Big Lychee, Various Sectors

The mood on the Mid-Levels Escalator this morning is one of balmy indifference to just about everything. It is 7.45, and not one, not two, but all three 7-Elevens between Soho and Queens Road have still not had the South China Morning Post delivered. But life goes on. The building on the corner between the ‘Ivan the Cossack’ Russian restaurant and Lyndhurst Terrace – home of the old Flow second-hand bookstore – has been evacuated and is soon to come down, to be replaced no doubt by an oversize monster tower of chrome and glass, housing shops selling perfumed candles, hand-crafted luxury stationery or perverted swimwear like the one a few doors up. There is nothing anyone can do.

And for how much longer will Yuet Yuen Restaurant, purveyor of fine congee to the neighbourhood gentry for countless decades, hold out? It is virtually the last family owned eatery – or retailer of any description – for miles around. In the corner, I find delectable Administrative Officer Winky Ip setting her Blackberry alongside her noodles on the Formica tabletop and scrolling through her messages. “Oh God,” she mutters. “It’s that time of the year again. The annual meeting with the Nigels and Brians.”

Seeing that I have no interest in knowing about it, she carefully explains. “They’re a bunch of men – Westerners, mostly. British, I suppose. They’re… How can I put it? They’re very pleasant, polite, well-spoken, clean. And just incredibly dull.”

“Let me guess.” I reply. “They’re on expatriate contracts, have mousy wives from back home whose parents were shopkeepers. Two kids doing averagely at an international school. They golf.”

“God – you know them!”

“No, no, it’s a type. They’re usually engineers with the MTR, airline pilots, actuaries – precise, unwittingly pedantic, devoid of creativity. And, yes, boring. Why are you meeting them?”

Winky tells me how every year this group of perpetual 12-year-olds insists on putting forward a proposal for a Formula One race track in Hong Kong. And every year, she says, the civil servants thank them and say they will think about it.

“Wrong response!” I tell her. “What you do is this. You get the runty one with a mustache – there is one like that, right?”

“Um, yes.”

“There always is. You point at him and ask ‘how big is the apartment you live in?’ Then, when he says ‘Over a thousand square feet’ you tell him that the average family in Hong Kong lives in just 450 square feet, and when he moves his wife and kids into a place that small, and if he still thinks a huge race track is a neat use of space, he should come back and see you.”

“But I live in a thousand square foot,” she says.

“Yes, but you’re not asking for a Formula One race track.”

“Oh, right, I see.”

Are our civil servants getting more and more dense by the day?

It seems supplies of the SCMP won’t start dribbling through into this part of Central until later in the day (like in Shanghai, where it gets delivered at 4pm, except they don’t cut bits out here). So I flick through the Standard, and to my delight I behold a glimmer of hope. A little gleaming chance that the Hong Kong we all know and love lives on.

A teenager died last year – or tragically died, as everyone does these days – after throwing himself from the sixth floor of his high school. At the inquest now underway the distraught mother, who blames the school, expressed her grief and anguish with unforgettable, heartbreaking passion: “My son was 17 when he died. He would have been eligible for the HK$6,000 cash handout [by the government] had he lived.” Who would want to be anywhere else?

I declare the weekend open.

From the Asia Weekly supplement in today's China Daily

Another calm and relaxing morning in Perpetual Opulence Mansions. The building’s breadwinners have glided down the hill on the wondrous, semi-high-speed transport infrastructure that is the Mid-Levels Escalator to their bustling offices in the central business district of Asia’s leading international financial, cultural, arbitration and wine hub. Children have been dropped off at their summer French, piano, painting and fun differential-calculus activities classes. Frail grandparents, in the households that treasure traditional values of filial piety, are spoon-fed, washed, walked and otherwise amused by lowly paid Indonesian girls who steal samples of their wards’ fingernail clippings for use in casting magic spells. For the next eight or nine hours, the whole block, like all the exclusive residences in these prosperous streets overlooking Hong Kong’s Central District, is under the control of its Filipino maids.

Mindful of the extortionate bills levied by Mr Li Ka-shing’s Hongkong Electric, I adjust the air conditioning in my little home office. As I sip my oolong and peruse the news on-line, the doorbell rings. I leap up to answer it and find a small, dusky lady clutching a booklet titled How to Share Christ Effectively. “They’re busy,” I tell the shocked face. “And yes – I am in! Didn’t expect that did you?” She scuttles off and I pace through the sweltering living room of the apartment where the two Filipino elves are kneeling and carefully scrubbing the parquet with little toothbrushes.

“Just a Jehovah’s Witness,” I lie. “The security guard has taken him away to tear his tongue out with red hot tongs.” They have done over half the floor in the last two hours and are glistening with sweat. Our socialistic, interventionist government, not content with taxing the neighbourhood’s hard-working middle class half to death and driving businesses to the wall by imposing a minimum wage, has issued an impertinent decree ordering employers to Assess the risk of heat stroke to employees – tremble and obey. “Alright,” I announce to the two figures at my feet, “you can have two minutes off to drink water.”

