A Run-in With The Law

Aren’t chilies beautiful? Not only in a dish and on the tongue, but just to look at, to be near. When traveling in China I’m drawn to markets with great force; I don’t have a kitchen or any way to carry the delicacies (everything looks so much more delicious here, probably because of wildly inappropriate pesticide and everything-enhancers) so I’m kind of window shopping for vegetables.

Here we are in Liu Pan Shui (six basins of water) in inner Guizhou province. Guizhou is supposed to be the poorest province in China, and they’re not wrong there.

Anyway, we’re strolling around this market with its flayed puppies, dangling ox testicles and on-site making of mouth-watering chili paste

when this short-haired, black leather jacketed guy sidles up to us. I can smell government official and yes, there’s his police ID.

“I’m from the police, where are you staying?”

“What?”

“I need to know where you’re staying.”

“Why are you asking us this?”

“I work in a station nearby and we’ve received a phone call about two foreigners walking around the market.”

Lost for words I just hold up my hotel key card. After a quick glance he buggers off.

Hurt in our middle-class sensibilities, we splutter on. What a nerve, who made that call, etc., etc.

When we get back to the hotel, the staff is all a-flutter. The night before they’d given X’s passport a cursory glance while checking us into two rooms, now they want to see my ID too and need us to fill in a form they had “forgotten” the night before. I show them my HK ID card, being a permanent resident, and we fill in the forms. Sure, it’s easy to forget to use the right forms when two foreigners suddenly come into the reception without warning…
Suddenly it dawns on me.

“You’ve had a call from the police, haven’t you.”

“Heh, heh, yes. But this is for your own safety!”

Own safety my arse. Some ludicrous crackdown on everything more like it. We go to get our stuff. Out of here! Get on that train to an even more parochial place, but out of here. The receptionists are all writhing and simpering.

“Sorry, your ID card, we need to know how long you’re allowed to stay in Hong Kong… you need to talk to the police…”

“Too late, we’re leaving now.”

“But please wait, it’s for your own safety, please wait a moment…”

As we wait for the train in the freezing waiting hall with millions of people we expect to see a SWAT team zoom in to check my ID. X is afraid they will make us miss our train. Unfortunately nothing happens and we just join the crush of people trying to force their way 60 abreast through the narrow gate where barking ticket inspectors egg them on.

On the platform we have a giggle. Safe at last!

But the rozzers get us in the end. Just as we’re about to get on the train this fat, rosy-cheeked policeman in uniform stops us.

“You have been taking photos in the station area and need to erase them.”

“Oh GHOWD!”

I duly erased the photos of a million people pushing to get through the gate, and also one technically inferior one of minority woman with baby in sling. And that’s why you can’t see them on this site. The policeman had the grace to say thank you, though, and he looked very embarrassed as well he should. After all I’ve been taking photos in train waiting halls with impunity for 19 years and can’t really see how a photo of a million people crushing in various settings can constitute spying, stealing state secrets or trying to split the country. But the communist party knows best, that’s what some of us mere mortals must strive to understand.

I’m trying. I really am.

China Drool – Beautiful Dudes IX

These people just walk around train stations trying to get tickets. What a world.

Cool Yule – Not, II

Christmas is a difficult time for me. I’m not a Christian and there is so much, so many … how can I put it diplomatically… “decorations catering to Hong Kong taste.” There’s too much food, too much drink and too much forced jollity and pressure to give people things they don’t need. To get away from Christmas, my trusty China companion X and I therefore got on the train and headed for the western provinces. But lo! Christmas has taken China by storm. Not the religious aspect of it, obviously, but here in Guiyang, as an example, I saw street cleaners wearing Santa Claus hats.

In fact many bars now have Christmas decorations all year round. I’m all for it! Why hang something up only to take it down again a few weeks later? Still, there’s no Christmas music here, so China is the place to be.

