Room 8, Cathay Hotel, Penang, Malaysia, February 10, 2008 4pm

There was no question: I couldn't leave Penang without spending at least one night at the Cathay Hotel. But it was completely booked. I begged, shamelessly. I showed up twice a day to chat up one or another of the elderly Chinese men who manned the marvelous, Art Deco front desk with its vintage square 1950s clock above. I even pulled out my secret weapon: I chatted them all up in Cantonese.

Yauh mouh fong ah? Ting yaht yauh mouh gei wuih a?

Mr. David Chan, a wiry fellow missing all but two of his top teeth, shook his head. "Mun jo ah!" Full up. Chinese New Year, la!"

Mr. Michael Wong was more sympathetic. He cracked open the Cathay's heavy, dusty black leather ledger to a page scrawled with numerous names and obscure notations pencilled in and scratched out. "Maybe Sunday, lah. Waiting list, put your name here."

The column of hopefuls already had four or five names on it. I recognized one of them: the dour retired Scandinavian engineer who'd been my seatmate for 24 hours on the train down from Bangkok. No way was I going to let him keep me out of a room at this inn. I angled harder.

"Wah! Wong sin saang. Gam do yahn ah! So many people already. Mr. Wong, what can I do?"

He looked pained, in the way that many Chinese in business do when you ask them to deliver something that they can't. I'm familiar with this expression, and I suddenly felt bad about pushing my case too hard. Mr. Wong was doing me a solid, really, just by opening up the book.

A moment or two passed uncomfortably, silently. I could hear nothing but the sound of the sweeper stroking his old-fashioned Chinese straw broom across the dingy tile floor. Mr. Wong was lost in thought; his eyes didn't make contact with mine. Then, to my surprise, he looked straight at me and smiled. "Okay you come, okay, come on Sunday. Give me fifty ringgit deposit now."

Reaching into a desk drawer, he pulled out a yellowed, crumbling paper pad that appeared to have been salvaged from an attic sale, and wrote me out a receipt.

I folded it carefully and tucked it into my wallet for safekeeping. It was my ticket to paradise.

You're probably wondering by this point what all the fuss is about. Or, to frame it in the preferred lingo of the travel section of a famous American newspaper:

Why Does Everyone Want to Stay at the Cathay Hotel?

Since it was busy season, Chinese New Year, I had arranged a place to stay before arriving in Penang: what we travel writers would call a "decent mid-ranged hotel for the business traveler." It had a comfy bed, a nice view of Penang's harbour, reliable a/c and hot water, it even came with a free breakfast. And it was totally, utterly devoid of personality.

The Cathay Hotel has saggy beds covered with brown China-made fleece blankets printed with flowers and the slogan "Happy. Forever. Wishes." Water, sometimes verging on lukewarm, sputters from an overhead shower fixture, then drips into the rust-stained tub for hours afterwards. Guests are issued two striped dishtowels, each the thickness of a paper napkin.

Breakfast? At the Cathay, you're on your own.

In nearly every measure of traveler comfort, my "decent mid-ranged hotel" ran rings around the hotel I lusted after. Except for that most elusive, yet most important measure of a hotel's allure: character. The Cathay Hotel has six stars worth of it.



The Cathay Hotel is what I'd call a "magnificent pile". I've stayed in other piles, around the world: The Olaffson Hotel in Port au Prince, Haiti. The Broadlands Hotel, in Chennai, the Z Hotel in Puri, India. The Royal Hotel in Levuka, Ovalau, Fiji (the oldest continuously operating hotel in the South Pacific!). Hotels that were once the homes of maharajas, wealthy opium traders, Presidents-for-life. And that now slumber in quirky decline. They're an endangered species, and you're lucky when you find one before it's torn down to make room for a shopping mall, or "restored" into boutique-y sameness.

