六月一日有感

看電視
之後上網
再之後呆坐思考
結論是

我也是個人。完畢。

謝謝。

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”

Linoleum Roses (Sandra Cisneros)

Sally got married like we knew she would, young and not ready but married just the same. She met a marshmellow salesman at a school bazaar, and she married him in another state where it's legal to get married before eight grade. She has her husband and her house now, her pillowcases and her plates. She says she is in love, but I think she did it to escape.

Sally says she like being married because now she gets to buy her own things when her husband gives her money. She is happy, except sometimes her husband gets angry and once he broke the door where his foot went through, though most days he is okay. Except he won't let her talk on the telephone. And he doesn't let her look out the window. And he doesn't like her friends, so nobody gets to visit her unless she is working.

She sits at home because she is afraid to go outside without his permission. She looks at all the things they own: the towels and the toaster, the alarm clock and the drapes. She likes looking at the walls, at how neatly their corners meet, the linoleum roses on the floor, the ceiling smooth as wedding cake.

Vanitas (Joyce Carol Oates)

Philippa woke one morning in early April to discover that her face had collapsed. Overnight! Her long-celebrated cameo face! Her classic cheekbones had disappeared beneath the sagging bruises of the bags beneath her eyes. What had been smooth taut skin was now "jowls" that were puffy and discolored, the hue of old piano keys. Her eyes were small and brightly anxious, threaded with fine filaments of blood, and her aquiline nose was now a pug nose in which broken capillaries glowed with a sullen heat. Philippa stared in disbelief. She shielded her eyes with her hands and backed out of the brightly lighted bathroom. My life is over, she thought.

It was so. She could not endure the humiliation. Only a few years ago she'd been mistaken frequently as the older sister of her eighteen-year-old daughter. This was true! Strange men followed her in the street, and anonymous valentines, love poems, and long-stemmed red roses in bouquets of a dozen found their way to her door. Philippa was only forty-nine, and had anticipated many years more of worldly conquest and triumph, giddy laughter,drama and melodrama with Philippa in the starring role.

She would reveal her ruined face to only a few individuals, whom she could hardly avoid—her husband, children, relatives, a small circle of supportive friends. Among themselves they would speak in bafflement of the change in Philippa: not in her face, which looked more or less the way it had looked for years, but in her new attitude which, they agreed, had become tragic.

Keeping Things Whole (Mark Strand)

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body's been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

A Blessing (James Wright)

Just off the Highway to Rochester, Minnesota
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl's wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

Insufferable Philistines

Death comes in different shapes. To the unworthy and plain it comes in rigor mortis of the body. To the uncultivated it comes in rigor mortis of the mind. To the refined it comes in rigor mortis of imagination.

It is distasteful to ponder on the former two; almost as much as lamenting over a dog's refusal to write a sensible essay. It is the latter that one cries over. The Christians, the herd of sheep, the insufferable fools, the incorrigible sinners, are breeding an Army of Philistines. Gone was the age when the Aesthetic in Christianity stunned and awed until we are on our knees wailing and begging for deliverance from evil. The architecture, the incense, the robes, the alter, the music, the chanting, the glamorous rituals, the very essence of Christian salvation, are now crushed under the goose-step marches of the Philistine Christians. The Aesthetic elevates and delivers. The Ascetic numbs and kills.


Dionysius, Pray save me from the the burning stake of Sense;
Apollo, Pray save me from the crushing waves of Sensuality.

潮物共享計劃

潮物年年有，今年特別多。某名牌子為了向大眾推廣環保概念，以割喉價全球限量銷售時尚購物袋，結果只差一點就引起暴動。本來嘛，環保就是要減省浪費。然而為了推廣環保而挑起群眾不必要的購物慾，這樣的手法似乎就僅僅能推廣環保的「概念」罷了。

假如花得起一百二十大元，卻付不出一日一夜跟後生女學生哥迫餐死的時間，然而又想擁有如此潮物－－怎辦？易辦。


１）請以Ａ２尺寸將上圖打印。
２）用美工刀小心翼翼將之界出。
３）用漿糊（記緊是漿糊！切勿貪方便以膠水膠紙代替，不然製成品就會有一點點膠了！）將白色部份糊好捻貼妥。
４）將劃有「ｘ」的地方穿孔，再以線穿過綁好。

看！一個很環保的 "I'm not a Plastic bag" 完成了。

最少
它是紙做的。

p.s. 假如閣下真的真的真的有興趣要這自作業，不妨電郵在下索取圖檔。

Bourgeois degeneracy

"What am I doing? As with any man whose native merits arouse an aristocratic interest in his ancestry, his achievements and successes always inspired him to recall his forebears, to assure himself mentally of their approval, their satisfaction, their mandatory respect. He thought of them here and now, entangled as he was in such an illicit experience, involved in such exotic emotional debauchery; he remembered their rigorous self-control, their respectable manliness, and he smiled dourly. What would they say? But then again, what would they have said about his entire life, which deviated from theirs to the point of degeneracy; what would they have said about this life lived under the sway of art? Once, with the bourgeois attitude of his forefathers, the adolescent had openly derided such an existence, which basically was so similar to theirs! He, too, had served in the military, had been a soldier and warrior, like a number of them - for art was a war, a grueling struggle that nowadays ground you down very quickly.

