Jason Y. Ng's Blog, page 4

Winners and Losers in the New Territories East By-election 新界東補選的贏家與輸家

After weeks of intense political campaigns and a vicious war of words on social media, the dust has finally settled on who will fill the Legislative Council seat vacated by former Civic Party senior Ronny Tong.
In the end, Alvin Yeung beat out six other candidates in the New Terrorities East by-election last Sunday, winning by a thin margin, and became the latest poster boy for the pan-dems. The 35-year-old barrister could heave a sigh of relief for not letting down his party elders. His win means the tie-breaking seat in the geographic constituencies, the directly elected half of Legco, is now safe and the pan-dems can hold on to their house majority and veto power. All’s well that ends well.
Or so it seems.
While the by-election is a winner-takes-all proposition, the politics behind it isn’t. The time to take stock of the winners and losers is now.
To the victor belong the spoils

Localist groups

Hong Kong Indigenous’ Edward Leung might have lost his Legco bid, but he went home with something else: bragging rights. The 66,000 votes he mopped up aren’t exactly chum change; they are enough to silence the skeptics and prove to fan boys that localism is more than a fringe voice that appeals only to a “very small minority” of voters.
Leung’s well-organized campaign – replete with color-matching hoodies, banners and major endorsements from opinion leaders – succeeded in galvanizing the young and the restless. The 24-year-old philosophy student addressed a range of burning issues that many of his opponents would rather not talk about: the perceived Sinofication of Hong Kong, eroding freedom of expression and the growing desire among the youth for self-governance.
Emboldened by his strong showing in the by-election, Leung declared that local politics is now a “tripartite division,” a reference to the Three Kingdoms Dynasty during which three feudal lords carved up Imperial China into regional states. The metaphor doubles as a declaration of war to both the pro-Beijing camp and the pan-dems: the by-election is only a dress rehearsal for the localists, before they return in full throttle in the September general election when all 35 geographic constituency seats will be up for grabs.
And they don’t even need to win big – Leung and his supporters don’t give a hoot to pan-dem concerns such as securing a house majority and veto power. A single seat is all it takes for these proverbial skunks-at-the-garden-party to make a stink on the Legco floor. If C.Y. Leung finds Long Hair’s theatrics offensive, then he had better start growing thicker skin to face off an Edward Leung in the house.
Leung (middle) and his supporters
Pan-dems

If the localists have come out on top, then the pan-dems have gone down in flames.
Alvin Yeung’s difficult campaign and narrow win have exposed the many cracks within the opposition. There is a growing sentiment among voters, especially the so-called “post-90s” (people born after 1990), that traditional pan-dem parties are out of touch and care more about their own political existence than the best interests of their constituents. Many believe that Yeung would have done much better at the polls had he run as an independent or at least not been constantly chaperoned by a posse of annoying pan-dem old-timers on the campaign trail. To young voters, that’s about as cool as bringing your mother to the school prom.
In an television interview shortly after the by-election, Edward Leung categorically ruled out the possibility of any form of coordination between Hong Kong Indigenous and the pan-dems in the general election, which, unlike the first-past-the-post by-election, operates under a different voting system: proportional representation. To put simply, if, say, 30% of the electorate supports a particular political party, then roughly 30% of the Legco seats will be won by – or “apportioned to” – that party. That means while the pan-dems were able to narrowly hold on to that one seat last Sunday, they stand to lose many more this September as a result of a vote leak to the localists.
Pan-dems struggling to stay relevant
Pro-Beijing camp

The Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong (DAB) ran a clumsy campaign. As a candidate, Holden Chow lacked charisma and his debate performances, including a poorly executed cry scene on television, was at times hard to watch.
DAB also needs to rethink their ground strategy going forward. As much as Edward Leung siphoned off votes from Alvin Yeung, the other five pro-establishment and quasi-independent candidates did exactly the same to Chow. With the Liaison Office (the de facto Chinese consulate in Hong Kong) breathing down their necks, one would expect the “red team” to put out a better coordinated campaign than the one we saw.
Looking ahead, the pro-Beijing camp is not expected to gain much from the Three Kingdoms scenario either. While the infighting within the opposition may shift a seat or two from the traditional pan-dems to the localists in the general election, the vote split will not strengthen parties like DAB under a proportional representation system. In other words, robbing Peter to pay Paul will hardly benefit Mary. What’s more, Hong Kong Indigenous and other localist groups hold the most sway with the youth vote comprising primarily first time voters. The emergence of a new, progressive and highly energized electorate will only hurt the establishment.
Chow's poor acting skill might have cost him the election
Magnet Man

In an episode that is best described as comic relief, a man who wasn’t even part of the race has ended up in the political doghouse. Starring in this sideshow was 21-year-old Oscar Lai, best known for his role as Scholarism’s spokesman and Joshua Wong’s faithful sidekick. During Alvin Yeung’s campaign, Lai stalked the candidate whenever he went and photo-bombed him and his Civic Party colleagues on numerous occasions. One photograph showed a desperate Lai standing on his toes and craning his neck just to get in the frame.
Netizens took notice and mocked the shameless political climber with the nickname “Magnet Man” – the Cantonese phrase for attention seekers who are drawn to the camera lens like moths to a flame, or in less poetic terms, paper clips to a magnet. It is believed that Lai has set his sight on the September election (unlike 19-year-old Joshua Wong, he is old enough to run) and is trying his hardest to sidle up to the pan-dems, including a high profile announcement days before the by-election that he would sever his ties with Scholarism and throw his support behind his new best friend, Yeung. Magnet Man’s not-so-subtle political agenda exposed, the question is whether he can recover in time before the next campaign season begins.
Lai (middle, front) blocking Yeung who was standing behind him
The abstainers

Despite all the drama, comedy and media hoopla, the turnout of the by-election was just over 46%, lower than that of the district elections three months ago. Excusing those who were out of town or infirm, there is really no reason why anyone could spend hours queueing up for a Mark Six lottery ticket but not stop by the voting booth in their own neighborhood on a Sunday to discharge their civic responsibility.
When one in two adults voluntarily gives up his or her most fundamental right as a citizen – the kind of right that tens of thousands slept on the streets for more than 70 days in the fallof 2014 fighting for – the whole city loses.

___________________________
This article appears on SCMP.com under the title "Who were the winners and losers in the New Territories East by-election?"

As posted on SCMP.com

Citizen Kwan 大市民

If you speak Cantonese, by now you have must have watched it at least once or possibly more times. You must have shared the link with your family and friends and urged them to watch it too. If asked, you can probably quote a few zingers from it verbatim.

I am referring to the anti-government tirade by Kwan Ying-yi (關穎怡), a self-described “concerned citizen,” at a special Legco meeting to discuss retirement protection earlier this week. The video went viral on social media, receiving 300,000 views on YouTube in just 48 hours. Netizens have added English subtitles, turned her words into a rap song, and even called on her to run for Legco in the September general election.
Kwan, an unlikely heroine

For those who haven’t had the pleasure of viewing – or understanding – the Cantonese-only clip, here’s a recap of Kwan’s three-minute rant.
On the government’s proposed pension scheme, she said:
Your so-called ‘universal’ retirement plan puts an $80,000 asset limit on applicants but only offers them a paltry payment of $3,230 per month. Are you kidding me? There is so much government-business collusion and inflation these days that we can’t even buy a catty of contaminated vegetable for $30!
People like [Labour and Welfare] Secretary Matthew Cheung (張建宗), who makes $300,000 a month, have no idea how much we struggle to make ends meet, or else he wouldn’t have made the callous, cold-blooded remark that $16,000 is a very decent income [for a two-person household].
Chief Secretary Carrie Lam (林鄭月娥) rejected the need-blind proposal [favored by the public] because she claimed it would lead to a government deficit. What she said made me laugh out loud! The government spent hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars on white elephant projects like the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge and the high-speed rail link, only to nickel and dime the poor on social programs. How dare she mention the word deficit! Pardon my language, but these corrupt bureaucrats are worse than thieves!
Hands off our money, old hag!


On law and order:
What happened to C.Y. Leung after he accepted $50 million in secret payments? Nothing. What happened to the seven police officers after they beat up a citizen in a back alley? Nothing. [...] What happened to the pro-Beijing camp after it blatantly rigged the district elections? Nothing!
In our topsy-turvy city, firing shots into the air is considered compliant with police protocol. The ethical standards for the government and the police are as ‘flexible’ as the arm of the officer who hit passersby with his baton and called it an ‘extension of his arm.’ Lawmakers are permitted to spread unfounded rumors in Legco, like the one about one of the abducted booksellers taking a speedboat to China to procure prostitution.
To be honest, I am worried that after making this speech today I too may disappear and ‘go to the mainland using my own methods.’ [Kwan was again referring to the missing booksellers who had presumably entered China without proper documentation]. Why bother with retirement protection when our personal security is unprotected?
The five booksellers still missing after months

On the chief executive and his cabinet:
Since taking his job, C.Y. Leung has lost his conscience – then again, maybe he never had one to begin with. I want to offer Leung, his senior staff and the Hong Kong Police a piece of advice: there is something called karma in this world.
There isn’t much we can do to stop you now, but future generations of Hong Kongers will be watching you. Your karma will catch up with you one day!
As soon as Kwan’s speaking time was up, the meeting’s chairman, pro-Beijing lawmaker Wong Kwok-kin (黃國健), switched off her microphone to stop her from spewing more anti-government venom. But the damage was already done. Her harangue was uploaded to YouTube within minutes and was held up in the echo chamber of the Internet as the ultimate indictment of C.Y. Leung’s failed administration. Kwan became an overnight social media sensation, all for venting frustrations that so many others have failed to put into words.
Netizens credited her success to her well-chosen tone. She delivered the sort of angry wife scolding based on logic understood by ordinary citizens, with none of the abstruse political speak preferred by the traditional pan-dems. Even a “C9” (師奶) – an unsophisticated housewife in the local vernacular – is able to grasp the convoluted political issues covered in her speech.
But perhaps it is who she is that has made her tongue-lashing so powerful. 

