aggressive ones tried to climb on top of the vehicle. I was scared out of my wits, for right in front of my eyes common sense had clicked off and lawlessness had taken over. An old woman finally cried from her seat, “let’s go, please, let’s go!” Then the bus started moving slowly, heading north, avoiding pedestrians. Along the way, traffic lights became irrelevant, as did all the banks, furniture shops, pizza joints and other traces of civilization. When we reached the 42nd Street intersection, a pair of police officers stopped us in our tracks. There was a bomb in Grand Central Station, everyone get off the bus right now! The B-word set off an immediate stampede and everyone started to push their way off the bus and run for their lives. I ran as fast as I could, away from where the bomb was supposed to be, all the while hunkering down and holding on to my bag. It was a false alarm, but the evacuation left empty baby-strollers and shoes all over the streets. Right there and then I knew America was at war, and I was one of the city’s 8 million refugees.

Two hours later I arrived at Ivan and Sarah’s building. The security guard was long gone and I took the elevator straight up to their apartment. I rang the doorbell and Ivan, who didn’t even know I was in town, answered the door. “Come on in,” my friend urged, pulling me inside. On a day like this, a surprise visit from an unannounced guest needed no explanation or apology. Later that afternoon, another friend of the couple's showed up at the door and together we turned their Upper East Side apartment into a makeshift refugee camp for stranded visitors. All day, the four of us did nothing but watched CNN, alternating between gruesome footage of the plane crashes and gut-wrenching pleas from families searching for loved ones. All night, we felt the rumble of heavy dump trucks going up and down the island carrying debris from Ground Zero. We didn’t talk much, for one of us would start to cry each time we attempted a conversation. 48 hours went by just like that. By the end of the week, I decided to take a 12-hour train ride back to Toronto instead of waiting indefinitely for the airports to reopen. But on September 13, the day before I left the city, I did the unexpected. I kept the appointment with my broker and signed a two-year lease when all of his other clients had backed out and walked away. Three weeks later, I returned from Toronto and moved into my small one-bedroom apartment, the place I would call home for the next five years.

It is said that everyone remembers where they were on September 11 and every New Yorker has a 9/11 story to tell. I have told mine to friends and family dozens of times, an account of events that requires neither embellishment nor dramatization. I wasn't covered in ash while running away from the collapsing towers, nor did I witness trapped office workers jump out of the windows and pulverize in front of my eyes. 14th Street was still a way from the Twin Towers. Nevertheless, the day was without a doubt the single most terrifying experience I ever had. It is also said that once bitten, twice shy. Even today, ten years after the day that changed the world forever, every loud bang or ambulance siren I hear raises the specter of another terrorist attack and makes my heart skip a beat. And each time I take off my shoes at airport security, lose interest in a history book after realizing it was written before 2001 or find myself taking the office fire drills much more seriously, I am reminded of the sweeping and permanent impact the event has on our daily lives. But if September 11 was the scariest day of my life, then September 12 would very well be my proudest. Say what you will about the Americans, but I have never seen a more united and compassionate people than those I encountered in the weeks and months following the attacks. From Harlem to Greenwich Village, Brooklyn Heights to the South Bronx, there were donations of every kind: money, blood, food, clothing and toys for the thousands of children orphaned by the attacks. Sanity and civility were restored almost immediately, and the early moments of panic and despair quickly gave way to kindness, gumption and hope. It was New York's finest hour and being a part of it filled me with complicated joy and infinite pride. That's why I decided to sign the lease and move to the city ten years ago. And it remains one of the best decisions I have ever made.

Pirates and Hidden Treasures 海盜和寶藏

2011-08-25T01:40:00.060+08:00

Six miles off the southwestern shore of Hong Kong Island is a piece of rock smaller than New York’s Central Park. Shaped like a dumbbell and separated from Ap Lei Chau by a narrow channel of water, Cheung Chau – or literally Long Island in Cantonese – was once a strategic hideout for ferocious pirates who ruled the Canton coasts. At the turn of the 19th Century, these Pirates of the South China Sea, our own versions of Jack Sparrow and Captain Hook, terrorized seafarers and threatened the Qing courts. The most prominent of them all, Cheung Po Tsai (張保仔), famously bisexual and captain of a vast and formidable fleet, was a staple in local legends and myths. With all that eye makeup and flailing hand gestures, Johnny Depp might have had a certain Chinese pirate in mind when crafting his character.

Two weeks ago, my brothers and I decided to take the 30-minute ferry ride for a two-day getaway in Cheung Chau. The island has long been a favorite “staycation” destination among citizens tired of airport checkpoints and crowded flights. With a thriving population of 23,000, it is one of the few outlying islands in Hong Kong still able to sustain an active local community. There are no double-decker buses, no taxis and no motor vehicles of any sorts, save for a few miniature ambulances and police cars specially made to zoom through narrow alleyways. On the crowded yet surprisingly serene island, close your eyes and all you will hear are bicycle bells and restaurant crockery. Up the hill and down the street, flare your nose and you will smell nothing but sea brine, barbequed squids and burning incense. That’s why every city slicker ferried to the island will invariably ask themselves one simple question: can I possibly retire here?

Cheung Po Tsai was only 21 years old when he took over the pirating business from his adopted parents. During the short period between 1807 and 1810 – the year he capitulated to the Qing government and became an imperial navy colonel, Cheung pillaged and plundered towns and villages along the Canton coastal area, including Hong Kong and Macau. At the pinnacle of his pirating career, Cheung commanded a fleet of 600 ships and a private army of 40,000 men. Recognizing Hong Kong’s strategic value to his growing enterprise, the Pirate Lord established outposts in Stanley, Chung Hom Kok, Lantau Island and Cheung Chau. In the eyes of the Qing government, however, piracy threatened not only lucrative trades but also the ever-fragile international comity. And because the imperial courts were no match for Cheung and his fearless Red Flag Clan (紅旗幫), they turned to the warships and cannons of the Portuguese and British navies. Nevertheless, Cheung’s sea-savvy and firepower allowed him to out-maneuver the coalition forces at every turn. Whenever the pirates were pushed back by their pursuers, they sought refuge in the nooks and crannies along the South China Coast. The Cheung Po Tsai Cave on the southwestern tip of Cheung Chau is one of the more intact of these hiding places and is now a popular spot for treasure hunters in search of hidden fortunes.

My brothers and I tottered off the wobbling ferry and was immediately greeted by a line of street vendors hawking village lodges and local snacks. Like a time capsule, Cheung Chau has preserved bits and pieces of Hong Kong’s postwar city life. Everywhere on the island, we saw men of all ages sitting on the sidewalk chatting about nothing and everything; children on their rusty bicycles chasing stray dogs from one end of the island to another. Along the shoreline, fishermen dried their daily catch on wicker trays in the blazing sun, while the piercing sounds of Cantonese opera blasted from a distant radio. Taking refuge from the punishing summer heat, I walked into a mom-and-pop zaap for po (雜貨鋪; variety store) looking for a straw hat. The shopkeeper disappeared into the back of the store and re-emerged a minute later with a half-dozen designs for me to consider. After a long, unrushed process of deliberation, I walked out with a fedora hat for all of HK$32 (US$4). Thanks to its relative isolation from the urban populations, Cheung Chau has been spared from the fire of the retail rental market that has scorched the rest of Hong Kong. As a result, stores and restaurants on the island still operate under much the same business model as they did in the 50s and 60s. Without a six-figure monthly rent beating down on them, retailers on the island can afford to stock more creatively and sell less aggressively. Elsewhere in the city, however, the very idea of a corner store has all but disappeared from the retail lexicon.

From the son of a penniless Cantonese fisherman to the reigning chief of one of the biggest pirate clans, Cheung Po Tsai had a colorful personal life to match his professional achievements. He was just 15 when he was abducted by notorious pirate Cheng I (鄭一) and his wife Lady Cheng, a former prostitute. The childless couple formally adopted Cheung as their son, but it was believed that Cheng I kept the teenage boy, a positive Adonis, as his lover. Their love affair went on for six years until Cheng I drowned in a typhoon in 1807. After his beloved’s untimely death, young Cheung transferred his love to the widowed wife and married Lady Cheng, his adopted mother. The complicated love triangle, unconventional and bold even by today’s standard, allowed Cheung Po Tsai to inherit the family fortune and eventually take over the Red Flag Clan. As it were, the young pirate owed his meteoric rise in the underworld of piracy to his pursuit of free love and disdain for social norms. In doing so Cheung became the protagonist of the kind of torrid romance novel that would make a preacher blush.

After finishing lunch at a local seafood restaurant, we walked half a mile to a rental shop where we each got a bicycle to seek out the island’s many sights. Apart from the famous cave, Cheung Chau is known for its annual festival of Tai Ping Tsing Chiu (太平清醮), once a ritual to ward off plagues and now a celebration of a time-honored tradition. The festivities culminate with an eye-popping parade of children dressed up as folk heroes while balancing on a pole, and end with a heart-stopping series of bun snatching contests (搶包山) held at midnight. Besides these tourist attractions, however, Cheung Chau has earned a rather curious reputation among Hong Kongers. The island has long been the venue of choice for young boys and girls to lose their innocence. As part of a best (or worst) kept secret in the city, teenagers would ask for permission to have a sleepover on the island with “school-friends,” and unsuspecting parents would most certainly answer “yes.” After a day of wholesome cycling and beach volleyball, hordes of hormone-raging adolescents check into affordable no-tell hotels, wash down peanuts and potato chips with a six-pack of Tsing Tao and lose themselves in a night of sexual free-for-all. Even though teenage intimacy is almost guaranteed to be disappointing (or anti-climactic I should say), it is a rite of passage that, without a place like Cheung Chau, would have been deferred to a later stage in life and become all the more traumatic.

From my room in the Warwick Hotel, I watched the moon-lit waves break toward the darkened beach. At the other end of the ocean, clusters of night lights in faraway Cyberport and Lamma Island twinkled like shimmering purple stars. In the depth of a late summer’s night, the sounds of bicycle bells and restaurant crockery had given way to the whispers of crashing waves and chattering crickets. Struck by the island’s serenity and last century’s charm, I came to realize that the real treasures of Cheung Chau are found not in ancient caves but in its laid-back, understated way of life. And while the legacy of Asia’s most famous pirate might have been his ferocity and charisma, it is his freewheeling spirits toward love and relationship that inspire coming-of-age children to welcome adulthood with a dose of defiance against accepted norms.

NEWS FLASH: HONG KONG State of Mind to be Reprinted 快訊:《香港情懷》再版

2011-08-20T15:26:00.007+08:00

Dear Readers,

My new book,
HONG KONG State of Mind,
was sold out within the
first seven months of release
and we are now reprinting.

A big THANK YOU to all my readers
and blog followers for their support!

The book is available in Hong Kong at:

Page One
Dymocks
Bookazine
G.O.D. 住好啲
商務印書館
三聯書店
天地圖書 and
book kiosks at the HK Int'l Airport
and major hotels

Readers outside Hong Kong
can order it from:

www.amazon.com
www.amazon.co.uk
www.amazon.co.jp
www.blacksmithbooks.com

Support a local writer
and purchase a copy today!

What's Cooking - Part 3 今睌食乜餸-下卷

2011-07-31T00:35:00.000+08:00

In New York, there is an old joke that citizens keep their sweaters in the oven because they never ever cook. Hong Kongers would have loved to do the same, if only we had the space for an oven. The lack of a proper kitchen, the prevalence of domestic help and the ease of eating out have all conspired to make home cooking a vanishing art in the city. At times it seems like no one around us – other than those penny-pinching, foldable-cart-pushing see lai (師奶; middle-age housewives) – bothers to prepare a meal any more. Nor do we know how.

Cooking is time-consuming. In time-pressed Hong Kong where most worker-bees get home just before the 9:30 soap opera starts, banging and clanging in the kitchen is the last thing on our minds. From buying groceries to all that washing and chopping, frying and steaming, the whole production is guaranteed to take up the entire evening – time otherwise well spent slumping in front of the television with a bucket of fried chicken. And that doesn’t even include the time to do dishes, a chore so universally hated that marriages have been broken and children disowned over it. But if all that sounds like a lot of fuss just to feed an empty stomach, that seems to be the point. Home cooking is designed to slow you down, way down. It is a waiting game where more haste means less speed and the slow but sure wins the race. What’s more, it is the one aspect of your life where, unlike the workplace, effort and reward are positively correlated; and where, unlike personal relationships, you won’t get burned for following your heart instead of your head. In the end, the key ingredient of any home-cooked meal will always be an appreciative spouse who proclaims whatever put on the table the best food he (or she) has ever tasted and proceeds to clean up without being prompted.

