Two epistles from veteran letter-writers to Hong Kong's premier non-free English-language newspaper caught my eye.
Peter Lok, from Heng Fa Chuen (a large private housing estate near Chai Wan on Hong Kong Island), got "peeved", to use his own, rather twee, word, with a Mr Jones, who wrote a couple of weeks back about his daughter's being prevented from participating in her school's sports day because of the air pollution that has swept in from the north over the past month or so. Like many others in her age-group – my daughter was sent home from school yesterday with a temperature and a racking cough – Miss Jones is particularly susceptible to respiratory tract problems when there's a lot of poison in the air.
The point of Mr Jones's original letter was about the roadside pollution caused by vehicles, especially coaches, minibuses and triad vans, whose drivers refuse to turn the engine off when they are not going anywhere, but want to sleep.
For some reason best known to himself, Mr Lok's response to Mr Jones's letter was not to engage in discussion on the suggestion being made – that Hong Kong introduce legislation to ban idling engines – but to construct a straw man. Having done that, Mr Lok, like an unguided missile, failed to locate and destroy his target.
His reasoning is so barren of common sense and validity that it's worth reproducing. Mr Lok put forward the hypothesis that if Miss Jones "had attended the sporting events she missed because of air pollution, the air-conditioning of her classroom would presumably have been left on – 'idling' – for her return."
Well, indeed. Presumably. And presumably Peter Lok is 38 years old and works for an investment bank. How do I know? I don't. But it's a reasonable assumption to make about something I know absolutely nothing about, isn't it?
I often wonder why the Pearl River Delta's finest newspaper publishes this rubbish. I assume (or "presume", lest I make Mr Lok more peeved) that it's because they love nothing better than to sow a bit of ethnic discord. If so, they obviously haven't read their Dante, since shit-stirrers occupy the eighth circle of hell next door to the alchemists.
Cynthia Sze, from Quarry Bay, just a few stops down the Island Line, is another regular correspondent. She harks back even further than Mr Lok, back to the furore created last month when it was divulged that singer Jacky Cheung had been through 21 Filipino servants in just three years and had been blacklisted by the Philippine Consulate.
Like the magistrate in the trial of Preslyn-Saga Catacutan, Winston Leung, who praised Cheung for his courage in launching legal action against his servant before jailing her for six months for stealing three passport photos and an unopened letter, Ms Sze pays tribute to Cheung's "moral courage". The multi-millionaire's courage has been a tremendous source of succour to employers like Ms Sze "who have been quietly suffering helpers' misbehaviour".
Cynthia Sze too takes her reader into a parallel universe, occupied by herself and, presumably, to borrow from Peter Lok, the suffering employers of Hong Kong, which I am going to stick my neck out and say must include Peter himself. This time the prose is so purple it's worth quoting more fully:
"The lack of a standardised measure of helpers' performance may render claims of deteriorating performance controversial. However, no controversy may detract from the universal percept that in Rome, one should do what Romans do."
Throw them to the lions? Give them bread and circuses? And why is Ms Sze calling this hackneyed old saying a "percept"? Has she got the wires of her transcendental schema crossed? Is she confusing her Kantian object of perception with a "precept"? Is her performance slipping? Should "Mr Sze" replace her with a new model?
But it gets better:
"Migrant workers who come to work cannot opt for Hong Kong pay and reject the ethos which has made Hong Kong such a great city."
Which ethos? I'm all ears:
"Hong Kong has every reason to keep and be proud of its traditions, which made it the world's largest producer of garments and consumer electronics by the late 1970s."
Peter Lok, from Heng Fa Chuen (a large private housing estate near Chai Wan on Hong Kong Island), got "peeved", to use his own, rather twee, word, with a Mr Jones, who wrote a couple of weeks back about his daughter's being prevented from participating in her school's sports day because of the air pollution that has swept in from the north over the past month or so. Like many others in her age-group – my daughter was sent home from school yesterday with a temperature and a racking cough – Miss Jones is particularly susceptible to respiratory tract problems when there's a lot of poison in the air.
The point of Mr Jones's original letter was about the roadside pollution caused by vehicles, especially coaches, minibuses and triad vans, whose drivers refuse to turn the engine off when they are not going anywhere, but want to sleep.
For some reason best known to himself, Mr Lok's response to Mr Jones's letter was not to engage in discussion on the suggestion being made – that Hong Kong introduce legislation to ban idling engines – but to construct a straw man. Having done that, Mr Lok, like an unguided missile, failed to locate and destroy his target.
His reasoning is so barren of common sense and validity that it's worth reproducing. Mr Lok put forward the hypothesis that if Miss Jones "had attended the sporting events she missed because of air pollution, the air-conditioning of her classroom would presumably have been left on – 'idling' – for her return."
Well, indeed. Presumably. And presumably Peter Lok is 38 years old and works for an investment bank. How do I know? I don't. But it's a reasonable assumption to make about something I know absolutely nothing about, isn't it?
I often wonder why the Pearl River Delta's finest newspaper publishes this rubbish. I assume (or "presume", lest I make Mr Lok more peeved) that it's because they love nothing better than to sow a bit of ethnic discord. If so, they obviously haven't read their Dante, since shit-stirrers occupy the eighth circle of hell next door to the alchemists.
Cynthia Sze, from Quarry Bay, just a few stops down the Island Line, is another regular correspondent. She harks back even further than Mr Lok, back to the furore created last month when it was divulged that singer Jacky Cheung had been through 21 Filipino servants in just three years and had been blacklisted by the Philippine Consulate.