There's nothing same about the Cathay Hotel. Not even the rate! The first day I arrived, it was 110 ringgits. The second and third day, it dropped to 75. If I'd stayed longer, maybe they'd eventually end up paying me to stay here.

But, after one last snapshot and a "Joi Gin" to Mr. Wong, I had to move on.





Malacca beckoned. And then I had to rush back to Hong Kong for my meeting with Michael Zhang, Translator of Many of Your Articles.

Yuen Lei Restaurant, Bangkok, 6:34 pm, February 4, 2008

One of the terrific unexpected benefits of learning Cantonese is how it lets you see the rest of the world with a Chinese eye.  Gwong Dung Wah is like a magic wand that opens a door to Chinese communities wherever I go.

The other night I was in Bangkok. I had walked a long way trying to find a travel agent's office at an address near Lumpini Park. After I finished the errand, I went back out on the street, feeling hot and sweaty, and not even particularly hungry. But my eye caught some signs written in Chinese characters. When I travel, any sign with Chinese words on it calls to me like home, especially in a place where most of the signs are written in a language that I don't have a clue about (namely, Thai).

The Chinese characters they use in Thailand are strange, though. Have you ever noticed this? I can just about read them. They have an odd, broken brushstroke style, as if they've been written by someone who barely remembers how to write Chinese:



It's a kind of Chinese calligraphy I only see in Bangkok. Maybe it has something to do with the nature of the Chinese community there. Most of them are from Chiu Chow (in Thailand they say "Teo Chow"), and most of the families came down to Thailand a long time ago, trading in birds nest, and other expensive dried seafood. The lingua franca of the community now is mainly Thai. Chinese here have Thai, not Chinese names.

As assimilated as they have become, the Chinese community in Thailand is nevertheless distinct from the Thai. Everyone, Thai and Chinese, knows who is who. For instance, all of Thailand knows that Thaksin Shinawatra, ex-Thai Prime Minister turned Hong Kong resident and power broker in exile, is Chiu Chow Chinese.  

Anyway, I was looking at these broken brushstrokes, and trying to figure out what the third character from the left was supposed to be, when my eye wandered off across the street to another Chinese sign that I did know how to read:

Yuen Lei Daai Fan Dihm

The Source of Fortune Restaurant.

What grabbed me was not the name but the look of the place. It wasn't exactly a building, but an open corner lot partially covered with plastic and iron sheeting. In front was a streetside kitchen surrounded by pots filled with fresh green leafy vegetables, glass containers with pieces of tofu, sliced Chinese sausages and pigeon eggs. Roast ducks hung from a pole. I recognized that the eggs and the tofu had been prepared in the lo seui braising style typical of the Chiu Chow cooking I have sampled in Sheung Wan and Wan Chai, in Hong Kong.

I walked over to take a closer look. If I were Wong Kar Wai, I would have made an urgent call to my cinematographer on the spot. Inside the place had, well, patina. It looked as if it had not been painted, scrubbed, or otherwise improved since 1967. Just on the basis of the decor-- industrial steel tables, acid-green molded plastic chairs, ancient ceiling fans--I would have eaten there.

Well, that's not entirely true. If it had not smelled fabulous, I wouldn't have done what I did without thinking: walk into the middle of the Source of Fortune and sit down by myself at a big round metal table.

That smell. There's nothing like it anywhere in Hong Kong. Sure, Hong Kong has a lot of Chui Chow Chinese restaurants, but the Chiu Chow food of Thailand has morphed into something different, as odd looking as that calligraphy. The Chiu Chow have become a little bit Thai in their tastes. They have developed a liking for strong, intense flavors, they use the pungent green herbs of the Thai countryside. I suppose you could call this cooking Thai-Chiu Chow fusion food.

Seconds after I seated myself, a scary-looking middle-aged Chinese woman with a blob of fuschia lipstick, pencilled eyebrows and a butch cropped haircut came over and slapped a plastic menu down on my table. It was tri-lingual, in Thai, Chinese, and English, and it also had some helpful pictures.

