Infantile Jealousy

I’m one of those people who, for one reason or another, is not in the possession of a child. Perhaps I’m not ready to fork out 2 000 000 dollars between now and 2027 for its upkeep; or maybe I’m not willing to bring another life into this terrible world only to see it perish for lack of water and air a few years down the line, or it could be that I never trusted any potential father figure it might have had.
The joy and heartbreak of having children just didn’t happen to me.
However, that doesn’t mean I don’t like children. But “liking children”, that’s a funny one, isn’t it. People ask me “do you like children?” or they describe themselves as “loving children.” Children, like adults, come in all shapes and forms. Nobody asks me, or indeed each other: “Do you like adults?”
Me, I like some children and some adults. But children being what they are, vibrant, exuberant and, up to a certain age, honest, draw the attention of adults.

Whenever I’m on a ferry, bus or train, I like to play “hide behind the newspaper” or “hide behind the seat” with a child, both for my own amusement and also to keep the child from crying for the time being, seeing that I, as all childless and noise-sensitive people, hate the sound of kids crying.
You would think that when the child and I are engaged in this game which, I imagine, hasn’t changed much since we were all living in caves, the parents would be free to talk among themselves about romantic issues such as family economy or who should take out the rubbish. You would think that they would welcome a short break in their incessant attention on the kid, and let it get on with the little game with a poor childless spinster and born-again virgin who obviously has no real joy in life. However, you’d be wrong.

As soon as the mother notices her child’s attention turned away from herself and toward a stranger, she starts a fussing and a to-do which I’m sure the child seldom sees in its normal life. Suddenly there’s a grabbing of limbs, a forceful turning of head toward herself and a frantic activity to catch the child’s attention – anything but to let it have a little interlude with the person sitting next to them.
It seems a parent, I’ll say that again, a mother, can’t stand to have her child having any interaction at all with anybody but her; it is indeed as if she is jealous of every second her child spends not fully concentrated on her.

At least as a woman I won’t suffer the indignity of being taken for a paedophile if I as much as look at a stranger’s child, but really people: Is it really so painful for you when your kid looks at, plays with and turns its attention to somebody else? In a few minutes the child will be all yours again and you can do with it what you wish; scream at it, hit it, leave it alone to be burnt in a fire and let it fall out the window.

I know, or I’m under the impression, that having a child all to yourself, is like being perpetually in love. Great! But unlike a husband, a child won’t suddenly and irrevocably turn its attentions to some stranger who happens to catch its eye. Why can’t all you mothers out there let your children have their little eye-contact and newspaper-hiding with me? It’s only for five minutes and it’s not doing any harm. You should appreciate that there are some people out there who aren’t creating dozens of more people to futher deplete the few resources we have left.

Sad Mugs

Last time I went across the border from Hong Kong to Shenzhen, something about the people there struck me as unusual. I couldn’t put my finger on it at first. People looked so… sad? Depressed? Or just out of sorts?
There were downturned mouths everywhere, some people had tears in their eyes and everybody seemed to drag themselves around dejectedly. The I saw what it was.
They were hurt.
Hurt in their feelings.
But of course! Hadn’t the Chinese government warned that wilful German chancellor Merkel time and time again about not meddling in China’s affairs by meeting that splittist, separatist, conservationist, violence-ist rabble-rouser the Dalai Lama? Hadn’t they clearly expressed that by meeting him in her own country, (invented by the Chinese in the Yu Dynasty but they didn’t want it) she would seriously hurt the feelings of the Chinese people? Well that stubborn bint wouldn’t listen. She foolhardily went ahead and did it anyway and: Hurt! Hurt feelings everywhere!
Let this be a warning to all you Europeans and other foreigners who think you have a right to meet whoever you like in your own homes: You don’t! Your homes are in fact China’s domestic affairs. And 1.3 billion sad mugs is a threat not to be taken lightly.

Harbour Harbour On The Wall

The submissions to the government’s call for ideas on what we’re going to do with the tiny part of the Central Royal Communist Reclamation Harbour Front that’s not going to be taken up by Government Fascist Bastion Headquarters , have been pouring in like so much freshly mixed concrete.

