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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  • Oops

    I was wondering what had happened to IceRed. They shut down their servers on Friday and were supposed to be back on Monday morning, but whenever I checked at the address I have bookmarked, there was just an announcement saying they would be back on Monday 24 November.

    Then I had an *idea*. Why not try http://www.icered.com, I thought. Yes, that seems to work fine. So the idiots have effectively switched off a URL that they had previously asked people to use, and not bothered to put any information or new address on that page. That’s gonna work real well, Tim.

  • Wikipedia

    I’ve been sick all week, but I’m gradually recovering. The trouble is that I am now sufficiently recovered that I can’t put off the work I’m supposed to be doing, but not enough to do justice to anything else at the same time.

    Does anyone else look at Wikipedia? The concept is that this is a free encylopedia entirely consisting of comments added by users. I sometimes come across entries when I do a Google search, and the problem is that the information is not totally reliable.

    For example, I found this on the Hong Kong History page:

    In 2003, the worsening economy, the SARS health crisis, the to-be legislation of Hong Kong Basic Law Article 23 and the unpopularity of Tung Chee Hwa and his officials led to a half million people’s march on July 1,

    SARS? It had nothing to do with SARS! It was about the anti-subversion legislation and Tung Chee-Hwa.

    Now the question is whether you jump in and correct it, or just ignore it. Is this a useful project or just a bunch of people wasting their time?

  • Human nature

    I was reading this in the SCMP, and I’m not sure what to make of it:

    Men who go to the mainland to find a wife have characteristics that make them more likely than most to become wife beaters … most of these men have strong egos and want an obedient wife. They apparently feel more powerful on the mainland, where they have more spending power.

    Well, that plus the fact there are a lot of women in China who see marriage to a foreigner as a way of escaping to a better lifestyle.

    Men who seek wives on the mainland tend to see women as possessions, and seem to believe they can do whatever they want to their wives because they pay for their living expenses. Some also see marriage as a means towards finding someone to take care of their parents.

    I suppose the idea that anyone could go somewhere for the express purpose of “finding a wife” is a bit scary to me. Did anyone see that marvellous Louis Theroux documentary about elderly men going to Bangkok (I think) to find a wife to take back to the UK? They mainly wanted women who would obey them, whereas the women somehow believed that the men were rich and they would enjoy a much better lifestyle in the UK. No prizes for guessing how things turned out when they discovered that their new husbands owned nothing more than a 2-up, 2-down in Redditch and that the weather wasn’t quite as good as in Thailand.

    “It is better that more people seek help rather than avoiding the problem,” Ms Wong said. “If they just keep it bottled up, it could create tragedies like homicides.”

    Er, yes, best to avoid “tragedies like homicides”. Do people really talk like that?

    I am somewhat at a loss to understand what conclusion we should draw from this piece. Isn’t it obvious that these marriages are much more likely to fail? Of course, the people who need to realize that are most unlikely to be reading the SCMP, and even if they did they would probably still get married regardless.

    Or am I just being too cynical?

  • Insert pun about windows here

    Phil has found an article about domestic helpers attending computer courses at the YMCA in Tsim Tsa Tsui.

    A few things strike me as odd about this piece:

    The idea that maids could earn more money in Hong Kong by virtue of their computer skills. There is a so-called minimum wage for domestic helpers, and that is how much most of them are paid – if they are employed legally (some, usually Indonesian, are illegal and paid significantly less). I very much doubt that more than a handful of employer would pay extra for computer skills!

    Across the border, in Shenzhen, computer-literate maids can earn US$225 a month

    Really? For one thing that is significantly less than the minimum wage for helpers in Hong Kong, and for another I don’t think it’s that easy to get an employment visa to work as a "computer-literate maid" in the PRC!

    What would make sense would be that the domestic helpers hope to start a new career once their contract ends, but that wouldn’t make such a good story, would it?

    Conrad (Gweilo Diaries) is probably the leading authority on domestic helpers in Hong Kong.

