Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category

Restaurant review: Amber (in which a foodie draws the line)

Friday, March 15th, 2013

Some really, really classy restaurants, it says here, have banned patrons from photographing their meals. This anarchist got away with it a couple of weeks ago in the Michelin two-star Amber in the Mandarin Landmark in Central, the only establishment in China to make it into the World’s 50 Best Restaurants. The chef is Richard Ekkebus, of whom I had vaguely heard in an isn’t-he-a-tennis-player sort of way. World famous among serious foodies, it seems.

The cuisine describes itself as French, but I’m not sure an average Parisian or Lyonais citoyen would recognize any of the dishes here.

We began with this amuse bouche. If sculpture using green edible plant material were an artistic genre, it would be a masterpiece. The little discs, barely half an inch across and a few microns thick, are slices of apple. The tube beneath is made of cucumber and contains yogurt. (All ingredients are of course very special, coming from remote valleys in the Andes, etc.) The stuff next to it is guacamole, even though it looks like guacamole. Some nimble-fingered underling in the kitchen must have taken hours, and it’s gone in one bite. Nice: a lovely combination of crunchiness, creaminess and fresh, tangy tastes. I make a mental note to consider combining apple and cucumber more often – possibly with a bit of salty cheese? With a thick grainy bread?

When looking through the menu, my host – a Henry Tang wannabe devoted to the whole wine-collecting, golf-playing thing – had recommended the ‘Cauliflower velouté with taiyouran egg sabayon’ as the starter. Filtering out the mystery vocabulary, I was left with cauliflower and egg, which sounded OK. It all depended on what a taiyouran was. An egg-laying animal, obviously. But a special superior breed of chicken – or an exotic species of giant iguana? My host said it was Japanese. Imagining some sort of vegetable teppanyaki you could dip in soy sauce, I chose it.

Wrong. It looked quite like this and came in a similar giant wine-glass vessel, to be eaten with a spoon. The staff linger and talk you through dishes, and the waitress suggested that I stir this one before eating it; behind her smile was a grim urgency that said ‘you’ll regret it if you don’t’. Beneath the foamy surface was a black, tarry mucus with brown lumps. Then, delving deeper down, I saw raw egg yolk. I stirred thoroughly before devouring. It was lukewarm and sticky. Obviously, you’re supposed to get off in a big way on the mushy/crunchy textures and sweet/savoury flavours. I didn’t feel a desperate need to gag, exactly, but I certainly had a sense that I could do so at will, with little effort. It wasn’t… what’s the word I’m looking for? Enjoyable, that’s it. I’m showing my age here, perhaps, expecting food to be enjoyable.

(OK: velouté is a sauce based on chicken stock; Taiyouran is a Japanese brand of hyper-expensive eggs laid by chickens that are fed only secret magic herbs and have daily massages; sabayon – the foamy stuff – is a chic version of the Italian zabaglione, an egg-based desert.)

I was so disturbed by the above course that I didn’t have the presence of mind to snap a picture of it or the main event that came next. This looked like a glistening square of French caramel pudding with chopped shallots, beetroot, herbs and cranberries painstakingly arranged on top, and a dark sauce artistically drizzled around. It was in fact ‘Stew ravioli wild venison’. A big pasta shell containing slices of deer. Edible and tasty, even, but no improvement on a conventional arrangement of venison with pasta.

Recovering from the raw yolk-black mucus trauma, I pulled the trusty camera out to capture pudding: ‘Chestnut ice-cream, brown rum marinated raisins & pastry diplomat cream served as a deconstructed mille-feuille’. (Whaddya mean, ‘What’s diplomat cream?’) I was suspicious at first. It was magnificent visually – possibly the finest ever expressionist figurine crafted from dairy products and marron glacé. But where, or rather what, was the challenge? Was there shaved air-dried hedgehog loin scattered into the gaps left by the deconstruction of the mille-feuilles? Did chili-stuffed pickled garlic lurk within the cream as a tantalizing contrast to the soothing sweetness? Had Richard Ekkebus’s minions left delicate shards of specially imported broken glass in every mouthful?

No. As if to reward the victim diner for getting through the earlier courses, the restaurant served up something you would actually want more of.

Just as you add a pinch of sugar to offset lemon or vinegar, so Amber includes a dash of humour to ensure you’re not overcome by the earnest pretentiousness. For example, lollipops made of paté as a between-course nibble. My host, well-known to the staff, got a lot of bowing and scraping, but the heavily-accented French uber-attendant – straight out of central casting – seemed to sense I was a skeptic; as with other supernatural powers, Richard Ekkebus’s mystical gifts with food don’t always work in the presence of negative vibes. Trying a bit of telepathy with the Filipino and HK Chinese waitresses, I got the impression that deep down they were on my wavelength: why not just have a bowl of noodles?