Cooking is also expensive. Because few of us step into the kitchen much these days, when we finally decide to deign ourselves to cook something, it is often for a special occasion and accompanied with fanfare. Refusing to rough it with second grade ingredients, we turn to City Super, ThreeSixty and other gourmet grocery stores in the city. There, organic vegetables and prized meats are arranged in irresistible displays and tagged with eye-popping prices, not to mention the thousands of food miles they have logged having been flown in from Australia and The Netherlands. Even in more “everyday” supermarkets like Wellcome and Park’n Shop, rising food prices in China – the main source of our fresh produce – have pushed up the cost of cooking, making that take-out flyer from the neighborhood Chinese restaurant all the more enticing. Determined home cooks are therefore well served to practice that tried and tested Navy SEAL combat technique: adapt, improvise and overcome. Substitute broccoli for asparagus, replace scallops with diced chicken, and remember that white truffles are always optional. And as far as aphrodisiacs go, avocados work just as well as oysters.

Then there is the space issue. As a child I developed a mild phobia of the kitchen. The crammed space in our Tin Hau apartment was stuffy, greasy and fraught with perils. Scorching hot appliances, dripping condiment containers, window bars coated with grime, and the most frightening of all, dark crevices where tiny morsels of food were trapped and that devil’s own creation -- the giant cockroaches – lurked at all hours of the day. Growing up I always thought my mother was a brave woman for slaving away in the punishing room churning out meal after meal for a family of seven. Nowadays any real estate agent in the city would tell you that the newer the building the smaller the kitchen gets. For many local homes, it is a 15-square-foot telephone booth big enough to fit only one person at a time. Over time, what used to be the center of family life has degenerated into a glorified pantry where one does little more than boiling water for tea and instant noodles. The two-door refrigerator, the largest of all household appliances, is often expelled from the kitchen and banished to a lonely corner in the living room. It is one of the unique features of a true Hong Kong home.

I am lucky to have a big kitchen in my current apartment. The space allows me to have a proper oven for roasting and baking, and a dishwasher to take the most unpleasant part of cooking out of the equation. Like writing and photography, cooking is an important outlet for my creativity. And if preparing different dishes can be likened to taking pictures in exotic locations, then hosting a dinner party must be the equivalent of having my own photo exhibition. I know few things in life more pleasurable than opening my home to like-minded friends and spending the entire evening with home-cooked food, free-flowing wine, and conversation and laughs that last well into the night. Over the years I have learned that while fresh ingredients are a cook’s best friend, time is his worst enemy. Preparing a multi-course meal for a dinner party requires meticulous planning and impeccable timing. One wrong move and you can have an overcooked lamb rack and collapsed soufflés on your hands. Determined to make myself a consummate party host, I have taken cooking classes in New York, Bangkok and Hong Kong; I subscribe to food magazines and collect cookbooks from my travels; and at the risk of sounding like a complete nerd, I keep a book of my own recipes adopted from various sources and tailored to my needs. Julia Child would have been so proud.

Either by choice or by circumstance, few Hong Kong people get to experience the joy of cooking. The ever shrinking kitchen has dealt a serious blow to the domestic art form, as even the most eager of cooks would lose his appetite working in an ill-equipped and poorly-configured kitchen. In a city where time is money and space is gold, this critical life skill, this symbol of self-reliance and self-actualization, has fallen by the wayside. In the process we have also lost a powerful weapon in our romantic arsenal. While anyone can impress a loved one with an expensive watch or glittering jewelry – as we often do in a consumer-driven city, it is he (or she) who takes the trouble to study a recipe, practice it days in advance and whip up a feast that wins the heart. In fact, the shared experience of eating a home-cooked meal together is such an intimate proposition that it is often used as a metaphor for coitus in literature. All that suggests that by the end of the evening, the cook with the silly apron may get a lot more than just a kiss. And if that’s not enough incentive to pick up cooking, I don’t know what is.

Maid in Hong Kong - Part 2 女傭在港-下卷

2011-07-13T00:44:00.031+08:00

Loretta didn’t have any training in cooking or house-keeping. But what she did have was an eight-year-old son she needed to feed back in Quezon City.

Loretta got pregnant when she was 17 and soon thereafter her boyfriend disappeared. Left with no other choice, the single mother – a title she carried in her home town for eight years like a scarlet letter – turned her child over to his grandmother and headed to Hong Kong in 1986. In the past 25 years, she served twelve local Chinese families across the city. The Chans, the Wongs and the Leungs, Loretta had seen it all. For a quarter of a century, she cleaned the house, ate in the kitchen and listened to the radio by herself in the maid’s quarter. Most of her employers treated her well enough, though none of them ever considered her one of their own. Not once did any of the families invite her to eat with them, watch television with them, or simply have a chat with them. Loretta heard that back in the days those Chinese maids with their signature queues – amah (媽姐) as they were called – often became their employers’ best friends and confidants. When it came to Filipinas, however, a maid was always just a maid. She wondered if the complexion of her skin had anything to do with it. Or was it a trust issue? She was told that Chinese people, especially the Cantonese, had problems trusting people, even their own kind.

Speaking of trust, she remembered the Kos. She worked for them for only nine months in the late 1980s. Mrs. Ko wouldn’t believe a word her maid said; she never did. That’s why Loretta kept Mr. Ko's little secret all to herself. Until that moment she had only heard about these “incidents” at church gatherings; they were merely urban legends that swirled around within the community. But that one Saturday afternoon in 1989 changed all that. While Mrs. Ko was out, her husband summoned Loretta to his bedroom. He patted gently on the bed and signaled her to get closer. The 20-year-old pretended that nothing happened and went back to her ironing in the kitchen. In all, it happened three more times before Mr. Ko finally gave up. Each time he warned her not to say anything to his wife or else he would terminate her contract. The incidents frightened Loretta, for she no longer felt safe sharing an apartment with a man she didn’t trust, and with a woman who didn’t trust her. But more so the incidents angered her. She wasn’t so much angry with Mr. Ko – he was just a sad, sexually frustrated man – as she was angry with herself and her country, the Maid Capital of the World whose citizens were to be humiliated and taken advantage of at will.

Loretta now worked for an expat family. The Harrises treated their 50-year-old helper like an aunt and paid her $6,500 a month – the most she had made all this time in Hong Kong – plus a plane ticket and pocket money every year to visit her son in Manila. These days when Loretta was home alone, she would read a book or make small handicraft that she sold to other churchgoers on Sundays. She still chuckled when she thought about some of the silly things that young maids would do to kill time when their bosses weren’t around: trying on their name brand clothes, putting on their expensive make-up and taking naps in their beds. The more daring ones would bring men home – men they met in those sleazy bars on Lockhart Road – and have a jolly good time. All that, and so much more, observed by the veteran maid day after day for 25 years. New recruits who just arrived in the city would come to see Loretta, and the reigning matriarch would dispense the same advice: be patient. “If you let every little thing get to you, you won’t last a month in Hong Kong,” she told them before giving them a motherly hug.

Whenever Loretta looked in the mirror she was reminded of the long way she had come since her wayward teenage years. Three decades of hardship and loneliness chiseled her face. Despite all the years she had spent in the city, Hong Kong people were still a mystery to her. Why was it that they had everything in life but none of them seemed very happy? Back in the Philippines, people lived from hand to mouth and yet she heard more laugher there than anywhere in Hong Kong. But Loretta adored Hong Kong, and above all she admired its inexhaustible energy and the people’s endless desire to live a better life. By contrast, Filipinos were all too quick to accept the status quo, like her son, now 33, who was barely scraping by in Manila and still required his mother’s constant reminder to ask for more from life. If only the two peoples could balance each other out.

* * *

Anna hadn’t been in Hong Kong very long. The 23-year-old moved to the city less than two years ago. The bustling metropolis was a far cry from Aguso, the sleepy farming village in the province of Tarlac that she left behind, along with her father, two brothers and a fiancé named James. The young couple got engaged just weeks before she left the country. They knew the perils of a long-distance relationship, but they did it anyway. Nothing had to change, they thought. But everything did.

The spirited, college-educated Filipina remembered her first day in the city like it was just last week. Her mother, also a domestic helper in Hong Kong, picked her up from the airport – a blinding stadium of marble floor and steel beams – and took her to the employer’s home where they would both work. Anna was luckier than other Filipinas. Most of her friends, or “sisters” as they called each other, arrived in the dizzying city all by themselves, only to be greeted by some stranger sent by the agency. And the unlucky ones would get placed with a “terror employer” – that’s what they called abusive Chinese families that worked their helpers like slaves. But not Anna; she was with her mom. As the Airport Express train quietly zoomed through the jungle of high rise apartment buildings, she actually felt lucky to be a second generation maid.

Every Filipina who became a foreign domestic worker did it for a reason. For Anna’s mother, it was a necessity after her husband lost his mobility – and his job as a tricycle driver – to a polio affliction. For young Anna, it was an opportunity to re-acquaint herself with a mother who left home when her daughter was just six years old. Anna planned to stay in Hong Kong for only two years (the term of an employment contract), just long enough to get to know her mother and make a few extra bucks before she went home to James. And that’s how mother and daughter ended up working side-by-side, sharing a small air-conditionless room in a Midlevels apartment. Though it was good to have mom around, it wasn’t always easy to be in each other’s face every day and be treated like a child all over again.

But Anna’s plans were shattered six months into her new job. Back home, James got into a motorcycle accident and went through multiple surgeries. After months of recuperation, he suddenly broke off the engagement. His change of heart might have something to do with his head injuries, the doctor said. Or was it another woman? Anna would never know, for she was thousands of miles away and couldn’t leave the city during the first 18 months of employment. But it didn’t matter now. It was all in the past. “Life goes on and you must do something for yourself, Anna,” her mother nagged. “Anna, make as much money as you can and pay back your loans,” her mother nagged some more.

Yes, the loans – always the loans. Before moving to Hong Kong, Anna borrowed money to pay for her trip to Manila to get a work visa. All the people she had to pay just to get a piece of paper. She also bought new clothes and shoes for the move – even a maid ought to look good in Hong Kong, her friends told her. After James’ accident Anna took out a loan many times her monthly salary to pay for his surgeries and medication. Even now, every few months her cousins would need money for school and her uncle’s tricycle would require a repair. And so she took out more loans. That’s why she didn’t like going back home: too many relatives expecting too much handout. She wondered how they all got by before she had this job.

Anna now planned to renew her contract when it expired in the summer. There was no reason to go back to Aguso any more. There, people would pull her down like a ton of bricks, both financially and emotionally. “Life goes on and I must do something for myself,” she remembered her mother’s words. She wanted to move to Hawaii one day and go back to school. “To do that, I need to make as much money as I can and pay back my loans,” she remembered those other words too. All that happened had made Anna realize what a wise woman her mother was. In time she also realized that her mother had enormous grit, because wisdom alone was not enough to get through all those years working away from home, all by herself. Anna felt she had done what she came to Hong Kong to do. She finally knew her mother.

* * *

The profiles featured above are based on my interviews with two Filipinas who graciously agreed to have their stories told. During our conversations, their soft voices beat out detailed accounts of their hard lives. The stories are unique to Loretta and Anna, but they are also the stories of the 140,000 Filipinas working in Hong Kong. As such while each story is a portrait of one, it is a celebration of everyone. Their struggles, their dreams and their cheerful nature give the people unity, the sort of unity that makes them smile to each other on the streets and turns perfect strangers into instant friends. Their spirit is, and always will be, their greatest strength and most admirable quality.

Maid in Hong Kong - Part 1 女傭在港-上卷

2011-06-30T19:37:00.016+08:00

Few symbols of colonialism are more powerful and universally recognized than the live-in maid. From the British trading post in Bombay to the cotton plantation in Mississippi, images abound of the olive-skinned domestic worker buzzing around the house, cooking, cleaning, ironing and bringing ice-cold lemonade to her masters griping about the summer heat. It is therefore all the more ironic that, for a city that cowered to colonial rule for almost a century, Hong Kong should have the highest number of maids per capita in Asia. In our city of contradictions, neither a modest income nor a diminutive apartment is an obstacle for local families to hire a domestic helper and to live out the dream of a middle-class existence free of chores and errands.

On any given Sunday or public holiday, migrant domestic workers carpet every inch of open space in Central and Causeway Bay. They turn parks and footbridges into camping sites where cardboard boxes are their walls and opened umbrellas their roofs. They play cards, cut hair, sell handicraft and practice complicated dance routines for upcoming talent contests. It is one of those Hong Kong phenomena that charm tourists and fascinate newcomers. Local citizens, on the other hand, have grown so used to the weekly nuisance that they no longer see it or hear it. But when the night falls, the music stops and the crowds disperse. One by one the fun-loving revelers return to their employers’ homes for another week of mindless drudgery. And the weeks turn into months, months into years.

