24 posts tagged “hong kong”

While I wouldn’t consider myself a “birther” (I am far too left-wing, relatively speaking, for that), there’s a part of me that wishes the American president would show his birth certificate, just to silence a good group of his critics and get them focusing on more important matters. I publicly said so at the time when the matter first came up and yes, it did seem odd, even if his challengers in the courts’ system had fairly ill-prepared cases.
   However, I remember how John Major, then PM of the UK, resisted showing his O levels, which he also had sealed, because he felt they weren’t important. Eventually, he released them, and his marks were unremarkable. They made absolutely no difference to his authority and it was a “nothing” story that the British media were good at pushing. Maybe President Obama is taking a lesson from a conservative politician: showing it would be a waste of time.
   I imagine in the US, things are so divisive politically that if President Obama were to show his (original, long form) birth certificate, there would still be people saying it was faked. I have read some comical criticisms even of his certification of live birth, pointing out the colour differences between ones they had seen and the one on the President’s campaign site. I guess those people have never used more than one scanner, or more than one digital camera.
   The political right, even if its case had merit, kept shooting itself in the foot with some of the less thought-out theories. I admit there is a question that could be easily cleared up, but Obama’s own critics are clouding the issue. While they’re doing that, then the President and his allies can sit back comfortably.
   Still, just to get a bit of closure as I potentially enter local politics, here’s a 37-year-old piece of paper (in fact, it is 37 years today that Dad had my birth registered):

   Queen Elizabeth Hospital is still there, as is 4 Victory Avenue, though we soon moved into the front apartment. Here is how the entry to the building looks these days:     Now, that should all check out, not that local politics gets as nasty as American national politics.

The stories are different enough that one could not accuse the Hong Kong film-makers of outright copying, but there is clear inspiration between the English Ooh, You Are Awful (or Get Charlie Tully), starring Dick Emery, and the first of the successful franchise 最佳拍檔 (Aces Go Places). The films are 10 years apart.
   The plot lines are similar: in the original, Emery has to find a Swiss bank account number, separately tattooed on four different girls’ behinds. In the later film, Sam Hui (the father of Canto-pop) and Karl Maka’s characters have to find a map reference, tattooed on two different girls’ behinds. The following is of two very similar scenes, one set at Waterloo Station in London, the other at a taxi company’s radio department, and subsequent scenes involving photographic booths, where one might be able to claim there was a fair amount of direct copying. Emery is more blue, while the later film is more slapstick with better pacing.
   And yes, that is the lovely Cheryl Kennedy in the first clip.
   In the 1970s and 1980s, it was highly unlikely for Hong Kong cinemagoers to have seen the Emery film.
   Head to 2.45 for the above scene in the first video; 0.43 in the second clip.

What is the first movie you saw in the the theatre?

Believe it or not, it was A Bridge Too Far. I hate war.
   As far as I can recall, we were new émigrés in New Zealand and with no one to look after me, my parents had to take me along to the cinema when invited by a relative. It was a late session as well and the movie bored the crap out of me. To this day I still despise war films (not to mention war itself).
   My second movie was either Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo (very good stuff to a kid) or another gritty adult drama which was shown in my school’s hall, The Taxi Driver (not Scorsese, but a Hong Kong movie, 的士大佬, released a year before the US film). The latter was very violent and was only interesting then for its glimpse of life back “home”, in an age before video cassettes and long before Chinese cinema became mainstream in the west.
   Films took ages to make it out here, so the 1975 film, The Taxi Driver, would have been shown around 1978.
   The whole thing can be viewed on Youku, the Chinese version of YouTube that seems to be the home to a lot of pirated videos. The original, however, was in Cantonese. I glanced at a few minutes to refresh my memory that this was the right film, and sure enough, it was. I fast forwarded to the middle and there was a bunch of men beating the crap out of each other. As stupid today as it was in the 1970s, but this time I know it’s a movie with sound effects.

Found on Andrew Lau’s Facebook page, a video with Martin Yan (甄文達), probably the most famous guy in my whanau. Martin and I were both interviewed a few years ago for a book on our clan.

Martin begins with his past in China and his subsequent emigration to the US. It’s a great video and one of the few times we see him speak Cantonese on TV. (He is Taishanese, as I am.)

This was a classic scene from Security Unlimited (1981), possibly Michael Hui’s finest film. Pity the English subtitles are totally wrong, but hopefully the Cantonese readers will get it and enjoy this scene. My mother said this really helped her learn to drive!

