Ho Yih
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."
The sky is postcard blue, the air clear and crisp--there's a "cold" warning up at the Hong Kong Observatory (which means that it might plunge below--yes, you Canadian readers are welcome to laugh now--50 degrees Fahrenheit. But hey, that's pretty freezing when you live in buildings with no insulation or central heat). As we weave through crowds of afternoon shoppers, somebody fixes Long Hair up with a headset microphone so he can shout out the march's key slogans while maintaining a firm grip on the handlebars. "Heung Gong Yi Ling Yat Yi Seung Po Syun!" "Faan Deui Leung Dihn Ga Ga!"
I take it all in, and notice I'm taking in much more than usual. In the last few weeks my Cantonese has finally moved off the miserable frozen plateau where it has been languishing all year. While my ability to read Chinese characters has steadily improved all year, my conversational Cantonese had gotten so bad that I could hardly get through daily pleasantries with the amazing Mrs. Wong Syut Ha, my doorlady. So a few weeks ago I signed up for some conversation classes, and it's recharged my Canto-vocabulary batteries. Also, I gave myself a vacation from writing in English for the last couple of weeks, which really seems to help. When I'm wrapped up too much in one language, there doesn't seem to be room for a second to find its way in.
In any case, I am thrilled to be understanding just about everything going on around me --from the slogans ("Hong Kong 2012 must have universal suffrage!" "Oppose the two electric company's price hikes!"), to the instructions of the police as they guide our merry band of cyclers across intersections and around busses, trucks and cable cars.
We reach the Legco building, dismount, and a bunch of us--Long Hair, Ah Ngau (the Bull, Tsang Kin-sheng), Wong Yuk-man and Albert Chan Wai Yip--stroll over to Canteen, the only cheap cafeteria in the super-pricey Prince's Building.
The exertion of the ride, and the beauty of the day, has worked magic--everyone's smiling and laughing. I'm feeling so good, I break my moratorium on greasy cha chaan teng cuisine and order siu ngaap faan--that's a bowl of rice topped with slices of barbecued duck (mostly the skin and fat parts. As the old saying goes: Yauh yauh, yauh peih, yauh meih! If it's oily and has skin, then it's tasty. Yum!).
Comfort food for discomfiting times. For anyone who cares about the future and well-being of Hong Kong, it's been a really, really crappy couple of days. Right before Christmas, as the world and the media were shutting down for the holidays, and half of Hong Kong was about to split town, the National People's Congress sprung a surprise. Guess what! This week we're going to meet to consider and vote on Hong Kong's electoral future!
Those of you who've read about this in the international press are probably wondering why this was an event that sent the Big Chill to Hong Kong's democracy movement. The headlines, mostly, read: "Hong Kong to have Universal Suffrage in 2017, says Chinese Government."
Okay, so it's a long way off, but now the Chinese leaders have committed to a timetable, so this is a huge step forward, right? That's what Hong Kong's Chief Executive Donald Tsang proclaimed, with a triumphant smirk on his face, to the Hong Kong people after the decision was announced.
As is always the case in politics--and especially in politics conducted in the Chinese language--the devil's in the details. In two little words, actually: ho yih.
"Ho yih", 可以 , is a compound Chinese word comprised of two characters-- the first, ho, means can, able, may, and the second character, yih means "implement". Together, the phrase is usually translated as or "may", "permitted" or "it is possible". According to the text of the National People's Congress decision, the Hong Kong people ho yih have universal suffrage to elect the Chief Executive in 2017. At some time after that, (the declaration doesn't specify when) the Hong Kong people ho yih elect their Legislative Representatives by one-person-one vote.
But ho yih, just like the English "may", is slippery, fuzzy, indefinite. Just because you "ho yih" do something, doesn't mean you'll actually be able to do it. Ho yih belongs to the realm of polite expressions. The radical, or root, of the character 可 is the mouth character, 口, or hau. The mouth radical, as you'd expect, usually shows up in Chinese words that have to do with the spoken word. (In the so-called "bad" vernacular writing practiced by Hong Kong tabloid newspapers like Ta Kung Pao, you'll notice the 口 radical appears at the left side of many colloquial Cantonese characters. It's there as a marker to let you know that the character is a transcription of spoken Cantonese speech and not "correct" standard written Chinese.)
In other words, "Ho" is a character that has at its middle an open mouth. It might be filled with good intentions, but also might be filled with hot (albiet polite) air.
It's a commonplace belief among non-Chinese speakers that Chinese is one of the world's most ambiguous languages. While there's some truth in this (Cantonese, for instance, has no words that are the exact equivalent of the English "yes" or "no"), Chinese is not lacking in direct, strong and clear language. If you want to proclaim that Hong Kong people, without any shadow of a doubt, will have universal suffrage in 2017, there's a wide variety of phrases and expressions at your disposal, from ying goi (should), to yauh (have), to yat dihng (certainly). Or, you might use that handy, all-purpose word, one of the most widely used in Cantonese, and certainly one of the most fun to say:
得
Dak dak dak! says Mrs. Wong as she tells me that yes, certainly, she can collect my grocery delivery in case it arrives while I pop out. DAK! smiles the clerk at the stationery store when I ask if I can pay for my computer paper with the EPS card. Melvin, the genius shoe-repair guy on Cochrane Street can have my heels replaced by next Friday at the latest, dak!
The radical, or root, of the character 得 is 彳, which means step. As in action, forward motion, accomplishment.
