A Game of Words

Exactly how indigenous is Hong Kong Sevens after all? Let’s look at what the Hong Kong Rugby Union has to say on their website:


The world's premier Rugby Sevens Tournament was born over pre-luncheon drinks at the venerable old Hong Kong Club on a misty spring day in 1975. The Chairman of the Hong Kong Rugby Football Union, an amiable South African entrepreneur, A.D.C. "Tokkie" Smith, was talking with tobacco company executive Ian Gow. It was Gow's idea, as Promotions Manager for his firm, to sponsor a Rugby Tournament with top teams from throughout the world competing.
The Hong Kong Sevens Tournament itself has a wonderful history. It is now considered the iRB's "Jewel in the Crown" in the Series and still continues to grow in popularity with players and spectators. Rugby World Cup Sevens 2005 was the second time Hong Kong has hosted RWC Sevens and this year marks 32 years of sevens rugby in Hong Kong - a remarkable achievement.


A remarkable achievement it certainly is. A casual proposal made over cocktails and canapés by privileged colonizers at a privileged club that has sprung into an elaborate first-class tournament for the privileged. And exactly how enthused is Hong Kong about the Sevens? Getting a ticket is an initiation rite into Freemasonry. There is no advanced booking unless you know the right (and obscure) persons. Some of my friends had ordered tickets for all 3 days’ tournaments at HKD1000 a year before (through a friend’s friend who was somehow faintly related to the Hong Kong Rugby Union) and right before the tournament he touted the first 2 day’s tickets out at HKD3000. (The mythical box office was selling a 3-day ticket at a legendary price of HKD5000+.) The box office has become a long-standing urban legend. Try joining the queue at 3am every morning and every time when you reach the box tickets are sold out. The eventual Rugby-Freemasons have certainly had a good time there at the South Stand where people under 18 are not allowed. It has always been the place notorious for all sorts of jolly debaucheries. The place looked nothing less than some comical concentration camp for non-Chinese under a Chinese Nazi regime. A foul, fishy stench of sweat and urine mixed with oppressive spring heat and moisture brewing from scantily-clad and sufficiently inebriated bodies: innumerable Batmen and Robins with capes and masks but without leather tights; drag queens having major wardrobe malfunction; men dressed like women trying to be macho with cigarettes, booze, and belly; the more drunk taking off their shirts ready to make a dive into the pitch; the less drunk shouting indecipherable obscenities in vague European languages – it could have been the very picture of living hell, save for the occasional flittering nymphs in bikini tops that added poetic beauty to the scene.













At exactly the same time in another part of Hong Kong, the Mongkok Stadium, a local football match was taking place with incomparable enthusiasm: no shouting, no cheering, no jeering, no drinking, no smoking, no banner-waving, no cross-dressing. The audience, largely comprised of senior citizens living on the dole, with nothing better to do than stare at the sky in a dodgy government park, was apparently shocked and awed by local footballers’ incompetence. No one would be crazy enough to train hard to go pro in Hong Kong football: “pro” in Hong Kong means surviving on $4000 a month the football club hands you as a charitable act of mercy, which also means keeping another 9-to-9 job just to get by. The definitive existential heroes. Football heroes.


The juxtaposition of these two sports scenes in Hong Kong sheds new lights on the tear-jerking communistic-revolutionary slogan by wind-surfing gold medalist Lee Lai Shan: “Hong Kong athletes aren’t rubbish.” I daresay Hong Kong people have never harboured the faintest doubt about their athletic talents but they do question their economic power. In Hong Kong what doesn’t sell doesn’t exist. The point I am trying to make can be seen at the starting line-up of the Hong Kong rugby team: there are two Asiatic looking fellows who can’t handle a Cantonese interview. This is how local the team is. But “the best in Asia” Japanese team is comprised of almost a hundred percent Japanese and the same for the Koreans. So why can’t we localise our team a bit more?


