Big Lychee, Various Sectors

Sun, 1 Oct
And so we bid farewell to historic Stonegallows, gateway to the West.  Normally at this stage of the annual Filial Piety Tour, I would wend my way to the capital city of the Little Satan, and thence to the seat of government of the Great Satan, from which I would proceed to the remote mountain hamlet that is home to the Appalachian branch of the Hemlock clan.  This year, sadly, I will not be seeing my stateside kin, with their breakfasts of Twinkies and grits and their snake-handling neighbours who speak in tongues.  I have to be back in the Big Lychee this time next week.   And I need to see long-lost friends in London-by-Sea.  Both sound reasons, mercifully freeing me of the temptation to concoct lame excuses to avoid flying on the route that terrorists would most like to attack.

The statistically improbable prospect of being blown up in mid-air doesn’t worry me.  It is the thought of the hours-long procession through security, the removal of shoes and belts, the confiscation of toothpaste, the sight of mothers sipping their babies’ milk to prove it isn’t explosive, and all the other rigmarole.  The additional precautions introduced following the scare in August have largely been lifted, but I am just not in the mood.  What can you do when faced with impressionable young, semi-fascistic folk who probably say to themselves, “We are all killers until we stop flying”?

That said, it would be fun to do an extra few thousand miles in the air simply to irritate someone called George Monbiot.  Although unknown to the rest of the planet, Mr Monbiot is hard to avoid here.  He appears in certain newspapers and magazines very frequently, wringing his hands about how hard he tries to insulate his house, avoid Brazilian beef, cycle everywhere, and grow his own vegetables.  He is strongly opposed – and you are not allowed to forget it – to evil supermarkets, evil Western companies in Africa, evil Western countries’ foreign policies, energy of most descriptions, wealth and fun.  And air transport – telling us in an article called We are all killers until we stop flying that:

Already, one fifth of all the world’s international air passengers fly to or from an airport in the UK … Orwell’s most accurate prediction in 1984 was the mutation of Britain into Airstrip One.

He has an adoring fan club of impressionable young folk who write to him with their exciting and well-thought out ideas…

George,

How would you limit air travel?  I can think of a few options: Very high levels of taxation.  As part of a wider carbon rationing/quota scheme.  A more bureacratic approach that banned air travel for non-essential purposes – requiring a permit to be allowed to travel by air.

I wonder what you think about alternatives [eg Zeppelins]?

Hong Kong seems more inviting by the minute. And not by Zeppelin.

Fri, 6 Oct
A parting thought.  Why do people here pronounce the word ‘mall’ to rhyme with ‘mal’, as in petit mal or grand mal?  Why don’t they rhyme it with all, ball, call, fall, gall, hall, pall, tall and wall (leaving Pall Mall out of it)?

All I know is that you get the same retail outlets everywhere these days – once you’ve seen one shopping centre, you’ve seen a mall.

*******

Special 2010 National Day Holiday Long Weekend Quiz

A map of the USA: What do the two colours represent?

Thurs, 28 Sep
Freezing. Venture out to buy a bottle of MucoHack for my wheezing mother.

“Does she have a dry cough or a chest cough?” asks the young Indian woman in the pharmacy.  When I was a kid, there was just one variant of this foul-tasting syrupy medication.  Today, it comes in any number of flavours, for several specific bronchial conditions and in ‘non-drowsy’ as well as normal, alcohol-laden form.  The harder I try to resist attempts to sell me the ‘non-drowsy’ version, the more I sense a certain mistrust on the part of the pert shop assistant.  She scuttles off to the small dispensary and confers with an older colleague.   “Mrs Hemlock’s son,” I hear her whisper.  “Trying to put her to sleep.”

