tim's experiment

Hong Kong’s New Territories still have a good deal of rural charm. I lived in a village for five years and got on very well with my neighbours. They were all surnamed Li; it was that sort of village. The only reason we were able to buy a house in the village was because the Post Office, when numbering the houses to prepare for dour-to-door delivery, had allocated ours the catastrophically inauspicious number 44. But the Lis were very hospitable. We were invited to an annual feast outside the ancestral hall, the village lion dance team performed on our doorstep, for a small tip, at Chinese New Year, and our then small son ran in and out of everyone’s houses with the other kids, loosely supervised by a network of grandmas, elder sisters and domestic helpers.  I was even invited to clan meetings, not because I was expected to say anything, but because the village welfare fund, to which I had contributed, supplied free beer on these occasions and I was expected to drink my share. A small tree in our front garden had some traditional role in wedding folklore, so every time one of the village youngsters got married the happy couple would knock on our door and politely ask permission to take a twig.

This was very law-abiding of them because the tree overhung a public path and they could have just helped themselves. In other respects I fear my neighbours were not so fastidious. I did not inquire about the mysteriously high rate of comings and goings in the dog population, but you could not miss the firecrackers. We were up to our ears in them every New Year. Large lorries would sometimes appear in our little car park and I fear things sometimes fell off the back of them, as it were.

Still, on the whole I am a fan of the NT and all who dwell in it. But this scene is being ruined by greed. Or to give it its official name, the Small House Policy. This states that male descendants of the original villagers can apply for a plot to build a small house near their ancestral home. This produces a supply of houses which vastly exceeds the requirements of the indigenous population, many of whom have in any case emigrated. But the policy persists because it is a racket. It was a racket in the 80s, when a member of the Heung Yee Kuk complained that some members of the Kuk itself were participating, it was a racket in the 90s, when there seemed some prospect of it being stopped, and it is a racket now, when there is no such prospect at all because the Kuk is effectively a functional constituency and the continuation of the policy is the price of its support for the government.  In my village the Lis commonly built their small house with an outside staircase, so that they could let one or two of the upper floors and live in the rest. This is not quite what was intended but near enough. However the vast majority of village houses are built for people who have no intention of living in them, or indeed of living in Hong Kong. The indigenous villager has simply sold his signature on the necessary form to a developer. And as a result real villages are surrounded by an ill-planned accumulation of new houses, most of them inhabited by outsiders. A way of life is disappearing, and it is no consolation that the people who used to enjoy it are the ones selling it out.

The news that Mrs Kissel is to have a new trial is somehow cheering. Of course we cannot have married ladies doing away with inconvenient husbands who are an impediment to romance with the television repair man, if that is what happened. But after a while anyone caught up in the legal system looks like a victim, whatever they have done. The idea that some people can sentence others to spend a decade or two locked up is terrible. It may also be necessary, but not, surely, as often as you would think if you watched Hong Kong’s legal system in action.
It is interesting to contrast the muted reception to the news that there will be a new trial with the paroxysms of complaints about public waste which have greeted the five by-elections which we must not call a referendum. The Court of Final Appeal has now decided that the judge in the original trial made two important mistakes. In due course they were apparently overlooked by the Court of Appeal. So we have had three legal circuses so far without deciding anything, while Mrs Kissel, who may eventually be found to be innocent, has spent a few years in the bosom of the Correctional Services.
Of course you might see this as having improved her chances, in a way. As I recall the defence in the first trial was that the husband succumbed to homicidal rage on the same day as his wife had put a Mickey in his milkshake, which seems a bit of a coincidence. Nowadays, though, people feel differently about bankers. Before the financial meltdown one felt a bit of instinctive sympathy for Mr Kissel. Times have changed. Many of us, if offered an unsuspecting banker and a heavy ornament, would be happy to reduce the financial population a bit ourselves. I should think the prosecution in the new trial will be struggling to persuade the jury not to recommend a medal.

I am not an uncharitable person. I contribute. But there are ways of asking which are nice, and there are ways which are not nice. Most of us do not wish to be manipulated. So I am heartily annoyed by the latest habit of the people who do their solicitation through unsolicited mail: they send you a gift. The gift is not valuable. The first time it was a keyring. Very useful if you happen to need a keyring but most of us have lots of the things hanging around the place. The latest offering was a piece of plastic whose purpose escaped me.
Clearly there is some psychological justification for this approach. It makes the recipient reluctant to throw the envelope away unopened, which is what tends to happen to mail of this kind. A gift! Let’s have a look. Having opened it you then face a moral dilemma. You have in effect accepted the gift. The gift may be worthless, or at least costless to the supplier, but it now feels wrong to throw it away, and wrong to keep it without sending them something. In practice of course the “gift” probably costs less than the price of the stamp. It’s only real value is its role in persuading some recipients to send money.