In the kitchen, I see a list. A very long list. ‘Maria, Jesus, Trixie, Ritzy, Vilma, Aunt Maribeth, Uncle Bong-Bong, Aunt Marcelina, Cousin Sweety, Cousin Manny, Cousin Nilda…’ It goes on and on.

“Are these by any chance the family members you plan to bring over here if domestic helpers get right of abode?” I ask the senior of my loyal and devoted pair of ‘part-times’.

“Some of them,” she replies.

The newspapers report that the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment of Hong Kong is warning of dire repercussions should a group of maids win a forthcoming court case in which they claim residency on the grounds that they have lived in Hong Kong for seven years. Millions of brown-skinned, loincloth-wearing savages would descend upon Hong Kong and roam the streets of Kowloon looking for furry animals to kill with their blowpipes. Food supplies would run out, and unemployment would rise to 50% while the government built dozens of vast new public housing estates. Or something like that. Our leaders might ask Beijing to declare the law to mean the opposite of what it says, or maybe it would resort to sinister-sounding stopgap measures, possibly involving cattle trucks and forced marches.

The DAB is a pro-communist party with a support base among the – non-maid-employing – grassroots in the fetid slums across the harbour.  Its voters are the sort of people whose relatives moved from the Mainland and had to wait seven years before qualifying for welfare; they don’t much approve of foreigners at the best of times and particularly dislike dark ones, especially the uppity sort who are happier and better at English than they are.

Maybe they have a point: could we handle so many people grinning all the time?

“So where would they all live?” I ask.

“Lantau,” comes the reply, “near where we catch squid at night.”

The deputy elf chimes in: “There are free water buffalo there!”

Mention of beasts of burden leads me to glance at the clock. They have had 15 seconds more watering time than required by law.

Aujourd’hui, l’ordinateur est mort – as a novel jointly written by Albert Camus and Isaac Asimov might have begun. I sit and stare, paying my last respects to the lifeless screen before me in the gwailo’s lair on the top floor of S-Meg Tower in the bustling heart of Asia’s international business hub. It is hardly surprising. So tired had my trusty old office PC become that its creaky Windows 2000 would take over five minutes to wake up in the morning, and then a bit longer to digest the various programs as they started up. During the day it would wheeze away, its tiny memory full to the brim, writing web pages, documents and other things onto the hard drive and reading them off again, trying desperately to keep up with even my modest multitasking work style. And then, at the day’s end it would take what seemed like an eternity to shut down, so I had taken to yanking the power supply just to get it over with. Maybe that’s what killed it.

I leap to my feet and stride confidently out into Private Office, mentally preparing myself to order various dull-witted and slow-moving deltas and epsilons to do things. I start with Ms Fang the hunter-killer secretary.

“My computer has broken down, for good this time. I need a new one. Now. Can we [note the clever psychology here: ‘we’] get Ricky from IT to, um, do something?”

She looks at me sullenly, grasping a small furry Hello Kitty hot water bottle to her cramp-racked abdomen – though frankly there is no right time of the month to ask her for favours.

More psychology: “You can tell him that I have important work to do for the Big Boss, and if I can’t do it, I will tell the Big Boss that it is all Ricky’s fault.”

The opportunity to cause someone mental anguish fills Ms Fang with warmth and enthusiasm. Neither of us needs to add that the next anyone would hear of lank-haired, terminal acne victim Ricky under this scenario would be when the police broke the window of his apartment to let the charcoal-scented carbon monoxide out.

And so, the good news: Ricky is installing a brand new PC, with 4GB of memory and a stupendous 764GB hard drive within minutes. (Windows 7. Surprisingly good, though I suppose Microsoft stole all the ideas from Apple.)

All my several dozen gigabytes of obscure music downloads, vast collection of photos and illustrations harmlessly copied and pasted from cyberworld, recipes, the ‘art’, the book and nearly 10 years’ worth of diary are painstakingly backed up on a variety of external drives, memory sticks, my home PC and on-line, so no worries there. However, by some tragic oversight, years of work-related material for the Chairman of S-Meg Holdings are on the dead PC’s hard drive and nowhere else.

I catch Ricky just as he is about to drag the remains of my PC down to his hovel on the 10th floor. As I explain how vital it is for him to retrieve the documents, he breaks into a sweat. The fluorescent lighting of the foyer near the elevators reflects off his oily skin with growing intensity. “I don’t think it is possible,” he mumbles. “I… I checked.” Unable to bring myself to touch him, I order him onto his knees to pull the device from the carcass and give it to me, then to go downstairs and strangle himself to death.

The obvious thing to do would be to pass it to Ms Fang and ask her to get a proper IT person from the big world out there to crack the hard drive. If a Navy SEAL had grabbed the thing from the flames of Osama Bin Laden’s hideout in Abbottabad, you can bet every bit of data would be unveiled. But I have already used up my daily quota of cooperation. And besides, the Big Boss’s scowling PA is in even less of a mood to help than usual, having spied the vast, shiny new monitor sitting on my desk and erupted in a silent, seething pout of envy.

