10 posts tagged “hong kong”

I wasn’t a huge fan of Dick Emery but I have £9 left over from an Amazon UK coupon and have been considering buying his 1972 film, Ooh, You Are Awful (a.k.a. Get Charlie Tully). It is a trivial, film-buff interest: the movie formed the basis of the Hong Kong movie series, 最佳拍檔 (Aces Go Places), and even some of the gags are repeated. The above one, where Dick is in his Mandy character, isn’t in the Chinese film, though others are (almost line for line, in some cases)—and the overall storyline (the location of loot is tattooed on a series of female posteriors) comes straight from here.
   Unless I can find some Alarm für Cobra 11 DVDs through the UK service (the coupon can’t be used at other Amazons), the credit may go on Emery—especially as it expires on June 11. Suggestions on how to waste £9 are welcome (remember, shipping will be £3 to New Zealand).

Before The Lord of the Rings, before Bad Taste even, Hong Kong film-makers on the crew of 最佳拍檔千里救差婆 (Aces Go Places IV) came to New Zealand to film their action–comedy.
   Watch as we go all from New Plymouth to Auckland to Wellington: by the miracle of film you can exit the Auckland Harbour Bridge and wind up on Willis Street, Wellington!
   Fly over the Cable Car tracks from the Clifton Terrace car park and wind up at … the Clifton Terrace car park going the opposite way!
   Fly off the Lombard car park and wind up on a Hong Kong sound stage, your Holden Torana turned into a Ford Taunus!
   You know this is old because the traffic on the Bridge is moving.
   You also know this is fiction because the drivers on the Bridge are letting other motorists through.
   Kiwi TV fans from the 1980s: look out for Credit Card hostess Gayle-Anne Jones as a henchwoman—yes, there were beautiful blonde TV hostesses before Hilary Timmins.
   And, Indiana Jones fans, that is Ronald Lacey there as the baddie in the Rolls-Royce.

Dan Chan funeral order of service

I learned quite a few things about Dan Chan at his funeral last Wednesday in the eulogy delivered by historian Dr James Ng.
   Dan was born in China in 1907 but was educated in Australia, where his father worked, from 13—both at a state school in NSW and Scotch College in Melbourne. This was, as James told us, unusual in its day as most Chinese fathers of Dan’s era would have sent their children back to the old country.
   This foreign education meant that Dan was bilingual and a very well versed and philosophical writer. He had returned to China and Hong Kong to set up a business there but the Japanese invasion meant that he and his family had to flee to the antipodes.
   His education meant that he could stay in New Zealand because his work was needed in editing a magazine for expatriates here and Dan also helped members of the diaspora get money back to the old country (one of his proud accomplishments being the mastering of a code to aid the transfers).
   However, his business in New Zealand, as I knew it, was in the restaurant trade—back in those postwar days it was rare to see anyone other than Anglo New Zealanders in white-collar professions.
   This did bring his family some security and Dan was a great benefactor in the old country, even having a high school built.
   His contributions to New Zealand society were awarded with a Queen’s Service Medal and he was made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit, which I understand equates roughly to an OBE.
   His driving licence was apparently still valid at the time of his passing. He was so alert and capable that instead of having an annual renewal—which is necessary for people at his age—he was given his for two years at age 99. He gave up driving voluntarily.
   As I said in my earlier tribute, he had a better memory for faces and people at age 100 than I do today.
   When you hear this history you come to realize that men like Dan, whom I knew more as being active in the Chinese New Zealand community, were actually the trailblazers who bridged the gulf between the émigrés and mainstream Kiwis.
   He was respected in legal circles, a recent conference only being funded because someone had made a large donation in his honour.
   The Otago University library holds Dan’s papers, a collection of writings between 1939 and 1999, often dealing with philosophy, not just Chinese issues.
   At his funeral, even former restaurateur and City Missioner Father Des Britten attended, along with engineer, blogger and historian Steven Young.
   Without his contribution and his readiness to work with institutions to help Chinese people in New Zealand, we would have been much the poorer. Dan was a great advocate.
   Although Dan had made it into the MSM when his ONZM was bestowed on him with the 2007 New Year honours, I found it a great surprise that the media missed his passing and a well attended funeral at Old St Paul’s.
   It may be a slight exaggeration to say that we would still be expected to run Chinese takeaways, laundromats and groceries—when you think about it, those days were within the lifetimes of many of us reading this post today. But certainly the idea of the well versed, professional Chinese New Zealander might not have been as well cemented, because the cultural gulf would not have been bridged as successfully.
   Those of us who enjoy professional positions today owe a debt of gratitude to men like Dan Chan. God bless you.

