Learning Cantonese
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Learning Cantonese
Look Back in Anger
Yesterday afternoon at the Legco question and answer session, as Hong Kong legislator Margaret Ng stood brimming with righteous fury before Hong Kong Chief Executive Donald Tsang , I swear I saw a halo of golden sparks shimmering around her tweedy, cropped salt-and-pepper bob.
"I have a simple question for the Chief Executive," she spoke in her soft, no-nonsense voice. Barrister Ng is one of the few public figures in Hong Kong whose speech carries equal intelligence and gravity in both English--which she speaks eloquently, with an academic British accent--and Cantonese, which she pronounces precisely with the genteel, somewhat old-fashioned tones and inflections of Canton. My first teacher, Mr. Wen, would approve.
"My question is this." She paused. "On the 20th anniversary of the 1989 incident, many Hong Kong people are concerned about an issue of the most extreme importance...
"We would like to know, Mr. Chief Executive, do you, or do you not support the vindication of the June 4th (Tiananmen Square) incident?"
As I watched this drama play out(on live TV in the comfort of home, thanks to NOW Direct, Hong Kong's own C-Span) I observed Tsang's face freeze into that tight mask he adopts when he knows he must deal with something he'd really rather not.
Aiming his gaze out at the chamber, not at Margaret, he took a breath, and then words began pouring out.
"This is something that happened a long time ago. The national economy has grown and brought prosperity to Hong Kong....the Hong Kong people have made their own judgements."
Margaret Ng stood again, her voice now rising in pitch, incredulity and fury. "Am I understanding the Chief Executive's meaning? Do you mean to say that as long as the economy is prospering that we should not care about people who were killed? That we should bury our conscience for economic benefits?"
Tsang has the George W. Bush reflex. When cornered, he gets testy and starts swinging back like a street bully. "My view represents the opinion of Hong Kong people in general," he huffed back at Margaret.
At this, a man up in the public spectators' gallery jumped up and started shouting Tsang down. Several security guards surrounded him, and bundled him out of the chamber. As they did, chaos broke loose down on the floor: the LSD's Wong Yuk Man and Long Hair also began shouting. Labor legislator Lee Cheuk Yan stood up to denouce Tsang. Then, he, Margaret Ng and the rest of the 20 or so pan-democrats in the chamber turned their backs on the Chief Executive and walked out. Legco President Tsang Yok Sing had to adjourn the meeting. Later, the democrats gave a press conference and raised hastily printed banners with the slogan that swept across Hong Kong today: Tsang Yam Kuen, Bat Doih Biu Ngoh!
Today's Hong Kong papers are filled with unflattering headlines and stories about Donald Tsang's sat yin 失言 --his "slip of the tongue". (The literal meaning of the two characters 失言 combination is "lose speech". The "sat" character is the same one you'll find in other ill-fated Chinese expressions like failure (sat baaih), unemployed (sat yihp) and disappointed (sat mohng). )
Tsang came back out after his gaffe when the meeting resumed and apologized, kinda sort of, for his loss of words in the face of Margaret Ng's firestorm of indignation. He said he was sorry to have raised such unpleasant emotions. His aides later ran around spinning the ridiculous excuse that Donald Tsang--the Hong Kong born and bred son of a cop-- made an error because "he's really more comfortable speaking in English than in Cantonese." (Last year, when Tsang made an inconvenient remark in an English language interview, his spin-doctors proclaimed just the opposite).
Then, thirty minutes after the meeting, he faced the press and said that he shouldn't have claimed to have been speaking on behalf of all Hong Kong when he suggested that people have "moved on" from the Tiananmen Square massacre.
After lunch today I saw my friend Eddie, who summed the Tsang debacle up in three words: "What an idiot." June 4th is a couple of weeks away. Zhou Zi Yang's posthumous memoir of the sordid behind-the-scenes story of the Tiananmen affair was published today. (if you speak Mandarin you can listen to some of the tapes his followers smuggled out of China at the New York Times website.) It's a perfect storm of bad timing. As of 6pm today, more than 2,700 members have joined the Facebook group "Donald Tsang Does Not Represent Me".
Thanks to Tsang's awkward handling of a pointed question he should have known was coming, it's pretty much of a slam dunk now: there will certainly be record crowds of Hong Kongers at this year's candlelight commemoration of the fallen Tiananmen students in Victoria Park on June 4th.
So I'm happy for Donald Tsang's sat yin. Because the terrible, unspoken truth here is that he is right--many, many Hong Kongers would rather forget about the ugly murders of 1989, and the subsequent persecutions of the victims' families, stick their heads in the sand and just go about their daily lives. It takes a soaring, courageous and eloquent figure like Margaret Ng to galvanize people into action, to remind them to act according to their better nature. To remind them that sometimes you must look back in anger in order to look forward with hope.
I only wish that Donald's slippery tongue disease was as contagious as swine flu and could infect, and draw shame, on politicians across continents. Yesterday, just a few hours before Tsang's blooper, the U.S. government--Barack Obama's government--changed its mind and decided to block the release of photographs of the victims of American torture. And so, the Obama administration continues the Bush policy of hiding America's own festering Tiananmen behind lies, elaborate justifications and cover ups.
Like Donald Tsang, Obama has lots of soothing words for his public. We shouldn't dwell in the past. We need to look forward. Move on. Transform America. Rebuild the economy.
But as I'm sure Margaret Ng would say, if she were rising to the occasion in the House of Representatives in Washington DC instead of the Legco chamber in Statue Square, "What about the people who were injured and maimed? Are you saying we should just bury our consciences because it might disrupt national harmony? What about justice, our constitution, and the rule of law?
Sometimes this life I live bouncing back and forth between Hong Kong and America makes me dizzy with dislocation. Traveling thousands of miles, between cultures and continents, the narratives of each place twist and wrap around each other, and the words of arrogance and power seem to converge into a single stream, a language that is, at once, English and Chinese.
In these dreams, Barrister Ng is standing like a beacon in Legco--or is it the U.S. Senate?--as she proclaims in her clear, steady tones: "It is our obligation to remember. Our duty to vindicate. We must therefore not hesitate to look back, and look back we shall. Now."
Moving
Everybody I know is bun nguk. Moving. Anh thu to Happy Valley, driven away from Elgin Street by the creeping Lan Kwai Fong-ization of Central (despite the recession, the drunken expat bar scene has been spreading across my neighborhood like an extra-terrestrial mold, swallowing up the Persian carpet stores on Wyndham Street, the antique dealers on Hollywood Road. Now, Saturday nights are a parade of women encased in lycra minidresses and strapped into spike heels teetering woozily down Shelley Street's 70 percent grade.)
In English, "moving" is a verb--the language emphasizes the action, implies the uncertainty of transition. But in Cantonese, the stress falls squarely and practically on the noun of place: bun nguk means, literally, "change house". Maybe this is why I feel so unsettled and anxiety ridden by moves, even when (or maybe especially when) I am not the one moving.
But my Hong Kong friends David and Ah Lan have no such emotional baggage. Next month they will say goodbye to their 6th floor Caine Road walkup in the tong lau with its magical tin toi and decamp to a new flat in Kowloon Bay.
David got the keys on Friday, and Saturday morning we all went up to Gaau Lung Wan to inspect the premises.
Kowloon Bay is not a neighborhood you'd ever think to visit if you didn't live there yourself (or know someone who did). Decades ago, in the time when the proud label "Made in the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong" dangled from toys, plastic flowers and transistor radio sets, the area was an industrial center, home to small factories. But in the mid-60s, Hong Kong's colonial government faced a housing crisis, with more than a half million squatters, refugees from Mao's economic "reforms", living in slum conditions. The bureaucrats embarked on a public housing program, kind of a low-rent version of Britain's own council housing estates. The relatively unpopulated Kowloon Bay became the early staging ground for this grand social experiment, which continues to the present day.