In the late 1970s, Hong Kong was experiencing historical economic growths and transforming from a manufacturing to a service-based economy. The colonial government found itself facing the twin problems of labor shortage and rising labor costs. In an effort to encourage local women to enter the workforce, the government eased restrictions on migrant workers and brought in the first batch of domestic helpers from the Philippines. In the decades that followed, the number of Filipino maids in the city continued to rise. More young women followed in the footsteps of their friends and relatives and moved here in search of higher pay and a chance to escape from their impoverished country. Other South East Asian countries soon caught on and joined in the labor export business. Today, there are roughly 140,000 Filipino domestic helpers in the city, nearly as many from Indonesia and just under 4,000 from Thailand.

Back in the Philippines, women with a high school education or less – who make up the bulk of the migrant workers overseas – make around HK$300 (US$40) a month working in a restaurant or a store. Here in Hong Kong, on the other hand, they stand to earn many times that amount, plus free room and board and a round-trip ticket to return home once a year. In exchange, they must leave behind their own family and live a vicarious life in a stranger’s home. They must also endure homesickness, loneliness, spousal infidelity, and the occasional verbal and even physical abuse by their employers. Fearing reprisals and termination of their employment contracts, domestic helpers keep their mouths shut when they are asked to do things they are not supposed to (such as washing cars and giving massages) or paid less than they are supposed to. Indeed, the rising popularity of Indonesian maids among local families – they are soon to outnumber Filipino maids in the city – owes in part to their reputation for being soft-spoken and obliging, and in part to their willingness to accept a 25% discount from the statutory minimum wage.

By law, employers are required to pay their live-in helpers a minimum monthly salary of HK$3,580 (US$460). The amount reflects how much our society values the economic benefit of freeing up a parent from domestic responsibilities to earn a second household income. For the price of a couple of piano lessons or a monthly parking space, we get to hold a fellow human being in captivity while we are out in the world making 10, 20 times the salary we pay them. Though much of the city’s economic success is built on the backs of these migrant workers, they remain one of the most grossly mispriced commodities in our economy. Perhaps that’s why every expatriate employer, without exception, pays their domestic workers well above the legal minimum, starting at $5,000 and sometimes as high as $7,000 or $8,000. The pay differential is largely unknown and irrelevant to the local population, most of whom sees absolutely nothing wrong with sticking to the bare minimum. For there appears to be a simple justification: if they don’t like it, there is always that $300 job waiting for them back in the Philippines! We got a glimpse of that line of reasoning recently, when the government raised the minimum allowable wage by a meager $160 per month, an increase of less than 5%. The move was meant to pacify the migrant worker community after the government callously excluded them from the protection of a new labor law guaranteeing local workers a $28 hourly rate. Nevertheless, the $160 pay raise prompted unhappy citizens to call in to radio talk shows to gripe about the excessive increase and the added financial burden on the middle class. No doubt the callers were already thinking up ways to work their maids a little harder just to make up for the difference.

The access to cheap domestic help has altered many aspects of our daily lives, but none is more disturbing than the creation of a generation of gong hai (港孩). The term, a relatively new entrant to our lexicon, refers to local children spoiled rotten by their doting parents. With a maid at their every beck and call, they have troubles performing simple tasks like making their beds, tying their shoelaces or even brushing their own teeth. Accustomed to barking orders at their adult helpers, these pint-sized tyrants lack basic manners and social skills. The sheltered environment at home, combined with the deep sense of entitlement it instills, sets these children up to fail in the real world. Parents waking up to this new reality are forced to take a closer look at the way their children are raised. Some are rethinking the wisdom of getting domestic help in the first place.

I don’t have a live-in maid and I never thought about getting one. Besides finding the idea itself too colonial for my taste, I would probably feel awkward and somewhat restrained having another person living in close quarters. Still, every other family in my apartment building seems to have a helper; some have even more than one. Everyday I see them walking the family dog or lugging bagfuls of groceries. They hold the door for me and let me get into the elevator before them, always a smile on the face. The fact that they would yield to someone they don’t even work for reminds me of the social divide that still exists between us and them. More than three decades after their predecessors first arrived in Hong Kong, foreign domestic workers are still not afforded full membership in our society. But like it or not, these quasi-citizens unflinchingly hold up a mirror to our city and reveal our parsimony and ingratitude to those who have made an immeasurable contribution to our prosperity and quality of life.

Raquel Nunag contributed research.

Those Who Live in Glass Houses 住在玻璃屋的人

2011-06-17T00:00:00.018+08:00

In a city where space is at a premium, where a luxury apartment on the Peak costs more than the GDP of a small nation, and where a shoebox apartment in Wanchai can rent for three times the average household income, there is a surprisingly easy way to create space. With a few buckets of cement and a bamboo scaffolding, a contractor can turn your balcony into an extra bedroom or add a solarium outside the back window. If you live on the top floor, you can even build an entire glass house on the rooftop complete with its own kitchen and bathroom. When it comes to creating livable space, your imagination – and audacity – is the only limit.

Unauthorized building alterations are everywhere in Hong Kong. They are also against the law. But like jaywalking and downloading movies online, illegal structures are one of those offenses that everyone commits and no one expects to get caught. Consider them an act of civil disobedience against a government too cozy with greedy property companies, the same companies that give us diamond-shaped living rooms and inflate gross floor area with club houses and podium gardens that nobody uses. While a majority of the city’s illegal structures are safe, the rest of them pose fire and other public safety risks. Every now and then we hear news stories about fallen balconies and collapsed canopies that succumbed to a powerful typhoon or the occasional “black rain.” Those who lost their lives to illegal structures achieved martyrdom in our collective struggle against capitalistic oppression personified by the Lees and the Kwoks, for they and the companies they run are the very reason why illegal structures existed in the first place.

The problem of unauthorized building works is particularly egregious in the rural areas of the New Territories. In 1972, the colonial government introduced the so-called “small house” (丁屋) policy to get buy-in from New Territories villagers for its urban development plans, granting every male descendent of indigenous lineage the right to build a standalone house on government land when he turns 18. These houses are meant to be small, capped at three stories high and 700 square feet in size on each floor. In addition to being overtly sexist, the controversial policy creates a massive headache for subsequent administrations, as land supply fails to keep up with the male birth rate. Motivated by greed or necessity, many right-holders take the policy as a carte blanche to build whatever their hearts desire, putting up four- or five-story houses, each with an obligatory glass house sitting on the rooftop for self-use or for rent. And when a recent report by the Office of the Ombudsman (申訴專員公署) prompted the government to finally take action against construction violations, villagers responded with mob anger and threatened to wage a “bloody revolution” the city has never seen.

Their battle cry rhetoric might have been over-the-top, but their sentiment is understandable. For who among us is without sin? Like millions others in Hong Kong, my family and I were once beneficiaries of illegal structures. Back in the 60s, my parents lived in a rental apartment on the rooftop of a tenement building in Wanchai. Built with plywood and corrugated metal, the unit cost $100 a month, roughly 10% of my father’s income at the time. Though the tenement building was torn down and rebuilt many years ago, my parents still speak fondly of their “penthouse” apartment where the living room and outdoor garden was separated by a flimsy screen door. During the early 70s my family moved into a brick-and-mortar apartment in Tin Hau, finally a legal abode we could call our own. Even so, there were two basic house rules by which we must all abide: do not jump in the kitchen and under no circumstances can more than two people set foot on it. Mounted on the exterior wall and supported by cantilever beams, the kitchen was a metal cage packed with heavy appliances and overhead cabinetry. Add a microwave oven and the whole thing might tumble like a free-fall ride at Ocean Park. Fortunately for us, nothing of the sort ever happened, not to our kitchen or to any of our neighbors’ similarly built but equally unlawful structures hovering above and below us.

Our longstanding culture of illegal structures has come under intense fire in recent weeks. Just when the small house saga was pushing the city to the brink of a civil war, the media discovered a spat of building violations by a half-dozen high-profile government officials, starting with Kitty Poon (潘潔), Under-secretary of the Environment Bureau (環境局), who was caught with a law-breaking glass house and two balconies in her Tai Po residence. Shortly thereafter, Chief Executive Donald Tsang was forced to take down a wall of glass panels from the balcony on his Midlevels property. Within the same week, Au Choi-Kai (區載佳), Head of the Buildings Department (屋宇署) responsible for enforcing the buildings ordinance and approving building plans, was caught with a similar violation. It is said that those who live in glass houses should not throw stones; those who literally live in glass houses, like Poon, Tsang and Au, have neither the credibility nor the moral authority to make us follow rules that they themselves have broken.

A public relations nightmare aside, the recent turn of events has forced our bureaucrats to confront a social issue that has long been swept under the rug. Neither a one-time amnesty to exempt all existing illegal structures from demolition nor a pay-per-structure scheme would work, for the former would lead to a mad rush to get new structures in before the door is permanently closed and the latter raises fairness issues between those who can pay their way through the law and those who can’t. Most importantly, neither approach addresses the fundamental issue of public safety. It appears that the government has little choice but to stay its course and use its limited resources to crack down on structures that pose an immediate danger. But short of solving the fundamental housing problem in Hong Kong, whatever the government decides to do will only get at the symptoms and not the cause.

The Curious Case of Ai Weiwei 艾未未的奇案

2011-05-31T23:59:00.024+08:00

The third anniversary of the Sichuan Earthquake had barely just passed, the Chinese government is already gearing up for the 22nd anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. In a few months there will be the centennial celebration of the Xinhai Revolution (辛亥革命), the anti-government campaign led by Sun Yat-sen in 1911 that eventually led to the fall of Imperial China. With a calendar peppered with politically sensitive days, Beijing these days is finding it increasingly exhausting to run an authoritarian regime. But it gets worse: the Arab Spring that swept across the Middle East is threatening to spread through Inner Mongolia all the way to the capital city. To nip the jasmine in the bud, the central government mobilized local authorities to lock up dissidents, disperse public gatherings and intercept Internet search engines. Flower markets in major cities are forbidden from selling jasmine altogether. Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times called the latest turn of events in China the “harshest clampdown since… 1989.”

When put in this context, the arrest of Ai Weiwei (艾未未) at the Beijing Airport on April 3 seems to make perfect sense. The rotund, 53-year-old artist-provocateur joined a long line of social activists who succumbed to their government’s newest weapon: detention and disappearance. One moment you are blogging merrily away in your living room, the next moment you are taken by plain clothes police to an undisclosed location and held there for weeks without access to a lawyer or contact with the outside world. The extrajudicial punishment cuts through the legal red tape and saves authorities the trouble of getting an arrest warrant. Ai might have been Beijing’s darling once upon a time – he was handpicked for a role in the design of the Bird’s Nest stadium for the Beijing Olympics – but when he sided with the quake victims in Sichuan and stuck his nose in places where it didn’t belong, he crossed the line from eccentric artist to trouble-making nuisance. Ai Weiwei’s reckoning was not a matter of if but when.

The rest of the story is supposed to follow a tight script. Ai is charged with “inciting subversion of state power” (煽動顛覆國家政權) or perhaps the less serious “inciting social disorder” (尋釁滋事), two of the catch-all crimes that entered the revised penal code in 1997. Any one of Ai’s provocative art installations would have been enough evidence for those vaguely-worded offenses. A sham trial is then hastily staged, before a unanimous bench of judges sentence him to five or ten years in some faraway prison. Add another nine months if Western diplomats show up outside the courtroom or if the White House turns up the human rights rhetoric. The path of a fallen dissident from arrest to imprisonment is so well traveled that even a fifth grader in Hong Kong can regurgitate it on his social studies exam. But therein lies the mystery about the case of Ai Weiwei: none of that has happened. Two months after he was taken away by authorities, the artist is yet to be formally charged with any crime. There were talks of tax evasion and other “economic crimes” and even rumors about bigamy and possession of pornography. Nevertheless, in an unprecedented show of indecision, government authorities sat on their fat hands for more than eight weeks, leaving the detainee’s family and the rest of world scratching their heads and wondering what really is going on.

The Western press is quick to supply an explanation based on their one-dimensional understanding of the New China. To the West, the arrest of Ai Weiwei is a clear sign that China is worried about becoming the next Egypt or Tunisia. But keeping the artist in police custody is one thing, sentencing him to years in prison is quite another. The latter would cost Beijing too much political capital – soured trade relationships, diplomatic tit-for-tat or simply a bad rap – a price too high for a country on its rise to the world’s stage. The Nicholas Kristofs of the world might have written something along those lines. But China already is on the world’s stage and grumbling from America or Europe is nothing but white noise. If Beijing was willing to take the heat for locking up Liu Xiaobo (劉曉波), winner of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize, for co-authoring the incendiary Chapter ’08 manifesto (零八憲章), it certainly isn’t worried about a little flak for crushing a rascal like Ai Weiwei, whose social concerns have been largely parochial – the cover-ups of shoddy school construction in a couple of tiny Sichuan villages. In fact, for decades Ai has been carefully toeing the line between acceptable artistic expressions and unacceptable political advocacy. Though many of his recent artworks deal with subject matters such as corruption and social injustice, Ai has by-and-large stayed clear of real pressure points like constitutional reform and political pluralism. Contrary to popular (and mostly Western) belief, China is not afraid of Ai Weiwei.