In the pantry, I have a quiet word with her very capable and aptly named assistant Angel. Oh, how everyone – from the Big Boss down to the three Stanleys in the mailroom – looks forward to Ms Fang’s annual two weeks’ vacation, when Angel takes charge and everything works smoothly and sweetly before another 50 weeks’ of spite and incompetence begin.

“Top urgent ah?” she says, taking the chunk of ‘electric brain’ and sprinting to her desk to flick through a Rolodex.

Thus it is that within barely an hour, a techie from outside the company is in our conference room, surrounded by the inevitable photos of the Big Boss meeting President Hu Jintao, successfully decanting the important bits out of the deceased machine. As I suspected was possible. His skin, I note, appears flawless.

The first email to arrive on my sparkling new PC is from none other than wild American friend Odell, informing me of a curious development at our second home, the IFC Mall branch of Pacific Coffee. The outlet, he excitedly writes, is starting a weekly Ladies’ Night, in which people who do not have penises will be entitled to 50% off ‘liqueur coffee or other alcoholic drinks every Wednesday starting from 6pm’. 

The mood on the Mid-Levels Escalator this morning is one of mild bemusement as Hong Kong’s industrious and clean-living middle class absorb the latest news about the government’s increasingly complex and laborious efforts to give us all HK$6,000 each to spend on candy. After months of agonizing effort, officials have produced a schedule, stretching out into the distant future – into an era when the concept of money as we understand it may no longer even have any meaning. They have drawn up a barely fathomable plan to release the money in stages to recipients according to age, starting with the oldest and moving down to younger cohorts at such a slow pace that even the current 18-24-year-olds will be occupying well-tended niches in multistory columbaria by the time their cheque is ready.

Over chicken congee in the fashionable and elegant surroundings of the Foreign Correspondents Club, I get the chance to quiz the equally fashionable and elegant Administrative Officer Winky Ip about this ill-fated handout.

“What you should do,” I tell her, “is give every immigration officer a big box of money under their desk. And then every time a permanent resident passes through the border entering or leaving Hong Kong, the officer can check the records to see if that person’s been paid yet. If they haven’t, they can lean down and hand over the cash and say, “Here you go, careful how you spend it.”

The sleek civil servant casts a wary eye over me. “Many of the elderly and less advantaged members of the community don’t travel overseas,” she says.

“They would if you did that,” I point out.

She pushes her bowl to one side and sighs. She fingers the Fendi Borsa Baguette bag sitting on the chair next to her, clearly wondering whether to hit me with it. “Let me explain the whole thing to you,” she finally says in her finest, it-took-months-of-training, condescending bureaucrat’s tone.

It is a lengthy public-administration saga. The whole principle of the government giving its personal wealth away, willy-nilly, to this bunch of 7 million complete strangers who happen to be hanging around all the time is, she stresses, totally without precedent. There are layers and layers of systemic and institutional protection against imprudent use of these valuable resources, right down to a giant three-headed dog guarding a dungeon somewhere beneath the West Wing of the government offices in Central. The weird HK$200 bonus for not spending the money is just a distraction, to make people think plans are well advanced.

“Look,” I break in, “why is it taking so long? In Macau and Singapore they just send the cash out, end of story.”

She grabs the handbag and I brace myself for a wack on the side of the head. Instead she opens it and pulls out a sheet of paper titled ‘Line to Take’. She reads from it. “It takes a relatively longer administrative process than places like Macau and Singapore because Hong Kong has more stringent rules on personal data privacy,” she announces. I am silenced. It took a few months to think up, but it sounds half-credible. Of course it helps that personal data privacy is one of those issues, like carbon offsets, that send you into almost instant slumber.

I am about to ask her whether our genius policymakers have considered the possibility that citizens will demand another HK$6,000 at the next budget in early 2012. Then it dawns on me: they’ll still be waiting for the first one.

What a brilliant way of managing people’s expectations. By the time the six grand turns up, it will be enough to buy a pack of gum with – less than the average bureaucrat’s Air Conditioning Allowance for one month – and we’ll all be dead anyway. The government’s very own, not-for-sharing never-ever wealth remains secure.

Back from a four-day trip to Bangkok, and I find myself in the conference room on the top floor of S-Meg Tower, in the central district of Asia’s perennially dynamic international business hub. The Big Boss fiddles with the ceramic three-headed toad. He shouts at someone through the door. He restores the toad to the northward-facing direction it requires to maximize its positive influence on the family-run conglomerate’s revenues. After thinking in silence for a few seconds, he makes a firm decision and walks out, telling me to wait.

So I do what any right-thinking person does in such circumstances when he has a good view of anyone approaching through partially frosted glass: I rummage through the morning’s correspondence. Could there be, by any chance, something as diverting as the recent multi-rant emails from the expat housewife?

