Naughty Newspaper

Here’s the draft I made for the cover of my book Don’t joke On The Stairs. It is a book researched through 18 years of travel in China, its title inspired by this piece of good advice I found on a poster in Gansu:

I had been strangely happy recently because my book was supposed to be published in three or four weeks, and not only that, it was to be published by the prestigeous South China Morning Post Publishing. I had contacted them in March 2007, got the go-ahead, edited the book twice more and signed the contract with them in July, and was now inviting people to the launch to which I’d found a great venue, dreaming of the interviews and public appearances.

(Interviews and public appearances is one of the few ways I have of meeting people, stuck as I am in sleepy backwater Pui O, chained to my writing.)

Oh, and I was also looking forward the several cents per book that would be trickling in with great force – I would make enough to buy myself a meal in a real restaurant only with the revenue from the launch sales, I calculated. Perhaps a toothbrush too.

So imagine my surprise and faint irritation when I received an email from SCMP Publishers last Thursday, not a personal, grovelling email addressed to me and mentioning the business relationship we’ve had for almost a year, no, it was a breezy, mass email saying something like:

“Oh by the way we’re suspending SCMP Publishers as of February 1st. If you have any inquiries, call Anus Wong on 2526….(etc)”

No book! No launch! (Sorry, everybody I’ve already invited.) No membership in the Royal Communist Party! No meal and toothbrush!

When I finally got hold of one of the editors (all other staff having sensibly gone into hiding) she said (also breezingly and without even a “sorry”) Oh yeah we won’t be printing your book. But you’re free to find another publisher.

I thanked her profusely for this. Free to find another publisher – the kindness!

But I was scathing too soon. A journalist from Ming Pao told me that many other writers in SCMP’s stable have not only lost their books but the copyright to their own books as well!

The moral of this story is… I don’t know really. You can’t trust anything or – body, not even when you have a contract?

Wei! Any publishers reading this? My book is ready for print, it’s controversial and bound to get banned in China, thereby generating hundreds of meals in real restaurants, and a handful of toothbrushes too. Electric!

Visual Gags and Puns

This is the kind of thing I find funny and probably the main reason why I love China. Of course I had to snap fast; as soon the owner of the underwear saw my camera, she tore the faded rags away and proudly presented the poster: NowI could photograph it.

Another thing I find funny is a good pun. I seldom laugh while reading the South China Morning Post, but this time I cackled out loud, and that in public.

It was about Donald Trump erecting another dreary, gold-encrusted 200 storey building in New York. This particular building had for some reason irrititated some people – something about it being illegal, that The Donald had just rushed it through using his normal bulldozer charm, something like that.

Anyway angry protesters had congregated around the site, waving fists and placards. One of the placards said: Don’t Comb Over Here.

Ah. Love it. Can we do the same with our The Donald? Don’t bow tie the property developers?

How Long Do I Have To Suffer For Having Been Born?

Norway. A freezing hellhole on the outskirts of the known world, a country whose entire population can fit into a good-sized swimming pool.

So I was born there. So what? I’m not there now. And I haven’t been for almost 20 years. So why is it that every time the conversation saunters around the weather situation, or the temperature situation, or specifically the recent temperature situation in HK (“cooler than 35 degrees”) some bastard always finds it in his or her what they think is deeply original soul to say:
“Well you should be used to it, you’re Norwegian.”

Today, Sunday the 27th of January no fewer than three people said it. Two of them were Swiss and Canadian, for christ’s sakes.

If i had 0.07 cents for every time, when the temperature creeps below 22 degrees (which is every day in Hong Kong where the temperature in most offices, malls and public transport is around 6 degrees) somebody always, but always utters: “But it’s nothing for you, you’re Norwegian!” “You should be used to it, you’re Norwegian!” or “Why are you wearing a coat, you are Norwegian!” I could retire in the Bahamas. Make that 0.007 cents.

I want to say once and for all: I might have been born in Norway but the last time I looked, my entire body wasn’t covered in fur. That means I have nerve endings and skin like other people. So why the buggering blisters to they think that my central nervous system is somehow different from a person from say, Switzerland?

And more pertinently, if they think I’m so “used to” freezing weather, what the buggering blistering bastards do they think I’m doing here in the first place?

Once and for all so I don’t have to knock any more people’s teeth out:

I LIVE IN A SUBTROPICAL CLIMATE BECAUSE I’M NOT FOND OF, USED TO OR IN ANY WAY AFFILIATED WITH COLD BUT WANT TO AVOID IT. All right?

Mo$##@ langua@!!

I am not a luddite. I have a laquered teak board with which I bash my clothes clean, an electric telephone which doesn’t require a central to put me through to the person I want to talk to and also a modern-looking cleaner to darn my wooden socks.

So why is it I take such umbrage at receiving text messages on my (bamboo) mobile phone, saying:
C u 2morrow?

