Cultural Convolution

Living in Hong Kong and trying to write are two things mortally incompatible.

Hong Kong is a city great for everything but writing. One simply has too many distractions here. I also have the benefits of having lots of friends growing up and residing here at the moment, introducing me every time a growing list of local scenic gems and culinary wonders. And movies (in both original and Catonese versions!) and theatrical shows and dances and concerts to go to. These are, even so, inspirational experience. Only my conscience was constantly banging on my skull to get some work done…thought it wasn’t loud enough. — I could barely hear the music on my iPod in Causeway Bay, already set at maximum loudness.

I never knew when Hong Kong started to have so many television stations, and some of them offered in High Definition, which logically led to my parents’ recent purchase of a new LED TV with a display bigger than my totally surface area. And if not it, the other computers, netbooks, mp3s, iPhone and other unidentifiable brand-less ultra-advanced electronic telecommunication devices possibly manufactured in my motherland China, would be blaring the latest news, sports updates, share prices, foreign affairs and bad attempt of Amazing Grace and some Whitney Houston songs from talent shows in Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese, English and other foreign languages.

You think you’d get a moment of rest and do some self-reflecting while commuting, you can’t be more wrong. — People rushed in and out of the MTR compartments, infiltrating even the most dimly-lit, badly-ventilated corners of the train it was virtually impossible to hold a book within reasonable, non-eyesight threatening distance for reading. Trying almost every time, unsuccessfully, in the past three weeks, I have managed only to read about twenty pages from my Error-nomics book. Same unsatisfying experience could be told about using my cell phone’s memo function to record notes of my idle thoughts, sudden inspiration on how to finish “killing my Valentine” (an unfinished story of mine) and random quotations I heard eavesdropping in public. It could be called a win if one’s cellphone didn’t get knocked out of his or her hand once in every five times in use.

There are even more distractions in a coffee shop in the likes of Starbucks, than in the middle of the casino floor inside Macau’s Venetian hotel. — I tried to use my iPod to update an app that has been helping me organize my ideas in the Starbucks in Pacific Place a week ago, while sipping iced coffee with coffee jelly (ooo…why are they not cut into chunks?…ooo…will I be able to sip them with this rickety straw?….yuck, they tasted so weird….*cough*…back to the story) and chocolate cake (…yummm….how many calories am I stuffing into my mouth every spoon??), and occasionally distracted by the numbers of non-Chinese locals in Hong Kong (when did Hong Kong became so diverse?) when I wasn’t scanning the Bloomberg Businessweek offered for Starbucks’ patrons to read for free, nor when my gaze was stole by the diamond-studded Porsche displayed outside the store, I found that there were…1,2,3,4,5………,10,11 WIFI hotspots in one single Starbucks. Holy Moly. (I found 6 WIFI hotspot in London’s Westfield Mall once and that remained to be my personal record high till that day) To completely confuse me, none of their namings made any sense to me. Which of these were for free? Which of these belonged to the mall, and most likely to be opened to public and which of them were available for lower cost from local service providers I recognized? My head was racing with questions. I was curious enough to see how many hotspots would my Nokia 72 find, and 2 more did I find….I almost wanted to scream : “Can someone help me? I don’t know how to go online around here!” That’s how the saying goes, the more choices you have, the lonelier you became. I was banished out of the online community in Starbucks…But very quickly, I was distracted by the monstrosity a lady had draped, as if by the self-proclaimed designers that failed the Heidi Klum’s show’s audition in Coo Coo Land, across her thigh that one, less sophisticated and more practical, like my mother, would called it “a pair of pants that looked like a skirt”, and have forgotten completely about going online as soon as the shiny logo of MANGO clothing store, in front of which the girl attacked in the thighs by the monster, talked to me…

And you are not entirely distraction free in the safety of your personal computer. Using the same computer, the same browsers in a different country could lead the internet surfing experience to be so much more distracting. — Having a Hong Kong IP address, which automatically directs users to the Chinese (language) version of Google makes finding things you want a lot more difficult than it should…for example when one types “iPhone” on the US google to look up its specs., you get the Apple page as your first search result, then the Wiki page, then some consumer review reports, then some Youtube videos shot by people with too much time in their hands. If you do the same on the Hong Kong Google, you will get the Apple page on top, but after that, you will see registration required Chinese forums discussing only on iPhones in Chinese, a whole lot of commercials from Smartone Telecom, 3 Telecom, Jailbreaking service, a Chinese language input apps and more. Most of the time a simple keyword would lead to exponential numbers of unintended clicks into some service providing sites, and even if you weren’t sold on its affiliate’s offers, you already helped SEOs and online marketing companies generated profits like cancer cell division by clicking, and promoting their ratings of popularity overall, and subsequently making the people who came after you more difficult to focus on finding the one thing they thought they wanted to know.

And has anyone thought about how “Convenience” could be a significant barrier to intellectual progression? It is so convenient to get everything in Hong Kong from the the latest electronics to stuffed Winnie the Poohs to specialized Takoyaki’s Mayonnaise sauce to loose parts I could used for my iPod hacking experiments…our brain started to generate more wants and needs for objects we could afford and subsequently consume. I never knew I needed another external hard drive, nor runaway clocks, nor Aromatic oil essence in 15 different scents, nor was I intended to book a vacation to Saba. But my life in Hong Kong runs on its own course.