You’re supposed to say the surroundings are amazing (it cost loads and the designer was someone really famous). One thing I noticed is that the artful ceiling radiates a gilded halo over the restaurant’s rich spectrum from amber to russet. I did – honest. One thing you get for your money here is space; the surface area of our table for two equalled the square footage of a whole Soho concept themed eatery.

Otherwise, this is the level at which this particular foodie declares that pretentiousness officially begins, thus perhaps revealing himself to be only a semi-foodie after all. Some of us can consider ‘sake in a cup that was also previously filled with smoke’ and ‘liver … paired with a hibiscus reduction’ without laughing out loud, some of us just can’t manage it. 

Click to hear ‘Sexy Anarchist Boy’ by Cheese on Bread!

 

I bet Andy Xie can pay his rent with no problem

Monday, January 28th, 2013

South China Morning Post columnist Michael Chugani says he thinks Hong Kong’s pro-democrats are more to blame for unaffordable housing than Chief Executive-of-six-months CY Leung. They could, he points out, have used the years they spent fruitlessly demanding universal suffrage lobbying for livelihood issues people care about. He says his landlord absorbs nearly half his income, which suggests that he is, sadly, seriously under-achieving career-wise, or that his choice of living accommodation is overly lavish and he should downsize to something more modest. Or a bit of both, of course.

(On the subject of columnists or any other people who possibly need to augment their earnings, I was recently reliably informed that competition among paper/cardboard scavengers has intensified. And what do I see over the weekend other than positive proof: an elderly lady painstakingly pulling advice slips out of the ATM waste bin outside HSBC on Lyndhurst Terrace, Central. It took her even longer than the people who make you wait to get cash while they shuffle funds around multiple accounts with different cards.)

Across the page, economist Andy Xie maintains his maverick reputation by approving of CY Leung’s recent policy address. Xie is famous for being sacked when employer Morgan Stanley grovelled to the Singapore government after he mass-emailed comments about the Lion City’s role as a money laundering centre for corrupt Indonesians. In that same email, he mentioned how most Singaporeans have seen little if any increase in living standards despite years of economic growth (as Punggol East voters were no doubt aware on Saturday). In today’s SCMP, he says much the same about our own little ex-colonial paradise ‘financial services hub’.

Xie is a fan of CY’s plans to reclaim, baby, reclaim. (Given the almost grotesque bureaucratic and political, let alone environmental, barriers to sourcing extra land onshore, many observers see reclamation as the only realistic way – other than invading Shenzhen – of creating more space for Hong Kong. The policy address gave the impression that CLK Airport-style artificial islands would be off the Western New Territories coast; looking at a map, you could shove them in south of Tuen Mun or off the Hong Kong coast on Shenzhen Bay.) His thesis is that Hong Kong is headed for serious social and political problems if it does not give people a better quality of life, notably bigger, yet affordable, homes. Only this will compensate for the stagnation of incomes by both cutting costs and making life more enjoyable. This is also in line with CY’s comments in the past, warning that people will simply quit Hong Kong if it does not significantly increase residential square feet per person in the next 20 years.

Xie’s conclusion is that this would keep Hong Kong stable, and that the alternative is ‘the downfall of the plutocracy’ – but surely the big-homes-on-reclamations plan implies the end of the property hegemony, too.

Cynics doubt CY’s commitment to change, and Xie’s article opens with a scanario that many of us deep down assume will in fact happen.

Hong Kong’s current property bubble is the result of much-vaunted expectations that US quantitative easing* will debase the US/HK dollar massively. But the anti-Keynsians and gold freaks seem to be overstating their case. The purchasing power of the dreaded ‘fiat money’ is holding up quite well in terms of, say, commodity prices and other assets and currencies. Hong Kong’s retail price increases seem to be largely RMB/Mainland-influenced. Our property prices are doubling to compensate for a halving of the US dollar that maybe isn’t going to happen.

So… The crash happens, prices halve, the landed middle class freak out and wet themselves a la 1998, CY Leung and team go into Donald Tsang-style push-prices-up-at-all-costs mode, and the whole rigomarol starts again faster than you can say ‘buying opportunity’… 

*A little friendly word to RTHK Radio 3: your morning business news announcer does not need to interrupt interviewees constantly to request definitions of ‘quantitative easing’, ‘gini coefficient’, ‘A shares’ and other simple terms that everyone understands.

‘For people who only watch a little television’

Thursday, January 26th, 2012

Last week’s ultimately somber stay in the Gateway to the West melds into Hong Kong’s annual Chinese New Year suspension of normal life. Plus it’s freezing. For those who do not share living space with a huge US$45 dollar handout from Sony, it is one of those occasional opportunities to fascinate ourselves with the technological wonder of moving images on tiny electronic screens.