We emerged from the MTR station at Kowloon Bay to a archeology of public housing estate architecture, old and new.
The building in the foreground, marked with the number "10" is part of Lower Ngau Tau Kok estate, and it is one of the reasons I was extra-eager to accompany David to check out his new digs (which are in a private housing estate about 10 minutes walk away). Built in 1967, "Lower Cow Head Corners" estate is a vintage example of early Hong Kong public housing architecture. It's going under the wrecking ball in a month or so, and lately it's been the subject of lots of newspaper and magazine articles and even an artists' exhibit.
"Let's cut through the estate," David suggested. "Then you can see the old grassroots shops and food stalls."
We entered the estate courtyard from the bright sunlight street, and headed down a narrow alleylike passageway covered with plastic tarps and the occasional corrugated iron roof. The place teemed with commerce--here there was a cha chaan teng, over there was a vendor selling cooked dishes over a steam table. A sign overhead marked the palace of "Ah Jing" the "Big King of Lo Seui Goose".
entry to block 9F, Lower Ngau Tau Kok estate
I felt relieved for the people who were getting out of here. The estate had outlived its usefulness, and seemed ripe for one of those disastrous events--fire, contagion, monstrous family murders-- that spread across the front page of Apple Daily illustrated by hand with helpful cartoon strip re-creations of the gory scene. Indeed, during the 2003 SARS epidemic, Lower Ngau Tau Kok was one of the hardest hit areas. (Central Hong Kong, on the other hand, was almost untouched).
And yet, I completely understood the nostalgia that Hong Kongers have been expressing for the Lower Cow Head Estate as its last moments tick away. If you believe, as I do, that the real grassroots spirit of Hong Kong is the spirit of the Chinese village modulated by the constraints of cramped urban living conditions, then Lower Cow is a brilliant, Jane Jacobs-ean creation. Here, down these narrow lanes filled with crazy quilt, makeshift businesses, is the living genius of Hong Kong people who can transform a cheerless, bureaucrat-designed public housing block into a thriving, teeming urban village. One where the poverty of private cubicle space is overwhelmed by the glorious cacophony of living in public.
"fix-it" shop, Lower Cow Head Estate
The modern housing estates, unlike Lower Ngau Tau Kok, were designed with the control of public space in mind. After the early 1960s experiments in estate housing, the Hong Kong government decided that outdoor markets and shops were "un-hygienic", and they set in place new policies to prevent the shopkeepers and food vendors (dai pai dongs) from setting up outside, makeshift stalls, and to force them to move into proper premises. Of course, when you force business into buildings, you create new income streams for property developers, too. 大家樂 ---Everybody happy!
Except the on-a-shoestring, spontaneous small businesspeople like the ones who created the messy, marvelous urban village in Lower Ngau Tau Kok.
I've read the economic theory, so I know that choking off the ways that people from the grassroots can independently make a living is one of the strategies of late-stage capitalism. The big boys want Mr. Wong slaving away for them. They don't want Ah Wong out there selling his cuttlefish sticks from a cart in the lane when they can make big rent money by having a branch of the Daai Ga Lok chain in the estate's lower retail area.
不大家樂!
As we walk through the ordered, undistinguished shops underneath David's new building, I suddenly understand the source of my anxiety. All around me, Hong Kong is bun nguk, changing houses. Trading up from damp, grimy tong lau walkups and ancient housing estates one step up from the squatters hut to better, cleaner, healthier flats in the property developer's towers.
But what kind of lives are we moving towards? The nicer private spaces bear a steep price tag that's greater than any mortgage can cover. We--and I say this about Hong Kongers, as well as New Yorkers--have been forced into a Faustian bargain, paying for better private spaces with the richness of our public lives, and our control over them.
The longer I stay in Hong Kong the more I grasp at beloved moments. I try to freeze all my friends, and our memorable dinners enjoyed on tin tois, holding onto them like a parent does a child, filled with fear these things will vanish if I loosen my grip or glance away. Before the handover, I am told, the city's sensibility was ruled by anxiety and uncertainty about the future. But now Hong Kong seems to be about fear of loss. All these precious intangible things--the texture of daily life, neighborly connections, the patch of view from your window, the vendor who sells you cuttlefish on sticks--are being stripped away, erased from existence, by the relentless machinery of Hong Kong's government, in cahoots with crony capitalists.
This fear manifests as nostalgia for the passing of the old Lower Cow estate. But lately it also has surged in the anger over the redevelopment of Wedding Card Street, and the destruction of the Star Ferry. It is, I believe, the most potent and untapped political force in Hong Kong. If I were doing branding for the pan-democrats, I'd be making spots filled with dai pai dongs and cuttlefish vendors cross cut with leering execs from Sun Hung Kai and with ex-Housing Authority turned New World Development honcho Leung Chi Man. I would use propaganda to make the point that democracy is all that stands between a rich, satisfying community life, and the people who want to re-design public lives to suit their profit margins.
But I don't see the pan-Democrats doing that. Half of them because they belong, or aspire to, the profiteering class, and the other half because they are so focussed on street-fighting that they've forgotten the essence of what they're fighting for:
Let's Resist the Virulent Flu Together
Friday night I was sitting at Ngau Gei eating steamed fish head with Ching Wah, Po Ying, and her daughter Fook Lin, when a mass SMS message came through on Fook Lin's cell phone: "First case of Swine Flu found in Hong Kong!"
Immediately, the news channels jumped into breathless action, showing endless grainy black and white security camera loops of one poor Mexican flu sufferer passing through HK immigration. The Hong Kong authorities, who clearly had been marshalling all their forces for this moment, commandeered, closed and quarantined the Metropark in Wanchai, the budget hotel where the Mexican man had been staying, forcing 250 staff and tourists to remain inside. The word was that they would not be allowed out for 7 days. (There's a Hong Kong law on the books, passed after SARS, that punishes quarantine violators with a fine of $5,000 and up to 6 months imprisonment.)
The following evening, I was waiting for the Star Ferry in Tsim Sha Tsui, watching an overhead TV screen silently run and re-run shots of health personnel swathed in white protective suits swarming around the entrance to the quarantined Metropark hotel lobby. Seven or eight people waiting for the ferry wore green surgical masks over their faces. Taped up to a nearby post, I spotted this passionately hand lettered sign:
I decided then, to take the ferry back to Wan Chai instead of to Central, so I could rubberneck the scene at the Metropark.
Metropark Wanchai, Saturday May 2, 9:30 pm
It was a typical Hong Kong Police Department lockdown scene. (It made me nostalgic for the 2005 WTO demonstrations, which took place in these same Wanchai streets). The sidewalks were cordoned off on all sides, so pedestrians couldn't get close. The press, as you can see, were crammed in a pen on the left, and the lobby windows had been screened with white paper so they couldn't photograph inside. Police vans blocked the side street, and a big police command trailer had been set up across the street near where I stood, on the corner of Hennessey.
Cops hovered around. They were all wearing hau jau, surgical masks, a word I learned as a Cantonese student in Hong Kong in 2003.
Some cops had pulled off the hau jau so they could eat their faan hap, their rice boxes. The press, also, were eating rice boxes. In Hong Kong, we take our flu epidemics seriously, but god forbid they should interfere with dinner.
It looked like everyone was hunkered down for a long stakeout.
