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Whitefella Australian learning how to be gwai lo (鬼佬) in Hong Kong

Monday, June 6, 2011

At last...

Well, it's been a long time coming, but I finally made it to a Dragon Boat race. It's June 6th, and so it's 端午節 (Dragon boat festival), a public holiday devoted just to this event. If I was going to watch a Dragon Boat race this year, I figured it had better be today. The public holiday commemorates the sport (which is pretty ancient) as well as the story of Qu Yuan, which you can read about at the wikipedia link, if you're interested.
Now there are many different dragon boat races on today, but I wanted to go back to our old neighbourhood, and enjoy the familiarity of Tai Po. I've walked many times in Tai Po waterfront park, and figured it was as beautiful a place as any to watch some racing.
Loved all the bamboo structures
My interest in Dragon Boat racing came about because of a book that I read by two New Zealanders called "Time to eat the dog", which was an attempt to put some numbers on the environmental impact of many common activities, such as sport, keeping pets, or whatever. Their discussion of which sports had the smallest carbon footprint concluded that the best, at least out of the ones they examined, was Dragon Boat racing. Now at the time, I don't think I'd even heard of it, or at least it hadn't made much of an impression on me. Their analysis at least intrigued me enough that when we moved to Hong Kong I thought, 'I must see one of those races', and so here I was. The 271 bus provided a convenient, and uncommonly peaceful, way to get there, and the place was buzzing with people, even at 8.30am.
So what did I learn about Dragon Boat racing? Well, only what I could learn with my eyes and ears, because I didn't see any explanations of the proceedings, and I didn't understand the commentary, except for the numbers and the word Tai Po! Every dragon boat seems to have twenty rowers, ten on each side, each with an individual paddle. There is also a drummer, who keeps time up the front with a regular beat on a big drum, and an oarsperson at the back who stands up and keeps the boat heading in the right direction. I liked the way it is a mixed sex sport, as there aren't that many of these, and certainly a mixed ability one, as some of the teams were very strong and fast, while others seemed to be just happy to finish. I think this is because most, and perhaps all, of the teams are formed by local businesses, community groups, or whoever (at least one team was connected with a bar in Tai Po), and so they will all take it with varying degrees of seriousness depending on the culture and size of the organisation.
All the teams getting ready to race
I was expecting the boats themselves to be a bit more varied. I love the dragon-head prow, and dragon-tail stern, but they all seemed very similar, at least to my undiscerning eye. Perhaps there is a standard design to try and level the playing-field for the sport? One of the curious aspects of it was the difficulty in getting six to eight very long thin boats lined up at the starting line. When the wind got up a bit, many of them got blown around so that they were facing sideways, and often this seemed to necessitate one boat, and then another, paddling around in a circle to get in place again. I don't know how common this is, but certainly one race seemed to take about ten minutes before everyone was lined up to the satisfaction of the starter. Perhaps this is normal for boat races - I'm certainly not a regular visitor at any others.
One of the most startling things to me, as a newbie to Hong Kong, was the complete absence of commerce at the Dragon Boat races in Tai Po. With so many spectators, athletes, and officials, I would have assumed there would have been many small food stalls, if nothing else, and perhaps a bit of a mini-fair besides. Certainly the Tai Po district council had organised things very well, with a number of different bamboo VIP viewing platforms, plenty of portaloos (Kenny eat your heart out), a number of St John ambulance divisions, and various police, Leisure services staff, and others I couldn't identity, on duty. So where was the commerce? I mean, this is Hong Kong, where there must be more places to shop per person that anywhere in the world. And nothing?!? It was actually reassuring to have it be all about the racing, rather than anything else, though given the sticky 31°C day, I was secretly hoping for at least an ice-cream vendor. As there seems to be with many festivals here, there is a particular food associated with the Dragon Boat festival - sticky rice parcels wrapped in, I think lotus leaves. There weren't even these for sale at the racing, which would have at least fitted with the theme. Fortunately I got in early, and tried a vegetarian version of one a day or two earlier, so that I didn't miss out. I learned at Chinese New Year how fast some of these special foods can disappear, once the holiday is over, and I'm always happy to experience Hong Kong through my tastebuds, as well as my eyes and ears.