I came across an article from the BBC website (through Emu’s blog) where an American expert says that kids are reading too early.
   This comes in the wake of UK government proposals that kids should be taught to read earlier.
   Dr Lilian Katz says kids could be put off learning, and education too early harms boys more than girls. She also points out that in Scandinavia formal education begins at six or seven.
   This is at odds with my experience.
   As I had to sit an examination to start kindergarten at age two, I had to begin studying for them at age one. I would say that before two I knew the alphabet and had numerical skills, being able to count to 99 very easily. I had to—the join-the-dots puzzles beckoned.
   My examination for kindergarten, which I had to do solo with only the examiner in the room (no, it was not easy, and I was terrified) consisted of putting shapes in holes. Which, incidentally, I had not studied for.
   When I think back, I must have bluffed it, because I remember crying through most of it.
   (Chatting to Dad tonight, he says this could have been a prep exam at another institution. Now that he mentions it, I have a vague recollection that I aced the actual one at kindy. Or at least it was less traumatic. I had assumed until today it was the kindergarten exam. Hey, 1975 was a busy year.)
   I had homework nightly from age 2½ at kindergarten, of handwriting. Pretty standard, really, to anyone who has ever lived in Hong Kong.
   As I was Dux at my primary school in New Zealand and Proxime Accessit (salutatorian to our American friends) at high school, I don’t think the early start put me off learning.
   And today I still consider myself very much a student, still learning.
   The only difference I had with most kids is I took the ages of four to five off because of emigrating (spending a year watching Play School, The Brothers, Days of Our Lives, Des Britten and Sesame Street is not a bad thing), and because my parents did not know there was such a thing as pre-school in New Zealand. Instead, I geared up learning a few key English phrases (‘Please may I go to the toilet?’) to start the primers.
   The thought of not having a formal education till five, six or seven sounds ridiculous to me and I imagine would be crazy to most people from my culture.
   I am sure Dr Katz has observed that by and large, oriental children can do rather well at school, even if I am furthering a stereotype here. But I did indeed observe this myself through my primary school career.
   A late start sounds like total and utter bollocks to me, though unlike the professor I don’t have a big sample to work from.
   But I wonder if she has made any examinations of the east Asian experience.
   While I believe I did start too young in having homework or sitting an entrance exam, there surely is a happy medium between what is normal in east Asia and what is normal in the occident. Kids are aching to learn—and want to—as they absorb the world around them.

This had me captured for a while today:

A letter from Dr Sun Yat-sen, the father of modern China, to Henry Ford, discussing the economic and international development of the country. An amazing historical document backing up how Dr Sun saw China, combining his Confucian beliefs and his knowledge of democracy and self-determination. He was also prescient in saying that China could be the centre of the next world war if it did not set itself straight. Naturally, a man of Dr Sun’s knowledge and training had perfect written English—much like modern Chinese.

His Excellency George Fergusson, the British High Commissioner and a fellow alumnus of St Mark’s Church School, did respond to my letter about the status of my Hong Kong Permanent Identity Card—which is far better than one of his predecessors, who ignored me outright when I had a complaint back in 2001.
   It only took a month to get here from the High Commission—which is about an hour’s walk from here—thanks to goofs in the postal system.
   First up, the envelope was misaddressed, to PO Box 14-168 and not 14-368.
   The first postmark, from what I can make out, was February 10. It arrived at box 14-168 and the boxholder wrote, ‘Not @ 14168’, crossing out the incorrect address.
   Sadly, it returned to that box after February 16, the second postmark. The boxholder decided that if the post office could not sort things out, (s)he would. (S)he opened the letter, possibly to find if the address inside was correct (it wasn’t), then Googled me and got the correct information from our website.
   (S)he wrote a Post-It note apologizing for opening it and explaining the circumstances, then re-sealed the envelope and clearly wrote the correct details.
   Sadly, it has taken the post office another two weeks before it arrived March 5.
   I have written to the person at 14-168 to thank him or her for taking the initiative, especially when administrative gaffes made the initial error, then a post office that is probably so automated that, without the human element, keeps making mistakes with its multi-million-dollar mail sorting system.
   The problem is I have put the thank-you note into the post. Do you think it will get there?

   The blog post could end there, but here’s another thing: anyone spot what is wrong with the envelope above (obviously apart from the errors already detailed)?
   No, it’s not the use of Arial (which is sort of a crime with the Font Police) and that in my world, the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office should use Times (which it did for many years—Times New Roman is almost as associated with it as with The Times).
   Verso, the Dieu et Mon Droit seal is present, but where’s OHMS on the front? And when did that disappear?
   I remember when my documents were returned in the 1990s for my passport, it was still OHMS; I do not know in 2006 when it was renewed as I went to the Commission to collect it.
   Last time I looked, the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office was still on Her Majesty’s Service, much like James Bond.
   Maybe things are different under ol’ Gordon.

