Hacking the Good days…

I pledged to dedicate a blog post on today, the Ada Lovelace Day, and my tribute goes to Dr. Cheng Ha-Yan, Kate, who volunteered to help saved patients inflicted with SARS in Hong Kong and unfortunately contacted the disease and passed away at the age of 30.

Also I’d like to highlight the strength and leadership of Dr. Margaret Ng, another Hong Kong Chinese who led Hong Kong through a really weird period of SARS and continue to keep the world vigilant against aviation flu as the Director-General of the World Health Organisation.

Now to put this achievement in context, we are talking about fight this,

In a city like this,

Source from the legendary Michael Wolf’s protrait of Hong Kong’s density


Where everyone was patrified and did not know exactly what to do (and not to do),

SARS was a bossy, horrible epidemic – 296 people died of the disease and 1,755 became ill [BBC].

I also dedicate this post to everyone who has been through the tough time time – imagine everything holds still in a city and no one knows for certain whether you or your love one still be around the next day…  It is these women and men in the health care industry who work very hard to keep things in check.  People are now comparing the economic downturn with the impact of SARS, but hey, at least people don’t get killed (directly) by the recession… but that’s irrelevant.

What is important is this – Hats off to everyone.  Thank you so very much.

A bunch of Hong Kong Lego fanatics have created miniature Olympics village with Lego,

As the world watches the Beijing Games, enthusiasts from Hong Kong have unveiled their own Olympics — built entirely from Lego.

More than 300,000 Lego bricks and 4,500 Lego people were used to create the display, by the Hong Kong Lego User Group.

The stadium

Even the rickshaw was re-created with Lego – how cute!

Photo courtesy: Flickr images by Dunechaser

For more photos, check out Flickr.  I particular admire this quote from the Lego folks, ‘We believe that creations are not limited by resources, but by ideas.’  I wish more people share that enthusiasm at well not just with lego, but at times with work as well… :)

Go on, Hong Kong Lego Users Group!

[Hong Kong only]

We lost our cute puppy, Coco – please help us find him:

Small White Male Dog with White Curly Fur 白色捲軟毛男小狗

Also Black Collar Little Bell

Last Seen on Friday May 16TH AT 9AM
ON DES VOEUX ROAD WEST, SAI YING PUN
星期五(16/05)最後到見在德輔道西. 西營盤

[Update: We found Coco!!] Yaya!!!!

It’s been more than two weeks when close to a thousand of private/sex photos of various female popstars with Edison Chen are released and I have been trying to resist the urge to blog about it – until yesterday, bear with me for the summary of this story before I elaborate why.

International press started chiming into the ’sex scandal incident’ in Hong Kong when the Hong Kong media has been getting absolutely frantic (see EWSN’s brilliant summary here) and the police started arresting and detaining suspects who might have ‘distributed’ indecent materials on the internet without trial,

The police have arrested nine people in connection with photographs and videos on the Internet in the last two weeks. Three suspects have been formally charged, including a 24-year-old man in Kowloon who was charged Tuesday with publishing obscene materials after he was said to have posted two files containing 100 photos.

What’s so indecent of these photos, you have to ask? Basically they are photos of female stars posing and revealing their private parts, as well as various photos of them performing oral sex on Edison Chen. These photos were taken but weren’t meant to be for ‘public consumption’, however when when Mr. Chen took his laptop for repairing, they got stolen and distributed. (that I have to say, it’s simply and utterly inconsiderate and stupid).

The police are looking to capture the ‘cultprit’ and also almost randomly tracking down people who distributed the photos. The reactions from the ‘moralists’, the ‘authority’ and the ‘public’ all reveal issues more than skin-deep in this psuedo ‘Westernised’ society that I have known of. The most apparent issue, is what John Kennedy coined at white terror,

Pornography is openly sold by many street newspaper vendors in Hong Kong and versions of the photographs have been seen on the covers of most Chinese-language dailies every day since the first batch of photos appeared online two weeks ago, despite that under the city’s Obscene and Indecent Articles Ordinance, distribution is prohibited.

