Tag Archives: hong kong

Mooning the Party this Mid-Autumn Festival

20 Sep

mooncakeIt’s Mid Autumn festival in China: a lunar holiday where families get together over a healthy dinner of seafood, offal, chickens’ extremities and pig anus to complain why their youngest sons/daughters/nephews/nieces aren’t married yet, while their kids fire up the Galaxy Note for the 71st time that day.

I’m being flippant of course. The lanterns bedecking every house, block of flats and public building in Hong Kong at this time of year are actually quite lovely, especially at night, and the giving of thanks to the moon – in years gone by to celebrate the harvest – is a lot more spiritually nourishing than the veneration of a magic Jewish baby.
It’s also nicknamed the “moon festival” and locals eat mooncakes – a traditional Chinese food (danger team) which usually consists of a round pastry-wrapped pie filled with a disgusting slurry of lotus seed paste, red bean paste, or something equally offensive to my delicate western pallet. Imagine tasting a selection of lovingly prepared mooncakes and you’ve just imagined eating a pack of Revels with all the nice ones taken out.
Still, legend goes that back in the 14th century, the humble mooncake helped China topple the mighty Mongols, after Ming revolutionaries communicated  by baking secret messages In the pastry. Mmm delicious revolution .
Sticking the Vs up to the Party

The festival this year has also coincided with more online unrest in China, this time concerning the so-called the Big Vs. These are weibo’s verified account holders, or at least, some of its most popular users, many of whom have accrued followers in their millions and become pretty influential as opinion movers and shapers online.

The problem is that the Communist Party doesn’t much like it when mere mortals start speaking their brains, especially if their thoughts are at odds with Mao, Deng, Marx et al.

Witness the case of poor old Charles Xue, a Chinese American venture capitalist. Now I don’t have much time for VCs, their over-inflated egos and their massive wallets, but Xue has been a powerful voice on Sina Weibo, usually for social good. His campaign against kidnapping in China, and support for Deng Fei’s clean water campaign managed to effect real change in a country where things usually only get done when palms are greased, guanxi tapped and prostitutes exchanged in luxury 5 star hotels.

Unfortunately, rather than let Mr Xue do his thang, the Party decided in its wisdom to make a scapegoat of him. It has been clamping down of late on any online discussions it doesn’t like the sound of, with the increasingly paranoid air of a meth-addled tramp. The great and good of Zhongnanhai call it a campaign to rid the Chinternet of online “rumours” – there’s even jail time promised for popular tweeters whose messages are deemed to fall in this category – but to be honest, it’s just an excuse. I mean, you don’t see Xinhua hauled over the coals for republishing as fact so many Onion stories by now it’s just embarrassing.

Yup, if the Communist Party of China were a person its family and friends would have staged an intervention long ago.

So Xue was arrested the other week for soliciting prostitutes and banged up at His General Secretary’s pleasure to think on his debauched behaviour. Now if it actually happened, he did break the law, fair and square. But quite tellingly, Xue was then paraded before state-run CCTV apologising, not for his filthy whoreing, but for spreading online rumours. Exactly what does his social media profile have to do with his nightime sojourns with ladies of sexy repute? Exactly.

It was such a blatant stitch up it would be funny, if it wasn’t China. The more troubling back story, of course, is that the whole new online rumour clamp down is already stifling debate on an interweb already patrolled by the formidable censorship apparatus of the Great Firewall.

I’ve said it before but once a government creates this kind of a society they can forget about building any kind of cultural soft power to spread throughout the world. Bland TV, bland state-approved movies, awful music and a culture where no one wants to stick their head above the parapet, start an innovative online business, build the next Google.

Already the Big Vs are rushing to have their verified status removed on the country’s microblogs. The rationale is that without the giant letter next to their name they’ll attract less attention. It’s unlikely to work.

Pretty soon they’ll be forced to rely on mooncakes to spread their message.

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Hong Kong’s best clubs are … where exactly?

31 Jul

hidden agendaIt’s funny how a change of scene can so utterly alter one’s behaviour. About 18 months ago I was to be found most Friday and Saturday nights in the arse end of Dalston, throwing shapes, gurning at strangers and losing my phone. My nights out in Hong Kong are somewhat different, but this new low-key existence is not the result of some new found maturity. Oh no. It could more appropriately be called “adjusting to circumstances”.

