Big Lychee, Various Sectors

A lot of Hong Kong’s restaurants, especially in the more central areas, are characterless and insipid.  They and (unconsciously) the customers are playing a game: I’ll pretend I’m a real, up-market and stylish establishment, and you pretend to think the meal was fine dining and good value.  To prop up the fantasy, restaurant reviewers produce serious-sounding reports describing texture, flavour and ambience while never once pointing out this is just another impersonal, corporate concept cutting corners to pay off the landlord.

The Chinese press are notorious for printing good reviews to shoe-shine or for favours and deserve one star at best.  The local English media, with a smaller audience to offer (I mean, higher journalistic standards), is probably more objective but also wrapped up in the game of charades – see the similarity of HK and Time Out’s earnest treatments of eminently missable places with silly names and decors.  Two stars.

On-line readers’ reviews like those at Open Rice are beyond the grip of the fashion/spas/brands consumerism that earns glossy magazines their living and are therefore more likely to be rooted in reality.  However, real life can include amateurishness, inconsistency, malice, and PR people posing as happy customers, so, despite deserving three stars, this fare still needs a pinch of salt to go with it.

Is there no such thing as a four-star review – one that cuts through the pretentiousness and says: “this is crap”?  There is.  Consider the following description of the Soupe à l’oignon at the ridiculously named Agnès b in IFC Mall:

…the soup was laced, very heavily, with sugar. It is an old trick of idiot cooks, worn thin with time.  If one enjoys drinking onion water with some peeled onions, added to it, a broth that tastes sickly sweet, then, this is for you. For this reviewer, it was pushed aside after the first spoonful …

After the first 2 courses, things went downhill rapidly…

It gets worse, to the extent that you almost start to feel sorry for the cynical accountants behind this sorry excuse for an eatery.  This is a review that makes you wince and want to look away, but of course you can’t; you want more.

Even if a restaurant is judged to be good, its environs may still not pass muster:

…a filthy place, in the main, and some of the buildings in their present state ought to be condemned, in this medium’s opinion … a horrid admixture of European and Asian drunks … whores and prostitutes roam the street … At the same time, homosexuals scour the area in search of new partners.

For young girls to visit this area of Hongkong Central, it may seem an exciting adventure into another side of the Hongkong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), but, probably, more often than not, innocent girls are corrupted by the fast-talking inebriants that frequent what this medium would claim is a blot on the territory.

That, it hardly needs to be said, is Lan Kwai Fong.  The restaurant under review, Habibi, quite rightly gets the thumbs-up.

Those two reviews in all their glory are here and here.  The writer –
the commas gave it away – is Raymonde Sacklyn, founder (in 1974) of Target, a daily Xeroxed newssheet covering business legal cases, market commentary and sometimes eccentric gossip.  It lives on, on the web.  The restaurant coverage is free for all to peruse, as a public service, and perhaps as an inspiration and example to the more self-restrained and cautious reviewers out there.  Four stars.

There is a particular type of Westerner who works in Hong Kong educational institutions and is, or becomes, mentally unhinged.  There was the lecturer who fought a years-long battle with his college and the government in an attempt to prove himself exempt from having to pay tiny Mandatory Provident Fund contributions.  A teacher who compiled a 100-plus-page dossier, replete with upper-case, bold and yellow highlighter, which he sent to every senior official and lawmaker, describing his persecution by colleagues and superiors.  There was a course designer in an education faculty whose conflict with his boss led to legal action and a whole, vindictive book.  I have long assumed that such people, who would never last five minutes in a private-sector commercial environment, drifted into education.

Does it Have to Be Like This? raises a second possibility, namely that Hong Kong schools drive people mad.  The author, who has taught in the system, seems to have escaped with his sanity intact – but perhaps only just.  This fascinating and disturbing critique of Hong Kong’s education system leans at times towards strong polemic.  At the very least, it is fair to say that this is a highly opinionated work.  Some might say insensitive, or worse after reading a passage like “…the vast majority of Hong Kong males (the current writer hesitates to use the term men)…”

To some of us who have not worked, studied or put children in Hong Kong’s local (as opposed to international) schools, the city’s education methods conjure up clichés: rote-learning, exam-based, and so on.  We know the system has its shortcomings.  What we don’t realize, and what this book describes, is just how dysfunctional the system really is, and what the repercussions are for the whole community.

