Moooooooo Dudes

Pastoral, eh? Who would think that such a tranquil scene can be found a mere 30 minutes’ boat ride away from the insanity of smoke-belching cars and 50 storey buildings that is the concrete canyon of Central in Hong Kong, where no living thing can survive for long?

These gentle bovines are now under threat from irate villagers who accuse them of being big and scary, as well as pooing everywhere. Oh, and they slow down cars as well. Yes! These water buffalo which used to be tools to farmers tilling the land, have now been cast on the scrapheap of history to be regarded as a mere nuisance.

Seeing them close up every day I have to say I can’t see the problem. Yes they enjoy eating crops, but the few areas where stuff is grown around here are all tilled illegally on government land anyway, and the buffalo problem would soon be solved if farmers could be bothered to put up real walls around “their” fields – for example they could use the enormous amount of bricks from building rubble which is dumped illegally everywhere. But because the fields are illegal, farmers choose to use old doors, bed frames, cardboard boxes and anything else that’s at hand, thus further uglifying the already astonishingly ugly face of Pui O, where the buffalo roam.

I bet you’ve always wondered what they look like and now you can see them: The leaders, movers and shakers of Hong Kong! As well as a sprinkling of the PLA! Well, not just a sprinkling; it seems that the military is taking over Hong Kong so much that only a handful of suit and bowtie people are left.

However, there it is, with our Esteemed Hero Donald Tsang in the middle, being given a crystal ball? Lamp? by some girl. (Apparently it’s supposed to be a PEARL, symbolising – what was it again? Oh yeah, the superitority of China in all things.)
Notice how the … I would love to call it painting but… all right, painting, has a kind of religious feel to it? Or North Korean?

This is not a coincidence. Nothing in the Chinese world is. It is of course not Hong Kong’s leader Donald T who takes centre stage, but China’s president Hu Jintao, the real leader of Hong Kong and we’d better not forget it.
Just the other day some Chinese academic said it’s meaningless to have democracy in Hong Kong before people are clear about who is the correct person to vote for.

Well, so that cat’s out of the bag and has never in fact been in it – we’ll have democracy in Hong Kong with all the candidates chosen by Beijing. Who was ever in any doubt.

Anyway, here they are, all the self-serving, self-important, vested interested, ivory tower-dwelling, anti-environment, anti-people, reactionary bureaucratic ******* who are running this place, masters of their own house, happy as pigs in shit, driving Hong Kong into the ditch on a brand new super-highway.

Talking about North Korea – apparently the gullible powers that be in the west have decided to unfreeze the money that august country has salted away in Macau in return for NK opening up its nuclear (not “nukelar”) facilities. Yeah right! When has North Korea ever, I mean EVER stuck to its promises? Why do South Korea, the US and all the other nations sycophantically hanging on to North Korea’s every word, always believe what those masters at manipulation decide to spew forth?
Save your money and efforts dudes: Those guys will never, I say it again, NEVER! close down their nuclear facilities, let alone let anyone inspect them. So the North Koreans suddenly came to their senses of an afternoon?
Puh-lease! This is a gigantic ruse, as always. It’s just incredible that people fall for it again and again.
Wishful thinking is a wonderful thing, but to let it dictate world politics?
I laugh incredulously but a little bit disappointedly: Ha fucking ha!

Funky Bovine (Beautiful Dudes III)

Just wanted to share this chap that I ran into on my piling expedition this morning. (Pile: (v) walking black and white dog named Piles)
Another bright green and blue, and a little bit white, day in Hong Kong. What’s happening? I’ve been seeing islands and blue skies for several days this year. Have all the factories in southern China closed down, their owners turned to the bicycle for entertainment? Have the six empty buses per second along all of Hong kong’s streets suddenly stopped running? Have the chauffeurs of Hong Kong’s fattie catties stopped sleeping in their cars with the engines running?

In short, is this, in fact, the end of the world as we know it?
That’d be something….

Canto Panto

My fellow Lantau environmentalist Larry Feign has written a book called Hongkongitis, reports from the wackiest place on earth.
It is very spot on and funny in a deliciously scathing sort of way, and I found myself giggling and laughing “out loud” on various occasions as I devoured it in one sitting. (Check it out at www.chameleonpress.com) It has many things in common with my new book Avoid The Exchange Of Jokes, yet to be published. But the wackiest place on earth? Surely that prize must go to several of the middle eastern countries. All right, can only be one, so Saudi. Or North Korea.

