Fix or flick?

Our repaired handy-vac, happy again...

Picking up on the environmental thread of this blog, after a long delay, I need to say that there is one green area where Hong Kong excels.

Back in Australia, it was defeating whenever an appliance broke down. If it was a small appliance, you knew that there was no chance of getting it repaired, and if you were lucky, it was new enough that you could take it back to the store and get an even newer replacement. However with no electronic waste (e-waste) program, you knew that it was likely to be bound for the dump.

If it was a large appliance, such as a washing machine, you had a genuine desire to get it fixed, because the pain and expense of replacing it was a lot harder than taking something like a toaster or electric kettle back to the store. But even then it was hard to find someone to fix it, and when they did come out, there seemed to be little guarantee that the thing would actually be fixable, and if it was, it often cost most of the price of a replacement machine.

Now, I had thought that this was simply the modern world, and that the relentless search for cheap labour, and the driving down of manufacturing costs, had made things not worth repairing. It turns out that this is not actually true, or at least, only true for Australia.

For in Hong Kong, everything and anything seems to be repairable. This is A GOOD THING. A repaired item doesn't need to be replaced entirely, or even very much at all. It doesn't need to be condemned to landfill, and only make the world that little bit more polluted. And best of all, when it is repaired you don't have to relearn how to operate a new make or model - you have your old 'friend' back in place. Nice.

Now even though I'm writing this I find it hard to believe, but it has turned out to be true, time and time again. The last twelve months has been a bad year for stuff going wrong. I guess if you want to have bad karma, it's much better to have it with electrical goods that with your health. Bad stab-mixer or bad stabbing pains in the heart? I know which one I'd choose!

Let me see all the things that have broken... Hmmm... Hand-blender, handheld vacuum cleaner, the toilet cistern (three separate problems), the air conditioner, the microwave, and the electric kettle. So I am now quite experienced with getting stuff fixed now, especially toilets (唔該晒, 陳先生 - Thanks, Mr Chan!).

The latest to go was the hand vacuum cleaner, which we bought because we didn't have a vacuum cleaner at all, and it seemed like it might be a more suitable size for our small apartment. It has, it's been perfect, but the other day, while lifting up the bed platform to access the under-bed storage (a must in a small apartment), the cord to the vac got caught as we put it down, and completely severed. So our poor little vac gradually got less and less charged, a pathetic low-pitched whine, until we noticed it's power source wasn't actually connected to any electricity grid.

Now this had been our mistake. I assumed I would have to buy a new charging base, so I headed to my closest listed repair store, which turned out to be just near the Star Ferry terminal, in Tsim Sha Tsui. I took the broken charger to the repair counter and explained, in English (as I wasn't up to this nuance in Cantonese) that this had been our fault, and was it possible to buy a new base. The very helpful staff-member said, 'Do you have your warranty with you?' (I didn't, because I hadn't even thought this would be covered). He said, 'Don't worry, I can see the manufacturing date here, let's just see if they'll repair it for you, just sign here, take this receipt, and come back in a week.'

I came back in a week, receipt in hand, to find that the power-cord had been replaced, and even better, I wasn't being charged anything! Is this some secret conspiracy by Hong Kong appliance manufacturers to create good will? Is there really that fierce a competition for business in Hong Kong? Whatever the reason, I love it! It may be a pain when something breaks, but I am made endlessly cheerful by the need NOT to have to throw things out, and relieved when the repair cost has been minimal, or nothing.

So clearly the Australian situation is not normal around the world. Perhaps the consequences of high labour costs, and great distance from the centres of manufacturing, makes the Australian marketplace particularly prone to the chuck-and-replace approach? So for all those who might be reading this, and living in a 'repair' culture, rather than a 'replace' one - celebrate! And perhaps be extra nice to your next repairer - they're saving the world, one repair at a time...

The poetry of Special English

Well, it's been a long time between posts, mostly because I've been in Australia, and I don't feel any great need to write about that.
It was lovely to be back in Hong Kong, and as I was wandering around on my first full day back, I noticed this sign, on the scaffolding where a row of older buildings (唐樓) have been knocked down to make way for some (presumably massive) new building.
Now I recently read a book called 'Oracle Bones' in which the author talked about a type of English with a more limited vocabulary, of about 1500 words, called Special English which was used by the USA in their worldwide radio programs to be more accessible to their listeners whose first language was not English. As someone who had taught English in China many years before, he was still in touch with many of his former students, who liked these programs, because they were a good accessible way to keep up their English skills.
I liked this idea. There are a lot of jokes made by English speakers about the way English is spoken by native Chinese speakers. This is probably because there aren't enough examples of how badly Chinese is spoken by native English speakers, because so few of them actually try. Being in the process of learning Cantonese myself, I have great respect for how well many HongKongers speak English. I hope my Cantonese is that good some day.
But for now, I am liking the idea of Special English, because it conjures up the distinctive perspective that comes through when someone speaks a language not their own. For example, it makes a lot of sense when Chinese people substitute the words she and he for each other in English, because why would you distinguish between them when in Cantonese there is a particular word, such as 佢 for she, he or it.
Which, getting back very slowly to my original point, is why I loved this sign. No native speaker of English would talk about an undulating pavement, and what a terrible shame that is. Undulating is a beautiful word, a poetic word, conjuring up the Latin root, undis, waves. It made me imagine the rolling curves of the pavement bearing down on me, sweeping me away into a land where all public notices were written poetically, and life was just that little bit more humane.
 