In all fairness, Hong Kong is also a writer’s haven. — In Hong Kong you hear about things from all over the world. You are constantly connected, with or without your consent, to the outside world. Every single day, on the bus, in the MTR, in the restaurant, on way between Zara to H&M in IFC…you hear people talking about the latest bits of juicy gossips about celebrity either dying or raping someone, drunk driving or marrying somebody rich, about the ban of “Young Models” (aka girl with low self-esteem and are genetically shorter than 5′7 , a traditional criteria to become a Real model) signing their photo books in the book fair, about gory domestic violence between crazy employers and their poor Indonesian nannies, about how the Chinese official seized the lands of businesses without forewarning or offering any compensation…in the society of free flowing information of which media was dominated with low level information exchange, mostly pertaining to the human desire to betray, scandalize, exaggerate and self-serve, this is a writer’s haven! Except that some times, you are confronted with so many contradicting, exciting, blood-raising, pulse-stopping news, opinions and ideas that you might just get a bit inspiration overloaded.

And it is soooooo hot in here.

“Error: System Fan Has Failed. Treat Yourself to SPA in 5 Stars Hotel to Prevent Damage to the System……”

It just came to my mind, that I can write Hong Kong, Hong Kong like New York, New York. But in New York, New York, the second New York is only a state, while the second Hong Kong in Hong, Kong Kong is referring to something that’s between a state and a country. Isn’t it amazing? That you can find your city under the country list? I’m not kidding. Try to create a fake fb account and put your country as Hong Kong. You’ll see. I can only think of two other cities that you could do this to: Singapore and Vatican City. There should be some more but if I don’t know them that means you don’t know them either. But they are actually countries, while Hong Kong is not, unless we want live monkeys pulled out of our asses by the Chinese gov. Cute.

Hong Kong is a pretty awesome place. We are a capitalist city where freedom of everything is celebrated. We embrace idiocy as much as we love democracy. We make great movies and we make a lot of crap movies too. We are proud to have stars that appears in big Hollywood movies conversing with Morgan Freeman in Batman and we are ashamed that he also shags like fifteen of our most loved female celebrities, taking nude photos of them and “accidentally” posted them on the internet. People think Hong Kong-eses are racists but no, we love foreigners, as long as you are not from the East, North and South. We think Hong Kong is gonna thrive, oh yes, it will, but our sons and daughters are going to school in the US and we are retiring to Canada. We love our own goods but we think that Japanese goods are better.

There are many names for the city: the Pearl of the East, the Food Paradise, the Shopping Paradise… Hong Kong IS a paradise for everything. You can get anything in Hong Kong — Disneyland, Hollywood Walk of Fame and even Fisherman Wharf — and you can get away with anything in Hong Kong. But everything comes with a price. The price is usually proportional to the size of your ego. And you can always find the right stuff to fuel it, and the people to fan it.

Do you know there are 408 persons per sq mile in New York, 9,920 persons per sq mile in Berlin, and 16,000 persons per sq mile in Hong Kong? There’s so little space available for people you cannot walk down the street without brushing against someone else’s shoulders, bumping into each other and taking in each other’s disgusting breaths. But with that little room, there is always still some more for bigotry.

Most Hong Kong-eses are multi-lingual. While many of us speak fluent English and good Japanese, vulgarity is our mother-tongue. Advice: Don’t ask any Hong Kong people to teach you Cantonese, or someone’s mom is gonna get brutally abused.

Hong Kong is a complicated place. It’s not for the tender heart. To survive out there, speed is essential. Agility is absolute. Remember, in the concrete jungle, if you are not the first, then you are the last. While good deals are everywhere in Hong Kong, bad deals are ubiquitous. If you can find something cheaper in one store than the other, I can guarantee you that you can find it even cheaper somewhere else.

And in a city as highly commercialized as it is, individuality is just another rendition of the sheep psychology — you think you’re the coolest dude getting an iPhone. There are another million of you out there who covet the iPhone. You think you’ll be the first one in Krispy Kream when it opens, there are about fifty thousand of you lining up for Krispy Kream while you are savoring that thought.

We live the lives of bees. Except we don’t work for the queen. We work for ourselves. We are the guards, the fighters, the drone all in one. Many work from dusk till dawn but many work like they are the same thing.

My co-workers asked me if Hong Kong is like Beijing. No, it’s nothing like it. Beijing has its charm. I’d love to go to Beijing one day. But Hong Kong is a completely different city/country/planet by itself. It’s very hard to describe it in words. You have to be in a crowded MTR train to understand it; You have to be standing on the intersection in front of Sogo in Causeway Bay to understand it…

We all love Hong Kong, for it sweeps us off our feet and takes our breath away every single time, regardless of where you are when the thought of it comes to mine.

It is crystal clear. The rival for the most gold medals in this year’s Olympics is simply a battle between two nations, US and China.