As luck would have it, I find one interesting letter. It is from Anita, the wife of Nelson Auyeung and an old college friend of the Big Boss’s younger sister. The impertinence and presumptuousness of the woman is staggering. Could the great man sign a letter – thoughtfully already composed and printed out – recommending the couple’s son Conan for an expensive and exclusive educational institution? I can’t resist reading the attachment hopefully awaiting the Big Boss’s signature …

To The Principle, Harrow Kindergarten

It is my great pleasure to recommend to your goodself Conan Auyeung for admission to your highly regarded kindergarten.

I have known Conan’s parents, Nelson and Anita, very closely for many years. Nelson is the chief financial officer of Everhype Asia, the prominent consumer goods distributor, who has a Masters Degree from Ohio University, and Anita is a highly respected senior director of the Hong Kong Institute of Human Resources Management Professionals.

I believe very strongly that Conan, who was 18 months old in April, would greatly benefit from your esteemed school. Conan is an exceptionally bright, ambitious, communicative, fast-learning and hard-working child with very impressive social skills and creative (including musical) ability. He would most certainly be a popular and valuable asset to his class and the school as a whole.

I can also guarantee that Nelson and Anita will be very supportive and encouraging to Conan, and indeed to the overall school community. Anita’s uncle is Mr Mok Gwok-hing, the founder of Nice Day paper hygiene products company, who has made generous endowments to a number of educational establishments and takes a very keen interest in Conan’s development.

In conclusion, I sincerely believe that Conrad’s application deserves every consideration.

Yours sincerely,

Mercifully, I have just the thing for this…

Thurs, 2 June 2006
On the top floor of S-Meg Tower, I’m still trying to work out how the travel companies can make a profit from these package deals.  The money doesn’t seem to add up.  The retail price for our tour, according to Fat Karen, was HK$500 per person, plus a HK$150 tip for the guide and driver.  Assuming that these two Mainlanders live off these gratuities and commissions, the company gets HK$5,000 from a typical group of five couples on a three-day, two-night trip.  From this, it has to pay for…

• 10 room-nights at a 4-star hotel, with 20 breakfasts
• 10 fancy hotel dinners
• 30 basic lunches
• Around 50 admissions to temples, etc
• Yo-Yo’s salary
• Fuel for minibus, around 1,000km
• Highway and bridge tolls (of which there are many)

Even allowing for bulk-buying, rebates and the fact that the Mainland is dirt cheap, they must be operating on razor-thin margins.  From the customer’s point of view, it is undeniably a bargain.  If you spent your entire life on these tours, it would cost less than HK$8,000 a month – cheaper than living in Hong Kong at a fixed abode.  My retirement problems are solved.

Wed, 31 May
And so we bid farewell to historic Shantou and set off on our journey back to Hong Kong.  But not before visiting one last attraction – possibly the weirdest of the trip.

As our driver expertly lurches between potholes, inter-city buses and over-laden trucks, it occurs to me that, despite being in a state of constant repair like many main roads in the Western world, the Shen Shan Expressway is unusual.  There is zero roadkill to be seen – something I will ask my companions about over lunch.  There are banners warning of the death penalty for highway robbery.  There are toll booths in the least expected places, manned by toothsome young women who raise their left hand, palm outwards, as each vehicle pulls away.  And there are frequent signs saying ‘Next Exit 30km’ or more, meaning that it provides no access to dozens of sizeable communities in its path through this well-populated region.

The effects of this seem evident when we pull off somewhere in Shanwei and have to double back around 10 miles, through increasingly ramshackle and lifeless towns.  After some twists and turns, and another set of tollbooths for a stretch of modern road leading from nowhere to nowhere, we end up on a muddy lane going through a village with old but reasonably neat piles of rotting garbage on the sidewalk and plaster peeling off the mouldy buildings.  At the end of the lane is a new, very long, tall, beautifully whitewashed wall.  We stop outside ornate gates, which a man opens for us.  We drive into a courtyard and alight, while another man opens an equally grandiose set of interior gates.  We stroll into a massive square, with a fountain, a garden to one side, various statues, ornamental pillars and a large building in the far corner.  Is the initial impression of Tiananmen intentional?

Apart from a few caretakers and gardeners, we are alone here.  This is a freshly built monument to the glory of one Lam Sai-kam (various transliterations are possible).  I think I know my tycoons, but I fail to pin this one down.  Something to do with garments, says Boris, before adding, “probably money laundering.”  This place would be a mausoleum, but for the fact that, apparently, Mr Lam is very much alive.  At one end of the main parade-ground expanse is a statue of the great man, and a series of friezes showing his and his wife’s works, helping the young and old, leading, inspiring and building the community.  Kim Jong-il would drool.

