Libre

Fuck HSBC

2006-06-09T03:34:00.000-10:00

Here's one for those schlodges at HSBC.

On more than one occasion I've had the impulse to shove my mobile phone up the ass of an HSBC customer service employee.

Today, I had my revenge.

So, apparently, if you have a Visa card with HSBC, they require you to register it with the International Visa verification service. I was trying to make my plane tickets for Burma when I was told my credit card didn't work.

I had to traipse out to the parking lot to call HSBC, because my mobile doesn't work in the outer Hebrides of the New Territories.

We go through the banter and the binter. I learn that I have to do all of my transactions over the phone if I'm going to get to Burma. So I stand out there for twenty minutes making my reservations with my ticket agent. Meanwhile getting covered in mosquito bites.

When I register my credit card at the HSBC site, I realize they require a phrase that HSBC has to use every time they verify a transaction, or if they suspect there is an incorrect transaction with my card. I pick this one:

''HSBC is shit. They make their customers do all their work for them.''

Technically, that's two sentences. But I'm hoping it makes it past the censor.

You Always Have the Key In Your Hand, Use It

2006-05-28T03:26:00.000-10:00

A full seven months since I last posted. You'd think I'd gone missing. I did, as a matter of fact, and that is a story for later.

So, I'm sitting here after my one hour full pace run, sipping water laced with honey and ginger, contemplating the events of last night.

I had never been to the Kee Club, the sixth floor two-storey ritz establishment for Hong Kong's young up-and-comings and slightly-on-the-crash from their cocaine highs. It's sits right across Starbucks on the D'Aguilar Street in Lan Kwai Fong.

But there I was, sweating through my formal white shirt, so thin that my friend Sam noticed the freckles on my shoulders from my hours running in the lunch time sun. I couldn't move. There was a decent air conditioning breeze right where I stood and the thumping of the bass meant that the music was so loud I din't have to worry about losing my hearing. It had already gone.

And had I not been standing in that space, talking to the very cute Filipina advertising manager of the Tatler, I wouldn't have this post to write about the measurement of fate and the difference between thought and action.

White shirt almost drying. The women behind me smoking cigarettes at the reserved table are smiling and casting their gaze over the crowd below, which looks to be a mix of well-off local Chinese girls, most of them pretty enough to be solicitors, accounts agents or even models and wannabe actresses.

She passes by at first, the western-looking Chinese girl. I point her out to Sam. Sam nods. The music--a mishmash of dance hop electronica--too loud for conversation.

I lose her in the crowd. Ten or fifteen minutes later, as I'm talking to the Tatler girl, she appears, already standing there, in a Gucci dress, plunging ruffled neckline resembling a monochrome black samba outfit. Skirt rising up just above the knee, the v etch of the neckline revealing her low silver necklace and cream white skin. I smile at her. She smiles at me. She extends her hand.

This is rare, I think. Never in the three and a half years I've lived here has a beautiful woman extended her hand voluntarily as if she was waiting to speak to me.
As it turns out, she was doing just that.

Her name is (I don't know how to spell it) the female version of Ian. She tried to spell it for me, but again, the raging dance beat from the DJ's deck was so incredibly loud, I lost the letters.

We talk. Aspiring actress who lived most of her life in New York. Lived some of her life in Taiwan. And now here. And later on next month, she's on her way to Los Angeles.

''That seems to be where the market is moving,'' she says. ''I want to have my shot at it.''

Right now she's doing stage plays, some modelling and she might even try her hand at a screenplay. She's been working on it. For the life of me, I can't remember the names of the plays she's been in here. I would have remembered but for the fact that an hour after this brief introduction, I was sitting with Sam and his friend drinking HK$44 antispetic scotch we bought at the 7-Eleven on Peel Street.

Most of my synapses during that brief chat with the girl named Ian were telling me to ask for her number. I offered to get her a free champagne. She accepted. I went off to find it. When I found it, the Vueve Clicquot nazis were loathe to provide me one, though I begged. I was turned away.

When I came back empty-handed, she seemed a bit disappointed. I knew that offering a glass of champagne was a sign of wanting to take it further, a sign that I was interested. I could not come through with the transaction.

That disappointed me.

She went off and got her own. I asked how she did it.

''You'll have to show me your secret of how you acccomplish that sometimes,'' I say.

''It's simple. I just bat my eyelids,'' she says. And she bats her very long eyelashes. I bat mine.

I never asked for her number. Two men had approached her. I think they knew each other. Their conversation seemed to lack the verve of mine with her. On the way out, I touched her shoulder.

