Big Lychee, Various Sectors

We don’t see many marches in the Soho/Noho themed overpriced-dining concept hub zone up the hill from Central; they usually take place in the far more spacious environs of Victoria Park or Tamar. But I encountered a pretty big one snaking its way up alongside the Mid-Levels Escalator yesterday afternoon.  Unlike most demonstrations in Hong Kong, this one wasn’t protesting against – or even for – anything.

Alert news-watchers will recall that the Pope recently unashamedly went all-out for the women’s, Latino, Native American, Asian and other oppressed/minority votes by canonizing a variety of new saints, including one or more females, southern Europeans, Mohawks and Filipinos. The latter were especially pleased to see the Vatican tick their box, and it was local Filipinos parading up the hill yesterday. I’m guessing their route was something like Statue Square to the Catholic Cathedral on Caine Road.

They sang hymns, recited the Hail Mary, carried doll-like Virgin Marys and pictures of the suspiciously cool-looking martyr Saint Pedro Calungsod (played by Leonardo DeCaprio), and waited patiently as the police escorted them in packets up and across the narrow streets. Walking down against the flow, I would guess there must have been several thousand, scrappily photographed: 1) coming up from Staunton Street, 2) on Cochrane Street coming up to Lyndhurst Terrace and Hollywood Road, 3) the bottom of Cochrane near Stanley Street and 4) stretching back along Queens Road at least 200 yards past whatever Lane Crawford is these days…

In a city where homes have become unaffordable to the majority of families, what does it make more sense to do with 20 hectares of space: build housing, or build a white-elephant stadium for bores who want to run/cycle/hop backwards round and round in circles? Under the administration of Donald Tsang, the answer would have been obvious: you do whatever best suits the tycoons who profit from both housing scarcity and pointless infrastructure construction. But in the zany, Mainlandizing-but-pro-welfare world of Chief Executive CY Leung, some officials dare to think otherwise.

Some things, on the other hand, never change – like the Big Lychee’s embarrassing families. I was wrong about the role of US education consultancy IvyAdmit concerning the family of Gerald Chow, dentist and director of Chow Sang Sang jewellery chain. IvyAdmit did provide tutoring and hand-holding for the Chows’ two boys in the US, and is being sued by the Chows for return of US$2 million intended to help get the kids into Harvard. But the consultants’ tutors also researched and wrote essays for Gerald himself as he did (or ‘did’) his Masters in Public Administration at the Kennedy School of Government. Lots of snarky discussion here, here, etc, and the campus paper joins in, with some readers demanding that Harvard withdraw the degree.

I’m most freaked out by the fact that it’s Chow’s own legal team that submitted such damaging evidence for all the world to see. They presumably feel that the documents bolster his case against IvyAdmit’s Mark Zimny, and to hell with however else the materials might incriminate their client. The only explanations are that Chow needs his money back really badly, or has a hypersensitive attachment to principle, or – could it just be? – simply doesn’t think that paying for essays for a degree is in any way wrong. (You mean you’re supposed to do all that yourself?) But he must have studied in person for his DDS dental degree, right?

As a story about the deranged lengths people go to in order to get their kids into a particular school, it’s sordid enough. Now it’s doubly, trebly, and deliciously, horrible. If Gerald Chow were, say, the Under-Secretary at the Education Bureau – and in the wacky CY Leung era it’s bizarre that he’s not – this would of course be a big story in the Hong Kong press. As it is, his main public role apart from directorship of the listed family company is a 2010-11 part-time spell at the government’s so-called think-tank, the Central Policy Unit. Under Donald Tsang’s administration, such appointments were mostly pats on the head for docility (spot the tycoons’ kids and second-tier plutocrats in the current line-up). It is quite possible that Chow did no meaningful think-tankery, thus it’s not much of a ‘Government advisor cheated to get degree’ story.