The Olympics would have been a reasonable trigger for identity struggle for someone who’s trapped in the middle like me. Luckily, being a thoroughbred Hong Kongese who only some years ago got my nationality changed from British National Oversea to Hong Kong SAR of China now here living out in the Midwest, I have assumed the attitude of indifference, like many other expats in America, in light of the Olympic spirit and ethos of sports in which there is no country in sports (hypothetically speaking), only the gifted and the trained, the surrender and the endurer. And the world game is a facilitator of reaching the goal through series of intimate cultural exchange experience.

Hence, as I’ve said, in the face of this year’s Olympics Slogan ”One world, one dream.”, I have chosen to take the high road and remain impartial to avoid making unfair judgement of one team against the other. Certainly, my childhood in the small island of Hong Kong that was devoided of any type of patriotic education and my adolescence after the handed-over of Hong Kong which managed to maintain its own fairly independent government and a highly liberal press, made my enthusiasm for National sports only so-so and ”making it to the world stage” has not been my sole personal goal like many other Chinese youth. I barely know any of the famous sportsmen from China that appeared in the opening ceremony except Li Ning and Yao Ming and I supposed that’s how most other fellow Hong Kongeses are too.

My personal background has made me an impartial reader to Olympics news and being aptly equipped with a rather new HP computer that automatically loads up Yahoo! as my homepage on which I would always get immediately carried away by the intriguing news headlines before I have a chance to type in Yahoo! HK to read about the same competition in Chinese, I am under the advantage of being able to learn about the Olympics in both the perspectives of the American and the Chinese presses. And what I’ve found from the juxtaposition of the two was that the American press coverage always, with a humorous (at times sarcastic) undertone, highlights the brighter (actually, not so bright) side of things occurring in or behind the scene of the Beijing Olympics while their Chinese counterparts tried hard to maintain their perfectly amiable image by keeping all their news painfully sterile and to-the-point. The difference is grossly interesting. 

Let me give you an example. The Chinese gymnastics team — they are a widely popular topic over the lunch table here. The fact that they are amazingly good athletes is only a small part of the reason for their world acclaim in comparison to the controversy around them about their real ages. My personal opinion is that there is no dispute about the fact that some of the gymnasts are underage, but the press acitivity revolving the issue was just too much of a monkey business. Reports from self-proclaimed experts trying to decode the game videos and photos, and the plethora of reports about evidence American journalists have dug up from ancient Chinese history concerning the real age of those poor Chinese gymnasts, trying their best to deface the Chinese team are ungracefully abundant. When I went on to the Chinese news website, however, there are nothing but straightforward reports about their brilliant performance. I missed the show, but apparently NBC has a program a couple of nights ago where they’ve brought in anthropologists to analyze the facial features and bone structures of the Chinese gymnasts to determine their real ages, and came up with the conclusion that they were no more than 14 years old. Of course, the anthropologists came from the States. What magnificent way to contest the validity of the gymnasts’ ages that were testified by the Chinese government itself. Hmm… it seems like neither country is very good at this.

Another example is the controversy around the girl who lip-synced in the opening ceremony to Ode to the Motherland. The switch has caused many hostile opinions over China’s obsession with maintaining the perfect image. But who could blame them? You don’t get to do the Olympics everyday. The only pitfall of the Chinese government over this matter would be not to have realized that Westerners think all the Chinese people looks the same and that the girl with the crooked teeth, much like how we see Caucasian kids with freckles, are just as cute as any six-year-old kid is. The little girl herself whose voice was used was also reported to have said that it was an honor already to have her voice being used in the opening ceremony and it didn’t matter that she got replaced. That was very graceful in her part.

After you finished reading as many of these reports as I’ve, you would certainly realized that American presses are definitely much more liberal and at times highly infilterated with personal opinions. Because of the pervasiveness of mixed media broadcasting that the boundaries of journalism ethics and standards that keep television and newspaper reports in its impartial and honest state have become much more vague when it comes to broadcasting on the web and on a blog, even though those sites are still connected to the news agencies. And this prompts us to question the unbiased, unprejudiced nature of the journalism on this side of the earth.

Because of the Don Quixote spirits of American press, every other news article now reads like a crusade waged against the integrity of the Chinese sportsmen and their government. Regardless of whether the Chinese are lying or not, they will get badgered by the rest of the world until the end of time and that’s the truth whether you accept it or not. US and China relation is no more cleaner than that between Israel and Pakistan. It’s God’s will (whoever their Gods might be) to put the two Nations in constantly conflict and I’m afraid that cannot be helped. But we should rejoice that they have shifted the battlefields from lands to papers and computer screens. Perhaps one can think of the western world as the mother who just can’t help nitpicking everything her son does and there’s nothing he can do about it until he grows up and become independent of her, then her good-natured advices wouldn’t matter anymore.

There are much deeper political implications of the Olympics than a person like me can fathom and I acknowledge that my light-hearted analogies about US-China relations are definitely inadequate and very inaccurate. One thing I know for sure, however, is that the news on this side of the river (when I say river I mean ocean) are definitely funnier.