Hong Kong Ham

Dear ———,

The other day I received two thank you cards from the ———-. They were appreciated. What —- wrote (that I “travelled”) was more accurate than what you wrote (that my balls smell like “mushrooms”).

Last night I went to a very fancy party thrown by the Discovery channel at the Four Seasons Hotel. They had food from Australia, China, Brazil, and Italy. And a number of imported dancers and strangers in fancy dress. I ate a lot of food, I really did. I actually consumed caviar wrapped in salmon. I have to tell you, it was good, it really was. Also, I drank excessively. Red wine, rum, and later, beer. I was intoxicated. Later I went with one of the guys from the party to the bar popularly known as Fenwicks. You might remember it as that place where all the hookers were. He ended up going back to his hotel with a prostitute. I resisted the fervent advances of a couple. Then I went home.

Or tried to.

I had forgotten to take my keys with me from the office. Many thoughts passed through my head at this moment — “fuck!” was chief among them. I contemplated doing an all-nighter, seeing as it was 4am already, but I soon realised I wasn’t up to it. So, I found a cosy concrete ledge in a public ’sitting-out’ area near my flat. I slept on this comfortable bed until 7am. I didn’t even have newspaper to cover me, and no-one threw me change.

Today I feel the bad side of rotten. And tired. A sleep I look forward to.

This email is over.

Peace be upon him,
Ham

Hong Kong’s not just tall buildings with dancing lights. Trips to its fringes are rewarded with expanses of green, fresh sea breezes, quaint markets, and dogs in prams. Observe the following photo essay, from photos taken at Sai Kung.

Far away, in a land called Sai Kung, humans in straw hats supply humans in flip-flops with the bounty of the sea, in exchange for moolah. The flip-flopped ones lazily stroll the sidewalks and promenades by the shore, while the hatted moor their boats against wharves and walls to provide customers with fresh seafood, ranging from still-writhing snapper to slovenly slimy eels. Somehow, they also purvey dried fish — though only God knows where they caught that. It must be awfully hard for a dried fish to survive in such a soggy environment as the ocean.

This lady is a fish-monger. At the end of that long rod she has in her hands is a small mesh basket. With this she conveys the marine fruits to the eager hands above. With this she conveys the moolah back to her boat. It’s all very tranquil and civilised, and it circumvents the need to to make phsyical contact at a time when hygiene concerns are paramount because of the recent outbreak of marine flu. Credit cards are not accepted.

In Sai Kung, when people take dogs for a walk, they sometimes just mean they’re going to push their dogs around in small red wagons. This is an example of that. You can see that all the physical exertion has worn this dog right out. But, aw, look — when it yawns it’s so cute.

And here is what makes it so hard for people to leave Hong Kong. Not the city, nor the nightlife; not the economic opportunities, nor the great food — but the variety, the surprises, and the contrasts. Give me this over Lan Kwai Fong any day. Unless you’re buying me a drink.

Introducing the new CH1001M self-cleaning crapper:

• Made of effluent-resistant acrylics
• Soap bubbles to clear off remaining sludge
• Built-in lighting
• iPod compatibility
• Embedded speakers

I want that one!

Coolio didn’t show. Ian Brown couldn’t sing. The Yours were cut short. The organiser played his own useless band in a prime slot on the Sunday. The pretty MCs laboured tediously under the misconception everyone was at the park to see them. Beer was $50 a pop, and you weren’t allowed to take even water into Victoria Park, for fear the organisers wouldn’t make maximum money from the con compulsory food voucher scam they were running inside.

Thank fuck for Electric Eel Shock. Without them, Rockit could have been a disaster.

Sure, Goldie was great. But I was really, really drunk by that stage on Saturday. And I’m pretty sure Anthony Wong was cool, too. Local metallers Qiu Hong were full-throttle amazing, but one embarrassing and — as one muso who missed out on playing the two-day festival put it — insulting decision put more of a dampener on the evening than the late-arriving monsoon not long after the final act.

