Defining the Local

On Being and (Not) Belonging

The act, or at least the assumption, of being local is a defining element of human identity. Unlike other animals, we characterise ourselves not so much by where we are, but by where we might belong. Being local is about limits instead or exceptions, probabilities instead of possibilities. I grew up on the coast of Queensland in northern Australia, but the locals never forgave me for the audacity of birth in Victoria on the southern coast. My two youngest children were born in Hong Kong, but can never hold Hong Kong passports. One day they may become permanent residents, but never citizens – the Basic Law limits that privilege to ethnic Chinese.

You know, the locals.

Why is it so hard to fit in, to become a local? Language and culture play their roles, but something else is at work. We’re often told that globalisation is redefining the distinctions between the common and the specific, and we even have ludicrous terms like glocal to delineate the interactions between global pressures and local resistance. Seen as a system of competing influences, the world becomes a series of sites at which universal values are reshaped and re-prioritised deep down in the dirt around the grass roots. But beyond that rhetoric of change, insularity is still the norm.

So You Think You Want a Revolution?

The Misbehaving Middle Classes and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis

Revolutions are rarely what they seem. Forget streets awash with slogan cant and fists clenched in undiminished rage. Ignore pundits who proclaim the death of hope as wayward regimes slide beneath the waterlines of hubris. Revolutions move, change, retreat and advance. They’re about people doing things beyond the norm, when the status quo no longer holds sway. Revolutionaries might well be ideologues, or keepers of the faith, but within the chaos of change they haven’t really got a clue. Revolutions fail because all things fail – that’s preordained – but their dynamics catch everyone by surprise. Take the time to read Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis and you’ll ask yourself not so much what you’ve learned about the act of revolution, but how much you’ve cast aside.

What does Satrapi’s graphic novel, re-released to accompany the film of the same name, tell us about this weighty matter, this thing we call revolution? How can a mere comic book speak of concerns more significant than teenage angst and passing fancy? By combining two earlier volumes of black and white simplicity, by illustrating with an economy of effort that balances a density of dialogue, it gives us tumultuous change through the eyes of a girl who grows into a woman, and grows apart. By casting herself as the main character Satrapi tells us that revolutions are not simply events, they’re intensely personal. And by their very nature they’re built on middle class misbehaviour, with the bourgeoisie struggling to retrieve a relinquished past that they might or might not really understand.

At one level a simple account of teenage rebellion, along with premonition and consequence, Satrapi’s narrative also slaloms across her more impressive family history. Her grandfather was a prince of Persia, her uncle imprisoned by the second Shah of Iran and again after the Shah fled, she a teenage brat packed off to Austria after radical Islamists captured the post-revolution state and made of it a doctrinaire training camp for martyrs in the war against Iraq. To mention, without that sort of reflection, that her parents were committed Marxists who lost their rebellion and chose quietude over death would have been to offer a sanitised middle-class soap opera. Instead we are given pathos in the repudiation of action to ensure that young Marji might know freedom elsewhere.

Even after the girl slinks back from Austria, a whiney, unlikeable adolescent stumbling into adulthood, it is to her parents’ home she returns. And it is they who refrain from condemning the calamity of her marriage, her many mistakes. When Marji finally leaves for France as an adult her personal revolution is complete. She has returned to her origin and gained the freedom to move out again. All the while her parents, and her almost ever-present grandmother, counterbalance the changefulness of the Iranian regime. They offer freedom and growth, they give their daughter the chance to learn for herself, while the regime constrains, deforms, murders.

Kowloon by Night

The Dark Side of Migrant Labour in Hong Kong

Evening falls on Kowloon like a mood, gently at first and then with a sting that drains the day. Nathan Road swallows traffic by the mile and spits back noise and fumes as pedestrians push up against each other on the bulging sidewalk. Neon signs hang from buildings like over-ripened fruit, hawking seafood and spirits, Chinese medicine and the melancholy of girlie bars where light never dares to go.