The worst thing about eating alone in a Chinese restaurant where everything looks and smells great is that you can't order all over the menu, like you would if you were with a group of friends. I ordered a beer and pondered. Then I gathered my courage and asked the scary waitress for some help. She didn't speak any Chinese, but she had a few words of English.

"You want vegetable? Come, look." I chose a tender, bright green bunch of morning glory shoots, and then I pointed to some fat prawns swimming in the tank.

The choi arrived first, stir fried to perfection.



Hidden in there with the morning glory stalks were fat cloves of Thai garlic that had been fried brown, and some of those little almond-like seeds that my friend David puts in with his pig's lung dish. But this vegetable stir fry didn't smell or taste like a Hong Kong stir fry. The sauce was stronger, a bit sweet. I ate with chopsticks, and ate with gusto. When I stopped for a moment and looked up, I noticed that all the help had come out of the kitchen and were standing in a line by the doorway, watching my reaction to every bite.

Soon, part two of my order arrived: Prawns with Bean Thread Noodles (called here, woon sen):



The cook served this dish to me himself, bringing it covered to the table. With a flourish, he opened the claypot top so that the steam released at once, in a whooooosh!. My god. The aroma of the green chinese celery was intense, concentrated, like a curative herb. The whole dish--noodles and meaty prawns--was infused with it.

"My mother is Thai and father Chinese," said the waitress when I asked her about her background. But, where in China did she and the restaurant owners come from? "Over there," she answered, pointing towards the kitchen. Oh, I said, Chiu Chow? Guangdong?"

"No, no" she shook her head. "Over there. Chinatown."

Memory fades, but delicious food is forever.

Yuen Lei Daai Fan Dim is near the corner where Thanon Lang Suan meets Lumpini Park. The location surely has excellent fung seui. In a city where things get torn down and rebuilt almost as fast as in Hong Kong, this restaurant has occupied this corner for more than thirty years. Hopefully it will still be there the next time I pass through Bangkok in search of a source for amazing Chinese fusion food.

It's cold. Hou dung ah! I can't remember it ever being this cold in Hong Kong in winter. Dung in the damp streets of Sheung Wan. Dung in the wind-whipped corridors of Tsim Sha Tsui. Very, very, fei seung dung in the New Territories.

Ah Go is cracking me up. He's become my SMS comrade in shared dung suffering. At midnight, my mobile phone bleeps unexpectedly. "Freezing Cold, take care, Ah Go." The next morning, at 11, another bleep: "Freezing cold. Did U fix Ur Heater? Take care, Ah Go." By that afternoon, he's down to a shorthand: "F.C. Have to go to Fanling, shit, Ah Go."

Yeah, okay, I know the people on the mainland are up to their katucchas in snow. But do they live in buildings with five inch exterior porous concrete walls and zero insulation, apartments equipped with nothing but air conditioners? I tear myself away from the bosom of my newest best friend, my sputtering, probably fire-hazardous, $200 HKD-on-special-at-Watson's-drugstore electric space heater and brace myself for the outdoors.Mrs. Wong is on duty as usual in the lobby of Prosperous View Court, bundled up in a puffy powder-blue down jacket that I've never seen her wearing before. Hoooooooooou dung! my doorlady greets me, stomping her feet and doing a little shiver dance for me as she opens the door.

Now it's official. In Hong Kong this week, "Hou dung" (It's cold!) has replaced "Sihk jo faan mei ah?" (Have you eaten yet?) as the universal polite Cantonese language greeting.

Mrs. Wong has been in a cheerful mood lately. She always is around Chinese New Years time. Last week I came out of the elevator and found her up on a ladder, arranging the final touches of red tinsel on the dusty florescent light ceiling fixture.