Outside my hotel room I found a charming vase

which some geezers living down the corridor for some reason had felt compelled to SPIT into! What are people like? But it’s better than spitting on the carpet I suppose. I’m fine with spitting actually – the carpets are not mine. It’s the blowing of the nose using one finger to close the nostril that I find … Yes Christmas with Chinese characteristics is great. It’s also very cold, which I think is only proper for late December, not this T-shirt wearing crap we have in Hong Kong.

Hope everyone will celebrate solemnly, sedately and with great dignity and flair.

Cool Yule – Not

It’s that time of the year again when HK goes into overdrive with every mall and public space competing for “tackiest Christmas decoration of the universe.”

I don’t do Christmas because ‘m not a Christian (why the capital letter by the way; isn’t “Christian” a noun like “wanker” or “pederast”?) and will not only go away for the awful duration but also donate money to Animals Asia (save the moon bears) instead of buying more useless stuff for people who have everything.

And it’s that time of life again when people like me tut-tut about the materialism of young people of today, going: When I was your age…
Actually, I don’t envy young people of today. Unlike many middle-agies I don’t use every opportunity to criticise them for their taste in music, clothes and the fact that they get laid incessantly (the debate about sex education has been raging lately as it does around this time most years, with oldies saying the young people of today should be ‘responsible” and “take sex seriously.” Should they hell! Go for it, I say.

(I am, however, in awe of young people of today vs. the law of gravity. How do they make those trousers stay hovering around their mid-thigh while walking?)

I don’t subscribe to the idea that everything was better when I was young. We didn’t have mobiles, the internet and The Sopranos. And the Simpsons. On the other hand, we didn’t know that the planet would soon breathe its last with us on it. We didn’t have George W. Bush either, so we’re probably even.

But one thing we had which I think the young (Hong Kong) people of today don’t have, is a childhood.
I saw a couple on the MTR (HK’s metro) yesterday, anxiously hovering over their girl about three years old. They’d given her one of those portable whiteboards which you can draw on and delete by pulling a thing across it. The girl was happily doodling away, but that wasn’t good enough for Mr and Mrs Wong. “Draw a tree!” “No, draw a house!” “Draw Mummy!” The little girl looked very bewildered and then distraught as she couldn’t keep up with the demands. When her lip started to quiver and she dropped the pen, the father brusquely tore the toy away. Not even an outlet for creativity is allowed to be used creatively in education-mad HK, and I couldn’t help thinking that this little girl was set up for a life of feeling like a failure.

In Hong Kong, you seldom see parents playing with their children, it’s always to do with learning something. “A is for Apple, B is for Bastard…” Children here don’t have a second of the day to themselves; when it’s not school and homework, it’s piano lessons, tennis lessons and lesson lessons; not a free moment to daydream, read or just be.

Last week I went to possibly the most awful place in the entire city, Shatin’s Futuristic-port or whatever it’s called. Sorry, Science Park. It looked like one of those models or computer-generated architect’s drawings of Life On Mars.
Everything was metal and everything was grey, with the usual fascistically trimmed hedges and unnaturally bright flowers standing guard as a token of life around all the grey. I felt like one of those little people plonked down around the pavements of the architect’s drawings to add that human touch.

Anyway, I was there to check the Norwegian spelling of a computer game for little girls (and boys): Be your own fashion designer. With a background noise of incessantly playing, really irritating plink-plonk music, the child was encouraged to creatively change clothes on the various Barbie-like, inanely smiling creatures popping up on the screen, equipping them with handbags, shoes and other accessories.
A strident (Norwegian) voice told the player what to do, where to put things and what they should look like.

When the unbearable three hours of listening and taking notes came to an end, the proud manufacturers asked me what I thought of their product. I had to say: I think it’s total crap. When I was young, yes, when I was young! We played with real dolls, dressing and undressing them. We talked for them in different voices and let them have personalities and lives. In fact, we were the dolls, using our imagination to decide what was going to happen to them.