Firstly there is no shape throwing. God forbid you actually enjoy yourself at one of the many overpriced late bars in Hong Kong optimistically branded “clubs”, get up from your pre-booked banquette where your friends are sipping Krug and dance. No, no. What you need to do is sit back down, put on that permanent frown and carry on posing.

Secondly, there really is no arse-end of anywhere here. Every district is easily reachable by quick, cheap MTR or taxi, and most of it is gentrified to fuck. Well, that’s not necessarily Hong Kong’s fault given the chronic lack of space and the greed of a handful of property moguls. But when there is a cool local, bar, club or venue, the authorities – probably at the behest of said moguls or the pro-Beijing DAB party, aka the fun police – do their very best to shut it down and harass the owners. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. Club 71 in Soho and Tai Lung Fung in Wan Chai have both had to stop smokers going outside after a certain hour – police will circle outside in the late evening hoping to catch an infraction. I almost feel like robbing a bank just so they have something better to do.

One glorious exception to this general lack of grungey, local dives is Hidden Agenda, a 2nd floor factory space near the old airport in an industrial estate in Kwun Tong. It reminds me of my teenaged years dancing to Radiohead in a darkened club beside the River Tyne and is, quite frankly, what Hong Kong needs more of. Except it can’t get a liquor license (which is not too bad, although the BYO beers tend to get a bit warm after an hour), and it can’t open much past 10.

It’s an industrial estate, for fuck’s sake, how many sleeping families are going to be disturbed by a well-insulated live music venue that wants to stay open at the weekends until 1 or 2? I’d rather see a world class DJ perform there than in the horror of Drop, Volar or Hyde. In fact, I’d rather sit outside 7-11 with my iPod on then go back into Volar. That entire Kwun Tong estate could be transformed into a kind of artsy/cultural area with clubs, art galleries, little bars and cafes. Last I heard they were trying to get datacentre companies to move in. It’s a moot point anyway – the whole lot will probably be demolished in a few years to make way for another fucking shopping mall.

In the meantime my nights these days are more likely to be filled with drunken meals, bar crawls and the odd secret beach party than reaching for the lasers. Which, I’m sure you’ll agree, is no way to live out one’s 30s.

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Hong fun in the summer Kong-shine!

12 Jul

lionsAs someone who has a love-hate relationship with sport, love it when we win, inconsolable when we don’t, last weekend could have gone down as one of the worst since Newcastle “blew” the Premier League lead in ’96. As it happened, it was one of the best. A scintillating 10 minute period from the Lions which routed the Oz-tralians was followed by even greater heroics as Andy Murray reclaimed his British credentials from the claws of Alex Salmond and gave a nation even more to cheer about.

Watching it all soaked in cider and sweat from my Hong Kong home has made the whole thing seem slightly unreal, although at least we’re spared blanket coverage and Sue friggin’ Barker here. In fact, witnessing the demolition of the Wallabies was all the sweeter from the grand colonial setting of the Foreign Correspondent’s Club in Central. Sipping Tsingtao with my fellow gin-soaked members – whose faces were about the shade of a Lion’s jersey – was particularly satisfying come the final whistle. I can say in all honesty that the “whingeing” moniker is ironically enough 100% more appropriate when applied to our Antipodean cousins – as a nation possibly the world’s worst sporting losers.

So that’s the start of summer then. All here are hugely looking forward to morphing into an unwrung sponge after just a few steps out of the door. As indeed are we to spotting the hordes of teenaged Hong Kong girls – and indeed middle aged women with teenaged girls’ bodies – dressed in hot pants so short  it really does make Wan Chai a confusing place after a couple of sherbets.

There’s honestly not much to do here until September. In a week or so China’s government will pretty much shut down for the summer and Party cadres and their families across the Middle Kingdom will pack up their Louis Vuitton luggage and primary colour clothes and head to Europe or the US on luxury holidays most Chinese can only dream of. They will behave appallingly but spend an obscene amount of (probably) illegally acquired money, thus making them at once both indispensable to the tourist industry of these foreign lands and utterly hated throughout the world.