With me it failed, partly because of the blatant dishonesty which came with it. On the outside of the package was a picture of a small girl, who judging by name and complexion was in Africa. You could only see her face but she looked neither well nor well-fed. And we were exhorted not to “let her starve”. But actually your money is not going to save this girl and your decision whether to send it or not won’t determine whether she lives or dies. The picture was of course taken mnoths, if not years, ago and by now the kid has been rescued, or not. I suppose the advertising agency advising this enterprise thought this was a jsutifiable way to put a human face on a dangerously statistical problem. It is easier to get people to be moved by one named individual than by the thought of millions of starving third worlders waiting to be rescued by their benevolence. And I suppose if anyone complains the answer will be that this is a matter of life and death for the distant clients of this charity so the end justifies the means.

But surely we have a right to expect people to be a bit more forthcoming than that. Faced with a strange charity people are entitled to ask what it does, who runs it, how much money it is already handling and how much of that money is spent on sending junk mail to people with no previous acquaintance with the organisation. If essential information like this is not supplied we are being offered a rather mysterious opportunity to feel good on the cheap by sending money to someone of whom we know nothing. I suppose this sort of thing cannot be banned but it can be binned.

I am indebted to my friend Kieran Wan for the acute observation that there is more to the size of men’s umbrellas than meets the eye. Men who have girlfriends have small umbrellas; men who are still hunting have large umbrellas.

The reasoning behind this is that men with girlfriends relish physical proximity. Having a small umbrella means you have to huddle together to avoid getting wet. This argues strongly for putting an arm round the lady, which is what you want to do anyway. Unattached men, on the other hand, wish to be in a position to offer generous and unthreatening umbrella accommodation to ladies they have not met but are interested in. So they have very large umbrellas of the kind usually found on golf courses and parachutists.

This leaves us with the question of married men’s umbrellas, and a possibly useful guide for suspicious wives. Happily married men have collapsibles which they can hide in their briefcases. If he switches to a large umbrella he is hunting. And if he moves on to a smaller umbrella the hunt has been successful.

I am not sure if this system works, but it is probably as reliable as looking for lipstick on his collar, and less intrusive.

To Tin Shui Wai today to play for a small parade. I am not sure why footdrill is considered a desirable accomplishment for young first aiders but if they are prepared to take the considerable trouble involved in learning it then I do think adults should arrange music for the resulting parade. A parade without music is a lifeless thing. The technicalities of parade ground music are very encouraging for amateur bagpipers. Half a dozen of us with two or three drummers can make enough noise to put a spring into the parade step on all but the largest venues. To do the same with a traditional military band would require 30-40 players, with a lot of demanding sub-categories so that the result is reasonably balanced. One cannot, for example, have a Susaphone section of 16. So if you’re willing to pipe for expenses, as we are, there are quite a lot of opportunities.

Tin Shui Wai is, of course, the City of Sorrows for headline purposes. When I am interviewing students for admissions purposes I always ask anyone from Tin Shui Wai how the sorrow is going, and they indignantly deny that the place is depressing. Everyone agrees that the geographical remoteness is a problem. The place looks all right when you visit it. The centre is spacious, the landscaping lavish. There is the usual new town shortage of mature trees. The school we performed in was fresh, spacious and, even on a grey day, cheerful. The school next door was already building an extension. Blocks of flats marched across the surrounding landscape. Clearly a lot of people have views consisting of hundreds of flats much like their own, but there is no easy solution to that.

Historically the “City of Sorrow” label has marched across the Hong Kong landscape with the public housing programme. The latest construction always seems to be in the middle of nowhere. I can remember complaints about Shatin, Tuen Mun, Tsing Yi, Ma On Shan and Cheung Kwan O. The new public housing gets only the tenants who have no choice, and they tend to have other problems. The community facilities and public transport  lag behind the population. From a bureaucratic point of view this is unavoidable. We cannot build a sports centre to cater for 50,000 people until 50,000 people are already there to use it. To do otherwise would be an abuse of public funds. And the private sector people don’t want to open anything until they can see a profit. Still I wonder if we could try a bit harder. In the English new town where I grew up they had much the same problem. So in each  neighbourhood they supplied a small prefabricated building, which we rather unkindly called the “community hut”. But the huts were used and were useful. Many of them, actually, are still there and as busy as ever, though they were meant to be temporary. In the days when the Polytechnic Staff Quarters occupied an estate of their own in Fotan, one ground-floor flat was reserved for community purposes, and accomodated the usual mix of play group, youth groups, interest classes and what have you for many years. Then some planning official spotted what was going on and complained that the flat should only be used for domestic purposes. So the community users were kicked out. Even on quiet estates people shun ground-floor flats, so this one remained empty until the whole place was demolished.