Hong Kong Tropes

Hong Kong image from here under Creative Commons licence

In homage to my new favourite way to waste spend time on the Interweb, this page is a shout-out to TVtropes, a site that despite its name, covers all manner of popular culture. It does not, however cover cities, though I am not going to let that stop me here.

Sadly, unlike the original, which relies on the wisdom of crowds, this one will be based on my poor isolated grey matter, and will be all the poorer for it, although perhaps that is the true fate of all homage.
Nonetheless, I will forge on, confident in the knowledge that a true fan knows no bounds! Some will surely disagree with these, or maybe just think that I don't know what I'm talking about. Having only lived in Hong Kong a short while (十個月), I cannot be sure I have these tropes nailed, but I'll give it a go.

Floors are dirty

Now if you come to Hong Kong from far enough away, you quickly learn that something is up with the floor. Either it's dirtier than where you came from, or we're all much cleaner. This is easy to notice at restaurants. You walk in, get seated, dump your bag on the floor (no!), and before you know it, the super-efficient staff will pick them up, pull up a chair, and seat them next to you, like a crowd of small, but surprisingly silent children. Sooner or later, you eventually get it, and you start to look for a table with enough chairs for your party, plus one.
This is not just about good service at eating establishments, it's EVERYWHERE. A great example, from the other day, was a group of young men, perhaps in their late teens, early twenties, handing out flyers. Now, this is not an age-group or a gender that I associate with hygiene, but nonetheless their bags were all piled up on some carefully laid-out sheets of newspaper. Now, I am sure it can't be because the whole population is really worried about germs, so where does it come from. Knowledgeable Hong Kong friends tell me that there is a class element to it, because everyone knows you just don't sit on the floor. Now, obviously there is a reasonable element to this, as you wouldn't want to spend too much of your time eating food off the floor, and yet, so much of what was normal in my former life was about sitting/putting things on/lying down on the ground, all without a care in the world. An associated trope is bag hooks, those indispensable items for keeping your precious possessions off the filthy floor.

Whacky photos

This one is a tricky one. Presumably many of the photo-takers I see are actually tourists, and so not from here, but then why do I see it here all over the place, and not so much elsewhere. Is it something in the air? You know what I'm talking about. It isn't enough to actually be having your photo taken - you have to do something whacky! Hey, maybe you could look like you're resting your hand on the head of that Giant Buddha in the background? Perhaps you need to act as if you're not just happy to be on holiday, but ecstatic! At the very least you need to make some effort, like making the classic double 'v' sign. You know it's the rules.
I wonder if this is something that you just normalise over time, into you find yourself doing it without thinking. I know I've been tempted to do it in photos lately, out of a sort-of ironic homage, but it could be easy to slide from that into seeing it as normal. Contrast this trope with German Photo, where everyone is very serious and self-contained.

Can you see how seductive this whole process is?
 

De Natura Lavatorium

Just a quick post today, as I am still mulling over a longer one. Making good on my promise that this blog would talk about design, I was pleased to come across this very stylish hand basin in the washrooms at the Hong Kong Museum of Art, on the waterfront at Tsim Sha Tsui.

I had always thought of Norway as the epitome of child-centred societies, and perhaps they do a better job across the board, but if you just want to look at the material culture of this one public toilet, then you'd have to say that either the designer, or the ones preparing the brief, should get top marks for considering the needs of those small in size or age.

My curiosity was piqued firstly by the sign on the door. Now once upon a time I would not have paid attention to the signs on the toilet doors, but after a very memorable Women's Studies lecture about fifteen years ago, I have never looked at a toilet door the same again. I could go on at length about how gender is 'created' in both the signs themselves, and the normative choice we must make, out of two very limiting options, whenever we use a non-unisex bathroom, but I will leave it at that, for the sake of brevity and sanity (however I will say thank-you to Dr Annamaria Jagose for one of the few genuinely memorable lectures of my educational life). So back to the sign, or signs (because they always come in matching pairs); they were fairly typical stick figures (i.e. two generic humans, one in pants/trousers, and one in a skirt), but on each sign there were two figures, one larger and one smaller. A nice touch. I suspect you are supposed to read this as good for both adults and children (they being a large category of generally small people), but really it could just as easily be a shout-out to anyone of small stature.