I lean over the counter.  “Not permanently!” I protest.  But the ageing, sour-faced manageress emerges in her white tunic and will have none of it.  The traditional concoction is now considered dangerous, she tells me, especially if the user is operating machinery.  And yes, that includes a Kenwood Chef.  My polite request for a small quantity of laudanum meets with an ungracious rebuff.  I depart comforting myself with the knowledge that in Hong Kong, where pharmacists have the good manners to provide customers with absolutely anything they want without question, the old sow would have retired to a life of luxury decades ago.

Mon, 25 Sep
The heroic struggle to install broadband in Stonegallows Hall resulted in a short-lived victory, as the 1920s, hamster-powered PC reacted to the presence of a 2.2 megabytes per second connection by spewing out such vast quantities of unsolicited data into the wild blue Internet that the machine all but seized up.   The only processing power and memory it could spare was devoted to hijacking the browser and producing pop-ups.  I pulled the plug on the contraption and dragged it out into the back garden, pausing only to pick the shotgun off the wall.  It breathed its last on a patch of rhubarb.

I am trapped in a house with nothing but a newspaper’s Sunday colour magazine for amusement.  I open it and start to read We Gave Birth In A Tepee, about a couple living less than a hundred miles from here.  “I spend the evenings spinning and listening to the wind-up radio,” says the trendy mother.

So today’s task is to avert insanity by doing what I suggested (but what do I know?) several weeks ago from Hong Kong when I first heard that broadband was in the offing – get a post-Alan Turing computer.  This involves a trip to the small big city, which proves harrowing.  The taxi drivers are even more aggressive and irritable than usual, this being the second day of Ramadan.  And the main IT supplies store offers a reasonable deal under one condition.  “It’ll be ready in two weeks,” says the salesman, a spotty, early 20s specimen in a cheap suit.  “Or three.”  He looks at me in the slightly inbred way people do around here.  “Actually, officially we say nine working days, like?  But…”  Nine.  It is his great fortune that I have left the trusty 12 bore at home.

Eventually, I track down a place that can put one together in six hours.  It is now back at the family seat, up and running, and an initially skeptical aged P is jumping up and down like a delighted schoolgirl, phoning all the neighbours to announce that she is the proud owner of a PC with a flat screen and a black mouse – both unheard of in this late medieval village.  A hum of amazement drifts from the parish hall to the pub and on the cider-scented breeze across the hedgerows, and the church bells start to ring.  I will keep quiet about the fact that it also has six USB ports on the back as well as two on the front – that’s more than the locals could comprehend.

Wed, 27 Sep
Under a bright sun at exactly noon I approach Chez Dougie, an unassuming self-styled bistro in the northern outskirts of the little big city.  The sign says ‘closed’, but the door is open.  I stroll in.  A quick glance around the dark interior confirms that I am the first customer of the day.  In a far corner near the kitchen a table is occupied by a plump, bearded man with longish but neat hair chatting to a bleached blonde in leather.  He rises and approaches me smartly.  “Can I help you sir?”  I greet him and ask if they have a reservation in the name of Natalka Nesmith.  He regards me with a strange, very slight smile.  “Yes,” he eventually replies.  “We do.”  And he stands there motionless, just looking at me expectantly.  After a few seconds of silence, I look over at the only other person in the small restaurant.  Spiky hair, loud red lipstick, dark glasses, a dozen silver bangles on each wrist, she looks like an actress who’s finding it harder to get roles these days.  A woman preparing to do battle with middle age by deploying no-holds-barred glamour.  No-one I’ve ever met, surely.  But I’m wrong.  She grins broadly at me and gets up as I walk over to her.

“Hemlock!  Long time no see!”  We hug and stare at each other.  “This is amazing!” she shrieks.  The restaurant owner comes over to us, laughing.  “You remember Antonio,” Natalka says.  “Antonio Pappalardo.”  I look up and down at him.  The fat boy who used to sit at the back of the class and hiss “That’s rubbish – he’s lying” as the teacher imparted yet another vitally important piece of knowledge.  And now, 20-something years on, we are reunited, courtesy of the BoresComeBackToHauntYou.com website.