A more plausible explanation for the authorities’ hesitation to bring charges against the artist lies in a simple interview given by his mother. Shortly after the April arrest, Gao Ying (高瑛) told reporters that she was bewildered by her son’s arrest because President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) had once made a promise to grant her family protection from political harassment. Gao’s husband and Ai’s father, Ai Qing (艾青), was one of the greatest poets and best known intellectuals in 20^th Century China. Although Ai Senior was purged and exiled in the 1950s, he was eventually reinstated and honored by the Politburo. It is not surprising that President Hu would offer the prominent family certain privileges and immunity. But in much the same way the mafia underworld is beset by infighting among rival factions, the arrest of a citizen declared off-limits by the Paramount Leader is an open challenge to his authority. Indeed, President Hu has been on the hot seat for doing little to combat widespread corruption, persistent inflation and soaring property prices, all of which have weakened his grip on power in the dog-eat-dog world of Chinese politics. The power struggle is ever exacerbated by the uncertainty surrounding the impending transfer of power in 2012, as the Fourth Generation of Chinese leadership is widely expected to pass the baton to current Vice President Xi Jinping (習近平).

In the end, the arrest of Ai Weiwei may have little to do with the Jasmine Revolution and the resulting crackdown on free speech, but much more to do with a political tug-of-war in the lead up to a power handover. The will-they-won’t-they suspense in the indictment of Ai Weiwei has exposed the widening cracks in China’s ruling establishment. If the artist is a mere pawn in the high-stake factional struggle in Beijing, then his fate in the coming weeks would tell us which way the political wind is blowing. Until the dust settles and a victor emerges, no amount of graffiti and light projections would be enough to get China’s most famous artist released from wherever he is.

K. Ng contributed research.

It Could Happen to You 或許一天會是你

2011-05-22T23:01:00.024+08:00

Last Tuesday I had dinner with a few friends at a restaurant in Kennedy Town. At precisely 9:30pm, the entire restaurant, patrons and staff, came to an abrupt standstill. Children were hushed, the clinking of bowls and plates stopped and everyone turned their heads to the flat-screen television hung high from the ceiling. One of the uniformed waiters clicked the remote control to the ATV Home channel (本港台), which almost never happened. By the time the plastic drum stopped turning and the seven golf balls lined up neatly on the bottom of the screen, the show was over. Patrons returned to their food and staff continued making beelines to and from the kitchen. Balled up tickets strewed the floor. But all was not lost: the estimated jackpot on Friday’s draw, just three days later, was to exceed HK$100 million (US$12.5 million), the biggest in the city’s history.

Mark Six is the only legal form of lottery betting in Hong Kong. Nearly four decades since its introduction by the colonial government to combat underground gambling, the lottery remains the most popular game of chance in the city and the fastest way to rewrite a person’s destiny. If ever we need to come up with a single shibboleth to tell locals from foreigners, then the lottery’s famous theme song, adopted from a 1972 hit by Dutch band Shocking Blue, would be it. Indeed, nothing betrays a person’s alien status faster than his failure to hum the entire Mark Six tune from start to finish, verse and chorus. When I was little, my father used to ask me and my brother to decide what numbers to play by drawing from a bag of marbles with numbers he had meticulously taped on each on them. According to Chinese folklore, young boys possess extraordinary luck in all forms of gambling, although I never once believed it was true. Just the same, I answered my father’s call with great enthusiasm, for who wouldn’t want to be the boy angel who lifts his family from rags to riches?

With the nine-digit prize money dangling in front of me and practically everyone in the city talking about how they would spend it if they won, it was impossible not to join in the fun. And so this past Friday I decided to visit one of the Jockey Club’s betting branches – my first time ever – for a chance to rewrite my own destiny. At the Stanley Street branch in Central, a queue of roughly 200 people hugged around the block, up D’Aguilar Street and onto Wellington. I later learned that that particular branch was widely regarded as the luckiest betting outpost in the city, where several first prize tickets were sold in the past. Lucky or not, I wasn’t about to spend an hour waiting in line and so I made my way to the Connaught Road location where the line was noticeably shorter. Inside the betting hall, I was surrounded by swarms of men and women of all ages, some waiting impatiently in front of the half dozen manned counters while others busily punching numbers at the umpteen self-service betting machines, all in a controlled chaos where the illusion of hope collided with an assault on the senses. The line at counter number four – a decidedly unpopular counter for its inauspiciousness – was moving quickly and in less five minutes I walked out of the branch with a ticket in hand and high hopes in my head.

Lotteries are a universal phenomenon, simultaneously a powerful agent of income redistribution and a ready means for governments to finance anything from wars to education and healthcare. Prize moneys in the United States, notably of the multi-state lotteries such as Powerball and Mega Millions, are in the billions of Hong Kong dollars. Even in nearby Taiwan, lottery jackpots are much more sizable than ours. This past February, for instance, five people shared the Taiwan Lottery (大樂透) top prize and took home NT$1.8 billion (HK$484 million) in cash, nearly five times our Friday record-breaking jackpot. It seems a bit odd that, for a city known in the region for its vibrant horse racing scenes and where a luxury apartment can easily fetch hundreds of millions, we should have so much catching up to do when it comes to lottery winnings.

As is the case for many things in life, anticipation is the best part. Thinking up ways to spend a sudden windfall is a form of entertainment in and out of itself, enough to make a Jewish milkman break into song in Fiddler on the Roof. I too was forced to confront the very question of “if I were a rich man” when a young girl carrying a clipboard accosted me outside the betting station and asked if I wanted to participate in a quick survey for an organization I had never heard of. Even though I knew it was nothing but a telemarketing trick to solicit personal details, I said “yes” anyway just to see what the questions were. Surely enough, the selection of answers to her last question proffered a glimpse of our collective psyche.

Question 5: What would you do with your prize money? (Circle all that apply)

(A) purchase property

(B) invest in the stock markets

(C) set up an education fund for your children

(D) other uses

I couldn’t think of more boring ways of spending my fortune and so I asked the girl to circle (D). Then it struck me that to many people in Hong Kong the best way to spend one’s money is to find ways to make more of it. Sad, but superbly pragmatic. In the end the surveyor never asked me to explain what those “others uses” I had in mind and I never gave her my phone number and mailing address she so insistently demanded.

As much as it is fun to spend hours planning how to spend my multi-million jackpot, I find it equally liberating to think of all the blessings for not winning it. As a wise man once said, the thing about things that you don’t have, getting it is the last thing you need. Perhaps the best example of lottery-win-turned-nightmare was Jack Whittaker, the West Virginia businessman who won a US$315 million (HK$2.5 billion) Powerball lottery in 2007. During the five years following his heavily publicized win, Whittaker’s home and car were burglarized repeatedly, his employees embezzled company funds 11 times and 460 lawsuits were filed against him. In his darkest moments, his wife left him, his daughter was diagnosed with cancer and his granddaughter died from a drug overdose. When horror novelist Shirley Jackson wrote her haunting short story The Lottery for The New Yorker in 1948 about a small town’s annual ritual to stone a randomly selected townsman to death, she might have had someone like Jack Whittaker in mind. But the West Virginian’s case of be-careful-what-you-wish-for was hardly alone. Because lotteries reserve the right to publish the winners’ names and places of work for free publicity, winners of mega jackpots are suddenly thrust into the intense media spotlight and find themselves in the unenviable position of having their way of life drastically and irreversibly altered. “If it would bring my granddaughter back, I’d give it all back,” Jack Whittaker famously said. So much for free publicity.

Needless to say, I didn’t win this Friday’s lottery. Instead, three winners shared the $100 million jackpot and found themselves on the precipice of a destiny rewritten. But it didn’t really matter. If I had won, I know I would never spend another day in the office and would split my time between my summer villa in Tuscany and my three-story mansion on the Peak writing my blog in front of the Victoria Harbor, all the while collecting things I never thought I’d need. And since I didn’t win, I am spared from the trials of Jack Whittaker and many others who have won billions but lost so much more. I consider that a bet well-hedged.

Video 1 - “Inkpot” by Shocking Blue (1972)

Video 2 - “If I Were a Rich Man” from《Fiddler on the Roof》 (1971)

The King and I 國王與我

2011-04-23T01:15:00.028+08:00

I always find business trips a great way to catch up on the movies I missed. On my way to a meeting in Jakarta a few weeks ago, I was thrilled to find on the in-flight entertainment menu The King’s Speech, the low-budget British history drama that came out of nowhere but went on to clinch four top awards at this year’s Oscars. The film tells the story of King George VI, a life-long stutterer who struggled to overcome his crippling speech impediment with the help of an unorthodox Australian speech therapist. David Seidler, who wrote the screenplay for the film, was himself a stutterer as a child and used to listen to George VI’s wartime speeches on the radio as a source of inspiration. With the help of seasoned actors Colin Firth and Jeffrey Rush, Seidler turned an otherwise little known king into a courageous hero who galvanized his nation in turbulent times and in doing so, gave eloquent voice to the entire stuttering community around the world.

* * *

When I was a child I hated meeting new people. The first thing I had to say to a stranger was my name. And I hated saying my name, for the “j” sound was the most difficult of them all. No matter how many times I rehearsed it in my head, I always ended up sounding like a sputtering engine. Surely when my parents asked my uncle to name me at birth, no one had any idea that the innocent name he picked would make such trouble for his baby nephew. Stomping my feet or swinging my body sometimes helped, and I spent my spare time making up new, inventive ways to get my words out. Nevertheless, simple day-to-day tasks like answering the phone or yelling out my stop on the minibus would cause me great anxiety, frustration and humiliation. Over the years, I learned to choose the path of least resistance by paraphrasing, modifying and self-editing. I would avoid words and phrases that were hard to say and substitute them with easier ones, such as syllables that begin with a vowel or an “h” or “y” sound. Like other stutterers I learned to adapt, for adaptation was the only way to survive in an impatient world.

At home my brothers and sisters, even my parents, would make fun of my stutter. I used to tell myself that it was the Chinese way of saying “it’s no big deal. We love you the way you are.” And it probably was. Steeped in Chinese folklore, my mom would remind me that people with thin lips, like my brother Dan, were blessed with eloquence and would make great orators and politicians. I, on the other hand, had fat lips and when I grew up I should stick to professions that required more thinking than talking. An engineer or an accountant perhaps. I took my mother’s career advice to heart and mentally crossed out lawyer and teacher from the list. Like other stutterers, I learned to accept my lot, for acceptance was the only way to survive in an unfair world.

Stuttering is a behavioral disorder defined by the World Health Organization as a persistent or recurrent speech impediment characterized by frequent repetition or prolongation of sounds. There are reportedly 68 million stutterers in the world, around 1% of the general population. People who stutter live under constant stress, caused by even the simplest of social interactions where shame is the knife and the scars run deep. And if the saying that “the squeaky wheel gets the oil” holds true, then the stuttering man is destined to lead a life of missed opportunities and unrequited attention. Like people afflicted with other physical disabilities, many stutterers have to struggle with their handicap on their own. Encouragement from parents and peers often makes the speaker feel even more exposed and self-conscious. Studies show that roughly 75% of stuttering children recover by their early teens. The remaining 25%, however, carry their speech impediment to adulthood and show little improvement despite prolonged therapy or medications. Nevertheless, there appears to be no shortage of famous and successful stuttering adults past and present, from Isaac Newton and Winston Churchill to Marilyn Monroe and James Earl Jones. Stuttering organizations and support groups hold up their pictures as evidence that even stutterers can lead happy, fulfilled lives.

Thankfully I am among the 75% of the stuttering population that do recover from their childhood stammer. My disfluency began to fall away during university and, by the time I was in law school, I had all but conquered my fear of speaking in public. Being among outspoken, assertive law students every day for three years enabled me to pretend I was one of them, while I secretly observed the way they talked and learned by osmosis. Just like that, my biggest source of embarrassment and frustration throughout my adolescence became a thing of the past. Still, even today my stutter creeps back in every once in a while. I find myself lapsing into my old stammer when my confidence is most shaken, such as when telling an unconvincing lie or speaking a foreign language.

Many years have gone by since my stuttering days. I now practice law full time and teach English on weekends, those two very things that I had crossed off my list, things that I had long considered off limits for a disfluent adolescent. I decided to go to law school despite – and especially because of – my limitations, not so much as an act of defiance to prove my mom wrong as it was a flash of boyish chivalry to prove myself right. In time I realized there was a bigger lesson hidden somewhere in the story: how often do we build walls around ourselves, crossing things off our lists and accepting limitations that either can be overcome or never existed in the first place?