The higher-fidelity viewing options came in-flight – the only time I pay much attention to Hollywood’s latest releases. In one movie, the actor from The Truman Show plays a New York City-dwelling recipient of a penguin; fast-forwarding revealed that the character is soon housing dozens of the beasts in his apartment. Twenty minutes of the 12-hour journey vanish. In another film, three men commiserate with one another about their hellish bosses. I am guessing that, if I had watched more than a third of an hour of it, they would have found intriguing and entertaining ways to dispatch the tyrants.

Two things were worth viewing in full. Yet another adaptation of Jane Eyre, complete not only with all the costumes, windswept moorland and darkness you could want, but an extremely watchable, indeed mesmerizing, lady called Mia Wasikowska in the lead role. This is more post-feminism than girly love story. And Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which somehow recreates the seediness of the period more effectively than the classic late-70s made-for-TV version. (It’s all about atmosphere, which makes me wonder why cinema-world doesn’t do more Graham Greene.)

But it’s back home where things get really interesting, delving and foraging in the less-visited bits of YouTube where the picture is grainy and the sound possibly out-of-synch; people accustomed to 75-inch plasma, high-definition and 3D don’t know what they’re missing.

Behold Left Behind (seven parts), the movie of the novel of the apocalyptic belief known as dispensational premillenialism, in which the second coming of Christ is preceded by the rapture – a scenario that millions of fundamentalist Christians (let’s be blunt: Americans) believe is already underway. This has everything a bad movie should have, including cheap sets and effects, jarringly inappropriate scoring and of course corny dialogue. But what’s really riveting about it is the straight-faced portrayal of this parallel universe. After a bearded and polyglot God thwarts an Arab attack on Israel on live television, all the faithful suddenly vanish (leaving little piles of clothes on airline seats and elsewhere) and the antichrist appears in the form of a United Nations leader pushing global currency union. How many films have this?

But truth is stranger than fiction, and the Found Small Screen Experience of the Year Award must go to Adam Curtis’s It Felt Like a Kiss (2009). Curtis – a sort of adults’ version of TV journalist John Pilger – describes this work as “the story of an enchanted world that was built by American power as it became supreme … and how those living in that dream world responded to it.”

What you get here is HIV, Lee Harvey Oswald, chimps in space, attempts to cure Lou Reed of homosexuality, Saddam Hussein, a Carole King song about a girl whose boyfriend beats her, the Congo, the Manson Family, and a thousand other things from the late 50s-60s, all to a soundtrack of contemporary pop from West Side Story to the Velvet Underground. Thanks to painstaking and inspired footage/sound research and editing, you are bombarded with juxtapositions that reveal connections you had barely thought about. If you are acquainted with the subject matter, this is surely the nearest a TV documentary has come to art; for the benighted, it’s the most elaborate music video ever.

(Parts 2, 3, 5 and 6 in 10-minute segments; part 4 seems to have been swept up into the heavens, but given the stream-of-consciousness nature of the work, you can glide past it.)

Click to hear ‘He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss)’ by the Crystals!

Restaurant reviews

Thursday, November 10th, 2011

Inedible cuts of meat and a surly Afrikaner assistant manager at Japanese eatery Roka in Pacific Place bring out the exquisite best of Target founder and editor Raymonde Sacklyn’s inimitable restaurant reviewing style.  

The capital letter, ‘R’, also stands for RUBBISH! 

And that, in TARGET’s opinion, is, exactly, what one gets at ROKA Restaurant

What would Sacklyn make of the Beijing Steamed Dumpling Shop in Austin Road, Tsimshatsui? Stroll too fast, and you would go straight past it – except anyone with a modicum of alertness will automatically stop to admire the lamb pancakes in the window. They will squeeze their way in and find somewhere to sit. The place has four four-person booths and a little folding table with three stools. On my visit, an appropriately severe Hard Stare convinced the book-reading intellectual hogging an entire booth to himself to retreat to the latter.

The button mushrooms [at Ole Spanish restaurant, Ice House Street] were, clearly, sautéed, either by a Chinese or a Filipina/Filipino cook who determined not to prostitute his/her art by bowing to the requirements of Spanish cuisine …

Lastly, this had to have been the oiliest paella in the history of Spain.

From left to right here: pork and pickled cabbage dumplings (made in the corner by the Beijinger owner); two variants of lamb pancake (one with leek), lamb of course being an abhorrence to the Cantonese; and seaweed soup perched behind hot and sour soup with congealed pig’s blood, perhaps to help Hongkongers get the taste of wooly ruminant out of their mouths… 

If this restaurant [Manzo Italian Steak House, Times Squae] continues to sell half-rotten meat, even USDA Prime beef that smells and tastes as though it were fermented bean curd (腐乳), it will not last the season.