The moralists are urging the film star to admit that they are ‘wrong’.

Now, let’s get two things clear. In many of Hong Kong daily newspapers, there is a PORNOGRAPHIC section where anyone, ANYONE, who can afford 30p can go and get a copy. Where as in this case, these young pop stars were meant to be taking *private* photos in their bedrooms. There is no coercion, no intimidation. What is wrong with that?

As early as the days where Eve Ensler produced the Vagina Monologue, a screenplay about how people were never able to respectfully speak aloud the word ‘vigina’ to where we stand – the conservatism and the hypocrisy is what getting to me. People went into details accusing one of the pop stars as hypocritical and should apologise in the public. Now why does , e.g. Gillian Chung, need to apology – what has she done wrong? EWSN translation of thosewerethedays blog illustrated part of the problem,

In the Hong Kong entertainment industry, some artistes have become upholders of morality. They criticize the media for being very yellow and very violent; they preach morality; they say that this or that magazine should not have published something or the other because corrupts young people; they describe themselves as clean, self-respecting and pure beyond belief.

Grow up, Hong Kong. We freaking need to revamp our sex education starting with a healthy attitude towards sex and relationships. We can never *change* the media – we *are* the media. We are the lowest in the media ecology foodchain and they produce these low-quality, high fuss stories because we are asking for it. I would applaud if the Hong Kong government steps up and announces that they will reform Hong Kong’s liberal and sex education, otherwise just joining the moral [panic] folks and picking up the pitchfork is totally, utterly immature and useless.

Updates: thanks Christian for pointing out that I miss-spelled vagina. Not sure if I was taught to spell that in Hong Kong anyway ;)

If you are asked to choose a decade that you remember most vividly, and consider that as the most influential ten years of who you are, which ten years will that be?

There is a Chinese saying, 死，有輕於鴻毛，有重於泰山。 A rough translation would be, “death, light as a feather, or as weighty as the Mountain Tai”. This metaphor seems to also fit perfectly well into how we see our lives. There are times you remember better, and there are things you cannot wait to forget – It is a funny and scary feeling, isn’t it? To start sensing that as you get older, time passes faster, while you still remember how it felt to be a little child at school waiting millisecond to pass by so that you can get off school.

If you are asked to think of the most memorable 10 years, which 10 will that be?

For a lot of Hong Kongers, would it be the past 10 years?

At work yesterday and had the chance to flip through a few main English Newspapers, and saw a special supplement of the Financial Times on Hong Kong, a ten years review since the handover. When seeing people that I adore in London, even though they were not from Hong Kong, I could not help but nudge them, gently reminding the, ‘this Sunday is the ten year’s anniversary of Hong Kong handover.’ I am sure to some of them, this must seem like a random move. It is however, now in retrospect, a delicate way of sharing something that has severely touched me, a Hongkie. The something deeply buried in my heart that has recently emerged and started bouncing again. Perhaps this is the whole reason I come to live in a foreign city here in London? Because it vaguely reminded me of Hong Kong in the eighties?

I will never know. What I know is that in the past ten years, Hong Kong has changed as with all of her past years. The difference is despite all the changes in her financial outlook and physical skylines, there is also cultural transformation in her identity. In the past decade, I have had grown from a teenage to a young woman, and all these changes seem to have a significant weigh on us. It has become increasingly clear that Hong Kong has just wakened up like a lost child in search for its own cultural identity, and for our administrative reign, it is particularly challenging for the officials’ background and how easily it is for them to miss this growing sentiments. Currently our administration comprises of mostly former Administrative Officers of Hong Kong. They are a generation growing up in Hong Kong; either went into the University and be trained as super-efficient civil servants.