"It was nice to meet you,'' I said.

''It was nice to meet you, too,'' she said. Clearly I should have asked for her number.

That's the whole thing with fate.

A friend told me tonight, if you really are meant to see her, there's another way. Just think of it. It will come to you. It might be more difficult than her being right in front of you, but there is a way.

If not?

Then, not.

That's fate, she said.

So, it appears that whatever you do, that's what you do. A little less thought, though, man. A little more action, next time.

I once saw written on the tomb of Brandon Lee, Bruce Lee's son, an epitaph that said that we are tricked by life into assumign the next thing that happens will be even greater than this moment, but then this moment passes. And sometimes there's not much worth enjoying in the next moment.

When we get to that moment we enjoy, take every chance to arrest it. I believe that's our fate making itself known. Got to act. Got to.

Icered Cometh

2005-10-03T03:46:00.000-10:00

In a new form.

Johnathan Lee, who is the public relations hack flown in exclusively by Icered to launch its new version this week, said that they are going to be back bigger and better than before.

Icered will now be badua, which is Mandarin pinyin for rumor or gossip.

Let's hope that doesn't turn into more libelous scandal. The Icered of former years was a vessel of venomous media scandal, everything from allegations of affairs to threats of lawsuits over perceived cons, slights and ego bruisings. There was even a special section that delimited the flaws and insufficincies of the two local English language rags, the South China Morning Post and The Standard.

Word has it that Icered will feature blogging software, some paid services and more of the same ole same ole ''social networking'' that made its owners proud until it went tits up and began its metamporphosis into a more finely tuned social engineering project to encourage gossip and behind-the-scenes chatter.

Let's hope that Hong Kong's local bloggers, who are pretty good already at observing and analysing the situations here, can give that site a run for its money and make for some healthy competition. And less deception, all around.

Tom Cruise: Psychotic Actor? Brainwashed Syncophant? Delirious Insane Guy?

2005-07-20T00:16:00.000-10:00

One day, Tom Cruise might use the tape he made under the brainwashing hypnotism of Scientology and then confront Matt Lauer about this same event by saying, ''Look, Matt, people need to know more about The Today Show. I've studied the Today Show, I know the history of the Today Show. You don't.''

Designer NGO

2005-07-19T15:01:00.000-10:00

Someone in Bangladesh saw it fit to send me an email demonstrating the ''anger'' that Bangladeshi people have against the World Trade Organization and the free and open trading system that allows textiles to flood Indian markets, Bangladeshi markets and all of Asian markets from China and places around the world.

Look how angry they are.

Look at that nice purse the woman in the foreground is hauling around, as well as her diamond rings. Apparently, someone has inadvertently sent me a picture of their son's high school private school basketball match.

The Woman, The Witch and the Wardrobe

2005-07-19T03:10:00.000-10:00

Just back from one of those wonderful 48 hour whirlwind romances where it starts with a lovely day at the beach and ends the next evening at about midnight with the wife accusing me of cheating on her.

So, I'm out the door with my bags, my shoes and my rolodex. She has no proof, I certainly did nothing and I'll just have to wait around for a couple of days at our other place across the harbour until the winds of passion die down.

For the record, nothing strikes the mighty down so hard as the rampant chattering of Tagalog from an inflamed woman, who may be quite high (for three days) on cocaine.

The things we do for love.

Or the things love do to us.

Ai yah. Bastos kah.

Wherever Your Mobile Roams

2005-07-16T18:18:00.000-10:00

News from the United States that a terrorist called a jihadi recruiter in New Jersey with his mobile phone. There's nothing in this report that does anything but suggest. Why do we even bother reading news text that is written on the web site for a television station? We all know that television news is crap.

Maos eat oats and does eat oats

2005-07-14T17:19:00.000-10:00

But little lambs don't make it far in this world. Here is a killer quote from Mr. Chong Siong Hin, president of a Chinese pharmaceuticals company, Xian Janssen Pharmaceutical.

On how to effectively manage a company:

Chong: If you look at Chinese history and culture, the first emperor had management strategy. Without management, how could the empire last? I say, "Don't look far, just look at what we have in China. Look at Chairman Mao". Chairman Mao was a great communicator. He visited every village and talked about his ideas. He and his core team were great communicators because of their passion and beliefs. We use Chairman Mao's quotes a lot in our company. Culture is very abstract, we need to give them concrete examples which can stay in their heads.

That comes from The Hang Lung Center for Organizational Research Newsletter.