Before the authorities put up white paper in the lobby windows, intrepid HK reporters had taped up messages with their cellphone numbers, begging "inmates" to call. Stories filtered out, telling of bureaucratic confusion and bad communication. The guests were told to stay in their rooms and avoid contact with other guests. Yet they were all herded into the lobby together for meetings and examinations.
They Gave Us Spam Sandwiches For Breakfast! read the subhead in the next day's South China Morning Post.
What, no faan hap?
The rationalist in me knows the Hong Kong government is acting totally over the top. New York has more than fifty confirmed cases of H1N1, including one death, and nobody's imprisoning tourists in their Best Western cubicle rooms. But if you ask my inner fraidy cat which city she'd rather spend an epidemic in, New York or Hong Kong, I'd vote for the paranoid, over-kill, bureaucratic and quarantine mad Asia World City every time.
I only wish they were as fanatically concerned for my health in the long term. Thanks to the vigilance of the Hong Kong government, it is highly unlikely I'll get swine flu, or bird flu, or any kind of flu, and die. But if the government continues its policy of building massive highway projects, and allowing tycoon developers to build walls of skyscrapers that block air circulation, I may choke to death in five years from Hong Kong's toxic air. The number of potential flu victims is a fraction of the actual tens of thousands of Hong Kongers who suffer from environmentally caused (and exacerbated) illnesses.
If Hong Kong's hyper-drive flu season sounds to you like a bad case of politics trumping medicine, you're not alone. I find it unsettling that feverish emotion, not cool science, is the driving force behind the Hong Kong government's actions. My acquaintance Dr. Lo Wing Lok, one of Hong Kong's most respected epidemiologists said on RTHK yesterday that the quarantine of the Metropark was entirely unnecessary, from a medical and scientific point of view.
Of course he's right. And of course that's beside the point. What's really underneath all these hau jaus and quarantine edicts isn't science, but fear and guilt. The mismanagement of the SARS fiasco, and the horrible way that people, mostly frontline medical workers and poor folks in dilapidated public housing estates got sick, is still a raw memory here. No government official wants to get it wrong again this time. Better to lock up tourists and trot out the contamination suits than follow sensible science. (And--thinking long range--sensible urban planning for one of the world's most crowded cities).
So the more nervous of us don hau jaus, while others (like the South China Morning Post's editorial board) praise the HK government for their terrific preparation and precautionary wisdom. Meanwhile, British tourists suffer Spam breakfasts locked in cheap Wanchai hotels while the poor hapless Hong Kong taxi driver who had the bad luck to ferry the feverish Mexican from his hotel to the hospital is hunted down by the Criminal Investigative Division of the HKPD.
And I walk--maskless and free--from Wanchai back to my neighborhood in Central Hong Kong, through narrow lanes where the bubonic plague once raged, and where now financial execs buy overpriced apartments and vomit lager on the Saturday night streets.
Wash your hands. Get a good night's sleep. Together, we will resist the virulent flu.
The Jong Sau
Jong Sau! The rumors of our building's impending renovation were put to rest last Christmas when Mrs. Wong, the doorlady, posted a copy of all six A4 pages of the coop association's meeting minutes, in English and Chinese, underneath the red tinsel by the elevator:
PLANNED BUILDING WORK APPROVED BY MAJORITY OF OWNERS.
Since then, we lowly tenants of Prosperous View Court have been waiting, nervously. A Hong Kong building renovation--裝 修 is a form of slow torture so inhuman and despicable that it has been banned by the Geneva Convention. My buddy Josh spent 8 months living under renovation conditions, in a building that was scaffolded from top to bottom in bamboo, then wrapped up like a Christo art project in dark green plastic mesh that covered all his windows, turning his flat into an eerie den with a Kryptonite glow.
Everywhere in Hong Kong you see buildings matchsticked with bamboo and wrapped in netting. Modern construction here is a slap bang, profit-squeezing affair, and most new buildings start looking shabby in a few years. Things are built with the idea that they will be torn down in 10 years, 15 at the outside. Rice farms in the New Territories are buried under ever-growing heaps of construction debris. Hey, it's the Hong Kong way!
At least it has been until recently. A handful of grass roots green activists and Jane Jacobs-ite urban planners are fighting the system, and gaining a foothold here and there. Hong Kong has lots of gorgeous and solid old low-rise and art deco buildings, and unused factories that are ripe for conversion. Renovation, not demolition, is the rallying cry of these new Hong Kong urban activists.
I support this movement. We should repair, not raze. So how can I complain when it moves from theory to reality, from the buildings across the street to the one I live in?
"Of course they will have to da paang," laughed Mr. Poon, the night doorman. " The whole thing take, maybe, six months--rainy season is coming." Da paang? I called Leung up to ask for a translation. Did it mean what I thought?
"Da paang means putting the bamboo," said Leung, confirming my worst fears.
I shuddered. I am home during the days most days, working. How could I do anything bathed in Kryptonite green for 12 hours?
I considered moving. I considered a long vacation.
But when would this work begin? No one seemed to know.
Then, one day last month, I walked into my lobby and noticed Mrs. Wong speaking to an affable young man. I overheard the words "jong sau". When the man stepped into the elevator with me, I asked him if he knew anything about the impending construction.
"Actually, I'm the building association president," he told me. "I'm coordinating the work."
He told me that the renovation was only a replacement of the building's external pipes, which had become rusted over time. The work would last exactly 63 days, and the scaffolding would only be constructed over the parts of the buildings where the pipes are.
Yesterday, at 10am, Jack the building manager, assisted by Mrs. Wong, held a ceremony with the manager of the construction company in the sitting out area behind Prosperous View Court. They burned sticks of incense over a bowl of fruit.
I knew that "hoi gung" (literally "start work") ceremonies were common for new buildings, and even used before starting work on a film. But I didn't know they were performed for renovations. "We would always do this," Mr. Building President told me. "To make sure the work is performed well." (Note to self: I should recommend the Hoi Gung ceremony to my building's coop board back in Brooklyn).
The scaffolders arrived this morning at 9:30am. By 11, their shaky matchstick grid of bamboo poles rose almost to my apartment on the 12th floor. I watched them from my kitchen window in awe.
What amazing cool. I'd admired these guys from afar before, but watching them upclose is a revelation. They scramble, pirouette, work and balance with four limbs at once. Two of the guys, I notice, are climbing the slippery poles wearing only simple cloth kung fu shoes.
The bamboo scaffolders belong to a very exclusive union of professionals who dominate this traditional trade unique to Hong Kong (it's been outlawed in most of China, where its considered too dangerous).
I think they are even more awe-worthy than the wire acrobats who dazzle moviegoers in Hong Kong's kung fu movies. Because these guys aren't protected by wires. There's no safety net below as they dance on the temporary stages they build in the air.
They are like Hong Kong--impermanent, nimble, and awesome.
They're back from lunch now, and I'm going over to my window to watch some more.
The Bad Stick
The unfortunate fortune of the "Number 27" stick drawn at Che Gung temple
Nobody I know in Hong Kong is rending their garments in despair over the very, very bad Chinese fortune stick drawn by Lau Wong Fat at Che Gung temple in Shatin last Tuesday.
My buddy, Ah Wong, in fact, is laughing. "What did they expect? The most important ritual of the Chinese New Year for the Hong Kong Government, and who do they send to kau chim? A guy who's under investigation by the ICAC!"
Really, Ah Wong has a point. If I were sending a proxy to pull the stick that determined my fortune for the forthcoming year--pulling it, mind you, in front of the entire assembled Hong Kong media corps--I certainly would hesitate before sending the shifty, scandal-ridden "Uncle" Lau, head of the clannish, secretive and powerful village chief's association, the Heung Yee Kuk.