In the meantime, I for one intend fully to spend my summer afternoons at the beach, my weekends gorging on dim sum and the rest of the time jumping off boats into sea the temperature of warm milk. Oh yeah, and my evenings agonising over the Ashes, having one too many and being bundled onto some concrete by some twat. Probably Australian.

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Beijing: So near but actually too far

28 Jun

chinaflagSo right about now I was supposed to be on a flight to Beijing – a stylish long weekend with friends in the northern capital, doing the hell out of the wall, the City, the square…you know the sort of thing. I pushed to the back of my mind the thought that the air will be thick with carcinogens, the streets littered with children’s tears and shit, and the locals, well, Chinese.

However it was all a moot point. Points don’t get any mooter than this particular point, because you see, I didn’t have the requisite visa. The newly announced 72 hours visa-free permit for visitors to stay in Beijing and Shanghai apparently doesn’t apply if you have a return ticket. Rules, damn rules…

It makes about as much sense as any piece of Chinese bureaucracy – a system, no, an entire country, that takes immense pride from fucking up the hapless laowai. Whether it’s the idiosyncratic approach to queuing, cab drivers that have no idea where they’re going, vomitingly dreadful food, or Benson&Hedges air quality, everything about Beijing is fiercely offensive to a cosseted little Brit like me. I’m sorry about the Opium War guys but seriously, it was a long time ago…time to move on people.

hadrians wall

Hadrian’s….by far the better wall

Anyway, sod it. The mercury’s set to hit 33 degrees this weekend in Hong Kong. It’s a bank holiday, there are beach parties galore, people to get nicely tipsy with and cab drivers who know where I live. There’s the best Chinese food anywhere on the planet, tap water you can drink without literally shitting yourself, and internet porn. Oh, and I can Tweet. Screw you Beijing, I’d rather invent a time machine and go back to London in the ’50s….

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Bye bye Snowden, hello more terrible HK news

25 Jun

save snowdenSo that’s it. Panic over. Move along please. Nothing to see here. Prism snitch Edward Snowden has finally left the building. Currently en route to that bastion of free speech Ecuador, or possibly Venezuela, via the equally liberal Russia, he’s off to live out what’s left of his life. Let’s just hope he makes a better crack of it (pun intended) than John McAfee, founder of the eponymous AV software vendor, whose bizarre video set various alarm bells ringing last week. What’s that John? They’re not alarm bells, they’re police sirens? Really? OK, I’m going to suggest you ease off a bit on the meth this week, ok pal?

Snowden’s revelations have of course been a propaganda coup for China – a gift straight out of the blue that now makes the US look hugely hypocritical when it accuses Beijing of sponsoring hacking intrusions on US targets. The truth is that the NSA revelations, while deeply concerning on one level (the Verizon orders, not PRISM), are definitely not the same as the state sponsored Chinese cyber attacks which Obama and co are angry about.

Rather than snooping for traditional Cold War national security reasons, these attacks are about nicking hugely valuable IP – on military equipment, smartphone designs, high-speed trains, you name it. In China it’s pretty impossible to separate state from private enterprise as the Party runs through it all, so anything which benefits SOEs or even private firms could be seen as benefitting Team China – thus such hacks are thought to be fair game. Sadly the media globally has been poor at articulating the difference, whereas in China, of course, it just ignores there is a difference.

One major problem resulting from Snowden’s departure from Hong Kong faces local journalists, however – what the fuck do we write about now? The media here may be free, at least theoretically, but it’s not what you’d call a great exponent of the art. There’s one all-encompassing narrative – when will we get universal suffrage? – and everything else is really just a sideshow.

Standard bearer the SCMP was quick to label EXCLUSIVE over every Snowden story it got its hands on but this tired old rag of a local paper has really seen better days. I know for a fact that PRs have had their editorial “suggestions” cut and pasted wholesale into stories – I mean not just sentences but whole paragraphs of text. Even the local TV newscasters stumble and stammer over their dreadfully dull soliloquies. Vested interests have an ever-tighter grip on the media here but, despite the odd public protest, the general downward trend is accepted because, after all, it’s still better than what goes on across the border.