The lamb pancakes are the main reason to come to the Beijing Steamed Dumpling Shop. Generous amounts of tasty, tender meat in a fairly light pastry. Maybe half of the output goes out the door in the form of take-away. Like all good, tiny, hole-in-the-wall food places, the cheerful owner has covered a wall with photos of himself posing with hundreds of celebrities you’ve never heard of (plus the inevitable tiresome TV culinary genius who claims to have tried human meat – his picture is in every diner in the Pearl River Delta). Order recklessly enough and two ultimately very stuffed people can rack up a bill for HK$150, and leave with leftover dumplings to take back home to fry, as recommended by Mrs Owner.

Or we can follow the action-packed gastronomic trail blazed by Raymonde Sacklyn and savour not the food but the reviewing skills…

The location of The Pawn Restaurant, at Number 62, Johnston Road, Wanchai, the Hongkong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), is perfect. It faces a very large rubbish dump which abuts a concrete playground and the sounds of Wanchai, with its drunks, pimps and prostitutes lend colour to the listed building that houses The Pawn …

The risotto resembled Scottish porridge, made of rice instead of oats.

Update from Hemlock

Tuesday, August 9th, 2011

Global markets are crashing, London’s in flames and the Syrian regime is slaughtering its own people – or, as its more understanding friends put it, working for inclusive dialogue. Meanwhile, here in our safe Hong Kong home, we are swaddled in goodwill, warmth, affection and even mutual adoration.

Helmut Sohmen, the businessman who married shipping tycoon YK Pao’s daughter and who ranted so much against democracy back in the 1980s (for which, perhaps being Austrian-born, he was largely excused) writes to the Standard with a charming idea: name the exciting but unsightly new multibillion-dollar government palace at Tamar after Sir Bow-Tie.

Critics will dismiss Sohmen’s proposal as a shabby little bit of shoe-shining, but is there not something exquisitely appropriate about it? Of all the overpriced and unnecessary construction projects Donald Tsang has strewn around Hong Kong, one needs to be named for him. We owe it to our grandchildren to immortalize the visionary who spent so lavishly on these curiously peaceful and uncrowded concrete adornments to our city. We could have the Donald Tsang Bridge, gateway to exotic Zhuhai, the distant town of which we know little and care even less. Or the Donald Tsang Express Rail Line, with its empty trains gliding between the West Kowloon Contemporary Cantonese Opera Hub and that Guangzhou suburb we can never remember the name of.

But no. The new government palace it must be. Extravagant in style, occupying an inappropriately prominent position and by all accounts publicly inaccessible: The Donald Tsang Government Centre – a big building for small people trying their best.

Just a stone’s throw away across over the Standard’s daily Sudoku for people who find the Telegraph crossword too hard, the loving awareness that permeates the Big Lychee continues. Sing Tao editor Siu Sai-wo crafts a touching and adulatory column singing the praises of Shirley Yuen, the 17-year-old former civil servant who has just taken over as Chief Executive. Of the HK General Chamber of Commerce, that is.

Malcontents and nitpickers would ask why a business lobby group is appointing a former bureaucrat to its number-two position when it needs to be a stern critic of much government policy if it is to promote the interests of commerce. They might add that the chamber already enjoys strong public-sector links via its chairman Anthony Wu, a big friend of Donald and a sitter on numerous government, quasi-government and pro-government committees and boards. Luckily, the Sing Tao Group’s mission in the world is to banish such negativism and surround us with tenderness and nice thoughts. The fewer people running the chamber of commerce who have any real business experience, the sweeter and calmer life will be for us all.

And, as the ever-vivacious Administrative Officer Winky Ip will confirm, more than a few of the more fragile and sensitive AOs are fleeing the civil service these days in search of calmer climes where no Legislative Council committees will eat them alive and no media will mutilate them whatever they do. I think it’s most generous of a chamber of commerce to open its doors to one of these refugees from the cruel world of government.

According to the press release, Shirley was involved in the ‘formulation’ of the Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement, or CEPA, the so-called free-trade agreement between Hong Kong and the Mainland. In practice, CEPA was a PR gimmick; perhaps it was Shirley who, in conjunction with Mainland officials, drew up a lengthy list of tariff reductions on goods Hong Kong was in no danger of exporting across the border (the highly protected Mainland market obviously couldn’t be opened up to a free port). Harder work than it sounds.

She was also administrative assistant to Henry Tang when he was Financial Secretary. I’m not sure what an administrative assistant does exactly, but I do recall that Henry had an eager young lady working with him at the time who would churn out ‘Lines-to-Take’ – soundbites to talk up government policy when public opinion was too dense to comprehend its wondrousness.