Kwan has no discernible political affiliation or agenda. She has no constituent to please or ideology to preach. She is, it seems, just a fed-up citizen who is tired of being a passive bystander and has to blurt out the truth, like the child in The Emperor’s New Clothes. By calling out the government in a simple, relatable way, Kwan might have changed more minds in a few days than any of the slogan-shouting pan-dems or brick-throwing localists have in years.
A Hong Kong pig under the Communists' care

Gong chu (港豬), which literally means a Hong Kong pig, is a popular Cantonese catchphrase to describe citizens who choose a steady livelihood over civil liberties, or those who are thankful for economic handouts from Beijing despite having their freedoms gradually taken away. Kwan’s refusal to be a docile farm animal is a testament to the long-term impact of the occupy movement, which put citizens through a kind of social awakening not experienced since the Tiananmen Square Protests.
Impressive as it was, Kwan’s Legco appearance has not been universally praised. Criticisms are coming from both ends of the political spectrum: the moderates found her rhetoric too aggressive, while the radicals said it wasn’t nearly aggressive enough. 

The latter group, comprising mainly localists, took particular issue with her reliance on karma as a form of political comeuppance. To them, the Buddhist belief in retribution is just a self-deluding old wife’s tale to make the oppressed feel better about their plight when they lack the courage to tIf there is a moral in this story, it is that to counter the ruling elite’s growing impunity, the opposition needs all the help it can get. The pan-dem lawmakers will push back government officials in Legco debates, the radicals will resist riot police in street protests, and ordinary citizens like Kwan will use their sharp tongues to engage and educate the masses in every day dialogues. They will each do their part and give what they can, instead of constantly ripping into each other and bickering over whose method is the only way forward. As the city heads into an election weekend where two opposition candidates are siphoning off votes from each other and effectively handing the victory to the other side, citizens are well-served to remember the fortune cookie wisdom that we are stronger together than apart.
The pro-Beijing candidate is most likely to win this weekend's election

_________________________
This article appears on SCMP.com under the title "Hong Kong activist's anti-government tirade goes viral as social media users hail her for voicing Hong Kongers' frustrations."

As posted on SCMP.com

Yeung versus Leung 楊梁戰

This Sunday, residents in the New Territories East (NTE) district – which includes Sha Tin, Tai Po, Sai Kung and surrounding areas – will get to decide the political future of the entire city. That's when a by-election to fill the Legco seat vacated by former Civic Party member Ronny Tong (湯家驊) will be held. A social media war over how NTE residents should vote has reached a fever pitch. Not since the five-constituency de facto referendum (五區公投) in 2012 has a by-election drawn so much public attention and polarized the city into such diametrically opposed extremes.

Edward Leung (left) and Alvin Yeung

Why the election matters
We begin with a refresher on local politics.
Legco is a 70-seat legislative body comprising of two houses – the Functional Constituencies (FC) and Geographic Constituencies (GC) – each having 35 seats. The FC is stacked with Beijing loyalists handpicked by big business and special interest groups. Because it marches in lockstep with our equally unelected chief executive, the FC is a lost cause as far as government oversight is concerned. By contrast, the GC (including Ronny Tong’s vacated seat) is democratically elected and represents our only hope within Legco to impose some form of checks and balances on government actions.
When it comes to making laws, Legco is clinically schizophrenic. While bills introduced by the government require all 70 Legco seats voting together, bills proposed by individual Legco members must be passed by each of the GC and the FC voting separately. This bizarre, only-in-Hong Kong voting procedure is commonly referred to as “separate vote count” (分組點票).
Until Ronny Tong resigned last June following the defeat of the 2015 electoral reform bill, opposition lawmakers carried a razor-thin 18-17 majority in the GC over their pro-Beijing rivals. As a result, motions initiated by the pan-democratic lawmakers, such as the one to investigate police violence during the 2014 occupy movement, would be passed by the GC but defeated by the FC. Likewise, any proposal from the pro-Beijing camp would sail through the FC but get shot down by the GC. That’s about as fair as our lopsided legislative system gets.
But this dubious balance of power only works if the opposition controls the GC. Should one of the pro-Beijing candidates snatch the contested seat in the by-election next Saturday, the balance would be tipped from 18-17 to 17-18, thereby handing the majority control to the other side – at least until all Legco seats are once again up for grabs in the next general election in September 2016. In other words, if the opposition fails to hold on to that critical seat, there will be nothing to stop a lawmaker from the dark side from initiating dangerous proposals and having them rubber stamped by both Beijing loyalist-controlled houses.
Under this doomsday scenario, the biggest worry is a Legco rule change to put an end to filibusters, a motion that only members of Legco's Committee on Rules of Procedure can initiate (and hence having a GC majority matters). The filibuster is currently the opposition’s only effective weapon to delay or derail bad government bills like the copyright amendment (dubbed “Article 23 of the Internet”) and funding requests for wasteful infrastructure projects that squander billions of taxpayer dollars. For instance, C.Y. Leung’s pet project to create an innovation and technology bureau – accused by the pan-dems of being yet another pork barrel project to benefit political friends – was stalled for several years by Long Hair and his People Power friends. But if the opposition’s GC majority goes, so goes its ability to filibuster.
Tipping the balance in the GC

Frontrunner’s blues
There are seven candidates vying for the GC seat. All but two of them are Beijing loyalists (such as DAB’s Holden Chow (周浩鼎)) or faux opposition (such as Democratic Party reject Nelson Wong (黃成智)). For most freedom-loving NTE voters, the real choice comes down to two candidates: Alvin Yeung (楊岳橋), barrister and longtime Civic Party member, and Edward Leung (梁天琦), HKU philosophy major and spokesperson for nativist group Hong Kong Indigenous (本土民主前線).
The by-election is a first-past-the-post, winner-takes-all proposition, which means Yeung and Leung are in the same quagmire that beset Eric Chu (朱立倫) and James Soong (宋楚瑜) in the Taiwan general election a month ago, or, for those with a longer memory, George H.W. Bush and Ross Perot in the 1992 U.S. presidential election. It is a political truism: candidates with similar political leanings siphon votes from each other and often end up handing the election to the other side. Political cannibalism is every bit as savage and tragic as it sounds.
In the past, if two pan-dem candidates found themselves running head-to-head in the same election, they would either hold a primary or work it out among themselves behind the scenes. In the latter scenario, the candidate with weaker poll numbers would graciously bow out in the best interest of the entire opposition – the so-called “big picture” argument.
Bernie Sanders (left) and Hillary Clinton
But not this time. Frontrunner Yeung and political newbie Leung are strange bedfellows who represent two vastly different factions within the opposition camp: the mainstream pan-dems and the nativists. Whereas one prefers to sit down and talk, the other demands supporters to stand up and fight. That Yeung and Leung share a common political enemy is not enough to make them friends, much less allies. To the delight of their pro-Beijing rivals, there has been no coordination within the opposition. A gracious bow-out by either candidate is out of the question.
For months, the pan-dems had hoped that Yeung would carry enough votes in NTE, a pan-dem stronghold, to win the election notwithstanding the vote leak to Leung. But the fish ball riots on Chinese New Year’s Day altered the calculus. Overnight, radical groups like Hong Kong Indigenous became the people’s heroes, especially among the post-80s and post-90s. To these young (and many of them first time) voters, nativist warriors finally put their money where their mouth was and risked prison by standing up to the authorities during the police clashes. Dozens of them have been arrested and charged with rioting which carries a maximum sentence of ten years if convicted. Their personal sacrifices have added fuel to the rising localist movement in the post-occupy era.
The fish ball riots have bolstered Leung’s popularity and strengthened his poll numbers (Leung himself is currently on bail after being charged with participating in a riot). In the zero-sum game that is the Legco by-election, barrister Yeung finds his frontrunner status greatly diminished. That, combined with the prevalent views among the new generation that traditional pan-dem parties are out of touch and don’t “get” them, is giving Yeung a taste of Hillary Clinton’s blues after Bernie Sanders came out of nowhere and won the New Hampshire primary.  
Fish ball riots, a game changer

