My Life As a Blog
http://hk.youtube.com/watch?v=Tt39HM2u1OE
Please tell me how to get the actual film clip here with an arrow to click on. You know, like the other bloggers do.
Yes I’m particularly proud of this episode as I get to dress up like Jimsee’s favourite look (or fantasy) : Early Hillary Rodham Clinton.
It’s on!!! The Wan Chai Olympics. And you, yes - you! can be part of the show. We’ll be shooting Episode 5 of my Canto course Cantonese - The Movie (you can access the other episodes from the sidebar) and we need lots of extras to play spectators. We also need actors to play spectators who get kicked out by the royal public security bureau for being not Chinese.
You don’t like the limelight? Come anyway. This is all about making cantonese a world language, so everybody must muck in. One world, one dream, one language, one royal public security bureau. In the olympic spirit, let’s GO, WAN CHAI! And go for a drink afterwards.
Sunday October 5th
Southorn Sports Ground, Wan Chai
3.30 pm
Wear sports clothes or national costume
The thing about China, right, is that even the most mundane things can be beautiful. A walk through the old streets of Guangzhou always throws up some stunning tableaux. Tableaux. I like that word. Apart from playing cards and liar’s dice with dudes, walking around looking at tableaux is my favourite pastime. Ever.
I think it’s been done already but it would be fun to publish a photo book about Geezers Sleeping In Public, especially beautiful ones. This one, in Guangzhou, was so far gone into dreamland that it took his annoying friends several minutes to wake him up and alert him about the foreigners’ photographic activities. But I mean: Sleep in public and you can’t demand full copyright to your face anymore.
It has been suggested in this forum that I like “a bit of Chinese rough.” But look at this! Smooth as a summer’s day. In fact should I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art as smooth, and twice as intemperate.
Rough my arse. (Ha.) Just because their parents grew up during the cultural revolution, egging on and in every way facilitating the actions of the worst, most murderous dictator the world has ever seen, doesn’t make the offspring rough.
But some people should always be asleep, that goes without saying.
Sei wui (Sihui) in western Guangdong is a particularly fine party town of about 400 000 people, a mere village in Chinese terms. There are some old streets not yet ruined by neo-Gothic arches and columns, shiny tiles and ornate wrought-iron railings, and there’s about one open-air market per five people. It was also 37 degrees and no wind when we were there yesterday, but did I care? I wandered around with a big smile is what I did, delirious to be back in the earthy clutches of the motherland, from which I had been so brutally torn by the fcuking olympics.
Smiling like an uncle I came upon the above touching tableau in a little street with no cars - a lovely family group resting after a hard morning of nursing, yapping and biting. (No father though.)
Oh so cute, etc I went, as the human owners looked on with bemused smiles. Foreigners are strange. Five minutes later I could understand their puzzlement as I walked through an open air market and heard some strange screams and sickening thuds. It was a bunch of laughing, smoking guys casually bludgeoning three dogs to death, with two more waiting in cages.
And here I was thinking they only ate dogs in winter? Well, that disproves the things I’ve always heard about dogs being killed slowly to release more adrenalin as it tenderizes the meat. Another myth debunked.
A little further down the road my faith in Chinese animal husbandry was further restored; not only are dogs killed quickly and with joy, but before slitting the throats of ducks (and, presumably, geese) the farmers actually give them water.
Oh yeah, the travel tips for plonkers: How many umbrellas do two plonkers on holiday in Guangdong province need? Answer: Three. Two really expensive, high quality ones to leave in the hotel room in purpose when it’s very obvious it’s going to rain, and one small cheap Tack City to huddle under together after it’s started seriously chucking it down.
At last. At last! Back in my beloved motherland, China, the place from which we all, paper, gunpowder and football sprang. Wildly irritating olympic games finished, I still can’t get my three year China visa for another month or so but I just had to breathe the rarified air of Guangzhou again. $800 for two entries but without the need for documentation - worth every milli-cent.
This is the place where extremely handsome guys work in chicken markets (above) or cycle around delivering cardboard boxes.
Have to go to the countryside now, my friend is pacing and tapping outside. Coming up next: Travel tips for plonkers.
On YouTube!
The 3rd episode of my Cantonese course Cantonese - The Movie, is now out. Please check it out:
http://hk.youtube.com/watch?v=ssF_DlF7wGA&feature=related
Lots of titillating shots.
Even Fumier will like it.
We’re in the midst of a, or should I say the annual, milk powder scandal in China.