And in a rare instance of cohesive design, this small-friendly sign was borne out by the design of the rest of the bathrooms, which were organised to make everything easy to access, whatever your height. As an added bonus, the sinks were a sterling example of practical industrial design, with clean lines, good materials, and all teamed with water pressure moderate enough for washing without precipitating a fountain!

If only all toilets could be so satisfying...

Fire dragons and website design

Find some better photos here...

If there's one thing that Hong Kong people seem to love, it's a festival, and almost anything is an excuse for celebration. Some are late additions, like Halloween, which is big here at the moment. Others, like the Fire Dragon dance, seem to have a longer and richer history. I could go into detail, but you're much better off looking at the website, which you will NOT want to miss (how could you not love the Tron aesthetic?)

We seem to miss far too many of these, so we thought we would make the effort to get along and see this Fire Dragon that we'd heard so much about.We turned up pretty close to the advertised time, but perhaps we should have been a bit more skeptical - we had to wait a long time for the Fire Dragon to appear. Still, this was an 'Event', so I suppose they needed some build-up. This consisted mostly of a platform on wheels, which contained a big sign, lots of fairy lights, and a succession of very energetic drummers, old and young, female and male, getting us into the right mood for the night.
It is very much a community effort in Tai Hang, and it looks like everyone who wants to can be involved and find a role. Some of the children got to march around with lanterns on poles, many of the elders of the community marched in a dignified fashion up and down, and the energetic helped put together the fire dragon, which involves thousands upon thousands of sticks of incense. Perhaps it goes without saying that it can be a bit overwhelming being downwind of the dragon, which is partly why it needs to be held up nice and high!

The best of a bad set of photos...

Part of the long delay was the coordinated effort to get those thousands of incense sticks lit and pushed into the body of the dragon - this is impossible to do quickly, but needs to be done quickly enough that the first ones won't have burnt down before the procession ends (actually, I think at one point they stopped and replenished a whole lot that had gone out). Something we hadn't calculated for, was the way at a certain point in the night, when the dragon was almost ready to go, they closed the few pedestrian accessways across the roads that had been open, leaving us stranded within a small block of streets with no way out. This would have been okay, but the crowds were pretty intense, even by Hong Kong standards - you wouldn't have wanted to have a panic attack. So we resigned ourselves to going with the flow, and settled in for another half an hour or so.
The dragon is pretty cool, very very long, and ablaze with incense sticks. I can imagine this would have been much more impressive by comparison back in the 1880s (when it started), before we had all become jaded by neon lighting, CGI imagery, the wonders of smartphones, etc.
More puzzling to my mind, and never explained, was the full 'Scottish' marching band, with kilts, bagpipes, the works. I thought Tai Hang meant 'big water channel', not 'Scotland in the South China sea', but then translation is such a complicated affair. If someone can set me straight on the connection that would be great. I mean, I like bagpipe music, perhaps more than most, it was just hard to see how it fits with all the rest; the incense, the lanterns, the tradition.
When it was all over, we were glad we had gone, but next time we will make a better exit plan!

Dot painting on Cheung Chau - The good, the bad, and the ugly

A Hong Kong perspective on Papunya Tula?

Having moved from Australia to Hong Kong, I am always on the look-out for signs, however tenuous, of the connections between the two places. In part, I suppose this is an attempt to know how and where I fit, in this chaotic and bustling metropolis.

So it was interesting the other day to be wandering one of the back alleys of Cheung Chau, one of the outlying islands, and come across one of the ubiquitous private education businesses in HK, whose sole purpose seems to be about taking advantage of the desire of parents to hot-house their kids. This particular one focused on art, and what caught my eye in the window was a display of (Australian) indigenous dot-painting - or at least some Cantonese young people's take on this. Who knows what they had been told/taught about Aboriginal art practices and history, or how much Australian indigenous art they had seen, thought about, or enjoyed. 

As an early childhood teacher back in Australia, I did some 'teaching' of art, though it is certainly very informal in the preschool years, and much of it is about exploration. I also did a lot of thinking, talking and teaching about Australia's indigenous culture, because it is something that is unique and valuable to Australia, and also to the world, being probably the world's oldest continuous culture. On a side note, there was a nice piece in the BBC news online, about Aboriginal science, and their early interest in astronomy, based on analysis of a site in my home state of Victoria.

So this subject interested me on a number of levels, in part because there has been some controversy in Australia about whether it is respectful to teach 'dot painting' to children, as if this can effectively 'do' Aboriginal culture for the class the whole year. It might be different, perhaps, if children experimented with dot painting in the course of a whole year's learning about all the different forms of Aboriginal art, because dot painting is just one technique of many, mostly associated with an art movement based around Papunya, in the central part of Australia, northwest of Alice Springs. Or indeed if children were given some sense of the meaning, the history and the traditions of dot painting, which would give them some sense of the intricacies of indigenous cultures in Australia. At the root of it all, I suppose, is respect, and whether it is disrespectful, particularly in a country that still has a wide streak of racism when it comes to the treatment of indigenous people, to take one tiny element of a culture, and appropriate it without thought or meaning.