One possible angle is that Chow is not the first Hongkonger to get a Masters in Public Administration at KSG: Donald Tsang is a fellow alumnus (and yes, that does make you wonder what sort of qualification it is). But will the South China Morning Post news editor think that makes it any more newsworthy? Probably not. File under ‘pathetic’ rather than ‘scandalous’. The story’s worth – especially if Harvard strips Chow of his degree – is as a morality tale and a reflection of Hong Kong’s values (which is a euphemism for ‘lurid, embarrassing, crashing of someone’s reputation that we can’t take our eyes off’). Tons of stuff for investigative reporters to browse. But this just doesn’t rank with taking photos up schoolgirls’ skirts or offering half a billion bucks to straighten out your gay daughter. Perhaps the real story is one of desperate, Kamikaze legal tactics (neatly summarized as a), b) and c) here).

Chow Sang Sang have frequently taken advertising space in the South China Morning Post; I’m sure nothing will happen that will prevent us from seeing the ads again.

Click to hear Fred Neil’s ‘Other Side of This Life’!

The ‘how to spend $2 million and still not get your kids into Harvard’ story will presumably be back at some stage. Looking at the complaint they filed, Gerald and Lily Chow seem to be claiming that education consultant Mark Zimny basically ripped them off (which for all I know is what ‘promissory estoppel’ means). It wasn’t that he failed to get our two kids into Harvard, they’re saying, but that he took our money on false pretenses.

Amazingly, to support their case, they present the court with consultancy IvyAdmit’s invoices (pages 4-38) for looking after the two kids while they were being educated in the US. Some of the items are unremarkable (fixing the plumbing in the rented home, for example). But the bulk of the bills are for – no other way to put it – doing the kids’ school work for them. Reading their assigned textbooks for them, and writing their essays for them. I can imagine the defendant producing these documents as a way to damage the plaintiffs’ characters, but they themselves are using the materials as evidence in their favour.

One of the kids was obviously being prepared for some sort of business course, studying (or ‘studying’, I should say) things like finance and leadership. Oh, and ethics. You couldn’t make this up. Sacha Baron Cohen is reportedly planning a movie on Hong Kong tycoon Cecil Chow offering HK$500 million for a guy to marry his gay daughter; he ought to combine the character with the Chows (who are of Chow Sang Sang jewellery stores).

According to the Boston Globe, Zimny’s lawyer has argued that “common law counts do not serve as an insurance policy for poor judgment, avarice, or any other of many human failings.” In other words: my client takes advantage of rich idiots, and there’s no law against it. No-one comes out of this looking very good (you can’t help having a twinge of sympathy for the poor kids). I suppose the Chows are at best middle-ranking by the standards of Hong Kong plutocrats, and they could really use that US$2 million back. Or, in their wealth-burdened naivety, are they taking this stand on what they see as principle? It was morally wrong for Zimny not to successfully use our money to buy the kids into Harvard, even if his staff did write little Kevin’s ethics essay for him.

We are all prostitutes, and I may as well ‘fess up. Actually, I have little to be hugely ashamed of. Many moons ago, a tycoon’s son’s admission essay to a top US school landed on my desk, with a request to the company’s sole native English-speaker to do whatever seemed necessary. The kid had acquired a dummy’s guide on how to write a dazzling admission essay on personal goals, blah-blah. One suggestion he had taken up was to begin and end the paper with the same sentence. Not a memorable one. And everything between was bilge. I corrected the spelling and punctuation, and passed it back. Number-one brat presented me with an absurdly expensive ‘writing instrument’ (just basic taste and decorum were beyond him). His father, seeing I had done no real repair work, passed the draft on to a crony who headed up an international media organization and who personally (I am pretty sure) re-wrote the whole thing. (He is now remembered mainly for wrecking his company.) The kid failed to get into his top choice school anyway, and had to be content with a less renowned institution, where he was sent a monthly package of cup noodles by a clerical assistant. He graduated – I don’t know how – and is now being groomed to take over from Daddy one day. A dumbass with a fancy-sounding MBA is still a dumbass, as quite a few of the Big Lychee’s blue-chips’ stock prices will attest as the older generation of bosses fades away.

I declare the four-day-weekend-with-compulsory-work-on-Monday open.

Which is less interesting: Hong Kong Chief Executive CY Leung’s address to the Legislative Council or the announcement of two more appointments to the Executive Council?

