Hm. What’s going on? Walking around the great city of Hong Kong I see local people - about my height or shorter, weighing not very much, not bulging with insane muscles or dragging hundreds of kilos of excess flesh around. But, as usual, my eyes are lying. For it appears that Hong Kong people are huge, enormous mastodons one and all, and also worrisomely unsteady on their feet.
And aggressive? Why, they just can’t see for example a fence before they want to throw themselves on it and rip it to shreds. Or how else would you explain the photo above: This huge production has been going on in a tiny little stream in sleepy backwater Pui O for about eight months now. I thought there must be some major drainage works or laying of huge underwater cables to Cheung Chau or beyond - (yes I know CLP did that five years ago but they are always digging up the same bit of road so why not lay the same cable?) however yesterday I found out from a worker that it has all been to exchange this type of railing:
with this concrete wall:
“It’s for safety!” the worker, amazingly working for local triad construction company Yick Hing, added helpfully. Of course. The government must have been panic-stricken at the danger to all those lives walking on that road, feeling compelled to throw themselves onto that flimsy metal railing only as thick as my arm and at least two years old, and blasting through it, crashing to a certain watery death.
Only good old reliable concrete can save those gigantic fence-tearing maniacs from an untimely demise. That must be why workers from the same company and at the last minute are now also replacing the railings on this death trap:
with concrete. When I asked the workers why they were removing these railings, they said they were “broken.” Really? Risking my life for investigative journalism I shook all four parts of the railing. Nothing. Then I threw myself on them with a not inconsiderable force. Not a millimetre of budging.
This raises the interesting question: Is our government now psychic, on top of all its other admirable qualities? Can it predict that in some unforeseeable future, for example the day after I don’t see any signs of a length of railing being broken, that it will be?
Or could it be that all the destruction work, concreting, digging up the same bit of road, putting up of ludicrous, unnecessary railing, cutting down of trees, dumping of construction waste, useless so-called improvement work and the relentless march to turn Pui O and the rest of Lantau into Tsuen Mun is because this government is so damned corrupt, pouring unlimited money into the pockets of the same two corrupt local construction companies?
Don’t know, really. It’s hard to tell.
Are they using that really excellent mainland kind concrete? Then they can replace it, again, next year.
No quality or lack thereof of concrete has ever stopped the HK civil engineering corps from replacing it every year.
This sounds exactly like how things are done in my native Chicago where structures are built by a politically connected (i.e. corrupt) construction company in order to be torn down by the same type of demolition company and then rebuilt by a third company. And it turns out that each of them are controlled by the same few people.
Nice to know there are urban traditions that cross cultural, ethnic and linguistic lines.