  • A good article about Asian blogs

    Everybody else has already linked to this article about Asian blogging, so why should I be different. It reinforces the point that Friday’s piece in the SCMP was fairly hopeless, and highlights a general point that stories in large-circulation newspapers (or the SCMP) tend to be less reliable than smaller-circulation magazines.

    My favourite publication is The Economist, which has an excellent (but not perfect) record of getting things right. This happens because they take the trouble to ensure that their writers understand the subjects they write about rather than just scribbling down any old rubbish that people tell them.

    I am not familiar with Asian Century, but it appears to be an Australian magazine. Why would a magazine that says:

    We’ve had the European century and the American century. Clearly, this will be the Asian century. The largest investors in America are not Americans – but China, Taiwan and Japan. We see an unprecedented shift of high-tech manufacturing towards Asia and, latterly, a similar shift in services and research and development. The fastest-growing technology companies in the world are Asian – Wipro, Huawei, ZTE, Samsung and Infosys. And lately, we see that the buyers of what were previously American-funded regional infrastructures – the FLAG Telecoms, the Global Crossings and so on – are Asian.

    be published in Australia? Or is Australia part of Asia these days?

  • DAB chief “offers” to quit

    A strange story, already covered by Phil, is that the leader of the DAB has offered to resign.

    To paraphrase the unlinkable SCMP:

    Tsang Yok-sing offered his resignation after the party suffered its worst ever election result on Sunday, winning only 78 of the 206 seats it contested in Sunday’s district council polls

    or you can read the full story here

    Why is the guy only offering to resign? He made such an ass of himself in the summer with his stupid comments about the July 1st march, and now Hong Kong people have demonstrated that they remember what he said and they didn’t like it. If he goes then the DAB have a chance of achieving a respectable result in the next year’s Legislative Council elections. It really doesn’t matter how much support he has in Beijing, he is an electoral liability. If he is really hoping that the party will talk him out of quitting, as they did earlier this year, he is an idiot.

  • One cheer for the Post Office, three cheers for Amazon

    Further to the recent theft of some DVDs from my mail box, the Post Office do seem genuinely concerned and even sent a bloke round to take a look and to apologize again. The management company keep calling my wife and apologizing but are too scared to speak to me directly.

    However, Amazon are the real heroes of the hour, because they have apologized (!!) and despatched the DVDs a second time. You really can’t ask more than that, can you!

    It really is quite astounding how much cheaper some DVDs are from Amazon compared to HMV in Hong Kong. I look at some of the prices in HMV in total disbelief, I really do. Amazon deduct VAT from the prices if they are shipping to Hong Kong, and this just about makes up for the shipping charges, as long as you order a few items in each shipment.

    Apparently the problem with stuff being stolen is so serious that some companies use boxes that will fit through most letter boxes and refuse to ship anything bigger than a single DVD to addresses in Hong Kong.

  • The Times they are a-changing

    The Times is to launch a tabloid (sorry, compact) version of the newspaper, initially in the London area. I can just about remember when The Times was resolutely elitist and prided itself on employing the likes of Bernard Levin to write high-minded opinion pieces. Now they have hired Julie Burchill and are going tabloid – what is happening to the world!

    The fact is that Rupert Murdoch has totally transformed The Times since he bought the paper, and it has a much wider appeal these days. So it makes a lot of sense to try to compete with the mid-market (tabloid) Daily Mail, many of whose readers should find themselves quite at home with a tabloid Times.

    It’s easy to forget that up until the early 70’s the Daily Mail was also a broadsheet newspaper, and although the change to tabloid format must have seem like a big risk at the time, it was a huge success. I loathe the Daily Mail for its Middle England viewpoint and its xenophobic and racist outpourings, but you can’t help admiring what they have achieved. I’m not a big fan of Rupert Murdoch either, especially if he thinks that he can influence the outcome of the next General Election through his newspapers.

  • Leih Hou Mah

    The letters page of the SCMP is currently running a debate about the pronounciation of the Cantonese word for “year”, following on from the way that it was written in English in SCMP’s centenary edition.

