Eyewitness news

So the wife and I were out for a stroll in Kowloon Tong the other day when, in the street across from ours, this scene greets us:

So we've got half a dozen cherry pickers set up in the street to overlook someone's yard and a bunch of guys standing on the fence, all for no apparent reason. Now, one of the disadvantages I am at, as a new and not very well informed Hongkonger, is that when I walk past something like this I can never be sure whether it is:
(a) a newsworthy event;
(b) an annual festival;

(c) a flash mob; or

(d) something that just happens everyday and which Hongkongers cannot understand why I find odd.

In this case, it turned out the answer was (a).  It turns out that we live just down the road from Mr Henry Tang.

Mr Tang is (or maybe now was) Beijing's chosen candidate for the next Chief Executive of Hong Kong. That's right, Hong Kong has a Chief Executive, which I always thought is quite an appropriate name for the world's biggest experiment in laissez faire capitalism. Also Chief Executive keeps Beijing happy, because it doesn't denote autonomy like President might.

Being Beijing's chosen candidate for Chief Executive of Hong Kong usually means that you've automatically got the job. There is an election of sorts, but the voters are an electoral college of 1,200 electors, and the majority of these electors are loyal to Beijing.

Unfortunately for him, Mr Tang's campaign seems to be going from bad to worse, to the point where one of his opponents has also been deemed acceptable by Beijing.  So now it appears Beijing has left the Beijing-loyal electors with a choice, so no-one knows what the hell to do.

Anyway, the latest scandal involves Mr Tang's wife's house, which apparently has an illegally constructed basement.  Now in Hong Kong, you do not eat on the trains, you do not cough on a stranger and you especially do not renovate without a permit.  More importantly, nothing makes a politician look out of touch more than revealing that your 6,000 square foot mansion was not quite big enough and so you had to add a wine cellar. I guess the Australian equivalent would be discovering that Tony Abbott was running a private water slide in his backyard filled with Moet & Chandon and the tears of orphaned babies, all during water restrictions.

So the scene above was the local journalists showing they are eminently qualified to work for Rupert Murdoch by taking photos over Mr Tang's fence.  There were at least six cherry pickers in the street all loaded with cameramen.  Sadly, they didn't get any footage of the basement, given that it is by its nature covered by the house.  That certainly didn't deter them, however - the cameramen and cherry pickers were there all weekend, just in case the basement felt like making an appearance or giving an interview at any point.

EDIT: It turns out that Mr Tang's pool has a glass bottom, so the journalists could see the illegal basement through the pool.  Are you kidding me?  No wonder Beijing endorsed this guy, nothing says socialist like a glass-bottomed swimming pool.

So the upshot is, we live near the guy who is either going to be the next Chief Executive or going to be famous for fumbling what should have been a formality.  Either way, it should be good for property prices, and those are far more important to Hongkongers than politics.

What's in a name?

Some of you may be wondering about the provenance of the name of this blog.

Well, firstly I am a man and I am in Hong Kong. So it seemed apposite.

The second and more interesting explanation is that I ripped it off The Man from Hong Kong, a 1975 movie starring George Lazenby and Jimmy Wang-Yu.  At the time, Lazenby was looking for something to do after it became apparent the Bond people weren't going to call back and Wang-Yu was looking for something to do after his second marriage broke down amidst allegations of wife-beating.

I have to confess I have only seen the trailer, but Not Quite Hollywood makes it look awesome.  It has kung-fu, gangsters and like all good Australian B-movies, fight scenes in which the actors actually got hurt. And it has what has to be the most perfect '70s gimmick ever, hang-gliding to the song "Sky High".

I also quite like the 1970s connection because the changes that Hong Kong has gone through since the 70s are quite unbelievable.  The 70s was when everyone started to focus on the handover and also when the power and money in Hong Kong started shifting from the British to the local Chinese. Today Hong Kong as a British colony seems quaint.  I got a one dollar coin with the Queen's head on the back in my change the other day.  I remember her.

Anyway, that is the reason for the name.  Other names on my shortlist were:
1.  The King of Kong - a little self-aggrandizing, also Universal Pictures may get upset
2.  Life in the 'Kong - sounds a bit like a war diary
3.  Honkin' On - I could actually see this as the title of an ABC youth affairs programme
4.  Well Hong - *crickets*

I'll get my coat.

Lesson one: walking

A few months ago came the news that Hong Kong is now officially the world's largest financial market. Based on this reputation as a time-is-money big-business cut-throat dog-eat-dog over-hyphenated metropolis, I expected that Hongkongers would be the world's most efficient walkers, charging to wherever it is they need to be to make that next big deal, buy those undervalued stocks or foreclose on some poor bastard's house.

However, as everyone who comes to Hong Kong quickly discovers, the truth is quite the opposite.

Hongkongers are frustratingly slow walkers. Now in summer, this is understandable, because as the temperature rises to 35 degrees and the humidity increases to the point at which there is no longer any difference between the air and the sea, the miracle is that anyone is able to walk upright at all. But this is true all year round, under all conditions.

Hongkongers wander along the footpath as though they are just having a lovely day out, with no particular place to be, just smelling the flowers (although if you are at the flower market, that may actually be fair enough). The slowness of their pace is both literally and figuratively staggering. You have to wonder where they are going; it is presumably somewhere close enough that they can walk at that pace and still arrive there before they die.
The dawdlers like to walk n abreast (where n is the necessary number of dawdlers to block the entire width of the footpath). If there happens to be (n-1) dawdlers, they compensate by drifting randomly from one side of the footpath to the other and back again in order to prevent overtaking.  The only way around is to step on the road, which is not recommended given that Hong Kong bus drivers do not slow down for jaywalkers.

Because Hongkongers walk so slowly, it is necessary for them to use smartphones while walking in order to update friends and family about the month and year in which they will be arriving at their destination. Beginners simply text while they walk; more advanced users check their email, watch streaming media and play Angry Birds. I actually saw a woman wandering down the street with a laptop open in front of her face the other day. Presumably a mere smartphone would have been inadequate for the massive parallel data processing project she was working on.

Then there are the escalators.  I worked out on day one that the rule is stand on the right, walk on the left.  Some people appear to have not worked this out by day six thousand.  If you stand on the left, I reserve the right to walk up right behind you and sigh or clear my throat in a passive-aggressive manner, until you notice me and step to the right.  You have been warned.

So when you come to Hong Kong, my advice is to be prepared for the dawdlers. Breathe deeply and keep calm. Feel free to vault over fellow pedestrians if you think you can make it. And, whatever you do, don't look up from your smartphone.

Hello... is this thing on?

Er... hello, my name is Nick and I am an Australian living in Hong Kong.

After stepping off the plane at Chek Lap Kok it quickly became apparent that I wasn't in Melbourne anymore.  The public transport is efficient.  The coffee is appalling.  They have a homonym of a rude word in the name of their airport and only I appear to find that amusing.

Barely a day passes when I don't see something that strikes me as weird and I wish I had another Australian next to me who I could elbow and ask "what on God's green earth is that all about?"

So in lieu of that, I turn to the interwebs to vent my confusion, amusement, frustration and admiration for the city of Hong Kong, its people, its culture, its manners and its absolute dread of communicable diseases. I hope you learn some valuable cultural lessons, or failing that, have a mild chuckle.