Tung
I'm fine, really. No, I don't need anything, so kind of you to ask. I've stocked up on take-out yu pin juk from Lau Fu on Lyndhurst Terrace (best congee in Central!), and that special fresh Greek yoghurt they sell in Oliver's for way too much money. Truly, I wasn't upset at all to have to cancel my birthday dinner and spend the whole day curled up on the couch instead. (Aside to HK blog watchers: did you know this amazing fact-let? Hemlock and I are born on the same day?!)
And while I'm waiting for the heavy drugs to take effect and kill the intruders who invaded my digestive system somewhere between Dumaguete and Sai Wan Ho, the comfort foods and medications from East and West are at my fingertips. What's more, I have the most deadly weapon in the Hong Kong medical arsenal at my disposal:
The Po Chai Yuen. Protect-Assist Pills. They really work!
I haven't read Susan Sontag's Illness as Metaphor for a long time, but I remember her line about "emigrating from the kingdom of the well to the kingdom of the ill." She was seriously ill, and of course I'm not, but I think that any resident of Sick-o-landia will see the world from a different angle, even if only for a few days. I must say that my brief sojourn as expat in the land of gut trouble has given me a special perspective on this week in Hong Kong politics.
I'm talking about tung. No, not as in Tung Che Hwa, 董建華, he of the newly-minted honorary Chinese University doctorate. I mean tung as in 痛.
Pain. Ouch. Tung was one of the first words I learned in Cantonese that really stuck with me. Literally, that is. I remember the afternoon my friend Leslie dragged me to her Chinese medicine si fu, master. Si fu's consultation room was on the 18th floor of a crummy 1960s high rise on Sai Yeung Choi street in Mongkok. Hollywood couldn't have done a better job casting this guy--he was close to 80 years old, skeletal, with a pallid complexion and a thin, grey wispy beard that came to a point. I'd had acupuncture before in New York and thought I knew what to expect. But si fu jammed the needles into me like a five year old poking a sharpened pencil into the neck of the pig-tailed little girl he's trying to impress. Aside to language fans: did you know that in Cantonese the word for needle is also jam? So I could say that my si fu jammed the jam. And then he stuck a little piece of dried herb onto the top and lit the thing on fire! Every time he repeated this action, the Chinese doctor asked the same diagnostic question beloved of doctors worldwide:
Tung 'm tung ah? Does it hurt?
(I don't recommend this extreme method of language acquisition, but it certainly does work.)
Back to tung. When I began to study Chinese written language, one of the first things my teacher pointed out to me is a rather unfortuate family of Chinese characters. There are dozens of them and they all share the same building block, or radical. In Cantonese it is called nik, and looks like this:
疒
Radicals, as a lot of you certainly know already, are used to organize the words in Chinese and Chinese-English dictionaries (along with the number of strokes in a character). Opening my dictionary to the 疒 section, here's the first few entries:
boil
prolonged illness
wart
hernia
scar
scabies
plague, sickness, jaundice, hemorrhoids, rashes, eruptions
heartache...
(Ah yes. In Chinese, as in English, love can make you sick.)
Anyway, you get the idea. The radical 疒 must be the most worn-down key in every physician's computer. I must ask Dr. Lo about this next time I see him. Which hopefully will be in social, not clinical circumstances...
Living, as I have this week, in the Land of Tung has made me more sensitive to the manifestations of tung in the world around me. And by this I don't mean just 痛苦 tung fu, pain and suffering, but also variations
like 痛恨, tung han, to hate bitterly, and 沉痛 cham tung, bitterly resentful. Actually, cham tung is a pretty heavy number: it literally means to sink into, to become addicted to the pain of your hatred and resentment.
As I watched the Secretary of Home Affairs, Tsang Tak-sing, personally attacking newly elected legislator Anson Chan on the live TV broadcast of this Wednesday's Legco meeting (brought to me in living color by the marvelous new NOW Direct TV--more on this later), all I could think of was cham tung.