This part of Hong Kong the British barely even owned; they just left their little marks as time moved them on. Step around the corner onto Jordan Road and the crowd drifts away. Look beyond the high-rise shadows and there – look now, or you might just miss it – is one of those reminders that past days are gone. An old house, a church, perhaps a school, the shape suggests authority once remembered. The Romans offered the miracle of concrete to the Mediterranean world; the British multiplied it rudely in the sweated tropics.

The house has a name now – Bethune – and it stands as a monument to social change in the empire’s dying days, when Hong Kong’s wealth, or the fear of loosing it, swelled the ranks of foreign amahs as the local middle classes sent their wives to work for ten, twelve, maybe fourteen hours a day. In the intimacy of private homes commercial contracts tear and fray, and as amahs became maids and then domestic helpers – as Filipinos were joined by Indonesians and many more besides – the unreasoned contrast between employee expectations and employer arrogance spilled out onto the streets.

Bethune House is a migrant women’s shelter, a refuge for domestic helpers who have been unduly dismissed by their employers. Some have been abused – physically, mentally, sexually – and others exploited, underpaid, overworked, stripped of rights. All remain in Hong Kong because they’re pursuing justice through the semi-formal Labour Tribunal or the daunting courts, if their cases ever go to trial. Their employers have new maids now, new victims, but these women are forbidden to work again until they’ve finished with their recourse to the law. If they leave Hong Kong their chance of restitution evaporates.

Walk with me now into the building, retrace the steps I took last night with my wife, daughter and friends. Trudge up the long flight of stairs to the second floor. Pass the suitcases jammed in where handrails should be, the women standing, waiting, expectant. Impermanence leaks into everything, but one woman has been here two years now with no real end in sight. The scene is much like the overcrowded transit lounge of a rundown bus interchange, but the Greyhound might never come.

Show and Tell

One Picture, 706 Words

There is, we are often told, an old Chinese saying that a picture tells a thousand words. But no-one ever mentions which picture, what words and who might be listening. Or, for that matter, who might be watching, wondering. Consider the photograph on the left. What does it tell us? It shows an athlete running into a crowded stadium – only the marathon allows for that. His salute suggests victory ahead, and a certain confidence that would only come from entering the stadium with a comfortable lead. He is, in fact, Samuel Wanjiru, and he’s just over 400 metres away from crossing the line first in the Olympic marathon for men in Beijing this morning. We don’t know that from the picture, yet a quick search of the Internet will give us the background, the frame if you will.

But leave Wanjiru aside now, including his stupendous capacity to run just over 42 kilometres in 2:06:32 hours and not seem to be tiring. Consider what’s happening around him instead. Click on the picture to enlarge it if you need to. The crowd haven’t quite noticed Wanjiru yet, but they will soon. The stadium announcer will point him out, and cameras are just starting to relay his image to the big screens high up in the stands. And, if you look carefully enough, the screen in the picture is exhorting the crowd to cheer, in both Chinese and English for good effect.

Now ask yourself this: why does the crowd need to be told to cheer? This is no reminder. Crowds cheer – that’s why they go to any sporting event, let alone the Olympics. Not everyone understands the technicalities of every event, but when Wanjiru makes it to the track, when he runs beyond the frame, so to speak, they’ll know. So again, why do they need to be told?

Typographical Surprises

Or, You’ve Just Gotta Laugh

Typos are the terror of the journalist and the scourge of the editor. In this technological age of word-processors, spelling checkers and state-of-the-art document sharing they should never happen. But take it from an overworked editor – they do, and more often than might seem apparent to the untrained eye. They range from the embarrassing to the downright silly when they slip on through. Once, in a thirty-six hour stretch of poverty-inspired freelance editing I accidentally changed the abbreviation for a mainland Chinese government department to that for a well-known Hong Kong kindergarten, to the outrage of the author who assumed an ulterior motive. What could I say? Dear client, I screwed up because I haven’t slept in two days . . .