Since I may be wrong, I will confine my thoughts to one that presumably could not have been hers, could it? How can anyone not feel snug, secure and loved on reading such positive, life-affirming bullet points?

Click to hear ‘Government Center’ by the Modern Lovers!

 

 

Book review: The Ghost of Neil Diamond

Thursday, January 13th, 2011

A quick break from National Regina Week for a review of The Ghost of Neil Diamond by David Milnes, apparently a former teacher at KGV or some such school. The hard-to-forget title proved its worth when I saw this in the IFC Mall branch of Dymocks last week and recalled an email strongly urging me to read it. It is, in brief, what a Hong Kong expat novel would be like if Tom Sharpe wrote it: a farce in which an innocent abroad gets himself into an appalling and ludicrous mess.

Other than the eye-catching title, the book cover does the novel no favours by omitting any meaningful blurb about the content. It helps to know that Neil Diamond is one of the uncoolest of the great Sixties-era songwriters, penning a string of major catchy hits for various artists and becoming ever-less trendy with age while still performing to his loyal and mature easy-listening audience.

Aside from serving as a refreshingly seedy setting for a bizarre romp, Hong Kong’s contribution to the story is the theme of self-reinvention. Antihero Neil Atherton is a British former folk musician pushing 50 who has come here when his wife gets a high-flying job. While he bums around singing classics like Sweet Caroline in karaoke bars, she eagerly embraces a new identity and corporate lifestyle. When he dyes his hair after grubby empresario Elbert Chan offers him a job impersonating Diamond in clubs, she kicks him out. Like his namesake standing by the side of the road troubadour-style on an album cover, Neil trudges off with his guitar from the comforts of Shatin to find cheap lodgings in Tsimshatsui.

Chan – a finely drawn shyster we’ve all met before – entices the penniless Neil with his vision of an award-winning show comprising multiple acts covering yesteryear’s major stars; a faux Petula Clark has already been lined up. But Chan is clearly an untrustworthy huckster. After a first, promising gig at the Mariners Club, disaster strikes when a genuine, highly accomplished, professional Neil Diamond impersonator of repute from Los Angeles turns up in town and tells Neil to beat it. Outrageous chaos ensues.

On a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is Tom Sharpe’s output since the 1990s and 10 is his early 70s satires of South Africa, The Ghost of Neil Diamond probably comes in at around a 5 or 6 – decently crafted, unpretentious fun with a dash of black humour, and worth grabbing if you see it. It warrants extra marks for its cliché-free depiction of an unglamorous and squalid Hong Kong, exemplified by the pitiful Chan and his grubby office. The HK Tourism Board won’t be handing out copies of this book. Is there any higher praise?

Three Book Reviews

Thursday, January 6th, 2011

Forget opium, tobacco or San Miguel, or even the Agatha Christie’s Poirot episodes various fiends have uploaded onto YouTube: the greatest addictive curse known to afflict mankind must be Amazon’s Buy with one click facility combined with its massive offering of used books from thousands of second-hand stores throughout the US. I last saw my copy of Jean Francois Revel’s Totalitarian Temptation back in the early 80s. Long out of print. Never to be seen again. But there is one – 91 cents plus US$3.99 shipping from someone in Ohio. Click. Click, click, click. This is deadly. (Yes, there’s a book on it.)

Among the books I read in 2010 stacked up at my bedside waiting to be transplanted to shelves are: Paul Johnson’s History of the Jews; Neal Stephenson’s Anathem; Steve Pincus’s 1688: The First Modern Revolution; Simon Singh’s Big Bang; Ali Allawi’s The Crisis of Islamic Civilization; Antony Beevor’s Paris After the Liberation; and on and on. In the lull before the next package from Amazon, I take a quick look at what Santa left me from Hong Kong’s Blacksmith Books and have a brief Kevin Bloody Wilson moment. These volumes aren’t really my thing. But what else is there? Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow is sitting there, lying open halfway through after being started before last summer; I have all of 2011 to finish that. So here goes…

A quick glance at The Great Walk of China: Travels on foot from Shanghai to Tibet by Graham Earnshaw is a bit misleading. The author (an ex-Reuters man living in Shanghai) does not walk the route in the title in one go and has not, as of the final page, reached western Sichuan. Instead, he indulges in a sort of token, nine-to-five version of roughing it, doing the trip in stages and flying/taxiing in and out each time, including to hotels at night where necessary. But no matter. He pretty much skips this process (nor does he say who pays for this logistical extravagance, which would be interesting since the endeavour is apparently for charity) so the reader gets an impression of accompanying him on a steady uninterrupted plod, with some disjointed seasonal changes, through the rural back roads of middle China.