The band had hyped itself up for the entire weekend, distributing T-shirts with the question “Do you know Spencer Douglas?” emblazoned on the fronts. It was a cheap marketing tactic employed by a band that clearly lacked the talent to win fans in other ways. They came on the main stage at around 6:30pm on the Sunday — one act prior to headliner Brown (though Qiu Hong did play in the marquee in the meantime) — with much posturing, heavy riffs and screaming about how cool Rockit is. Thirty seconds later, the frontman started singing, rhymed “feeling” with “ceiling,” the previously jizzed-up crowd went flat, and people started asking what these chimps were doing onstage in such prime time. It wasn’t until hours later I found out one of the band members was a chief Rockit organiser.

Okay, fair enough, dude: if you wanna play at your own festival, you can — just don’t stick yourself under the spotlight when the money musicians (i.e. the ones that can fairly be called musicians) are supposed to be on. If you want people to keep paying big bucks to come to this festival, don’t cheat them for your personal gratification.

And don’t get me started on Ian Brown. Okay, he’s a legend. But he’s a legend who can’t sing. After the first song, I kinda hoped it was just him playing a drawn-out joke, and that he intended to perform like a bad karaoke crooner — you know, the ones who can’t actually sing but cover up for it by shouting instead (I fall into this category). I gave up on him after two songs and slunk back to my seat on the ground to read the newspaper while he played out his set.

Right. Got that off my chest. Now. On a more positive note. Electric Eel Shock were entertaining, awesome, and flat-out hilarious. Theirs was a rock of personality, self-deprecation, vigour, and fuck-yeah!-edness. Go buy their music now. You bastard!

Another joy of working in a job in Hong Kong in which I have to exchange emails with numerous faceless PR people are the many imaginative yet woeful attempts at spelling my name (even after phone conversations in which I’ve clearly recited each letter to them). Many of you will know my name is Hamish. Keep that in mind when you read through this list of names I’ve been called via email in the last four months:

• Harrish
• Harnish
• Henry
• James
• Harmish
• Hamrish
• Amish

Thankfully, no-one’s yet taken to calling me one of my old primary school nicknames: Humpish.

I didn’t have time last week to write about one of the best restaurants I’ve been to in Hong Kong. So here I go now. Most of what needs to be said about Tung Po, to be found above the cooked meat market on Java Road in North Point, is in the two pictures below, but I also want to add the following points:

• Getting served by guys in gumboots is awesome.
• Drinking beer from small bowls is awesome.
• Ordering without a menu is awesome.
• Sharing a massive space teeming with families and triads is awesome.
• Having beer promotion girls on hand to keep your bowl constantly brim-full is dangerous. In an awesome way.

When I first arrived here five months ago, I despaired at what seemed to be a dearth of a good local music scene. That disappointment hasn’t completely abated, but lately I have been somewhat cheered to discover a few hidden rough diamonds. While I’ve still only had a small taste of what’s on offer here, I can confidently recommend at least three bands, and give promising nods in the direction of a couple of others.

First, allow me to introduce to you Kim Tak Building, an instrumental four-piece that draws inspiration from Mogwai, Mozart, Sigur Ros, Aphex Twin and Nintendo Gameboy. Their album, the fairytale-like In the Forest and the Field (if you follow that link, click on the tracks listed besides stars to listen), was four years in the making. Though the band itself doesn’t know how to characterise its sound, its label, Harbour Records, calls it “e-ambio-motion”. I’m happy enough with something along the lines of “a lot of ambient, a little rock, and a healthy dose of classical”. Whatever you call it, you just need to know it’s excellent. And what’s more, it’s elusive. The band has played just two gigs, both to audiences of 30 — not a white face among them — in their Jordan studio.

After seeing Fan Hung A play at a gig in the YMCA in Tsim Sha Tsui, I was compelled to buy their latest album, She’s Here. I’m glad I did. Granted, the performance at the YMCA wasn’t the most polished (my chorally-inclined friend, for instance, wasn’t impressed in the slightest), but Fan Hung A did ooze cool attitude and spunk (not to be taken literally), and their stripped-back indie-pop represented the antithesis of the poisonous Cantopop that infests this entire city. The four-piece (though when I saw them, they were minus a guitarist) somehow gets by without a drummer, and though it’s hard to say just what it is about their sound that keeps you hanging in, it’s even harder to stop listening. There aren’t any tracks from their new album available online, but ‘Humid’ and ‘Physical Education’ from their second album are fairly representative of what Fan Hung A have to offer.