The appointment of legislators Jeffrey Lam and Regina Ip to CY’s top policy advisory body probably takes first prize for dullness. Lam is part of the Henry Tang/inherited wealth/bureaucrat camp that CY needs to get on side, while Regina is an opportunist who is perhaps potentially less troublesome in the tent than out of it. In colonial times, Exco had the governor, a pair of guys from HSBC and Swire, the Commander of British Forces and the Chief Secretary – that was about it. Now there are over 30 people in those meetings.

CY’s address consisted in large part of the sort of integration-is-good-for-you/we-need-the-Mainland waffle we don’t want to hear. To the extent that it’s true, we don’t need to be told again and again. To the extent that it’s alarmist, politically correct blather, it’s excruciatingly tedious and insulting to the intelligence. All cities are economically dependent on their hinterlands – so what?

Peel all that stuff away, and CY does hint at something that might be noteworthy (but, we must hasten to add, might not be; so Sphinx-like is the man that you have no clue). He dismissed Hong Kong’s 1960s official pseudo-philosophy of positive noninterventionism as ‘vague and contradictory’, and then similarly rejected the ‘big market, small government’ invented and promoted by his predecessor Donald Tsang. The implication is that government needs to be more proactive, or perhaps should simply stop pretending that it doesn’t intervene in order to do so with greater deliberation and thus, somehow, better.

Unfortunately but typically, the example CY gave was to do with CEPA, the elaborate-looking but mostly vacuous ‘free-trade’ agreement between Hong Kong and the Mainland. A better example could (but again, can’t necessarily) be drawn from his oblique comments on housing.

We often hear that measures to bar property sales to Mainlanders, penalize investors for keeping apartments empty or push developers into building homes suited for local people would offend ‘free market’ principles. Yet in a place where the government owns all the land, a cartel monopolizes and manipulates supply and demand has been magnified by an influx of outsiders with suitcases of cash, where is the free market? There isn’t one. It is distorted, and in such a way as to harm the local population – so you need to re-distort it.

Former Monetary Authority boss Joseph Yam and a writer in China Daily pick up on this. Doesn’t it warm the heart just ever so slightly to see that both use the word ‘oligarchy’?

People who drone on endlessly about integration also tend to get hugely excited by the prospect of Hong Kong playing some sort of super-important role in the internationalization of the Renminbi. It seems hard to believe that the Chinese Communist Party, with all its paranoia and semi-xenophobia – plus its need to buy Ferraris for its kids – can ever let go of the control that a closed capital account gives it. To make the currency freely tradable, China’s leaders would have to allow international markets to set either exchange rates (if the currency floats) or interest rates (if they have a peg). For ‘international markets’, read ‘nasty evil foreigners who hate China and aim to prevent the country from rising’.

Still, let’s humour people who think Communists make currencies convertible. Will they use Hong Kong to gradually free the Yuan up? Forbes columnist Cedric Muhammad believes that it will happen in… Africa. He makes some interesting points about, for example, the communities of Africans living and trading in China and the possibilities for RMB mortgages in Africa. Then he comes up with a bombshell: “I believe … that 300 million Chinese will eventually have to move into Africa to alleviate [China’s] demographic nightmare…” He has even identified a CITIC-built housing development in Angola that will host several hundred thousand of them. And he’s written a whole (US$99) report on what would be one of the most historic migrations in human history since our ancestors crossed the Red Sea into Eurasia.

I always assumed that when the demographic pyramid keels over, the rivers catch fire and the pollution starts raining down like volcanic ash, the Chinese would expand into dark, cold, morose but nearby empty places like Mongolia and Siberia. Africa sounds much more fun.

One more souvenir of Taiwan, where child abuse in the guise of learning is as rampant as it is here. There’s surely a monolingual After-After-School School out there too.

The biennial inspection visit to the mess of mopeds, pineapple cakes and overhead telephone wires that is Taipei proves a success. There was a time when Taiwan seemed expensive, but not these days. A quick haircut comes to HK$27 (paid for via a vending machine outside the shop – appropriately next to a McDonalds). The orange-uniformed hairdresser sucks loose hairs off you with a vacuum tube afterwards, then dabs scented powder on your face. A stunning Wanhua night-market meal of non-oily beef noodles, dumplings, sublime not-very-hot-and-sour soup and pickled veg and tofu plus beer at barely HK$50 a head. A bus ride to Keelung costs half the fare from Sheung Wan to Shenzhen Bay.

