Loving you is easy cuz you're beautiful

Remember the days when all you had to worry about on the MTR was a crazy guy threatening you for coughing without covering your mouth? Such simpler times, such innocent times...

Now there's Mr. Pole Humper, and if you'll excuse me, I think I'll be heading down to Watsons to buy some anti-bacterial wipes and a Hazmat suit for my next subway ride.




*Thanks to Miss Fong for making me aware of the original of this video. I shortened it and added the music. Because all acts of public perversion should be accompanied by a loungey soundtrack.

Riding the crazy train

First there was Bus Uncle, then Airport Auntie, and now the Subway Demented Dad (placeholder name until someone comes up with a better one).

Swine flu paranoia causes man to freak out after a young boy coughs near him without covering his mouth. He yells at and mocks the kid and his guardian, and when they ignore his ranting, he hits the boy and makes him cry. If this had happened in NYC, it wouldn't have surprised me if the entire subway car had beaten the guy to death.

I don't speak Chinese! Whaddya want?!

During one slow night at my job as a copy editor for a large-ish daily newspaper, I showed a co-worker photos from my one-month trip around Europe. When she came to one of the Spanish Steps in Rome, she exclaimed, "Wow, it's just like on TV!"

I tried to explain that, no, by watching a special about Italy on the Travel Channel, you're not getting the full experience of a creepy, perverted Italian guy following you around and making comments that imply he'd like to show you his salametti.

You kind of need to be there, I told her, but she assured me that the United States has everything you could possibly want -- I mean, Manhattan has a Chinatown and a Koreatown -- and anything else she needed to know about the world, she could learn from cable TV and magazines with pretty, glossy pictures.

But if she somehow found herself in Hong Kong, she'd feel right at home in Langham Place.

As part of its new online "Big Deal" campaign, Langham Hotels has had created a series of videos (since removed) that depicted Hong Kong as a place where East meets West, and West is, like, totally not cool with East and its rudeness and copy-watches and bizarre culinary habits.

The tagline could easily be, "Langham Hotels: Where white people go to pretend they're not surrounded by filthy Chinese."

Each video starts with a foreign tourist disgusted by a common Hong Kong stereotype, like a non-English-speaking waiter misinterpreting your strange sign language and giving you a bowl of rice porridge with a side of chicken feet, before finding refuge in Langham Place or the Eaton Hotel.



The company that created the marketing campaign claims it's satire aimed at tourists who don't dive headfirst into local culture, but it's difficult to read anything into it other than: "If you happen to be a racist twat who has been forced to travel to a scary foreign land by your employer or by an uncaring significant other, Langham Place is an oasis of civilization for you."

It's not a matter of viewers not "getting" the humor -- it pretty much hits you over the head -- but of the company being completely tone-deaf to its audience and of mistaking "poor taste" for "edgy."

Although with growing outrage about the campaign online, I think they're trying to make amends with their latest video in the series:

Keep clean! Be healthy!

So, we've repeatedly established that Hong Kong is a nanny state trying to protect its citizens from, well, life. Today's tip from the government? Don't buy dirty street food that's been stored and cooked improperly from a fat guy with man boobs who is smoking a cigarette and wearing a shirt that is two sizes too small. Noted.

Yeah, I'm around

I've been meaning to update, particularly about my trip to Borneo, but I'm caught up in the sheer enjoyment of teaching Brazilians how to curse and use slang in English. Did you know an afro is called "cabelo black power" in Brazil? Cultural exchange, 'tis a beautiful thing.

I have no motivation and I must write

One thing I do like about Hong Kong is that no matter where I am, I can find graffiti that matches my mood.

Hey, gringo... tranquilo!

When I was in elementary school, there was an unpopular kid we'd nicknamed "Mucous Marcus." While our overworked mothers would require a limb to be falling off before they'd indulge our whining, his was at the forefront of the helicopter-parent trend, and he paid the price for it.

If we needed to wait outside of the school in the morning for the teachers to let us in and it was a hot day, she would wait in her car and, every few minutes, would bring him water, wipe his brow, shower him with kisses and provide us awful children with more fodder for our taunts.

Her motherly paranoia prevented her from reacting to life's complications with a proportional response.

Hong Kong is that smothering mommy figure taken to the extreme, an extreme that would find logic in quarantining hundreds of guests and staff at a hotel where one person tested positive for swine flu and would make statements like, "We will be draconian in our policy."

Yes, Hong Kong has quarantined an entire hotel, the Metropark in the business-by-day/red-light-by-night district of Wan Chai, for seven days and those who refused to stay at the hotel were moved to a "suburban holiday camp."



The government, with SARS still fresh on its mind, is reacting disproportionately to the threat. This is, by recent accounts, a relatively mild strain of flu, and the Mexican tourist who caused the hotel lockdown is doing just fine.

But it seems like the quarantine is a great way to spread the virus if others are infected. If you had the sniffles and would normally go the doctor to be checked out, would you really risk being forcibly placed under quarantine for up to a week when, even if you did have swine flu, you'd probably recover without medical intervention?