Let me backtrack a moment for you non-Hong Kong readers. "Kau chim", 求簽 , literally "request a sign" is one of the hallowed rituals of our Chinese New Year. I've never been tempted to try--it involves unpleasant waiting in line for hours with throngs of people in the cold weather at one of the kitchy "auspicious" Taoist temples like Wong Tai Sin.
The drill goes like this: you get to the head of the line, you are handed a cup filled with 64 (sometimes 96) flat wooden sticks, each one engraved with a number and one of three Chinese characters--seung, ha, jung: up, down, or middle. You shake the cup until one stick jumps out, and take it to the fortuneteller, who pulls out the slip of paper that corresponds to the number of your stick, and reads the fortune printed on it. Whatever it says, that's your "year", on a stick.
How seriously do people take this? Well, I've actually seen people quickly shove a bad stick down in the bunch when no one's looking, and start shaking over again. A few years ago, a local district councillor drew such a bad stick, on behalf of his district, that he immediately re-did his pick.
And what was the number of the stick that caused this fellow such distress that he saw no alternative but to beg the gods for a do-over?
Number 27. The same number on the stick that Lau Wong Fat drew on behalf of the Hong Kong Government at Che Gung temple the other day.
"Evil and Calamity Is Coming And Going All Around You: And it Comes from You."
Soothsayers and oracles, in all languages and cultures, derive their power from maddening un-specificity. The companion text to the Chinese fortune sticks, true to its genre, is written in flowery, dense poetry filled with allusions to Chinese literature and history. In other words, there's enough interpretative wiggle-room in here to make the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference blind with envy. No surprise that the team of fortunetellers at Che Gung temple, along with the pundits at twelve or thirteen Hong Kong dailies, representatives of various Hong Kong political parties, and Lau Wong Fat himself, have been spinning the result like it's Sunday morning on Meet the Press. (There's an excellent digest of all the armchair oracles, and a translation of the fortune poem, on ESWN.)
My Chinese is not up to literary standards, so I'm not going to try to analyze the 28 character poem with its allusions to demons and phantasms, and traitors from within. But you don't need an M.A. in Chinese Literature to notice that there is one, and only one, specific historical figure referenced in the frame of Stick Number 27.
Qin Shi Huang
Okay, here's where I admit that most of what I know about the first Emperor of a United China comes from the Zhang Yimou movie, Hero. But his nasty cinematic character, I'm told, is pretty true to the history books. Qin was a manipulator, a single-minded tyrant, who justified slaughtering and repressing the people (he banned dissenting books, buried scholars alive) in order to pull competing fiefdoms together into a Chinese nation. The Great Wall of China is the man's legacy--he started its construction to keep China safe from outsiders. Hero makes the very controversial case that Qin was, in the end, a good guy--that the violence and extreme political repression he unleashed was an unfortunate but necessary means to achieve the higher goal of nationhood.
Does this argument sound familiar?
Anyway, Emperor Qin is right smack in the middle of Bad Stick Number 27:
秦王徒把長城築...
"Emperor Qin built the Great Wall in vain...Evil and Calamity are Everywhere, and it's Because of You."
Now, if you wanted to stretch and spin-doctor a lot--a whole lot--I suppose you could transform that ominous warning about the dangers of arrogant, absolute power into a DAB-ready platitude for the Hong Kong People. Something along the lines of "We must stay united as a community and beware of dissent and disharmony within."
At least, that's what "Uncle" Lau Wong Fat did.
But nobody in Hong Kong is buying it. Chief Executive Donald Tsang's popularity rating is not quite as low as George Bush's was in the Final Days, but it's heading to Tung Chee Hwa territory. The HK government's missteps and political failures are there for everyone to see--as clear and vainglorious as Tsang's very ugly "Great Wall" of a government complex that's being constructed over in Admiralty.
Like Ah Wong, everyone is chuckling, because they know who pulled the bad stick, and it isn't the Hong Kong public. Of course the pro-government spinners want to pin this bad mojo on Hong Kong and the community--that "we" are to blame for our "internal squabbles" (that is to say, for insisting on being able to actually elect our representatives, instead of letting the Emperors in Beijing call the shots).
"We" is a word that tends to get thrown about when uncomfortable realities are being avoided. It often works: my countrymen in the U.S. so far seem quite happy to go along with Obama's inaugural suggestion that "we" citizens are the ones culpable for the current evils and calamities facing the U.S. (instead of, say, the yet-to-be-prosecuted corporate and financial industry crooks, plus George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Alberto Gonzalez, et.al.).
Thank god Hong Kong people--no doubt sharpened by their love for chao dao fu-- have a nose for that kind of smelly "we".
That is to say, Hong Kong people understand that when politicians start throwing around the "we's" you really have to take a close look to determine who, really, is "We".
And in this case, the "We" is not us. It's them. The really, really bad fortune stick Number 27 belongs to the un-elected officials of Hong Kong's government.
Serves them right, I say. What were they thinking when they dispatched Lau Wong Fat to Che Gung temple? Actually, I'm pretty sure I can figure what they were thinking. Usually, the Hong Kong government sends one of the Secretary-level cabinet ministers to do the deed each year. This presents problems, since many of the top brass are Christians who really don't want to be involved with such a superstitious practice, or they're sophisticates who jet off to Paris or New York the instant the Chinese New Year holiday begins. What's more, nobody in the government wants to be saddled with the bad press of making an unfortunate stick pick in this most unfortunate of years.
From that perspective, traditional old "Uncle" Lau from the New Territories must have looked like a great solution to this knotty, perennial problem. What's more, probably the government figured it would be a way to give him face. The week before Chinese New Year, Lau was given a seat on Hong Kong's Executive Council amid a storm of accusations that his appointment was a political tit for tat. (Lau Wong Fat, you may remember, turned his back on his own political party last August to campaign for a government-supporting DAB candidate).
Ah, but how inexorably the wheels of karmic justice spin! As it turns out, the traitorous and scheming Lau Wong Fat got exactly the fortune that he--and by extension, his masters--deserved.
Ji San Bat On. You got that right. In 2009, the year of Financial Tsunami and the 20th Anniversary of Tienanmen Square, there will be no rest for these guys.
And that, in plain English, is the lesson of the bad stick: believe in the illusion that your power is righteous and justified, and it will eventually come and bite you in the ass.
I'll need a few more years of study before I can translate that elegantly into Chinese.
Surfing the Financial Tsunami
The Cantonese description of the mess we're in is way better and more colorful than that dull old CNN/New York Times-standby: "Financial Crisis." It shows more poetic flair, too, than the slangy, "Ponzi scheme". And I'd take it in a minute over the other C-words that have been bandying around the newspaper headlines: calamity, collapse, catastrophe.
The Cantonese term for the global economic crisis is gam yung hoi siu:
金融海嘯
literally: gold fuses, the ocean screams.
I know, I know, you can't translate these things so literally. Chinese words consist mainly of pairs of characters that carry a different meaning in combination than the individual parts. Yet for a Westerner, it is hard to resist parsing the elements and delighting in the uncanny, poetic resonances of the basic building blocks. For me this is one of the joys of being a student of Chinese, so you'll just have to put up with my quirks. (In elementary school English class I was the number one diagrammer of sentences and sleuth of root words, so at least I'm consistent).
Anyway, the "Gam Yung" part of this equation is the character combination that translates as "financial" (as in the Hong Kong building we all call IFC, but which occasionally gets referred to by its "official" Cantonese name "Gwok Jai Gam Yung Jung Sam" --International Financial Centre.)