On Race and Rationality

A New Take on Race from Hong Kong

Look past the bias of the times, the certainties of this epoch or that, and race becomes a messy, various concept. At any given moment – and quite aside from the scientific definition of a single human race – it can define people of different types in any number of categories, depending on perspective. There was for many years, and perhaps still is, the perception of a British race, born of the concept that empire and a core of supra-national boundaries in the so-called British Isles could fuse biology and location to produce an identifiable people with certain physical and psychological characteristics. More often today, British people are subsumed under the generic appellation of Caucasian, and at a stretch – most often in the United States – as White. Regardless of how ludicrously broad these categories might or might not seem from your perspective, they are constructed according to a reason. Each has a nub of logic at its centre, from a certain point of view.

To claim that context is crucial in defining race might well seem equivocal, but it’s an observation rather than a moral judgement. It also helps to reveal the reasoning behind otherwise inexplicable definitions and their derivatives. Consider, for instance, this passage from Section 8(4) of Hong Kong’s soon to be enacted Racial Discrimination Ordinance:

The fact that a racial group comprises 2 or more distinct racial groups does not prevent it from constituting a particular racial group for the purposes of this Ordinance.

First, let’s consider what might make immediate sense here, given the context. Any legislation seeking to address racial discrimination, if not ban it outright, must first determine what ‘race’ really means before identifying how it can be used to disadvantage anyone. So the second half of this sentence, on constituting a ‘particular racial group’, is just a way of ensuring that the Ordinance does what it’s supposed to do.

But what about the seemingly nonsensical first part of the sentence? How on Earth, or even in Hong Kong, can one racial group comprise either multiple or distinct racial groups, let alone the two together? Surely that’s just gibberish. If, as the legal norm in common-law countries insists, the words of the Ordinance should be applied in their “natural and ordinary sense”, then good luck to any magistrate doomed to apply it. Right? Well, no – it just so happens that the words do make sense, in their own peculiar way.

You Will Believe!

The Economist on Marx

Every publication needs a conceit, a sort of literary attitude that extends across issues, separates believers from the heathen, occasionally flows into a full article, but more often manifests in a well-placed quip or a scornful remark. Wired has its peccadillo for predication, and the New Yorker its disdain for the drudge of popular culture. The Economist is a little more sophisticated, but no less enthusiastic in its construction of a bête noire. It has Karl Marx, and it just won’t let go.

Consider last week’s issue of the magazine. Buried in a leader on the failed intellectual “heirs” of Russian literary dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the grand old rag of English conservatism slipped in a warning that “ideas should not be suppressed, but nor should they be worshipped”. In the context of the article that wasn’t a particularly significant statement – the problem of co-opted intellectuals, of ideas held rigidly in place and manipulated by the state, was its central theme. So why bother to distil the argument into a single sentence at all? Because it set up a strained comparison of Solzhenitsyn’s fictionalised condemnation of Soviet excess, the Gulag Archipelago, and the Communist Manifesto.

Of course Karl Marx and Manifesto co-author Friedrich Engels weren’t named in the article, all the better to maintain Solzhenitsyn’s status as a “great man” and underscore his well-known opposition to Marxism. But more than a simple genre-hop in pursuit of easy political points, the comparison pointed back to a long-term illogic in the magazine’s stance towards communism in general and Marx in particular. An illogic, I should add, that is very likely to comfort its core of conservative readers.

The article mentioned that “in 1848 two well-meaning intellectuals published another powerful indictment of a system, and their ‘Communist Manifesto’ went on to enslave half of mankind”. In the broadest possible sense, taking the words not at their literal meaning but as a loose pointer towards a series of documented historical events, you could say – on the balance of probabilities – that this is an adequate observation.