Who wants to end up in an isolation camp because it turned out they were feeling sick from the chicken parm at Fat Angelo's? (Note: Never eat at Fat Angelo's, no matter how much your visiting in-laws beg you for "a taste of back home.")

And have we learned nothing from zombie movies? Like the secondary character who has been bitten but doesn't tell anyone out of fear of being shot in the head and, hey, maybe he'll survive it just fine anyway, but then does turn into a zombie and infects others and creates bedlam in what had been an otherwise safe hiding place?

I thought we'd all agreed that everything you need to know about surviving a pandemic, you can learn from George Romero? Someone send his oeuvre to the Hong Kong government.

Anyway, after seeing photos last night of medical workers dramatically entering the Metropark in Hazmat suits, like the zombie apocalypse itself was upon us, I went by the hotel this afternoon to see the circus for myself.

As tempted as I was to dance in front of the police line while singing, "I escaped... I escaped... cough, cough," I figure I've already used my one asshole-foreigner card for my stay here, but I was able to take great delight in freaking out passersby who were gawking and taking photos by sneezing and saying loudly, "Creo que tengo gripe." Jajaja.

Does anyone think this is a rational response?

PS. And don't pick your nose and eat it

Hong Kong knows a thing or two about pandemics and coupled with its status as the premier nanny state in the region, we are going to fucking kick this swine flu's ass. You do not want to mess with Honkers, you punk-ass influenza A, subtype H1N1 virus.

The government has vowed to shut down all schools if even one student comes down with it and will undoubtedly slaughter every last pig even if it puts every last Tai Hing Roast restaurant out of business. Surgical masks are on display more than usual, and leading the charge in educating the public about common-sense hygiene efforts is, once again, our friendly building supervisor. As seen in my apartment building's elevator.

Things I kind of, sort of hate about Hong Kong: Part II

In the United States, we don't need friends. We're a country that doesn't need anyone for anything. You can live alone and off the grid in your cabin in the woods, writing your manifesto about how the rise in autism is linked to a secret government mind-control program gone awry -- and you'll survive just fine. If you don't, well, that's what happens when you can't pull yourself up by your bootstraps.

We don't like when strangers, or even our neighbors, engage us in idle chit-chat. It scares us. We think they're weird or mentally ill, and they probably want something from us anyway. We prefer our isolated, every-man-is-an-island lifestyle that causes us to view everyone with suspicion. I'm not immune to it, and I mostly prefer my own company and, occasionally, the company of the small circle of close friends I've built for myself across three continents.

Except none of those friends live in Hong Kong, bringing me to Reason #3 I hate living here.

There's a reason why tagalong ex-pat wives who can't find full-time work often turn into breeding machines: once you've slipped on vomit in Wan Chai and visited every mall attached to an MTR station, there's not much left to keep you occupied or to give you a sense of purpose and, hey, you can pay a Filipina nanny US$500/month to do all of the dirty work for you. And naming babies is fun, you know?

As the dependent one in my marriage, I've found it difficult to find friends here because aside from the misanthropic nature that makes me slightly unlovable, those home during the day tend to fall into three categories: a) married women with kids who spend their afternoons at Mommy and Me Ashtanga Yoga classes; b) childless tai-tai wives who use their husband's money to live out a "Sex and the City" fantasy; and c) single women who have created a look-at-me-I-am-so-risque image for themselves. Like the middle-aged Scottish woman who, over drinks at an African bar, confided in me how much she loves to fuck black guys, particularly the black guy singing on the stage at that moment, who was trying desperately to avoid eye contact with her. Nothing screams "rebel" like lovin' big, black cock. Come on, who doesn't?

And unlike in Brazil, there's not the same level of mingling between locals and ex-pats, so I've gone to the ex-pat meet-and-greets to be amongst "my people" but have yet to meet anyone I'd want in my tribe, and while Couchsurfing was a reliable source of entertainment in São Paulo, here, it's mostly a group for dictatorial types who chastise you for not being able to accurately predict when your epileptic husband might have a seizure, thus ruining their junk-boat cruise. You know how I can predict when he's going to have a seizure? I wake him up with strobe lights.

I thought perhaps I'd found my salvation when I picked up a recent issue of Time Out Hong Kong and flipped to an article about a social group created by three ex-pat wives. Sassy Hong Kong, they named it. I hate the word sassy. I hate when women describe themselves as sassy. Sassy is a word that bitches use when they're still too insecure to describe themselves as such and continue to look for outside approval. "I'm bold and in control, heyyyyyyy, but not so much that I'm threatening!"

Sassy women hold "fashionista-recessionista" events, with mani-pedis and free-flowing wine and canapés and stylists telling you how to be less schlubby. Sassy women actually use words like "recessionista."

Unfortunately, I'm not sassy or sophisticated, and I'd feel guilty about going out with my girl-friends, drinking mojitos, and having my asshole waxed while my stressed-out husband was at work earning the money for my pampered evenings.

So, what's a bitch to do in Hong Kong? Apparently sit in her apartment and watch "Tango & Cash" while drinking whisky and writing for her blog.

Happy Easter from Hong Kong