And lovely submissions they are too, all touchingly featuring almost disproportionately large swathes of green areas. Our open and accountable, sharing and caring (but strong) government, after looking carefully at all the creative and well thought-out submissions, have just made public their own final blueprint, clearly taking the public need for greenery into consideration:

Here it is in detail:

Beautiful Dudes VII

Wei hey you prancing gym drones out there! This is the way to an impressive physique: Work.
W… w… what? Yes, work, good old fashioned physical labour.

I realise my Beautiful Dudes series so far has been concentrating on faces, but of course beauty can be found anywhere on the male figure. It took me half an hour to walk around this guy, his shoulders were so wide. When I finally got to the other side he was already in the truck, but took the time to pose for several photos before I melted into the tarmac and disappeared.

There’s something appealing in the combination of the face of an angel, and a body, one finger of which could lift you up and chuck you. Dudes, go lift some sacks!

Build It And They Will … Take Photos?

My vexedness or should I say irate-icity with things on tops of my ferry piers continues. This time it’s the developers/owners of one of the many monstrosities that have sprung up on Kowloon side after the airport was moved to Lantau (HK’s last green lung) that has caught my irate eye.

Yes the marketing idea is great: Putting a huge replica of a digital camera in a place which can be seen from miles away, or could be if we had visibility, with said monstrosity in sharp focus. But really – who’s going to photograph that thing? It’s an ugly pile and no different from hundreds if not thousands of other boring, non-descript, “force as many people as possible into minimal space” money-milkers with which our poor city is replete.

Also you’ll be glad to know that the reality of that blue-sky, festive view is this:

I deliberately put a ferry in the foreground so nobody would think I had photoshopped the image to appear to be seen through several layers of grey cloth. It’s real! It’s Hong Kong’s reality every day, all year round. But I have to say to the credit of the developers, that their optimistic image of the real building surrounded by clear skies is a welcome change from the images they normally present as advertising for the shoe-box hellholes they keep churning out, namely “English country mansion with elegant damsel on horseback trotting around endless expanse of green.”
So I shouldn’t complain, really. There’s a new kind of honesty afoot – shame about the “inclement weather conditions”…

Bitter Lives

The South China Morning Post, HK’s leading English language newspaper, has seen many changes over the years. The news pages are getting fewer while each day’s advertising section will break your wrist if you try to lift it with one hand.

All the good journalists have been sacked for being too critical of Beijing, and attempts at humour in the writing is frowned upon by editors.
The good news is that you can now gallop through the entire paper in less than 15 minutes, which certainly saves a lot of time. Still, I buy the SCMP faithfully every day, because it contains so many little news-snippets from China and the world, wonderful nuggets for people drawn to the, shall we say more surreal side of life.

Unfortunately they are mostly about terribly unhappy, unlucky and unhinged people in China, but reading them just puts a smile on my face – probably because it makes me feel not so badly off after all.
Take this geezer in Yunnan for example. Headline: “Bitter man uses car as weapon.”
“Chen Zhengwei swallowed petrol and drove his car into six students on campus, injuring one of them severely….”
Hang on. Running down a few kids with one’s car is probably something most people fantasise about doing, but drinking petrol??
Yes he’d been pissed off about having his application for early retirement turned down, and saw running students down as a reasonable way of addressing this injustice. Fair enough. The petrol-drinking was “part of a plan to commit suicide [afterwards].”
How was he going to do that- chuck a burning match down his throat?
The story ends there of course. No details, no mention of how much he drank or if drinking petrol will in fact kill you without burning – apparently not in this case as he’d lived to be interrogated by the police. But: Riveting! Why isn’t that kind of thing on the front page, with pictures and full details, instead of “Poverty-ridden Hong Kong Developer Manages To Eke Out Living By Clinching Deal”
“Donald Tsang Shows Caring Side, Waves To Public From Limousine” and “Pink Dolphin Thrives On Human Waste, Government Finding Shows”?

Beautiful Dudes VI

Beautiful dudes, beautiful dudes, China is full of beautiful dudes. There we were sitting in a restaurant in Shenzhen gnawing on some excellent Sichuan food, when one beautiful and one very reasonably looking dude walked past.
“Look, BDs at eleven o’clock,” I nudged my friend Richard. I waved, BD waved back and smiled with teeth that could out-teeth a Korean, and a few minutes later we’re all eating and drinking together, playing cards and having a whale of a time. (And believe me, as a Norwegian I know what a whale is!)