Despite appearances, The Yours aren’t just another try-hard teenage shoe-gazing band. For a start, they’re actually young 20-somethings. Secondly, they’re beginning to forge a style that is imaginative, edgy, and, most importantly, different. You can slap a variety of labels on them — shoe-gazers, post-punk, noise pop — and still not get to their (still immature) essence. Clear influences are The Cure, Joy Division, and, their favourites, My Bloody Valentine, but the snappy-dressing mods retain their own distinct personality. The hard-working band — they’re in a bandroom at least three nights a week, often until the early hours — is still rough round the edges (as you can hear from their MySpace demos), but that’s how I like ‘em. They’re among a select few local bands to be playing at this weekend’s Rockit musical festival in Causeway Bay’s Victoria Park (which sadly looks like it’s going to be pretty shit). An EP is due for release next month, with an album on its way next year.

And finally, my confident nods go to high-energy rock band The Love Song and dark pop/post punk soundscape artists Elf Fatima. Listen as soon as you can.

To those of you who think the term ’scientific feng shui’ is an oxymoron, I have this to say to you: Yeah, you’re right. To those of you who don’t really know what feng shui is, despite reading the advice column in Woman’s Day for the past 13 years of your life, I have this to say to you: It’s all to do with the harmony and balance between the heaven, the earth, and the human. It’s not just physical, though — it’s about internal balance and feelings. And, as this conference was trying to convince us, science.

Don’t laugh. Many Chinese take this shit dead seriously. If you laugh, you’re going to experience some seriously bad luck. Stuff will fall on you. You’ll lose money. Your energy flow will be fully fucked up.

Today I attended the first session of the 2nd International Conference on Scientific Feng Shui and Built Environment. A few weeks back, the chief organiser told me the conference was being conducted in English so as to strip the ancient Chinese practice of all its spiritual and mystical aspects and guide focus to its scientific properties.

And they are?

Well, astrology, mainly. At least, that’s what I gathered from the keynote speaker, a Mr. Derek Walters from Manchaster, respected author of many Chinese astrology tomes and feng shui guides. Walters started his speech by informing us he had predicted earthquakes in San Andreas, California, in 1989, and Istanbul, Turkey, in 1999, based on his readings of the stars. He did actually make a lot of calculations — scientific ones, even — to ascertain the position of the moon and sun during 1999’s total eclipse and where the eclipse would reach its maximum (Istanbul, as it turns out). But he then interpreted the stars and eclipse according to ancient Chinese thought, mystical philosophy, that says in ‘Earth’ years (as in, a year predetermined as an ‘earth’ year — kinda like, the year of the family) you’re more likely to get earthquakes — especially when they meet with a ‘Snake’ year. That his predictions proved to be at least somewhat accurate — devastating earthquakes in both San Andreas and Istanbul had the simultaneous effects of destroying large chunks or big cities and lending Walters some cred — is no doubt testament to the power of feng shui.

Fair play to Mr. Walters, though. In an interview after his speech, he did tell me you can’t truly remove the spiritual element from feng shui — a deal of it is left up to interpretation. And another speaker at the conference, a PhD student from Serbia (it was interesting to see just how many non-Chinese were into feng shui), suggested that the question of whether it’s a science or not depends on how you define science. If science is determined by materials — things you can physically touch — then feng shui doesn’t qualify, she said. But then again, she pointed out, psychology isn’t like that either.

The Prime Minister followed by private investigators hired by a secretive sect. The leader of the Opposition caught in an affair with the deputy chairman of a prominent right-wing lobby group — an affair revealed by a renegade member of his own caucus. A magazine edited by a fundamental Christian peddling salacious rumours about the Prime Minister’s husband’s sexuality. Allegations of corruption. The Prime Minister depicted as a lesbian Darth Vader on the website of the Opposition’s youth wing. The Prime Minister calling her counterpart “corrosive and cancerous”. New Zealand politics have never been so hilarious.