"A life of defiance and strength of mind, a stern, staunch, and abstemious life that he had shaped into a symbol of the frail heroism that fitted in with the times - he had the right to call that life manly, to call it valiant; and it seemed to him as if the kind of eros that had overpowered him somehow fitted in with and favored such a life. Had not this eros been highly revered by the bravest nations; had it not, it was said, flourished in their cities because of bravery? Countless ancient war heroes had willingly borne its yoke, never viewing its commands as humiliations; and those heroes did things that would be condemned as cowardice if done for other reasons: they knelt, vowed, begged, and slavishly groveled - and such actions never shamed the lover; why, he even reaped praise for them." - Death in Venice, Thomas Mann.

Spontaneous Overflow of Powerful Feelings

Or so Wordsworth said about poetry. Poetry is a recollection of powerful feelings. Yet spontaneously overflowing. Quite a paradox. Calm recollection of feelings and somehow a genius retains the power that was once there. Yet I say, feelings powerful are best ridden and written at the head of the crest, the very acme of the storm's uprising crawl rushing towaed the shore. It engulfs cities, swamps civilizations, and drowns the steeple of a church.

Life seen through a telescope. I have never ridden the crest of wrathful wave; I have never seen a child's hand hacked off by a machete; I have never seen the misery of a dying tree. Life has been distilled for me. drip by drip. the very fine specimens of life encript'd. Images of films, or words, or sickeningly numerous volumes of books that obssess me. Artificial life that is, my friends. The joy of a sea voyage from La France to England; perfectly imitated in a cabin built on land, the scent of salt-soaked ropes and achors, clock-work fish that swim betwix wooden planks and panelled walls, filled with salty water, the very essence of a sea voyage is there and why bother paying for a ticket to embark on an actual voyage? Very well said there Monsieur Huysmans. Powerful feelings rendered in words. Adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, nouns, proper nouns, relative clauses and ellipses. Why bother sweating over the nerve wrecking task of packing and unpacking when you can have it all in a well built cabin that imitates a sea voyage? Why bother paying for a hooker and risking diseases and affections towards a paid-for object of sex when you can have it all with a pirated DVD, some spit and body oil? Artificial life, my friend. Life is most beautiful when resurrected fomr sheer blunt force of imagination.

But Art is always imperfect because it is man-made. a paradox isn't it? A well-said phrase about jealousy cannot evoke the very essence of jealousy. the Wrath. The Basic Instinct of Life itself. The warmth of freshly spilt blood pouring from a gaping hole; the coarseness of plastic handle of a cheap imitation Japanese sword; the images of a man making love to your beloved; the prosaic scent of a standardized office toilet, of bleach and perfume made out of plastic flowers... Tell me Wordsworth: can you render these feelings? Can you put it into words how it feels to taste your enemy's blood? Can you transform with your alchemy into words the scent of a woman who is yearning for sex because her husband is frigid like a wooden plank? Can you, Mr. Wordsworth? Can you juxtapose in words the swooning sensations evoked by the scent of your beloved's hair and the infernal agony at the sight of your beloved in someone else's arms? Can you, Mr. Wordsworth? Can you perchance tell me how it feels to be chained at the bottom of a well for life?

Let me tell you Monsieur Wordsworth. Let me tell you this. Your words aren't worth a dime. Can your words tell me what it feels like to be breathing and inhaling poisonous fumes of life? Feelings are a curse. An eternal torture it is to be alive. Can you tell me how it feels the surge of adrenaline when your beloved looks you in the eyes and lies? Can you tell me how it feels when suspicions eat you up alive? Can you tell me how it feels when paranoia splits your mind in pieces? Can you tell me how it feels when Salome was dancing naked to King Hesod just to kiss my lips on a severed head, handed over neatly on a silver platter? Can you tell me how it feels to be bleeding through iron-forged mannacles at the bottom of a well?

Monsieur, you had taken your Grand Tour to see the world when you were 15. When I was 15 I was sweating over textbooks for exams written by thugs who couldn't get a proper job because of sheer incompetence. Does that make me a fool, Mr. Poet?

Let me tell you, Monsieur Wordsworth. Let me tell you this. Humans exist on many levels. Some are gods, some are mediocres, some are dogs. If you can transform the agony onto paper the dog who strives to be a saint, I give you my life. I hand my head over to you, Salome, on a silver platter.