A Hong Kong Columnist used the headline”Hong Kong-China split: warring in not just soccer, but even entertainment at large.” He condemned a famous singer and judge’s comments at a TV singing contest about a Hong Kong singer’s “performing an old song from twenty or thirty years ago instead of creating or exporting any excellent culture”.
A contributor in Asia Weekly counter-attacked with the same singer’s highly praising the Hong Kong pop song “Stone Myth” that condensed in 144 words the great literary classics “Dream of the Red Chamber” in Chinese culture (comparable to what “War and Peace”means to Russians).
That was during the time of the protests against Chinese from Mainland crossing the border on weekends to plunder milk powder and consumer products in supermarkets like locusts.The protesters were holding up UK’s Union Jack flag.A few people held a banner “Hong Kong is not China” and booed the Chinese National Anthem, the same kind of banner was posted on the democracy wall at a university.
When a young college friend visited a Hong Kong scholar teaching in Quangzhou, they went for tea and Cantonese BBQ pork bun was served. The young friend asked,”How come they have BBQ pork bun in Quangzhou?” She cracked a joke, “Don’t you know they sneaked through the Hong Kong borders like smugglers?”
“How can I know what I say I know is actually what I don’t know? Likewise, how can I know what I think I don’t know is not really what I do know? ” Chuang Tzu.
In contrast to conflicts among Chinese,Elsie Tu, who died on Dec.8,2015 in Hong Kong at the age of 102, was a British teacher, campaigner and political activist who was the social conscience of Hong Kong during colonial rule.
She came to Hong Kong as a missionary’s wife in 1951 after being expelled from Communist China.She was shocked by the vile, overcrowded living conditions and unregulated child labour she observed in the colony with many refugees from mainland China.Frustrated by the mission’s disinterest in social work, she ended up in divorce.
She had helped to found an English School in an old army tent at a squatter area of Kowloon, subsidised by wages from her second teaching job at Hong Kong Baptist College and married the school’s co-founder, a native of Inner Mongolia.
She exposed the endemic corruption to which colonial authority turned a blind eye, notably in police officers, who collaborated with gangsters to extract protection money from street hawkers and minibus drivers. Her tireless campaigning resulted in establishment of the Independent Commission Against Corruption.
The couple promoted public justice for human rights of Filipino domestic servants and others. They campaigned successfully for decriminalisation of homosexual acts.
When the last governor of Hong Kong, embarked on democratic reforms that threatened the 1997 handover, she called his proposals hypocritical in the final days of a disgraceful colonial era in which Hong Kong never had any democracy to destroy. She lost her seats on the Urban and Legislative Councils because of it. But she remained the only worthy, authentic, popular hero on China’s side. She once said,“I am proud to be British, but it does not mean I support British imperialism. I stand by social justice and support China’s sovereignty to reclaim Hong Kong.” She was appointed as consultant on Hong Kong affairs by China.
She discounted the initiator for the Umbrella Revolution against China’s governance as corrupt democracy through foreign friendliness and claimed what was called democratic after the handover actually was undemocratic actions holding up democratic progress.
Her recent birthday wish every year was “a world at peace instead of all wanting to fight.”
Daily Living Charm 