We didn’t let adults decide what and how we would play, with tinny music tormenting the ears and soul, playing dementedly while we struggled to find the right handbag to go with whatever shoes, clicking on whatever we thought was expected of us, with a mouse…

So in that respect and in many others, yes, I dont envy the young people of today. Adults have hijacked their childhood in the name of commercialism and are doing their best to do the same with their youth. The only playful thing young people of today have left is sex, apparently. Now the adults are trying to take over that part of their lives as well, with fathers scarily dancing with their daughters in various “stay pure” incestious rituals which are gaining popularity around the globe, according to the SCMP of two Sundays ago.

I shudder and I want to puke. No, I don’t envy the young. Merry Bloody Christmas, I’m off hitchhiking in Sichuan province. Stay tuned.

Regrets, I Have A Few… and here’s another one!

Ha ha how silly can one get? I thought I’d done a smart and great thing by moving to Hong Kong all those years ago.
Full of leeng tsai, no snow and with many opportunities to make several dollars an hour for translating manuals for washing machines into Norwegian, it seemed Hong Kong had it all.

After having read the South China Morning Post (another reason to love HK) yesterday, however, I’m kicking myself senseless. It turns out I was stupid to move to Hong Kong and that it was in fact in Saudi Arabia I should have settled.

You thought HK was laissez faire and all that? Ho ho, it’s nothing! For a more benign and tolerant government as that of Saudi Arabia isn’t to be found on this earth.

Listen to this: An 18-year old girl was gang-raped by seven guys. What does the king of Saudi Arabia do? Instead of giving her the 200 lashes of the old whip and the lengthy prison term to which she was originally sentenced and which she clearly deserves – what a slut! he pardons her!!!!

A bit bleeding heart liberal for me to be honest, but what magnanimity! Saudi: Clearly the place to be.

Store Your Relatives At Christmas

Beautiful village house to let over Christmas. Three bedrooms, lovely sea view

1 kind dog. Domestic helper available. Broadband access, huge roof terrace, ideal for storing those pesky relatives and friends come to stay for christmas. Or better still – let them stay in your small flat in Wanchai while you bask on the beach near this lovely 1400 square foot house!

Contact me for further information. Act fast, offer open till Friday only!

Government Come Back – All Is Forgiven

Reading through some of my old blogs I realise I’ve been hard on the HK government more than once. I have, in fact, criticized it roundly and called it things, for example self-important amoebas. But after a quick stroll around Mui Wo this morning I’ve come to the conclusion that the HK government is a caring sharing government which (who?) ultimately means well. For look at what it is doing for our friends, trees.

To keep irate passers-by from gnawing the trees down, representatives from our warm-hearted government have put tree protectors around each darling trunk. This is kind not only to trees but to the aforementioned irate passers-by milling aimlessly around, too. With all the tree protectors, the pavement has much less walking space than before, and so presents a much smaller risk for over-confident (“fast”) walkers to harm themselves.

This seems to be the thinking of the people protecting trees from gnawage in Central too. Here the tree isn’t just protected from the onslaught of unpredictable pedestrians once (see inner metal protector ) but twice.

Again the effect is a safer, less hurried Central – as only two people at a time can squeeze between the outer tree protector and the metal pagoda for adverts for crap, there is less stress and violence among the black-suited lunchtime crowds. Another victory for the Royal Communist Government of Hong Kong Special Administrative Cheung Kong Holdings.

Good For The Environment, Crap For The Soul

Being an environmentalist, that is to say, trying my best to save the planet for the children of people who have children (looking around my local supermarket and roads, however, I can’t see that the people with children are doing much – they seem to be the ones with the fiercest, largest, most petrol-guzzling cars and the most insane amount of plastic bags in which they carry non-biodegradable nappies and vegetables individually wrapped. But what do I know. They may just not have the time or energy to save the planet for their children because they have children), I travel by public transport as often as possible.