Tanya at Lucire wanted to see this, and I once promised William Shepherd I would show him, too. Bill, as promised:

I entered Hong Kong as many of us old colonials would: with a British passport (air hair lair, what) and a falling-apart Hong Kong Permanent Identity Card (PIC).
   I did have a few problems with the latter, because it was issued in 1995, and it did not have much of the information that the new ones now contain, like your thumbprint, a photograph without a Melrose Place hairstyle and samples of my DNA contained in hermetically sealed vials of sweat, or whatever these newfangled things they have nowadays on identity cards.
   (In fact, I had problems with my British passport, notably at Waterloo Station where the passport controller insisted I was not British and had to queue up with foreigners. It was ironic that she was black and was herself practising apartheid. I had been British for longer than she had, thank you very much. The matter was ultimately raised with the PM after correspondence with the British High Commissioner, the Foreign Secretary, and the Shadow Foreign Secretary was ignored. I was going to expose all this and had some Fleet Street friends willing to aid and abet in the cause of true patriotism, but then HRH Princess Margaret went and inconveniently died on us.
   Since then, armed with this correspondence, I have not had any problems entering the United Kingdom on a British passport. I was under the impression we overseas British had the same Queen whose ‘Secretary of State Requests and requires in the Name of Her Majesty all those whom it may concern to allow the bearer to pass freely without let or hindrance’. Funnily enough, this is respected in France and Germany, even the US where we are allies on the War on Terror, but not Britain herself. But I digress.)
   I was still let through because the PIC number matched what was noted on my passport, though the controller, a very charming lady by the name of Y. T. Chan, advised I should get the PIC changed ASAP.
   Fast forward to today. We are very law-abiding, we British, so I began checking. There’s nothing at the British High Commission site about the PIC, but the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region website does have an application form and some notes.
   The problem, as I discovered, is that Britons like me cannot get a new PIC without applying for a HKSAR passport at the same time, which entails becoming a Communist.
   And I know from experience that my definition of ‘Chinese citizen’ somehow differs from that of the Politburo politician and the Beijing bureaucrat.
   My father did not escape from the Commies in 1949 just so his son could get into bed with the Reds.
   My mother did not insist on emigrating in 1976 to avoid the perceived peril of 1997 just so her son could get into bed with the Reds.
   I am proudly Chinese. I am proud of my culture. I am proud of my heritage. But I do not believe that the chaps who came to occupy my family’s land in ’49 have much of a right to it.
   Or the chaps that overran Beijing.
   Not while the Chinese people lack self-determination, a basic requirement under the UN Charter if China wishes to call itself a state.
   Some of my family members are technically, if not willingly, communists, but it doesn’t mean I have to join them.
   All I want is to retain my nationality as a British subject and get a PIC to which I believe I am rightly entitled by my domicil of origin.
   Back in 1995, this was perfectly feasible and I was under the assumption that the Reds would continue respecting the status quo ante when it came to administrative matters like this for an uninterrupted 50 years. And since when have Hong Kongers gone and pissed off Beijing? Well, apart from every June 4?
   We have contributed quite nicely to the Pekingese capitalist public purse, and the sayings of the old Chinese profit.
   I do hope, one day, there will be a united China, possibly a commonwealth of independent states. I also hope to see self-determination by the Chinese people exercised in my lifetime. But I have zero affinity with communist régimes, anywhere in the world, and certainly won’t be looking at changing my allegiance from HM the Queen, even if modern Britain is in a mess and it gave us Gary Glitter and selected nonces. There are some of us who are proud to be old colonials, who remember what it used to mean to be British, even if it is couched in some idealist, double-decker-bus-and-cobbled-street world where John Steed could poke a baddie with his brolley—and without us colonials kowtowing to any body, thank you very much.
   And quite simply, I agree more even with a faded modern Blairbrown-shaded Britain subservient to some Brussels Bonaparte than with a totalitarian régime that did its best to try to knock some of my family off, or shove them into jail on no charge.
   There is quite a price to be paid for loyalty to Her Britannic Majesty, but there you have it. It is a choice I quite publicly make.
   Tomorrow: a visit to the High Commission to see what HM Government can do. If they even care. Let’s hope they do, more so than after the Waterloo incident.