The house is a series of courtyards, linking open-walled chambers over-decorated with carvings, statues, plants and fancy ceilings.  Lam apparently intends this as an example of what Southern Chinese homes used to be like – before they somehow turned into the crumbling and cracked, soot-stained slums invisible just yards away behind the towering walls.  A smaller square to one side is lined by 300 or so marble panels featuring poems and pictures offered by shoe-shiners from Guangdong, Hong Kong, Macau, Beijing, other provinces and, of course, Thailand.  It is hard to believe that this is the creation of a happy man.  The place warrants a separate page of photos.

If it’s Tues, 30 May 2006, this must be Shantou – historic city of contrasts, as evidenced by the breathtaking view from my hotel room. After the standard breakfast buffet of congee, baked beans, iceberg lettuce and cha siu bao, my team of intrepid explorers board the minibus and set off into the unknown.  “Chiuchow people make lots of money but they are very mean,” Boris informs us.  “When a couple get married, people just give them two oranges.  Also, they never throw orange peel away – they use it to make candy.  The men are famous for beating their wives.”

The first stop is another tea plantation, complete with another quick lesson on the noble art of making what I have long assumed to be an extremely tedious drink.  I now know that it is necessary to throw the first dash of hot water out of the pot to clean the leaves – the discarded liquid is known as ‘foot-wash water’.  The real purpose of our visit, however, is to try the farm’s honey and, in particular, a bitter, black jelly made from magic bee excrement, which is, inevitably, good for health.  So expensive is this precious substance that we are asked to contribute RMB10 towards the free sample.

Thus immune to fatigue, lack of virility, TB and other ailments, we proceed to Chaozhou to examine the old city, with its ancient walls and temple.  “Stick together,” Boris warns us, “there are lots of beggars and they are dangerous.”  I discover this the hard way on the steps of the Kaiyuan Temple (Tang Dynasty, destroyed during Cultural Revolution, rebuilt with funds from Li Ka-shing et al).  A blind woman (late Qing if she’s a day) on crutches lashes out at me viciously with a plastic bowl.  Ignoring Boris’s advice to curl up on the ground and pretend to be dead, I flee, slowing her down by zigzagging (they can only run in a straight line).  It was a close thing.   I would have gone down fighting.

Being off-limits to visitors, the monks’ quarters demand a quick peek through the courtyard doorway.  Their saffron robes hang from their verandas.  The asceticism of their lifestyle can be judged by the cheap, non-brand name air-conditioning units in the bedroom windows.

After a suitably frugal vegetarian lunch, at which everyone complains about the gritty rice and less-than-fresh stewed celery, we are on the road again, driving through a variety of light industrial suburbs.  One district is devoted to manufacturing toilets and sinks, and even sports a Ceramics Capital Middle School.  This gives way to the beads zone, which feeds the world’s inexplicable appetite for lurid, sequin-covered handbags.  Then we enter the neighbourhood of food additives, which gives way to muddy fields and dilapidated villages.  After 20 minutes, we turn off onto a rutted road leading past banana trees, filthy motorbike repair shops, nasty small concrete houses and occasional larger, luxury villas.  People sit around doing nothing – it’s as if we’ve suddenly left China and entered Southeast Asia.  The only movement is from chickens and dogs, and a few people’s heads turning to watch us.  The arrival of a tourist bus is clearly a bit of a novelty.  My fellow passengers are oblivious to all this, chatting about souvenirs and previous package tours.

Eventually, we get to Dragon Lake Village.  It is an old walled settlement.  Boris says it is so poor it qualifies for aid under the latest Five-Year Plan’s rural poverty reduction programme.  An expensive board outside welcomes tourists.  A few modern, shiny bilingual signs add a dash of incongruous colour to the streets, pointing out supposedly noteworthy features.  Otherwise, apart from decently maintained paving stones by local standards, it is untouched.  Sewers run down the middle of some streets, under metal grilling.  Plants grow through cracked roof tiles.  Reasonably clean but shabbily dressed folk tend little shops, waving flies away from orange-coloured chunks of drying tofu or sitting silently in unlit hovels behind a few jars of pickled plums.  Through windows and doorways, we spy women of all ages doing piece work – threading sequins, packing little items into plastic bags and gluing gold edging onto paper offerings for the dead.  They stare back.  Behind a barred window, in a room lined with shelves of dusty boxes, an apothecary in a white coat grinds something in a mortar and pestle.

Children peer out from alleyways and point at the strangers.  For the first time, my companions stop prattling.  Even after they get used to the smell, they are stumped.  The place is waiting to be turned into a theme park, but the government people who put the signs up never came back.  There is nothing for tourists to buy.  Nothing to pose before for the camera, grinning and making a ‘V’ sign.  We are bouncing along in the bus, halfway back to the food additives zone before normal chatter is resumed.  “They took us there because it’s free,” Fat Karen tells me.

Monday, 29 May 2006
My instructions are to find a Ms Chan at Peking Road, at 7am. How many Ms Chans will there be in a Tsimshatsui street? As it happens, she is easy to find, looking important in a bright blue travel agency uniform and holding a clipboard. Fat Karen and another of S-Meg Holdings’ lower-ranking female staff are also there, along with their respective spouses. The Spring dinner prize was a trip for two, they ask. Why didn’t I bring anyone with me?