Of course, in Hong Kong, it is entirely different. Without the troubled relationship between indigenous and non-indigenous Australia, who can say what meaning it has in this context. Perhaps a traveler from Australia with Indigenous heritage might smile on seeing that same display in Cheung Chau, knowing how far their culture has travelled. Which all reminds me of a beautiful poster put out by ATSIC years ago, which if you can track it down, remains one of the best images ever...

National Day celebrations, or, Why red is doubly significant in China

It was a pleasant surprise to find out, when the National Day fireworks began down at the harbour the other day, that we could see a surprising amount over the tops of the buildings from our apartment window.

This scrappy iPhone photo cannot in any way do it justice. Not only was it hard to capture the moment with the loooong camera delay on a phone, but the phone seemed to struggle to capture the contrasts between the glare of the Tsim Sha Tsui at street level (I'd never noticed it was that bright!), the darkness of the night, and the stunning fireworks.

What made it more amusing was all the televisions I could see tuned to the fireworks in the apartments across the street. Truly, even with much of the view cut off, they still seemed more spectacular seen through my own retina than on the television screens I could see.

It was an impressive fireworks display, as these things go, and a reminder of how much money is still floating around in Hong Kong despite the worldwide recession. It went for twenty-five minutes, which I'd guess results in a hefty price tag. If you want to see some better photos, and read the work of someone who has done some background research, click here.

As for me, I merely reflected on how fortuitous it seems that red has always been an auspicious colour in China, and is also the colour of the International Labour movement, and hence the colour of the flag of the PRC. Nothing like starting off with the public relations battle already won. I don't feel I have learnt enough yet about China's history, ancient and modern, to make more of a comment than that right now. I have lots of opinions, but I am sure there are wiser heads out there to listen to, such as this guy, whom M and I have enjoyed reading.

Instead I will leave you with some appropriate music...

Kung Fu in Kowloon - 功夫喺九龍

Gotta love those outfits, and the concentration

It feels like there are many things that have been on-the-to-do-list for quite some time, without ever quite happening. So once in a while it is great to tick something off that ever-expanding list. One of these is the Kung Fu demonstrations in Kowloon Park, which ought to have been easier to get along to, given how close they are to our apartment (perhaps a three minute walk, at the absolute maximum).

These happen every Sunday, weather permitting, in the sculpture garden of the park - an area is roped off, seats are set-up, and various martial arts groups and people go through the paces for the benefit of an audience that seems to comprise mostly of old Chinese guys (former or current martial artists, or armchair enthusiasts, perhaps?) and sundry curious tourists.

It was a thrill to finally see it, because I didn't really have a sense of what it would be like. Sure, there would be martial arts, but would this be sparring, impromptu lessons, people doing practice drills, or who knows what?

It turns out that it is a bit like what might happen at an Agricultural Show, or a local fair, back in Australia. Though I have no idea how it is organised - is there a peak body for martial arts in Hong Kong? - it seems like it's a forum for the sort of heart-warming, get-the-locals-involved event that every place needs. So while I was there there were demonstrations from one particular school, where the teachers (師父) seemed to be two women. So I saw demonstrations from the beginners (some of whom looked about three or four), through intermediate groups, to some of the older students (late high-school age). Most of the groups ran through a set of moves lasting around three minutes, though a couple of the exhibitions were of stylized, choreographed fights, almost like a dance.

Swords too!

There was also some single performers, mostly older men, and it was hard to tell whether they had just signed up to give a demo, or were part of the same school as the kids in the bright uniforms. Some had uniforms of their own, while others were just in comfortable training clothes. They were all fun to watch - a good reminder that martial arts is about lots of hard work, practice and consistent discipline, rather than what you see in the movies. The most fascinating were two individual demos which were of a style that seemed to be mostly about marshalling your chi (氣, I think!) because these involved very restricted movement, and a whole lot of straining of the face and neck muscles. To me it put me in mind of something I had only vaguely read about, the One-inch punch. It turns out that wikipedia has quite a lot to say about this, if you follow the link, which is all about the differences in Northern and Southern styles of martial arts. Being southerners, here in greater Guangdong province, I suppose I should conclude that those performances were the most local and 'authentic' of them all.

While I'm on the subject, and because I'm unlikely to get back to this topic anytime soon, if you're looking for a good bit of escapist fiction including the beautiful city of Hong Kong, some rollicking martial arts, and the odd Daoist diety, then look no further than this series by Kylie Chan. Lots of fun...