But if you think in more precise terms, the statement is clearly illogical. A book enslaved half of mankind? No, a political system did, or might have done depending on how you define ‘enslave’. And when you consider how that political system – wherever it was localised after the Bolshevik revolution – started at precisely the point at which the Communist Manifesto ended, with the dissolution of the old state, then the argument is little more than wasted ink.

Slowly Turn the Wheels of Justice

Police Report Issued on Vicky Flores’ Death

Almost four months after Vicenta ‘Vicky’ Flores – a Filipino domestic helper in Discovery Bay, Hong Kong – fled her employers’ home and drowned under mysterious circumstances, the regional police have finalised their investigation. Today’s print edition of the South China Morning Post reports that the North Lantau police issued a report on the case “this week”, without specifying a day or any other details.

Vicky’s disappearance and death have been a very serious issue here in Discovery Bay, not only because the loss of life is tragic and the community has been diminished by her passing, but also because the government reaction to it has revealed a distinct lack of enthusiasm in dealing with people from other cultures, and an inability to communicate meaningfully with minority ethnic communities.

Following standard procedure, the police report has been forwarded to the Coroner, who will consider whether an inquest is necessary. Given that the police refused to investigate the circumstances of Vicky’s employment and focused on ludicrous insinuations of “cult-like” connections, a re-investigation of the situation through the Coroner’s Court will be most welcome.

Around a month ago the Justice for Vicky Flores concern group, of which I’m a member, received independent advice that an inquest would be likely due to the publicity and genuine concern surrounding the case. This was complemented more recently by an indication from the Lantau District Police Commander that “a death inquest is very likely to be held”. Of course, that in no way guarantees an inquest, which will bring much needed transparency to the case in an open court, but it’s promising given the latest news.

Dealing with the police in Hong Kong isn’t an easy task, despite a wealth of propaganda that suggests a mission to serve and protect. For the sake of Vicky’s family – especially her sister Irene, who has struggled through a mountain of difficulty both here in Hong Kong and at home in the Philippines to make sense of the situation – any news of the police finding and a prompt indication of an inquest date will be vital.

In a humane society, people care for people, even foreigners.

Meanwhile, Back in Hong Kong . . .

‘Care’ in a Callous City

One of the fundamental comforts any modern society can offer is the knowledge that emergency medical care will be available when you need it. Although few would ever have cause to consider it in precisely this way, the emergency room is a metaphor for effective governance, a symbol of the social contract at work. Those countries that lack emergency care, and those in which only begging or bribery will obtain it, are clearly deficient in their duty of care towards residents. As are those that discriminate against certain people when they arrive at a hospital, in need and in pain.

“RosesmdCW” is one of those people, a Filipino working as a domestic helper in Hong Kong. Last week she left a comment on the other blog I maintain, A Death in Hong Kong, describing the treatment that she and her sister have experienced in a local emergency room. It pays to remember that Hong Kong is not part of the Third World, has every obligation to offer proper emergency care to all people within its borders, and has an otherwise efficient (if sometimes overwhelmed) hospital system.

I’ll quote her comment here at length, slightly edited to ensure clarity and broken into paragraphs to highlight the main points:

I have been here in Hong Kong for almost 14 years now, and it makes me sad to say that most of us believe that the “LAW” here in Hong Kong is much better than in the Philippines, but yes I do agree that the discrimination here is much worse than I had ever imagined. If you are only a mere servant, even in cases of emergency, people here will just ignore you.

I have experienced going to the emergency section of the government hospital several times with a severe stiff neck pain, and still the staff haven’t attended to me immediately (you have to wait 2 to 3 hours before being attended).

I took my sister to one of the hospitals yesterday as she was bleeding, but she was still sent home and advised by the doctor to wait for an appointment on November 21, 2008. My question here is: What does “emergency” mean? Does emergency mean that you should be drawing your last breath to be considered?

I really can’t understand the hospital rules here … I saw people waiting at the emergency section with just slight problems. To make matters worse for my sister, she was immediately terminated by her employers when they knew she was going to attend Emergency! They had objected to her going to see the doctor and made her continue work even though she was in pain and bleeding.

