Is this a tornado I see before me?
Chomp chomp swallow swallow, gotta finish the whole field, crunch crunch, gotta eat everything, chomp chomp
Poor Lasi running into the void, never to be seen again
Monthly Archive for February, 2010
Have you always wanted to learn a little bit of Cantonese, just enough to get by, but can’t be arsed to take lessons?
My side-line (blogging being the main one) could be the answer for you! Check it out at www.happyjellyfish.com
We are caring, sharing and baring all of the Canto secrets - for yooooooou!
This time - wait for it - the story of Happy jellyfish People’s Democratic Language Bureau!
Or even:
Now YOU too can learn Cantonese without really trying …
I’m a sucker for excellent hovelage. What, you don’t know what hovelage is? It’s a word I’ve invented in keeping with the Hong Kong government style of ending every noun with -age. You know, “usage” instead of “use,” “signage” instead of “sign” and no doubtage “wordage” instead of “word.”
So “hovelage” is a word meaning “beautiful houses which in some instances have gone a little to seed.” It can also mean “Dickensian.”
Last weekend in Inner Guangdong province I was photographing hovelage and grading it good to excellent, and my friend Ah-On said: “That should totally be a word!” Well my dear young friend, it’s been a word for at least five years.
Good hovelage with river.
Good hovelage with river II. After I had taken this photo, a woman came out on the second floor balcony and threw a bag full of rubbish into the river.
Fine hovelage with motorbike taxi and wanted criminal posters
Superior hovelage with texture
Excellent hovelage. Courtyard (with bags)
Good hovelage with Chinese new year door couplets and fine balcony
Outstanding hovelage. Tenement building
Good example of fine city hovelage, Sei Wui
Superb hovelage. Whole row (including corner)
And here is a collection of village hovelage, including scraggy crags and firecracker debris:
Happy year of the tiger and happy hovelage hunting!
Five days on the mainland feels like all the time in the world, and yet, when the last day rolls terribly around, one realises the holiday was far too short. Again.
This time we went west in Guangdong instead of north, because a weather report we happened to catch while having a foot massage, promised 4 degrees and rain in the north. As opposed to 5 degrees and a light drizzle in the west, presumably.
Yes, it was cold. Bone-rattlingly, spine-curlingly cold. But not “if you look to one side your eyeballs freeze in that position” cold, unlike for example Harbin where a lot of people are inexplicably going this year, paying to look at ice.
My friends had never been to Guangzhou, so we swung around that lovely city to find it completely empty, closed and shut down, apart from some lion dancers doing their stuff the next morning at 8.
What a contrast to Sei Wui（四 會）only two hours away, a town positively hopping with new year joy. Here everything was not only open but more open than usual. And instead of sitting at home watching tv with their families, the geezers of Seiwui were out in force, filling every available party space. We were invited to gatecrash one party in a karaoke room, where we found about seven guys in their late 30’s snorting ketamine through a bent straw.
It was just them by themselves in the room, no whores, even. I suppose they had gone back to their villages for CNY. Small wonder the guys were sucking up the “lao K” like Scarface at Christmas. They weren’t too keen on us taking photos, and we weren’t too keen on being involved in a possible police raid of some sort, so we quickly left, presumably leaving the face of the guy who had invited us in tatters.
Finding the world’s biggest motorbike graveyard the next day further made up for all disappointment some of us may have felt at a gate crashing gone awry.
And anyway, another party with younger, non drug-taking (but drinking) guys quickly made up for our miss, and Seiwui retains its title as “most intense party town in Southern China, possibly the whole country.” Just go there and see for yourself.
Oh and you must stay in “Filmcenter Hotel,” built only a few months ago but already looking like an early 80’s hotel. It proves the strange rule I’ve seen time and time again: In China, three star hotels vastly out-perform those of four.