Why you should vote for Yeung
If you subscribe to the big picture argument, as do the majority of pro-democracy citizens aged 30 or above, then the clear choice is Alvin Yeung.
After all, no matter how much some Democrats in the United States are “feeling the Bern,” they need to consider the reality that Hillary Clinton has a much better chance of defeating the Republican nominee in the presidential election. Likewise, even if you prefer Edward Leung’s “any means necessary” rhetoric to Yeung’s waistcoat-and-necktie preppy charm, why “waste” your vote on a political unknown who won’t win and will effectively deliver the seat to the pro-Beijing camp?
Strategic voting aside, Yeung is a likable guy. For years, he offers pro bono legal services to anti-government protesters, including many in the occupy movement and most recently the fish ball rioters – the very people who are now jeopardizing his quest for a Legco seat. Although Leung’s supporters have questioned Yeung’s motive for defending the Mongkok protesters in the run-up to the by-election, their accusation does not hold up considering that any association with street violence would and did invite attacks from the establishment and alienate Yeung’s peace-loving electoral base.
Yeung also represents a new generation of pan-dems who is less saddled with political baggage. The 35-year-old barrister is determined to change the old boys’ club culture and bridge the generation gap between traditional parties and young voters. Unlike his mentor Ronny Tong, he is more inclined to fight the system from within by joining forces with Long Hair and other firebrand lawmakers. Yeung does not want voters to “settle for” him solely because of the big picture argument. He wants them to pick him for who he is and what he stands for.
Alvin Yeung (left) and Ronny Tong

Why you should vote for Leung
If you believe that parliamentary politics in Hong Kong is dead and that the battle to free the city from the ever-extending claws of Beijing is fought on the streets and not in Legco, then 24-year-old Edward Leung is your man.
The logic is simple: why bother with the big picture argument or any of the gibberish about the 18-17 majority when the legislative process is so inherently and hopelessly unfair? Forget about blocking bills and filibustering, because local politics needs not small fixes but a complete overhaul, and an overhaul can only come about through resistance and revolt. Sending another slogan-shouting, finger-wagging pan-dem like Alvin Yeung to Legco will do absolutely nothing to change the status quo. Voting for Leung, even if he doesn’t win, will send a clear message to the establishment that nativism is a force to reckon with. And if he does win, C.Y. Leung and his cronies will have to brace themselves for a lot worse than projectile bananas on the Legco floor.
In fact, who ultimately wins the by-election doesn’t matter all that much to Leung and his supporters. In their minds, the big picture argument is simply another permutation of the pan-dem fear tactics designed to protect their dwindling political power. For all the nativists care, Holden Chow can take the contest seat and the pro-Beijing camp should go ahead and wreak even more havoc in Legco than they already have – it will only serve to expose how utterly grotesque the system is and galvanize the city al the more for an all-out revolt. Scorch the earth and torch the sky, and a new world order will emerge.
As radical as the rhetoric sounds, it has its appeal – especially to the frustrated youth. For one thing, Leung’s platform of violent resistance is clear and easily understood (compared to Alvin Yeung’s sometimes muffled message). For another, many voters are growing increasingly disillusioned with the pan-dems, who have been in the fight for democracy since the 1980s but none of them has much to show for it. Their efforts have created an illusion of “doing something” but amounted to “achieving nothing.” Long Hair’s filibusters might have succeeded in delaying the technology bureau for years, but who had the last laugh when funding for it was eventually approved? The Legco rules are so stacked against the opposition that it is likened to a four-card hand in a poker game: knowing that you could never ever win with one card missing, would you keep playing or would you throw the cards and flip the table?
Leung has successfully turned the by-election debate into a referendum on the entire pan-dem platform. Running as an outsider and gaining momentum with his rare combination of youth, intellect and passion, he has tapped into the bubbling public anger and sucking up the youth vote faster than Bernie Sanders. There is much more to this nondescript, bespectacled college student than meets the eye.
Edward Leung at a rally

With power comes responsibility
With the way things are going, neither Alvin Yeung nor Edward Leung will win the by-election, and Holden Chow is poised to become the chief beneficiary of the vote split. But will it actually matter if Legco is broken and beyond repair?
That question is being put to hundreds of thousands of NTE residents entrusted with the power to determine the political fate of Hong Kong. If you happen to be one of them and haven’t yet made up your mind, your deliberation over the next few days boils down to this: what direction should the opposition take going forward? It is the eternal struggle between evolution and revolution, between peaceful resistance and violent rebellion, between fixing what is broken and breaking what cannot be fixed. It is as much a battle of ideologies as it is a question of morality. So while this article does not purport to tell you how to vote, it does entreat you to think clearly and choose carefully, no matter whom you end up voting for. You owe the city that much.
_________________ Candidates for the Legislative Council seat for the New Territories East geographical constituency: Lau Chi-shing, Nelson Wong Sing-chi, Holden Chow Ho-ding, Albert Leung Sze-ho, Christine Fong Kwok-shan, Edward Leung Tin-kei, and Alvin Yeung Ngo-kiu.

____________________
This article appears on EJInsight under the title "Yeung vs. Leung: Who to vote for in upcoming Legco by-election?" 

As posted on EJInsight

Year of the Fire Monkey 火猴年

Mo was a street vendor. He sold food out of a pushcart in one of the busiest areas in the city. Because hawking without a permit was against the law, Mo spent much of the day running from the authorities who pursued him with more vigor and less mercy than they did armed robbers. Each time Mo got arrested, the police would confiscate not just his goods but also his only means to a livelihood: his cart and the scale he used to weigh food. Mo didn’t understand why the government would go after little people like him when it had far bigger political and social issues to deal with.
The Fish Ball revolutionary
If you think Mo was one of the dozens of food hawkers in Mongkok who were at the front and center of the so-called Chinese New Year’s Riot that rattled Hong Kong just 30 hours ago, you would be wrong and not even close. Mo’s full name was Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian vegetable seller who doused himself with gasoline and set himself on fire in 201o. His public suicide had fueled so much public outrage toward the Tunisian government that street rallies organized in his honor would turn into riots, and riots would snowball into an uprising that would be known to the world as the Jasmine Revolution. The unpopular president Ben Ali would step down a month later, the country would be fully democratized with a free election by year’s end, and citizens in the rest of the Arab World would be inspired to demand similar political reform. All that, because of one unknown street vendor.
Never underestimate what the little guy can do.
That appears to be the lesson of the day for C.Y. Leung and his dysfunctional government. Revolutions often begin with the most inconsequential and unlikely of events. Ben Ali would never have imagined in his wildest dream that a 26-year-old hawker could upend his presidency. Just the same, our chief executive would not have predicted that a few shots of tear gas would trigger a 79-day occupy movement, or that a run-of-the-mill crackdown on unlicensed food stalls of curry fish balls, beef tripe and stinky tofu would provoke an all-out riot. It is believed that whatever happens on New Year’s Day will repeat itself throughout the year. If Leung is a superstitious man, he should brace himself for many more unpleasant surprises in the Year of the Fire Monkey.
Bouazizi at the end of his rope
The significance of the fish ball hawkers lies in their very insignificance. Many in Hong Kong are asking the same question that Bouazizi had asked himself: why did the government systematically target these petty outlaws and mobilized an army of riot police to go after them and their supporters, when, well, the five missing booksellers are still unaccounted for, none of the cases of police brutality during the occupy movement has been resolved, tens of thousands of public housing residents continue to drink water from lead-leaching pipes, and the high-speed rail link project with a whopping $85 billion price tag is delayed and may possibly be abandoned at the expense of taxpayers. Then there are the chronic political Gordian knots like the cross-border tensions, the marginalization of Cantonese, and, above all, the broken promises of universal suffrage that have left the city of seven million despondent and disenfranchised.
And so this so-called “Fish Ball Revolution” really isn’t about fish balls at all – it is about citizens fed up with the daily abuse by an unelected and unaccountable government led by an unelected and unaccountable chief executive. One commentator compares Hong Kong people to a battered woman, who, after putting up with years of domestic violence, finally snapped and threw a beer bottle at her husband. That sums up why protesters in support of the food vendors hurled bricks and set garbage on fire during the predawn police clashes on Tuesday. It was the same pent-up anger and resentment that pushed Bouazizi over the edge. Surely, the vegetable seller did not set himself on fire because he had a bad day – it was years of harassment and intimidation by the local police that made him do the unthinkable. For frustrated Hong Kongers, three and a half years of C.Y. Leung dismantling the city bit by bit has just about done the trick.
Tear gas is so two years ago
Much like the occupy movement, the Chinese New Year’s Riot has polarized society and torn the city asunder. On social media, sympathizers hailed the violent clashes as a game changer that has finally put Hong Kong on par with the rest of the world, where protesters have the chutzpah to throw rocks and set vehicles on fire instead of sticking to slogans and banners. The pacifists, on the other hand, were quick to condemn the brick-throwers and fire-setters as radical and extreme. When the dust finally settles, however, the hawks will likely have the last word on this round of debate, for no matter how “radical and extreme” Bouazizi’s self-immolation may seem to some, most reasonable people would place the blame on the oppressive government instead of the man who gave his life resisting it. Likewise, no matter how rash and misguided the protesters appear, none of them would have risked prison by throwing bricks at the police if they had better, more effective ways to make themselves heard.
One of the five stories that make up Ten Years  (《十年》), the surprise box office hit that posits a grim future for Hong Kong, is about a woman who commits self-immolation outside the British consulate in protest of the country’s failure to uphold the Sino-British Joint Declaration. With street protests becoming increasingly intense and the city looking more ungovernable by the day, what seems like a far-fetched conjecture may well become a terrifying reality. Unless we find a way to cool the rising political temperature, it is perhaps a matter of time before protesters set more than just garbage on fire and we have our very own Mohamed Bouazizi.
A game changer
________________________
This article appears on Hong Kong Free Press under the title "Never underestimate the little guy: what the Mongkok clashes have in common with the Arab Spring."
As posted on HKFP.com
This article was reproduced on The Wall Street Journal's opinion page. 