Anyway, I was thinking about the wacky thing today on the bus home. I’ve decided to become a better person by participating in more small talk. Last night for example, I went to a party where people were engaged in deep discussions about real estate, the temperature (34 degrees) and whether one should fire a helper (euphemism for servant in Hong Kong) who’s failed to clean the windows properly – twice! I joined in enthusiastically, scoring brownie points all round.

Worse Than Normal News

What do you have to do to get on the front page of Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post? Answer: Be Paris Hilton, famous for having been born.

If you’re for example a Chinese teenager rescued from working 14 hours a day in an illegal brick kiln without pay, being beaten and thrown bricks at for not working fast enough, you barely make it to the third page.  Still, the story is now out and I have to say even I, pretty blase, cynical and above all worn down about terrible news from China through 18 years of living here as I am, was gobsmacked.

 It turns out that kidnapping children as young as eight as well as retarded adults to use as slave labour in illegal kilns is  normal practise in Shanxi province, home to thousands of small kilns, and has been going on for more than a decade.

The good news is of course that this has been exposed at all,  even resulting in the whole nation being “shocked.” The norm would have been that reporters from the news station which exposed the scandal, would have been beaten by the police and probably detained indefinitely. 

Today’s front page finally carried news from the case: A kiln manager had been arrested. He said “I felt it was a fairly small thing, just beating and swearing at the workers and not paying them wages.” Indeed.

As we tut-tut our way through the article, cursing the barbarian Chinese and their lack of respect for human life, we feel smug in our knowledge that we could never do such a thing. Beating workers and not paying them – whatever next?

Actually, everybody is capable of such behaviour and worse. The only thing that separates for example me and those sadisitic slave drivers in China is opportunity. They do it because they can. If I were to try something similar, even beating up one single person with a shovel or other blunt agricultural instrument, the law would come down on me like a ton of, well, bricks. In China, the law exists more or less solely for the prupose of assisting perpetrators, transgressors and other criminals, as long as they are percieved as powerful.

I am not at all surprised that these slave camps exist in China. The surprising thing is that the scandal has been allowed to be exposed without a number of journalists ending up in the nick with their teeth knocked out. Hooray! Is this the beginning of press freedom?

Another Pet Peeve

That Hong Kong is a great city, nobody can disagree. It never snows here and we’ve got equal opportunities to make a quick buck. We have an open and accountable government, working tirelessly for the good of almost all the people, or at least a very large section of the property developing community. So I love Hong Kong. Now we are even apparently over the economic slump and our future is bright again, especially if we follow the government’s advice to shut up, make money and spend spend spend. Now, I’m as eager to obey government orders as the next man, and I’d love to increase its revenue and bulging coffers with my hard-earned cash. Just don’t ask me to do it by shopping. If I go shopping, I’ll be forced to encounter the Hong Kong shop assistant. No, I’ll say that again: The Hong Kong shop girl.

Beautiful Dudes II

Ahhrghhhh…. why? I ask. Why? Why can’t the mainland be in Hong Kong or vice versa? Why can’t we have dudes like this in Hong Kong?
Well, we do. But in Hong Kong dudes like this are all snatched and tweaked, preened and polished into Canto pop-stars or worse. (Who cares if they can sing – beauty is everything!)
The Western equivalent of this extreme handsomeness would be a movie star earning billions.
In China… they’re just allowed to roam free.
And they’re so approachable! A few meters away from the border in Shenzhen they’re just sitting there, taking a rest. When foreigners turn up, insanely brandishing a camera, drooling and frothing at the mouth while mumbling incoherently about writing blogs and books about Chinese male beauty, they not only chat to us for ages but ask for our cards as well as writing down their own numbers!!!
Why, why can’t it be like this everywhere, all the time?

An Inconvenient Rant

When I saw this sign at Guangzhou East Train Station yesterday I have to admit I was puzzled at first. A place for cars to rant; what, were the bastards not content to have taken up all living space in the city, sending pedestrians scuttling for cover, now they were to have a place to rant as well?
But then I saw the light. It was of course a place to rant about cars!
I’ve been wanting to do that for several years. I haven’t driven a car in 20 years and here is why: I hate f***ing cars.

Expensive Picnic

I love my pet peeves! It feels so good to feel pleasantly vexed, disgusted and morally indignant.
Living in Hong Kong one doesn’t have to look far to find something about which to be up in arms. For me personally a huge pp is when I talk to locals in Chinese and they answer me in English, but over the years that practice has fortunately abated somewhat. Another gigantic pp is of course pollution and the way Hong Kong treats the planet’s resources as some kind of cornucopia, in fact seems to revel in and be proud of the act of rampant waste.