“I have no friends,” I reply, “and if I did, I wouldn’t wish this on them, even assuming they would agree to come – which they wouldn’t.” As they digest this, we board a bus. It trundles through the morning traffic to call at exotic Shatin and mystical Fanling to pick up more victims. By the time we get to the border at Shataukok, there are, not counting the driver, a dozen of us – me, plus five, very average 30-something couples, and Ms Chan, who introduces herself as Yo-yo.

Once on Mainland territory, in a damp suburb of Shenzhen, we transfer to a minibus and are joined by our guide, Boris. We head east, and he assures us that our destination is safe. “People in Shantou and Chaozhou don’t speak Cantonese,” he admits, “but Chiuchow food is not strange. You can eat it with no problem.”

After passing through rush-hour traffic, we set off along the Shen Shan Expressway. We pass by suburbs devoted not only to light industry, but offices and shopping centres – the modern buildings rising from the woodland remind me of the exurban landscape around Washington DC, around areas like Tyson’s Corner, Herndon and Vienna. After 50 miles or so, we are surrounded by mountainous scrubland, much like the New Territories, except it goes on and on, like real wilderness. Just an hour away from the border.

I spy a business opportunity – lots of unused south-facing slopes begging to be subdivided into grave plots, with no-one’s feng shui to wreck. Looking around the minibus, I see I am alone in finding the scenery interesting. Every other fellow tourist is asleep. A few have brought little blow-up pillows that wrap around their necks, like air travellers who take things too seriously.

Lunch is in a cavernous but deserted tourist restaurant in a coastal settlement called Houmen. Fellow-travellers murmur their approval at the gwailo’s chopstick skills. I must have a very high IQ, they more or less venture to suggest. And who am I to disagree? Back on the bus, we zip past lychee orchards and duck and fish farms, while Boris tells us more about where we are going. “We are now in the Chiuchow area,” he declares. “These people traditionally are involved in smuggling, piracy and illegal emigration.” The road surface becomes rougher, and I wish I hadn’t had so many fishballs. “When we arrive at the hotel, you will have a seven course dinner,” Boris tells us. “After that, you are free. If you like, you can go to the night market and try typical Chiuchow beefballs.”

Thanks to maintenance works, the Shen Shan Expressway – a four-lane freeway in theory – is reduced to one lane in each direction for most of the second half of the 400-kilometre journey. It’s almost as bad as certain major roads in certain First World countries I can think of. At a Sinopec service station, I look around the little supermarket. Oil, car batteries, ice cream, cold drinks, big bottles of beer, jars of dried fruit peel and an impressive range of pornographic magazines and DVDs, gleefully defying their illegality in simplified characters.

Later on, we drop into a tea plantation and sample six different types of brew. Maybe I am mesmerized by the tea babes who hand out the little cups, but I am most taken with a variety called ‘one leaf’ and actually buy some. Initially tasting bitter, then becoming sweet to the palate, it seems to complement my personality. Or something.

On the outskirts of Shantou (aka Swatow), we visit a temple at the top of a mountain. “Chiuchow people are the Jews of China,” Boris informs us. “They make lots of money. So they like to renovate temples like this to give everyone the impression that they are honourable.” This site dates from the Ming dynasty and has a huge boulder hollowed out to make a chapel. We then visit another temple, funded by overseas Chinese billionaires and opened by the Queen of Thailand. It is aimed at encouraging people to seek simple and contented lives. And then a third temple, with a hot spring that cures all sorts of ailments. Or it might, but Boris has other ideas. “Don’t drink it,” he warns.

Finally, we drive into Shantou city. “This is the peanut candy capital of the world,” we are told, “and on your left is the TV tower, which is the worst one in China.” Boris points out the new apartment blocks in a suburb on reclaimed land. “These flats are very nice and they only cost…” At this point, his mobile phone goes. We all wait in suspense while he finishes the call. “…You can buy them for HK$300,000,” he concludes. Waaah!

“Most drug dealers are Chiuchow,” Boris tells us as we get out of the bus to check in to the Meritus Hotel. “This place is partially closed owing to lack of business. The bathrooms are really big – you can get four people in a shower.” Waaah!

I start the day stirring my congee in the booth with the window view in the charming Formica surroundings of Yuet Yuen restaurant – one of the last remaining family businesses in this edge of Central now largely blanketed with stores selling designer-label scented candles, fine handcrafted elite stationery, exclusive lifestyle collections of silver and glass ornaments, and impractically shaped jars of brightly coloured wellness products. Opposite me, ever-ravishing Administrative Officer Winky Ip dabs ladylike traces of chili onto her noodles and then turns her laptop round to show me something.

“Do you remember this email from about three years ago? It was originally sent to every legislator. Then your boss got it, my boss got it, every government minister and public figure got it.”