A few minutes later we are joined by Bernadette O’Looney, or Berg as she now is.  “I’d have married anyone to get rid of that name,” she admits as we catch up after all this time.  It transpires that Antonio wishes he could have done the same.  His brother’s two sons are renowned heroin addicts, and whenever he has to deal with local law enforcement he has to roll his eyes and say, “yes – those Pappalardos.”   Natalka has a five-year-old daughter who eats the carpets at home.  “I’m always lifting up rugs or looking behind furniture and finding she’s gnawed another hole.”  I suggest they serve her pieces of carpet on a plate for dinner.  “Tried it,” she sighs.

Over lunch we reminisce about the evil Nazi nuns who would suspend us from the ceiling by our thumbs and whip us bloody for not eating the gristle and gruel served up by the canteen.  I hear about people I had forgotten existed.  One lives in a house full of rabbits.  One was last heard of in Prague.  One trained his small boy to be a burglar and did time in prison.  One is a politician.  Most apparently classify their life since school days into first marriage and second marriage.  It all sounds so alien and exotic that I agree to a similar gathering on my next visit from run-of-the-mill Hong Kong.

Mon, 18 Sep
Originally intended to guard innocent citizens from merchants that lie and cheat, the Consumer Council unfortunately spends much of its time these days protecting the Hong Kong people from their own stupidity.  For example, strolling along Queens Road this golden autumn morning, pondering my flight to foreign parts this evening, I find myself almost overwhelmed by the urge to have someone put a lit candle in my ear. But I don’t succumb to this impulse. Some deep instinct within myself begs me to reconsider. Candles are intended to aid sight and have no obvious connection with our auditory organs, do they? And melted wax burns. So the strange craving passes. For the less disciplined among us, however, the Consumer Council remains vigilant in warning of the hazards of placing burning objects into sensitive and useful parts of the body, while implicitly advising practitioners of holistic wellness into which orifice they can put their candles.

Tue, 19 Sep
Mid-morning, and after a few hours’ drive west the bus from the airport pulls into the small big city. I get a taxi to take me out to Stonegallows Hall – a meandering journey through downtown degradation, vibrant inner suburbs, leafy outer banlieus, science park and mall-splattered exurbia and, finally, quiet country lanes knee-deep in falling leaves and horse manure. In the regenerated inner city neighbourhood we pass a silver-coloured police SUV with CITY CENTRE TEAM on the side. A cop in body armour, festooned with matt black electronic and other gadgetry, stands behind yellow ‘crime scene’ barrier tape. The taxi driver says someone was shot dead there the night before.  But the main problem, he tells me, is the traffic. After 20 years, he wants a change. Are there any jobs going in Hong Kong?

You can tell you’re not in Hong Kong any more when you see…

• Three tattoo/body piercing shops in a quarter-mile strip of main street.
• Flabby, early middle-aged, peroxide-blonde mothers (apparently customers of aforementioned self-mutilation emporia) passing bags of candy and burgers through the railings of a high school where the canteen now serves only salads, fish, vegetables and low-fat yoghurt.
• A weird new species of tree that has invaded and is thriving in all types of surroundings. It is significantly taller than most native varieties, with a straight vertical trunk. The branches are all at the very top, evenly spaced and sticking out just a few feet, dead horizontally. They then point sharply upwards, perpendicular. The entire body is covered with leaves of an identical, non-autumnal hue. It looks even more out of place than would a mobile phone mast.
• A police car flashing a message through a display panel in its rear window – GET OFF PHONE NOW.
• A headline about seven-year-olds worrying about their appearance. They are using laxatives to keep themselves thin.

Eventually, I am dropped off outside the family seat. If I were a member of the Narikot tribe in Nepal, the local women would come out and wash my feet and then drink the water to welcome me back. In Russia, I would be greeted with an offering of bread and salt. Here, before I can even drop my bags by the front door, I am presented with a modem, two ADSL filters and a length of cabling. After a year’s absence, I have come at just the right time to get the broadband connection up and running.