A brief briefing

Since the September 2005 election, in which the ruling centre-left Labour party prevailed with coalition support from other minor centrist parties, New Zealand politics has lurched from scandal to scandal, often involving a solitary miscreant, sometimes involving actual malfeasance, and always selling great wads of newspapers. The tabloid sideshow that our government and its tormenters have become has been too entertaining to keep within the confines of the land of the long white cloud. It deserves an international showing. And so I present to you, my eclectic international readership, a synopsis of a period in New Zealand’s political history that has been described by many as “a new low”.First, you must familiarise yourself with the key players.

Helen Clark, Prime Minister

Please note: Elements of this graphic have been altered by PhotoShop. The rest was done with MS Paint.

Regarded by many as the leader of the country, Clark has developed a reputation as a tough customer who presides over her party with a heavy but decisive hand. Except when it doesn’t suit her. Despite numerous controversies — an illicit signing of a painting not of her creation, speeding to a rugby game in a police convoy, wearing pants at a dinner for the Queen — Clark remains NZ’s preferred Prime Minister by a long-shot and has enjoyed considerable popularity with her constituents. Some of her detractors say she is a lesbian and keeps many lesbian friends, an assertion complicated by the fact she’s married to one Dr. Peter Davis, a non-lesbian.

Don Brash, leader of the Opposition

Please note: Dr. Brash doesn’t really look this cool.

Brash was once regarded as the brilliant former Governor of the Reserve Bank. But then he entered politics and immediately became a dithering, hapless, Bush-loving neophyte with the world’s most futile comb-over. Since his assumption of the National party leadership in 2003, Brash has been unfairly labelled as evil, racist, and honest. Despite numerous cock-ups — admitting association with the reviled Exclusive Brethren, suggesting homosexuals didn’t qualify as ‘mainstream’ New Zealanders, walking a plank for an ill-advised photo-shoot — Brash enjoys the public support of his entire caucus. In private, however, they all want him out.

The Exclusive Brethren, tosspots

Please note: This is, obviously, a childish cheap shot, but seeing as the Exclusive Brethren aren’t allowed to read the internet, they’ll never know.

This normally reclusive and exclusive sect believes the world is a sinful place and the only way to obey God is to keep to themselves. They failed their God miserably, then, in the 2005 election, when they unofficially backed National with a spectacular smear campaign against Labour and the even-left-wing (and therefore more Un-Exclusive-Godly) Greens, featuring pamphlets that told straight-up nasty lies about the parties — and we all know how hurtful colourful printed materials can be. Recently, it was revealed that the EB hired private investigators to uncover dirt on the government. National party leader Don Brash, who at first denied association with the Brethren and later admitted to it, eventually resolved to cut ties to the sect.