I would argue that cham tung is the dominant emotion of the pro-Beijing DAB leadership. How else to explain them? Look at their faces, gloating and gleeful like bullies when they "won" the District Council elections last month (even though they are fighting with brass knuckles against wimpy democrats with legal degrees), twisted with hatred when they think they have lost face, as they did with Anson Chan's decisive victory on Monday.
Tsang Tak-sing--who is the brother of Tsang Yok-sing, the former head of the DAB (Cantonese parents often name their various children in "parallel"--Tak-sing, Yok-sing) lost his cool on Wednesday when he came out and attacked Anson Chan for being a Johnny-come-lately democrat while delivering a speech as a spokesperson of the Hong Kong government. Sure, his assesment of Chan's career twist is absolutely correct. She was one of the top bureaucrats at the table crafting and approving many of the bad policies that Hong Kong suffers under today. Still, in politics (and even more so in Cantonese culture) you figure out a way to slice someone elegantly. You don't mix personal and professional and lose your cool in public, as Tsang did--major bad.
But cham tung is a powerful, uncontrollable force. Tsang Tak-sing, like most of his DAB senior cohorts, has been working for the Chinese Communist Party since he was a high school student in the late 60s. Back then, to be pro-left meant that you were fighting the British Colonial powers, which was not an unpopular or unjustified position at all. The far-leftists, however, got carried away. Some of the groups got violent. Bombs went off and innocent people died. And Tak-sing got arrested in 1967, at the height of the action, for passing out pro-Communist leaflets criticizing the British colonial education system at his school, the elite prep academy St. Paul's College.
Convicted under the draconian sedition laws of the colony, he was sent to Stanley Prison for two years. He came out with a felony record and couldn't apply to university. (His brother Yok-sing went on to become a graduate of Hong Kong U.) Tak-sing's adolescent revolutionary fervor was costly to him personally.
After the handover, the DAB guys were jubilant, and figured they'd be rewarded for their unswerving loyalty to the Little Red Book. But it hasn't quite worked out the way they imagined the Glorious Motherland would arrange it. Yeah, they got perks parceled out to them--Tak-sing, who spent years editing Ta Kung Pao, even snagged a minister's position last year. Still, there is bitterness, tung fu, to suck down for these Mao-quoting true believers. For instance, the person occupying the Chief Executive's mansion of Hong Kong is not a fellow traveler of the lefty Tsang brothers, but a very differnt Mr. Tsang who is not only a former bureaucrat of the British Civil Service--he even has a knighthood bestowed by the Queen!
And, bitterness of bitterness, another smiling Brit-trained bureaucrat is now sitting in Legco--in the seat that's right next to Tak-sing's brother, legislator Tsang Yok-sing!
My stomach cramps in distress, thinking about these layers and layers of bitterness. Is there no escape from cham tung? Is Hong Kong's government forever at the mercy of these men and women filled with angry resentments that go back 30 and 40 years? Tsang's dispropotionate punishment at the hands of the British sowed his heart with bitterness--a bitterness that, decades later, is causing suffering to anyone who hopes for a democratic Hong Kong. Will these ugly emotions never die? History, in this city, sometimes feels like one of those ghosts in a Hong Kong horror movie--just as you think the hero has banished it, it pops up out of the ground gloating like a victorious DAB party official, and wraps itself around your neck.
Ugh. Hou tung, indeed. Hand me the po chai yuen.
Dear DM,
Thank you for sharing your understanding of Cantonese and, more importantly, of Hong Kong in general. Now I see why that Mr Tsang lost his cool.
I am learning Cantonese even though it is my 8th year in HK. I've just subscribed to your blog. I can learn more from your blog than from a local hongkonger speaking his/her native tongue.
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I'm embarassed by your praise, and hope that I will be able to measure up to it. Thank you.
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Get well soon my friend. I had a "What the heck" moment when I saw Secretary of Home Affairs, Tsang Tak-sing, personally attacking the newly elected Anson Chan on TVB evening news.