Rather than take the immediate Westernized reaction to this quote, I will avoid condemming this man for bringing up the name of Mao to discuss effective leadership. Instead, I think I will just say what I thought when I read it.

Do most Chinese businessmen use this kind of thinking and if they do, then do others, and if others do, has this been the result of progress? Maybe all we need to know from Mao as business executives is what he said. Maybe it really isn't important what a person does. Maybe truth really is defined by what we perceive and if we can perceive enough in a certain way, e.g, eliminate the bad and just insist on the good, then there's no problem.

There never was a problem. This may be a great business strategy. It means, effectively, that the ends justify the means. And we'll all work towards a happy end and keep the peace.

It certainly is keeping in line with a civil servant's comments over lunch the other day: ''You saw riots in North Korea?''

''No, I said, South Korea, they riot all the time,'' I clarified.

''Oh, right. He he. North Korea should be more civilized, isn't it?''

''Right...I assume so.''

Dude, Where's My Street?

2005-07-13T15:56:00.000-10:00

Another of my favourite places is a passageway just off Woburn Place called Woburn Walk, where there was a sandwich bar run by gloomy Italians with a plaque saying that WB Yeats had lived there. What the plaque didn't tell you was that that was also where Yeats lost his virginity, at the decidedly late-starterish age of 31. He and Olivia Shakespear had to go to Heal's specially to order a bed before finally consummating the relationship, and he found the experience - that of ordering the bed - deeply traumatic, since "every inch added to the expense".

All this is what this street used to mean to me. Everybody has their own version of their own bits of their own towns; history and memory overlap, and they are what make cities liveable; they are the human stuff with which we fight the city's potentially overwhelming feelings of anonymity, depersonality, and anxiety. They are how we make it human.

When someone tries to rewrite your street's history: A look at the bombing's effect on memory.

When The Terrorist Strikes, Can You Deal?

2005-07-13T15:12:00.000-10:00

When The Terrorist strikes, it's easy--maybe even simple-minded--to equate ''terrorist'' with ''other.'' Or, to put it another way, it is very simple to think that someone else did this to Us. In the moments after the terrorist attacks, the rage was palpable, but the forward thinking, progressive tea-house, small indepdendent publisher of art books intellectualism born out of Great Britain got sloppy, of a fashion.

These--apparently British--folks claimed (as rightfully they should) that terrorism would not stop their British attitude about going on with life as if nothing would happen.

Shaky passes on the ''fuck you motherfuckers'' thread.

Flying Chair analyzes the effect terrorism has on being British, in a roughly one hundred and fifty word blurb that mentions being British seven times and makes other references to the idea of being British throughout.

And earlier, believes the Islamic Extremists will not get their 72 virgins. Islamic, extremist or otherwise, they came from Leeds. One of them liked cricket.

Here we go. Yorkshire Tea

When it happened in the United States, and we were over here, gazing awkwardly and with horror at the images, not soon after, other people, from other countries, knew right away the backlash it would spark. Would America wake up to the fact that terrorists, trained and supplied in the very United States that brought us peanut butter, bred their terror in a racist and extreme environment? It's easy to look at America and say, ''Well, it's perfectly obvious, isn't it?'' It's harder when you're living in Hong Kong, jewel of the British colonial days, and you look back at the country and think, ''God almighty, we did this, really. We created this. It's not just George Bush and his little war. It's not just third world hate.''

Allow me to be continually brash and illogical for a moment.

Hong Kong is not known for its reflective, thinking citizens, both expatriate and Chinese. It's known for the slap-dash, all consuming hustle and bustle and capitalist exptertise that makes everyone a winner and nobody (oh no, nobody) a loser.

The very same thing can happen here. Will these Britons, join me in thinking clearly and cogently about what we can do as residents in Hong Kong to prevent this kind of thing from happening here? Are there people about whose existence you ignore because you're too busy, too British or even too wealthy to care?

We can not jump on nationalist bandwagons and ignore our global citizenship.

I wonder, now that we know these were British people who killed their own and others, will we stop and analyse what does it mean to be British, what factors in Britain lead to this kind of carnage, desperation and anger? What does it mean to be an expatriate?

In this war on terror, it is not nations fighting each other. It is the idea of nationalism fighting against a dread and a loneliness that has been produced by a country's citizenry that has constantly told them

''I am British, you are other.''

''I am American, you are other.''

''I am Australian, you do my wash.''

''I am a human, you....I don't know what you are...''

Time to start thinking, time to start loving and time to stop reacting. And that goes for everybody, alright?

Love,

Coach Libre

Let's get 'em, team.