And what of that news in China proper? Well, state-run news service Xinhua has scoured the vast Middle Kingdom for the most important news around and found this thriller – a Beijing woman’s breast implants exploded after she lay on her front for 4 straight hours playing video games. Yup.  Hold the front page…

Another story, actually from The Telegraph’s Beijing correspondent, is worth pointing out this week. In Zhongxiang city, livid parents attacked external exam invigilators after they used metal detectors to relieve students of smartphones and secret transmitters ahead of their gaokao exams, in a major crack down on cheating.

The college entrance exams have attained huge significance in a society where the acquisition of wealth and status is everything, raising the stakes ever higher for a place at a good uni. So far so normal, you might say, after all every parent wants their child to do well in exams and cheating certainly shouldn’t be tolerated. Ah, but in China cheating is endemic in every walk of life, you see, the key is to not getting caught. The fact is that the folks in Zhongxiang weren’t very good enough at it and now they’re paying the price. The previous year, for example, examiners discovered 99 identical papers in one subject.

“We want fairness. There is no fairness if you do not let us cheat,” screamed the angry mob of over 2,000 parents and kids.

I don’t think there could be any more perfect a commentary on modern China that that little vignette in a small corner of Hubei.

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Warning: make contain whistles

14 Jun

whistleThis week I have to write a little bit about this guy who blew someone’s whistle. I’m not sure if it was technically his whistle or the US government’s whistle but it was bloody loud enough to get everyone’s attention and now you can’t move for news of him. I’m talking of course about Edward Snowden, the former IT bod at defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton who became China’s new favourite person after fleeing to Hong Kong to avoid capture by the US and possible charges of treason.

My observations are as follows:

IT technicians at defence contractors get paid too much. The Mira is a friggin’ swish hotel in Tsim Sha Tsui where Snowden was holed up, the inside of which I only ever get to see for IDC analyst conferences on virtualisation. Before that he was rumoured to be staying in the W. Seriously, this former information security engineer should be used as a poster boy to get more kids into IT: excitement, intrigue, a $200,000 a year salary, Hawaii home, a hot girlfriend who’s a professional pole dancer. And he still wasn’t happy? Some people. Let’s see how he likes the inside of Guantanamo.

Second; I can’t work out whether he’s incredibly naïve or very smart. Out of pure schadenfreude I’d quite like to see Snowden bundled into the back of a black van and never heard from again due to his decision to flee to Hong Kong because the people here “have a spirited commitment to free speech and the right of political dissent”. Part of that is true – people love complaining, usually with whistles, about the government and their rapidly eroding rights – but how often do they get their way? Only when it suits Beijing. Case in point, three pro-democracy activists have just been convicted of burning the HK flag in a protest. Seriously, in 2013 people are still getting done for that…

It doesn’t stop there. A Hong Kong Uni poll last month revealed the majority of people here (48 per cent) think the press in HK actively self censors, while Reporters Without Borders ranks it 58th on its World Press Freedom Index, four places down from 2012. Freedom House doesn’t rate Hong Kong too highly either – ranking it 71st in the world in terms of protection of civil liberties and listing it as only “partly free”.

This place exists in a “one country two systems” regime which protects civil liberties, press and internet freedoms and preserves the rule of law, unlike mainland China. But it’s never really been tested yet. The regime only continues to exist in this form because it allows HK to flourish as one of the world’s great financial capitals. In reality, the former British colony is ruled by property moguls and bankers and the politicians they elect and become; and who as a property mogul or financier wouldn’t want to appease Beijing with its huge coffers and vast potential market?

Having said this, I think on balance Snowden’s smarter than this.

He is appealing to HK-ers’ natural proclivity to fight for free speech, which they will do – again with whistles – at a rally on Saturday afternoon. It doesn’t matter that the free speech on this occasion is being threatened by the US rather than Chinese government. In fact, this unusual twist will also appeal to Beijing. Whether it’s part of the plan or not, he’s been making himself an attractive asset for the Party to keep hold of by disclosing some hugely embarrassing secrets about US state surveillance of its own citizens, as well as revelations of NSA hacking attacks on China and other countries. It’s all given the Communist Party huge leverage in the on-going cyber blame war with the US and will surely mean Beijing will not want to step in and over-rule Hong Kong’s decision on extradition – which could itself take forever.

save snowden

I should really be happy that the warrantless surveillance of citizens by US security agencies is being uncovered by an IT droid, but there are a few things that made me take an instant dislike to this guy.