In Hong Kong the best and quickest public transport is the MTR (Mass Transit Rail). The picture above shows the MTR as few people have seen it: Empty.

When I first arrived in Hong Kong in 1989 I marvelled at the reliabilty of the MTR and also at how the different stations had different colours; I imagined it was to cater to the illiterate people (of whom HK still has many.) The stations were well laid-out and scrupulously clean. Surely the MTR was the envy of the world. Then.

Recently though, advertisers have come to see MTR stations as just so much empty space to be filled to the brim with adverts. The trains themselves, formerly havens of coolly pristine metal, are now a free-for-all (or rather expensive for all) of garish adverts; not one square millimeter is left unscathed. Not even the floors of the stations are empty as companies come up with more and more outlandish ideas for how to bother people’s eyes no matter where they look.

I’m just thinking – what will the illiterate people think when they look out at a station, formerly covered in red tiles, the colour of Tsim Sha Tsui, and see this? They will be wondering! They will be confused! They will think: This is Svarowski Station! (If they indeed know about Svarowski. As I wish I don’t. But being poor and illiterate they won’t, and what have poor and illiterate people to do in Tsim Sha Tsui anyway? Seems to be the philosophy behind the latest floor to ceiling onslaughts.)

You may say that they (the poor and illiterate undesirables) should listen to the station announcements. Then they won’t be lost. But the thing is that in the same way as every last square millimeter of space on the MTR is taken up by adverts, so every moment of air time is taken up by sound.

Instead of for example the brisk “mind the gap!” of the London Underground, we in Hong Kong have: (in three languages) “Please mind the gap between the train and the platform.” Oh, THAT gap! I thought it was the gap in income between our Chief Executive and MTR cleaners!

Some stations, not satisfied with letting adults and other people who presumably have used an escalator once or twice in their lives, just get on the escalator and to hell with it, have seen it prudent to advice people: “Escalator safety is easy to learn and easy to understand. Hold the handdrail, stand firm and don’t walk.” In three languages, naturally.

Combined with the “mind the gap between…etc” and the other millions of messages about not eating and drinking, not smoking and how to take extra care of children and the elderly (without which message most people would probably just push their children under the train), words in three languages fill up every second of empty aural space in every MTR station and on every train.

You just have to tune out to survive, relying on your animal instinct to look up when you feel the station you’re going to, hoves into view. Which again leaves the poor and illiterate discriminated against; they can’t just tune out but have to listen to every announcement, hoping to recognise the name of their station amid all the incessant noise.

I was therefore quite relieved to read in the paper the other day that accidents in MTR stations have INCREASED SIGNIFICANTLY recently.

Yes!!! I would also choose to be seriously hurt rather than obey the inane splutterings of those squeaking bints. What happened to common sense? “Please hold-the-hand-rail. Please-hold-the-hand-rail.” If people weren’t so brainwashed, no, white-noised, with this stuff, they might actually start holding the handrail, look where they were going and, yes, minding the gap “between the train and the platform.”

Hong Kong is turning into an awful nanny state and the more people are nannied about, the more accidents they’re going to have, out of spite. Tip to MTR chiefs and other “this is how to walk”-nannies: Apparently the human race has been walking upright for several thousand years. We know how to do it.

Surviving Every Day III: Don’t Take The Ferry

This post was going to be about How To Survive Games, chess in particular. A man in Henan has got it right when it comes to chess survival; when he got into a minor argument with a colleague about a chess game, he gunned him down. Oh if life could only be that easy. Overcharged in a restaurant? Strangle the waiter. Taxi driver takes the longer route? Hack him into pieces. Staff on First Ferry steal your property? Nuke them.

All right all right, so I should look after my own property.That is and has always been the norm. But sometimes I read the paper on the ferry and things somehow end up under a sea of paper, which the ferry guys collect and sell…
Last Saturday it was a book, a brand new book by A A Gill. I could only have left it on the ferry because I remember taking it out of my bag there. Called up the next day – gone. I know for a fact the ferry guys don’t speak English and certainly don’t read English books.