Buildings don’t cost much either, judging by the worse-than-the-Mainland quality of some of the architecture. The traditional explanation of Taiwan’s urban seediness is that the Kuomintang regime ignored hardware for decades on the assumption that they would be going back to Beijing one day. It’s an excuse that’s growing a bit thin.

And then there is all the free entertainment that belies the physical ugliness – or at least charmlessness – of the city. A woman squatting outside her front door feeding seeds to a caged bird with chopsticks. The girl with large fairy wings swooping up to me to put a ‘paid for’ sticker on my bottle of water as I enter Carrefour supermarket. The startlingly no-nonsense English subtitle added to a local edition of Catcher in the Rye in Eslite bookstore. The well-lit dentist’s you can see right into from the sidewalk through very skimpy lace curtains – a one-way viewing system after nightfall. Some people might think that watching a stranger having his teeth drilled just feet away through a window is virtually as creepy as taking photos up women’s skirts on trains. Others might appreciate the compelling fascination. I could have gawped all evening.

At the airport I tried my luck with an earlier flight. The girl at the check-in looked slightly alarmed when I asked if I could get the 4pm instead of the 6pm. She hesitated and checked the computer. Then she bit her lip and glanced at me anxiously. I thought she was going to demand a rebooking fee. But no.

“We have space on the 4pm flight,” she said. “But… but you will not be able to have the Hello Kitty boarding card.” She looked utterly distraught. I tried my best to look grief-stricken. In the line heading towards immigration, I passed the pink-and-chrome Hello Kitty check-in counter. Before take-off, peering from the all-economy flight’s business-class cabin, I saw the Hello Kitty A330 itself on the apron. It was a lost opportunity that made my trip complete.

Some interesting things – things that you would never realize existed – have somehow ended up on YouTube. Here’s a couple.

For people with over two hours to spare, Iwo Jima: 36 Days of Hell. The documentary is outstanding for two reasons. First is the quality of the oral history, with extensive recollections from US Marines and others who took part in this bloodbath – at least some of these guys are probably no longer around. Second is the original colour film footage, which, among other things, conveys the nastiness of the volcanic island’s surface.

(It says ‘Part 1 of 2’ but this is a 2hr 10m stand-alone video; the ‘Part 2’  is a concoction for hardcore Pacific War/B-29 fans only.)

For people needing a seven-minute fix of weirdness, the trailer and some extracts from Smile Til it Hurts. It’s a documentary about Up With People, a touring performance group through which thousands of clean-cut youngsters passed, notably in the 1960s and 70s. It was originally funded by Halliburton, Exxon, GM and so on (I would guess with some CIA string-pulling). The official aim was to unite the world’s idealistic youth behind upright and positive moral values. In practice, it was supposed to counteract the rebellious, hippy, peacenik, antiwar counterculture – which is what makes the whole thing so hilarious. Middle-aged bureaucrats try to create a political youth subculture to oppose the one they don’t like. You couldn’t make this up.

(UWP is still around, but I think more as a straight high-school exchange sort of thing.)

For the undecided, with a bit over an hour, First Kill. More oral history, with Vietnam vets discussing how it felt taking life – even of children – plus author Michael Herr.

Check out ‘Paradise Now’, an exhibition of works by artist Ye Hongxing at Zee Stone Gallery at Hollywood Road (opposite the old Central police station) until Nov 14.

This might look like a pleasingly composed surreal collage (it’s just a part – the whole thing is huge)…

…and so might this…

But you have to get up close and see what they’re actually made out of. And wonder how long each piece must take to do.

“This suggests that the West doesn’t only embrace individuals that are against the Chinese system.” So says stridently nationalist Global Times on the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Mo Yan – the guy we’d barely heard of who wrote the novel that became one of those acclaimed movies we never saw back in the late 80s. Which is what the Literature prize is for: recognizing undoubtedly outstanding writers from Uruguay, Senegal and other places that don’t do physics and medicine, and reminding us that not everything is in English. As GT puts it: “The Literature Prize is not as direct as the science prizes.”