If you thought the story of Amir Massoud Tofangsazan was embarrassing, what if something similar happened to a celebrity?
   Over the last few weeks, the Edison Chen scandal has rocked Hong Kong and even affected the Beijing Olympics.
   Chen, a Canadian-born actor about to make a big US début—already he’s a Pepsi spokesman in Hong Kong—took in his laptop for repair but forgot to take down his home-made porn, which includes 12 female celebrities.
   Just as with Laptop Guy (Thomas Sawyer) in the UK with Amir’s photos in 2006, someone at the computer shop decided they would post the 1,200-plus images and videos on to the ’net.
   If we think the Britney Spears Machine is bad, Hong Kong tabloids make that look like a old world gentlemen’s club.
   PC World offers this analogy: ‘Imagine photos of, say, Matthew McConaughey popping up on the Internet, showing him in various states of undress and sexual acts with, say, Alicia Keys, Kelly Clarkson and Kirsten Dunst.’
   One of the celebs implicated is Gillian Chung, who was supposedly going to perform at the Olympics. Not any more. Prior to this month she had a wholesome image—now she may be more associated with performing and receiving oral sex. (The logical thing now would be to revamp her image as Madonna does regularly, but whether that will go down well in the innocent Cantopop world is another matter.)
   Batgwa summarizes the other celebs:

The biggest female stars implicated were Gillian Chung (鍾欣桐) and Cecilia Cheung (張栢芝).
   Other less well known female celebrities were implicated too, including Bobo Chan (陳文媛), Rachel Ngan (顏穎思), Mandy Chen (陳育嬬), Candice Chan (陳思慧) and Edison’s current girlfriend Vincy Yeung (楊永晴).

   Chen has basically announced, at 27, his retirement from the Hong Kong scene. He might have to: some of the celebs may have Triad connections (there is some gang involvement in Hong Kong moviemaking) and he’s received death threats.
   Cops have arrested nine people so far in connection with the unlawful distribution of the images.
   While Chen is no saint, he deserved his privacy. The poster has essentially brought down the careers of several people. I suppose this is a reminder that when you are in the public eye, you need to take precautions. Putting your own porn on to a disc or a flash drive would be an idea—or simply be a role model and being less promiscuous in relationships and never fear these leaks.
   We may criticize Chen for his behaviour and we certainly should criticize the breach of trust from the shop, but the problem is wider. We need to ask ourselves just where our values are—and the way the Chinese people have reacted shows that they have not fled the free and occupied parts of China.

Since November, I have received scam emails from a company called China Net Technology Ltd. A page about the scam can be found in the comments here.
   The MO: a company finds a dot com and sends them a letter, saying that another company plans to register the same name, but for various Chinese territories (with the cn, tw and hk suffixes, among others).
   Your expected reaction: you panic and decide to negotiate with the company, because it claims it is a registry service for domain names.
   Their response: they send you a form for the domain names, at outrageous (thousands of dollars) prices.
   Initially, I was so naïve I started talking to these people. They did highlight a few domains our company planned on getting, so we registered those—but through our regular domain name registration service, paying a normal price.
   When they sent me the form, I said, ‘Forget it.’ I knew how much these names were actually worth and how they were probably phonies. Their response, sensing that the deal was about to slip through their fingers, was to say that the company wanting to register the domains was known for porn.
   By this point I didn’t really care.
   It got more suspicious as these emails kept on coming, either from another company or from the same one, but claiming yet another group was planning to register the same domains. I’ve had three more for one dot com and another for a dot org, same MO.
   Ergo: these are scammers.
   I was lucky. According to the E-consultancy page I cited, some folks even get called up by the scammers. I was fortunate that I was travelling when they first emailed me, so they never figured out where I was.
   So while you should protect your domain names, if you are interested in Chinese ones, do not get suckered in by these folks. Use your regular registry service or a respectable company.