As posted on WSJ.COM

Past Events: 2015

2016

2015

Shooting of Korean food documentaryVenue: Central, Admiralty, Pokfulam
Dates: 26 - 27 December
Air date: summer 2016

Guest Speaker at Venue: Broadcasting House, Kowloon Tong
Date: 17 December

Featured in Taipei Times
Title: "Today's Hong Kong, tomorrow's Taiwan?"
Publication date: 2 December 

Featured Author at 2015 Singapore Writers FestivalPanel 1: "Crime and misdemeanors: a reading," moderated by Philip HoldenPanel 2: "Tweeting for change," moderated by Michelle MartinPanel 3: "Where have all the readers gone?" moderated by Kenny ChanVenue: Arts House (Old Parliament House), SingaporeDate: 7 & 8 November
Featured Author at Hong Kong International Literary Festival 2015
Panel 1: "10 years in Hong Kong," moderated by Nick Thorpe
Panel 2: "Ghost Cave: Elsie Sze" (Ng as moderator)
Venue: Fringe Club, Central
Date: 5 November 
Featured in Apple DailyTitle: "Documenting the Umbrella Movement"Publication date: 27 September

Guest Speaker/Opinion Leader at Harvey Nichols HK x MANIFESTO Fall 2015 EventVenue: Harvey Nichols, The Landmark
Date: 25 September

Appointment as Adjunct Associate Professor at Faculty of Law of Hong Kong University, LLM ProgramCourse: International Securities LawAppointment date: September 2015First lecture: Spring 2016
Featured in Bookazine's 30th Anniversary Ad Campaign and Promotional VideoDate: August
Moderator at Book Launch of China Rich GirlfriendFeatured author: New York Times bestselling author Kevin KwanVenue: Kee Club, CentralDate: 7 August
Guest Speaker at Official Launch Party of Hong Kong Free Press
Venue: Foreign Correspondents' Club, CentralDate: 31 July
Panel Judge at Leadership & Social Entrepreneurship Program Co-organized by Wimler Foundation and Aeteno UniversityVenue: Migrants Empowerment Resource Center MERC, CentralDate: 26 July & 9 August
Featured Author at 2015 Hong Kong Book FairPanel: "Walking ten thousand miles," moderator by Oliver ChouVenue: Hong Kong Exhibition Centre, Wanchai
Date: 18 July 
Speaking aat the Hong Kong Book Fair 2015
Third Printing of No City for Slow MenDate: 16 July

Appearance on RTHK Radio3
Show: "Morning Brew" with presenter Phil Whelan
Topic: "Reading culture in Hong Kong"Broadcast date: 15 July
Two Interviews with Chip TsaoShow: "Chip Tsao's Book Talk"
Part 1: "Today's Hong Kong is worse than during SARS"
Part 2: "That is no city for slow men"
Broadcast date: 13 July

Guest Speaker at Victoria Shanghai AcademyTopic: "How does living abroad influence one's writing and thinking?"Venue: VSA, Wong Chuk Hang (via Skype)Date: 26 June
Interview with L.A. Times
Article: "Hong Kong lawmakers reject election framework offered by Beijing" by Julie Makinen and Violet LawPublication date: 18 June
Appearance on Malaysia's BFM Business RadioShow: "Current Affairs" with presenter Sharaad KuttanTitle: "Tiananmen Massacre, unforgotten"Broadcast date: 4 June
Panel Judge at 2015 Best of the Best Culinary AwardsCategory: dim sumVenue: Chinese Culinary Training Institute, PokfulamDate: 3 June

Joined Hong Kong Free Press as a Contributor
Start date: June

Featured Author at Polytechnic University's Writing Roundtable 2015Topic:  "From blogging to getting published"Venue: PolyU English Language Centre, Hung Hom
Date: 15 May

South China Morning Post Article "Pint-sized Heroes" Featured in DVD Box Set of Documentary Lessons in Dissent
Date: May

Interview with Associated Press
Article: "Defiant Hong Kongers resist embrace of mainland China" by Jack Chang
Publication date: 21 April

No City for Slow Men Selected by Hong Kong Literary Group Book Club/Guest Speaker at Book Club Meeting
Venue: Great Indian Kebab Factory, CentralDate: 18 April 

Featured Speaker at Raising the Bar HK
Topic: "Hong Kong food culture in the shadow of gentrification"Venue: KEE Club, Central
Date: 31 March

Guest Speaker at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Anderson School of Manangement's Global Immersion ProgramTopic: "The Umbrella Movement"Venue: CUHK MBA Town Centre, Admiralty
Date: 26 March
Featured Author at 2015 Bookworm Literary FestivalPanel 1: "Hong Kong State of Mind," moderated by Los Angeles Times journalist Julie MakinenPanel 2: "Meet the authors," moderated by Reuters editor John FoleyVenue: Sanlitun, Beijing
Date: 21 March 

Guest Speaker/Opinion Leader at John Hardy x MANIFESTO Spring 2015 Event
Venue: John Hardy, The Landmark
Date: 5 March
Guest Speaker at Victoria Shanghai AcademyTopic: "Writing and Journalism"Venue: VSA, Wong Chuk Hang
Date: 3 March 
Speaker at Opening Ceremony of Wimler Foundation's Leadership and Social Entrepreneurship ProgramVenue: Migrants Empowerment Resource Center MERC, CentralDate: 1 March

Guest Appearance on Discovery Network's TLC ChannelShow: "My Taste of Hong Kong"Broadcast date: 3 February
Lunch with Pen America to Discuss Speech Freedom in Hong KongVenue: Foreign Correspondents' Club, Central
Date: 16 January
Endorsed Peter Gregoire's New Novel The Devil You KnowDate: January


2014
2013
2008 - 2012

*                              *                          *



If you would like Jason Y. Ng, bestselling author of Umbrellas in Bloom, No City for Slow Men and HONG KONG State of Mind, to speak at your school or organization, please contact him at info@jasonyng.com.

10 Years in Hong Kong - Part 2 香港十年 - 下卷

I often tell overseas friends that Hong Kong is like a diva who gets a makeover every few years. In the past decade alone, the city has gone through several rounds of transformation that rendered postcards and guidebooks instantly obsolete each time.

The waterfront on the island side, for instance, has received a complete facelift. The twin piers in Central – Star Ferry and Queen’s – fell under the wrecking ball, replaced by a sprawl of reclaimed land to house new docks, a giant Ferris wheel and possibly the world’s most extravagant government office building. Across the harbor, the effect of relocating the airport to Lantau and relaxing building height limitations is finally felt. New skyscrapers have been popping up in Kowloon like bamboo shoots: K11, the Arch, and the 118-story ICC, the city’s tallest structure.
This endless cycle of urban development and redevelopment – and the image of prosperity and progress it projects – is like placing a pretty rug over a gap-toothed floor. Beneath the surface, a confluence of economic, cultural, social and political changes are threatening the status quo and demanding a new way of governance. They say change is the only constant; in our case, change is also the biggest variable. It is happening both too fast and not nearly fast enough.
The latest makeover

Economic changes

The soaring cost of living is everybody’s bête noire in Hong Kong. When I moved here 10 years ago, the taxi meter started at a reasonable HK$15. It is $22 today, a 50% increase. The flag fall fare will likely go up to $24 by the end of this year. The cost of a bowl of wonton noodles at Tsim Chai Kee (沾仔記) on Wellington Street – my personal measure of consumer prices – has doubled from $13 to $26. It is still a bargain considering the restaurant’s prime location and how many bowls of noodles they must sell every day to pay rent. 

Speaking of rent, I walked by a real estate agent’s office in Midlevels the other day, and saw the name of my first apartment building on Robinson Road printed in bold font on the window display. The monthly rent of a unit in that building is now more than twice the amount I used to pay in 2005. But things are even worse elsewhere. As property prices continue to skyrocket, competition for affordable housing intensified, resulting in a market anomaly: smaller flats in more remote areas are outpacing luxury homes in terms of rent increase.

During the same 10-year period, my salary has gone up by at around 2.5% each year, which is considered respectable among my peers given the Lehman fallout in 2007 and the financial tsunami that ensued. I couldn’t resist the temptation to crunch these numbers on a calculator, which led me to a sobering conclusion: the average renter who subsists on wonton noodles and takes a cab every now and then – that’s most people in Hong Kong – is roughly 40% poorer in real terms than he was a decade ago. 
Citizens like to point the finger at the “hot money” coming from China. Mainlanders are driving up prices and drying up supply in Hong Kong, the same way the Russians and the Arabs are in London. In recent years, growing public outcry has prompted the SAR government to come up with a slew of stopgap measures to prevent a run on everything from real estate to daily supplies. In 2012, a 15% stamp duty was imposed on property purchases by non-permanent residents. Starting 2013, no one can leave the city with more than two cans of baby formula. What’s next? A ban on shampoo sale to anyone who speaks Mandarin?
But our economic woes are far deeper than simple supply and demand. When it comes to innovation and industrial diversification, changes are not just happening too slowly – they are not happening at all. Hong Kong is increasingly behaving like a one-trick pony prancing in its own La-la Land of banking and finance, while neighboring economies like South Korea and Singapore are branching out to clean energy, life sciences and nanotechnology. Our Science Park and Cyberport, both opened for business circa 2005, turned out to be glorified real estate developments. C.Y. Leung’s proposal to set up an Innovation and Technology Bureau was derailed by filibusters in 2012 and again this year, after pan-democratic lawmakers accused it of being just another pork barrel project to benefit cronies.