Two generations older than us, I see them as not have beliefs in our own cultures. The recent West Kowloon Cultural District says it all. Although the land remains the last prime land in the waterfront; although the government has promised a huge under-taking in transforming it into a cultural zone, Hong Kong citizens were not asked about what they wanted to see in area, nor the question of what culture was to them. Of course, as with every important development project, our government must have had issued white paper for consultation. What particularly saddens me is that publishing lengthy consultation paper is not civic engagement, and it is neither an effective way to fully invite the participation of the locals in determining their cultural development trajectory. I am sad because I have faith in Hong Kong as a cultural city given our colonial legacy and various years of cultural resilience, and how Hong Kong people stood up things they believe in.

It was 2004 when I accompanied my journalist friend and interviewed local people why they protested during the July first (6th Handover Anniversary). I remembered it was the hottest day in Hong Kong, but for the protesters it was also the warmest day, one told me, because they were fighting for universal suffrage. That is it. Hong Kong people are humble and mild. There was a freaking half million people demonstrating on the street but yet there was no riot, no distress in a 33-degree sunny day. There were grandmothers bringing their grandchildren telling me they wanted their generation to behold their own future. How humble is that! We were not even talking about ‘democracy’ here. Not that I do not ‘believe’ in democracy, but I am keenly aware of its as a slippery, fluid concept that can be subjected to the dichotomization between right or wrong, west or east, which does not help a particular situation like what we are in. (Need more elaboration? Look at Russia and Iraq, how many people have suffered from exacerbated, inhumane condition in the name of democracy?) I believe in fairness, justice, but also timeliness… Probably sometimes too much of a Taoist, I guess.

What is appearing in Hong Kong in the past ten years, that I am extremely proud of, is the slowing awakening of local identities and the emergence of citizenry. People demonstrating on the street, but at the same time there were holding hands and picking up after their own trash. There are films made recording our tough time and our best time, in particular Gold Chicken is one of my all time favourites.

This is a story about a prostitute surviving the 1997 financial crisis, falling in and out of love, SARS, witnessing the introduction of Beijing’s policies that benefited Hong Kong economy (such as CEPA – Mainland and Hong Kong Closer Economic Partnership). From a sweet and funny, female-based, angle, it was a yet a strong film. I remembered playing an extract in my class for students 5 years younger than me, who vaguely remembered what happened and why there were people demonstrating on the street, they were stunned to relive what happened by just going through the film, and one even broke down into tears.

To understand societies, we need a marriage between psychology and sociology. Attachment theory seems to fit well in the developing Hong Kong. John Bowlby started theorizing the impacts of adult-children bondings on their future personality styles, and established how important it is for a child to develop strong bonding and hence grow emotionally sound and secure.

Hong Kong, if she was an infant, had been taken away as a young child. The foster parent, probably saw the financial potential of this baby, had groomed it well and fairly happy. Except she was inevitably emotionally ambivalent. She could not convince herself this was her parent hence she could not bond emotionally with it. But at the same time, a city is like a baby, it needs to develop its own identity as well. Hong Kong has since then been encourage to grow economically but not culturally, as with many of the colonies of the world.

This ‘baby’, eventually grew into a child and her parent’s rising power had made it clear that the foster parent should return her back to their own hands. This child who had no understanding or bond with the ‘parents’, reverted back to their arms, not knowing whether to laugh or cry. There were clear moments of ambivalence and self-doubt, and eternal cycles of self-loathing – cynicism was not rare. As a product of this reign, I did not understand its full impact until last week.

It was the 10th anniversary of Hong Kong Handover reception held by the British government at the British Museum. It was all nice and quiet when I walked into the empty museum hall, amazing consider how crowded it usually was. There were very few Hong Kong people out of the almost hundreds of attendees, of which most were British Seniors and Mainland Chinese representative. It saddens me how few Hong Kong people were present, but I also understand there was another (international) reception at Wembley station which might have taken the HKies away from this event.

What caught my eye, after a few speeches from the then Duputy Priminister John Prescott was Lord David Wilson, the last second government of Hong Kong. I still remember him as vaguely as I saw his face in the news when I was very little. I found myself gravitated toward him, the current Master of Peterhouse at Cambridge and discussed with him on Hong Kong’s cultural future. Given that he was 72 years old, he was extremely witty and charming. I was blown away having spoken to him, but the ambivalence kicked in when I started feeling guilty of being ecstatic. After all, wasn’t we supposed to be angry at being colonized? All I wished, at that point, was someone from Hong Kong to share this emotional ambivalence with me, for once, I dangerously missed Hong Kong.

