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……”

Germany is broken.

I am not talking about the so-called never-seemingly-ending-post-war-reconstructions still going on in various parts of Germany, nor am I talking about the Nazis or WWII that the rest of the world cannot stop making jokes about. — I am not even sure the majority of Germans and young residence of Germany remember what these words meant except some distant stories about their ancestors that somehow explained why “Overt patriotism may be a bad thing”. The brokenness is not a philosophical concept but something that one can see on the most common streets of German cities, inside public transportation, from the glares of their TVs and on the faces of its people. Solid, tangible evidence of broken families, broken education system, sluggish law enforcement system, the consequences of boorish immigration policies from the ghastly past, the less known side of argument to National Health Care and high tax to the rich which feeds the homeless, jobless yet capable men and women who enjoy their unemployment benefits to the fullness by spending it on beers.

On a warm, early Spring night without rain, the spoiled youth of Germany poured into the streets in herds, chain-smoking, beer sloshing, hallucinogen dealing and flinging their future to outer space. The level of testosterone on the streets sent out an unbearable scent to the sweltering air that made older women coming back from REWE or tired businessmen in suits quickened their steps while averting eye contacts with the “Elites of Germany”. They burnt holes into the seats of the tram, painted graffiti on public spaces, hurled insults to curious passerby if not challenged them to a stand-off with their childish, defiance glances. Though most of us could comfort ourselves with the fact that almost certainly in all cases, they delivered nothing empty promises of violence.

Somewhere everywhere in Germany, groups of men and women were piled over each other on couches, passed out on toilet bathroom floors, or beating their heads to the monotonous higher art called techno music, and passing time with hallucinogens that seems to come all too easily in Germany parties and clubs where some even designed their furniture to accommodate these incapacitated future of the country. Doener places business flourished at the wee hours of the morning as a consequence of desperate hungers in consummated youth with bad cases of acid reflux.

In the seedy places on the streets, of apartment buildings, of basements of old abandoned establishments, in the internet and last but not least in the hearts of the wealthy, middle-class Germans, certain crimes of morality were being committed every second. Honesty, loyalty, trust and love were based on trickery, lies, blind faith, or mutual disclosures of equal disinterests in traditional, biblical values. Relationship histories were ill-written chronicles of sexual conquests of proportions no less gory than the invasion of Arabs in Western Europe 700AD.

At home, bored adults were watching spin-off shows from the worst of American media — Heidi Klum telling girls made out of skins and bones they were far too fat to be Germany’s Next Top Model; 15 year old kid prancing on stage on Germany Super Star singing ‘Das geht ab’ (You dont need to know how to sing per se to sing that song…), in competition with another pale faced blonde hair boy yet to reach puberty who admitted publicly he didn’t know whether he loved men or women. — The next morning at work, these people would share their pointed opinions about these TV personnel in intense fervor with their colleagues in the office, as if they also had a monumental health care reform bill passed just the night before.

Google pulled out of China sparked some minute interests in the German people about foreign cultures. One after the other they repeated their ignorant comments about their foreign counterparts, persevering cultural misunderstanding deeper into the their heads.

There’s no safe place in Germany for a drug-free, mentally sane, literate and self-respectable person. I asked myself where did all the true elites of Germany that I have met and was so impressed by gone to?

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.

Can an adult enjoy Disney World? That was the question that occupied my mind while I was walking through their various attractions with my parents on their first visit to the famed theme park. It seems to me an incredible embarrassment for anyone over the age of sixteen to say that they love Disney World, especially when they are being glaringly ripped off not only financially, but creatively.

 In this day and age, it is unbelievable that Disney could operate in such rundown condition and continue offering the same rides and exhibition that employs cheap mechanical gadgets and visual tricks as they have been since the 90s. Regardless it was the Animal Kingdom or the Hollywood Studio, the Magical Kingdom or the experimental village Epcot, the technology behind most of their games are crude, outdated and monotonous. Since the last time I was there four years ago, only one extra attraction has been added to the Hollywood Studio, and it was basically a walk-in movie theater that, as in the typical theme park fashion, cramps a whole bunch of unknowing tourists like me into a dark room with loud music and forces us to watch a trailer of a new movie that they’ve recently made (this particular one is Narnia and Prince Caspian) on four white projector screens. The financial investment in this new attraction compared to what Disney was charging us was nothing.