She loves doing the New Year's lobby decorations. Every year is different. This year, she's transformed our environment into a Chinese New Year of the Rat/Mouse Disneyland Wonderland Extravaganza! Lucky fai cheun, in red and gold, cover every wall, and our doorway is a fung seui nuclear power plant of fortunate energy. "Cheut Yahp Ping On!", shouted Mrs. Wong, pointing to the fai cheun over the top of the door. It's the most common New Year's fai cheun couplet. For those of you who don't read Chinese, the characters mean: In, Out, Normal, Peaceful. You better believe nothing bad is going to get through the door of Prosperous View Court this year! If Mrs. Wong doesn't bite your head off, Lo Syu Mai Keih, Mickey Mouse surely will.



This is where I have to make a horrible confession. I'm not a big fan of Chinese New Year in Hong Kong. Before I came here, I always imagined it would  be a lively, fun time of great excitement and interest. Then I got here and found out that Chinese New Year is when all your favorite restaurants close for a week, the streets go dark for three days, and all your Hong Kong friends vanish into the bosom of their various family obligations. If you aren't part of a big Chinese family, then you are as lost and adrift at this time of year as a Jewish person in New York at Christmas. (Except that my Jewish friends in New York, at least, can go out for Chinese food on December 25th!)

Then there's the general mood. Just like Americans at Christmastime, Hong Kongers are caught up in an intricate and often stressful web of obligations, face, customs, and money. This angst has a tangible, visible form:



Yes, the deadly lai see. The myth of lai see is that it is a happy, Santa Claus-like manner of delivering holiday presents to delighted children. While that is certainly part of the story, I have discovered that the lai see is also a ritual fraught with delicate family politics and financial strain. Who gives what to whom, and how much? Two of my Hong Kong friends have actually kept their marriage a secret from their family for the last five years, so they won't have to become entangled in the family's lai see web every New Years (singles are exempt from the giving obligations.)

That's extreme, and unusual behavior. Most Hong Kongers who want to escape the New Year's obligations take an easier way out. That whoooooosh! that you just heard is the sound of hundreds of fully loaded jets headed for Phuket, Kota Kinabalu, Tokyo--anywhere but here.

And I, too, will be on one of those jets soon.

But that's okay, because the part of Chinese New Year that I enjoy is the anticipatory build-up, the two weeks before the actual holiday. Flower shops set out sidewalk displays of gorgeous peach blossom branches, and fat bushes studded with Mandarin oranges. The shopping malls and buildings decorate their public spaces splendiforously, with lanterns as huge as Macy's Thanksgiving Day balloons. Suddenly the air is filled with endless loops of Cantonese opera Muzak everywhere you go--lobbies, building elevators, supermarkets. Yesterday in Park and Shop, I found myself doing a little scarf dance in the dairy aisle.

And, like Mrs. Wong, I love the fai cheun.

Some of you are probably wondering: what are these fai cheun? They are the vertical Chinese paper scrolls, usually red, occasionally gold, that Chinese put up on their doors and walls at this time of year. The Chinese characters "fai cheun" literally mean "brushstroke of spring". But it's usually translated as "Spring Couplets." Written on each fai cheun is a four-character poetic message–a wish for good luck, good health, prosperity, etc.

Nowadays, most fai cheun are mass produced printed affairs, and the poetic phrases are stock ones like Mrs. Wong's favorite "Cheut yahp ping on"–Come in, come out peacefully. But in olden times, fai cheun were handmade affairs, and the couplets were composed for the occasion by the calligrapher writing the fai cheun, often spontaneously.

In Hong Kong, the making of fai cheun has drifted into the world of politics. I'm not sure how or when this tradition of scholars and artists got turned over to the politicians. What I do know is that, in the weeks before Chinese New Year, all the major Hong Kong political parties send their best known leaders and legislators out into the street with brushes and black ink to make fai chuen for the public. Imagine if politicians in the U.S., in addition to their baby-kissing and rubber chicken-eating obligations, had to be judged, like their Hong Kong counterparts, on their handwriting and poetry-composing skills!