Tomorrow the Hong Kong government will pass the bill to demolish a listed historical heritage, the Queen’s Pier of Hong Kong.

It is a place we where share our collective memories, a place in the heart of central Hong Kong island. It is where all the Hong Kong governors arrived and departed, of which tons of Hong Kong movies being filmed, and probably the place where a lot of our parents first kissed. The plan is to demolish the pier, landfill it, and build highways over.

Hong Kong protesters tried their best to resist, but being termed as the trouble-makers who are wasting the tax-payers’ money and time, there is a polarization of opinions and it seems that they are being demonized to perhaps justify the ‘development’ plan.

I even met an older person asking me what’s a big deal about the Queen’s Pier? There is nothing as such as collective memory, he said, it is all political, totally manipulative.

Then I realize, again, some of us where just too intoxicated by the ‘Central value’ – everything should be like Central in Hong Kong. New, impeccable, slick, and grand. Develop, developing, developing. But as Lung Yingtai, Asia’s star cultural critic says, the glasses outside commercial buildings shine brightly and reflect the skyline. But a bird cannot tell it is not the real sky. It hits it, dies.You can’t help but ask, what has happened ten years after the handover?

Been reviewing the cultural policy of Hong Kong, and there is nothing new about what I have learnt, except it is a painful process going through a few historical sites that had been demolished recently by the SAR government.

Examples include Li Tung Street in Wanchai of which I grew up in, and one of the places that I visit often just to feel the neighbourhood – it’s dirty, smelly – but it is where we feel like home, not the another cold Pacific Mall of which I can’t just sit and watch old neighbours passing by.

Also the Starferry pier – for people who say that Hong Kong young generations only care about brands and fashion or gadgets, check out this youtube clip, especially on the right hand side of all the derivative videos made in memoir of the recently torn Star ferry pier in Central.

We all know that urban development, to a large extent, is inevitable. Especially when you see the huge International Finance Centre boldly erects itself next to the humble, but yet reminiscent StarFerry, you can’t help but ask yourself what our priorities are.

The thing is, the demolition of Star Ferry actually hits the younger generation equally hard, if not harder, because we are being raised in the age of uncertainty. For those who grew up as teens during the handover, we are witnessing, as well as experiencing, first-hand of what it’s like to be passed on from one colony to another. There is a question of identity, of dignity, also a quest of seeking our rights, responsibility and sovereign. My experience tells me Hong Kong people care – years of colonial rules had made most of us politically desensitized, but yet, it doesn’t mean that our past is not respected.

Star Ferry is a place where we have met our friends in, and before i left for London, it is the transportation that I made excuses to ride on the most. The breezes that gently massage your face bringing in the scent of Hong Kong harbour (surprising it doesn’t smell [too] bad) with little local toddlers opening eyes wide with the amazing wonderful view.. that costs only a few pence..

Unfortunately, by the time I am back, the Central StarFerry will be gone. I would go as far as feeling like going back home but yet one of the familiar faces is gone. You just can’t help but ask, why? Did I do something wrong? It is very, very painful not being able to do something about it, even though you know there are people sharing you pain.

So the results are out – 649 versus 123 – Donald Tsang has won.

Of all the clips over youtube, and the first thing I did was to listen to RTHK’s podcast. Everything was under my expectations, except I just cannot bare watching the announcement on the videos. The main reason is that Alan Leong has somehow sacrificed – this is a no-win game for him, by standing out he basically voluntarily turned himself into someone that seeks approvals from the Hong Kong people, whom understandably gravitated towards stability and the recent economic booms. I was not disappointed at the game, as there is an interesting twist to it – maybe Donald Tsang was sincere, or maybe it is a political token to promise so, he basically set the goal of establishing a timetable of universal suffrage in Hong Kong. If this is true, that would be great news. In the past ten years, there seems to be a gradual awakening of Hong Kong identity. From July First demonstration, the proliferation of blogs, the thriving debates in what constitute ‘Hong Kong’s culture’, to this date the idea of a political mini-show, Hong Kong people are getting more comfortable with the idea of political discussion, even I do, surprisingly in the past four years I am more interested in reading about politics and political philosophies.