But the "hoi siu" is another story. The literal power of these two characters only amplifies the meaning of the pair. It carries, for me and anyone who has lived close to the sea, the same kind of powerful horror as "dai fung" the great wind of the "typhoon." The ocean screams, surges out of control, without favor or pity wipes away everything in its path.
Ah, if only our current financial ocean scream were as democratic as nature's big winds and giant killer waves.
But it isn't, and it is--typically--hitting those people hardest who deserve it least. And barely moisturizing those who deserve to get soaked to the bone and swept out to oblivion.
I don't belong either of those groups. I'd say I'm in a pretty average and typical situation, all things considered, and I'm thankful. But I've still taken a couple of hits, which is why you may have noticed my blogging has gone dark for a while. Writing these Learning Cantonese essays about Hong Kong is my passion, but it takes my full focus and energy to put out work I'm proud of. If I'm tapped out because I've been spending that brain capital on money-spinning projects, I'd rather not post some old blah blah blah on the blog. I'd rather wait and hold on until I can tap my top-shelf product.
So I thank all of you, this Chinese New Year of the mighty ngau, for your patience and continued support. No matter how long the blog goes dark, you terrific readers have come back. I appreciate that.
Speaking of support, I have been brainstorming a way to support the time I spend on this blog, and came up with a little project called Little Adventures in Hong Kong. You may have spotted the button for the link down on the left side of the page. It is my small way of trying to surf this financial tsunami, and I hope it may generate the $$$ to offset the hours I spend wandering around the city looking for adventures to recount on this blog. If you plan to come to Hong Kong, or have a friend who's planning to come, please do check it out.
Enough self-promotion. Here's to a powerful year of the OX, which I just now notice spells, backwards, my favorite Hong Kong spicy fishy flavored sauce. This must be a good thing, and when I figure out if there's any luck or fortune attached to this lovely coincidence, I will come back and tell you all about it.
Sooner than later, I promise.
In the meanwhile, San Nin Faai Lok!
Freedom Beyond Noodles
This little note at the bottom of a column in today's South China Morning Post reminds me it's been some months since I visited my favorite noodle shop:
Celebrating 20 years of Freedom Noodles
Amid the economic downturn and a series of closures in the catering sector, a popular, yet humble restaurant called Freedom Noodles - founded 20 years ago on the ground floor of the Professional Teachers' Union's clubhouse in Causeway Bay - is still going strong.
Democrat Cheung Man-kwong, who is head of the union, said the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown this year had a special meaning for the shop, which was a favourite in the neighbourhood.
"There is more to the name of the shop than the freedom for customers to choose whatever combination of ingredients they wish for their dish of noodles. The owners were active supporters of the pro-democracy movement before June 4, 1989," Mr Cheung said.
I didn't know that the owners of Ji Yauh Mihn Ga were pro-democracy supporters, but this knowledge will add to my pleasure and comfort the next time I happen to be near the Bowrington Market in Wan Chai and duck into the steamy shop and order a bowl of their delicious and utterly satisfying seui gau mihn.
Lately, there's been a foodie scramble to anoint one or another Hong Kong noodle shop as the "best" won ton noodle place in town. I blame this urge to categorize and rate on the recent release of the Michelin Guide for Foreign Tourists Coming to Hong Kong who Can't Read The Chinese Menu and are Afraid Someone Might Slip Dog Meat in their Dumpling. The "classic" elements of the won ton noodle soup have been analyzed and proclaimed by these experts. If a soup does not contain slivers of the more expensive white chive (as opposed to the lowly green one, which is so cheap that the vendors in the gaai sih will often give a bunch away for free to customers, like a pack of Kleenex at the 7-11), it is instantly crossed off the golden foodie noodle list.
According to the believers of the Won Ton Bible, just about the only "real" noodle shop in Hong Kong is a place on Wellington Street called Mak Gei. Now, I live about a two minute walk from that shop, and I eat there from time to time, and their won ton mihn is fine by me. The broth is richer than usual, and suitably shrimpy. The won tons are a good size, not too big or small, and the noodles are springy and chewy.
Still, Mak's is not a noodle soup that I go out of my way to eat. For one thing, it's pricey and they're a bit mingy on the portions--$38 Hong Kong dollars only gets you a bowl the size of a teacup, three small wontons and a baby's fistful of noodles. If you want to make a lunch of it, you really have to order two bowls, which puts your tab close to $10 US--a lot of moolah for a bowl of noodles in the Time of Financial Tsunami.
But it's not money that makes me less interested in eating a bowl of Mak's noodles than a $14 bowl of Freedom's. Soup, no matter what culture you are in, is not just about the ingredients--it's about the soul. In this chilly month, of this cold, cold year, I want to be comforted by friends and familiar faces. I want to pick up my porcelain spoon and chopsticks, lower my head to the steaming bowl, and knock elbows with teachers, unionists, market vendors and taxi drivers. I want freedom from the gnawing fear that these people, this shop, and this won ton mihn will disappear in a blink, replaced by some rapacious developer's crappy concrete tower filled with slick corporate restaurants that promise a "perfect" won ton "lifestyle".
Thank god, we're done with that. For a while, at least. The upside of the finanical tsunami: a pause, and a space, to be filled not by mere things, but by things that matter.
The King of You Tube
The banners have been pulled down, the leftover campaign flyers are headed for landfill or papering the bottoms of birdcages, and the last lonely, sticky salty-sweet crumbs of double yolk mooncakes have been swept away. Hong Kong's election season, and the Mid Autumn Festival, are officially over.
Long Hair's folded up his lantern.
And gone back to work. (He needs to hire a new head assistant--anyone interested?)
Meanwhile, Hong Kong's journalistic pundits and analysts have finally started to catch on to the real big story of this election. The early spin--that the vote was a huge loss for the pan-Democrats--fell apart within 24 hours, after people had a chance to do the math and figure out that the total percentage of Hong Kongers who voted for pro-democracy candidates was the same as four years ago. The second spin, that Hong Kongers voted from their pocketbooks for grassroots candidates, became the narrative du jour for the rest of the week. But then, the polling results from individual stations came out and revealed this puzzling fact: Long Hair and his party, the so-called "radical" League of Social Democrats, polled just as strongly, if not more so, in middle and upper middle neighborhoods as they did in public housing estates.
Which leaves two big mysteries:
1. Why did a grassroots, supposedly working-class party like the LSD pull so many voters from across the economic class spectrum?
2. Why didn't any of the pre-election polls predict the big victories of Long Hair and the LSD?
My handle on this, until a day or so ago, was that the polls had simply missed a lot of Long Hair's voters. Most of the local pollsters work from number lists of fixed-line telephones, which are practically pre-historic relics here in HK, where 98% of folks have mobile phones. I also figured that, since people often vote for candidates who reflect themselves and their lifestyles, and since Long Hair practically owns the brand name of "rebel", that a typical Long Hair voter would either hang up the phone on a pollster, or mess with them: "Sure, I'm gonna vote for James Tien. That guy really knows his way around a banana."
Still, there was something missing in the picture, a blank spot on the radar. But then suddenly, it hit me while I was watching the now-viral Gary Chan Hak-kan video, "Try My Breast", and surfing the links to it on You Tube. That's how I found the clip, from TVB, of Long Hair's wonderful election night speech--the one in which he now (famously) grabs the open mike to gloat at the pro-Beijing flacks of DAB: "You spent ten million dollars, and you only got two seats, and we got five. Go to bed!" (The powers that be quickly turned the mike off, so Long Hair's follow up comment, in which he uses a rich Cantonese phrase (sau pei) that likens the DAB to tofu scum or a foreskin, take your pick, didn't get broadcast).