* * *

I arrived at my meeting in Jakarta, in a room full of strangers. Those same serious faces and pinstriped suits. I introduced myself and my team and proceeded to chair the all-day meeting with equal ease and confidence. Public speaking – the most dreaded of all human experiences – no longer intimidates me. It empowers me and reminds me of the long way I have come to get to where I am. “You have such perseverance, Bertie, you are the bravest man I know,” Lionel Logue, the speech therapist, said to King George VI in one of the most moving dialogues in The King’s Speech. Even though achieving normal fluency is nothing that the general population would brag about, I have always considered it one of the bravest things I have done.

Apocalypse Now - Part 2 現代啟示錄-下卷

2011-03-30T22:40:00.006+08:00

The sakura season in Tokyo has barely began, but the city is already draped in dazzling shades of pink and white. The blossoms arrived just in time to welcome the all-important day of April 1, when, by tradition, the first day of school coincides with the first day of work for hundreds of thousands of university graduates entering the work force. Crisp white shirts, new black suits and brown leather attaché are as ubiquitous as the spring blossoms themselves.

This year, the triple threat of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear crisis have cast a thick shadow on the season of hope and renewal. Each day citizens wake up to the new reality of a nation teetering on the brink of a Chernobyl-type disaster. Nearly a month after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, TEPCO, operator of the damaged Fukushima (福島) nuclear plants, remains utterly incapable of containing the radiation leaks. To cool down the overheating reactors, sea water, fresh water and water with neutron-absorbing boric acid were dumped every which way from helicopters, fire engines and a 20-story tall truck donated by China. And when contaminated water started to build up and leak into the ocean, the power company tried to stop it using liquid glass, saw dust and even old newspaper. TEPCO’s kitchen sink approach to a mounting environmental catastrophe takes us right back to the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico a year old, where every solution seemed just as bad as the problem itself. And if the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history had raised public awareness over the safety of offshore drilling, the Fukushima crisis has no doubt rekindled worldwide debate over the wisdom of nuclear power, even when used in resource poor, energy hungry countries like Japan.

So much has been made of the Japanese people’s patience and self-sacrifice in the face of extreme adversity. Words like gaman (我慢; endurance), muga (無我; selflessness) and omote-ura (表里) – that national requirement to keep all negative emotions locked up inside – were tossed around all over the Western press. At evacuee shelters, men and women of all ages organized themselves to keep the premises clean and the rationing of provisions orderly. Residents stranded within the radiation zone became self-reliant, melting snow to make drinking water and chopping up bamboo to make chopsticks for themselves and others. In big cities like Tokyo and Yokohama, citizens unplugged all home appliances except for their refrigerators to conserve electricity for those who needed it more. A legion of anonymous power plant technicians dubbed the “Fukushima Fifty” stayed inside the pitch dark facilities to resuscitate the backup cooling systems, despite lethal exposures to radioactive iodine and cesium. In a true collectivist society, not even certain death is a price too high for the greater good.

While the nuclear crisis has brought out the best in the Japanese people, it has also brought out the worst in their government. The Kan administration has been widely criticized for being less than forthcoming about the true extent of the radiation leaks. Is it simply a case of bureaucratic tendency to downplay bad news with vague language, or is it a reflection that government officials have become far too cozy with powerful corporations? Instead of pressuring TEPCO to get their act together, the government turned to the people and called on them, with the help of Emperor Akihito (日皇明仁) no less, for more understanding, more patience and more sacrifices. But all that gaman, muga and omote-ura is about to run out, as citizens struggle to grapple with the political reality that the frequent changes in leadership – 14 prime ministers in the past 20 years – have brought about little or no change in policy and accountability.

* * *

The southwesterly wind strengthens as spring rolls into early summer, carrying with it traces of iodine-131 that will slowly thin out over the South China Sea. Just the same, the new round of radioactivity blown from northeastern Japan promises to throw hypochondriac Hong Kongers into renewed paranoia. Days after the nuclear explosions in Fukushima, hundreds in Hong Kong along with many more in Mainland China overran supermarkets buying up table salt, soy sauce and anything that contained iodine to fend off thyroid cancer. There was a run on all things Japanese, from baby formula, abalone and dried scallops to camera lenses and even cars. Ugly human behavior in times of an epic disaster is not uncommon, but exposing our selfish, every-man-for-himself true nature because of a disaster 3,000 miles away had to be a first. Our tendency to panic and switch off all common sense becomes all the more laughable when you consider how Hong Kongers inhale massive amounts of much more harmful carbon monoxide and lead particles from vehicular exhaust and factory emissions on a daily basis and yet no one bats an eyelid. Whatever the situation, it seems, we can always count on a few bad apples to embarrass us in front of our Asian cousins.

A far more intriguing aspect of the Chinese’s reaction to the continuing nuclear crisis in Japan is perhaps all the conspiracy theories that have been swirling around on the Internet. Reports that trace levels of the highly toxic plutonium were found near the crippled power plants have, rightfully, drawn our attention. Japan’s decision to use plutonium (purchased from France and England) in their nuclear reactors when uranium is much more abundant and much less expensive has fueled suspicion that the country has been secretly turning spent fuel into weapons-grade plutonium in a furtive attempt to counter China’s rising hegemony. It would be months if not years before we find out whether these conspiracy theories hold water. For now one thing is certain: nearly six decades after the Pacific War, many of us still wonder whether Japan has really learned its lessons from World War II, and whether that frightful imperial flag would one day fly again and lead the country down the same gruesome path it did two generations ago. For why else, we wonder, would the Japanese government still leave out the truths about its wartime atrocities from history textbooks?

Apocalypse Now - Part 1 現代啟示錄-上卷

2011-03-13T21:17:00.026+08:00

On the early spring day of 11 March 2011, as citizens were busily preparing for the upcoming cherry blossom season, a magnitude 9.0 earthquake struck northeastern Japan, the biggest seismic event ever recorded in the country’s history. The powerful quake unleashed a 3o-foot high tsunami that swept across the Pacific coast of Honshu (本州) Island and leveled everything in its path. By the time the tremors ended and the water receded, entire cities and towns as far as the eye could see were reduced to a landfill of sludge and rubble. Sendai (仙台), the closest major city to the epicenter with a population of one million, was pummeled beyond recognition. Successive explosions at nuclear facilities near the quake zone spewed radioactive materials into the air. If this was Mother Nature’s way of proving her dominion over man, she had done so many times over.

Around 2:30pm Hong Kong time, 45 minutes after the big temblor hit, I received an email from someone in the Tokyo office titled “EARTHQUAKE” in all capital letters. Mika, a colleague of mine doing a deal with me, had sent the message to tell me that she had lost her Bloomberg connection and that she would not be able to send out the term sheet she had promised me. I told my dutiful – and in this case rather insane – colleague to forget the stupid term sheet and hide under her desk in case of aftershocks. An hour after receiving Mika’s harrowing email, iPhone videos of the earthquake captured by Tokyo citizens began to trickle in on CNN and YouTube: office towers swaying like reeds, frightened office workers running to open space, subways, Shinkansen and other mass transit coming to a complete standstill. As is the case for many natural disasters, the physical devastation preceded the economic one. The Nikkei index fell nearly 17% in the first two trading days after the quake, the kind of decline not seen since the 1987 market crash. But the actual economic impact of the twin disasters of earthquake and tsunami remained too vast to ascertain. Apocalypse had befallen Japan and the rest of the world looked on in awe and disbelief.

Like many others in Hong Kong, I was glued to the television screen watching the endless loop of raw footage playing on the 24-hour news channel. One of the first things that struck me was how calm and composed Japanese citizens appeared. There was no screaming, no mass panic and certainly no violence or looting. All I saw was quiet, orderly citizens lining up outside convenience stores and at telephone booths. Part of it is that earthquakes are simply a fact of life in Japan, a quake-prone nation where minor tremors can be felt several times every year. Elementary schools hold monthly earthquake drills and train small children to duck under their desks and run away from simulated fires. There is a fire proof cushion on every seat in the classroom that can be turned into a bousai zukin (防災頭巾; protective hat) to be used during evacuation. A Japanese friend of mine once told me that it is not uncommon for him to wake up in the morning and find his bed having shifted inches away from the wall. But awareness aside, another explanation for the general tranquility is that Japanese people are disciplined, self-restrained and remarkably civilized. Not even the worst crisis since World War II would betray the sense of mutual respect and dignity so ingrained in the national psyche. It saddens me when I compare how one people behaved in their worst hour to the way the Chinese did in their best, when visitors trampled over each other and elbowed their way into the 2010 Expo in Shanghai, presumably a proud event to showcase China’s civility and modernity.

The other thing that struck me about the news footage was that almost every structure survived the powerful quake. Surely the coastal area had been completely ravaged by the unstoppable tsunami – fishing boats, cars and standalone homes were swept away like bath toys. But by and large there have been few reports of collapsed buildings, a testament to the Japanese government’s extraordinary preparedness for natural disasters. Japan has put in place strict building codes to ensure every structure withstand seismic shocks, including the use of some of the world’s most sophisticated springs and dampers systems. All the expensive earthquake engineering that for decades has pushed up construction costs finally paid off, bearing out the age-old Chinese saying that it is worthwhile to feed an army for a thousand days if you can use it for an hour. Then there is the early warning system: as soon as the first tremor was detected, J-Alert, the nationwide satellite-based system broadcast announcements to local media so that citizens were given sufficient time to get to safety. Within hours of the quake, brigades of jieitai (自衛隊; self-defense forces) were bused to the scenes by armored vehicles, while helicopters were deployed to airlift patients from hospital rooftops. Neatly packed supply kits stockpiled in nearby bunkers containing water, dried food and flashlights were promptly handed to victims. This is a government with a plan, a plan designed to minimize casualties and maximize survival in the event of a national crisis. The same cannot be said about that other superpower. Just six years ago, the world witnessed in horror the way the United States bungled the rescue efforts after Katrina, a Category 5 hurricane, overran the city of New Orleans. Six years later, with memories of their government’s mismanagement and lack of leadership still fresh on their minds, many Americans must be watching CNN in marvel of the Japanese government’s efficiency and organization.

Watching the earthquake and tsunami unfold in Japan, I couldn’t help but wonder what would happen if something this big happened to Hong Kong. For starters, an earthquake, even one of much less magnitude, would turn every tenement building in the city into a pile of rubble like the collapsed building on Ma Tau Wai Road (馬頭圍道) last year. And it was only a month ago when concerned residents in Wanchai reported tremors in their homes as a result of nearby construction. It would be unimaginable the kind of complete destruction an earthquake could do to a city that fills every occupiable space with pencil buildings up the hills, down the shore and inches from each other. What’s more, the earthquake would force the nuclear power plant at Daya Bay (大亞灣) in nearby Shenzhen to shut down. But Hong Kongers would probably be kept in the dark about radiation leaks, for its operator China Light and Power (中電) doesn’t always tell us what is going on as we so horribly found out last October. Then there is the tsunami that would swallow every square foot of reclaimed land on the north shore of Hong Kong Island from Kennedy Town to Shau Kei Wan, as well as the entire Kowloon peninsula up to Lion Rock. In Central alone, a 30-foot wall of water would push debris all the way up to SoHo and even Midlevels. But don’t count on our government to be of much help. Despite years of drainage projects, Wing Lok Street (永樂街) in Sheung Wan and Ho Sheung Heung (河上鄉) village near Fanling are perennial flood victims vulnerable to even moderate rainstorms. Just last week, a water main on Wong Ngai Chung Road (黃泥涌道) broke and it took the Water Department a total of 6 hours just to locate the valve to turn the water off. Residents and restaurant workers waited late into the night for water trucks that never came. Compared to Japan, Hong Kong is a place utterly unprepared for any emergency situation. Our overpaid, underworked bureaucrats wouldn’t know the first thing about disaster recovery and would instinctively look to Beijing for direction, all the while jealously guarding its HK$260 billion foreign reserve as a political lifesaver. My only hope is that citizens of Hong Kong could be half as civilized and well behaved as their counterparts in Japan so as to prevent the city from plunging into a complete anarchy should any large-scale natural disaster befall us.

In the days and weeks ahead, Japan will have to deal with more aftershocks and nuclear power plant malfunctions. The death toll will continue to climb and gut-wrenching survival stories will come to light. What will not happen, however, is another humanitarian crisis like Katrina and Haiti. In its darkest hour, Japan has proven itself a true superpower, one not measured by its GDP growth or military prowess, but by the way its citizens and government work together in times of national crises. As we take our hats off to the Japanese for their grace and civility, we must put on our thinking caps to figure out what to do with our own sclerotic government.

The Insomniacs' Club 失眠俱樂部

2011-02-15T01:12:00.017+08:00

Glass bottles arced through the smoke-filled sky, followed by sticks, shoes and blocks of pavement torn up from the streets. Riot police pushed back with water canons and rubber bullets, adding to the growing pandemonium. A few blocks away, an old woman in a burqa posed for a television camera, holding the national flag in one hand and in the other a cardboard sign written in Arabic and English: “Enough is Enough.” These were not religious fundamentalists protesting against America or Israel. These were regular citizens, men and women of all ages, standing up to their own government and all the ills of society it represented: corruption, unemployment, rising food prices and the enormous gaps between rich and poor. Enough was enough.