First: “Edward”. The only people I know who actually use the full length version of this name are politicians, former kings of England and people trying to give themselves more gravitas than they innately possess. Unless it’s The Guardian that is trying to give Ed more gravitas than he innately possesses, in which case ignore me…

Second: The Guardian interview. Have you noticed how Snowden is at pains to say “I don’t want public attention because I don’t want the story to be about me”, and that “my sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them”. Err, why didn’t you just try and stay anonymous then? Not easy, granted, but there is a touch of the Assange about his carefully rehearsed, media-friendly declamations.

Third: failure to grasp basic employment law. “I have no intention of hiding who I am because I know I have done nothing wrong,” he told The Grauniad. Again, I think you’ll find that disclosing top secret state-run surveillance programs is against the rules according to your former employer and possibly treasonous.

Fourth: I hate IT nerds in glasses and I can’t abide whistles.

That last one was a joke.

As for the future. Well, Hong Kong’s media unfriendly CEO CY Leung was giving nothing away in this cringe-worthy interview by what looked like a Bloomberg TV intern.

Despite the above rant, though, Death Noodle hopes Edward Snowden is able to stay exiled in Hong Kong for as long as possible. With any luck, until after 2047 when the “one country, two systems” rule runs out and he’ll finally be able to experience what it’s like to live in a proper tyrannical state. Although by then, no doubt, we’ll all be speaking bad Mandarin and defecating in lifts.

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Taiwan: Land of t-shirt wrestling and stinky tofu

7 Jun

taiwan beerAhhh Taipei. Another weekend, another new favourite Asian city. I realise I do this gratuitous love-in on an irritatingly frequent basis but I’ve got to say this place is worth fawning over.

Taiwan has a long and chequered history ending in a lengthy period of Japanese colonialism in the late 1800s to 1945, and then the forced immigration of the Kuomintang Chinese nationalists after they were routed by Mao’s lot in the Chinese civil war. This has made it a smaller, friendlier, cleaner, tastier and altogether sexier version of China proper. Some American douchebags I met called it China Light, but that’s doing Taiwan a massive disservice.

The Japanese empire may have departed this island long ago but its cultural remnants cast a long shadow. From the tap-to-open automatic doors to the ubiquitous vending machines and even the hot springs, Japanism is everywhere. And people queue! And, especially refreshing coming from Hong Kong where the locals are tucked up in bed playing Candy Crush on their phablets by 10pm, Taipeiers go out and booze like it’s the end of the world.

taipei cityscape

Case in point: I was awoken in my hotel room on Sunday afternoon by the gentle shaking of a 6.3 magnitude earthquake, with no memory of how I got home. Only the blurred pictures of tequila shots on my smartphone and a vague memory of being wrestled out of my t-shirt by a girl called Melody remained. Ahh, Taipei.dancing girls

The Republic of China has been unfairly ignored for much of the past 50 years by the international community but in a lot of ways it’s the kind of place you wish mainland China could have been. Ignore the stinky tofu for a second and you’ve got a free press, good education, a fully functioning healthcare system and lovely people. The PRC still regards it as a territory to be eventually subsumed into the motherland à la Hong Kong, but one visit to the imposing Chiang Kai Shek Memorial Hall in Taipei will prove that this is about as likely to happen as Xi Jinping opening a Twitter account.

chiang kai shek

Generalissimo Chiang cuts a forlorn, almost tragic figure in the museum dedicated to his life, beneath the monument. After all, this is the guy – the Kuomintang leader for several decades – who let China slip through his fingers and effectively exiled himself on a small mountainous island. It’s now a place where the rivers flow bereft of even a solitary rotting pig carcass; where the internet takes you to any site you wish, where the police do not arrest elderly women protesting the sexual abuse of their infant daughters; where the air is clean and the rice doesn’t even contain dangerously high levels of cadmium.