After you get past the thrill of enjoying Leung Kwok Hung's gleeful, in-your-face political showmanship, what you notice is this: the video clip has grabbed more than 159,000 views--that is, more than three times the number of people who actually voted for Long Hair. Not only that, this week the video's received more than 450 viewer comments.
I read through the responses--some are in English, but most are in the language I like to call "Internet Chinese", a fusion of traditional characters, spiked with spoken (often profane) Cantonese and English words and letters. 98% aren't comments really, but cheers. Some of them echo Long Hair's "Good Night DAB!" from the video. Others shout, "Go Long Hair!" "Long Hair is the best!" "You're a hero!" Some repeat their cheers 3, or 10, or 50 times. A few flamers materialize, only to be squashed to a pulp by masses of indignant, Long Hair supporting netizens.
This all looked familiar to me. I spent the spring in the U.S. reading similar flame wars on the political blogs during the presidential primaries. The landslide winner of those flame wars was Barack Obama, who leveraged his netizen fanbase into political capital, and won the primary. Obama became the King of the Blogs.
But Leung Kwok Hung, Long Hair, has become more than that. He is HK's Mong Sih Wong --King of the Netizens.
Unlike Obama, Long Hair didn't plan or strategize his huge popularity in the online world. Like most things Long Hair, it just kind of happened. Long Hair has always had a base of fanboys (in 2004, his strongest demographic at the polls was young men), and I noticed when I first started hanging out around his office four years ago that it was run, mainly, by shy, kind of geeky Hong Kong guys in their twenties who spent most of their time staring into the computer screen. (And who could be counted on, in the event of a computer crash, to help get you back up and running).
From the beginning, Long Hair's website was a central part of his operation, and (unlike most other "straight" Legco member's websites) constantly changing and updating. Long Hair's office staff used it as a double edged tool: to alert followers to his packed schedule of upcoming demonstrations, and to document the demonstrations (especially any clashes with the police) through photos and videography.
The hottest part of the Long Hair website, back in the beginning, was its board, or "touh leuhn keui" (in Cantonese, literally, "discussion corner"). For a while, one of Long Hair's staff members spent most of his time on the job running it, and the website. But after about a year, Long Hair and businessman Siu Yeuk Yuen launched the Internet radio project, www.myradio.com.hk, and the discussion action moved over to that board, and to its sister project, www.hkreporter.com.
Every week for the last four years, with few lapses, Long Hair has appeared twice a week on programs on myradio.com.hk. One program is a loose, free-ranging, two and a half hour political discussion with Mr. Siu. The other show--and, I would say, the more important one, in terms of Long Hair's rise as Netizen King, is his soccer program.
Long Hair loves football, maybe even more than he loves politics. His fellow commentators on his football broadcasts happen to overlap almost 100 percent with his computer-geek fanboy followers. They're the ones who found the wallpaper of Che Guevara's portrait to put on his mobile phone screen,and who downloaded and installed the MP3 of the "Internationale" that plays every time Long Hair gets a phone call.
They are, also, the guys who helped transform him, at the age of 50, from an Internet sideliner to a tech-savvy Internet user. It used to be that an email to Long Hair was as likely to reach him as a message in a bottle--he was a phone guy, all the way. (He is so old school he can't even type in Chinese, he writes with a pen.) But now he regularly answers and reads his email (in English), surfs, and finds the viral videos before I do. What happened? Well, we acquire new languages and skills when we have a strong need for them, and once Long Hair's net geek football comrades showed him that he could find the (illegal) live feeds of European matches on Chinese websites, his tech fluency went exponential. Now he surfs and downloads--music, films, videos--like a pro. More important, he knows the online world not as a tourist, but because he lives there too.
During the Legco campaign, as essayist and netizen badboy Martin Oei points out in his great article today in the HK Economic Journal (warning: it's behind a pay wall, and in Chinese. It would take me all day to translate so I hope Roland does), some candidates tried to jump on the web bandwagon. Some joined Facebook. "Broomhead" Regina Ip hired rap musicians to make her a cringe worthy promo video called "Reginababy". As it usually does in Hong Kong, a Reginababy parody appeared almost instantly, and (of course!) has out-polled the original.
(And, guess who's behind the parody? None other than fokguy, aka Kay Lam, aka the creator of the fabulously snarky parody of the government's official 2007 Hong Kong Handover video "Folk Guy's Always With You".)
It's an incestuous world, this Hong Kong netizen universe. This is, after all, probably the most connected city in the world. We Hong Kongers are wired up the wazoo, to cellphones, computers, heck, even our television comes through a broadband connection. Internet culture here is more intense, pervasive and powerful than it is in the U.S., where there are so many other media diversions competing for attention, and where you really can, still, escape to places beyond the reach of the Wired World. Here, in small, densely-packed HK, you can't. If you lose your temper and your cool and suddenly start screaming at the guy next to you on the bus, you can be sure that someone will quietly whip out his cellphone and film you and the next thing you know you'll be screaming your Cantonese profanity in front of 200,000 netizens on You Tube. With subtitles.
In Hong Kong, more than perhaps any other city in the world, we live our lives on You Tube. The wackiness and spontaneous non-conformity that in London, or New York, invigorates street life doesn't exist here. People are reserved, conservative, unwilling to risk making a public fuss, being the object of attention. But on You Tube, you can feel free to shout and snark and behave like a citizen of a less inhibited society. That's why, in vast numbers, Hong Kongers have taken up residence online. Charles Dickens did his research for his novels by walking the streets of London; to find the soul of modern Hong Kong you gotta surf in Chinese on YouTube.
Really, there's only one public figure in Hong Kong who breaks the mold, and routinely steps out of line, shouts and behaves outrageously in public, rather than behind the safety wall of a computer. Who dresses as he pleases and doesn't give a fig or fart about what anyone thinks.
And that's Long Hair.* No wonder he's the hero, the King of the Netizens. In the parallel universe of Hong Kong's You Tube, the net boys are his avatars, his disciples in the practice of free speech. Every televised appearance he makes, every time he stands up to speak in Legco, they record, creatively splice and upload it online. Then they skewer his enemies who "try their breast". Even if Long hired a top political consultant, they couldn't do a better job of image-making than this army of committed, clever netizens. (And, since Hong Kong election rules still ban tv and radio political advertisements, any traditional consultant coming here would be working like a plumber with no tools).
Thanks to the netizens in the discussion rooms, on the Internet radio, and You Tube, Long Hair is more than just a politician, he's become a leading Hong Kong brand. He stands for sticking it to the mighty and powerful. For speaking out in public. For daring, and being brave. A vote for him isn't just a ideological choice, it is much more powerful than that. You vote for Long Hair, because at some deep level you wish you could be as completely and freely yourself in the real world, as you are in the virtual one. And, knowing that you can't, you vote for Long Hair to say, "Thanks".
Such emotions transcend issues of income and class, just as Internet use does in super-wired Hong Kong. And they have a deeper, profounder pull than political platforms or propaganda. Most crucially: they don't register on pollster's questionnaires, which explains why the pre-election polls didn't predict the Long Hair victory. And that brings up a real problem, as we head into the age of online campaigning, in Hong Kong and all over the world. With the old-fashioned tools at our command, we can easily count the 44,763 Hong Kong voters who made Leung Kwok Hung a legislative council member. But how do we begin to enumerate, or even identify the citizens of You Tube City who made Long Hair a political and cultural icon?
_______
*I've always wondered why the Hong Kong press almost always prefaces any mention of "Long Hair" with the word "radical". Yeah, sure, he's a Trotskyite, but Leung Kwok Hung's politics of social democracy certainly wouldn't raise eyebrows in any European country. My suspicion is that people see Long Hair as radical not because of his political ideas, which fall well within the left-center spectrum of Western democracies, but because of his uninhibited public behavior, which contrasts so sharply with Hong Kong's straightlaced norms.