Take the marvellous town of Wan Fau (雲浮）for example. We arrived there shivering and on the brink of death after having spent the night in a four star hotel in the nondescript town Lo Deng (羅定）- a hotel so far up its arse that the heating wasn’t working AND I couldn’t close my window properly AND the floors didn’t have carpets, only shiny white morgue-like tiles. There were no extra blankets or duvets and the teacups had no lids because they were so fancy and “European.” (The place was called Hollybay. Say no more.) For this we paid almost 500 yuan, 300 more than the well-equipped, heated, perfectly working three star hotel in Wan Fau, across the road from the bus station and two minutes’ walk from a lake and some Guilin-like scraggy crags!
It’s Wan Fau forever for me now. That town has everything. Next to the hotel: A good restaurant. Next to the restaurant: A great bar.
And the hovelage! Oh, the hovelage. I love a good hovelage, me. Actually the houses in Wan Fau aren’t even hovels, just traditional houses.
Another victorious trip!
But should have chosen the slightly bigger bag. One that could hold a down jacket and a very thick woollen jumper.
Now I know where the HK government takes it from. Naw, of course I’ve known for ages. Before the handover in 1997 - god what a long time ago - people were saying that China would become more Hong Kong-ified. That by being near us and having greater openness between the two entities, China would follow our lead because we are, well, just better, more advanced etc. Pretty much in the same way that Europeans think that muslims, once they’ve settled in Europe and learnt the language of wherever they are, they will become integrated.
Well, that didn’t happen, in the same way as China never became Hong Kong-ified. (all right, so they’ve picked up the Canto words Dek-si (taxi) and Basi (bus) but that’s about it. No, the truth is of course that Hong Kong is becoming more and more China-ified. The railings, the “take ceah,” the increasing micro-management of all we do and say, walk and sit, it’s all classic communist intrusionism.
And most of all, the influence of mainland thinking manifests itself in the incessant drive to improve everything that doesn’t need improvement. Metal railings along forest paths, fences and tacky flowers around trees, widening and concreting of footpaths, railings along flat, completely non-dangerous roads; the list cloppety-clops drearily on. It’s mainland thinking. Make no mistake - our government officials, the few who weren’t actually born on the mainland, now want to be more communist than the communists, falling over themselves to out-commie each other.
The formerly wonderful bamboo forest in Guangying, west Guangdong, is a case in point.
I’d heard so much about this wondrous forest and had tried to go there for ages. One year ago I succeeded, and it was indeed a beautiful thing to behold; mile after mile of bamboo, the most elegant and most evocative of trees - and to think that it’s just a type of grass!
However, when I got there that day, it was almost six o’clock, and the park was about to close. I just got to walk along the river, mirroring an endless sea of bamboo, for half an hour or so, marvelling at how many shades of green with a light coating of luminous white powder just one bamboo can hold.
Last weekend I went back with two friends to get a good look at it, and semi-gladly paid the now 100 yuan to get in - I would finally see the bamboo forest!
Alas, the mainland official thinking-people had got there before me. The bamboo forest had now been improved.
Not only had the formerly wide and shiny river now been reclaimed to make way for a fake sandy beach festooned with weird balloons and with sand motorbikes sitting there at the ready to welcome the thousands of people who can’t be content with just walking along a river looking at bamboo and enjoying the peace, no, most of the bamboo trees were gone to make way for Thai-style bungalows, children’s playgrounds and wide foothpaths decorated with awful flowers. And to improve the bamboo experience further, all the footpaths were about to be covered in red carpets.
The bamboo forest had, in short, become a Disneyland-like hellhole with a few scattered bamboo, which only seemed to be there to accommodate the speakers blearing out Kenny G-like muzak. All in the name of “improvement.”
I have to say fortunately though, there was nobody there. Nobody was using the motorbikes and all the other stuff put up to entertain people.
When we left the place after an over-priced meal in an empty restaurant, we were picked up and driven to the bus station by some locals, who said: “Bamboo forest? Bah humbug, who’d want to go to that place? It’s just for gullible tour groups. If we want to look at bamboo, we can just look out the window. There’s no bamboo left in the bamboo forest.”