The book starts with a summary of the overall environment: the prevalence of child-rearing by grandparents or Southeast Asian maids, crowding, pollution, noise, even Confucianism and a culture of not questioning.  It is a colourful, if not entirely sympathetic, analysis of Hong Kong society.

The author then opens our eyes to the strange world of the Hong Kong classroom and school, where teachers – typically female, single and living at home well into adulthood – lecture and dictate to students through microphones, often interrupted by announcements over the school-wide PA system from the dictator-like principal’s office.  Teachers are overworked in that they are attending pointless meetings, having naps and long lunches, and marking and correcting students’ work without asking why their charges keep making the same mistakes year after year.  He describes the worst aspects of rote-learning and the traumas of the examination system (“Hong Kong does not really have an education system as such, but rather simply has an exam-preparation system”).  Textbook publishers, it seems, are “bottom-feeding educational leeches”.

He addresses the vexed issue of English versus Chinese medium, teachers’ often-woeful standards and the role of cram schools, as well as a lengthy and debatable digression on the way Chinese characters are taught.  He also delivers what, to me, is an epiphany in a single, small fact: all three bands of Hong Kong high school, segregating children by academic ability, follow the same curriculum – that designed for the elite  minority.  The majority of students study for exams they know, from the beginning, they have no hope of passing.  In all my years here, I had never realized this; it’s a wonder all kids at band two and three schools aren’t dropping out, doing drugs, joining triads and doing ‘compensated dating’.  The thinking, apparently, is that exam success is all about effort, and ability plays no role.

Other local assumptions explain much.  “Learning has to be structured and instructional; it is never unstructured or self-structured, and is never experiential.”  This is why, when I pontificate in certain company on the theory of evolution, plate tectonics or the history of man’s expansion across the world, some locally educated people assume I must have a formal education, and of course credentials, in these fields.  The possibility that I, a non-scientist, would read and learn about these subjects out of curiosity – for pleasure – seems to escape them.

After an esoteric rant about how the British Council trains English teachers, the author looks into the universities, where this lack of general knowledge and awareness of current affairs is noticeable.  “…few [students evince] any particular desire to know… Much of this can be put squarely down to a complete and total absence of reading.”  He also describes how academia becomes mired in politics and backstabbing.

Even allowing for some exaggeration on the jaded author’s part, it is easy to see how working in such a system would drive someone to despair, or to writing a sometimes-undiplomatically phrased book. Is it any wonder that anyone who can do so – including Education Bureau officials who oversee all this – sends their kids overseas?  What would Hong Kong, with its generally productive and resourceful people, be like without handicapping itself with such a system?

Does it Have to Be Like This? Education and Socialisation in Hong Kong is available at Amazon and here.

JD Salinger took reclusiveness to the point where it became pretentious and tiresome; he almost became more renowned for his determined invisibility than for his literary output.  Maybe this is because he never actually wrote much – it would be possible to read the complete works in a couple of days.  As well as refusing to give interviews, correspond or even make a physical appearance of any sort, he refused flatly to allow anyone to adapt his stories in any way, even taking legal action in 2009 against a Swede who produced some sort of sequel to his most famous book, Catcher in the Rye.

Now he has died, will they make a movie of Catcher in the Rye?  And what would Hollywood do with such a classic?  They could create an unashamed nostalgia-fest aimed at the 40-70 (or whatever) demographic brought up on the thing.  But the studios will no doubt seek a bigger market.  Update it so the action takes place in 2010 rather than around 1950, so you don’t creep out today’s youth audience with weird-looking cars and hairstyles.  Make sure Holden Caulfield (played by Daniel ‘Harry Potter’ Radcliff, or maybe Brad Pitt) actually has sex with the hooker (Paris Hilton) in the seedy hotel.  Tweak the plot so, strolling through Times Square, he helps George Clooney thwart a Muslim terrorist attack, personally shooting five of the would-be bombers with a half-inch caliber machine gun he holds in one hand.  On his way to visit his old teacher, the terrorists’ accomplices come out to get him, and in the resulting 20-minute high-speed chase with amazing special effects, 96 vehicles and seven buildings are blown up.  Then the aliens land.  Soundtrack by Eminem or Beyonce*.