One of these days, an angry motherfuckin' Hong Konger is going to wake up and say, ''They're gonna wish they never ignored me.'' And I'd hate to see what happens after that.

Hot Like

2005-07-12T03:06:00.000-10:00

Walked through Mongkok today. You do not have to take the pavements in Mong Kok. Even around Langham Place, the new ultra-modern mall built just last year, you can swerve off the well-laid brick under the building and take a side route.

I saw a woman I know, she works for a human rights organization. I followed her for a bit, watching the back of her hair in the sun. She was walking with her friends and when she looked back to talk to one of them, a tall German guy, she spotted me. She lowered her eyes, bit her bottom lip and then quickly looked back up at me, still walking sideways. She waved. I kept walking and eventually made it to the MTR and then, off to work.

Today I bought eyeglasses. The optometrist was avuncular, fat and slightly bug-eyed.

''Hello, sir, you have had glasses before,'' he asked.

''I have,'' I said.

''Then you will know what we are doing.'' I sat there and let him move the adustable eye lenses about. I liked it. I have always liked having eye exams. I think that it is the most otherworldly experience, almost like what you would expect an alien to do to you the first moment you are on a ship, having been lifted up at night bleary-eyed and wishing for something solid to tell you what you are doing there.

I sat there and imagined that I had never been able to see before, and it kind of worked. It produced a feeling of wonder. Letters, numbers, this man with a heavy but clean Cantonese accented English telling me, at the end, ''Please, sir, step this way.'' He put on my face these very clunky and purposeful eye mechanisms, on which were slots inside he had slid glass lenses. It was like being in the 1950s and I felt like a virgin.

''Look this way,'' he said. He seemed to be caught up in the game, as well. ''So you can see, this is how normal people can see.''

And so I looked across the road at all the Chinese walking in front of an advertisement for bras.

Hong Kong Woman Almost Forced to Have Abortion in China

2005-07-11T17:01:00.000-10:00

Mainland officials try to force abortion on Hong Kong visitor
12 July 2005

HONG KONG: Chinese officials tried to force a mother who was visiting from Hong Kong to abort her six-month-old foetus under the mainland's one-child policy, but Hong Kong's government intervened to save the unborn baby, a newspaper reported yesterday.

The Hong Kong woman, identified only by her surname Hong, and her two young children were staying with relatives at a town in Hunan province when family planning officials came to their home and said she had to get rid of the foetus, Hong Kong's Apple Daily said.

The officials tried to drag Mrs Hong to a hospital but her relatives stopped them, and Mrs Hong then contacted Hong Kong authorities who asked Hunan police to intervene, the report said.

Local officials later apologised to Mrs Hong, who had arrived in Hunan on June 28 and was planning to return to Hong Kong yesterday.

For three decades, China has limited most couples to one child to stem population growth in the country of 1.3 billion people. – AP

The Walking and the Waking

2005-07-11T06:37:00.000-10:00

I open up a ''Hello Kitty'' pin that comes with every purchase at 7-11. It's ''White Lily,'' and Italian version of the Japanese cute cat.

''Hey, this is just like Lily,'' I say. Lily is her white cat.

''That's so cute,'' N says, and begins to slip off her clothes. In the dark her body looks toned by yoga. It looks sleek. I think that I have been away from my hometown for so long that I don't remember loving my family. It's an odd feeling to have rise up in my spine so suddenly.

I toss away the ''Hello Kitty.''

The room is filled with white things. N. covers her body with a white blanket. Her cat sits on a white rug. It's hard to feel that Hong Kong is real when I look out the window, tired of looking at N. The city is so bright that the night sky looks blank.

A coolness moves through me. Nothing is permanent is the Buddha mantra. But tonight it begins to feel transparently artificial. I imagine, if the sky was my food, it would not satisfy me. I could not survive. It is too thin, too fragile to consume. There are no stars and nothing deeper to look into it. My eyes, I realize, want to consume the beautiful night sky that has gone missing in the last two years of my life.

I start humming a song to myself. It's Bonnie Rait's ''I Can't Make You Love Me.'' It has nothing to do with N. or me. I do love her. Something deeper inside of me is humming it. I don't feel N. coming up behind me until I feel her hair on my neck and shoulder. She kisses my left earlobe.

She says, in Tagolog, ''You smell like the sun. Come to bed.''

What is my family doing back home? The sun has risen. The rooftops are hot. The deer have retreated under the bushes and are sleeping while the dew vanishes.

I do not know what it is like to love my family anymore, I decide. I have, like other poets and other writers that had to wander, lost the feeling of what it feels like to be home. I have lost a piece of myself.