Like the magistrate in the trial of Preslyn-Saga Catacutan, Winston Leung, who praised Cheung for his courage in launching legal action against his servant before jailing her for six months for stealing three passport photos and an unopened letter, Ms Sze pays tribute to Cheung's "moral courage". The multi-millionaire's courage has been a tremendous source of succour to employers like Ms Sze "who have been quietly suffering helpers' misbehaviour".
Cynthia Sze too takes her reader into a parallel universe, occupied by herself and, presumably, to borrow from Peter Lok, the suffering employers of Hong Kong, which I am going to stick my neck out and say must include Peter himself. This time the prose is so purple it's worth quoting more fully:
"The lack of a standardised measure of helpers' performance may render claims of deteriorating performance controversial. However, no controversy may detract from the universal percept that in Rome, one should do what Romans do."
Throw them to the lions? Give them bread and circuses? And why is Ms Sze calling this hackneyed old saying a "percept"? Has she got the wires of her transcendental schema crossed? Is she confusing her Kantian object of perception with a "precept"? Is her performance slipping? Should "Mr Sze" replace her with a new model?
But it gets better:
"Migrant workers who come to work cannot opt for Hong Kong pay and reject the ethos which has made Hong Kong such a great city."
Which ethos? I'm all ears:
"Hong Kong has every reason to keep and be proud of its traditions, which made it the world's largest producer of garments and consumer electronics by the late 1970s."
Oh! That ethos. But, Cynthia, back in the 1970s, Hong Kong people were self-sufficient and did their own hard work. Filipino servants were unheard of. That Ms Sze is thinking seriously of a return to the old days of self-sufficiency is evidenced by the adjective she uses to describe post-Catacutan employers such as herself, "conscientious". Obviously, this is a code word for couples who've decided it's in their children's interests if they take a more hands-on role in their upbringing, while freeing up the store-room off the kitchen by letting their migrant go home.
9 comments:
You can't read the letters very often. Their all like that. Today some idiot writes top praise Donald Tsang for meeting 1000 schoolkids in Aberdeen. First she says he answered every question the kids out to him. Then, next sentence she says he avoided some questions!
Don't families in Hong Kong hire local live-in help in the house, as in UK and other places? Advantages are obvious in terms of language and culture.
Norman, the answer to your question is "no" unless you regard wives as domestic helpers :-)
My wife (HK Chinese) would not dream of hiring a local. She regards them as lazy and uncooperative. I have no opinion on the subject of course. I just do as I'm told.
Since I was lunching with three Chinese women, I took the opportunity to put your question to them.
They all pretty much said the same thing. First, it's difficult to find local women who are willing to be live-in helpers, as they find the employers too demanding. (Which is just a re-statement of Andrew's point from the employee's perspective.)
Locals are not willing to work from 6am to 10pm, for example, nor to work off-site helping relatives of their employers, as Filipinas are often required to.
A second consideration, and one that all of them felt most important, was that foreign domestic helpers aren't good for taking care of pregnant Chinese women, since they don't know how to cook the traditional food, etc. One of them, when pregnant, had hired a local woman part-time for a few months to draw on her expertise in bringing up baby. After the baby was a couple of months old, a Filipina was employed.
The third reason for preferring Filipinas is that they're much cheaper. The woman who hired the local lady said that though she worked only from 10 till 4, cooking and looking after the baby, she was paid $6,500 per month. Locals who stay overnight command a salary in excess of $10,000.
For the sake of comparison, helpers from overseas get $3,480 a month, plus return airfare home after completing each 2-year contract and a long service payment after completing five years with the same employer. This gratuity currently amounts to HK$11,600, but quite a few women don't get this as there's a tendency for them to be dismissed just short of the 5-year mark.
The latest story I’ve heard from my Chinese female colleague about how ‘useless’ Filipino maids are goes like this: ‘I told her specifically to pour me and my husband a glass of water when I arrive home from work and do the same before I go to bed, but she keeps forgetting it.’ I thought to myself, ‘Is it such a strenuous task to pour yourself a glass of water?’, but I managed to bite my tongue and responded, ‘Why don’t you ask her to jot down what you want?’ She nearly screamed, ‘I DID!! But she still forgets to look at her notes!! You know what – I’m sending her back to the agency on Sunday. Instead of having a day off, she’s going to do a re-training course again there.’ Before I could say more, she added, “Anyway, I think I’ve made a mistake to replace her with our previous Indonesian maid. I thought she’d be smarter than the Indonesian girls. Clearly, she’s not! And we have so many Filipino maids living around us. She’ll probably mix with the other bad girls one day. At least our previous maid wouldn’t talk to the maids here ‘cos she didn’t speak the same language. ”
Sounds like the Victorian age. I'm surprised they're not made to wear a maid's uniform.
Some do. An English couple once told my wife that they were going to require their servant to wear a uniform, as her performance was uacceptable. Normal thing - had forgotten to plump up the cushions on the settee.
Mind you, he was a nutjob, and she was a former lingerie saleswoman turned new age spiritualist and devotee of a shaman (sharlatan?) in the Amazon rain forest.
Never mind the letters ... how about the articles that prompt some of these letters! Something about setting the tone at the top?
Sadly, Hong Kong is a place where mediocrity reigns. This is so well documented by the likes of Hemlock and Dr. George at NTSCMP that I need add nothing more. Ron has already hit the nail on the head by saying that my forte is destruction, or as he puts it more delicately, drawing attention to the world's shortcomings. (My wife performs the same role for me!)
As Ambrose Bierce wrote, in a veiled self-reference, of course: "A cynic is someone who sees the world as it is, not as it should be." Twenty years in HK suggest that the powers that be here see things the other way.
As Hemlock once wrote, we are all prostitutes! Is the trick perhaps to be prostitutes with a heart of gold, sort of expat Julia Robertses, but with smaller mouths?
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