And very pleasant it is. At every dusty village we stop for a bottle of water and a chat with the storekeeper and hear what the locals have to say (cuts in taxes on farmers are a big hit). We are accosted by school kids who share with us their dreams for the future. We take photos of labourers planting and digging, and we make their day by helping out a bit. We hand our address out, plus invitations to visit, to a worrying number of friendly strangers. We admire the scenery on the plains and up in the mountains and valleys of the Three Gorges. We bump into the occasional outcast with a sad tale to tell. We enjoy the political slogans painted on the walls of old buildings. We run the risk of being a bit boorish by insisting on vegetarian food everywhere. And we have a bit of cheeky fun with cops who think it’s still the 1970s and ask for our IDs. Finally, turning a corner on a hillside one afternoon, we find, before we’ve even realized it, that we’ve reached page 341 and call a halt – though the great walk apparently continues/d.

In sum, an antidote to the media onslaught of modern China: after all the disasters, the new billionaires, the uprisings, the growing military might, the pollution, the corruption and the neon skyscrapers, here are the comfortingly mundane bits in between, coming across as almost exotic.

Most of us look the other way when we see children with extreme physical and mental disabilities. Some, if we are to be honest, do the same with books about them. I really did not want to read Wordjazz for Stevie: How a profoundly handicapped girl gave her father the gifts of pain and love by Jonathan Chamberlain.

The title didn’t help (wordjazz?), but maybe that’s just an excuse. You know it’s going to be icky, and I’ve never even changed a diaper for God’s sake. You know it’s going to be depressing. The author and his wife live on Cheung Chau. They have a baby. The baby, they are soon told, has Down syndrome. That comes with a hole in the heart. This needs an operation to fix. But the operation leaves the kid blind and semi-paralyzed as well. Everyone’s lives are going to be wrecked and wretched, and you’re going to catch yourself wondering why they didn’t just have an abortion, and then you’re going to feel rotten. If you’re in a really nasty mood, you might even ask why the author couldn’t just keep it to himself.

However, the book is a lot more welcoming – for want of a better word – than that. It is written in the form of a letter to the daughter who survived up to age eight before finally dying of pneumonia. It is nowhere near as mawkish as it could be. To the extent there is self-pity, it is blunt and concise. The details about doctors, hospitals and treatments, which do not always come out looking good, are dispassionate. Reflections on getting through to a child essentially trapped in a distant world are often intriguing; it comes down to touch, movement and music. If you want to be moved to tears you probably can be, but it’s not compulsory and the author shows no sign of wanting it. He celebrates the fact that the experience, which is to say Stevie’s existence, led him to found two charities that have benefited numerous lives. He discusses feelings, but he is a tough man who can get through it. As he needs to be: next thing, almost as an afterword at the end, his wife succumbs to cancer and dies, leaving him and one healthy kid.

After that, you might think that Lama of the Gobi: How Mongolia’s mystic monk spread Tibetan Buddhism in the world’s harshest desert by Michael Kohn would be light relief. But no.

Danzan Ravjaa was the fifth incarnation of Gobi Noyon Hutgat and as such he was (more or less) to 19th Century Mongolia what today’s Dalai Lama is to Tibet. By all accounts he was a character: part living God, part Robin Hood, part Omar Khayyam, knocking back fermented mare’s milk and hiding from Qing enemies in friendly yurts.

The problem is that the author knows his subject in depth, and the reader doesn’t. Certainly not this one. This is a (perhaps denser-than-average) example…

People who are really into this sort of thing rave about it, and apparently this book has sold well in California.

Is the world getting over mysterious traditions and creeds from desolate regions? One of Earnshaw’s closing comments is “I am not really very interested in Tibetan culture,” which tempted me to punch the air in delight. An introduction to the hero of Mongolian Buddhism for those of us who have never heard of him might be fascinating. But then, maybe it wouldn’t. Either way, this isn’t it. I resign myself to leaving this blank spot in my knowledge unfilled and reach with renewed eagerness to Gravity’s Rainbow.

Review and gift idea: Sleeping Chinese

Monday, December 20th, 2010

Before I forget… It’s that time of the year when The System forces virtually all of us, in however small a way, to partake in an act of collective insanity: the purchasing of things no-one needs for people who don’t want them. Even those of us who are by nature far too cool to be sucked into such a wasteful farce often find ourselves with no choice but to get one or two bits of junk to wrap up and pass on simply because life’s too short, and it’s the course of least resistance when the alternative is being considered a leper or, even worse, causing others who gleefully succumb to the madness to lose face.