Hong Kong is not real. It turns the world around it irreal, as well. This is the world that people with money want to live in. In that, they have control. I need to wander again, before I grow a cold person.

I need to listen to the gravel under my feet. Somewhere near an ocean I can actually touch.

2005-07-11T06:09:00.000-10:00

We walked up the escalators today and stopped at the third level from the International Finance Center.

''Let's buy juice,'' I said. ''Twenty cartons of juice.''

''Okay,'' she said. N. was wearing a white sun dress and her hair was up. She looked like an elf. I could see in her eyes an anger that made her passionate and friendly. The anger gave her something to stir her mind against. It made things clearer for her, so that she trusted her friends and loved her lovers.

It was hot.

We walked up to the convenience story where the shopkeeper spoke Cantonese to her.

''I don't like it when they speak Chinese to me. It makes me think that they think I'm Chinese. I don't think the women are especially pretty.''

2005-07-11T05:33:00.000-10:00

A Filipino attorney, who was speaking as a ''human rights lawyer,'' who did not mention he was a Communist party sympathizer, spoke today at Hong Kong's Foreign Correspondents' Club about how ''people power'' would get the Philippines through its current political crisis.

Essentially, Attorney Romeo Capulung's comments were thus:

1. The current electoral and representative system does not work.

2. Arroyo should go, not by impeachment but by mob rule, which would essentially hand the instruments of political power to the very same elite that he believes keeps the current administration from representing the people.

3. National socialism may be an option, because choosing ''government programs'' is far more important than wasting votes on ''leaders,'' ''celebrities,'' and ''personalities.''

4. Arroyo can't be impeached because the lower House of representatives doesn't have enough opposition members to kick her out, and besides, the rest of the politicized cabinent is filled with ''rich landlords'' and the ''elite.''

The Asian Human Rights Commission in Hong Kong was very big on drumming up attendance at the event. I wonder how they felt about some of his comments, listed below, when this is how they baited their audience to attend:

The Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) is deeply concerned by the attempt on the life of Atty. Romeo Capulong, a senior legal consultant for farm workers on strike in Hacienda Luisita, at midnight on 7 March 2005 in Nueva Ecija, Philippines. Mr. Capulong was among the people who were heading the investigation into the violent confrontation that broke out between the protesters (workers) and government forces broke out on 16 November 2004, which killed seven people and severely injured 10 others.

The main message of the day was that constitutional processes do not work in the Philippines and people must take to the streets to wrest power from the business elite, the Catholic Church and the military, who are bringing the Philippines into a quagmire of ''celebrity'' politics.

Who is Capulong? The good Capulong was one of the private prosectors who were going to impeach Joseph Estrada, but failed when, according to Capulong, millions of Filipinos took to the streets to take over the government.

And what brought those millions of people to the streets? Urgent calls by the Catholic church, the military and the business elite...

Some quotes:

''If Arroyo is ousted from power, the different forces that will succeed in ousting her must put in place a national transition government.''

No word, though, after many questions, on who those forces would be. Just generally, ''the people.''

''I am not a political analyst,'' he said at the beginning of twenty minutes of political ''analysis.''

''The president should be ousted by the direct action of the people in the streets.''

--A voluntary resignation or an impeachment were ''not good.''

The difference between what I assume to be a hoped-for impeachment process that fails is so that Capulong and his socialist views can be the people calling the masses to the streets.

One intelligent lawyer at the lunch asked if by calling for massive social action Capulong would in fact put the tools of political power once again into the elite's hands. ''Don't you risk handing the perfect weapons to set up plans for themselves?''

Capulong defended his ideas by saying that this was why whomever was taking over power must ''come up with a common program.'' He stressed: ''platforms and programs,'' not ''personalities.'' The current political process is ''too personality-oriented.''

The alternative would of course be a socialism, though he didn't say this. But correct me if I'm wrong...doesn't national socialism usually end up in hero worship?

Arroyo's current presidency is just ''a quarrel among different factions of the same Filipino elite.''

Then why didn't the Catholic church ask her to step down?

The long-awaited statement by the nation's Catholic Bishops Conference may ease the pressure on Arroyo, who looked increasingly isolated after 10 Cabinet members quit Friday and urged her to step down. Arroyo has defiantly refused and challenged the opposition to file an impeachment case instead of trying to force her to quit.

``We do not demand her resignation,'' the bishops said in a statement drafted during a weekend retreat. ``Yet, neither do we encourage her to simply dismiss such a call from others.''