Not even the grand finale of the day — the Fantasmic laser show at night time was at all inspiring. It was almost an insult to its audience’s intellect. The show was basically a re-showing of the almost century-old Fantasia cartoon (remember Mickey as the Sorcerer‘s Apprentice?) on a continuous waterfall screen at the amphitheater. The technology involved could easily be replicated in a small home water fountain one could get from pet stores for twenty dollars, except the one in Disney was much bigger in size. Although my parents were enjoying their Disney World visit greatly along with thousands of other cheerful visitors, I could not help but being the skeptic. What about “A million years of dream”? What about “Being ahead of its time”? What about the “Engineering” in the “Imagineering”? What about sustainability and continuous improvement? Did they stop hiring engineers in the last decade? What a shame it is for them to keep charging people sixty, seventy dollars for a ride in “Honey, I Shrunk the Kid.” The movie was so old I think even Blockbuster has moved its DVDs into the classics aisle next to Sunset Boulevard.

Despite the huge disappointment in their lack of innovations, I still enjoyed my time with my parents over there, thanks to the humorous hosts that entertained us on our way in various shows and rides, and the witty word-play that were on all the directories, menus, signs and displays. Since I liked to read, I have a suspicion that I enjoyed them more than any regular tourist and I’m loving it. Why, humor is timeless and nothing can beat the feeling of a hearty laugh that came from the depths of our hearts because of something that was downright funny. Hmm…there seemed to be a lesson to be learnt here — If you’re not smart enough, at least you can be funny. Here the Disney company has once again showed itself as the daring educators of the American youth, apart from nurturing such great role models like Linsay Lohan and our beloved Britney Spears.

Of course, some of the jokes were pretty corny, but they were made even funnier when the hosts that were supposed to say their much rehearsed speech with real Disney enthusiasm said them with an absolute irritation when they started to lose their patience with the roaring audience under the sweltering weather. I suppose the minimum wages didn’t help much.

Being quite on the verge of being an Engineer Disease patient myself, I could not help but noticed the pattern of how most rides and shows were conducted in Disney World. Apparently, the designers of the attractions decided that the best way their customers could enjoy their creations was when something unexpected happened during the course of the show, and they decided that stuff malfunctioning and breaking down were on the top of their list. Hence no matter where one goes, stuff are always going haywire in Disney World. — A mother elephant escaped in the midst of our Safari ride; The engine of the train broke down and has to stopped dead on its track right next to the plastic foam, wired frame Catastrophe Mountain (very aptly named, I must say) where everyone sitting on the left hand side was duely warned ahead of time to beware of the splashing water that would come “unexpectedly” during the course of the ride; The rabbit in the Muppet Show quitted during an act; Our host was abducted by Western Cowboys during the ride through classic movie scenes and reappeared two sets afterwards, killing the bandit that kidnapped our tour bus (who had continued to guide us through the various exhibits in between like any normal bandit would after kidnapping their subjects); The robot pilot in the Star War ride only told us seconds before takeoff that it was its first time flying a spaceship before crashing into a meteor in outer space…and the list goes on.

I just love how predictable everything is in Disney World. It’s like those fairytales that Disney has been trying to perpetuate all these years. It’s always “happily ever after” in one’s cocoon. Now if only life is that simple.

By sheer accident, I stumbled into a place where one could catch a glimpse of heaven if it should exist, a place of collective reminiscence for love that we have once experienced in our lives, requited or not.

When the old band of four, all in matching Hawaiian shirts and unflattering receding hairline that performs at Sunset Waterfront Grille and Bar in Cocoa Beach, Florida every Tuesday, played the famous tune of “Tennessee Waltz“, even the shyer Chinese couple started to move their bodies to the melodious rhythm of the heart-wrenching song that sustained its popularity from when it was first written in the 30s, through the wonderful interpretations of 50s’ Patti Page, Patsy Cline and Elvis Presley, 60s’ Tom Jones, Otis Redding and 90s’ Norah Jones and touched our hearts again and again in the decades passed. In this little air-conditioned room that was the main part of the Sunset G and B restaurant, the furnishing was rearranged for the Tuesday occasion. Chairs and tables were put together to allow for group sitting around the platform where the band was playing. On that particular day I happened to be there, all seats were occupied. Men and women in their sixties and more — all dressed to the nines — in this weekly social occasion to reconnect with old friends and make new ones while enjoying the music provided by the local band, danced to their hearts’ content to their favorite tunes. 