I've heard whispers that some Hong Kong politicians actually take calligraphy lessons in the weeks before New Year's, so their fai cheun won't look clumsy and embarrass them. (From the textbook-perfect form that DAB chairman emeritus Tsang Yok-sing is using to hold his bat, I'd guess he'd recently gone in for some, um, brush-ups.) For there is a high bar set in the political fai cheun stakes. Hong Kong's most famous pro-Democrat and most venerable elder statesman also happens to be a master calligrapher: Mr. Szeto Wah:

Last Sunday I was wandering around Causeway Bay and ran into Wah Suk–Mr. Szeto is 77 years old and everybody in Hong Kong calls him "Uncle"–sitting at his folding table. I asked him to make me a fai cheun. He looked me in the eye for a moment, as if sizing me up, then asked me my profession, and my Chinese character name. Then, huddling over two blank red papers, he dipped his pen into a saucer of jet black ink, and wrote quickly, with careful strokes:

I couldn't read the whole thing right there and then--I had never seen the third character from the top, on the right, before. So it was only after I returned to the comforts of my home and my dictionary that I realized what clever and masterful strokes Uncle Szeto had performed. In just a moment or two, he had written a lucky Spring Couplet that riffs and quotes and puns, like a jazz piece, around the two characters of my Chinese name, Lan Yan (which means–ugh!–Graceful Orchid, for those of you who haven't already read about how I got the name.)

"Lan saam sau hau/Yan chung ching luhng"

The character I didn't know is "sau", to embroider or knit. It's the key to Mr. Szeto's clever pun. The first two characters in the couplet, "Lan Saam" mean "Orchid and Heart". But when you say them aloud in Cantonese, they sound like laan saam--sweater.

A perfect pun for a freezing Hong Kong day.

Here's my stab at a somewhat poetic translation (Attention Kempton, Alice, armegag, Siu82, joyce, Roland and all you other native Cantonese speakers! Please feel free to tell me if I'm even close!):

"The flower in heart embroiders (her) language/With serious grace and abundant affection."

Szeto Wah's handmade fai cheun does exactly what a Chinese New Year's fai cheun is supposed to do: put a little spring cheer into a heart that's survived the winter's cold. I can't think of a sweeter note on which to enter the Year of the Rat.

Well, actually, I can. (Consider this next bit to be like the cool snippets that run over the credits of a Jackie Chan movie).

Cut to Wan Chai. I'm shivering down Johnston Road at rush hour, weaving through the crowd. On the corner of one of the market street lanes, I see a guy pushing a steaming cart, loaded to the gills with hot roasted chestnuts. For a moment I think about buying some, they smell so good, but he's passing so quickly, it's too crowded to get to my wallet, I don't have any small change...

Then, abruptly, one of the old lady market vendors whips out her arm and steals a fistful of hot chestnuts on the sly.

I can't help laughing. It's like she read my mind. And I feel naughty, like making trouble, so I laugh at her and say, in Cantonese, "You stole it, ah!"

She looks up at me from inside of the ratty scarf she has wound around and around her head like a turban, and she's laughing like hell.

Hou dung ah! Hou dung!

And then, so fast that I don't even have a second to register surprise, she grabs my hand, opens it, and presses it full of hot chestnuts.

Yit di la! Now you're warmer, see!

She sends me on my way, with a hand full of Hong Kong's heart.

*****

By the way, if you're in Hong Kong, you can find Szeto Wah out on the street writing fai cheun for the public during the next few evenings at the big Flower Market festival at Victoria Park in Causeway bay. Chinese readers (that is, people who can read Chinese) can consult Wah Suk's complete schedule here.

Gung hei faat choi! to all of my "Learning Cantonese" duhk je. And do jeh--this is a do jeh situation for sure--to everyone, for your kind comments and enthusiastic support in this last blogging year.