The keypoints

• Labour, knowing they’ve got away with it in previous elections, fail to declare about NZ$400,000 ( US$not-really-that-much) spent on their ‘pledge card’ — a piece of plastic advertising their election promises. The party has insisted it’s not election spending and dispute the auditor general’s finding that it contravenes campaign funding regulations. Obstinately, Labour has refused to pay it back, much to the delight of National, who have seized upon the issue to label the government “corrupt” and gained enormous political capital by maniacally demanding Labour “pay it back”.
• Not incidentally, National was also found guilty of overspending on their campaign, to the tune of NZ$10,500 (US$not-even-worth-mentioning), but have since paid it back.
• Labour take exception to the charges of corruption and threaten to dish dirt on National. Government bad boy (i.e. Sports Minister) Trevor Mallard taunts National leader Don Brash in parliamentary question time with schoolboyish plays on the word “affair”.
• Lowly rural MP Brian Connell confronts Brash in a caucus meeting about his affair with multi-millionaire businesswoman Diane Foreman — a detail many political insiders, including most of the press gallery, knew about for months but weren’t petty enough to bring up. News of the affair goes public and Brash, who during the campaign made a big deal of his wife being Singaporean, is made to look stupid. Fresh questions are raised as to his suitability to lead National.
• The National party rallies around Brash and he resolves to keep on keeping on. Later, Brash suspends Connell from caucus.
• A photo published in the lamentable Investigate magazine — a publication that manages to be at once morally conservative and morally deprived — sparks allegations that the Prime Minister’s husband, Peter Davis, is gay. The picture shows Davis being hugged by a friend on election night soon after Labour’s apparent victory was announced. It was broadcast at the time on a current affairs show. Investigate’s Godly editor, Ian Wishart, explains he published the photo in order to find more information about the other man in the photo as part of an “ongoing investigation” to an “incident” involving Davis overseas in a public place. Subsequent discussion revealed other reporters had already looked into the Davis rumours and decided they were a non-story.
• Helen Clark goes on the offensive, angrily denying the gay Davis rumours and linking National to the smut. She also claims she has been followed by private investigators.
• As it turns out, Clark is right — sort of. Private investigators had been snooping around her shit — but not at the behest of the National party. Nope, it was the good ol’ Exlcusive Brethren who were to blame. A PI comes out of the woodwork to say, yes, he was snooping around her shit, despite completely denying it the day before. But he says other PIs were going through National’s shit, too.
• By this stage, the whole debacle looks utterly ridiculous. Which is why it gets reported in the foreign media.
• Somewhere along the line, Brash and Clark call off the dogs, promising not to slump further into degrading personal politics.
• Clark promptly calls Brash “corrosive and cancerous”.
• Brash, determined to re-assert himself as National’s leader and draw attention back to the campaign spending allegations, accuses the police of cocking up their investigation into Labour’s pledge card spending.

For those in New Zealand, it must be a rather depressing and tiresome state of affairs, but with the benefit of distance, I can say it’s been a rollicking good run. I’ve enjoyed every minute of it.

The writing credit on the IMDB fooled me. Stupidly, I assumed Alan Mak had worked on The Departed — the Hollywood re-make of Mak’s creation: Infernal Affairs. Mak sounded confused.

“Um, no, I don’t think so,” he offered over the phone.

“Oh, but they’ve credited you,” I returned, thinking perhaps he didn’t quite grasp my mumbled English.

“No, no,” the co-director and co-writer of Hong Kong’s second-highest grossing film ever assured me. He had nothing to do with the Hollywood script, aside from taking a look at it just prior to filming last year.

I silently cursed myself as I mentally jettisoned most of my questions. I’d had to cram for this interview after my colleague passed the buck in the morning. I had been excited to discover Mak had worked on The Departed and subsequently structured my hurriedly-compiled questions around crossing the boundaries between Hong Kong and Hollywood, language and cultural differences, and all that sort of ‘Lost in Translation’ guff. This early setback, then, sent me firmly into what I fondly like to call ‘Wingville’.

“So, ah, what, ah, what did it feel like to have your film picked up by Hollywood?”

And here is where the beauty of being a journalist in Hong Kong — where, as one academic put it to me recently, people can get by in both Chinese and English but are good at neither* — kissed me square on the mouth.

“It made me happy. I was glad somebody liked the movie,” he said.

What the hell do you do with an answer like that? (It was clear this man, the brain behind twisted-like-ivy plot of IA, had something more to say than that, but the language barrier ensured it got, ah, lost in translation.)

“Ah, okay, cool.”

The ensuing 15 minutes was spent with me using crowbar questions to try prise out any gems I could from this obstinate mine. (If only I had the pick-axe that is Cantonese, I’m sure I could have dislodged a few more sparkling jewels.) Then, after I had scraped together a few flakes that would eventually come to form a not desperately shabby story, he asked: “How many more questions do you have?” He was putting the finishing touches on his latest film, the US$10 million Confession of Pain, and he was keen to get back to it.

I let him go.

* And how good was Mak’s English? Well, when I asked him what he thought of the new title, The Departed, he had to ask me what it meant.