I noticed a few things in that news clip. The two that sat beside Chan actually left when she spoke. Now, that would be funny in the future if they have to leave like cockroaches every time Chan speaks or asks a question)
And the "play" and insult on Ms. Chan's Chinese name (Chan Fang On San) was absolutely a third-rate comic act that set a new record on offensiveness in politics. A sad day in Hong Kong politics. I hope he has the decency to apologize but I am not holding my breath.
P.S. Let me wish you (and Hemlock) a belated happy birthday. And get well soon my friend.
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Thanks, Kempton.
For those of you wondering what that pun was about, translation time.
Anson Chan's Chinese name is Chan Fong On Saang 陳方安生. Why does she have 4 Chinese characters in her name instead of the usual three? Because often a Cantonese woman will add her husband's surname to her own 3 character name when she marries. So when Anson wed Mr. Chan, she added his surname to the name she was given at birth, Fong (surname) On Saang (given name).
Anson Chan's given name, "On Saang" 安生 means something like "peaceful life"
Tsang Tak-sing mocked her by suggesting she should be called "gun saang". "Gun" 官 in Cantonese means official, or bureaucrat. The moniker "Gun Saang" would mean "For the life and well-being of the bureaucrats.
I agree with Kempton: it is a third rate Cantonese pun. Long Hair's pun on Regina Ip's slogan was much funnier!
Incidentally, Tsang Tak-sing's name 德成translates as "achieve virtue". Which kind of blows my theory that the Chinese name is an uncanny predictor of the character of the man...
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Nice text ... Some might not like it, but Tsang poked exactly at one of the weakest point of the democrats. Most of them are and also have been under the brits part of the establishment. As products of the system they have a lot of difficulty to convince disadvantaged HKers that they would take their concerns at heart. That gives the DAB enough leverage to appear as if they would really do something for those at the bottom of HK society (of course they can't really cause they have to compromise with the tycoons).
Somebody I met who is somewhat inside the Beijing fraction told me: When Beijing took over they were like "these guys are anti-government right? So no we are the government. 不要他们" That must have been a really painful experience for these guys. Indeed no wonder they are bitter.
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I know this is petty but I'm glad you've switched back to your earlier design template. That shade of red is fitting.
And yes, never underestimate the power of a person confined to prison for a cause. But Tsang isn't the only martyr out there, and his chaam tung isn't going to be productive if he wants to simply settle old scores, or foist a non-existent communist utopia onto sensible HKers.
When Nelson Mandela got his turn in power, he promoted forgiveness, empathy, and compassion. In addition he promoted the concept of a "rainbow nation" where former oppressors could live side by side with the oppressed in peace. It's not working perfectly but at least the rhetoric and more importantly the policy framework is in place to attempt its implementation.
What is Tak-sing doing to promote a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, multi-cultural Hong Kong, to celebrate its uniqueness? Macau manages to do it without a sense of shame, but this Secretary for Home Affairs clearly has a different agenda...
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Daisann,
I've just subscribed after reading the interview with you at World Hum. You made some great comments. As an aspiring travel writer myself, it's so exciting to read about your projects and assignmments.
I commend you for taking on such a difficult language, and hope you get well soon!
~ Jessica
www.ispyjessica.com
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Hi DM,
I ran across your blog from National Geographic Traveler and I just wanted to say I love your blog. I'm headed off to Hong Kong myself in 2 days; I'm studying abroad at CUHK for a semester. I'm an ABC, so my Cantonese isn't that great; I consider English my first language. It was just really refreshing to see the posted picture of the po chai pills, as I definitely know what those are. I was wondering your take on other traditional Chinese medical/health topics, especially that of yeet hay, or hot air. I have an ongoing argument about it with my American friend, so I'm interested as to how you would define it, or maybe you can direct me to an English source with a detailed description about it. Thanks for your time, and if you have any suggestions for things to do/see/eat in Hong Kong, I'd love them. Thanks!
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Hey Kathy,
Best of luck with your time at CUHK. I was also an IASP and it changed my life forever. I owe so much of my current worldview to my study there. You're gonna love it!
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