tim's experiment

Well it’s nice to know that our local papers know what is important. No less than two columns in Wednesday’s SCMP were devoted to the fact that a Caucasian man in a rugby shirt had been seen urinating publicly during the Sevens. The results of this odd journalistic exercise were not encouraging. Alex Lo, who had seen the outrage, basically declined to comment on the grounds that journalists are hardly in a position to criticise public drunkenness. On this point I must entirely agree. Those of us who have been around the business for a while will mostly have personal histories which make this matter rather, well, personal. On the other hand Mr Lo rather lets the side down by not being terribly specific about what exactly he saw. The “young white male” was “in full view of dozens of commuters, pedestrians and patrons of a popular sushi bar…” But this does not really tell us where we are on the horror spectrum, because we do not know whether it was a front view or a rear one. Did the sushi consumers see more raw prawn than they were expecting, or are we just talking about a growing puddle here?
This did not trammel the muse of Mr Peter Kammerer, also uninhibited by the undisputed fact that he had not seen the incident. What seemed to be bothering Mr Kammerer was that Hong Kong racism was being directed unfairly at misbehaving mainlanders. His preferred remedy for this is that racism should be directed at errant foreign rugby fans as well.
In his eager pursuit of this curious quarry Mr Kammerer jumped eagerly to some unwarranted conclusions. He pointed out that the internet has an ample supply of clips of mainlanders peeing, or allowing their children to do so, in public places, and these often attract critical comments. Yet it seemed that the waiting bus queue treated to expat urination “although shocked, did not become outraged as they may have done had it been someone of another ethnic persuasion”. So the emotional reaction of the bus queue, as related by Mr Lo, did not reach the reaction which Mr Kammerer, who was not there, might have expected if the perpetrator had been peeing in Putonghua. This is a pretty fragile peg on which to hang several hundred words on history, culture, language and colonialism.
Let us put it this way. The fact that some people like to film mainlanders doing things which HK people do not do does not mean that any randomly selected group of Hongkongers will be moved to vocal protests if they see such a thing themselves. People who write internet comments on videos represent nobody but themselves. They are a self-selected minority of a minority. Probably none of them was present. A boring and rather deflating explanation but there it is.  Mr Kammerer also seems to suppose that drunken misbehaviour is some kind of Western speciality.  Lockhart Road regulars will know better.