Sunday, June 5, 2011

The joys of a local library

Feeling like you have settled into a place is different for different people. Probably everyone has their rituals for feeling settled, whether this is getting all your boxes unpacked, cooking a first meal, learning the names of your local streets, or perhaps finding out the best pizza place in the vicinity.
Today, M. and I went and found where our local library now is, the compact and slightly-hidden-away Tsim Sha Tsui library. In fine Hong Kong fashion, to get to this you have to go up in a lift - only one floor, mind you - but enough to remind you that Hong Kong is a vertical city. I'd like to think there are stairs somewhere, but if so, they are not easy to find. Naturally, the first thing we needed to do was to get our library cards. One of the beauties of a Hong Kong Identity Card is that it gets used as a multipurpose form of identification for all sorts of things. In a car-oriented culture like Australia, a driving licence gets used most regularly for this sort of thing, but in Hong Kong, where few people want or need to drive, the HKID is a very useful and universal form of identification.
Even better, as we found out today at the library, it can be used as our library card, due to the power of the microchip. So instead of my bag getting cluttered up with too many library cards, my HKID card can do the lot. The library staff very patiently, and with very competent English, explained which form to fill in and the correct way to insert your card in the card-reader (wait until the light stops flashing), and so we were on our way.
Best of all, this is a library that will just be for pleasure, because we are desperately in need of reading that isn't just academic. One of the great finds of today was the book above, that describes all the local neighbourhoods, in just enough detail to make them interesting, unpacking some of the history and culture that has resulted in what we see today. I did not know, for example, that until the 1960s, the Tsim Sha Tsui area was quite dominated by the (then) British military, so  that much of what has shaped this place is the requirements of the military personnel at the time. This explains, in part, why there are so many restaurants, bars, nightclubs, tailors and so on, in this area. It is the sort of detail that I would not have even thought about - TST just seemed to be that way - but naturally all places have a history and a reason behind their current existence. I suppose as the bars and restaurants sprang up, so people from other neighbourhoods were drawn here for the nightlife, and so as the military presence was withdrawn, this more 'tourist' aspect took on a life of its own. I had the funny thought as I started to read the book, 'Wow, this book is as good as Wikipedia', and then felt a bit ashamed at how Wikipedia has started to colonize my life! It is very easy to forget how much information that used to have to be searched out painstakingly is now at the tips of our fingers, quite literally.
The English language fiction section of the library is quite small, as you would expect, in a country where the first language of 97% of the people is 廣東話. On the upside, our new library membership gives us access to all forty-two (I think) branches of the Hong Kong library system, so there are bound to be quite a few books to read across all of those. And no matter how small the fiction section, it was certainly a lot more books than we had available to read at home. I was secretly pleased to see the library so well-used. All the communal tables were pretty much full, with people using them to read books, newspapers and magazines. Most of them looked like they were retired, and reminded me of one of the many things I am going to do more of when I retire. Shouldn't heaven be more like a library?
It was an interesting reminder of the local culture to see the balance of books in the social sciences section (academic curiosity). Most of the sections were pretty small, except for the sections on finances, money-management and information technology, which were pretty extensive. It is hard to miss when you come to Hong Kong that the power of money is big here. People respect money, and everyone wants to earn money. This is true of many places, I know, but in HK it is tied up as well with a lot of other religious and cultural aspects of the place that I am still only just getting a sense of. It is why the most common greeting at New Year is 恭喜發財 (which means sort-of 'Congratulations on becoming rich'). In a way that I have only seen elsewhere in the US, the myth that 'if you work hard you will prosper' seems alive and well. Given all the things I have been reading about social class and the education system in the last few months, while it may be true that all things being equal, you will do better if you work harder, for many people the harsh truth is that even working very hard brings few rewards, and for many the deck is really stacked against them.
Fresh from the glow of public education that is the library, we swung back past Crema Coffee, for a delicious espresso, with the added bonus of being able to flick through our new books. For the espresso aficionados, the latte art on M's coffee today was a swan! A lovely morning...