And so we are right where we were 10 years ago – all our eggs are still in the same financial services basket. Perhaps our being stuck in the rut is more by design than by circumstance. Cynics argue that Beijing has made a conscious decision to keep Hong Kong a “single industry city,” in order to make its economy more fragile and the population more governable. It is believed that pet birds are easier to tame if their wings are clipped. 
Not for the faint of heart

Cultural  changes

In 2006, Facebook opened its doors to any user over the age of 13. Around the same time, online chat room Golden Forum (高登討論區) gained traction by putting out funny parodies of local politicians. A few years later, a trio of twenty-somethingsnew founded 100 Most (100毛) – a satirical  “infotainment” weekly that focuses on the hundred most talked about topics in town – and used their nimbleness to take control of the public narrative. Little by little, these new platforms began to replace traditional print media as the leading news source and the key battleground where public opinion wars are won and lost. 
Meanwhile, YouTube and streaming sites are pushing public television to the brink of extinction. For decades, TVB’s near-monopoly has given the broadcaster a false sense of security, allowing it to churn out banal soap operas and cringe-worthy award shows without losing its viewership. Then came the wake-up call: the epic fall of rival ATVafter its acquisition by mainland Chinese businessman Wang Zheng in 2010 and HKTV's failed bid for a broadcasting license in 2013. At first glance, the two incidents stand to bolster TVB’s market position even more. In reality, they have exposed how the lack of competition is breeding bad programming and slaughtering the television industry.
Joining the telly in the graveyard of dead entertainment is the once-revered Hong Kong cinema and Cantopop. In 2005, the number of locally produced films stood at 57, down from a high of 238 in the 1990s. The number dropped to a record low of 42 in 2013 and rebounded somewhat to 51 in 2014. The Guardiansums up the grim reality well: “The golden age – when John Woo, Ringo Lam and Tsui Hark seemed to effortlessly knock off miracles of motion – is history.” No wonder industry insiders call it the “Hong Kong Crash.”
If you think movie production is depressing, the carnage in the music industry is even worse. A record label executive said to me the other day, “Nowadays, even an A-list singer would be lucky to sell 500 albums. And if the number breaks 1,000, which rarely happens, the studio will bring out the champagne!” The downward spiral is partly attributed to MP3 sharing and online piracy; but the real culprit is the lack of oxygen for local talent to thrive. 

It’s an open secret that both the movie and music industries are dominated by entertainment empires run by the local mafia, which perhaps explains why so many local films romanticize and glorify the Triads. At the same time, social pressure is making young artists wake up from their showbiz dreams and opt for safer career paths in banking and finance. These days, citizens can only cling to the past, remembering bygone superstars like Leslie Cheung and Anita Mui – both passed away in 2003 – as if they were deceased family members. We watch with abandon as Hong Kong goes from a net exporter of pop culture to a net importer of music, movies and drama series.  
Tomorrow never came

Social changes

The biggest shockwave is the arrival of Mainlanders by the tens of millions. The number of visitors from China has nearly quadrupled from 12.5 million in 2005 to a record high of 47.2 million in 2014. For perspective, that’s seven times the city’s population. In 2005, Mainlanders accounted for 54% of the total number of tourists coming to Hong Kong. 10 years later, the percentage jumped to 78%. Among them are armies of parallel traders who load up on merchandise over here and resell it at a higher price back home. Apart from quality assurance, the big draw is the exchange rate: the renminbi has appreciated over 30% against the Hong Kong dollar since 2005.

The striking imbalance in our tourist mix has many side effects, but none more glaring than the transformation of the city’s retail landscape. 10 years ago, our streets were crowded but not impenetrable. Today, citizens are lucky not to be run over by rolling suitcases on Canton Road or Russell Street. The IFC Mall – a microcosm of Hong Kong’s retail scene and a place I walked through multiple times a day – used to be upscale but not inaccessible. There were a half-dozen affordable restaurants and two bookstores to hang out at during lunch time. Not any more. With 43 stores listed under the “Jewellery” category in its directory, the mall is now dominated by a homogeneity of luxury stores, making it virtually indistinguishable from an airport duty-free arcade. The last bookstore was evicted in 2014 to make way for a fashion label flagship. Shopping, the national pastime for millions of Hong Kongers, has all but lost its appeal – at least domestically. Many prefer spending their hard-earned cash in Taipei or Tokyo, where retail means more than Chanel and Cartier.

This unplanned, uncontrolled influx of Mainland visitors is a tough pill for many Hong Kongers to swallow. To the social conservative, their presence is tantamount to an invasion and raises the specter of social engineering by the Communists to dilute our “Hong Kongness.” 12 years since the Individual Visit Scheme (自由行) was introduced to relax travel restrictions on Chinese nationals visiting Hong Kong, cross-border tension and nativist sentiment are at an all-time high. Racial slurs such as locust and zhinaren (支那人; a derogatory term coined by Japanese imperialists over a century ago) are used liberally on social media to refer to our cousins north of the border.
Locals don't shop on Canton Road

Political changes

When I first arrived in the city in 2005, Donald Tsang had just been sworn in as the second chief executive after his predecessor Tung Chee-wah was fired by Beijing. Tsang was a career bureaucrat who did the city neither good nor harm – he hardly did anything at all. But as soon as C.Y. Leung took over in 2012, it was all downhill from there. With the help of the Liaison Office (the de facto Chinese consulate in Hong Kong) and emboldened by a new leadership in Beijing that is distracted by its own epic power struggles, Leung began to dismantle the city bit by bit.
The destruction was systematic in method and broad in scope. Leung started with academic freedom – from his effort to introduce a moral and national curriculum in 2012 to the attempt to quietly sabotage the appointment of a pro-democracy vice chancellor at the University of Hong Kong – and quickly moved on to the freedom of the press. He didn’t succeed with the former, but he and he allies have done well the latter. PEN America, a Washington-based watchdog, published a damning report earlier this year about the accelerating deterioration of press freedom in Hong Kong. The document presents mounting evidence of economic pressures on pro-democracy newspapers, staff reshufflings at news organizations and the intimidation of journalists.

In politics, action and reaction always go hand-in-hand. The appointment of C.Y. Leung has sped up Beijing’s political agenda for Hong Kong, but it has also radicalized the opposition. A decade ago, Long Hair and his League of Social Democrats party were the firebrand rebels on the fringes of the political spectrum. Today, they are the moderates and are labeled as pacifists – or “leftards” – by splitter groups like Civic Passion and HK Indigenous. The new radical kids on the block believe that the LSD and their fellow pan-democrats have been wasting everybody’s time with their kumbaya, let’s-sit-down-and-talk approach, and that they should get out of the way so that real warriors like them can take real action, which includes getting physical with police officers and harassing Mainland visitors. And because these people will always choose scorched earth over common ground, society has become more polarized than it has ever been.

In 2014, bitter debate over an electoral reform proposal and the flagrant meddling by Beijing in the consultation process touched off a citywide class boycott and the now-infamous tear gas crackdown on 28 September. The escalating events culminated in the largest pro-democracy protest in the city’s history. Even though the Umbrella Movement failed to deliver what the suffragists had wanted to achieve, it sent a strong message to the Communist leadership that the city would not roll over and take their political abuse lying down – as so many had thought we would. More importantly, the movement has planted a seed in our youths. Among people in their 20s and 30s, voter registration has surged and many more are now paying attention to local politics. With this unprecedented level of civic participation, all it takes is a spark for the next social uprising to take hold. So fasten your seatbelt – it’s only a matter of time before a bigger and more violent turbulence hits again.

Civic Passion ready for battle

Fight or flight

If all that sounds unsettling to you, that’s because it is. Little has gone unnoticed by the expatriate community, and many will flee the city at the first sign of trouble. Since 2005, there have been two waves of exodus of expats: the first was by force in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, and the second was by choice following the conclusion of the Umbrella Movement last December. In the past six months, I have attended more farewell parties to send off friends and colleagues – bankers, business owners, writers and journalists – than I ever did in all of the past 10 years combined.
A week ago, I had lunch with Al, a barrister and a pan-democrat politician who repatriated from Toronto about the same time I did. He told me that lately he has been regretting his decision to renounce his Canadian citizenship when he ran for public office several years ago. We talked about ways for him to reapply for permanent residence in Canada, and went on to analyze the pros and cons of emigrating to the U.K., Australia and even Taiwan. The conversation was as depressing as my lunch partner pessimistic. Al lamented the twin frustration – and futility – of going up against the tone-deaf SAR government and the uncompromising Death Star up north. “I’m afraid things will get much worse before they will get better, if they will get better at all,” Al sighed. I tried to lighten up the mood. “If we cannot outgun the Communists, then we just have to outsmart them,” I said, before offering my reassurance. “We Hong Kongers are known for our street smarts and quick thinking, aren’t we?”  
In the introduction to my second book published 18 months ago, I wrote:

“Throughout our history, we have been told time and again that we are a city in decline. Skeptics have long prophesized the end of Hong Kong. Plight after predicament, we have proven them wrong. Our optimism, resilience and that copyrightable brand of Lion Rock Spirit have always pulled us out of the rut. It is ever thus.”  