He must be kicking himself.

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Camb-Okinawa: darkness and light in Asia

22 May

s21 museum“Does the genocide museum have a dress code?”

It’s not a phrase I’ve ever typed into Google, certainly not on holiday, but it was necessary research a couple of weekends ago in Phnom Penh. Cambodia isn’t really like any other SE Asian country I’ve ever visited but it doesn’t take long to realise that a sombre trip to the Killing Fields and the notorious S21 prison are essential, if harrowing, stops.

I’m not going to prattle on like a sententious twump about why they’re important, you can figure that out for yourself. But reading a forced confession of some poor sod from my old school in NE England whose life was abruptly terminated at the hands of the Khymer Rouge does rather focus the mind. Reading all about the horrors of the ’70s and the turbulence that followed for decades afterwards, it seems churlish to complain about the food (pretty terrible) or the horrific sex tourism (the Heart of Darkness club is aptly named) in Cambodia. That didn’t stop me, of course.

I didn’t make it out to the Angkor Wat wonderland but the highlights for me were the smiley, smiley locals – you’ll never meet more polite hustlers in your life* – the dirt cheap beer, and the other worldliness of a city which was almost entirely depopulated during the late ’70s.

As lovely as Cambodia was, however, it was eventually time to pack away the Gary Glitter costume and head somewhere slightly closerkaraoke to home, culturally at least: Okinawa. Now there are two types of people in this world: those who see a five day forecast of torrential storms and brave it to the beach anyway, like IDIOTS, and those who decide to cut their losses and spend their entire weekend eating and drinking. So it was we discovered that the delights of Okinawan nightlife are even more delightful perhaps than Tokyo, Osaka and Kyoto.

Naha is more chilled, more friendly and more accessible for the gaijin tourist than virtually any place in Japan proper I’ve been. That’s probably down to the fact it isn’t really Japan at all but part of the ancient kingdom of Ryukyu – the locals don’t much look like Japanese and they’ve a different dialect and even separate languages, although the two distinct cultures seem to have found a pretty sweet balance on these sub-tropical islands.

awamori

Cue lots of counter-stool-beer-izakaya action; plenty of chopstick competence-related comments; complementary shots of local firewater awamori; and the odd lock-in listening to the owner’s Led Zeppelin collection. Food = as good as you’d expect from Japan; beer = ditto; random events = cracking; brothels = surprisingly un-hidden; amusing Engrish signage = in abundance.

All in all an excellent quick-stop weekend destination from HK, especially thanks to Abenomics and the weak, weak yen.  The only dud was Black Harlem, a bar chocked full of over 10,000 vinyl records playing the most beautiful soul music but with the most miserable customer/bar staff combo known to man. In an irony which did not escape us as we exited post haste after one drink, it simply had no soul.

(*99% of the time anyway. My mate did have her flip flops nicked outside the Killing Fields museum. Who does that??)

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Kommen sie hier Hong Kong und listen to Kraft-Blur!

9 May

kraftwerkHong Kong outdid itself over the weekend with the London bus-style arrival of two global musical giants of very different pedigree – Kraftwerk and Blur. Both showed up what’s best and worst about the city’s live music tastes.

Having spent Saturday afternoon drinking Tsingtao and listening to krautrock our expectations were suitably piqued ahead of the electro-pioneers’ 3D gig at Kowloon’s Kitec centre. There was only one problem – no bar in the venue and no drinks allowed inside. At a gig? Seriously? So after muttering to the box office staff something about my inalienable rights and that I’d see them in Strasbourg, we rejoined to the venue’s apparently only café, to find it had stopped serving half an hour before the gig was due to start.

