Ordinary Gweilo

It's not big and it's not clever, it's just a Brit in Hong Kong writing (mainly) about Hong Kong

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  • Christmas past and present

    It’s funny how Christmas means different things at different stages in your life. My son is now old enough to understand Christmas, and at the weekend we bought him a Christmas tree (in response to frequent requests over the last few days) and he had great fun decorating it. I realized that this is the first time that I have had a Christmas tree at home for a very long time!

    For many years, as far as I was concerned, Christmas was not much more than an excuse for more drinking and less work, and the day itself was quite boring (though at least I did spend it with my family rather than on my own). Then when my brothers and my sister started having children it took on a new meaning, as I was able to enjoy the day with my nieces and nephews and share their excitement. Rather than feeling disappointed that my relatives had given me a book I didn’t really want, I could see how happy the children were with what they had been given.

    Then I moved to Hong Kong, away from my family and discovered that life carried on very much as normal over the Christmas period. I was amazed to find that shops were open as normal. One year we even moved apartments on Boxing Day, something that would be impossible in the UK. No Christmas presents, and basically just another public holiday. Now, for me, things have changed again as my son is old enough to get excited about Christmas.

    (more…)

  • Please don’t call it “cargate”

    The so-called “Cargate affair” has apparently come to an end, with the decision not to prosecute Anthony Leug because “a reasonable prospect of securing a conviction in this case simply [does] not exist”. Most people seem to have accepted this decision as reasonable, though Martin Lee is making a bit of a fuss about it. As Phil says,

    Anthony Leung may be a fool and he may be an old man with a young nubile wife but if the legal opinion is that there is not enough evidence of criminal intent to prosecute him then we should save the taxpayers money.

    He’s not that old, is he? Anyway, what I’d like to complain about is the use of the name “Cargate”. It’s lazy journalist’s trick to stick “gate” on the end of any noun or verb to create a snappy name. Most of the so-called scandals that are treated in this way are actually very minor (as here), and people will end up thinking that “Watergate” was some minor problem related to water. Come on, guys, be a bit more original!

  • The three satirists go to war

    Last Friday morning, RTHK devoted about half an hour to a discussion on the state of satire in Hong Kong, and the three guests spent most of the time attacking each other! Steve Vines was promoting Spike, George Adams was promoting his NTSCMP website, and Nury Vittachi was promoting, well mainly Nury Vittachi (though I think he does have a new book out). There is a long history of bad feeling between Nury and George Adams, so it was no surprise to find them arguing, but Adams seemed to have it in for Spike as well, and was basically arguing that the print media is always constrained by libel laws and timid proprietors, whereas he can say anything he likes on the Internet. Nury said that the three of them all hated each other, though I’m not sure whether that is completely true!

    Hilariously, Nury is still pushing the line that he has been sacked three times because his satire is too edgy. It may be the case that he lost his ‘Lai See’ column in the SCMP because he made too many disrepectful jokes about Chinese leaders, but the alternative view is that they didn’t need to employ someone on such a high salary to write that column, and were simply cutting costs. Interestingly, he also carried on working for the SCMP for a year or so after he stopped writing the ‘Lai See’ column. I suppose the second time was when the Hong Kong iMail changed hands and the new owners laid off a high proportion of the journalists including all the big names. Sad, but undoubtedly this was a cost-cutting exercise. Maybe someone can enlighten me about the third time Nury was sacked because I can’t recall it.

    These days Nury is a successful novelist, and he still has his column in the Far Eastern Economic Review, so I don’t think these sackings have done him too much harm!

    ‘Dr’ George Adams has re-launched his Not the South China Morning Post website, and seems to be indiscriminately attacking virtually everyone, including several innocent bloggers. Even before you read this stuff you get a visual hint that this may not be most calm and well-reasoned view of life in Hong Kong. Certainly the impression he created on RTHK was of someone who was most upset about something (though it was never clear exactly what).

    Steve Vines got very upset when George Adams said that Spike was bankrolled by Jimmy Lai, stressing that he was the publisher of the magazine. I didn’t quite understand why this proved that Jimmy Lai wasn’t putting money into the venture, or even why this idea upset him, but there was no discussion on either of these points, just some shouting. Apart from that he came across as fairly sane. I didn’t realize he used to be the editor of the Eastern Express.