18 months later, I am starting to doubt whether street smarts and quick thinking alone are enough to get us through the challenges ahead. 10 years on, I am beginning to wonder if my optimism is simply blind faith, and if I am in denial out of my deep affection for the city. Like Al, I can use some reassurance right about now.
Are street smarts alone enough?

10 Years in Hong Kong - Part 1 香港十年 - 上卷

This past Saturday marked my 10thanniversary in Hong Kong.
To be precise, it was the 10thanniversary of my repatriation to Hong Kong. I left the city in my teens as part of the diaspora which saw hundreds of thousands others fleeing from Communist rule ahead of the 1997 Handover. For nearly two decades, I moved from city to city in Europe and North America, never once returning to my birthplace in the interim. Until 2005. That summer, I turned in the keys to my Manhattan apartment, packed a suitcase, and headed east.
A personal milestone

My law firm agreed to transfer me from New York to their Hong Kong outpost half a world away. On my last day of work, Jon, one of the partners I worked for, called me into his office for a few words of wisdom. He told me that there was no such thing as a right or wrong decision, and that people could only make life choices based on what they knew at the time. “I assume you’ve done your due diligence,” Jon gave me wink, “in that case I should wish you good luck. Boldly go, Mr. Ng.” He stood up and shook my hand. “And if for whatever reason things don’t work out over there,” Jon offered, “there’s always a place for you here.”
On 25 July 2005, I boarded my flight, Continental Airlines CO99, at JKF Airport. My heavy carry-on bag was no match for my heavy heart. I never quite wrapped my head around why I decided to return to Hong Kong. Perhaps it was to rediscover my roots. Perhaps it was to find my true calling. Or perhaps it was just an impulse – the kind that makes a boy take apart his father’s watch or set off into the dark forest with a flashlight. Whatever it was, I had made my bed and now I had to lie in it. And lie I did, in the flat bed on the 15-hour transpacific flight. A short nap, two movies (Closerand Finding Neverland) and 12 time zones later, I was home. This sweaty, spastic, hyperventilating city was now my home. Well, not quite – at least not yet. 
My old hood in Manhattan

My first impression of the city was like reading the first two parts of Gulliver’s Travels simultaneously. Hong Kong was a fusion of Lilliput and Brobdingnag, where things were both bigger and smaller than how I remembered them. Buildings were of course taller and shopping malls larger. At the same time, the streets got narrower and the average apartment, the scourge of seven million minus the 1%, felt like a very expensive dollhouse. 

I made a point to visit my family’s old apartment in Tin Hau, the place where I spent my entire childhood with my parents and four siblings. I didn’t have the keys and so I followed someone into the building. For ventilation purposes, residents in old walkups often left their main doors open with the barred metal gates shut. So I was able to peek into one of the units the same size as ours, before being awash in old memories and new revelations. Among the mix of emotions was gratitude: how lucky that all seven of us were able to coexist in this shoebox without murdering each other.
The first thing a newcomer to any city does is get a mobile number. That first night, I walked into Three Mobile in Causeway Bay and walked out with a number that started with a 6. All the 9 numbers were taken, according to the store clerk. It took me back to the time when I first arrived in New York and had to reluctantly accept a 646 mobile number after all the coveted 917s had run out. I took comfort in the sudden realization that big cities weren’t that different from each other after all. 

My first smartphone in Hong Kong was a Sony Ericsson Walkman phone that made calls and played music. It stored up to 80 MP3s and even had a 2-megapixel camera. I felt empowered – it was like having the world in my hands. Updating my address book, however, was an ego deflator. I keyed in my brother Kelvin’s number and that of his wife and perhaps three childhood friends. Those were all the people I knew in Hong Kong outside the office. Big cities have a way of making one feel anonymous, sometimes invisible. My Sony Ericsson wouldn’t let me forget that.
For at least the first year or so, I would mentally divide every number by 8 (or 7.8 if I was up for an arithmetic challenge) to convert the Hong Kong dollar to USD. Cab fare from my apartment to the office was $32 at the time – that came to US$4 and was really quite reasonable. I would keep a list of things I needed to buy on my next family trip to Toronto and New York: toothpaste, dental floss, shampoo and other simple things that I could find in Hong Kong but that weren’t exactly the same as the ones I was used to. Then there were books and magazines – why are books and magazines so expensive here? On my annual “home leave,” I would bring an empty suitcase and come back with a year’s supply of reading material from Amazon.com. 
A maddening place

In December 2007, I opened a Facebook account at the urging of two summer interns visiting from California. I remember my first wall post was a picture taken at my housewarming party. I had just moved to a new apartment after my old lease expired and my landlady asked for a 30% rent hike. The party was well-attended – by then I had made enough friends to fill a respectful address book. Meeting people in Hong Kong turned out to be easier than I first thought, because everyone here seemed to know each other and their third cousin. The three degrees of separation was both handy and frightening, depending on how one carried himself socially. Whatever regrettable things one said or did would come back and bite him in the rear within 48 hours. After getting myself burned a few times, I decided to make Polonius’ advice to “give thy thoughts no tongue” and “reserve thy judgment” Golden Rule No. 2 in my personal Hong Kong Survival Guide. I will come back to Rule No. 1 later.
The rise of social media and the incestuous social circles had turned the already competitive megacity into a cage fight. For all its beauty and wonder, Hong Kong could be a miserable, even toxic, place. It didn’t take me long to realize that the toughest part about living here was neither a lack of space nor the high cost of living. It was peer comparison – the blood sport played by the middle and upper middle classes. It was bad enough to measure success by what one had: where he lived, how much money he made and which schools his children attended. It was so much worse, and borderline pathological, to peg one’s self-worth to what other people had that he didn’t: where his friends lived, how much money his friends made and which schools his friends’ children attended. No wonder people looked so stressed out and high-strung all the time – there was no slowing down on the hamster wheel as long as someone else had more, better things. And someone else always did.
Refusing to play the game, I needed a change. Two years after my transfer to Hong Kong, I left my law firm and became an in-house counsel for a bank. The job gave me a more predictable timetable to explore the universe outside the endless cycle of paychecks and credit card bills, that self-defeating seesaw of making money and spending it on things I didn’t need and never wanted. 

Then, in November 2008, Barack Obama was elected the first African American president of the United States. I was so inspired by his acceptance speech in Chicago’s Grant Parkthat I finally did something I had put off doing for ages: I wrote my first blog entry. I began writing about politics because that’s what I loved. Contrary to popular belief, local politics was anything but dull. There were so many proverbial elephants roaming in the city that the more I wrote the more there was for me to write about. Call it the butterfly effect or the law of unintended consequences, one thing soon led to another, and my blog grew into more than a bottle tossed into the ocean. Unbeknownst to me at the time, writing would take over my life and rescue me from an existential crisis.
My very first blog post

Time goes by like passing clouds in a time elapse video. But 10 years can also feel like a lifetime. My Manhattan apartment and all the friends and coworkers I left behind in New York are such distant memories that they now belong to the dusty pages of a biography set in a different place in a different time. 

Every now and then, the nagging question of why I decided to return to Hong Kong in the first place still popped into my head. 10 years on, I believe I am close to solving the mystery, and the answer lies in my puzzling reluctance to visit my hometown during all those years of bumming around overseas: I didn’t feel ready. There is something strangely human, even parental, about one’s birthplace; and there is something solemn, almost sacred, about one’s homecoming. For the longest time I was terrified of disappointing the place I loved with what little I had to show for. By 2005, nearly 20 years after I joined the diaspora, I finally felt I was ready. I had seen and experienced enough to come home to do my city proud, if only by a wee bit.
A lot can and did change in a decade. Continental Airlines merged with United three years ago and no longer exists. Sony Ericsson was rebranded before getting decimated by the iPhone, which is now in its sixth generation. I got used to the toothpastes and shampoos local pharmacies carry and stopped stockpiling daily supplies from Wal-Mart and Costco. I still feel like Gulliver sometimes – the relativity of time and space will always confound me no matter how long I have lived here. 

If there is one thing I have learned about surviving Hong Kong, it is that I have to go against the grain and boldly go where no one bothers to go. For life is a funny thing: happiness and fulfillment often lie in places that look dim and unrewarding. That includes writing, a pursuit that few take up because it promises neither fortune nor fame. All that takes me back to Golden Rule No. 1 in my Hong Kong Survival Guide: “chase not thy own tail” and “play not the game everyone else plays.” Old good Polonius would agree.
If I ever run into Jon on the streets of New York, I will shake his hand once again and tell him that things have worked out quite well for me in Hong Kong. I will tell him that this sweaty, spastic, hyperventilating city is now my home, and that it has always been. 
This, my home


*                *                 *


From personal to political – read Jason’s look back on how Hong Kong has changed in the past decade, for the better and for the worse, in part 2 of this article to be posted later this week.