As the Hong Kong civil service cannot be entirely manned by idiots and problems of this kind are rather common we must suppose that the problem is organisational rather than personal. The approach is too departmental. If you put a dozen people on a team and told them to forget their departmental loyalties and build a decent new town they would probably do a good job. Indeed something like that was done, with considerable success, with some of the first New Territories ones. But too often procedure trumps common sense. I once asked if I could take over a disused rural school for use as a place for courses and camps for various charitable bodies. The answer was that as this building was still classified as a school nobody could stay overnight except the caretaker. Could the building be reclassified? “Not my department…”

Fotan used to be famous, if anything, as a large nugget of industrial premises surrounded by housing estates on the adjacent hills, with the prices rising roughly according to altitude. Times have, as they say, changed. The industrial scene is still surprisingly active, considering industry is supposed to have expired in Hong Kong and moved over the border, leaving nothing behind except a few head offices and two functional constituencies. but it has declined considerably. Flatted factories have now become so cheap that they are hired by visual artists of various kinds. Real estate agents now offer the former palaces of productivity as “studios”. We even have an annual arts festival.

Also, Fotan is one of the few places in Hong Kong which still has dai pai dongs. You remember those street food places, which offered every variation of congee with dough sticks, or basic classics like won ton soup. Mostly they have been suppressed by our caring government, in a bid to make the city safe for proper cafe proprietors who pay rent to our beloved property developers. Their survival in Fotan owes something, I suppose, to the obscurity of the place and simple lethargy, and something to the reasonable consideration that there are very few alternatives on offer for the proletarian in search of a cheap lunch.

But they are open in the evenings as well, and the three by the bus station have become something of a culinary Mecca for people looking for cheap decent food in the open air.  It is also legal to smoke, no doubt an attraction for some diners. At weekends surprisingly expensive cars unload family parties and later in the evening the odd daring individual may even park his car in the bus station itself. The dai pai dongs have become something of a historical monument: a piece of that collective memory which crops up so often these days. Foreign visitors think they are wonderful.

In other words these are prime targets for reform and “improvement”. Get down there while you still can. I recommend the roast pigeon.

Raders may feel there are more worthy recipients of thir sympathy than Tony Chan, fung shui master, seducer of elderly millionairesses and unsuccessful chaimant for the Chinachem moneypile. I do wonder, though, how Mr Chan can hope to get a fair trial on the charges of forgery which were apparently levied against him on Wednesday.
Generally if an event can give rise to a civil or a criminal case, the criminal case is done first (OJ Simpson was a conspicuous example). There are two reasons for this. One is that the interest of society in the suppression of crime should take precedence over the interest of individuals in pursuing legal claims against other individuals. The other is that the civil proceedings will in all likelihood be highly prejudicial of the criminal ones. A great deal of relevant evidence will be heard and reported to people who have no reason to believe at that time that they will later be involved in a criminal trial involving the same facts. Also the result will be a distraction. If the future criminal defendant wins, potential jurors may believe he has already established his innocence. If he loses they may jump to the contrary conclusion. This is particularly unfortunate because the standard of proof in civil matters is lower. Mr Justice Johnson Lam only had to decide on the balance of probabilities which will was the valid one. A criminal conviction requires proof beyond reasonable doubt.  The prosecution will now be helped by a wave of pre-trial publicity. Of course it sometimes happens, as in the notorious Oscar Wilde trials, that matters emerge in a civil trial which clearly call for a criminal prosecution afterwards. But that is hardly the case here. Given the appearance of two competing wills the possibility that one was bogus was there from the start and could have been investigated properly before the civil trial took place.

Under the circumstances it is perhaps a pity that the learned Lam rather let his mouth run away with him. Once he had found that the second will was a forgery there was no need for him to express an opinion on other matters not germane to this point, like who was sleeping with whom. I suppose it was necessary for him to report that he did not find Mr Chan a credible witness, but other aspersions on Mr Chan’s character were gratuitous. Rich nutty ladies are entitled to leave their fortunes to “scheming syc0phants” if they want to. Poor Nina does not seem to have had many alternatives. The whole case has been a monument to people’s willingness to appear unlovely in public if a few million dollars are at stake. I can’t think of anyone involved in the case who I would happily contemplate as a son-in-law.