If my grandfather, Tung Wan Yan—Colonel, Chinese Constitutional Army, retired—was still alive, this would have been his 100th birthday.
   On December 15, 1907, he was born in Toishan, the eldest son of Jackson Yan, my great-grandfather. As a lad, he was sent to the United States after Jackson had arrived there and set up a farm, and travelled, as most did in those days, by boat to California.
   By this time, Jackson was a well established businessman and a wealthy landowner in southern California, and Granddad would tell us stories about how it would take a day to survey the place with a horse and cart.
   He was also involved heavily with the Association named after the first member of our family to go from central China to the south, Gin Sun Hall, a few centuries ago. History has it that we got into a bit of trouble with the Emperor. This family has been a thorn in the side of ruling parties for quite some time.
   The Gin Sun Hall Benevolent Association of San Francisco helps families—then, it was to assist with immigration. Today, the Association still exists as a charity.
   Jackson wanted respectability, and in those days that only came from the Republic. So, he sent his American-schooled son back to the old country to seek a job with the government. Tung Wan’s teacher promised to intervene if he did not wish to leave California. He declined, putting his father’s wishes first.
   As a teenager, my grandfather spoke little Toishanese after his years in the States. He had to become accustomed to his native tongue again after he got back home. A marriage was arranged, and before long, there were two new arrivals. However, both children—a boy and a girl—died in their infancy.
   By the mid-1920s, my grandfather had sought a job with the army, and other children were on the way. Between then and 1957, they had six children who survived their infancy.
   However, in the meantime, Jackson was murdered in California. Granddad tells a story where he heard the sound of motorcars at the end of his bed—even though he was in the old country and there weren’t any cars. He knew something was up, and soon received the news. It was his responsibility to get his father’s body back from California for burial in the old country. (The Communists eventually destroyed the tomb after 1949. Well, maybe not intentionally the tomb. They took out the mountain.)
   When the Japanese invaded, Granddad had steadily risen in the Constitutional Army to the rank of colonel, and was charged with dealing with Customs’ matters. Who knows? He might even have met one of John Kerry’s opium-selling dope-trading ancestors. There were stories of Lai, the family dog, who seemed to have a command of human language—taking my aunt to another village, swimming alongside a boat, and returning home.
   He did see active service in World War II. He told the story of being in a shelter with a friend, listening to the bombs being dropped by the Japanese. The bombs got closer and closer. His friend remarked, ‘They are getting close.’ After the next bomb, he said to his friend, ‘That was the closest of all.’ There was no reply: the shock waves had plastered his friend against the wall. They had been standing next to one another.
   Another close shave was hiding back at the farm when the Japs advanced. Granddad had found himself on a hit-list. A regiment of Japanese troops fired at him while he hid in trees. They all missed. Oh, he was unarmed in this episode—and got away.
   My grandmother did recall how his dress uniform was rather grand, complete with sword, and how, while taking her on a tour, many men saluted him. But I do not think she knew just what rank he was.
   I never heard many stories of actual front-line battles, though he was involved in his share. He also spent years in Malaya—Penang and Kuala Lumpur—with stories to tell about fights in gambling dens during the War. Since Asians place a good game of mah jong and other forms of gambling ahead of killing one another, it was not uncommon to see Chinese and Japanese play side by side there. One tale was about a Japanese general starting a fight. I must get someone in the family to tell it to me again so I can get it recorded.
   After the cease-fire, he helped stranded Japanese soldiers get jobs as street-sweepers or refuse collectors in postwar Malaya. I admire that: one day your sworn enemy, the next day, your ally.
   There was not too much time for sitting back before the Communists began revolting, or being revolting. He found himself having to give up the family lands in the old country in favour of a tiny room in Hong Kong, sharing it with a family of six kids, his mother and his wife. The family made it out in two waves. It would be fair to say that he was an absent father for most of the duration of World War II, so the children were mostly raised by their mother and grandmother.
   He retained great mana as a community leader among those from the old country, regularly drafted in as a mediator or trouble-shooter when problems arose. But being an army officer did not necessarily mean a high-ranking job in Hong Kong. He started again from the bottom career-wise.
   He had a penchant for painting in oil, calligraphy with a proper brush, and publishing, working on a self-owned private press.
   He had some security jobs, and had one story about seeing a ghost while keeping an eye on some property. Seeing a figure there, he called out to advise that he was trespassing. When he held his lamp up to identify the trespasser, he noticed he had no face.
   Granddad did suffer from some form of PTSD, which would plague him for most of the postwar years.
   He and my grandmother lived in a comfortable flat in Hong Kong by the time I was around. My love for cars was signalled early. He had found a toy car that same day—a model of a ’55 Chevy Nomad—and gave it to me. You could say I have owned cars since the day I was born.
   He was a generous man, once taking me to a toy store prepared to buy whatever I wanted. My parents had said to me that it was acceptable for him to buy me one thing. I settled on a single Jaguar XJ6 toy car from Corgi. He insisted he buy more. I declined. He was so impressed by my principled nature—I would have been around two, three at most—that he mentioned this to my parents. ‘He’s very fair about things,’ he said.
   In a visit to his youngest son in New Zealand in 1976, he fell critically ill. Wellington Hospital diagnosed him as being in the advanced stages of liver cancer and he had a fortnight to live. We came over in September armed with herbs, which we had him drink daily. As expected, the cancer disappeared.
   In those early, dark days in Wellington, I stayed with him and Grandma most days. My parents did not know there was such a thing as preschool, so I spent 1976–7 watching Play School, The Brothers and Days of Our Lives. Sometimes Des Britten would come on with a cooking show. Max Bygraves had a variety show. Granddad was a chain smoker and had a penchant for peanuts and dried apricots. He painted when he could, and usually stayed in a dressing gown and wore a cap.
   I had many talks with him over the years, and brought him meals on a weekly basis after he was widowed. There were the odd cracks—his paranoia began showing, and would insist on changing doctors regularly. By and large he held it together, but I think he knew that he had some hangovers from the War. In the late 1980s and the 1990s, he was prepared to open up with some of the tales of the period, and for the younger grandchildren, there was always the stories of Lai the Wonder Dog. He managed to give up smoking in 1992. 
   He moved into an old folks’ home in the mid-1990s, and in July 1996 he fell ill from a stroke, diagnosed by a clumsy doctor as ’flu. (I will not name him, but the rest of us could see that he had had a stroke.) This did cause some delirium. Eventually, after a second of lucidity and seeing my father and aunt in the room, he shut his eyes for the last time. By the Chinese system of counting (at birth, you are one year old), he had made it to 90, and the wake was considered auspicious. His service was at the Chinese Baptist Church: while he identified with the Anglican faith in Hong Kong, he supported both the Anglican and Baptist churches when he got to New Zealand. The connection to the latter was the Rev Samuel Lau, one of the most respected Chinese priests in Wellington, who, like my grandfather, served in the Constitutional Army. (It was a conversation in passing with Rev Lau that I worked out Granddad’s rank.)
   I paid him, and others, a visit at Makara Cemetery today. I remembered December 15, but did not realize it was his centenary till I got there and saw 1907 on the tombstone, which I co-designed with my father. So: happy birthday, Granddad. And you know, we are still kicking up a fuss whenever we see injustice, even putting ourselves on the line to uncover the truth. Freedom has to be protected, and the forces that try to diminish it have to be nipped in the bud.