Why not?  Catcher in the Rye grabbed teenagers because it was a larger-than-life fantasy.  Holden’s rebellious antics and precocity are not credible.  A teenage schoolboy picking up a prostitute, pontificating about women and death and generally acting and thinking like someone two or three times his age?  Salinger created a very cool character who every 16-year-old kid would like to be (in some ways), even though it’s about as likely as having superhuman powers owing to exposure to Kryptonite.

The Glass family in Franny and Zooey, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and the other short stories similarly represented something unattainable in real life: intellectual, free-living, upper East Side Manhattan-dwelling and of course beautiful.  It’s intriguingly written, great reading – and escapism.

Maybe that is why Salinger became an ultra-hermit: he was afraid of being rumbled as, to quote his hero’s favourite insult, a phony.  But how many deaths are this talked about?  I am still trying to get out of the habit – caught decades ago from Buddy Glass in Raise High – of saying “he’s a chiropodist” when strangers ask what a third person does for a living.

* OK, I have never knowingly heard anything by Beyonce, so I might be doing her – I think it’s a ‘her’ – a disservice of some sort, but… it’s just such a stupid name.

It is unlikely that anyone will buy this tome for themselves; it is expensive and not exactly useful.  But of course that makes it an ideal gift, either to give or receive, which is probably why it is appearing just before Christmas.  For the man who has everything: a coffee-table book containing nothing but full-colour, glossy photographs taken of, from, in or around Hong Kong trams.

There is a particular genre of Hong Kong photography that might be called ‘recently arrived Westerner’, in which the shutterbug seeks out what to him is highly exotic but to everyone else is humdrum.  Close-ups of ornate but slightly rusty mail boxes in older residential neighbourhoods seem to be a popular subject, as are the smelliest and slimiest bits of wet markets, and anything featuring big and brash Chinese characters – regardless of what they mean.

On the Tram by Morgan Ommer and Yvon Choi largely avoids clichés by refusing to tear the lens away – or at least far – from our old familiar streetcars.  The book features tram passengers, bits of tram equipment, views out of trams, views into trams, views from one tram into another, views of fellow road users jostling for space with trams.  There’s even a tram-wash.

The stars of this photo essay, however, are the ads – mostly on the sides of the vehicles, sometimes in the background.  The tram, otherwise an antiquated and thoroughly humdrum box on wheels, becomes a surreal juxtaposition of passengers sitting at windows or looking out of doors enveloped by oversized pictures and words: little human appendages to a giant Yao Ming or unwitting illustrations to a caption about lingerie.

In Dymocks soon, apparently.

It is unlikely that many people will want this small book, which is just as well since it must be difficult to find.  It was recently published by the author’s widow, perhaps primarily for circulation among family and friends, but the fact that a price appears on the back cover (HK$60) suggests a hope for a wider audience.

One way to get hold of a copy of A Little Man’s Story is to visit a member of Hong Kong’s great and good one day when his personal assistant is tipping boxes full of unsolicited gifts from admirers onto his desk.  As the little tome falls out, you should pick it up and comment on the charming cover artwork.  The scowling wench will press it into your hands and mutter “He won’t read it – he never reads anything.”  The next step, when you are leaving, is to take an elevator that gets stuck between floors at a time when all the traffic from Wanchai to Pokfulam has ground to a halt because of a fleet of trucks delivering goods to the Convention and Exhibition Centre.  Being non-urgent, you then have two hours waiting for the fire department to arrive – with nothing else to read.  It worked for me.