Because of one episode of BBC documentary by Adam Curtis, The Trap, I came to realize we do have a peculiar sense of freedom, which is built upon the notion of positive and negative liberty.

I had a hard time understanding the notion until I see this illustration on the Stanford website:

Imagine you are driving a car through town, and you come to a fork in the road. You turn left, but no one was forcing you to go one way or the other. Next you come to a crossroads. You turn right, but no one was preventing you from going left or straight on. There is no traffic to speak of and there are no diversions or police roadblocks. So you seem, as a driver, to be completely free. But this picture of your situation might change quite dramatically if we consider that the reason you went left and then right is that you’re addicted to cigarettes and you’re desperate to get to the tobacconists before it closes. Rather than driving, you feel you are being driven, as your urge to smoke leads you uncontrollably to turn the wheel first to the left and then to the right. Moreover, you’re perfectly aware that your turning right at the crossroads means you’ll probably miss a train that was to take you to an appointment you care about very much. You long to be free of this irrational desire that is not only threatening your longevity but is also stopping you right now from doing what you think you ought to be doing. This story gives us two contrasting ways of thinking of liberty. On the one hand, one can think of liberty as the absence of obstacles external to the agent (Negative Liberty). You are free if no one is stopping you from doing whatever you might want to do. In the above story you appear, in this sense, to be free. On the other hand, one can think of liberty as the presence of control on the part of the agent (Positive Liberty). To be free, you must be self-determined, which is to say that you must be able to control your own destiny in your own interests.

Very timely concepts, at least for me, indeed. So in the case of Hong Kong, we are allowed to express our opinions on the candidates and our thoughts on institutional rights, etc. We might like or dislike Donald, or we might seek universal suffrage and deliberative democracy – but hold on a second – it seems that Donald got over 80% support of Hong Kong citizens, despite this apparent non-democratic election. Does it mean that we do not opt for the liberal ideal anymore? The twist of this metaphor of the smoker driver basically sheds me new light,

the smoker in our story provides a clear example of a divided self, as there is the self that wants to get to the appointment and there is the self that wants to get to the tobacconists. We now add to this that one of the selves – the keeper of appointments – is a ‘higher’ self, and the other – the smoker – is a ‘lower’ self. The higher self is the rational, reflecting self, the self that is capable of moral action and of taking responsibility for what she does. This is the true self, since it is what marks us off from other animals. The lower self, on the other hand, is the self of the passions, of unreflecting desires and irrational impulses.

I do not want to make the ‘higher’ or ‘lower’ distinction here, as I do not feel qualified to make any moral judgments here. But the case in Hong Kong is similar – we might want to achieve the political ideals (that explains why half a million out of the seven million HK people demonstrated for universal suffrage in 2004), but at the same time we want stability and economic performance (just like the smoker who needs his tobacco). I feel a genuine sense of emptiness and dispair today when I was in the tube, watching all the English people around me when I listened to the podcast and how all the editorials in Hong Kong (except the leftwing Apple Daily) using all the rhetorical Chinese proverbs basically repeating how great this election is and how we Hong Kong together are ready to bring ourselves to a higher level.

Hadn’t we just opted for the tobacco? Better yet, is being the keeper of appointments a real option out there? I honestly, have no idea.

Let me just sum it up with my favorite story of the recent (highlight and italic on me),

In an old joke from the defunct German Democratic Republic, a German worker gets a job in Siberia; aware of how all mail will be read by censors, he tells his friends: Let’s establish a code: if a letter you will get from me is written in ordinary blue ink, it is true; if it is written in red ink, it is false.