Michael Hui, trained sociologist, actor, director, writer, and winner of the Best Actor award in Hong Kong in 1981—now, host of Deal or No Deal. I think he might have basically been retired when this gig happened. It’s good to see him back on regular TV.

The trailer for Security Unlimited does not do the film justice. This 1981 hit is, in my opinion, the funniest film to have ever come out of Hong Kong. The comedic pace holds up today (unlike, say, a 1984 episode of the Billy T. James show), Hui’s writing is so tied to working-class Hong Kong that I can’t even begin figuring out how some lines would be translated, and he makes the best of the three lead actors (himself, and two of his brothers). The “unseen brother”, Stanley, co-produces. The problem is: if you don’t understand Cantonese, this film does not work!
   With hindsight, there is no surprise that Michael Hui is regarded as a cinematic genius in my home town, and someone who was pivotal in changing the face of Hong Kong cinema. In fact, some give him credit for kickstarting the industry and fighting back a wave of Mandarin-language films. These days, he hosts the local Deal or No Deal, which, I am sure, is superior thanks to his wit.

I wasn’t searching specifically for this, but it brings back childhood memories. It’s a Michael Hui film—Hui is one of Hong Kong’s great comedians and comedic writers—with soundtrack by his very popular brother, singer, composer and lyricist Sam Hui.
   I grew up on Sam’s songs and this film would have been a hit the final year I was in Hong Kong. We did have the song on tape (yes, Virginia, there was a cassette tape) and I must have listened to it a lot. Very nostalgic stuff.