Hong Kong's New Disease: Ridiculitis 香港新病:荒謬症

Cynics in the local media like to say: there’s no such thing as the most absurd, only the more absurd. The Cantonese saying may not translate well, but the message is clear – just when we think we have seen everything, something more bizarre will come along to knock us off our feet. That about sums up this past week in Hong Kong, where a spate of mind-boggling events in local politics left citizens jaw-dropped and thinking only one thought: are these people for real?
Several days ago, a woman was convicted of attacking a police inspector with, of all things, her breast. No, this is not one of those “his face ran into my fist!” excuses we used to hear in second grade – it is an actual ruling by a local magistrate. The 30-year-old defendant was found guilty of hitting the officer’s right arm with her bosom during an anti-parallel trade protest in March. It is unclear what kind of injuries the victim had sustained – no medical expert witness was called to testify.
Franklin Chu caught red-handed

In a separate incident which also involves a police officer, superintendent Franklin Chu was accused of using excessive force, after being caught on video whacking innocent onlookers with his baton during a protest last fall. In an investigative hearing, the now retired officer explained that the baton was a mere “extension of [his] arm,” with which he had “patted” passersby to speed up pedestrian traffic. The defense was so creative, and the argument so cutting-edge, that it would make Johnnie Cochrane smile in his grave.
Just when citizens were wondering whether they had been reading the April Fool’s Day edition of The Onion, they were bombarded with still more head-scratching and hair-raising headlines: Watergate, Laundrygate and Livergate. The first refers to the lead-contaminated water supply at a long and growing list of public housing estates, whereas the other two relate to medical blunders at public hospitals involving moldy bed sheets and miscalibrated machines to diagnose liver disease.
Watergate is the most stunning scandal of the three, not only because of the large number of public housing residents it affects, but also the spectacularly blatant attempts by the government to downplay the incident. One official told reporters, with a straight face, that the lead intake is rather safe “if the amount is averaged out over the resident’s lifetime,” while Housing Secretary Anthony Cheung threw a local subcontractor under the bus and pinned the entire blame of the public health crisis on one scapegoat. Meanwhile, the Health Department was under fire for underreporting lead levels – many water samples were collected after the faucet had been running for a few minutes, which allowed the level of contaminants to drop significantly from the actual levels to which residents have been exposed for many years.
Public housing residents being rationed lead-free water

Citizens had barely the time to process these surreal events when our chief executive decided to drop yet another bombshell at a hastily called press conference Monday afternoon. Addressing shellshocked reporters all by himself (which in itself was unusual), C.Y. Leung announced that Tsang Tak-sing, longtime bureaucrat and brother of Legco chairman Tsang Yuk-sing, would step down as Secretary for Home Affairs, and that the position would be filled by Lau Kong-wah, former vice chairman of the pro-Beijing DAB party. Also fired – I mean retiring – was Civil Service Secretary Paul Tang, who would be replaced by Customs Commissioner Clement Cheung, a political unknown.
The sudden cabinet reshuffle is astonishing for two reasons. First, both departures have added to the massive hemorrhage of personnel at the top level of government since C.Y. Leung took office in 2012. 11 other high ranking officials have either resigned or forced to leave in the past three years. The revolving door that is Leung’s cabinet speaks volumes about the boss’s people skills and ability to lead. Second, the appointment of Lau Kong-wah as Home Affairs Secretary flies in the face of meritocracy and reflects Leung’s “bite me” attitude toward critics. Lau is a washed-up politician so reviled that netizens compare him to a public trash can. His failure to keep his Legco seat in the 2012 elections drew revelers to celebrate outside his councilman’s office. Lau's surprise promotion this week, which will nearly triple his current salary as Mainland Affairs Undersecretary, feels like a practical joke for Leung to spite opponents.
The cabinet reshuttle: (from the left) Tsang, Tang, Lau and Cheung

Anywhere else in the world, any one of the foregoing events would have caused a public uproar. Having all of them happen in the same week would have sent angry mobs to the streets – vehicles would have been set on fire and government buildings stormed. Lawmakers would have initiated a vote of no confidence to remove the political leader. Not so in Hong Kong. After the initial shock has passed, the news cycle hurtles on. Each headline elicits a dry laugh from citizens and makes them pause for a moment, before everyone returns to whatever it is that they busy themselves with. Hong Kongers now have the memory of a goldfish and the attention span of a hyperactive toddler.
To get a sense of this collective ADHD, look no further than what has been trending on social media these past few days. Two pieces of entertainment news received wall-to-wall coverage on Facebook, and completely eclipsed political issues of far greater importance. The first relates to Canto-pop singer Hacken Lee, who has won some singing contest in China wearing a mask on stage to conceal this celebrity identity. Whoopie doo. Then another pop singer Juno Mak posted a trilogy of gut-wrenching ballads with which love sick listeners seem to resonate. Whoopie whoopie doo. Suddenly, all that outrage about police brutality, lead poisoning and Mr. Trash Can vanished from the public consciousness. Anger and indignation are switched off and replaced by a whole different set of emotions. But Hacken and Juno shouldn’t celebrate too quickly either – the moment the next cat video or grumpy baby meme comes along, they too will suffer the same fate and disappear into the echo chamber of the Internet.
Can we not get distracted by Hacken Lee?

The phenomenon is hardly limited to the general public – even the victims in some of the news stories are having a hard time staying focused. Take the Watergate scandal as an example. Tens of thousands of public housing residents have been exposed to lead for years, which may have caused kidney failure, heart disease, reproductive problems, and for babies and young children, brain damage. So far, at least 39 residents were found to have excessive lead in their blood, of whom 27 are children under six and the remaining 12 are lactating mothers. Does it mean riots at the housing estates or heads rolling at the Housing Department? Not quite. As soon as the government brought in free bottled water and free water filters, and promised to replace faucets and pipes in the coming months, the complaints subsided. Lead-poisoned residents happily accepted the government’s band-aid solutions, never mind the long term health effects or holding the negligent parties responsible. Allegations that a Chinese state-owned construction company had supplied substandard faucets swirled around for a while and faded away. Like everything else, the issue flamed out after the news cycle passed.
Hong Kong is suffering from a bad case of ridiculitis. Each government action or inaction gets more absurd than the last. But instead of demanding answers and accountability, citizens are more blasé and easily distracted than ever. Their attention span may have gotten shorter still after the Umbrella Movement ended last winter. Since then, many have been mired in hopelessness and detachment. Hong Kongers can’t help but feel that nothing they say or do – even after taking the drastic step of staging a massive protest that paralyzed large swaths of the city for 79 days – is able to change a thing. Their government and, to a larger extent, Beijing, are like a brick wall, immovable and impervious to any amount of kicking and screaming. In other words, their cynicism is merely a coping mechanism. For if they take things too seriously and fight too tenaciously, they will wind up hurting and disappointing themselves.
If this didn't work, what will?
So we end up right where authorities want us to be: in a state of willing submission where “oh well” is the response to every policy and decision, no matter how shocking or absurd. Nevertheless, if we genuinely care about our city and don’t want to be the docile subjects we are gradually becoming, then we had better start paying attention to things that actually matter, and keep our eyes on the ball until common sense is restored. Everything else, like Hacken and Juno, is just social anesthesia. 

The City that Doesn’t Read 不看書的城市

The Hong Kong Book Fair is the city’s biggest literary event, drawing millions of visitors every July. The operative word in the preceding sentence is “visitors,” for many of them aren’t exactly readers. A good number show up to tsau yit lau (湊熱鬧) or literally, to go where the noise is.
In recent years, the week-long event has taken on a theme park atmosphere. It is where bargain hunters fill up empty suitcases with discounted books, where young entrepreneurs wait all night for autographed copies only to resell them on eBay, and where barely legal – and barely dressed – teenage models promote their latest photo albums. And why not? Hong Kongers love a carnival. How many people visit a Chinese New Year flower market to actually buy flowers?
Official poster for the Hong Kong Book Fair 2015

If books are nourishment for the soul, then the soul of our city must have gone on a diet. In Hong Kong, not enough of us read and we don’t read enough. That makes us an “aliterate” people: able to read but not interested in reading. According to a study by Lingnan University, 42% of the local population does not read anything other than magazines and newspapers.
The actual percentage is likely higher, considering that some respondents may feel embarrassed to admit they don’t read, while others may have counted flipping through a travel guide or looking up a word in the dictionary as reading.
If you think I’m being cynical, ask 10 people you know and see how many of them can name the author of Dream of the Red Chamber, one of the four great classics in the Chinese canon. How many of them actually think Franz Kafka is a luxury watch brand?
So what went wrong?
Not conducive to having a library

The intuitive answer is stress. Life in Hong Kong sometimes feels like an never-ending daisy chain of deadlines and to-do lists, and the last thing we want to do after a 14-hour work day is to pick up an epic novel printed in eight point font. A common complaint I hear from my friends is that reading tires their eyes and puts them to sleep.
But the stress argument doesn’t pass muster.
First of all, books are just like movies – they are a form of escapist entertainment. If Patton or Schindler’s List is too heavy, then go with a comedy or an anime. You don’t have to choose Shakespeare or Kierkegaard for bedtime reading.
Second, we are hardly the only people under stress. The Japanese and the Koreans, for instance, have equally demanding lives and face an even more oppressive office culture. Subway trains in Tokyo and Seoul are packed with commuters whose noses are buried in paperback novels.
By contrast, in Hong Kong we rarely find readers on any mode of public transport. It is always easy to pick out Hong Kong vacationers in beach resorts like Bali and Phuket – they are the only people carrying a tabloid magazine instead of a book.
If stress doesn’t explain our bibliophobia, then there must be something about our culture. 
More like a carnival