The main beneficiaries of this tortuous sacrificial ritual (that’s hard-earned cash you’re handing over) are the manufacturers of Ferrero Rocher, the spherical chocolate sweet that tells the recipient you consider him or her a total bore unworthy of even a shred of respect more than it takes to step into a 7-Eleven for 20 seconds at the last minute. (An interesting PhD thesis would involve sampling a cross-section of the million boxes of these things changing hands at Christmas to see what percentage have gone stale. My own taste-tests suggest large-scale recycling is going on.)

Other big winners from the seasonal lunacy inevitably include our local friendly landlords, renting out precious parcels of the Big Lychee’s scarce space to such contributors to human progress and happiness as Papyrus, a store in IFC Mall selling an ‘exceptional collection of social expression products from the very best resources’ – ugly and overpriced stationery, in plain English. (Presumably, this being 2010-11, people use the embossed, lavender-scented, Regent Blue Ecruwhite (‘a stunning frame for your words’) for shopping lists.

There is, however, an alternative. It is Sleeping Chinese by Bernd Hagemann – a book full of photos of PRC citizens indulging in extreme napping. Sensitive types might feel slightly dubious about this work on the grounds that it could cause offence: it contains, after all, nothing but noble sons of the Yellow Emperor being caught looking ridiculous on camera by a German. The author maintains that he took up his hobby to provide a juxtaposition to the image of the Middle Kingdom as an awakening, and even threatening, mighty superpower.

I tested it over the weekend on a Beijing native who laughed out loud throughout. It also gets a stamp of approval from the primary organ of the Communist Party’s Central Committee, which would not look kindly on anything that might hurt the feelings of the Chinese people. Maybe it is an exceptionally subtle bit of ‘soft-power’ propaganda to counteract Beijing’s recent string of foreign relations lapses from the Diaoyu-Senkakus to the Nobel Peace Prize. Even if they build an aircraft carrier, they’ll all be slumped on the flight deck, snoring.

The book doesn’t answer the question of why (let alone how) so many people in China snooze in the open during daylight hours. Were all of the photos taken during the early afternoon, post-lunch siesta that even some Hong Kong office workers still enjoy – a hangover from schooldays when it was compulsory? Is it extreme overwork? Or a complete lack of employment?

More to chew over than a tinfoil-wrapped chocolate hazelnut, at least.

Three Lamps shine on

Monday, November 29th, 2010

Time for my annual inspection of the Three Lamps (or more picturesquely, Three Candles) neighbourhood in Macau. The area is similar to Hong Kong’s Mongkok before parts of it like Temple Street went themed-tourist-zone and others were buried under shiny 60-storey monstrosities-on-podiums like the Urban Renewal Authority’s Langham Place. I like to check this precious stretch of undisturbed urban ecosystem from time to time for signs of degradation, and I am pleased to find that there is still plenty of it.

1 Now here’s something you don’t often see in Canto-land: lamb. From Beijing to Kashmir to Ireland, people have found delectable ways to cook baby sheep. The southern Chinese, on the other hand, don’t even like the stuff, considering it to have a gamey quality like that of unseasoned fish. In this case it is stewed with sheets of tofu in a surprisingly spicy gravy (perhaps to disguise its shocking taste from the delicate local palate), but not well enough to be truly tender and with the thick rubbery skin intact. So this will not go down as one of the great moments in the preparation of small-ruminant flesh – but under the circumstances it is a commendable effort.

2 Perhaps not surprisingly, the cooked meat stall fronts a gastronomically eccentric store. Along one wall are shelves displaying big packs of spice and jars of sauces, including curry preparations from India, no less. It is not a great range, but again it is surprising to see it here at all – suspicions that there is little demand for such ingredients in this district are confirmed by the general dustiness of the packages. On the opposite wall, across long freezers full of ice-hard chops and fishballs, the shop offers quasi-medical tonics made from extracts of various mammals and reptiles, including bottles of liquid Viagra courtesy of our friend the deer. So that’s what it’s made of.

3 A few doors along we have a fresh sesame- and almond-drink place. This is something new, hip and modern and could be seen as threat to the traditional griminess of the local environment, but it is pleasingly low-tech and smells nice. Electric mills grind up the seeds and nuts and deposit the mushy pulp into containers, which a girl takes behind the counter, where they dilute it and serve it. Needless to say it is good for health, especially the skin. This plus the price of MOP10 a cup seems to guarantee a long line of customers.

4 Many of the stalls on the side streets and alleyways sell the usual fresh food you find in similar markets anywhere in this part of the world. Crowds thicken in early evening, when vendors start to reduce prices, typically by offering them on a generous per-piece basis rather than by weight. You also get the planet’s cheapest clothing (a pair of jeans for MOP10?), and all sorts of dry foodstuffs. Among these are the various fungus-moss life-forms much prized in Guangdong for their nasty sliminess and complete lack of flavour. For a quick hit of the undoubted nutritional benefits offered by these commodities, you can always take a swig of this delicious-looking mushroom juice. This business hasn’t been the same since the sesame milk-shake joint opened. Progress is not always a bad thing.