Hosni Mubarak’s reign over Egypt might have lasted 30 years, but it only took 18 days for the people in Cairo to topple it. What happened on Tahrir Square these past weeks was the stuff we read about in history textbooks, like the Boston Tea Party or the storming of the Bastilles. Not since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990 had the world witnessed a celebration of the people’s power on such a grand scale. In his remarks on Mubarak’s resignation, Barack Obama borrowed from his favorite Martin Luther King Jr. quote and declared that “the moral force of nonviolence [has] bent the arc of history toward justice once more.” Indeed, with both justice and history on their side, the Egyptian people finally took ownership of their country and put an end to a regime decidedly out of touch with its young, educated population. In the end, slogans and banners, cell phones and laptops prevailed. Bullets and tanks never looked so powerless.

The concept of an Internet-organized revolution, so-called Revolution 2.0, can be traced back to Iran’s Presidential Election in 2009, when tens of thousands of Tehranians took to the streets accusing their supreme leader of rigging the election. The subsequent military crackdown sent an age-old television warning to anti-government protestors in the region: do not try this at home. Those who defied the force of nature would end up like 27-year-old Neda Agha-Soltan who suffered what was dubbed the “most witnessed death in human history.” But a year and a half later, things turned out very differently in Tunisia, where angry demonstrators succeeded in forcing President Ben Ali out of power and out of the country. The Tunisian Revolution started a prairie fire that quickly spread to neighboring Algeria, Jordan, Yemen and Egypt, the largest Arab nation in the world. Autocrats and dictators who used to hunker down to stay off the international radar screen were suddenly exposed, caught off-guard by an emboldened population that no longer took “no” for an answer. In a matter of weeks, Tahrir Square rewrote the laws of domestic politics in the Middle East.

Here in Hong Kong, we followed the events in faraway Cairo with momentary interest. The usual footage of angry mobs clashing with riot police – tear gas, Molotov cocktails and buildings on fire – flickered on our television screens. But what began as just another episode in the never-ending drama of Middle Eastern instability ended with something deeply emotional for our city. Our hearts sank when we saw those familiar images of crowds surrounding the tanks, cheering with the soldiers and calling on them to join the people’s movement; images that united us in a single thought: this is the Tiananmen Square that never was. Back in the summer of 1989, the same kind of optimism and euphoria swept across China and Hong Kong, just as it did in Egypt these past weeks. Student leaders Wang Dan (王丹) and Wu’er Kaixi (吾爾開希) galvanized the crowds demanding freedom and political reform in much the same way Wael Ghonim, the 30-year-old Google executive, demanded an end to government abuse and corruption. Like the Cairo demonstrators, citizens of Beijing took a leap of faith with the military, believing that they too wanted a better China and that even the coldest of soldiers wouldn’t open fire on defenseless students. But that’s where the stories of two ancient civilizations diverged. To the thousands who perished on Tiananmen Square that June morning, the arc of history was too long. They never got to see it bend.

22 years later, the Chinese government is much more prepared for organized protests. Years of practice from suppressing Tibetan separatists and falun gong have made the Politburo rather good at snuffing out organized protests before they begin. With state-controlled ISPs and the “Great Firewall” erected as part of a broader information censoring system called the Golden Shield Project (金盾工程), the government blocks website content and intercepts search engines on a daily basis. Then there is the army of Internet police who work around the clock to monitor chat rooms, blogs and instant messaging sites. Cyber-activists like Michael Anti (趙靜), Ai Weiwei (艾未未) and Wang Xiaoning (王小寧) are harassed, jailed and made an example of. In 2008, the government introduced Green Dam (綠壩), a content control software to be pre-installed on every computer sold in the country, presumably to protect children from inappropriate content. International and domestic condemnation of this brazen form of privacy invasion finally forced the government to abort the project.

But censorship is a dangerous game. It is also as futile as wrapping fire with paper – so goes the Chinese saying, for the spread of information will always outpace any government attempt to restrict it. Where China lacks in freedom of expression, however, it makes up for with houses, cars and other middle class must-haves. Replicating Singapore’s model of a freedomless economic city-state, the politburo keeps the economy growing at above 8% year after year, as a psychological morphine drip to numb opposition and silence dissent. Surely if Mubarak had bothered to do the same, he might have been able to hang around for another few years before handing the throne to his son. Instead, 40% of the Egyptian population lives on less than US$2 a day and young people between the ages of 15 and 25 account for 80% of the country’s unemployed. When it comes to running a one-party autocracy, Mubarak had much to learn from the Chinese.

The Revolution in Egypt was a genuine popular uprising. With no leader to be arrested and no organization to be crushed, the movement blindsided Mubarak’s government and sent chills down the spines of every autocrat in the world. From the Jordanian king and the Burmese president to Hugo Chavez, Vladimir Putin, Lee Hsien Loong and our very own Hu Jintao, leaders of authoritarian regimes are losing sleep, tossing and turning in bed wondering when the next Facebook or Twitter time bomb would go off. They are members of the Insomniacs’ Club that operates a franchise of ageing dystopias around the world. Until they unclench their fists and let off some of the steam, we can bet on more Tahrir Squares to come in the months and years ahead. T’is not the season to be a dictator.

NEWS FLASH: Book Launch Party at the IFC! 快訊:《香港情懷》國金商埸發佈會

2011-02-09T23:34:00.010+08:00

Dear Readers,

Come celebrate the release of my new book
HONG KONG State of Mind

at
BOOKAZINE, IFC Mall
(Level 3)

on
Saturday, 5 March
at
6:30pm

Meet the author
get your book autographed
and mingle with other book-lovers
over a glass of wine!

New Year, Old Tradition 新年、舊俗

2011-01-30T23:06:00.030+08:00

To the 1.3 billion ethnic Chinese living across the globe – roughly a fifth of the world’s population – the Lunar New Year is the mother of all celebrations. Cantonese people take things up a few notches and, over the centuries, developed a suite of regimented festivities that would make the Twelve Days of Christmas look like child’s play. In Hong Kong, the sanctuary where Cantonese customs are preserved and refined, our new year tradition is a combination of Christmas (the customs of exchanging gifts and putting up a decorated tree in the living room), Thanksgiving (that mandatory family dinner no matter how busy or far away we are), Halloween (children given a get-out-of-jail-free-card to gorge on unlimited candy) and, of course, the Gregorian calendar New Year (the sense of renewal that compels us to draw up a list of resolutions).

The city kicks into high gear weeks before New Year’s Day. Shops, restaurants and public transport blast ear-splitting holiday tunes and turn the entire city into a sea of red and gold. At home, families plaster their walls with fai chun (揮春), strips of paper inscribed with four-character wishes of prosperity, good health and domestic harmony. But as soon as the clock strikes twelve on New Year’s Eve, the whole atmosphere changes. Anticipation and excitement give way to a heightened sense of vigilance, as unbending folk beliefs take over and govern both deeds and speech. From that point on, every phone call is answered with “kung hey fat choi” instead of “hello.” Brooms, mops and vacuum cleaners are laid to rest for fear of “sweeping away” good fortune. Family members big and small are held to the highest standard of verbal discipline and abstain from uttering words like “death,” “misfortune,” “loss” or anything that sounds like them. Violations of the gag order are punished with the dramatic interjection choi (啋), followed by public condemnation. To redeem himself, the offender must take it all back by spitting on the floor and rephrasing what he said without the offending word.

In Hong Kong, new year is not new year without those famous red packets. The tradition of lai see started out with married couples giving young children a trifle of pocket money as a holiday treat. As kids, my brother Dan and I would compete to see who got more lai see money – a measure of our popularity among relatives – and spend it all on new toys as soon as the holiday season ended on the 15th day of the year. From time to time, my mom would tell us stories about exemplary children using lai see earnings to pay household bills, stories that Dan and I quickly dismissed as a ploy to guilt us into surrendering our hard-earned cash. Today, lai see has lost much of its original wholesomeness and evolved into a form of socially acceptable bribery. From doormen to secretaries and restaurant greeters, anyone in a position to make our lives easier will expect a “show of appreciation” to grease the wheels for the next twelve months. Those put off by the notion of paying money for small favors are well served to liken the practice to tipping the waiter after a meal.

In keeping with the season of renewal, families will loosen the purse strings and stock up on all things new: new clothes, new shoes, new supplies and, for those who can afford them, new cars. Back in the 60s and 70s when Hong Kong was still a fledgling cottage industry economy, those extra expenses were enough to create a liquidity crunch known in the local vernacular as nin kwan (年關). The financial bind was further exacerbated by the customs of bai nin (拜年), when friends and family would visit each other’s homes during the first week of the year. Personal hardship notwithstanding, visitors bore generous gifts, dressed sharp and looked cheerful when they presented themselves to the hosts. These days, the Lunar New Year is a much less stressful event than it used to be. Higher disposable incomes mean few of us would wait until the end of the year to buy new things, and fewer still would feel the pressure to parade well-groomed children once a year to create an illusion of abundance.

As is the case for most Chinese festivals, food figures prominently in the celebration. Cantonese people fill their kitchens with turnip cakes, tarot cakes and nin go (年糕) made from glutinous rice, cane sugar and lard. As a child I used to watch my mom roll up her sleeves to prepare homemade turnip cakes and tong yuen (湯圓; glutinous rice balls) from scratch. She would tell me that she learned everything from her mom, who also learned it from her mom, my great grandmother. Alas, the tradition of passing down holiday food recipes ended abruptly with my generation. After all, who has the time and patience in this day and age to mix, knead, roll and steam, when we can walk into any local bakery or restaurant and purchase turnip cakes at HK$50 a pop?

One of the most exciting new year festivities is the so-called “flower market,” a week-long bazaar with hundreds of booths selling seasonal flowers and toys. The biggest one in Hong Kong, held in Victoria Park, draws hundreds of thousands of visitors each year and turns the half-dozen contiguous soccer fields into Times Square on New Year’s Eve. Back in the days, getting lost in the dizzying crowds was a nightmare scenario for parents and kids alike and so the whole family stuck together, hand-in-hand, and walked through aisle upon aisle of daffodils, gladiolas, kumquat and cherry trees. For children, the bazaar was the one place they could forget their good manners and demand new toys. I would never forget my first remote control car – a red Corvette look-alike – my dad bought me for HK$35 (a whopping sum at the time) at the flower market when I was four, after I nagged and stomped, sulked and begged for hours. Today, flower markets have become something rather different: a training ground for future entrepreneurs. Screaming university students block pedestrian traffic hawking inflatable playthings and stuffed cushions, neither of which is intended for small children. Because kids nowadays get showered with toys all year around, going to the bazaar is more an annual ritual than a shopping trip to look forward to. And because no one ever leaves home without a cell phone in hand, family members often split up as soon as they arrive at the market and meet back at an appointed exit when they are ready to leave.

No matter how much things have changed, Chinese New Year will always be the most important time of the year. But as the city grows more affluent, an annual event to celebrate what we have and to wish for what we don’t is becoming less and less relevant. All the magic and romance associated with the festival, the pain and joy of getting through another year, continue to elude the younger generations until it is reduced to a set of customs we follow but no longer understand. When it comes to tradition and culture, it seems, a higher standard of living can be such a double-edged sword.

Hotel Review: Suiboku Ski Lofts 酒店點評: 水墨

2011-01-18T00:37:00.022+08:00

The rumbling Greyhound bus slowed as it glided down Hirafu-zaka Street drowned in the streetlights’ amber. The wiry bus driver announced my stop in sotto voce before the hydraulic door opened in front of a six-story industrial block. With a suitcase in one hand and a ski bag in the other, I stood before a dark cast-iron entrance hidden between concrete beams and steel planks. Austere even for a villains’ hideout in a Bond film, the monochromatic edifice was a visual anomaly in bustling Niseko (二世古), Asia’s most popular ski resort. The hotel concierge in a charcoal-gray suit extended a placid welcome and handed me a key chain, thereon etched my room number: Loft 7.

Completed 15 months ago just in time for the 2010 ski season, Suiboku (水墨) set out to challenge conventional wisdom in ski resort lodging. The name, which literally means water and ink in kanji, refers to the dark and light shading of the traditional Chinese brush painting technique adopted by Muromachi Japan in the 14th Century. In much the same way a consummate suibokuga painting (水墨画) captures the seen and the unseen using nuanced shades of gray, Suiboku communicates with its interplay of bold textures, subdued light sources and a metallic taupe palette. On the scroll that is the hotel’s open floor plan, every hunk of steel is a brushstroke, and each slab of concrete an ink wash.