Still, Mr Chan can still think himself lucky compared with the lady who was charged with driving while drunk and slapping a policeman last week. Reports of this case were spectacularly prejudicial, including names and pictures of defendant and victim, interviews with witnesses, accounts of television footage, and even the defendants’ previous convictions. Has the Department of Justice stopped bothering about prejudicial pre-trial coverage now, or are we only allowed to do it if it favours the prosecution?

When I was still working for the SCMPost I wrote a piece congratulating (not entirely sincerely) local building inspectors on reaching a state of such progress in their work that time and money could be spared to pursue the owners of trivial adornments on three-story rural houses. One might have thought they had more urgent matters to attend to. And now that an elderly building has collapsed it seems they have. The department concerned has now decided to proceed urgently with inspections of hundreds of elderly multi-story buildings in run-down areas of the city. In other words they are going to conentrate on the most dangerous ones. Apparently nobody had thought of this move before…
Meanwhile a fascinating revelation in the Post, attributed to “a person familiar with renewal projects”. It goes like this: “Buying flats from developers usually costs much more than compensating individual owners. Instead of paying for a seven-year-old flat, the (URA) would have to compensate developers for the forsaken redevelopment opportunity.” Think about that. If the urban renewers buy your crumbling hovel from you, they will haggle over local hovel prices. If they buy it from a developer they throw money to compensate for his lost dreams. I wish I could say this was hard to believe.

Actually the full name is Ruby Tuesday, named after a song with which fellow fossils will be familiar, and there is no Ruby, as far as I know. The restaurant chain has a few outlets in Hong Kong. One of the little mysteries of the local restaurant business is how it keeps going. There is nothing wrong with the food, and there are always plenty of customers, but the frequent flier benefits are amazing. For a small fee they will sell you card with which, for a year, you can eat at half price.  There are bonus points as well, though my family does not have the size or the appetite to qualify for them.

Still, the basic deal is spectacular. No, the regular prices are not outrageous. Nor is this a temporary expedient designed to get people to try the place. It has been going on for years. Recently they introduced a more expensive version of the card with which you can drink alcoholic drinks at half price as well. Needless to say local residents who go there tend to be equipped with the card. Indeed I am told that the children of the 80s turn up there in great shoals, but only if someone in the party qualifies for the discount.

The interesting thing is that this seems to defy the basic laws of restaurant economics, which state, or they did when I was covering such matters regularly, that only a quarter of what you pay goes on food. About half goes on fixed overheads and the rest is wages and, with luck, profit. Of course this wild generalisation conceals some odd wrinkles – the margin on tea and coffee, for example, is generally much higher, and wine, if you sell it, is a goldmine. But you rarely see anyone drinking alcohol in Ruby’s. So there is obviously something ingenious going on.

This is not going to turn into a food blog but Ruby is worth a try. The weekday set lunch is not covered by the discount scheme so you can experiment without the nagging feeling that everyone else in the place is paying half as much.

To Shatin racecourse today to play the pipes in a sponsor’s “box” – a curious word for a space which could have accomodated a good sized dim sum restaurant. This was the first time I had been on the racecourse while racing was in progress. Alas, such is the size of the horse empire and the small role in its affairs accorded to visiting musicians, that we never actually saw a live horse. The life of a piper consists of a great deal of waiting around for a small burst of actual blowing. But even by those standards this was a long day. A morning rehearsal was cancelled so we waited for about five hours. The good news was that we had a pleasant space, and seats, to do it in.

I had brief glimpses of the rest of the premises. Some large windowless rooms full of screens and seats where people who were not even pretending to be interested in four-legged animals could track the numbers. Bits of transplanted hotel for the use of various privileged groups. Hordes of staff. The Jockey Club appears to be a sort of terrestrial Cathay Pacific Airways. Everything is done as it should be but none of the people doing it look happy. None of the punters seemed to be deterred by the thought that their opulent surroundings had been constructed with the money donated by previous pickers of slow ponies. Did I detect the smell of greed? Perhaps it was my imagination.

What was not my imagination was the occasional whiff of nicotine. It seems that the enthusiasm for banning smoking in crowded open-air spaces has not yet reached horse territory. Perhaps those legal eagles who think a plastic screen makes a dining space “indoors” could set themselves a real challenge by considering the legal status of the parade ring, which nawadays has a huge retracting roof.