The Breast Is Yet To Come
Here's how I know that the LEGCO election is really over: Leung Kwok Hung is sitting at my dining room table, with me and Po Ying and another friend, and he's deep into his second bowl of rice. During the election, Long Hair was surviving on almost nothing. "I'm on a diet," he'd insist. "I'm not eating after 5pm". Thank goodness his eating habits are back to normal; during the last days of the campaign I kept imagining a disastrous scene: that in the middle of scolding Lau Gong Wah or Gary Chan Hak-kan, Long Hair's knees would buckle from hunger, and, clutching his megaphone, he'd crumple to the ground surrounded by DAB supporters bonging him on the head with their placards.
Speaking of that Mr. Chan. By now you've probably seen, or at least heard about, the hysterical video on YouTube that some creative Hong Konger produced, showing Chan stuttering in English to a foreign reporter during his first post-election interview. "We will, uh, uh, we will, er, um...try our breast" , Chan told the journalist, sealing forever his fate. Henceforth, the legislative councillor from New Territories East district shall be known, in newspaper columns and on hundreds of Hong Kong Internet chat boards, as "Nai Bo"--"Titty" Chan.
Long Hair, displaying his lightning political reflexes, opened his statement at the LSD's press conference the other day by telling the reporters, "We will not try our breast. We will try our best." After people stopped laughing at Long Hair's clever out-English-ing of his political rival, they began to wonder: How is it that Long Hair, with no formal education beyond a Chinese-medium secondary school, speaks far better English than a Chinese University masters graduate who worked as a special assistant to Hong Kong's Chief Executive for $70,000 HKD (about 9,000 US) a month?
"I use English every day," Long Hair chuckles. "I read English-language books and have lots of English speaking friends. From the way that Hak-kan speaks on that video clip, you can tell he seldom uses English at all. He has no opportunity to practice."
English-language proficiency isn't something that's high-priority in the China-focussed bubble that is the DAB. Party chairman Tsang Yok-sing and ex-Legco member Choy so-yuk are Hong Kong University graduates, and reasonably conversant, but they are exceptions. Most, if not all, the DAB's PR info and material is Chinese-only. Their website has a very clumsy English language section, which has a banner that reads, (strangely, considering the DAB is the arm of the Chinese Communist Party in HK), Fighting! China.
The DAB's disinterest in English-language outreach probably has its roots in the party's origins as an anti-British colonial government protest group. You don't learn the language of your hated occupier, or if you do, you don't show it off. As a result, the DAB's worldview is narrow, parochial, and completely focussed on China and things (mainland) Chinese.
However Hong Kong is both a Chinese and an international city. Hong Kong's fortune springs from its ability to make deals, do business transactions, and move money across the world and across cultures. The very nature of Hong Kong is tied together with its ability to translate, and the city's future hinges on its continued ability to do so. (And by "translate" I mean more than just language here.)
But it all starts with language. Languages are the key that opens the door to other worlds. You hold one in your hand, and the possibilites begin to flow. Without my (limited, crappy, but practiced every day) Cantonese, I would not have the tools to see Hong Kong as I do, and would not be writing this story for you. Without an interest in the English language, the DAB will remain eternally parochial. Which would be fine if they were still in the position they were in the 1960s--that of a fringe, opposition party fighting colonial oppression. But what a disastrous future Hong Kong will have if the city is led by a group of people with such a limited mindset! This is the biggest reason why I rue the emergent alliance of the DAB and Hong Kong's executive branch. The DAB, has a dark, angry, and xenophobic strain that runs entirely against the grain of Hong Kong's city culture. The party of Gary Chan Hak-kan does not represent Hong Kong at its breast.
(Sorry, couldn't resist!) Anyway, back to dinner. Leung and Po Ying and I raise a toast to the amazing LSD victory--the little party with no money, less than 2 years old, now has a LEGCO representative in three out of five districts! Long Hair, Wong Yuk-man and Albert Chan will sit together in the LEGCO chamber. "Now, if they throw me out of the chamber, they will still have to deal with Albert and Yuk-man," Long Hair chortles.
I wonder who will be doing the tossing. Long Hair's nemesis for the last four years, former Legco president Rita Fan, has retired. Already, names are being floated for the post of next LEGCO chairman. The DAB, of course, wants to put its chairman, Tsang Yok-sing, into the post.
"It will probably be Tsang yok-sing. That's okay with me," shrugs Long Hair.
At that moment, a wonderful idea jumps into my brain, and I throw it out for dinner table discussion:
"What about Miriam Lau?" The solicitor from the Liberal Party was Rita Fan's protege in the last session of LEGCO--Lau would take over chairing the legislature from Mrs. Fan when she took her lunch and dinner breaks.
Long Hair is dubious. "I think the DAB wants the chairmanship", he says. Anyway, Miriam Lau's Liberal Party was crushed by this last election. They lost all their races in the popular vote, and only won 7 seats in the functional constituencies. Just today, one of those members, Lau Wong-fat, resigned from the party, leaving the Liberals with only 6 seats. Lau Wong-fat had, outrageously, been campaigning against his party and for the DAB candidate in New Territories West.
But, I tell Long Hair, listen to me. Do the math. The pan-Democrats have 23 votes. There are two other independents who are said to be anti-government. The Liberal Party still has its six votes. It adds up to 31, enough votes to claim a majority.
The Liberal Party is furious at the DAB, and blames its humiliating defeat on the DAB's treachery. They're simmering, sussing out what to do next. In an article in today's South China Morning Post, a senior party member declares that the party should "shed its image as a government ally. "
Well, here's one way they can do it, brilliantly: Join forces with the pan-Dems to elect Miriam Lau as Legco Chairman for the next session. How cool would that be!? In one swoop, you dis the DAB, and its chairman Tsang yok-sing. You also serve warning to the pro-government, pro-Beijing bloc: We have the votes, and if you don't work with us, we can join forces to vote you down again.
Yeah, I know, the Liberal Party and the pan-Democrats are the most unlikely of bedfellows--but then again, stranger alliances have forged in the Parliaments all around the world.
Whatever happens, the early days of new session of LEGCO are going to be very, very interesting. For HK political junkies, the breast is yet to come.
Speaking of that Mr. Chan. By now you've probably seen, or at least heard about, the hysterical video on YouTube that some creative Hong Konger produced, showing Chan stuttering in English to a foreign reporter during his first post-election interview. "We will, uh, uh, we will, er, um...try our breast" , Chan told the journalist, sealing forever his fate. Henceforth, the legislative councillor from New Territories East district shall be known, in newspaper columns and on hundreds of Hong Kong Internet chat boards, as "Nai Bo"--"Titty" Chan.
Long Hair, displaying his lightning political reflexes, opened his statement at the LSD's press conference the other day by telling the reporters, "We will not try our breast. We will try our best." After people stopped laughing at Long Hair's clever out-English-ing of his political rival, they began to wonder: How is it that Long Hair, with no formal education beyond a Chinese-medium secondary school, speaks far better English than a Chinese University masters graduate who worked as a special assistant to Hong Kong's Chief Executive for $70,000 HKD (about 9,000 US) a month?
"I use English every day," Long Hair chuckles. "I read English-language books and have lots of English speaking friends. From the way that Hak-kan speaks on that video clip, you can tell he seldom uses English at all. He has no opportunity to practice."