I take a look and it comes back to me immediately. It was one of those something-for-everyone rants by someone who had simply suffered too much injustice and had gone over the edge. It had expat (in fact, Singaporean) housewife anguish, middle-class rage, more than a dash of seething kiasu, and GENEROUS USE of UPPER CASE to MAKE THE POINT.

The last straw for this woman – and she was not alone – was a woeful government decision to retroactively suspend a levy paid by employers of Filipino and Indonesian maids. It all came down to whether the maid was hired before or after 1 August. Rather than rejoice in others’ good fortune, employers who had already signed a new contract and had to pay the HK$9,600 railed at the great unfairness of it all.

Dear Legco members, I strongly believe that the policy is SO UNFAIR to the employers who have just signed a new contract with our domestic maid.  I have just signed a contract to employ a domestic maid in July therefore unfortunately not able to benefit from this new policy.

Having been in Hong Kong for over 20 years and being a faithful tax-payer all along, I am EXTREMELY DISAPPOINTED  with the Hong Kong SAR government.   I am not able to take  advantage of any of your government benefits, such as  purchasing a government subsidised flat, government medical  (how to, when you see hundreds of Chinese immigrants who  never pay tax queuing up, etc.), crapy local school systems  which made the children become ‘white mouse’ (B.T.W, I sent my kids to ESF, a British International school in order to  avoid further suffering), despite the loads of money that I  have been paying for the tax to the Hong Kong government.

Keep paying and paying to SAR HK Government, contributing so  much to Hong Kong, but yet NOT A BIT OF RETURN at all.  And  on the contrarary have to suffer from the soaring inflation,  depreciation of Hong Kong currency against Singapore dollars  and Renminbi, etc., it’s high time that I should decide to LEAVE HONG KONG FOREVER, together with my family.  Indeed, Hong Kong is NO LONGER AN ATTRACTIVE PLACE FOR FOREIGNERS TO STAY ON, ALL MY FRIENDS AGREE TOO! I urge that the new policy be taken with immediate effect  so that we will not suffer further.  I am getting more and more disappointed with Hong Kong Government, especially our  CEO, Mr. Tsang. The scandals in the Hong Kong Government have fueled my disappointment.

I grin at the memory of this nice little rant arriving in the email in-boxes of Hong Kong’s great and good. “She sent another one just the next day, didn’t she?” I ask Winky. A few taps at the keyboard, and up it comes…

Dear Legco, Both my husband and I are completely disappointed with our Hong Kong Government!  My husband loss his job in April this year, as a result of the MTR-KCR deal.  He is a surveyor by professional.  Being a Master Degree holder, he has also other professional such as royal institute, a law degree, a member of many renowned industry associations.  His pay at KCR was HK$48000/- per month.

Tell me, is HK$48000 too high a pay for a professional who have spent years of studies, burning midnight oil to study, to obtain one after another professional qualifications? Despite his significant contributions to the industry of Hong Kong, pathetically, the Hong Kong Government directly led him to become jobless due to the MTR-KCR deal.  My husband, together with 11 other surveyors were being fired together in April 2008.  Needless to say, everybody was very distressed, upset, disappointed with Hong Kong Government!

My husband was lucky enough to be able to get a job to work in a consultancy firm in Hong Kong, however, unfortunately, most of the others have to force to work in overseas country such as Dubai, Middle East, India, etc. and to be parted with their family members.  When my husband queried as to why he was being sacked, they simply told him that his response to the firm commissioned by MTR was somewhat too brief as he had only related to them only 5 years of his past experience.  As a matter of fact, a standard template CV prepared by MTR consultant, required them to only list out the past 5 years of their work experience but he ended up being fired because of falling into a snare set up by MTR!  I hope the Government will seriously conduct an investigation into this case re MTR recruitment process.

Isn’t it pathetic, these people have contributed significantly to Hong Kong, but ended up having to FAREWELL TO HONG KONG. What we fail to understand that while most developed countries will strive to sustain talent workers, the Hong Kong Government on the contrary, force out the talents to overseas and send them away like a ‘christmas gift’!  Therefore, it’s no matter that Hong Kong Government is getting more and more hopeless and the recent poll re survey of Donald Tsang explicitly should tell us how we citizens in Hong Kong are very, extremely, fed up with Donald ‘Duck’ Tsang!!!   Furthermore, all our friends from the middle working class, also share our views about the Hong Kong Government.

They all way that Hong Kong Government is getting more and more BRAINLESS, USELESS, HOPELESS and living in hong Kong is MEANINGLESS!!!

P.S.  now the phillipinos maid commotions!!!!  And our Mr Donald Tsang is happily enjoying his trip in North China. Anyway, we all don’t expect any miracles from him!

P.P.S.  Sadly, I previously quite admire Mr. Tsang, but the recent scandals, such as recruitment of senior government officers holding foreign passports, now the domestic maids issue (I just signed a contract)

At which point, the email fizzled out, leaving just the echoed screech of someone who was borderline unhinged, or at least getting a huge amount off her chest. I would have liked to have written it as fiction, but I’m not that good.