Why can’t Hong Kong people love whitey with the same enthusiasm? Or maybe I don’t even bother with them anymore. I only deal with populations of one billion or more, these days. Ha ha ha

Idiotic Children

A Hong Kong woman, 25 years old and with four kids, has been hauled in front of the magistrate for child abuse. Or neglect, I forget which.
Something about the kids being smelly, never turning up for school, being unable to talk properly at the age of seven and generally being grossly underweight and under height, malnourished, with broken bones, bruises and cigarette burns – the usual things.

Having no children myself I’m glad some people are taking up the mantle of populating this earth with vigour. It’s good to see that the future generation is in safe hands. But what was interesting about this news article was that when the children were to be gauged, as it were, by doctors and social workers, these were horrified to find that the abuse and neglect had been such that the kids didn’t know the names of any of the McDonalds meals put before them.
The mind doesn’t only boggle, it bugles! What cruelty, what evil. These retarded children, guaranteed to become sociopaths, must be locked up immediately and not allowed to come out until they can recite upside down, backwards and forwards and hanging out the window by one finger, the sacred rites of McDonalds meals.

And they say the way we treat children in HK is old-fashioned? The social services have at least woken up to our modern realities. A is for Big Mac, B is for Big Mac….

Car Cemetery

This is the latest rage among people living in or near Pui O, a famous working-class beauty spot: Releasing vehicles back to nature. It starts with people driving more and more slowly, almost as an afterthought, and using their cars less and less frequently. The cars (and vans, yes especially vans) then start taking on a shabby, unwashed look, and leaves settle on the windscreen and roof. And then, one day, the car slowly rolls to a halt somewhere discreet like right in front of a public toilet complete with government-sponsored flower bed and doesn’t move again.

People seem to think that car corpses disappear by themselves if they only look unused enough. And it’s true that rust appears and after a couple of years starts the arduous task of eating the car up, millimeter by painful millimeter; however, this can take a while. And where we are, no metal-hungry mainland workers are going to swarm in, dismantle the corpses and carry them back to the gaping furnaces screaming for steel.

The corpses remain where they have been abandoned. The tires deflate, the windows fall out and one back light is kicked to pieces by an irate water buffalo but that’s about it; on the whole, a car corpse is there for the duration. Some vans are used as storage space for stuff the villagers will never use again but can’t bear to throw away, such as one rubber glove, a broken picture frame and some bed springs, but I don’t really think it justifies their existence.

On any 50 yards walking around Pui O you can count at least ten or twelve abandoned vehicles. And as always, the real genius is that the police can’t do anything because it’s all happening on private land.

So I can do anything on private land eh? What if I bought a square meter and killed somebody there? Would I then be immune to prosecution?
I tell you who I’d like to kill (or at least give a good seeing to) on my piece of land; that would be the careless tossers leaving their rusting heaps of metal behind to uglify and pollute my beautful Pui O.

Caring, Sharing Police

You’ve got to give it to the mainland authorities; they do do everything in their power, of which they have quite a lot, to improve law and order as well as boosting their image.

The latest effort from the police of Guizhou, one of the poorest provinces in China (or, I suspect, not the police themselves but the provincial government) is a plan to “compensate companies which have been robbed if officers fail to catch the thieves.” (South China Morning Post) Nothing about private persons being robbed, but that is perhaps asking too much.

Two questions spring immediately to mind.

1. People in China robbing companies are normally government officials, more often than not with full cooperation from the police. How are they going to swing it? Does it mean that … the police will get the same money twice?

2. The mainland police is famous for its crime solving percentage. It works like this: A crime is reported. The police find someone they think may or may not have done it. They beat the shit out of him/them until they get a confession. Confession is proof of guilt, and hey presto.
So with this new threat of compensation hanging over officers’ heads, they now need to increase their quotas even more, to 110%.

Looks like Guizhou is going to see a hell of a lot more beatings down the cop shop in future…