English-language proficiency isn't something that's high-priority in the China-focussed bubble that is the DAB. Party chairman Tsang Yok-sing and ex-Legco member Choy so-yuk are Hong Kong University graduates, and reasonably conversant, but they are exceptions. Most, if not all, the DAB's PR info and material is Chinese-only. Their website has a very clumsy English language section, which has a banner that reads, (strangely, considering the DAB is the arm of the Chinese Communist Party in HK), Fighting! China.
The DAB's disinterest in English-language outreach probably has its roots in the party's origins as an anti-British colonial government protest group. You don't learn the language of your hated occupier, or if you do, you don't show it off. As a result, the DAB's worldview is narrow, parochial, and completely focussed on China and things (mainland) Chinese.
However Hong Kong is both a Chinese and an international city. Hong Kong's fortune springs from its ability to make deals, do business transactions, and move money across the world and across cultures. The very nature of Hong Kong is tied together with its ability to translate, and the city's future hinges on its continued ability to do so. (And by "translate" I mean more than just language here.)
But it all starts with language. Languages are the key that opens the door to other worlds. You hold one in your hand, and the possibilites begin to flow. Without my (limited, crappy, but practiced every day) Cantonese, I would not have the tools to see Hong Kong as I do, and would not be writing this story for you. Without an interest in the English language, the DAB will remain eternally parochial. Which would be fine if they were still in the position they were in the 1960s--that of a fringe, opposition party fighting colonial oppression. But what a disastrous future Hong Kong will have if the city is led by a group of people with such a limited mindset! This is the biggest reason why I rue the emergent alliance of the DAB and Hong Kong's executive branch. The DAB, has a dark, angry, and xenophobic strain that runs entirely against the grain of Hong Kong's city culture. The party of Gary Chan Hak-kan does not represent Hong Kong at its breast.
(Sorry, couldn't resist!) Anyway, back to dinner. Leung and Po Ying and I raise a toast to the amazing LSD victory--the little party with no money, less than 2 years old, now has a LEGCO representative in three out of five districts! Long Hair, Wong Yuk-man and Albert Chan will sit together in the LEGCO chamber. "Now, if they throw me out of the chamber, they will still have to deal with Albert and Yuk-man," Long Hair chortles.
I wonder who will be doing the tossing. Long Hair's nemesis for the last four years, former Legco president Rita Fan, has retired. Already, names are being floated for the post of next LEGCO chairman. The DAB, of course, wants to put its chairman, Tsang Yok-sing, into the post.
"It will probably be Tsang yok-sing. That's okay with me," shrugs Long Hair.
At that moment, a wonderful idea jumps into my brain, and I throw it out for dinner table discussion:
"What about Miriam Lau?" The solicitor from the Liberal Party was Rita Fan's protege in the last session of LEGCO--Lau would take over chairing the legislature from Mrs. Fan when she took her lunch and dinner breaks.
Long Hair is dubious. "I think the DAB wants the chairmanship", he says. Anyway, Miriam Lau's Liberal Party was crushed by this last election. They lost all their races in the popular vote, and only won 7 seats in the functional constituencies. Just today, one of those members, Lau Wong-fat, resigned from the party, leaving the Liberals with only 6 seats. Lau Wong-fat had, outrageously, been campaigning against his party and for the DAB candidate in New Territories West.
But, I tell Long Hair, listen to me. Do the math. The pan-Democrats have 23 votes. There are two other independents who are said to be anti-government. The Liberal Party still has its six votes. It adds up to 31, enough votes to claim a majority.
The Liberal Party is furious at the DAB, and blames its humiliating defeat on the DAB's treachery. They're simmering, sussing out what to do next. In an article in today's South China Morning Post, a senior party member declares that the party should "shed its image as a government ally. "
Well, here's one way they can do it, brilliantly: Join forces with the pan-Dems to elect Miriam Lau as Legco Chairman for the next session. How cool would that be!? In one swoop, you dis the DAB, and its chairman Tsang yok-sing. You also serve warning to the pro-government, pro-Beijing bloc: We have the votes, and if you don't work with us, we can join forces to vote you down again.
Yeah, I know, the Liberal Party and the pan-Democrats are the most unlikely of bedfellows--but then again, stranger alliances have forged in the Parliaments all around the world.
Whatever happens, the early days of new session of LEGCO are going to be very, very interesting. For HK political junkies, the breast is yet to come.
The Village People
After reading this essay from a fellow Hong Kong blogger named Chonghead, I feel like I have been unkind. Or, at least, that I'm guilty of painting the brusque, aggressive villagers of Sai Kung, who harassed me and my fellow Long Hair supporters on election day, with brushstrokes that are too broad and careless. There's a side to these villagers that in the heat and anger of the moment I was unable, or unwilling to see. But Chonghead, an ex-urbanite who lives up in a village in New Territories West, points it out: Those legions of pro-Beijing, pro-government DAB supporters, the troops of the infamous tit piu, or "Iron Vote" aren't casting their vote out of blind obedience. They're voting with passion.
It is not, of course, a passion that we advocates of a free and fully democratic Hong Kong can easily understand. We are big picture people, and our mantra is change! Change the system. Change injustice. Change intolerance. Change the world, or at least our little corner of it. One of our weapons of change is the vote. But in Hong Kong the system is rigged, and just about all a vote can do is hold the line, keep things from getting worse. Even if 60 percent of Hong Kong voters choose a pro-Democracy candidate, the most this will do is secure about a third of the seats, barely enough for a veto. This, in a legislature that by definition is already hamstrung. So the passion gets frustrated, cynicism and indifference set in. The government is all-powerful, there's no use fighting them, nothing will change. On this election day in Hong Kong, 55 percent of the people decided to stay home.
And what about the Iron Vote villagers? Chonghead observes them walking, in the evening, to the polls, large families strolling together cheerfully. They come out, willingly, in droves, to vote. Because they feel their vote has power, that it means something.
But the passion behind the Iron Vote isn't change, but stasis. These are small town folk who want life to stay calm, to stay predictable and same. And they want a gentle, paternal government to ensure that this happens. This is a deep and abiding passion in Chinese village culture--go take a look at a map of Guangdong province and count the number of villages named Ping On--"Ordinary Peaceful".
Actually, this is a deep and abiding passion just about everywhere in the world. I'm thinking about my own country, America, now. Really, how different is the mindset of a villager in the New Territories, from that of the mayor of Wasilla, Alaska? As the U.S. heads into the home stretch of its own big elections, I see nothing but a replay (albeit a more nuanced, complex one) of my little clash with the troops of the DAB in Sai Kung. You've got your people--mainly educated, city slickers--who rally behind the banner of CHANGE. And you've got your small town folk (in the sprawl that is the contemporary U.S., small town is a mindset, rather than a geographical location) who distrust those city types and their so-called "change". Who use their vote not as a weapon of change, but to celebrate who they are, to affirm the as is.
I told you that I felt I had been unkind to the "Iron Vote" villagers. The other day, in the hot sun, defending my banner against their elbows and jeers, I could only see them as an ugly, faceless tribe, not as individual human beings with history, feelings, opinions.
The ugliness is there, but it's not in the Iron Voters themselves. It is in how they are being used. Their honest passions, their love for their homes, their beliefs, are being manipulated for the benefit and profit of others. This is the greatest flaw of democracy. It only works if everyone agrees to play fair, on a level playing field. It assumes nobody will cheat or game the system. Ah, but the high minded and fair minded are always easy prey for the schemers and the powerful (and the "powerful" have many names--DAB, Republican Party, DNC).
That's true in Yuen Long, Hong Kong and is true in Brooklyn, New York and San Francisco. In the fight to keep democracy true, we are all, all of us, village people.