    I’d have liked to know more about Spike and its plans for the future, but it didn’t turn out to be that type of programme. In fact the presenters seemed to be struggling to keep control of the discussion for most of the time!

    Interesting, but not as interesting as it could have been!

  • The best response to pirate DVDs

    Interesting story in the SCMP this morning, about the approach taken by film distributors on the mainland to pirate DVDs. Infernal Affairs III was released last week, and pirate DVDs were available a few days later. So rather than whingeing about it in the SCMP they did something positive:

    Just three days after cinemas began screening Infernal Affairs III, they have flooded Beijing shops with DVDs of the police thriller – hoping to beat pirates at their own game.

    “It is our strategy to fight against the piracy by flooding the market with authentic and legal products at an extremely low price,” said Ouyang Xinpeng, media manager for the Guangzhou-based distributor Zoke Culture Company. Big-screen hits including Infernal Affairs II, Warriors of Heaven and Earth and Running on Karma have been fast-tracked to film vendors by Zoke Culture in the past six months.

    “Our products now occupy about 70 per cent of the market, as opposed to 60 per cent for the fakes in the past,” Mr Ouyang said. “We lost profits from them all, but we believe that all this effort is worthwhile to squeeze fake producers out of the market.”

    A very sensible response, I thought. The only thing that surprised me was that they are pricing them quite so cheaply. I’d have thought that they could have charged a little more for the genuine article, but perhaps this way guarantees that they beat the pirates.

  • Funny signs

    Batgung has some amusing signs from Hong Kong. Most are examples of poor or mangled English, and one is confusing jargon. It’s always tempting to do this, but it seems a bit too much like shooting fish in a barrel and I also feel it’s unfair to criticize other people’s English when my Chinese is so poor. Still amusing, though!

    Two that I thought were funny because of the way they were phrased (and they may even be amusing in Chinese as well):

  • "Beware of the man behind the door" (from Maritime Square in Tsing Yi. Batgung has a similar one, but I just have this mental image of one man standing permanently just behind the door!)

  • "Please do not smoke and carry heavy items" (from Snoopy World in Sha Tin)

    • In his temporary home, Hemlock is complaining about spam (not the delicious meat-based product in a can, but all those annoying junk email messages). Am I alone in finding junk emails only a very minor irritation? Let’s face it, we get junk mail through the ordinary post, and it’s quicker to glance at an email than it is to open an envelope. Yes, my Hotmail account is unusable because 99.99% of the messages are junk emails, but that simply means I have stopped using it. Of course I would prefer not to receive junk emails, but there are many worse things happening in the world.

  • Spike

    Spike has now reached issue 4, and on the positive side they seem to have attracted advertising from Vokswagen and copies still seem to be widely available even in the “Gweilo lite” parts of Hong Kong where I spend most of my time.

    The serious stuff is still first-rate, and I think it’s a very good idea to re-print stuff from Apple Daily and Next Magazine for those of us who can’t read Chinese. I am less sure about reprinting articles from The Spectator since they don’t have much relevance to Hong Kong (Taki’s article mentioning a dinner party attended by Princess Diana seemed particularly pointless). The business news is good, but I have my doubts about whether it is wise to devote so much space to the media (mainly the SCMP so far). It’s understandable that journalists should think that newspapers and magazines, and the people who work on them, are fascinating, but do the readers think the same way? Private Eye does the same thing and it has survived for 40 years and is very successful these days, so perhaps I am wrong (or perhaps readers just put up with the media stuff as its only part of the magazine).

    The biggest problem is that the humour and the feature material is still a bit hit-and-miss. The satire needs to improve, but I really wonder whether they need the critics at all, especially as they seem to have little relevance to Hong Kong.

    I also still think they need to tweak the design to differentiate the serious stuff, the satire and the features and to give the magazine a clearer identity. Private Eye manages this quite well even though the magazine still looks as if it was knocked up on an electric typewriter and they quite clearly don’t employ a designer. I’m afraid Spike looks a bit too much as if they purchased a generic magazine design off-the-shelf – it is “glossy” without looking really stylish, and I think that is confusing to the reader.