Let’s look at how a kid can get trained to be a rugby pro in Hong Kong. A gold spoon seems to be a must. It ushers you into the right international schools under the ESF where the only decent greens and professional coaches can be found. Through colonial connections they might stand a chance of getting into the Union. Probably they acquire automatic membership simply because of being half and half. The colonizer’s blood seems to be an effective admission ticket. Well, to give them credit, this year they did beat the “Asia best” Japanese team. A marvelous feat for sure. But has anyone ever asked how much they earn being a rugby pro in Hong Kong? The question seems absurd. Aristocrats needn’t live on money. Recently the TVB news programme The Pearl Report did have an interview of one of the teenage rubgy hopefuls. No question about finances was asked. The most valuable information about this character was where the best spot was to watch live football from around the world at a pub in the Hong Kong Rugby Club in the early afternoons. And of course this character spends half a day working out at the club gym to pump up those beastly muscles. In the early afternoons probably most local-Chinese football pros are busy doing office errands or bulldozing the 1010th crate of Tetley’s to the Happy Valley Jockey Club warehouse. No wonder why no journalists ever seem to be able to get hold of them for interviews. What is rugby to Hong Kong locals? A remnant of colonial past. A symbol of the privileged. A past-time of the well-to-do. A thing altogether foreign, alien, and “gweilo-ish”. “Hong Kong Sevens”: which “Hong Kong” are we talking about here?


It is true that Hong Kong is a vibrant place. Yes, “the Pearl of the Orient”. But it often escapes an unthinking local’s mind that it should never have been a name to brag about. There has never been a phrase more colonial. I do prefer the name “A Shopping Paradise” that lamentably suggests blatant survival-of-the-fittest commercialism. At least there is some sense of shameless honesty in it. “The Pearl of the Orient” the name itself doesn’t make sense if not spoken from a “western” point of view. It isn’t even “The Pearl of the East” which could be more arguably neutral. “The Orient” is a name hot-branded on our skin by our western “masters”. Perhaps it was suitable for a British governor before 1997 to say so. But for a street hawker at Temple Street to be harbouring a secret pride, deep-seated in their colonized identity, of being local to “The Pearl of the Orient”? And the nostalgic ad nauseum lyrics of the Canto-Pop song “The Pearl of the Orient” in the 1980s? They evoke two images: Captain Jack Sparrow’s friend, the Asian pirate Chow Yun Fat with a fu-manchu saying “welcome to Singapore” in English with a faked oriental accent (Chow himself can certainly speak English without an accent); and a big billboard on New York Times Square saying “The Big Apple of the Occident” – grotesque beyond words.


Hong Kong has always been dichotomized: the privileged “gweilos” born and bred in Hong Kong but still managing not to speak a word of Chinese; and the Chinese local salary-man struggling with English. The old cliché is never very accurate: after a hundred years of colonialism Hong Kong is not the place where East meets West – this is an understatement, euphemism of foreign domination and subjugation. For over a hundred years it has always been a standoff between East and West: between Kowloon and Hong Kong Island; Mongkok and Causeway Bay; ShamShuiPo and Wanchai; Cheung Sha Wan Road and Queen’s Road; Prince Edward and Lan Kwai Fong; Chris Patten and Tung Chee Wah; football and rugby. It’s now been ten years since the Handover. In retrospect we can see the quintessence that perpetually ostracizes the two Hong Kongs from each other – language. It is always in play. Language has always been the scepter of power that Hong Kong locals are forced to revere. “Hong Kong Identity” is forever kept from crystallizing by this language game. No, don’t be silly: Hong Kong locals are never allowed to play this game. It is a language game played by mom and dad, the child is a pawn.


The ultimate triumph of the colonizers came in the form the recent CMI vs. EMI farce. Hong Kong people’s sensitivity seems to have been numbed after a century of British indoctrination so that they cannot feel what the power of language can do to a community. It is true that the victor always writes the history and the British wanted it to be written in English. So from 1897 till 1997, Hong Kong locals had been taught to revere the English language. It might sound melodramatic, but think in terms of practicality. Imagine you were in the Police Force in the 1960s. If you couldn’t speak like the British with the RP accent and hobnob with them, would you get a promotion? If you couldn’t do that, you might as well hang yourself like so many other officers did when the ICAC started purging the government forces clean. What was true then is also true now.