Unscrupulous baby milk manifacturers are lacing the product with so much poison, children are dropping dead or developing kidney stone. What a perfect metaphor for our times! Here you have a great product which has been working fine for tens of thousands of years: Mother’s milk. It not only nourishes the child, but enhances its immune system.
Greedy manufacturers get in on the act and through advertising make mothers believe that breast milk isn’t good enough, no, they must buy a milk product made from cow’s milk ( only suitable for calves) if they want to have a chance to see their baby grow strong and healthy like Americans.
This product, in order to make a little bit of a profit for the manufacturers, then proceeds to kill the children.
It’s beautiful isn’t it? Apart from the fact that dairy products have never been a part of the Chinese diet until the last ten years or so when MILK suddenly started to be advertised as health drink number one with the inevitable result; instant obesity - the entire north of China is now a desert because of over-grazing by cattle.
Yes, the western way is certainly the best way.
These women are selling dogs on the street in Dandong in Liaoning province, but it could be any Chinese city or town. Now I’m starting to think: Will I have to sell mine too? After having sold my laptop and phone? (After I sell my laptop and phone the dogs will be the only thing I have left but I won’t hold on to them with too much sentimentality. There are starving people out there.)
But my savings have all but disappeared, a glass of lime soda costs $64 at Pawn and now Lehman Brothers are bankrupt - is this the end of life as we know it?
Ahhrghh, and now that things were going so well! I’m seriously vexed. Here I’ve been living firmly within my means, putting money away every month, saving the environment for other people’s kids, swearing less and generally doing the good citizen thing, pouring money into shops and enterprises belonging to Lee Ka-shing … and now this!
I’ve said many times that life isn’t fair and almost come to accept that. But now, it really, really isn’t fair.
So, that’s pretty much it for Wan Chai; there’s just this and another couple of pesky old buildings to get rid of, and then the whole area will be sanitised, gentrified and Shenzhen-ified. Old Wanchai is officially glammed up, shut down and wiped out.
But there’s one building that’s somehow survived the onslaught of clean modernity, HK style: An old pawnshop which has been restored almost to former glory with some cream paint. And like savvy entrepreneurs in every big city BUT Hong Kong, the new owners of the old pawnshop have turned it into a restaurant, imaginatively called PAWN.
So far, so “New York, London.”
I’ve heard people rave about the wonders of Pawn. Correction: I’ve heard people say that other people have raved about Pawn, never having got into contact with an actual Pawn-goer myself. (I of course only knew it when it was an actual pawnshop; I used to buy the paper there several times a week from the alcoholic newspaper vendor with the long greasy hair who sat slumped outside the pawnshop door, benefiting from people’s being flush after just having hocked their grandmother.)
My friend suggested we go there after shooting a new episode in our Canto course Cantonese - The Movie, (see right hand column) and I agreed - with some misgivings. The whole area had turned to shit, so why not Pawn?
I was right. After a promising-ish touched-up facade and a tantalisingly narrow staircase had been negotiated, it was all down hill. Whoever did the interior must have been so far up their own arses they couldn’t see what they were doing.
Each room looked like it had been designed and decorated by at least five different people, all sporting goatees or little strips of pubic hair down their chins. There was a mish-mash of different furniture styles, wall styles, ceiling styles and lamp styles, none of which worked, together or with the layout of the rooms.
These rooms with their high ceilings and stark beauty were screaming out for sober, sparse lines, simplicity and lots of air to complement the stunning, cathedral-like windows, but instead the fifteen different people had gone to sixteen different retro-shops, all coming back proudly clutching an item each, proceeding to fill up all free floor space with the horrors.
These decorators had read a magazine article about the meat packing district in New York and old factories being done up with the “raw functionalism intact” and on the next page that retro was in. But dudes - brown and orange checked 1974 sofas didn’t even look good in 1974, and in this room it just screamed: Nuke me now!
This old pawnshop is stunning, elegant and a perfect example of old Hong Kong architecture, but smearing some concrete on the walls does NOT make it a loft. Why couldn’t they have gone with what was there instead of trying so desperately to make it something it is not and will never be?
And also: $128 for two glasses of soda? Sorry, lime soda. As the tartan-trousered waiter said haughtily, they used fresh lime, that’s why he thought he was perfectly justified in charging $64 for a glass of what is essentially water with a few drops of fruit juice.
Going into Pawn (full of misgivings) I had said to my friend “I’m basically a deeply cynical eternal optimist so let’s hope for the best.” Oh how I had hoped my instincts would be wrong this time! For I want all the rest of Hong Kong’s old architecture will be saved. Just … can’t it be saved by people who have the gift of sight?
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