Wed, 13 Sep

“That stupid diary of yours – it was actually quite good on Monday.”  Pleasantly proportioned Administrative Office Winky Ip eases herself into the opposite seat at the Foreign Correspondents Club.  “But then yesterday it went back to being total rubbish.”  I ask her why, and she looks at me in amazement.

“The Greater Pearl River Delta Business Council!” she blurts out.  “How could you miss out the Greater Pearl River Delta Business Council?  They were the first people to realize that Hong Kong should grasp the opportunities presented by China’s 11th Five-Year Plan!”

Seeing my bewilderment, she uses her extensive Civil Service training to explain everything in a tone of voice so condescending that it drives the waitresses away.  “It was the Council’s perception that led to the Economic Summit on Monday.  And the participants there recommended…”  She glances down at something in her lap.  “… numerous strategic measures with great foresight and insight.  And in the coming months they will develop a pragmatic and feasible action agenda for the Government, the business sector and public organizations.  The implementation timetable of these measures will match the 11th Five-Year Plan period.”  She looks up at me again.  “You see now?  The action agenda will form the economic strategy for the next five-year term of the Hong Kong Government.”

I think I start to get it.  This is to do with the Chief Executive’s declaration that positive non-interventionism was a poisonous theory pushed by capitalist-roaders in our schools.  “Exactly,” says Winky, glancing at her crib sheet again.  “We now realize that the Hong Kong Government needs to take the initiative and identify areas where Hong Kong can contribute to the nation.”  She looks up again and smiles.

I am so excited that I think I will nominate Sir Bow-Tie for a Shaw Prize – the grand award that recognizes outstanding achievements among Mainlanders and a few other people and compensates them for their mysterious and tragic inability to win a real Nobel by giving each of them a million bucks left over from the glory days of the Hong Kong film industry.  It will somehow make everything complete.

The most magnificent Sir Run Run Shaw quote ever comes to mind…

Interviewer – “Of all the hundreds of movies you made over the decades, which one was your favourite?”

Sir Run-Run (without pausing) – “The one that made the most money.”

Fri, 15 Sep

I am not accustomed to asking the two Filipino elves if they felt the earth move last night, but I find myself doing so when they report for duty at Perpetual Opulence Mansions this morning.  I get good-natured sneers.  “That was nothing!  In my province that happens every day, and we get big ones most months when lots of houses collapse and hundreds of people are crushed to death.”

The other shrugs.  “Your people are lucky there!  Where I’m from, we get huge tremors all the time.  Hens stop laying eggs, herds of elephants stampede inland, there are strange lights in the sky, and then the ground bounces up and down and whole villages are swallowed up.  And it rains fish.  And we have a volcano in the middle of a lake, and one day that will blow up and kill millions of people!”

To my relief, the Mid-Levels Escalator is abuzz with mature accounts reflecting the true seriousness of the Great Hong Kong Earthquake of 2006.  “I was sitting in bed reading,” I tell several of my fellow commuters, “and I heard a distant rumbling noise lasting four or five seconds.  It wasn’t like thunder – the sound was even.  And I could feel a slight shuddering.  My immediate thought, after all the rain recently, was that it was a landslide, and some tower block was slipping down a hill.”  Mr Wong the banker describes how he was sitting at home and heard a distant rumbling noise lasting four or five seconds and felt a slight shuddering.  Mr Lee the teacher says he was watching TV and didn’t notice anything.  Then Ms Chan the marketing manager tells us how she heard a distant rumbling noise lasting four or five seconds and felt a slight shuddering.  It doesn’t get much more exciting than this.

Mon, 11 Sep
Christine Loh’s trouble-making Civic Exchange think tank continues its unending quest to undermine respect for the Government by producing smart-ass policy proposals.  This time, it is a plan to reduce Hong Kong’s air pollution within 24 months.