It is a testament to Kraftwerk’s magical electronic plinky plonkings that being forced to drink warm Blue Girl Imported Premium Lager and chow down on a microwaveable 7-11 hot dog did not ruin my evening before it had even started. 3-D glasses firmly in place we were treated to two hours of a Kraftwerk greatest hits show, complete with nicely retro three dimensional projections. Autobahn, Robots, Tour De France, The Model, Trans Europe Express, Musique Non Stop – the music and visuals just about distracted from the appalling skin-tight bathing suits these four portly middle-aged men were wearing. For the record, Kraftwerk dress auf der linken Seite.hiroshima - kraftwer

Apparently chief songwriter Ralf Hütter is the only remaining original member of the band. To be honest one Teutonic sounding sex offender looks very much like another when plonked behind a plinth wearing a skin-tight bathing suit, so no great loss there. Good tunes. No banter. A simple auf widersehen and then they were off to go cruising Lockhart Rd, or more probably back to the hotel for a slice of strudel and a sleepy. Quality.

Blur was an altogether different beast. In what was billed as their farewell tour the English indie legends blasted through a 90 minute set of such quality it was almost impossible to choose the lame song to go to the toilet during. Albarn spent the gig jumping and spazzing about like a 23-year-old, with Coxon coaxing unearthly howlings from his geetar (solo highlight: Trimm Trab) and Alex James, well, standing off to one side looking louche and thinking of cheese. Age has certainly not withered them, although Albarn managed to throw a bit of a hissy fit when his guitar malfunctioned during Tender and the crowd had to step in to calm him down with an impromptu a cappella version of the chorus, like a long-suffering mother dealing with an ADHD-riddled child.

The highlight, early on, came when the Gorillaz front man apologised for not having made it to HK with Blur until now – 25 years after forming. Their upcoming gig in Japan had been cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances, he continued, meaning the boys had a week free which they planned to spend in the SAR trying to write a new album. Cue screams of delight from the audience. Whether we’ll ever see the fruits of this week’s Blur holiday in Hong Kong remains to be seen, although Albarn has already penned the imperious Hong Kong with Gorillaz.

So, thanks Hong Kong, but can we have more of this in future please and sort the bar situation out? It’s pretty embarrassing when you begin to get out-muscled on the live music front by Singapore, although judging by the noticeable gaps in the crowd at both venues, it’s no more than some of us deserve.

(PS I might add some videos to this post if I can work out how to do it)

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RIP Ngau Kee: So long and thanks for all the frogs

26 Apr

HK night viewWhen we come to the end of days, when Hong Kong is nothing more than a giant shopping mall, devoid of culture, originality, character – an antiseptic playground for billionaire mainlanders. When we finally all decide we’re probably better off elsewhere, then 2013 may well be the year we look back on as the time everything started to go wrong.

Why am I reaching for the Prozac? My beloved Ngau Kee (pr. ‘now gay’) is no more. After 62 years serving the citizens of Sheung Wan, owner Mak Ping-keung has been forced to shut his family run Canto-food shop by a money-grabbing bastard masquerading as a landlord. Apparently the avaricious arse wants more than the HK$49,000 (£4,000) currently being paid and he’ll probably get it, such is the appetite for property in and around trendy Gough Street.

It wasn’t always this way. Well before the over-priced ponceholes moved in and family-run businesses were pushed out, Gough St and its environs was a pretty ropey part of town – home to printing presses and not much else. Not now. Now it’s filled with furniture shops selling shit no-one wants, posh cafes crammed with buggies and mummies and poncho-wearing bell-ends, and art galleries that look like clubs.

Ngau Kee was great. It was dirty, noisy, cramped and probably hadn’t seen a health & safety certificate in its entire life, but it had a long and delicious English menu, cheap Tsingtao, and a garrulous bunch of (mostly) friendly staff. Basically, everything you want from a local restaurant. And fresh frogs! Local celebs crowded round its tables, ordering braised beef hotpots and mountainous platters of salt and pepper squid, film crews shot regular pieces with Mak and his missus – and her amazing mulleted barnet – and the punters always went away full and happy.

There’s no word of them relocating. To be honest they already moved from an original site in Bridges St so I wouldn’t blame them calling it a day. Wherever they go they’ll have only a year or two respite before the rents price them out of the area again. In the meantime, what is Hong Kong left with? Already club favourite XXX has been forced to close, artsy bar-hole Sense 99 looks like it has become a block of flats, and now this.

So as you walk past what was Ngau Kee, soon no doubt to become a boutique fashion outlet selling clothes no-one wants, spare a thought for the old place, and the city that used to be Hong Kong.

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