I just published an article in praise of the cha chaan teng and my favorite Hong Kong beverage, yun yeung coffee-tea.


Eating In Hong Kong: the Cha Chaan Teng

by Daisann McLane

The Eskimos, so they say, have 12 different words for snow. Well, in Hong Kong, we have a dozen or more ways to say: Eat Here!

The variety of Cantonese words that mean “place to eat” is pretty amazing. Jau ga, jau lau, sihk sat, mihn sik, chaan teng, cha chaan teng. Years ago, when I was studying Cantonese in New York’s Chinatown, I remember how bewildered I was by it all. “But Mr. Wen,” I would ask my septuagenarian teacher from Canton, “The lesson book says that a jau ga is a restaurant. But then it says jau lau also means restaurant?

“Yes, same,” Mr. Wen sighed patiently.

So, then, what about the chaan teng, I’d ask him. And the mihn sihk and mihn ga–are these restaurants, too?

“Yes,” he would nod, “Also restaurants.”

By this point, feeling like the dimmest student on the planet, I’d stop with the questions. For years, I believed that the Cantonese language had numerous ways to say “restaurant”, all of them more or less interchangable.

Then I moved to Hong Kong.

Where I discovered that Hong Kong has as many different types of eateries as there are Cantonese words to describe them. .......

Read the full article on the International Herald Tribune's website.

On Sunday, the day before Justice Hartmann delivered his decision on the civil injunction, I rode the MTR out to Chai Wan, to visit the offices of Citizen's Radio. They'd called a press conference, and Long Hair and Tsang Kin Sheng "The Bull" were going to be there. Chai Wan is one of those working class Hong Kong districts that no tourists ever visit. Probably, at one time, Chai Wan was stunning: it is encircled by steeply rising green hills, and it faces the sea, the channel that leads into Victoria Harbour. But in the 1960s, it got "renewed" into a dreary, porcupine cluster of tightly-spaced housing estate high rises, and block-like factory buildings that cast long cold shadows over the narrow streets on a sunny day. To get there, you ride the Island subway line all the way to the eastern end of Hong Kong island. "Chai Wan is where you jump off Hong Kong," Long Hair chuckles. He grew up here before the urban renewal, when Chai Wan was a settlement of squatters, mostly Chinese from Guangdong and Fukien who'd fled the poverty and political chaos on the mainland. "I lived up there on the side of that mountain," says Leung, pointing in the direction of a concrete jungle where laundry droops from every window. I wasn't expecting Citizen's Radio to have a snappy headquarters, but still I was surprised when I got there. The broadcasting company that's giving the HKSAR government migraine headaches operates out of a 150 square foot space in a humongous old warehouse building that rents work spaces to small manufacturers. There's no window, and half the cubicle is occupied by The Bull's silk-screening equipment (he's also an artist). The makeshift broadcast booth in the back looks like it was carved from the original bathroom (the toilet is right alongside--it's a good thing that Citizen's Radio's broadcasts are only 1 hour long).<< MORE >>

Justice Michael Hartmann's decision yesterday (full text here) to deny the Hong Kong justice department's request for an extension of the civil injunction banning Citizens Radio from the airwaves wasn't a huge surprise. At least not for anybody who sat through all 7 and a half hours of arguments in High Court last Friday. As readers of this blog know, I've been following the ups and downs of Hong Kong's radio activists for more than 2 years. So of course I sat there absorbing every delicious minute. I really must thank Long Hair for introducing me to the Hong Kong arena that is more riveting than Cantonese opera or even Legco: the faat teng. Literally, the hall of law. Courtroom.