I wish the government would really act on this, and not wait until the reputation of Hong Kong deteriorates further.

Beyond how the two women were treated at the hospital lies a truly disturbing reaction from the sister’s employer. I’ve communicated with “RosesmdCW” before and have no doubt that what she has written is an accurate description of events. If there is a social contract in Hong Kong, if social decency is at all valued, then neither consideration extends to domestic helpers.

The Blogger on Holiday

My Middle-Class Misadventure

Sometimes, the oldest ideas are the most easily misunderstood. Take the word ‘holiday’, for instance – it’s been in the English language since at least the Twelfth Century, when it sounded more German than anything else, but most people don’t really understand what it means. Originally denoting a ‘holy’ day in the Christian calendar that allowed no labour, it later slid towards describing any day, or group of days, in which work was suspended. The term implies movement only in the somewhat abstract sense of escaping the obligation to toil, usually for someone else.

Yet increasingly over the course of the last century the notion that a holiday is necessarily a physical journey has crept into the language. It’s a middle class thing. Where once the bourgeoisie boasted mainly self-employed entrepreneurs with little time for rest, it’s now stuffed full of salaried professionals and other white-collar workers with the same ‘leave’ entitlements as their distant labouring cousins. But they’ve got more money and many are dual income couples – the prefect recipe for a little time in the sun, or the cold, or wherever else they might want to be.

So taking a holiday has slid lazily into meaning time spent anywhere else but here, with the authenticity of the period measured by the distance travelled, the fun others presume you’ll have and the almost miraculous refreshment you’ll feel from having been and returned. Because there is always an endpoint – holidays are only valuable in hindsight, recalled again at work as the years roll by.

But what of those people who resist the urge to travel while on holiday, those who can’t afford it or simply have better things to do? You would think the language is flexible enough to encompass the choice. But you’d be wrong.

I spent a great deal of time explaining to clients last week that, yes, I was going on holiday for two glorious weeks but, no, I wouldn’t be leaving Hong Kong. The retort, disturbingly enough, was that if I only intended to stay at home, perhaps I could do some work for them. For Hong Kongers, even expatriates who speak no other language than English, ‘holiday’ is a synonym for ‘escape’, and if you don’t escape, you must toil.

On Freedom

For Yayah and Beth

What is freedom? That seems like an easy question, but it can never be answered without equivocation, the implication of limits to protect some-one or something else. We tend to think of freedom as an absolute, as unconditional liberty, but who would be prepared to grant free choice over life and death, the freedom to harm as well as to help? At the dawn of the Philippine Revolution against Spain a new word entered the Tagalog language to capture this ambivalence, to speak both of liberty and obligation. The word was kalayaan, which implied cooperation for liberty and its rewards.

Freedom is a fundamentally social concept, with tension between the individual and the group, or between the group and yet other groups, always at its core. By their very nature groups contain, condense and consolidate. In doing so they force their members to relinquish something, even those members who have the greatest influence over others. A group needs a focus at best, or an alibi at worst, and not all members are prepared to accept that under all circumstances. Ultimately, some members attempt to negate the compulsion to belong, which is as often born of necessity in one form or another as it is of coercion.

When Justice is (Almost) Done

Or, How Did You Spend Your Sunday?

Sometimes the least words are the most welcome. So I’ll very quickly report that a crime investigation is now under way into the callous, wanton abuse of the domestic helper I mentioned a few days ago. The victim spent 10 hours giving a statement to the police yesterday, which should indicate that this is no trivial matter. Her case will proceed through at least one court and one tribunal here in Hong Kong, and I’ll write about the results when I can do so without legal ramifications. For now I should just mention again that domestic violence in all its forms, whether tinged with racism, presumptions of social superiority or marital dysfunction, is appalling.

Wake up people, the home is a refuge.