The story of Suiboku, the fruit of a true international collaboration, is a plot worthy of an NHK docudrama. The project brought together Japanese architecture firm Atelier BNK (which designed the Sapporo Dome and a host of other iconic public buildings throughout the country), creative Australian architect Chris Taylor, a project management team from ski resort-savvy Canada West Homes, as well as seasoned developers-cum-financiers C.J. Wysocki and Mike Jones from Hong Kong and Singapore. Together, the cross-border partnership overcame design challenges, above all in trying to maintain the building’s clean-lined structural form without hindering snow removal and to install an under-floor heating system throughout the premises, all the while keeping costs down and staying true to the minimalist design concept. One steel panel and one oak floorboard at a time, Wysocki and Jones saw their brainchild grow from a sketchbook of magazine clippings to one of Niseko’s most sought-after ski lodges in a matter of four winters.

To get a sense of the exacting precision put into the ski lofts, look no further than the off-form concrete used throughout the interior. The goal was to create an ad libitum roughness unique for each concrete surface and to that end, Niseko builder Itawa Chizaki erected a half-dozen sample walls in a nearby parking lot and concocted an intricate mathematical formula to create a variety of concrete textures achievable only with the finest Japanese workmanship. “Rough precision”, it seems, is no longer an oxymoron in this part of Japan.

The elevator door opened and I was greeted by an iron Arakan Buddha haloed under a solemn spotlight. I turned the key and pushed open the heavy floor-to-ceiling door made from bespoke Kurokawa black steel. In the foyer, silhouettes of dark and light quietly awaited the new occupant. While my body immediately sensed the heated floorboards beneath my feet, my eyes were drawn to the spacious living room sliced into halves by a twelve-foot long concrete surface. Aptly named the “living table,” the daring design statement triples as a dining table, a workstation and a bar countertop. Why didn’t anyone think of that before? I whispered despite myself.

One end of the living table leads to an open kitchen fitted with state-of-the-art appliances by Gaggenau, Miele, Rinnai and Nespresso. The other end opens to a generous configuration of sunken daybeds covered in lush faux fur upholstery and against an entire wall of Christian Liaigre-inspired bookshelves made with intersecting steel I-beams. In the deep recesses of the bookshelves, a roaring fireplace nestles unsuspectingly next to a 42-inch LCD screen, one of the four in my three-bedroom suite. The abundance of iPod docks and Internet access points is guaranteed to satisfy the technorati among us. And leaving no detail unattended, even the body lotion atop the bathroom sink, made in Hokkaido exclusively for the hotel, is wittily labeled “Meiji Restoration.” Suiboku is where a serene Zen Buddhist temple meets an under-lit Abercrombie & Fitch store minus the deafening dance beat.

As if all of that weren’t enough to impress the discriminating lodger, outside the wall-to-wall window and beyond the snow-covered balcony, the majestic Mount Yōtei (羊蹄山) basks in its full snow-capped glory. Each of the ten lofts at Suiboku promises a full view of this Niseko landmark, nicknamed “Mount Fuji of Hokkaido” for its symmetrical shape. In the presence of such imposing natural beauty, residents who wish to take a break from alpine skiing may well choose to stay in and snuggle up by the window with a novel and a cup of hot cocoa.

It is said that a suibokuga master can capture the life and fragrance of a flower without reproducing so much as the object’s colors and shapes. Without a doubt the über-chic yet delightfully livable Suiboku has done just that. In a paradox of the best kind, the hotel’s industrial austerity exudes warmth, luxury and a sense of home away from home, just when all of these things are most needed after an exhausted day out on the cold mountains.

________________

Suiboku
191-29 Aza-Yamada, Kutchan cho, Abuta gun
Hokkaido 044-0081, Japan
Tel: +81 136 21 5020
www.suibokuhirafu.com

What's Cooking - Part 2 今睌食乜餸-中卷

2010-12-30T01:11:00.019+08:00

Both my freelance work and my day job give me plenty of opportunities to live out a foodie’s dream. As a restaurant reviewer I get to try out fancy new places and sample their best dishes for free. The price to pay, however, is having to keep detailed notes of everything I put in my mouth so that I can spit out a thousand words on a two-page magazine spread the next day. Likewise, taking clients out on company expense sounds like a no-lose proposition until I find myself stuck with a table of stodgy bankers yapping about China’s next big IPOs and why everyone should buy gold. It all bears out the old adage that there is no free lunch in this world.

Hong Kong is a foodie’s paradise and we have the numbers to prove it. There are over 20,000 eating establishments listed on Open Rice, the city’s popular online restaurant guide. Based on that figure alone and excluding thousands other hole-in-the-wall noodle houses and neighborhood kitchens yet to make it to the list, our restaurants per capita is 1.5 times that of New York City and nearly four times that of London. Navigating the city’s hyperactive restaurant scene can be daunting, and friends often come to me for recommendations when planning a birthday or anniversary dinner. A question I get asked a lot is what my favorite restaurants are in Hong Kong. In terms of service, ambience and food – the three categories by which food critics score a restaurant – my top picks are the legendary Mandarin Grill, David Tang’s retro-chic China Club and Toscana under the helm of executive chef Umberto Bombana. Unfortunately for us, Toscana closed shop two years ago along with the Ritz-Carlton Hotel on Chater Road and Mr. Bombana’s subsequent ventures never quite measure up to his past success.

But for every Mandarin Grill, China Club and Toscana in the city, there are thousands of restaurants that fail us on the first two categories. Let’s begin with service. The service industry in Hong Kong has come a long way, but it wasn’t too long ago when store clerks still gave shoppers dirty looks for “just browsing” and hospital patients were abused by our own versions of Nurse Ratched. Although restaurant staff in the city is slowly moving up the learning curve, many unpleasant and sometimes shocking practices remain. The most offensive one of all – and I have written about it in the past – involves a waiter who brings you the check at the end of the meal and announces to the entire table how much it costs. Other examples of customer service faux pas are more subtle but no less irritating. For instance, many restaurants here operate under the misguided notion that quality of service is measured by how fast dishes are cleared from the table. Fast eaters, with their plates taken away as soon as they finish eating, must either stare at the empty placemat in front of them or watch their friends chow down their food for the rest of the meal. In more extreme cases, diners find themselves in a tug-of-war with an over-zealous waiter, while that last strand of pasta dangles precariously between their mouth and the vanishing plate, dripping sauce and all.

Anyone in the restaurant business will tell you that nothing annoys customers more than tardy food arrivals. People get cranky when they are hungry – it’s called hypoglycemia. Unless you are ordering a Peking duck or a chocolate soufflé, your food should arrive within 20 minutes, tops. Anything past that point warrants a polite follow-up with your server. But as if restaurant staff in Hong Kong were all trained to lie, every request to check on a late order is invariably hit back with a robotic smile and a patronizing “it’s on its way, sir.” How the waiter can possibly respond without so much as a trip to the kitchen will baffle you until you chase again, only to discover that your order was never placed. “Do you still want it, sir?” he asks with the same robotic smile.

With the exception of restaurants stationed in hotels, shopping malls and dining enclaves like SoHo, Star Street and Knutsford Terrace, eateries in Hong Kong generally pay very little attention to their décor. The wisdom that “you eat with your eyes first” has yet to gain traction in our city. Wet floor, sticky floor; dirty carpeting and peeling wallpapers; a guan gung (關公; a Taoist deity) shrine next to a giant television screen, Styrofoam take-out boxes stacked under dramatic crystal chandeliers, and customers queuing outside washrooms reeking of chlorine masking more unpleasant odors. Thankfully, restaurant groups like Maxim’s (美心集團) began buying up local restaurants since the 1980s and introduced more uniform standards in restaurant management, providing safe harbors for those with a lower tolerance for poor ambience and hygiene.

My griping about service and décor notwithstanding, the quality of food in Hong Kong is high and the standard is even. No matter where you go and how much you pay, it is difficult these days to get bad food in a restaurant. While fierce competition and instant feedback on the Internet have weeded out most bad apples and tourist traps, modern cooking technology has made preparing good food easier than ever. Gone are the days when you had to travel to Shum Tseng (深井) for that perfectly roasted squab or Lei Yu Mun (鯉魚門) for the best steamed grouper in town. Nowadays any restaurant with a decent steamer or broiler can cook those same dishes just as well. That’s good news for our seven million hungry citizens but very bad news for venerable names like Yung Kee (鏞記), Luk Yu (陸羽) and Mak An Kee (麥奀記). Once the sole guardians of culinary secrets, these big names with an overpriced menu have all but lost their allure and must rely on unwary tourists and a dwindling base of regulars to keep them afloat.

When it comes to eating out, Hong Kongers are spoiled for choice and spoiled for price. For a fraction of what we have to pay in other major cities, we get to feast on world class restaurant food day in and day out. And if Cantonese cooking is the richest and most sophisticated among all regional varieties of Chinese cuisine, then Hong Kong being the Cantonese food capital of the world makes us some of luckiest people around. But the supremacy of Cantonese cooking is something of a double-edged sword. From Sichuan and Hunan specialties to Italian risotto and Japanese teppanyaki, regional and international cuisines can’t escape a bit of “Cantonization” to pander to the local palate, resulting in everything tasting more or less like, well, Cantonese food. Perhaps that’s the price we all must pay for having affordable, delicious food anywhere, any time. Didn’t I tell you there is no free lunch?

NEWS FLASH: Jason's Book Now Available! 快訊:《香港情懷》現已出版!

2010-12-25T17:35:00.026+08:00

Dear Readers,

My new book,
HONG KONG State of Mind,
is now available in Hong Kong at:

Page One
Dymocks
Bookazine
G.O.D. 住好啲
商務印書館
三聯書店
天地圖書
and
book kiosks at the HK Int'l Airport
and major hotels.

Readers outside Hong Kong
can order it from:

www.amazon.com
www.amazon.co.uk
www.amazon.co.jp
www.blacksmithbooks.com

Support a local writer.
Purchase a copy today and
make this the first book
you read in 2011!

--------------------------------------------------------

PRESS RELEASE

For immediate release

New Publication
HONG KONG State of Mind: 37 Views of a City that Doesn’t Blink

HONG KONG State of Mind is a collection of essays by Jason Y. Ng, a popular local blogger, who zeroes in on the city’s idiosyncrasies with deadpan precision.

The 37 essays are organized into three thematic sections: people we see, things we do and places we go, each providing a window on Hong Kong’s city life. Ng’s topics range from the shark fins debate to our unique and unmistakably Cantonese coffee-drinking culture. While the book is meant to pay tribute to Hong Kong’s many quirks, it also puts her flaws on center stage. In “Rhapsody on Pedder,” the author juxtaposes his fellow citizens’ sense of alienation and vulnerability against their unbridled materialism. In “Total Eclipse of the Mind,” he puts our pervasive superstitious beliefs on trial using a series of unrelated news events. In “A Tale of Three Cities,” he compares the coming-of-age stories of Hong Kong and its sister cities Macau and Shenzhen and prompts us to reflect on who we are and where we are heading.

At once an outsider looking in and an insider looking out, Ng has created something for everyone: a travel journal for the passing visitor, a user’s manual for the wide-eyed expat, and an open diary for the native Hong Konger looking for moments of reflection.

“Many foreign writers have written about their experiences living as a gweilo and among other gweilo in the city, but their account of Hong Kong is often confined to the expat community,” Ng said. “Books by local writers, on the other hand, tend to focus on the city’s history, politics or economy. They tend to be academic and the average reader finds them heavy, if not altogether inaccessible. I wanted something to celebrate Hong Kong in a light-hearted, authentic way. There is a gap in the existing literature about Hong Kong and I wanted to fill it.”

The author’s no-nonsense style, punctuated with wry humor, cuts through the obfuscation and gives the reader the kind of social commentary that recalls F. Scott Fitzgerald during America’s Jazz Age. Each essay is graced with a line drawing by Lee Po Ng, the author’s father, which lends the book a personal touch and the aura of an old-fashioned travel journal.

The official book launch, organized jointly by Bookazine Ltd. and Blacksmith Books was held on 5 March 2011 at Bookazine’s new location at the IFC Mall.

About the Author

Jason Ng is a globe-trotter who spent years in Europe and various cities in the United States and Canada before settling back in his birthplace five years ago. He is a full-time lawyer and a contributing writer for lifestyle magazines. In 2008, Ng started his blog, As I See It, commenting on local culture and news events. Over a short span of time, the blog has attracted a sizable following of online readers. Ng lives in Hong Kong and can be contacted at info@jasonyng.com.