So who was Tin-pui Leung?  The HK Polytechnic University obituary reveals him to have been a respected and gifted engineering professor who trained locally, in the UK and in Beijing.  As well as sitting on many Hong Kong public boards, he served on a body connected with safety at the Daya Bay nuclear plant and on a committee of experts for China’s space establishment.  He was also a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference – a symbolic reward for loyalty.  The Hong Kong government fobbed him off with a Bronze Bauhinia Star, which suggests he made genuine contributions to society (Silvers tend to go to obsequious yes-men, Golds and Grands to multi-billionaires).  He died at just 62.

A Little Man’s Story is a history/memoir written in the form of fictionalized dialogue between an older man and his son and several other figures, including a British friend who worked for the Far Eastern Economic Review.  Beneath the surface, it is essentially an attempt to reconcile a quandary that many older, educated Hong Kong Chinese people face: how to define their personal relationship with their country and, more to the point, its ruling party, when they benefited so much by being brought up on stolen land run by foreigners.

For opponents of the Communist Party, the answer is relatively simple: love the country, hate the ruling power and don’t be ashamed to cite Hong Kong as evidence for the benefits of freedom and pluralism. For unwavering believers faithful to the red creed from Marxist-Leninist theory, through deranged Maoist dictatorship to post-Deng crony capitalism, it is also an easy question: no CCP, no New China poised for top place in the 21^st Century world.

A Little Man’s Story shows how much harder it is for Hong Kong people who don’t want to be disloyal to a regime they presume was always trying its best to do a difficult job, but who can’t submit to the full worshipful dogma of party infallibility.  They feel resentment at the racism and hypocrisy of colonial rule, but also humiliation at the inability of China to get its act together.  On top of that, having lived in a parallel universe with no anti-rightist campaigns, famine, Cultural Revolution or 6-4 killings, they have a sort of survivor’s guilt.

All this is apparent from the book’s discussions of events in Hong Kong and the mainland from the 1920s to the handover.  Rather than argue, the main characters – Cheung Sam and son Han-li – largely take it in turn to agree with one another.  China’s traditions are magnificent but its backwardness a misfortune.  The West has some strengths but also weaknesses.  Mao was cruel but necessary – and a fine strategist and poet.  They look back at colonialism, Japanese occupation, revolution, Hong Kong’s riots, campaigner Elsie Elliot (now Tu) and the beginning of the Diaoyutai Islands movement.  The “June 1989 events,” they admit, “gave many Hong Kong people uncomfortable feelings.”  John Evans the old FEER man chimes in as a sympathetic Western chorus.  China’s leaders should listen to the people more, he says after the Beijing slaughter, but it is partly the people’s fault for their habit of hiding their feelings until it is too late.

It seems likely that Leung wrote the work while terminally ill (one character in the book dies of prostate cancer).  Is it an effort to atone for a comfortable life while most compatriots suffered?  Is it an apologia by a member of the mildly pro-Beijing camp for Hong Kong people’s pragmatic tendency to sit on the fence and avoid awkward ideological choices?  Is it an attempt by the author to convince himself as death approached that he was right to put academia and teaching first, and take the path of least resistance in public affairs?  Take your pick.

We can say that it is an idiosyncratic history of modern Hong Kong and China (complete with factual errors) that unwittingly highlights the tragic effects of deference to authority and aversion to debate or criticism on its subject.  As such – worth a couple of spare hours in the unlikely event that you find yourself with a copy.

Some time in mid-2003, I was at an otherwise forgettable lunch/speech gathering in a big hotel ballroom.  Sitting opposite me at the round table of 10 was the rotund and garrulous Mike Rowse, boss of InvestHK, the Big Lychee’s inward investment agency.  During the meal, he proudly announced to his little captive audience that he was about to ask the Legislative Council’s finance committee for a billion bucks, which would be used for various projects to help the city recover from the short but sharp economic downturn that accompanied SARS.