Look, I, as much as the famous “next man” (Women are also, as we all know, “men”) know that language is a living, evolving thing. If it weren’t, or indeed were not, we’d still be saying “It is I” instead of “it’s me” (another aspect of the electric telephone which has always intrigued me: “Hello it’s me.” “Oh! What a coincidence, this is also me!” Why do these people think that only they are “me”? )

and we’d be speaking Shakespearian if not dolphin language.
It’s not that.

But when “you” becomes “u” not only in SMS but in adverts, headlines and articles, well, frankly, I cringe.

“B4 l8″ instead of “before late” is just visually painful. Yes, yes so we are all so busy nowadays and every second counts. But even while texting, is it really so time-saving to write “2day” instead of “today”? To write a number while texting requires you to hold down the key for several milliseconds, no? just as long as it would have taken to spell out the word, which, with the lovely modern invention of speedwriting, doesn’t take all that long to write anyway?

Do people really save so much time by writing “b4″ instead of “before” and if so, what do they do with the time they’ve saved? “C U 2morrow” or “see you tomorrow” … isn’t it a question of seconds? Has texting messages become an olympic sport where every milli, no, nanosecond counts?

For me, words, lovely words, broken up by ugly numbers and letters sounding like words, look the same as if you take a beautiful word like for example “verification” and spell it “veriFUCKation”. It grates on the eye.

What do those modern and happening people do with the time they save? (Incidentally, what do people do with all the face they save?) That’s what I want to know.

I’m darning socks with a wooden needle and whale’s intestine thread as we speak but I still have time to spell out the words. Yeah, maybe I am after all a luddite. But I still think words are beautiful in themselves, and I will still spend the extra milliseconds needed to spell them out without abbreviations, numbers and all the other supremely irritating things ppl uz nowadayz:) FCK U****!!!!.. or something.

Perchy Hats

Of all the things I hate, baseball caps are right up there with… well, not facial hair, obviously, but certainly in the top 20.

I especially hate baseball caps worn with suits. I mean – they are sport apparel! Wearing a baseball cap on top of a suit is like wearing a long dress with trainers. It reflects badly on the wearer.

It’s natural that our tent-wearing, long-bearded friends want to keep up with the times – they must have reached the year 1520 by now – and of course the baseball cap, though sprung from the great satan the US itself, seems to be the object of choice when these tradition-loving people want to show they’re sartorically happening.

But really, long flowing robes, layer upon layer, embroidery, beards of epical lengths – and baseball caps? No. No, it’s not right. It’s putting platform shoes on Mona Lisa…’s head. Just avoid.

Chinese guys, of course, look great in everything, even baseball caps. They are allowed to wear them as long as they’re not 65 and wear them back to front … but then again 65 year-old Chinese guys, unlike their beige counterparts, seldom do anything as undignified as that.

Unfortunately, among the young people of today it seems to be the trucker cap that’s the headgear of choice. These are the worst baseball caps of all. Made of a harder material, they end up perching on top of people’s heads and as you can see right through them, you can see where the head ends and empty space begins. You can get a truck into the empty space.

I read in the SCMP the other day that Caucasians and Asians have different head shapes, and nothing proves that better than these perchy things. Truckers’ hats are molded around white, obese truckers’ heads, then trucked out to Asia for the sole purpose of making Asians look ridiculous.

A great shame. Get rid of the perchy hats, people! It doesn’t matter how cool your jacket, jeans and hair are. With a perchy hat all the other gear comes to naught.

Cold Dark and Miserable

Hong Kong has been hit by slightly cooler weather and now everybody’s commenting on the dreadful temperatures.
“Freezing, innit?”
“Cold enough for you?”
“God I’m so sick of this cold.”

Yes it’s true that for the last five days, only the hardiest locals and some tourists have been able to walk around in T-shirts and shorts, so it hasn’t been burning hot – probably about 12 or 14 degrees. But to call that cold and to complain about it?

People: It’s January! It’s not supposed to be bikini weather! Bloody global warming – it’s made us so demanding that we want 27 degrees all year round. But now we’ve seen the flip side of this lovely balmy Christmas weather: Julys and Augusts so hot you can’t even be outside.

And anyway – cold? You don’t know what cold is. I’ll tell you what’s cold: Minus 34 degrees is cold.
That’s so cold that your eyeballs freeze if you look to one side. So cold that the potted flowers in your kitchen freeze to death if you forget to close the door when you take in the post. So cold, in fact, that you have to get up several times during the night to start your car and let it run for a while, if you have a car.

The place where I was living at the time, did. It also had an outside toilet and no heating. Chopping wood, getting up at 4 am to starting the car and having to pur boiling water over myself to extricate my bum from the frozen toilet ring got extremely wearisome, and so I became a climatic refugee.

I love the mild winters in Hong Kong and welcome the fact that I don’t have to ski to work. However! haven’t the winters got a little bit toomild recently? Don’t tell me sweating in a T-shirt in the middle of January is normal, or indeed natural. It’s winter and it should be cold. Colder than now.