    The biggest worry is whether they are selling enough copies to survive, which in turn depends upon how much it is costing them and when their backers expect to make a profit. I’m afraid I have no idea about that!

    Update: This article from the Taipei Times seems to shed some light on who is backing Spike (it’s Jimmy Lai in case you can’t be bothered to click on it). [via NTSCMP]

  • Democracy in Hong Kong

    Today’s SCMP leads on Beijing’s rebuke to the US for meddling in Hong Kong affairs. This arises from the comments made by James Keith, the US Consul General for Hong Kong. His comments seemed relatively uncontroversial – you’d expect the US to be advocating greater democracy for Hong Kong:

    It is the US belief that history has more than demonstrated that the best way to respond to the will of the people is through universal suffrage…We believe the best next step is to begin full and public consultations on democratisation as soon as possible.

    However, it’s not hard to see why the Chinese government should feel sensitive about this subject. The Basic Law is somewhat vague on the timetable, but full democracy is going to come eventually, and this will create some interesting problems. The success of the Democrats and their allies and the comparative failure of the DAB will not have reassured the central government.

    Stephen Vines discusses some of these issues in the current issue of Spike, and he points out that there are considerable risks here that need careful thought by the democrats. If the US consul-general had thought before he had opened his mouth, perhaps he would also have realised that the last thing anyone who wants more democracy should be doing right now is to provoke the Chinese government on this subject.

  • Pet food

    An interesting piece in The Guardian about what people in China will eat. Note that in Hong Kong it is illegal to eat cats, dogs and most wild animals, and there are still restrictions in force in the PRC from the SARS outbreak.

    I find it quite interesting what is deemed acceptable to eat in different countries – when I first went to France, for example, I was unsure about eating horse, frogs legs and snails, all of which seemed quite strange to someone brought up in the UK. Having tried all of them, I can say that I wouldn’t go out of my way to either eat, or avoid eating, any of them. In the North of England, sheep stomach is something of a delicacy for some people, and in France, veal sweetbreads (thymus glands) are popular.

    If you eat animals I can’t see why horses should be any different to cows, sheep or pigs. Ostrich and kangaroo meat is relatively common these days, and my wife rather surprised me by refusing to eat ostrich cheung fan. You can argue about which animals are more intelligent or more cuddly, I suppose, but if you start doing this I reckon you’d end up as a vegetarian and not eat any of them.

    It is perhaps a bit more understandable to worry about eating creatures that you feel squeamish about, but again this a fine line to draw. To many people it makes a difference what you can see on the plate, and for example frogs legs look like any other meat (and taste quite like chicken).

    Presumably the objection to eating cats and dogs arises from the fact that people keep them as pets. However, some people have rabbits as pets and yet we eat them – there’s quite a funny scene in “Local Hero” where one of the characters gets his pet rabbit served up in a pie and only finds out after he has eaten it. Pigeons are also kept by some people (mainly for racing) and eaten as well in most countries, and I’m sure there are other examples.

    Eating snake seems to upset some people, but I don’t have a problem with that. In fact I probably worry more about how awkward things are to eat, and I’m afraid I don’t have the Chinese ability to put something like a chicken foot in my mouth and then spit out the bone, skin, etc. When I had snake it was free of bones and so I had no problem eating it.

    I do have concerns about some of the wild animals that are eaten in China, all the more so after the outbreak of SARS. Mind you, the BSE problem in the UK was also quite scary, and although scientists don’t seem quite sure what happened, it was clearly not a good idea to serve sheep brains to cows.

  • From the Washington Post

    This is a good article about Hong Kong in today’s Washington Post.

  • We can’t hear you

    It’s always amusing to read prospectuses with the warnings that they are obliged to include these days (“all our senior management might leave the company, and all our customers might suddenly die from a mysterious disease”) but this one seems to be self-inflicted.

    The New York Times reports that a Chinese company called Ctrip.com has warned the holders of its American depository shares (ADS) that it hasn’t decided whether it will listen to their opinions:

    Ctrip’s contribution to convenient democracy is detailed in its prospectus. Buyers of the American depository shares are told they “may instruct the depositary of our A.D.S.’s to vote the shares underlying your A.D.S.’s but only if we ask the depositary to ask for your instructions.”