As with its policy papers on the Central waterfront, the electricity industry, constitutional reform and much else, the group implicitly attacks our officials.  It damages morale among civil servants by presuming that outsiders have the capability to formulate policy and the right to present such ideas to the public as if they were somehow on an equal basis with those of trained professionals.  It further humiliates our hard-working and selfless Civil Service by employing such reckless methods as lateral, critical and creative thinking.  This enables Civic Exchange to produce initiatives that strike many taxpayers – who don’t understand the realities like Administrative Officers do – as actually superior to those of the Government.

This is extremely disturbing.  The group’s recommendations blatantly disregard the interests of various sectors, focusing instead on the well-being of the population as a whole – a recipe for unimaginable disruption to our stability and prosperity.

Mercifully, as a reassuring thud-thud noise emanating from Lower Albert Road reminds us, there is a time-honoured way to manage this threat.  Like every other publication by this pesky mob of arrogant citizen-action, civil society fanatics, it will be cast with amused contempt into the nearest bin within seconds of being dropped on any bureaucrat’s desk.

Tue, 12 Sep
In recent years we have had the Pan-Pearl River Delta Regional Cooperation and Development Forum, the 2004 Hong Kong Economic Summit – Leveraging on the Mainland & Engaging Ourselves Globally, the Hong Kong/Guangdong Cooperation Joint Conference, the Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement, and too many other talking shops and symbolic institutional structures for bandwidth to accommodate.  Somewhere out there, we also have a Commission on Strategic Development, which has a Committee on Economic Development and Economic Cooperation with the Mainland.  And now we have the Economic Summit on China’s 11th Five-Year Plan and Development of Hong Kong, with the usual, depressingly predictable list of participants.

The common threads running through all of these events and initiatives are hand-wringing, even alarming, doubts and fears about Hong Kong’s future economic ‘positioning’, and constant mutual assurances that ‘integration’ with the Mainland will save us.  There is a Gordian knot of subtexts…

• Hong Kong is a weak and worthless place whose people are dependent on the munificence of the kindly Communist regime for their future well-being.  It is arrogant and disloyal to imagine that we can thrive without the help of the Motherland like we did before the British left.  This is why we must ‘focus on the economy’ and not upset Beijing about political reform.
• Laissez-faire affectations are out.  The Hong Kong Government now has the leading role to play in plotting our future economic course, and that role may be to beg Beijing for assistance or protection.  Ability to arrange favours from the Central People’s Government, such as an ever-increasing stream of ragged Mainland tourists or creaking companies seeking IPOs, is a key requirement of local leadership.  The importance of foreigners to the local economy is waning.
• We must cling to our existing strengths – financial services, tourism, the port – however tenuous some of them may be getting.  Failing that, we must look to our past and see if we can go back to having a manufacturing base.  Alternatively, we can consider Singapore-style planning, in which officials attempt to pick and subsidize winners in glamorous-sounding space-age tech-type industries.  Under no circumstances will we make space for any new industries or players by scrapping the high land-price policy, cutting spending on unnecessary infrastructure, trimming the bloated public sector or anything else that threatens the interests of the civil service-property cartel regime.
• Mainland cities that are developing fast from their old, low bases do not despise us for being un-taxed crybabies looking for free lunches from Beijing.  They do not take delight in seeing us held back economically by our frozen political structure.  They take no pleasure in gaining competitive advantages in more and more of our blue-collar and white-collar activities while we stand still.  They do not drool at the thought of getting their hands on our vast financial reserves in the guise of cross-border development schemes.  They do not hate our guts.  They love us, and if we have enough partnership, integration and cooperation, we will all live happily ever after.

When will it make sense for us all to move to Shenzhen?  Some say 10 years, some say five.  Maybe this latest summit will provide the answer.