<< MORE >>

It's official. I can no longer remember exactly how many times I've walked this same walk with thousands of other Hong Kongers. Fifteen times? Twenty? And I've been in Hong Kong just half the year, for only three years! I've marched in July's sweltering heat and sudden rains, I've marched wearing gloves in a January cold snap, I've marched with an umbrella under drizzly and sunny and (lately, all too frequently) white-grey pollution skies. I've marched alongside David, and Hemlock, with Leung and Wilson and Veronica and Mr. Lo and Patrick and San Ching and Ming and Po Ying. And, yesterday, once again, another Daaih Yauh Hang, 大游行, the Big Long Walk. It's not really that long. The distance from Victoria Park to the Central Government Office is probably about 2, 2 and a half miles. But it seems to get longer and longer. Kind of like the Hong Kong government's so-called "democracy timetable." In 1997, Hong Kong was supposed to have the opportunity to vote for its leaders in 2007. In 2007, Beijing said no way, that was never the deal. Talk began to float about suffrage in 2012. But three weeks ago, right in the middle of the Christmas doldrums, a hastily-convened meeting of the National People's Congress rubber stamped--excuse me, passed--a declaration that Hong Kong people must wait until 2017 to (maybe) vote for their Chief Executive. So: Sunday, 3pm, Daaih Yauh Hang. << MORE >>

David's place is at the top of six flights of stairs. Sometimes I make it up in a breeze, other times--at the end of a day, when I'm tired--I slog up like my feet are made of lead pipes. But the struggle is worth it; this is indeed a Stairway to Heaven. In Cantonese, literally so, for at the top of the climb is David's tin toi, his "heaven platform". That's rooftop, to you.

天台

Apartment hunting expats in Hong Kong, heads up! This is very important. Memorize these two characters diligently. That one on the left means sky, or heaven (and, sometimes in written Chinese, it also means "day"). The character on the right you will recognize from the previous blog post. That character is toi or platform, and you'll find it in many Chinese word combinations--for instance, in dihn toi, radio station, and also in the phrase you hear over and over on the intercom as you step out of any MTR train. It is probably the only phrase every non-Chinese in Hong Kong can recite by heart. Cheng siu sam yuet toi hung kwik! Please mind the gap. The words yuet toi are Cantonese for "train platform."

<< MORE >>

Yesterday an extraordinary thing happened in Hong Kong. A young magistrate in the Eastern District Court, Douglas Yau Tak Hong, delivered a knockout judgement in favor of the upstart pirate radio station, Citizen's Radio of Hong Kong. Judge Yau, in dismissing the case against activists Tsang Kin-sheng ("The Bull"), Leung Kwok-hung and several others, ruled that the current system of approving/rejecting applications for a broadcast license in Hong Kong is unconstitutional according to the Basic Law.

Yau's argument is so clear, and the situation so self-evident, you wonder why it has taken more than 10 years for this matter to be addressed. As Yau observes in the text of his decision, Hong Kong's chief executive has "unfettered and unchecked" power to control access to Hong Kong's airwaves. He gets to appoint half the members of the board in charge of considering applications. What's more, there's no clear set of guidelines for would-be license applicants.

Is it any wonder that the airwaves of Hong Kong, a city of nearly 8 million people, are home to only three dihn toi? (The Cantonese phrase for "radio station" is a marvelous compound of two Chinese characters: electric and platform. 電台)

Like a lot of things in this city, Hong Kong's broadcast law is an old British policy that dovetailed so well with the mainland Chinese government's interests, that it has survived the handover from one colonial ruler to another almost intact.<< MORE >>

Deja vu time. Exactly one year after starting this blog, once again it is New Year's Day. and once again I'm riding a bicycle down Queen's Road in Hong Kong with a group of democracy activists from the League of Social Democrats. This time, though, our marvelous (and rare) bicycle tour through downtown Hong Kong has a more extensive route. At two pm, we gather by the waterfront in Fortress Hill, and ride through busy Causeway Bay and Wan Chai before streaking in double file towards the finish line across the street from Statue Square. "The route is longer this year," explains the demo organizer, activist Lau San Ching. "Because this year the road to democracy in Hong Kong is longer, too."<< MORE >>