Even for someone like me that was born in the 80s, the effect of the Tennessee Waltz was immense. The talk of lost romance was delicately delivered within a few words that fully represented the more discreet and reserved cultures of men and women during courtship in the older times. A couple stood up and danced in the space between the potted trees and the entrance. Despite their ages, their bodies agile, their steps accurate, and their movements expressive. They could hardly be called beautiful yet two two of them together were nonetheless a beautiful sight to witness — two silhouettes weaving around each other like lovebirds twirling around tree branches chirping to a tune in their hearts which its historical meaning only known to them— it made one feel at ease about growing old.

Before I left the band played one of my favorite songs, “It Happened in Monterey” featured in the film in 1930 The King of Jazz and made popular than ever by the much loved Frank Sinatra. I have always loved the line when he sings “Broke somebody’s heart and I’m afraid it was mine.” It highlighted the irony of love — one doesn’t control one’s own heart. In the face of love, emotions are in charge. So when the line came up, in this rather sterile tourist city with nothing but feet sorching sands and blazing sun, on one of those days when I was in a desperate need to fall in love, the little song consoled me and left a pleasantly melancholic feeling in my lonely heart.

Link to listen Frank Sinatra’s “It Happened in Monterey”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhcuMVgROHU

Link to listen Patti Page’s “Tennessee Waltz”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ek3eCbfqp0&feature=related 

The Europeans are grateful —  Hop on any European airline, chances are you will be moved by the clapping and cheering of the fellow passengers around you when the flight has successfully landed and you will find yourself having a renewed appreciation for the wonderful job that the pilot did for bringing a full flight of passengers safely from one city to another across the endless ocean, the violent turbulence, the roaring weather, and slipping out of the deadly chances of mechanical failures and human errors by the meticulous preparation by the crew even before the journey begins.

Clapping is just a way for the passengers to say thank you to the crew. It is a tradition that begun a long time ago when flying is still a luxury instead of just another option to driving. While the novelty of flying has worn off a great deal in America and most part of Asia due to the light-speed advancement in flight technology and airline and route expansions, the tradition persisted in Europe, Africa and some Asian countries. Patrick Smith from Ask the Pilot column of Salon.com suggested that the phenonmenon is more pervasive in economy class. His said that ”There’s a certain communal spirit, especially after a long-haul flight, when you’ve spent several hours in a relatively intimate space with hundreds of people. In a way, the applause acts like big collective handshake.” He has his points.

I say we oughtta keep this tradition alive on American airlines and celebrate our living moments while we can because one doesn’t know when one would by the twist of faith board a flight of no return, given how manifestly bad American pilots are being trained on plane landing. And I am speaking from experience — for the past eight months I have travelled nationally through various American Airlines (US Airways, United Airline, Northwest, Continental and Delta) no less than ten times. As far as I can remember, more than twice my planes have landed at inappropriately acute angles like missiles aiming for the unknown enemies hidden underground and barely missed snapping into two halves after the thunderous thugs when the planes finally hit the asphalt and rushed forward at neck breaking speed. While my typically reticent fellow Americans squeaked in terror around me in the cabin, which turned into a collective laughter that was second-nature to any human to cover their embarrassments for their over-reactions, I released my grip on the arm rests, rolled my eyes and gave the direction of the cockpit a disgusted look.

Erraneous decision in the cockpit, however minute, has incalculable implication. Although humans are born to make mistakes, the airlines that are responsible to the training and re-education of the flight crews are being paid exorbitant amount of money by their trusting customers to ensure the chances of them making incorrigible mistakes are kept to the minimum. As nearly 50% of all airplane accidents occurred during the last phase of the flight, which is preparation landing (dropping altitude, circling at low altitudes before the air traffic authority of that particular city gives out permission to land) and landing on runway itself, these types of near-misses showed how much more importance we should be putting into training pilots on this portion of the flight and into reconstruction of any physical infrastructure and system to allow the appropriate landing procedures to be carried out in the most conducive environment. Seriously, one crash landing is just one too many.

Of course, never-failingly the pilots would speak to us after those near-misses in his deep, sexy nasal voice to welcome us to the city XYZ, as if absolutely nothing abnormal has ever happened. Sometimes I wonder if pilots are recruited based on the level of theatrics they displayed in making takeoff and arrival announcements rather than their leadership skills, their expertise in flying a plane, and most importantly landing one.

Let’s clap and cheer for the flight crew next time your plane lands safely on the runway of your destination like the Europeans. You just cheated death again. It’s never too late to realize the need to celebrate being alive.