    Natasha Rogai (“Linguistic tide”, November 17) and Hugh Tyrwhitt-Drake (“Linguistic tyranny”, November 19) are wrong to have claimed that no one nowadays in Hong Kong would pronounce the word “year” in Cantonese as nin. Such a pronunciation is, as far as I can observe, still very much prevalent in the local Cantonese-speaking community.

    The difference between “n” and “l” in the pronunciation of certain Cantonese words is actually one of the salient features of the language, being used to differentiate between many different words.

    If these two have really never encountered the word “year” spoken correctly in Cantonese as nin, I suggest that they tune into the local television and radio stations during Chinese New Year. They will hear it said hundreds of times during the festive period.

    One of the many challenges facing foreigners who try to learn Cantonese is how to remember the pronounciation of the various Chinese characters. There are many different systems for Romanization (as it’s called) and none of them are foolproof, in part because many of the distinctive sounds from Cantonese are impossible to represent accurately. In fact, the initial consonant in many of these “words” is virtually silent, meaning that it hardly matters whether it is represented by an ‘l’ or an ‘n’.

    For example, the Chinese word for “you” is traditionally represented as ‘neih’, but these days it is common to hear it pronounced as ‘leih’. However, many Cantonese speakers will not acknowledge that there is any difference between ‘leih’ and ‘neih’ and may even switch between the two pronounciations!!

    Try using the romanized form of most Hong Kong place names and a Cantonese speaker won’t understand what you’re saying. We also have the absurdity of announcements on the MTR and KCR in English and Cantonese even when the place names are Chinese – so the English version is Wan Chai, and the English is something more like “Wan Ji”. On the KCR the last station before the China border is Sheung Shui in English and “Song Soy” in Cantonese.

    Listening to visitors trying to say “Tsim Sha Tsui” can be excruciating, but that’s because they are trying to pronounce it as if it were an English word. If you listen to a local, it’s more like “Jim Sa Joy”, but you’d be unlikely to guess that from the ‘English’ name.

    Then there is Mong Kok. Apparently the first part of the Chinese name was changed from Mong (busy) to Wong (prosperous) but they left the English name the same, so a Cantonese speaker calls it something like “Wong Gok”.

    There’s more – when I first took Cantonese lessons, I had the misfortune to have a very old-fashioned teacher who insisted on speaking the language “correctly” rather than following common usage. This included teached us that 3.15 was “saam dim yat go gwat” (literally one quarter past three) whereas today almost everyone would say “saam dim saam”.

    And I haven’t even mentioned tones…

    I’m afraid I’m still a long, long, way from being fluent in Cantonese.

  • A kick in the teeth for the DAB

    An inauspicious 44% of those eligible to vote in yesterday’s elections for the District Council did so, and the big losers were the DAB, whose leader Tsang Yok-sing said a lot of stupid things about the 1 July march against the anti-subversion laws (which arise from Article 23 of the Basic Law).

    The BBC website says

    Opposition parties in Hong Kong make big gains in local elections – the first after big anti-government protests.

    Well, apart from the fact that none of the parties in Hong Kong’s Alice in Wonderland style political system are in government. Yes, the DAB is pro-Beijing, supports Tung Che-Hwa and faithfully toes the Communist Party line, but they aren’t formally part of the government. Although we have a ministerial system, the ministers are mainly ex-civil servants, and they aren’t members of a political party (somebody please correct me if I am wrong on this).

    The DAB got it badly wrong on Article 23, and are being punished for it. Hong Kong people want a government that will fight for Hong Kong’s interests in Beijing, and I believe that the PRC government is less worried about that than many people imagine. They have too many other things to worry about and would happily let the Chief Executive get on with things in his own way. Unfortunately they chose the wrong man, and now the Democrats and their allies have gained such momentum that the LegCo elections next year should be another triumph for them and another disaster for the DAB. But what happens after that? I’m afraid we’re still a long way from a normal Western-style political system, but that is a subject for another day.