16-22 January 2005
hemlock@hellokitty.com
Flicking through a backlog of inconsequential reading matter before throwing it out, I find myself reviewing the last few days’ news. After exacting a toll of 170,000 deaths, the Great Asian Tsunami is officially over. Into scenes of destruction, misery and mutilation have swooped foreign helicopters bearing crates full of optimism, cheer and positive thinking. And paint. A lick of paint, and everyone forgets what happened, and the happy, smiling inhabitants of the Indian Ocean coast get their lives back in order. Plucky fisherman take their boats back out to reap the harvest of the sea. Joyous young couples with babies and livestock ride overladen mopeds along sidewalks. Skillfully trained, dedicated monkeys clamber up trees to select and pluck the ripest, most succulent coconuts. And waiters radiating natural charm serve pina coladas to large sunburnt Scandinavians discovering the ancient culture of the mystical Orient. In the wave’s wake, the action shifts to the county of Gloucestershire, England, where one Prince Harry is photographed attending a fancy dress party in a Nazi uniform and swastika. Harry is the son of the late doe-eyed bimbo-saint, Princess Diana and – I am reliably told – an inbred, educationally subnormal army officer who offered her relief from the company of her eccentric husband and tiresome in-laws. That the 20-year-old can feed himself is a cause for wonder. With relief, I turn to HK Magazine, where at least I will find the sage counsel of Dan Savage. Suddenly, a tautology leaps out at me from the page. I swat it and send it reeling across the room. But I haven’t seen the last of it! Briefly perusing the journalistic wasteland that is the Sunday Morning Post Magazine, it jumps at me again! I bundle it up in the rag and chuck it in the bin. It is clearly at large and determined to haunt me. From now on, thanks to the autists who pass as copy editors in Hong Kong’s English press, everywhere I look I will see ‘metric tonnes’.
THE HEARTS of Hong Kong citizens swell with pride as they see their city coming seventh in Munich Re’s Big List of Places Most Likely to Suffer Hellish Carnage and Mayhem Sometime – yet more proof that the Big Lychee is a world class city, up there with Tokyo and New York. Shanghai-the-city-that’s-taking-over-from-Hong Kong and little Singapore don’t even rank. Were they to slip into the sea or be swallowed into the bowels of the Earth, Munich Re are telling us in their diplomatic Teutonic way, what would there be to miss? I cannot disagree.
A PHONE call from my lowlife friend Heung Kwok-leung, bookmaker to the gentry of Mongkok. What sort of odds do I think he should offer on the Zhao Ziyang funeral? After a few minutes’ discussion, we decide on the following…
- Private family funeral attended by no officials, reported in a few bland newspaper paragraphs: 3-1
- Private family funeral attended by insultingly low-ranking government or party official, reported in a few bland newspaper paragraphs: 30-1
- Buried at night in a cardboard box in an unmarked plot at no charge to the family, no media reports: 50-1
- Full state funeral attended by leadership, broadcast live on TV followed by official public mourning: 1,000-1
Alarming evidence finally surfaces of the growing threat to the freedom of the English-speaking world posed by the insidious alliance between China and Andorra, a conspiracy to replace the natural global order with ‘multipolarization’, the UN's ‘leading role’, ‘cultural diversity’ and other fantasies springing from diseased French minds. Ever eager to do Beijing’s bidding, Hong Kong’s English press pretends nothing is happening. Instead, they fall back on that traditional last resort of the newspaper editor desperate to fill space – the hairy Westerner passing through the Big Lychee while walking backwards around the world for charity. If it were up to me these people would be turned away at the Lo Wu border, their demands for attention and publicity being met with a sneer and a brisk wave of an immigration officer’s hand. With a big red stamp declaring ‘Denied entry for being tedious’ in their passports, they would slink away into the crowds of Shenzhen to seek their first shower and sandwich since Ulan Bataar without imposing themselves on us. Our spineless authorities let them in, however, hence the hirsute intrepid traveller du jour – a solo Brit demanding Marmite® and regaling us with tails of beating vicious tigers to death with a bicycle chain. It will take more than Marmite® and a bicycle chain to deal with the emerging Sino-Andorran menace.
Strolling across Statue Square, I spy Liberal Party doyenne Selina Chow prowling outside the Legislative Council building. “We’re the champions of the consumer today,” she proudly announces, flourishing the motion she will be introducing in the Circus this afternoon …
Thurs, 20 Jan
Who is to blame for yesterday’s outbreak of mass infantilism in the Legislative Council? That is the question on everyone’s lips this morning as we glide down the Mid-Levels Escalator into Central and wade to work through the foam left by lawmakers frothing at the mouth over their opponents’ unspeakable behaviour. My neighbour the investment banker blames the pro-democracy camp. All they had to do was hold their minute’s silence for Zhou Ziyang outside the Circus, he points out. But no, they had to be self-righteous, attention-seeking bores, breaking rules just to make a point. My other neighbour, the marketing manager, begs to differ. She blames the pro-Beijing members who left the chamber and didn’t return. They saw an opportunity to shine communist shoes and make the democrats look bad simultaneously – and distract attention from their spineless inability to form their own opinion of a great man’s place in history.
In his inauguration speech, against a backdrop of pompom-waving majorettes in hot pants, President Bush used the word ‘freedom’ once every 37.8 seconds. We will spread freedom around the globe, he announced. We will twist open the jar of liberty, insert the knife of righteousness and apply thick layers of freedom – silken and golden – leaving our entire benighted world’s spacious skies, amber waves of grain, purple mountain majesties above the fruited plain, from sea to shining sea, in its warm embrace. He also said “To serve your people you must learn to trust them,” though it seems Xinhua sadly lacked sufficient time or space to include that part.
In all fairness, Shanghai is a major centre for derivatives. The architecture is Hong Kong. The TV tower is Toronto. The museum and opera are Paris. The trendy nightspot for Westerners is Lan Kwai Fong. The floodlit greenery hanging from freeway bridges is Singapore. The flow of women to Hong Kong to sell their bodies is Bangkok. The power cuts are Manila circa 1987. The city’s only authentic feature is the lack of original thinking. And with that off my chest, I declare this weekend open.