“Well guess what?” Winky says, leaning forward to me. “She’s back.” She turns the screen to me again. The raving Singaporess has been stirred back to life and moved to email the entire Hong Kong establishment by the recent minor spot of bother the MTR got into when its ad agency stupidly threatened to withhold future advertising from a newspaper that ran a negative article on the company besides one of its advertisements…

Dear all, I am writing to express my ‘happiness’ and ‘relieve’ over the recent scandals about MTRC, in connection to OMD advertising issues, last year’s Optopus whereby we ignorant citizens discovered that our personal data had been sold out to insurance firm, etc.

The truth about MTRC, being a public corporation, funded by Government, has no social responsibility at all!  My husband, together with 11 other highly educated, professionals who had contributed to their utmost efforts to work on various Airport and other MTRC infrastructure projects since 1990, had been ruthlessly fired by MTRC!  This group of talented personnel, who had strived for the best interest of HK, were sadly being disregarded by MTRC.  Right after the retrenchment, we got an update that all these professionals left HK for other countries such as Singapore, Canada, Australia, USA, and in our case, Beijing, and due to their departure, their spouses also left HK.

For me, I had just went to the HK Home Affairs yesterday to declare permanent departure from HK, having lived here for over 20 years, to go back to Singapore and also live in Beijing sometimes, to reunion with my husband.  So you see, the HK government has balatantly loss tens, and perhaps hundreds of this elite group who had in the past contributed to paying a substantial amount of monies of tax, a faithfully group of tax payers BUT NEVER EVER ENJOY THE BENEFITS OF HK.  For example, we never have the opportunity to apply for government flat due to our income, never have the courage to give birth in a government hospital due to a chaotic influx of mainland Chinese women who literally occupy all the beds and fill up all government hospitals, my daughter goes to an international school in HK as we never trusted the ever changing, keep on changing, treating all children like ‘white rats’ ‘wonderful’ education in HK (also the shockingly high standard of English teachers over in HK, majority of whom flung their English test), government officials fetching heft salaries, but keep making wrong decisions and never act in the interest of the public, etc.

In retrospect, when I see our lives in HK, we have been paying and paying annually taxes to the HK government, BUT we have to ask ourselves ‘what have HK Government done to return our kindness, especially to the middle class professionals’?  No more infrastructure jobs available to sustain highly professional engineers, there also goes their spouses who, like me, used to work in an investment bank, but HAVE TO LEAVE HK (no choice, otherwise, I might face the consequence of divorce from my husband, having been living apart for so long, it’s high time to join him).

All of us, the past victims of MTRC ex employees were EXTREMELY THRILLED AND JOYOUS WHEN WE LEARNED OF THE RECENT NEWS ABOUT MTRC.  We feel that all the senior management staff of MTRC OUGHT TO BE FIRED as they are a group of brainless, lazy, bureaucratic, ruthless, bunch of shits!  There were 11 talented surveyors, together 11 of their spouses left HK permanently, as ‘eliminated’ by MTRC.  I had also contributed to the prosperity of HK, but sadly had to be ‘eliminated’ by MTRC as well as HK Government.  I am sure you folks have heard about this Chinese proverb ‘you drink the water and you must remember the source of the water’, ie. be grateful to people who are kind to you, BUT ironically, after all we had help built HK to be a  successful place as it is, MTRC (funded by HK government) ‘chopped’ ‘executed’ us, treating us like ‘merely another piece of machinery’ in HK.

Well, well, good luck to HK.  I felt a great joy when I file an oath at the Home Affairs department yesterday as its a relieve that I am finally going to be OUT OF HONG KONG.

P.S.  Keep on taking in millions of Mainland Chinese who come to HK to give birth everyday, and subsequently follow by their aunties, uncles, fathers and mothers who apply to come to HK to receive pensions but not contributing their talent to HK at all.  I wish you all as Good Luck as us.  B.T.W., we actually have to thank MTRC, it was a blessing in disguise, due to being fired by MTRC, my husband got a job from a renowned Australian firm and is now working for a huge project in Beijing.  Both his firm and his client, a renowned top 500 fortune American firm, are so impressed by his professional qualifications, skills, experience and above all, his integrity and character, have offer to extend his contract for another 5 years.  Anyway, after the end of the contract, we don’t decide to return to HK, but will be returning to Singapore, after all, PAP is STILL THE BEST!  We LOVE LEE KWAN YEW!

Magnificent. This is to literature what the King of Kowloon’s graffiti is to painting. I push the laptop back to Winky. “Wow… I wonder if she feels better now.” My congee has been getting cold.

The bureaucrat lowers the monitor of the computer with respect and affection, like a relative gently closing a loved one’s coffin. “I think I’ll miss her.”

“There are plenty more out there,” I assure her.