And that sums up rather depressingly how mainland thinking is now dominating Hong Kong, which is: How to take a perfectly good, nay, marvellous thing, and ruin it, in the name of improvement. Why? Because we can.
Aren’t they wonderful? This is the kind of vista I behold every morning. People ask me how I can live in such an “inconvenient” place - 40 minutes’ travel from Central. This is how.
Here we go again. Another man has been sent down, this time for a surprisingly lenient five years, for “inciting subversion of state power” for donating blood in a commemoration of the Tiananmen massacre, as well as publishing an essay about said commemoration. Oh, and he investigated the shoddy work of school buildings that led to hundreds of children being killed in the Sichuan earthquake. I think that was the hardest thing for the authorities to swallow.
They are, after all, the Chinese Communist Party, and when they’ve said a building is erected according to the law, it is erected according to the law, and anybody who questions it poses a direct threat to the supremacy of the communist party. Worst of all, he,Tan Zuoren, talked to foreign journalists about the immoral greed entrenched in the Chinese system, which allowed all those children to be killed just to let some unscrupulous builders (inevitably with links to the government) earn a little extra money.
Okay. That other guy, Liu Xiaobo, who was recently jailed for a more standard “counter-revolutionary” 11 years - he must have seen it coming. He had after all pointed out that freedom of speech is stipulated in Chinese law, so asking where the hell that freedom of speech is, must clearly be treason of the highest order. Everybody knows that.
But to get jailed for disclosing that greedy bastards have been building death-traps to skim money off building materials - one would think he deserved a medal for helping the authorities to avoid similar scandals in future? No, it’s off to jail he goes.
Countries with economic ties to China; pretty much any country which has ever imported anything in the last 20 years, are falling over themselves to praise China for its new “openness” and “willingness to get on board.” Look at how the Chinese government single-handed has lifted millions out of poverty with hardly any help from those millions! Look at how Wen Jiabao is kissing children and visiting poverty-stricken farmers in their homes! Why, Chinese government officials even speak English and wear suits now. We must do business with them.
Actually, the ideology has hardly changed since the cultural revolution.
Apart from the token corrupt government officials who get arrested or sometimes executed to scare others off being just that little too greedy (should have been satisfied with just a few millions and known better just whom to suck up to) - look at who gets in trouble with the law (hauled into police stations and beaten senseless, often jailed) in China today:
Parents who complain about their children being stolen
Farmers who complain about their land being taken from them
People who complain about their lakes/rivers/farmland being poisoned by factories
Parents who want to know how their healthy sons suddenly died from unspecified diseases in police custody
People who complain about being relocated to make way for infrastructure programs without compensation
Anybody who complains about any official transgressions in general
Parents who complain about their children being killed by tainted food products
Relatives who question the safety of mines where hundreds are killed each year
Women who complain about being forcibly sterilised or have their children aborted well into the ninth month
Nomads who complain about being forced off their grazing land and made to live in factory-like compounds without any chance of making a living
People who complain about being forced out of their homes to make way for flower beds to welcome the sacred Olympics
… the dreary list goes on and on.
Make no mistake: Black is still white and white still black in the new, shiny, “modern” China.
In Amsterdam, the only brave man in Europe is on trial for speaking the truth about fascist ideology ISLAM. I let the brilliant Pat Condell condemn this trial more eloquently than I ever could (Condell has a series of anti-fascism statements on YouTube, all worth listening to):
Yes shame on the Netherlands. It’s quite incredible that something like this could happen in a country formerly regarded as the vanguard of the free countries in Europe. We should be thankful, once again, that we live in Hong Kong.
I don’t want to have wonderful Guangdong province all to myself anymore. It’s too selfish! I’ve started a new service of funky, surreal TOURS.
No carbon footprint woes, no hassle, no need to learn Chinese (although you can) and no frisking for crotch bombs! Guangdong province: Your closest holiday destination. Why not start at Chinese New Year - the biggest ongoing party in China?
Recent Comments