So there are two possibilities: 1.They throw away the stuff they can’t flog.
2. They have a central for left-behind items which buys everything they find, even books.

Yesterday was one of my worst leave-behinds: My notebook with my schedule, notes for my new book and a crossed cheque with my name on it. They can’t cash the cheque and I can’t see what use my personal notes are to them, so they must have resorted to possibility 1.

I can see that they, although they have known me for almost 20 years, would want to take my laptop. It hurts but there’s a lot of money in it for them, underpaid as they are. Also my wallet and a pair of brand new shoes. My fault, my fault entirely. Should have looked after my own property. Should have known that on First Ferry it’s finders keepers.

Still – it is vexing. You would think that a public service like First Ferry would give the captains strict instructions about how to supervise and instruct staff. One rule should be to scrupulously save and hand over items left behind by pssengers. The old ferry company was good at that, and I always get back things I’ve left behind on the bus and in taxis. But First Ferry is like a black hole – everything that goes in there never comes out again.
It’s not one particular ferry, it’s all of them. So everybody must be in on it. And let’s face it, why would captains walk around tidying up the cabin if they weren’t in on it too?

The worst is they always blame Mui Wo residents. Yes it’s funny; every time someone leaves something behind on the ferry, even if they are the last person off it, it’s always some opportinistic Mui Wo resident who’s somehow managed to sneak back on and snatch the item, hidden under newspaper, fallen under the seat or left in a shopping bag in the toilet.

So according to the ferry guys, therefore, there must be hundreds of Mui Wo people who take the ferry only to steal things, because only one or a handful can’t manage to be on all the ferries all the time. Or maybe it’s one person who’s targetting me and everybody I know, following us around ready to snatch mobiles, children’s shoes, ladies shoes, laptops, books, wallets and personal notes?

If you’re on the ferry from Central to Mui Wo or vice versa, hold on to your property! And if you find something, whatever you do, don’t hand it in to the ferry guys! They have a massive thieving scam going on and nothing, but nothing, is safe.

Ethical Conondrum Again

I have a neighbour who neglects her child. The girl is eight or nine years old and the mother seems to think it’s the neighbours’ responsibility to look after her daughter.

My view on childcare is this: If you’re going to stay out at all hours and leave your kid to its own devices, at least give the little bastard a key! But no, the girl is always sitting outside, harassing the neighbours to feed her. Once a friend of mine saw her in Central (the business area of Hong Kong) at 11.30 at night by herself. My friend naturally took care of her, and since then the girl’s been bugging him for food and companionship.

Not only that, the girl doesn’t go to school. When I asked her why she said it was because she has head lice but that she would go to college later. What, skip primary school and go directly to college?

It’s a grim thing for a child to be taken over by the social services of Hong Kong, as indeed any country, but the neglect of this girl has been going on since I moved to this village five years ago, so I have suggested to the other neighbours that we do something. None of them wants to get involved.
We are nice middle-class people here, and child neglect just doesn’t happen.

But it does!
As crap as the HK educational system is, a child should be in school; for nothing else so at least have some structure and purpose to her days. This girl is at home by herself all day and every night. The case has been amptly documented in the papers as her mother is something of a prominent figure.
So why don’t the social services step in?
Why don’t I step in?
Is it because this kind of thing can’t happen on my doorstep; it’s something I only read about?
Should I feed and take care of the child because she lives next door and because I know the mother?
An ethical conondrum indeed.

But I wrote to the social services anyway. The girl hasn’t been to school all autumn and she’s still lonely and hungry.
What’s there to hesitate about?

However, if the result is that the girl will be taken to some awful place to spend her days with undesirables, watched over by fascists or Catholic nuns… what to do? Well I did it. But I still think it’s a parent’s responsibility to take care of their own damned child. There, I’ve said it.