After a month, his friends get the first letter written in blue ink:

“Everything is wonderful here: stores are full, food is abundant, apartments are large and properly heated, movie theatres show films from the West, there are many beautiful girls ready for an affair –the only thing unavailable is red ink…”

Is this not the very matrix of how ideology functions, not only in totalitarian conditions of censorship, but, perhaps even more, in the more refined conditions of liberal censorship?

We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom. What this lack of red ink means is that, today, all the main terms we use to designate the present conflict – war on terror, human rights, etc. – are FALSE terms, mystifying our perception of the situation instead of allowing us to think it: our freedoms themselves serve to mask and sustain our deeper unfreedom. -Slavoj Zize

The only thing I am sure about is google personal homepage now has new themes, which actually made me quite happy for a while,

except we can no longer sign in Flickr with our oldskul account. Yes, I am very very sad about that. Monster corporations! (talking about the paradoxes of life…)

Tomorrow will be the Election day for our Chief Execute, with two candidates – the current Chief Executive Donald Tsang, and his challenger Alan Leong, who are to face the ‘election committee’.

Speculations among Hong Kong people revealed that Donald is the ‘appointed’ Chief Executive, and by allowing Alan Leong to compete with him, it seems that China is trying to be more open with the idea of liberating the election processes in Hong Kong.  Perhaps within a few decades we will be able to elect (note: not  select though, since China will still probably nominate their preferred candidates) our own executive.

What bothered me the most, of which Donald is still very proud of, is his slogan – ‘I will do this job well’.  If you apply a deeper semiotic analysis to it – it started with ‘I’ and the main subject is the ‘job’.  If ‘I’ is Donald and the ‘job’ is Hong Kong and our people, it is quite clear how he positions himself with us.  If the idea of democracy is to put people in charge, and if he sees the values in doing so, why is the slogan sounding so unpersuasive and unrelated to these ideas?

Considering democracy, in its ideal form, should presumably be pursued carefully – how we can push the envelop without rocking the boat, it is still going to take a long way.  I do not have the right to vote tomorrow, but I appreciate Alan Leong for coming out, knowing that this is a no-win battle, in trying and did encourage the idea of political diversity and respects to the intellects of Hong Kong people.

Just hope that the election committee will see that and respect his courage and do leave some votes for Alan!

Just as I was chatting with my HK mate how racist we can get..

On Roland’s blog he posted all the halirious ‘classic’ English from Apple Daily (a Hong Kong tabloid-like mainstream newspaper, like the Sun in the UK)

Do you big me ？（ 你 大 我 呀 ？ ）
Do you think me didn’t arrive? （ 你 當 我 無 到 ？ ）
Eight woman, you are good! （ 八 婆 ， 你 好 ！ ）
I give you some colour to see. （ 我 畀 顏 色 你 睇 ！ ）
Laugh die me. （ 笑 死 我 。 ）
Peter piano piano green go to school. （ 彼 得 「 擒 擒 青 」 返 學 。 ）
Today I was very black son. （ 今 日 我 好 黑 仔 。 ）
What the ghost are you talk? （ 你 講 乜 鬼 ？ ）
What water are you? （ 你 係 乜 水 ？ ）
I saw a pork chop. （ 我 見 到 件 豬 扒 呀 ！ ）

LOL for those who read English/Chinese plus speak Cantonese, I think you are probably choking, like what I just did… . Even though these expressions are extremely culturally idiosyncratic, they nonetheless show how rich Cantonese as a language is. For example, Hong Kong Chinese men call unattractive women ‘pork chop’, and ‘piano piano green’ means someone doing something hastily, and green denotes that someone’s face turns pale because they’re panicking. And of course ‘Eight’ is an adjective used to describe people who are nosy. So no need for me to translate what ‘Eight woman’ is [lah].
Well, as the Chinese cultural critic Lung YinTai puts it, language is a key to another world and culture. I completely agree :)

Updates:  You case you guys haven’t see this, you’ve gotta check out this translated food menu in a random hotel in China… See in yourself.