The “subjugation by language” principle has been reincarnated as a more overt form of the CMI-EMI dispute. I have every sympathy for students in Hong Kong. Only a few years ago they were told to speak perfect English. And now, Mandarin instead? They have been very much misled and disorientated. Field experience in classroom has been telling me ever so painfully that pupils in Hong Kong have been made the canon fodder of the language war: so much so that they are left utterly confused about language that they are virtually denied the faculty of logic. Without a proper language that one feels absolutely comfortable in one can never ever even dream of thinking logically and coherently for more than 30 seconds. Whenever asked about a controversial topic, the vocabulary the pupils come up with never go beyond that of shouting contests held regularly in pubs on Saturday nights. “Bad”, “immoral”, “unethical”, “impermissible”, “evil”, and etc. are among the terminal points of their arguments. They never manage to get beyond the point of gross generalizations that have been constantly heard shouted from the congregation of poorly educated pensioners in the “Sunday Forum” held at the Victoria Park every week. To be fair, the pupils shouldn’t be blamed. Before 1997 they were denied a proper Chinese education (because Chinese had been considered a language that couldn’t get you a proper job); and since 1997, they have been told that Mandarin is the logos to success. They are perpetually trapped in the language puppet game, with the British as puppet master before 1997, and the Mainland Chinese after: neither of them Cantonese. The CMI-EMI row is the ultimate irony of fate to all Hong Kong pupils: mom and dad playing a game of chess, and the children the pawns. Yes, they might as well splash a fortune on the fashionable “Private Tutor Kings and Queens” to improve on their “two languages and three dialects” in a magical one month crash course.















Language is crucial to identity. Identity is a complex issue – a wide spectrum ranging from sophisticated linguistic-pedagogic theories to how you can buy an orange at a cut-throat discount price at a ShamShuiPo wet market without being able to speak any incarnations of the Chinese dialects. And to be brutally practical, it is very important that we get an orange at a cut-throat discount price. One experience from my long repressed childhood past told me the importance of language and identity. It so happened that one time my family wanted to move house and my father had hired some Chinese movers to carry our precious junk from Point A to B. All the way my father, being the person in charge, had been speaking Cantonese to the movers. The movers treated our junk as literally junk, breaking everything breakable and unbreakable when they arrived at Point B. At a crucial moment my father gave a virtuoso performance of his linguistic talent. Precisely when the movers had broken the last glass we owned, my father demonstrated a marvelous feat of speaking, albeit out of the blue, Mandarin heavily loaded with a northern accent. And like a swing of a magic wand, the movers treated us like blood brothers who had fought together shoulder to shoulder against the Japanese invaders in the WWII. The movers then provided us with first class service at the Peninsula Hotel. And of course the movers didn’t know that my father was only faking the northern accent as he had never been to the north.


There has always been a running local joke about identity in Hong Kong: when asked where you are from (especially if you look nothing more than a stereotyped slit-eyed sub-nosed buck-teethed freckled oriental kid with bowl-cut hair, the question seems ridiculous), you look the inquisitor straight in the eyes and proudly declare that you are half and half. This would usually be followed by an awe-inspired exclamation; to which you explain that you are half Shanghainese and half Cantonese, or half Mei-foo and half Shatin. A rather rubbish joke I admit but it certainly is a pretty ingenious take on the phenomenon of the privileged half-and-half. Nationality is always politically relative and for 70% of the time politics are constituted by blunders of power-obsessed geeks. Why make a fuss out of Eurasians and ABCs and the like when Tibetan-Cantonese or Shanghainese-Cantonese or Mei-foo-Shatin-ian can be so equally exotic?


So after all, can I get my future kid into the Hong Kong Rugby Team, without the money and the blood? The chance will be slim if I don’t manage soon to be a billionaire or marry a Caucasian multi-billionaire’s daughter. It takes a lot more than the anachronistic national anthem of the PRC played everyday before the evening news to imbue us with a sense of Hong Kong Chinese identity or to dilute the East-West “apartheid”. But I do anxiously hope for the day when the PRC rugby team faces the Hong Kong team in the Sevens Cup Final. By then Hong Kong people will have to choose: to which colonizer do we pledge our allegiance? Probably by then we will have to make use of our proficient “two languages and three dialects” to sing our new synthesized anthem titled “March of the Yi-yong-jun and God Save the Queen too”