Hong Kong, Asia's proud, can-do metropolis, is a city of daks--just walk down any street, and your background music is a bubbling, staccato chorus of short, high-pitched, emphatic exclamations of positive action.
The National People's Congress resolution on the future of Hong Kong's political development contains not a single 得 .
What it does contain, besides those fuzzy ho yihs, is a lot of conditions. Beijing will consider the possibility of universal suffrage for Hong Kong people in 2017--if they first get a proposal from the Hong Kong government. The proposal has to be passed by two-thirds of the Hong Kong legislature. Since the legislature cannot (m' ho yih ) be selected by universal suffrage until after the Chief Executive electoral process is settled, that means that all proposals for suffrage plans have to please a majority of the 30 Legco members in the Functional Constituency. These are the guys who are not popularly elected, who come from the moneyed, special interest classes. Will they sign on to any suffrage proposal that doesn't give them control of the nominating process? M' dak!
And so, the Beijing ho yih becomes even more of a ho yih. In fact I would even demote it to a yauh gei wuih (there's a chance) or even further, to a waak je. A perhaps.
Roadmap to democracy? What roadmap? This decision from Beijing is like a beautifully presented and packaged invitation to a party. You open the heavy vellum envelope with great anticipation, and pull out the folded card, only to discover at the bottom, in small engraved print, the information that the party's not happening until ten years in the future. And then, in even smaller type, down at the bottom, comes the kicker--that if you care to accept the invitation, you'll have to first pay a very, very high fee.
It's enough to make you want to burn a tire on the steps of the Chief Executive's mansion. Or eat an entire bowl of greasy siu ngaap faan. And it adds yet another entry to the many meanings of ho yih. Now, next to "can, possible, permitted, maybe", you can insert: Hong Kong people yearning for a voice in their own future: screw you.
I think there's a dialect thing going on here. Mandarin and standard written Chinese use 可以 (or more colloquially 行 )in exactly the same way as a Cantonese speaker would use 得 。 I agree on the slipperiness of the language - but frankly even if the shoemaker says 得 to your getting your shoes back on Friday, I wouldn't stake my next Macau stash on it necessarily happening. That 得 means "absolutely I know that's what you want to hear and I'll try and it'll probably happen, but let's see". What you really want to hear is 肯定！
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Hey, at my shoemaker's, a "dak!" is really a "dak"--take your broken heels to Melvin on Cochrane Street.
Actually, in Hong Kong I've almost never been let down by anybody's "dak!". Indeed, if a Hong Kong service person or merchant has the slightest worry that he or she might not be able to meet your expectations, they will usually go to great pains to warn you right at the beginning of the transaction. I've had merchants point out the flaws of things I wanted to buy from them, just so I wouldn't be disappointed or upset later!
That said, I know there are discrepancies, sometimes big ones, between Putonghua and Cantonese usage, even when the vocab appears to be similar or the same. But in the case of the National People's Congress's decision, I suspect the use of "ho yih" has a very Cantonese inflection...
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得(Dak) means okay.
If a person answers you 得 (dak) when you ask him "得唔得?" ("dak m' dak?")"Is that okay or not?"), he means it's okay. If you want to make sure, then you can ask him in the following ways:
(1) 實得o架啦? (sat dak ga la?)
(2) 係咪實得o架? (hai mai sat dak gaa?)
(3) 係咪實得先? (hai mai sat dak sin?)
(1) shows that you just would like to confirm it. Note 啦 is la4 and it is pronounced as a short ending sound together with (or to slur with) o架 - something like gla4.
(2) indicates a doubt on your part as to whether the person 真係得 (can really make it).
(3) carries a stronger doubt and suggests a lack of confidence in the person who said 得 to you.
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I was also very upset by the ruling. And yet your post has reminded me of the central point in Steinbeck's "East of Eden," the Hebrew word TIMSHEL.
I wonder if the Chinese sages from the "Old Gold Mountain" in San Fran's Chinatown would have equated "timshel" with "ho yih":
http://www.timshel.org/timshel.php
And that's now given me a bit of hope, because timshel was finally decided to mean "thou mayest," putting the ball back in the individual's court, so to speak.
Rather than give into the temptation to drop out of HK society, to heed the calls to resign from LegCo, boycott everything, quit your job and move to Canada, etc., in the kernel of "ho yih" comes a rallying cry to continue to fight for truly representative government.
Perhaps corporate voting could be abolished by the 2012 LegCo elections, perhaps other methods could be devised to make the FCs more representative (as they were in 1995). One way to read this is to say the NPC will leave it up to HKers, to future CCP leadership, to decide what to do.
After Obama's win in Iowa I guess I'm willing to be optimistic about things again...
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These guys are clever, that one must admit. Thanks for the entertaining blog post.
I guess in the end it all comes down to some very simple logic of political economy. The FCs, or better the capital interests that stand behind them, will NOT simply abolish themselves! This would mean giving up the direct access to power which again means volutarily giving up very convenient ways of making more money.
That being said, the only chance of getting enough FC votes for abolishing themselves is when public pressure mounts so high that even the cleverest spin-doctoring cannot disguise anymore what is really going on in HK politics. That is why I am so pessimistic about democratization in Hong Kong and that is why I agree with the blogger that the LSD is the political force most worth supporting in HK for people who really hope democracy will gain a foothold here. They might seem stubborn and unappropriate to some. However, the LSD guys seem to be the only ones who speak out who really has the power in the territory and what they are using it for.
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