Anyone who has studied literature has had to analyze texts to see what the words actually tell us beyond what the author wants us to think. The Global Times article acknowledges the Nobel for Mo with a grudging defiance that makes it clear China is a country that wants and expects more. More respect, more Nobels, more science Nobels, more – in due course – kowtowing. Read it properly, however, and the real message it delivers is very different. This is a country (or, to be fair, a state-run newspaper) of deep self-absorption, self-pity and insecurity.

Is it possible that Taiwan, which is where I will be until Wednesday, is in some ways more at ease with its place in the world? Who cares that you’re a renegade province and not supposed to exist if you can land F-16s on freeways? The neighbourhood I will be staying in certainly seems interesting. Strolling around it on Google Maps’ Street View, I find that on one side of the street, it’s a beautiful sunny day; cross directly over to the other side, and suddenly it is overcast and raining…

Around the corner, there is an interesting-looking restaurant 50 yards along; go right up to it, and it suddenly becomes a grimy motorbike repair shop. That’s what I call hallucinatory realism.

I officially declare a) this weekend open and b) Time and Newsweek magazines to have finally degenerated into peddlers of superstitious, New-Age mumbo-jumbo now they are explaining what your computer-using dog thinks of you, and why there must be an afterlife because a near-death experience happened to a neurosurgeon.

Being the offshoot of Sing Tao, the Standard occasionally scoops its paid-for alternative. And today’s front-page story suggests that CY Leung’s shining radicalism (or at least willingness to do something) can’t help bursting through his Beijing and Mainland patina from time to time. It looks as if the administration, in a sharp turn away from the hand-wringing obfuscation of its predecessor, will restore the English Schools Foundation’s level of funding and thus pretty much incorporate the institution into the existing system of subsidized-but-independent schools.

Parents who whine about the ESF’s insatiable appetite for higher fees and even a debenture scheme will be happy (if that’s possible). But the implications – if the story is correct – go much further.

It means the government is embracing something that previous officials feared as politically incorrect: a chain of colonial-era, English-language schools that can hardly be funded by the taxpayer. This is probably pragmatic rather than ideological, to accommodate the needs of a multi-cultural population. But it will really upset some patriotic types and the ‘Sino Pride’ cultural warriors who write all those South China Morning Post letters against Western influence.

It also means the leadership is showing approval for schools for which many Hong Kong families have a strong preference – a preference much resented by the civil servants in the Education Bureau because it’s such a vivid rejection of the style of education they seek to force upon the city.

CY is irritating all the right people, for a change.

A quick test based on today’s meaningful Hong Kong news…

1  After agreeing to appear on TV, your airhead bim wife is upset to see that the broadcasting company – CCTV, no less – bizarrely portray her as an airhead bim, with the extract even appearing on YouTube, where it has so far attracted a relatively modest 33,000 views. Do you: a) keep quiet and look into yourselves to ask the meaning of what has happened, possibly referring to Ecclesiastes 6:2 for inspiration; or b) take legal action, so it gets into the press and loads of people who would never otherwise have heard about it check out the video and wonder what ghastly people you must be? (Based on the first 1 minute 36 seconds, which was all I could stand.)

2  Upon concluding that your kids are too dimwitted to get into a brand-name university on their own merits, you engage a ‘college admissions consultant’ who tells you he can get them into Harvard for US$2.2 million. When he fails to do so, do you: a) keep your mouth shut and reflect on how shallow and distasteful your behaviour has been, maybe seeking guidance from, say, Matthew 16:26; or b) go to court, so the whole world can see how pathetic you are and wonder if everyone in Hong Kong is like you and Airhead Bim Taitai YouTube Lady and Cecil Chow?

3  Finding yourself starting to look a bit middle-aged, do you: a) live with it because you’re in your 40s or 50s and that’s what happens, and you still have a few decades of life ahead of you; or b) go to the DR beauty salon in Causeway Bay and pay some stem-cell-spouting quack to inject you with processed blood, after which you succumb to a major infection, ultimately dying in hospital, leaving your loved ones with no choice but to listen miserably at the funeral as the pastor reads out something like Genesis 3:19?