Media Contact

Blacksmith Books
5th Floor, 24 Hollywood Road
Central, Hong Kong
Tel: +852 2877 7899
Email: mail@blacksmithbooks.com

What's Cooking - Part 1 今睌食乜餸-上卷

2010-12-14T09:34:00.028+08:00

The 2011 Michelin Guide Hong Kong (oh, and slash Macau) came out last week. This year, Sun Tung Lok (新同樂), an old name in banquet food, became only the second Chinese restaurant in the world to earn three Michelin stars, the highest honor the French can bestow on a restaurant. It was just a couple of years ago when the Red Guide made landfall in Hong Kong and sparked spirited debate and sometimes even nationalistic rumblings among citizens. Hong Kongers balk at the idea of a bunch of foreigners judging our food, when most of the undercover inspectors can’t tell a fish maw from a fish belly or know the first thing about dun (燉), mun (焖), zing (蒸), pou (泡) and zoek (灼) – to name a few ways a Chinese chef may cook his ingredients with steam. For many of us, it seems far wiser to spend the $178 (that’s how much the guide costs) on a couple of hairy crabs currently in season than on a restaurant directory published by a tire manufacturer.

Food is a tricky business. It can trip up even the most sophisticated of cultures and peoples. The English and the German, for instance, excel in everything else in life except for the one thing that matters most. Young nations like America, Australia and Canada, yet to make a name for themselves in the culinary world, must pay their dues by sending away the best chefs they’ve got to study other people’s food. By contrast, countries blessed with rich culinary histories revere their cooking as the cornerstone of a proud culture and an enduring symbol of their people – people who never stop telling folk tales behind popular dishes, who are equally offended and flattered by imitators and copycats overseas, and who wish the word “fusion” had never entered the culinary lexicon.

Of all the worthy cuisines out there, French and Chinese are the reigning champions that leave the rest of the pack in the dust. Surely Koreans have their gogi gui (barbeque), Spaniards their paella and Moroccans their lamb tajine; but when it comes to diversity, complexity and subtlety, the French and the Chinese know few competitors. They are the only true haute cuisine in the world, and evidence abounds for that claim. Only the most ingenious and daring cooks would, for instance, think of putting frogs and snakes, brains and tripe on the menu and pull it off brilliantly. No other language rivals French and Chinese with a richer vocabulary devoted to food and food preparation. For centuries, European royalties checked their egos at the palace door and staffed their imperial kitchens with armies of French chefs. Even today, heads of state across South East Asia regale dignitaries with nothing but Chinese food at state events.

Trailing behind the French and the Chinese are the Japanese. The distant third boasts dishes made with the freshest seasonal ingredients and arranged in stunning, museum-worthy presentations. The edible art of Japanese cooking is best showcased by kaiseki (懐石料理), a multi-course affair featuring a menu that smacks of a wedding rhyme:

Something steamed (蒸物), something boiled (煮物)
Something deep-fried (油物), something broiled (焼物)
And a lacquered tray with a gold foil

But once you get past the intricate presentations and the fancy names, Japanese dishes taste surprisingly ordinary. In fact, many Chinese people in my parents' generation still regard Japanese food as bland, unsophisticated and, with so much emphasis on tofu, seaweed and other humble ingredients, something created by and for poor peasants.

Then there is Italian, the world’s most over-rated food. The problem has nothing to do with Italy and everything to do with the Europhilies on the other side of the Atlantic. Obsessed with all things Italian, Americans romanticize the mafia, go gaga over the Sicilian accent, and hype up Italian cooking to haute cuisine status. Mention Italian food anywhere in America and people give you words like “high-end,” “exclusive” and “refined.” Over the years, the man-made culinary phenomenon spread to the rest of the world like a disease. From Buenos Aires and Berlin to Shanghai and Singapore, hoity-toity Italian restaurants lure impressionable patrons with trite opera tunes and charge exorbitant prices for everyday foods. But no matter how much they window-dress it, noodles and rice are starchy foods that the French regard merely as side dishes and the Chinese use as stomach fillers at the end of a banquet meal. And no matter how much Mario Batali and Rocco DiSpirito like to say every Italian word with an overdone accent or brag about their travels in Tuscany in search of secret recipes, ossobuco and chicken marsala are not, and never will be, nearly as sophisticated as these celebrity chefs and the rest of the marketing machine would have you believe. And so let me set the record straight once and for all: Italian cooking is all about being hearty and folksy, not panache and refinement.

But don’t get me wrong – I love Italian food and I cook it every chance I get. During my boarding school years in Trieste, an idyllic city perched on the Adriatic coast in northeastern Italy, I spent many evenings with local families gorging on homemade gnocchi and polenta and many more nights honing my skills making that perfect al dente pasta with nothing but olive oil and garlic to feed hungry friends at the dormitory. That’s when I tasted Italian cooking at its best: not at some five-star hotel restaurant, but in a cozy kitchen where the main ingredients were cheers and laughs. Those fond memories rush right back whenever I sauté fresh basil in a buttered skillet or watch the steam rise from the sink when draining a pot of boiled spaghetti.

Food is an art form as subjective as any other. Perhaps comparing Italian and Japanese cooking to French and Chinese cuisines is no more meaningful than pitting Beijing opera against the Gregorian chant, The Taj Mahal against Chateau de Versailles. Perhaps good food has much more to do with our life experiences and the memories we associate it with than exotic ingredients and elaborate preparations. And perhaps I am amiss for not mentioning other fine cuisines such as Indian, Thai and Mexican. Whatever it is, all that wondering about food is starting to make me very hungry.

Post Mortem on a Massacre 屠殺後的檢討

2010-08-29T02:50:00.028+08:00

Not since the SARS outbreak in 2003 has a news event gripped the city with such intensity, as live coverage of the hostage crisis in Manila unfolded on prime time television and left us in shock and disbelief. On August 23rd, what started out as a media stunt staged by a frustrated ex-cop ended in a shooting gallery leaving nine dead and three seriously injured. In the days that followed, as details of the bungled rescue were exposed, dissected and analyzed, citizens of Hong Kong united in a kind of collective anger never seen before directed at another sovereign nation.

A lot of ink has been spilled by the local press over the sheer incompetence of the Manila police force. We saw it with our own eyes: rescue units performing a slapstick comedy titled Amateurs’ Night at Rizal Park. Using props from sledgehammers that bounced right off unbreakable windows to ropes that broke after a few pulls and purple glow sticks that smacked of a Halloween toy, the comedians completed their unfunny theatrical joke in front of a stunned audience 700 miles away. But the joke was on the victims and their families: a pair of young girls suddenly orphaned, a woman clever enough to save someone else’s child but not her own husband, and a mother weeping by the side of her comatose son after losing the rest of her family. Their stories tugged at our heartstrings and resonated across a city where taking a vacation in less developed parts of Asia is a national pastime. What happened to those families could have happened to any of us.

As is the case for other man-made disasters, many of us are looking for something or someone to direct our anger and frustration at. Unfortunately for the 150,000 Filipino expatriates working in Hong Kong, every aspect of the hostage crisis – from the gross negligence of the police force to the public relations blunders at the national level – feeds into our racial stereotypes. However untrue and unjustified, the stereotypical Filipino, ever lazy, sloppy and corner-cutting, has been part of the Hong Konger’s psyche since the first crop of domestic helpers from the Philippines arrived in the late 1970s. Within days of the Manila Massacre, a racial backlash started to simmer. Our chief executive, in an act of bravado that could only be described as closing the barn door after the horse has bolted, slapped the country with the most severe travel advisory the next day, not as a safety measure but rather a form of punishment against the tourism-dependent economy. Legislators organizing this Sunday’s mass rally urged participants not to carry racist banners or harass Filipino passers-by. Patience and understanding are in short supply in Hong Kong this week, and the already tenuous relationship between our city and its impoverished neighbor has gotten more tenuous still.

Determined to get a more balanced perspective on things, I sat down with a few of my Filipino friends earlier this week for some one-on-one, heart-to-heart discussions about the hostage crisis. Before I even began, Benny, a musician who moved to Hong Kong from Manila three years ago, asked me if the stories he had heard about Filipino maids being beaten or sacked by their Chinese employers were true. Indeed, rumors of violence and dismissals have begun to swirl within the Filipino community here. I could neither confirm nor deny these rumors, and so I instead offered Benny a rather cynical response: if there were abuses by Hong Kong people out of retaliation, the stories would have been all over the news and we would have known about it. Cold comfort, but comfort nonetheless.

On the subject of police incompetence, my Filipino friends proffered a unanimous explanation. In the Philippines, the police department’s budget is being strangled daily by rampant corruption. Police officers, including the half-hearted SWAT units charged with the perilous task of freeing the Hong Kong hostages, are under-paid and few are willing to risk their lives in the line of duty. “They just want to go home to their wives and children at the end of the day,” explained Lisa, a co-worker who sits three floors above me in the office. A cash-starved police force also means officers must muddle through the day with antiquated equipment and non-existent training. That explains why rescuers fumbled through the bus siege without so much as a step ladder, a battering ram or a pair of night vision goggles.

And so it once again boils down to that third world woe: corruption. The subject is echoed by every Filipino I have talked to and is the singular reason why the Philippines is mired in perpetual poverty. The country is currently ranked 139th on the worldwide corruption perceptions index, below even Bangladesh, Uganda and Libya. In the Philippines, corruption is simultaneously the oil that greases the economic machine and the venom that poisons it. With half of the country’s GDP controlled by 15 powerful families, bribery is the only way money can seep through the crevices of the crony system. Every new government since Ferdinand Marcos, crowned the second most corrupt head of state of all time by watchdog organization Transparency International, has run on an anti-corruption platform but none has made even a dent on the viper’s nest. In my past visits to Manila, I tasted first-hand the poison of corruption that flows through every vein of society. In the wealthy Makati City neighborhood within the greater metropolitan area, my friends and I couldn’t get through the day without passing out “coffee money” to umpteen police officers like it was Chinese New Year in Hong Kong.

In this week’s hostage crisis, corruption reared its ugly head and did so on multiple fronts. Corruption was what made the police department sack the gunman Rolando Mendoza a year ago, when the highly decorated cop got thrown under the bus for bringing drug charges against the scion of a powerful family in the Philippines. Corruption is what starves the police department of resources critical to keeping it afloat and capable of responding to emergencies like a hostage standoff. And corruption was possibly the reason why the Mayor of Manila ordered to have the gunman’s brother arrested in the middle of a hostage negotiation, a decision that defied all common sense and ultimately pushed the gunman over the edge.

In the weeks and months ahead, citizens of Hong Kong are expected to step through the various stages of grief – denial, anger, bargaining and mourning – before we finally come to terms with the heart-wrenching tragedy. Similarly, the Philippines will take a bit of time to recover from the national embarrassment of staging the most disastrous rescue operation in human history. But perhaps embarrassment is the last thing its people should worry about. Until and unless the endless cycle of corruption is dealt with, this country has no future.

I Died Three Saturdays Ago 我在三星前期死了

2010-08-05T13:57:00.020+08:00

“I have never given much thought to how I would die,” wrote Stephanie Meyer in the opening line of her best-selling vampire romance Twilight.

Well, neither have I. But on the ordinary summer morning of July 17, at a busy intersection on Pokfulam Road not 50 feet from my apartment building, my moment of reckoning finally arrived. And in the last few seconds of my life, I realized that death, that ultimate leveler of mankind, was not nearly as fearsome as I had thought. Nor was it as remote...

_______________________

Read the rest of this article in HONG KONG State of Mind, published by Blacksmith Books, available at major bookstores in Hong Kong and on www.blacksmithbooks.com.

As I See It

Funny Valentines 可笑的情人

Incident at Heathrow 希思羅事件

Hong Kong Hold'em 香港撲克

NEWS FLASH: Website Launched! 快訊: 網頁發放!

The Hundredth Post 第一百篇

Unfaithfully Yours 愛偷吃的男人

Still Work to Be Done 同志仍須努力

The Moose, The Gap and the Apple 麋 、溝、蘋

I Was There When the Sky Fell 當日我在場

Pirates and Hidden Treasures 海盜和寶藏

NEWS FLASH: HONG KONG State of Mind to be Reprinted 快訊:《香港情懷》再版

What's Cooking - Part 3 今睌食乜餸-下卷

Maid in Hong Kong - Part 2 女傭在港-下卷

Maid in Hong Kong - Part 1 女傭在港-上卷

Those Who Live in Glass Houses 住在玻璃屋的人

The Curious Case of Ai Weiwei 艾未未的奇案

It Could Happen to You 或許一天會是你

The King and I 國王與我

Apocalypse Now - Part 2 現代啟示錄-下卷

Apocalypse Now - Part 1 現代啟示錄-上卷

The Insomniacs' Club 失眠俱樂部

NEWS FLASH: Book Launch Party at the IFC! 快訊:《香港情懷》國金商埸發佈會

New Year, Old Tradition 新年、舊俗

Hotel Review: Suiboku Ski Lofts 酒店點評: 水墨

What's Cooking - Part 2 今睌食乜餸-中卷

NEWS FLASH: Jason's Book Now Available! 快訊:《香港情懷》現已出版!

What's Cooking - Part 1 今睌食乜餸-上卷

Post Mortem on a Massacre 屠殺後的檢討

I Died Three Saturdays Ago 我在三星前期死了

The Moose, The Gap and the Apple 麋、溝、蘋