I want to wear my long winter coat but haven’t been able to for the last three years because of this exaggerated mildness. Damn you, global warming! And damn all the people who act as if it’s not happening, but carry on like before. Worse than before.

Labour Law Will Be The Death Of Us

What’s the world coming to, eh? A man’s not allowed to make a living anymore. Now that even China is introducing labour laws, Hong Kong factory owners find it impossible to make a short-term profit in Guangdong. (SCMP Jan 17 “drastic changes have HK firms fighting to survive”)

What? It means … they actually have to pay workers wages? They can’t lock them up inside the factories at night anymore? They might have to … horrors! take steps to reduce pollution? Small wonder the HK factory bosses are despairing and planning to move to more industry-friendly areas like Vietnam where freedom for factory bosses is protected by law and where workers still, thank God, don’t worry too much whether they get paid or not.

Well, they’ve had a good ride for 20 years, those HK factory bosses. I thought it was interesting to read that it is a “short term business environment” they’re worried about. The way they’ve laid most of southern Guangdong’s prime farmland under concrete, poisoned all the rivers and lakes and completely fucked up Hong Kong’s air and water into the bargain, you’d think they were in it for the long term.

Plastic Spastic. I mean Drastic. I mean Schmastic.

Everybody’s always complaining about plastic bags. But what’s wrong with them, really? I mean, aren’t they the most versatile things? You can use them to frighten birds away from your vegetable patch:

or, in places where there isn’t enough rubbish, you can use them as a temporary stand-in rubbish filler:

or you can use them simply to decorate an otherwise empty space in nature or in your living room:

You can use them to preserve things. First you can put an apple core in a small plastic bag. (Don’t forget to wipe your mouth with a tissue and pick up the apple core to dispose of it with a different tissue!) Then you can put that plastic bag into a slightly larger plastic bag where you preserve things like egg shells and vegetable peel. That all goes into the bin lined with two bin liners or, if you’re an environmentalist like me, a Wellcome shopping bag. Securely tied and strenghtened with another bin liner (or Wellcome shopping bag) this then goes into the main plastic bag:

The good thing is: Now you know this stuff will all be preserved, outlive you as it were, and that you can leave a legacy forever, where for former generations for example an apple core would just turn into more boring and useless earth.

But now there are forces who want to get rid of plastic bags. More boo to them I say. Fortunately the durable bag is mightier than the pen. Since the anti-bag voices started to be heard in the late 90’s, The Hong Kong Plastic Bag has fought back by for example becoming ubiquitous on news paper stands: One man, one paper, one bag – that’s what real democracy is all about.

Hong Kong’s real enemy, namely, is water. As in supermarket customer to check-out person: “Why are you putting this apple in a separate plastic bag?”
“I’m afraid your tin of sardines will get wet.“

Another victory is the plastic bag all shooping malls and office buildings provide for people with dripping umbrellas. Again water is the enemy and a floor with droplets is so unsightly. To hire a person to mop up water is after all a temporary nuisance, but a landfill is forever!

But now the Chinese government has done it again: They (it) have (has) banned all handing out of free plastic bags. Damn. Have they no thought for future generations?

Market Forces

Pui O where I live is known as a “sleepy backwater.” Apart from the ongoing fight waged by locals against the buffalos which sometimes cross the road in a leisurely manner so drivers have to slow down, even stop for several seconds there is nothing much happening here.

It’s so slow and backwatery that some gossip about me one day came back to me: “Well, I hear you’ve bought yourself a bicycle.”

That’s how little people have to talk about in Pui O.

And if they want more, here’s some more gossip about my bicycle: First the seat was screwed up to capacity which would have made the bike suitable for Yao Ming. Then the seat disappeared completely. One day the whole bike was gone. The work of triads?

Now, Pui O is known as having the highest concentration of triads (Chinese mafia) anywhere in Hong Kong.
I don’t know how they can live.
There is little construction going on and few businesses from which they can extort. That means when an opportunity arises, triads must milk it for what it’s worth.

Yesterday I talked to my new neighbour who’s having the two lower floors of a village house renovated to suit his cosmopolitan tastes. That meant completely gutting the place which led to a lot of debris. He hired a car to take it away but whoops! The triads wanted HK$ 30 000 for letting him use the road above his house for away-taking purposes.

$30 000 for a road 200 meters long. Is there any wonder the triads are losing power and prestige? They are pricing themselves out of the market, that’s what they’re doing.
If they had said $2000 (which I think is also pretty stiff for use of a road which doesn’t belong to them anyway) he would have paid. Now they have nothing and , who knows, might have to resort to finding jobs to put their triady food on the table.

Another victory for market forces.

China Drool

A rower. I asked him if he was going to the olympics but no such thing. So we’ll probably never meet again, because I’m not going to the olympics either.