Oh joy! Just as we thought the passing of Golden Week and the clampdown on Shenzhen parallel traders meant our Mainlander problems were over for a while… it’s Invasion of the Baby Locusts at Sheung Shui kindergartens. Remember all those Mainland mothers in the maternity wards? They’re back, and they want your toddler’s pre-school place. This isn’t going to be pretty.

On top of that, welcome to inflationary austerity…

Indeed, through a policy of limiting land supply, some would argue [the Hong Kong government] has refined this process of inflationary wealth confiscation to an art form.

It directly raises large amounts of revenue from land sales as citizens are made to pay an ever-greater proportion of their income on the basic necessity of shelter. Hence, you get a rich government alongside poor citizens.

Some of those citizens are also elderly. And we are currently entertained by the sight of the pro-democracy camp in the Legislative Council trying to defeat a government measure to increase handouts to them. The government is valiantly fighting back and essentially daring the warriors for truth and justice to deny our less well-off senior citizens some badly needed extra cash.

The government, in effect, proposes doubling the universal Old Age Allowance (HK$1,000-a-month ‘fruit money’) for the elderly who come below a certain level of income and assets but don’t get CSSA – the basic welfare safety net. Technically, it will be a different benefit altogether, called Old Age Living Allowance. The opposition are demanding that the new handout also be universal. Part of the reason is that many ‘fruit money’ recipients are so poor that they should be on CSSA, but they don’t apply because the government forces them (more or less) as part of the application process to denounce their offspring as worthless, heartless scumbags who are letting their old parents starve like Westerners do.

The whole retirement/pension system needs reform, and Chief Executive CY Leung’s administration may actually address it a few years down the road. In the meantime, it’s patch-and-mend, with the pro-dems threatening to prevent even that. (In all fairness, some pan-dems who realise the confrontation is actually about deserving old folk who really could use the extra cash are tempted to support the government).

It would be nice to see the opposition question Secretary for Labour and Welfare Matthew Cheung’s forecasts of how Hong Kong will fall to fiscal ruin unless the new allowance is means-tested. Because of the dreaded ‘aging population’, he argues, the new allowance’s cost will balloon even with means-testing to almost HK$10 billion a year by 2022-23 (there is even a document floating around showing a scary cost projection out to 2041). The freedom fighters among our legislators could – but of course won’t – counter this in several ways.

First, they could compare the burden on taxpayers with the cost of civil service pensions, already running in the hundreds of billions a year thanks to the public sector’s bloated salaries (to which the pensions are directly tied). Trim that, and we can all have double ‘fruit money’.

Second, they could ask why Cheung and his fellow ministers assume so many of our retirees in one, two, etc decades’ time will still be the illiterate and unskilled sort of people who comprise today’s cohort of impoverished 70/80-somethings, born and raised in times of war and upheaval. If the government did its job properly and ensured that we had an educated and productive workforce, no-one would need any welfare in retirement by the 2030s.

Third, our fearless radicals could refer to the Craig Stephens quote at the top about how Hong Kong citizens pass on too much wealth to the property tycoons and the government via overpriced housing. And they could ask whether this has something to do with people’s inability to save enough to support themselves in old age. And then they could ask Matthew Cheung why he needs eight properties in Hong Kong.

Exciting penis-biting poultry update: my Mainland art advisor informs me that yesterday’s intriguing painting is entitled ‘ai-ya’ meaning ‘ai-duck’ (presumably 哎鴨), pronounced the same as ‘aiyaah’ (哎呀), which is what you scream if a bird mercilessly savages you in the manner portrayed. The artist is one Zhao Xiaoguang. He won a prize in a national paintings-by-farmers competition, following which he was later found to be a government official (albeit in a rural area). Fake milk powder, fake dumplings, fake farmers-who-paint. The (presumably genuine) work sold at auction for a very reasonable RMB20,000 in 2007. And yes, there’s a link. Disappointingly, his other works are less… memorable.

Click to hear ‘Things are Going to Get Better’ by the Small Faces!