5 A few hours later, back in Hong Kong, and the already much-prostituted, processed and sanitized Lan Kwai Fong counts down the weeks to the opening of the Hard Rock Café. This next episode of the long, dismal descent of the bar district into a carbuncle full of tourism-pus aimed at emerging markets’ eager new travellers is hardly unique around the Pearl River Delta. Macau now has a Playboy Club, complete with bunnies, where fat nouveau-riche peasants can sit around, smugly wallowing in their extreme coolness as bimbettes with floppy ears light their cigars and pour their burgundy.

Three Lamps is more than just a welcome relief from the ever-encroaching tackiness. It is a step into the past – a place out of the 1980s, when ordinary people could afford the rents to sell ordinary or not-so-ordinary things to other ordinary people at affordable prices. And plastic bags were still legal. The ultimate twinge of nostalgia comes at the sight of cheap clothing emblazoned in mangled English. I though this stuff died out ages ago, and here it still is in the backstreets of grimiest Macau. It is hard to believe that the Hugo Boss and Tommy Hilfiger bulldozers are not rumbling in the distance.

Mao’s Great Famine by Frank Dikotter

Friday, November 12th, 2010

It’s not every day you see ‘cannibal-chinese-starved-by-mao-ate-earth-bartered-sex-for-food’ in a URL for an article at a reputable business news website. Frank Dikotter’s Mao’s Great Famine has that sort of effect. Using previously unavailable provincial party archives as well as interviews and other sources, Dikotter attempts to assemble enough information about what happened in various parts of China from 1958 to 1962 to enable a picture of the full-scale, nationwide horror. The consensus among the anglo China fraternity (Mirsky and Fenby, for example) is that he succeeds.

Dikotter starts with the local and international political background, then the decision-making, and the implementation before getting to the gory results: a minimum of 45 million deaths (out of a population of 650 million) due mostly to starvation, but also disease, persecution, murder, accidents and suicides, plus mass-destruction of housing stock and wrecking of the natural environment.

The story starts after Mao lures opposition into the open in the ‘100 flowers’ campaign. Rather than rely on the intellectuals, he decides the muscle power of the rural masses is the best bet for dynamic economic progress. Envious of Sputnik-launching Khrushchev’s vow to surpass the USA’s economic production in 15 years, Mao declares that China will overtake Britain in the same period, notably in steel production.

The Great Leap Forward requires top-down central planning and a degree of mobilization possible only through collectivization. As ever-higher targets come down the chain of command, local officials turn much of rural China into little more than vast slave labour camps. People are stripped of possessions and land, forced away from homes to build dams, then forced back to communes to meet impossible food production targets, using disastrous agricultural methods and sacrificing their own housing materials and even hair as fertilizer. The state appropriates food and other commodities to ramp up exports as a show of economic strength – rice becomes a staple in East Germany – leaving the beaten masses to starve, often naked, by the roadside. (The book contains full, vivid details: not for those squeamish about clubbings-to-death, child-selling, the digging up of human remains for food and what happens when animal survival instincts displace the last shreds of morality.)

The economy collapses. Shaken by the eventual failure of the project and the dissent it provokes among his deputies, Mao goes back on the offensive and launches the country into 10 more years of lunacy in the form of the Cultural Revolution. Official history downplays the ‘years of difficulty’ and blames the weather and/or the USSR.

Although it is hardly the first, this book is probably one of the most damning indictments yet of Mao. This mass-killing was his doing, and he is therefore clearly a monster every bit as evil as Hitler, Stalin or Pol Pot. And yet there he is today, on banknotes, on a portrait overlooking Tiananmen Square, in a glass case in his mausoleum, on T-shirts, in millions of people’s hazy nostalgic feelings and as a national icon. With its ideology mangled as it places its aristocracy atop a corporatist state, the Communist Party relies on Mao for its claim to legitimacy. China may have overtaken the UK now – by feeding people more rather than less – but the government is built on a myth, which this book exposes.

There is a local angle here. Dikotter is Chair Professor of Humanities at Hong Kong University. Hong Kong U, like many of our educational institutions, is keen on expanding over the border and forging closer links with the Mainland, where colleges and academics exist to toe political lines and serve political ends. To patriots, HKU is a disgrace for having someone on the faculty who dares write such heretical nonsense as Mao’s Great Famine. The university’s top management are apparently hoping the whole issue will vanish. Dikotter’s supporters are half-jokingly referring to the professor as Hong Kong’s best chance of having a Salman Rushdie.  It would be required reading anyway, but all this makes the book that much more essential.