A few months later, I – and probably many of the other attendees at the lunch – saw something memorable: the Rolling Stones and Neil Young performing on separate nights at the outdoor Tamar site, surrounded by the skyscrapers of Admiralty.  The Harbourfest series of concerts was unique in Hong Kong and people (Westerners, at least) still rave about it today.  It was also a stupendous waste of HK$100 million of government money: the economy had bounced back of its own accord by that time.  After going over this background, the context of Tung Chee-hwa’s disastrous post-1997 spell at running the city and the logistical feat of the shows, No Minister largely tells the story of what happened next.

Harbourfest was controversial, and a hostile press attacked it for its cost, Anglocentric choice of artistes, ticket prices, and the involvement of senior figures in the American Chamber of Commerce, whose idea it was and who largely organized the event, with the government essentially acting as sponsor.  Accusations of mismanagement flew around, and a series of enquiries sought someone to blame.  In theory, a policy-making politician should have been accountable, but unlike other economic relaunch projects, Harbourfest did not come under the direct auspices of any top-level bureau.  The Finance and Commerce areas Rowse came under didn’t want to know; a more appropriate department, like the Home Affairs Bureau that organizes cultural events, mysteriously did not take the project under its wing.

Rowse ended up carrying the can, and was even subjected to a quasi-judicial disciplinary proceeding in which the roles of prosecutor, judge and jury were combined in individuals who were buddies of the senior officials with an interest in making him the scapegoat.  He was punished in 2005 with a severe reprimand and a fine by way of a suspension in pay.  For good measure along the way, his persecutors retroactively fiddled with minutes of meetings and indulged in press leaks against him.  Interestingly, the media at this stage started to see him more as a victim.

The correct behaviour under Hong Kong’s Confucian-Victorian institutional ethos would be to take your punishment like a man, regardless of the unfairness, and not lose everyone face by making a fuss.  A Bronze Bauhinia Star and a few appointments would make things right in the following years.  Rowse, however, decided to do a Big Bad Argumentative Troublemaking Non-conformist Westerner act.  After officials buck-passed his appeal until it was eventually rejected, he went to court.  And he won.

That’s the story Rowse recounts.  Reasonably gripping – at 100 pages – for any fans of bureaucratic skullduggery, if no Dreyfus Affair.  The Rowse I saw drooling at the thought of having a billion to play with does not appear. (I suppose it is human nature for civil servants to avidly implement projects  that suit them but suddenly be unaccountable non-policmakers when it becomes apparent the policy is a dud.)

A more interesting story would have gone like this:

Overenthusiastic American business figures, eager to help repair Hong Kong after its traumatic brush with death, ask their British buddy Mike in the government to fund an amazingly cool series of rock concerts, which they will put together.  Mike, with a billion taxpayers’ bucks to burn and a great collection of old LPs, loves the idea.  The committees of bureaucrats supposedly managing economic recovery, approve it (all the other projects are vacuous or childish things thought up by civil servants).

There is only one way to put such an event together in a quarter of the normal time, and that is to cut through red tape.  That means leaving bureaucrats from boring paper-shuffling units looking after Home Affairs, Leisure and Cultural Services and tourism out of the loop.  That means showing everyone else that they have no useful function.  It means humiliating them.  It means making them lose face.  It leaves them burning with hatred at the arrogant, bigheaded gweilos.

In certain quarters, a series of phone calls would result in Mike getting the excrement-smeared meat-cleaver treatment.  This being a respectable Hong Kong organization, mainstream supporters of harmony and The Way gang up on him by diverting press criticism and accountability in his direction. They work on absolving themselves of blame for the waste of Harbourfest and screwing Mike in one go.  (Meanwhile, the racial and cultural factors at the heart of the problem make life especially difficult for Mike’s Chinese staff.)

The haughty and overconfident senior officials determined to stitch Mike up throw everything at him in a kangaroo court and expect him to shut up when their faces are saved and he is given a relatively mild punishment.  Instead he fights back, exposing senior politicians as cowards, cheats and bullies and winning the hearts of the people.  In a dream sequence at the end, the only senior official involved still in office when the full story comes out is now-Chief Secretary Henry Tang, whose hopes of becoming Chief Executive lie in tatters.

Peer carefully between the lines and use a healthy bit of imagination, and that’s the story you might read.  Otherwise, wait for the movie.