Reading, like brushing our teeth and eating vegetables, starts from an early age. The habit begins at home. Whereas it is common in the West for families to have a small library at home, very few families in Hong Kong see the need – or have the space – to do so.
According to the same Lingnan University study, 14% of local homes do not have a single book other than textbooks. To many young children, reading for pleasure is considered a distraction from school work. Worse still, children who read books can be branded as antisocial and, in the age of the iPad and Xbox, rather uncool.
The situation doesn’t get better with age, as constant internal assessments at school bear down on students and the threat of make-or-break public exams loom large. As a result, local students applying for university are invariably tripped up by one simple question on the application form: What was your favorite book read outside class in the past twelve months and why?
Out in the real world, reading seems even more irrelevant. Hong Kongers pride themselves on being fast thinkers and smart workers. We put in minimum effort and get maximum results. Who needs books when we have Wikipedia and Google? As more and more citizens get their news from online sources, even tabloid magazines and free newspapers – the literary staple of 42% of the population – are facing obsolescence. The cultural desert is getting dryer by the day.
While nearly half of Hong Kongers don’t read, everyone seems to appreciate the benefits of reading. Every weekend, bookstores across the city are packed with parents binge shopping for their kids, from pop-up books to world classics and biographies of scions and celebrities. When it comes to nourishing young minds, money is no object.
In fact, children’s books now account for nearly 40% of book sales in Hong Kong. The rationale is simple: children need to appear well read to get into good schools. But that’s hardly the way to foster a reading environment at home. If mom and dad themselves do not read, then reading is simply one of those things that children are forced to do, like playing the violin or practicing karate. Very few end up keeping up with their childhood hobbies as they grow up.
Children are supposed to read, adults aren't

Turning to the 58% of the population that claims to be regular readers, the question becomes what they read. A survey by a local think tank indicates that less than half of the respondents are interested in fiction. The majority of readers go for the usual suspects: finance, self-help, travel, health and astrology.
There are very few local novelists in Hong Kong, and the only fiction genres that sell well are martial arts and Danielle Steel-esque romance. Let’s face it, Hong Kong is a utilitarian society. Everything we do must serve a purpose and the purpose is usually rooted in money. Non-fiction is popular because it is considered more “useful.” Fiction, on the other hand, is often dismissed as a waste of time or a luxury for retirees. Never mind that research after research has shown that reading even short stories can improve our cognitive abilities and help us exercise better judgment.
I grew up in a family of readers. My father worked in the newspaper industry, which helped instil in all of us an appreciation for the written word. There were books all around the house and we could always pick one up and start reading. We did it not because it would make us smarter or more knowledgeable, but because the books were just there. Once we started the first chapter, we wouldn’t be able to put it down. This was especially true with fiction, which took us to different places and different times. My parents never had to force us to read – it just happened naturally.
If there is one thing I learned from my childhood, it is that access holds the key to cultivating a reading habit. Perhaps that’s what the Hong Kong Book Fair hopes to achieve: to increase access to books for millions of aliterate citizens. Anything that brings people closer to the printed word, even only for a week, cannot be a bad thing.
So bring on the teenage models.
Teenage models promoting their risqué photo books
 ________________

This essay previously appears in the author’s book No City for Slow Men.

The Moonscape of Sexual Equality - Part 2 走在崎嶇的路上-下卷

Jason Y. Ng sat down with Ray Chan, the city’s first and only openly-gay lawmaker, last Saturday. They talked about the state of sexual equality in Hong Kong in the wake of the landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage.
*                     *                    *
Ray Chan, addressing Legco

JN: What does the Friday court ruling mean to you?
RC: It means everything. It sends a powerful message to the world that marriage is a right for all and not a privilege for a few. It pains me to say that in Hong Kong we face tremendous pushback from conservative groups and bureaucrats on even a simple piece of anti-discrimination legislation to protect the LGBT community. Same-sex marriage is still many years away.

JN: What initiatives are you working on at Legco [Hong Kong’s legislature]?
RC: As you are well aware, individual lawmakers don’t have the right to initiate new legislation at Legco. So we must wait for the government to draft a bill and present it to us before we can debate it and propose amendments. We’ve been talking about having a sexual discrimination ordinance for years, but so far nothing has happened. The Equal Opportunities Commission is due to issue a report next week to urge the government to pick up the slack.
In the meantime, I’m spearheading a non-binding motion debate at Legco to introduce civil union in Hong Kong. Same-sex marriage is our ultimate goal, but we need to have civil union as a near-term compromise to give gay and lesbian couples basic rights like hospital visitation and medical decision-making. If a person dies in a traffic accident today, his male partner can’t even retrieve his body from the morgue or make funeral arrangements. These are matters of human dignity that need to be addressed right away.


The computer says "no"

JN: What are the main obstacles facing these initiatives?
RC: There are two. First of all, many top government officials are devout Christians who still see the LGBT community as a threat to society and their faith. They are in no rush to change the status quo.
Second, most seats in the functional constituencies in Legco are taken up by socially conservative, pro-establishment businessmen. They are resistant to change and worried about their bottom line if the law were to require companies to extend same-sex benefits to their employees. These people will tell you they are not homophobes, but their voting records say otherwise.
Your question about obstacles is very much linked to the issue of universal suffrage. Public support for anti-sexual discrimination legislation now hovers at around 60%. If we had a chief executive and lawmakers who answered to their voters, things would have moved much more quickly for us. We need to have an accountable government that does what the people want them to do. That’s why we defeated the electoral reform bill on 18 June.

JN: How do you compare Hong Kong to other Asian countries in terms of sexual equality?
RC: I was at Pink Dot [the largest LGBT event in Singapore] two weeks ago. There were partygoers who flew in from all over the region. Event organizers lined up corporate sponsors like Google, Goldman Sachs and Bloomberg. The atmosphere was electric. Then there is Taiwan: we started our gay rights movement at about the same time as the Taiwanese did theirs. Gay Pride in Taipei now easily attracts 60,000 to 70,000 people. Even the mayor and other senior government officials come out to show support. Hong Kong is many years behind them – not that I really want to march next to C.Y. Leung at Pride!

Then mayor Ma Ying-jeou attending Gay Pride

JN: Are you hopeful that the city will catch up with countries like America and Canada on the issue of same-sex marriage?
RC: I am. Things happen very slowly here but they will happen eventually. I am prepared to wait out the current generation of bible-thumping bureaucrats. The younger generation is far more accepting and well-informed about LGBT issues. We saw that during Occupy Central last fall, when protestors teased Alex and Lester about BL. [Alex Chow and Lester Shum were leaders of the Hong Kong Federation of Students known for their well-publicized bromance. “BL” stands for boys’ love, a slang for homoerotic fan fiction and comic books marketed primarily to the female audience.]
And look at all those rainbow-colored profile pictures on Facebook. Even the fence-sitter and the so-called “silent majority” are now taking a stance. This kind of public support for the LGBT community would have been unthinkable just a couple of years ago. Whether the social conservatives like it or not, the cultural landscape is shifting, not just in the West but everywhere else.

JN: People are still talking about the Michael Chugani article in response to your MTR encounter. What do you have to say to Mr. Chugani?
RC: I’m disappointed. As an experienced reporter, he should know the difference between hate speech and free speech. As a racial minority, he should understand what it’s like to be part of a prejudiced group.

JN: What message do you have for Hong Kong people?
RC: I want everyone to know that we are not some monsters or circus animals. Nor are we a threat to anybody. We are people just like everyone else. We don’t want any special treatment or privilege. We just want to be treated with dignity and equality. I see that as a very basic request.
*                              *                         *



Alexter's bromance has inspired many BL manga

After our chat, I asked Chan where he was heading and he told me Jervois Street. The back alley in Sheung Wan boasts the largest gay scene in the city, where a cluster of bars and dance clubs blast techno music and spill noisy crowds onto the sidewalk. Chan had made plans to meet up with his colleagues there – they had brought flyers and life-size banners to promote voter registration for the upcoming local elections. I asked him whether a serious topic like that would go over well with the Saturday night crowd, especially when everyone would be celebrating the U.S. Supreme Court ruling.
“It’ll go over very well,” Chan said with marked confidence. “I’ll explain to my brothers and sisters that sexual equality and civic participation go hand in hand. Together, we will show the government that the pink vote counts. What happened in America can happen here too, but first we must make ourselves heard at the ballot.”
With that, I shook his hand and thanked him for his time. Before he finished saying goodbye, his phone rang and it was the Apple Daily wanting to get his thoughts on Obergefell v. Hodges. He mouthed the words “see you around” before disappearing, phone on ear, into the eddy of weekend revelers on Wyndham Street. From a distance, I could hear him trying to explain the concept of civil union to the reporter on the other end of the line.

Ray Chan and the gay-friendly People Power party at Gay Pride