I Have A Great Idea! Let's Get Naked Yuen Long!

Whenever I head down onto Hong Kong island itself, I become very conscious of the fact I am a Westerner. The grandfathers dangling out of the whorehouses and the fat old American ladies ranting about the quality of their $50HK desserts instil in me the belief that I should be a shining example of Western cultural acceptance. Not that this is always effective...

Last night however, I was not down on Hong Kong Island and was instead enjoying a single pint with a Western and Chinese person in a bar in Yuen Long; a town famous for seafood, gangsters, prostitutes and the Porky Pig Portuguese BBQ Restaurant.

After a ‘delicious’ dinner of pork fried rice (a mercilessly hacked Matteson’s Smoked Sausage in dry rice), we decided the evening was still young enough to merit an old times sake trip to our favourite local bar. Naturally, we had to play the dice game…

This game is uber popular in Hong Kong, a place where boring, stupid and pointless shite invariably becomes eligible for hero worship. Basically, each player rattles their dice around in a cup and then make projections of how many dice display a given number. Yes… it is pish*!

As dull as this game is, everyone seems to see playing it as acceptable and enjoyable entertainment for a Saturday night. Though I guess in a place where a shot of beer can inspire a frenzied vomiting session, having to take a drink if you lose is a pretty punishing and therefore high stakes thing to avoid.

Probably more popular than the dice game is the use of rock, paper scissors to resolve all of life’s great little moments of indecisiveness. Take for example this little scenario which uses actual Chinglish names…

COW: Darling, there’s something I want to talk about.

OPEN-DAY: (Rattles dice furiously) Six fours la.

COW: Just a moment Open-Day, I’ve been working eight days a week and I think I’ve saved up enough money. I think we should have a baby. I call you on six fours!

OPEN-DAY: Well we do only have a two bedroom house which we share with your parents, my parents a maid and four of our cousins. With all that spare room perhaps we could try for twins?

BOTH: Yat (One), yi (Two), sam (Three) … (Standard rock, paper, scissors hand-actions)

(Open-Day’s scissors beat Cow’s paper and for some reason this means they will be adding another bunk-bed in the maid’s room. Having lost the dice game, Open Day takes a gulp of pish beer and falls forward in a pool of his own digestive juices).

So as I say, I always worry about being perceived as a raucous irritable Westerner by the locals. However, taking a drink is not a punishment for Gallic people and so we decided we had to add a new dimension to the dice game (Remember the dice game in Yuen Long? This is a story about the dice game in Yuen Long?). So we decided to play strip dice game.

With alarming haste, I seemed to be down to my socks, jeans (unbelted) and t-shirt within a matter of minutes. In a cold bar like that, I’d picked the wrong night to go commando and I had my fear on that I would soon be exposed to the elements in every way. The chances of my defeat were enhanced by the fact one participant was wearing more jewellery than a chav in a registry office.

Mercifully, Simon ‘enjoys’ the most remarkable bad luck when it comes to these games! And so, the game concluded with me standing topless and sockless taking the all too important commemorative photo of Si’ sitting with his trousers round his ankles.

As bizarre as this modification of the dice game may have seemed, it seemed we were the only people in the bar who found it remotely novel. For the entire duration of our ‘risque and embarrassing’ game, at worst all we inspired were a few confused giggles from a group of Chinese guys which all died down after they drank shots of beer and sank into unconsciousness.

There’s something to love about such anonymity and I must confess, I am not looking forward to returning to Scotland. I wonder if the Chong-Hing Bank would afford me a loan to move my family and friends here?...

Oops… I forgot… They’re not really a bank…

*Why is the word pish not in my Microsoft Word dictionary?!

'Wait A Minute: Speed, Employment & Year One In Hong Kong'

If I have one hangover from my university days, it is definitely my enthusiasm for the underlying psychologies and sociologies of individuals and micro- macro-societies during World War II. I always wondered how people felt when they were unburdened from the hardline bureaucratic governance of the National Socialists. Having now completed my contract with an un-named educational foundation, I really think I’ve come a long way towards understanding how these people must have felt. Not just how they felt at the demise of Hitler, but also at the demise of his altogether more brutal and underhand henchmen. As I now spiral into (albeit temporary) unemployment, leave my home and bid goodbye to some firmly bonded friendships formed over the last few year, I am quite aware that I should really be off the charts of the Stress Index. And yet, as with all those people who made the best of a bad lot during the Hitler years, I find myself thankful for all those things that made it a good year! I find myself trying to think of one word to best sum up my time in Hong Kong… And if pressed, I think I would have to go for the word… Speed! I arrived in Hong Kong, and will leave it to, on a fairly risqué dosage of amphetamine. Before I make the front page of the Daily Mail (Young Asian Immigrant Junkie Is Not to Be Trusted, Says God) I should point out that this was entirely endorsed by my physician. And by all accounts, he was fairly likely to be the friend of someone whose cousin was once a doctor. So the whole thing was legitimate. My next encounter with speed was with my new employer. Her thinking was so fast that she claimed to know everything about me before having met me and I became suspicious that we may well have had the same physician*. In the face of the ultra-speedy Hong Kong, I was always impressed that she tried to slow it down for me by constantly saying: ‘WAIT A MINUTE! WAIT A MINUTE!’ But then these are just details la! One of the most remarkable things about the speedy city of Hong Kong is that it possesses some of the slowest people on the planet. People will dance behind you like a hypoglycaemic child in frustration at not being able to pass you in the street, they will then reach V2 (Note to self: Confirm this with Cesca) as they go past before developing a strange form of Werner Syndrome as they overtake you which makes them slower than a fat senescent man in a diving suit. ‘WAIT A MINUTE! WAIT A MINUTE!’ This all changes of course when the same people are taking the train. The Mass Transit Railway (MTR) is Hong Kong’s speedy and efficient underground rail network. At most, you have to wait four minutes for a train. However, in the ultra-fast city of Hong Kong four minutes is too long to wait. So even if an osteoperosis suffering antique is poised gingerly inside the door of the train, giant hulks of human beings will pay them scant regard and instead use them as their emergency handbrake as they thrust themselves onto the train to save a moment or two. Arseholes! ‘WAIT A MINUTE! WAIT A MINUTE!’ Yes… Let’s take a minute. A minute to remember the promise made before around sixty other people and I came to Hong Kong that we would enjoy a culturally mediated introduction to employment in Hong Kong. Let’s take a minute to remember the absolute dread that anyone from the foundation might visit my school and make grinding assertions about my moral character and personality. And let’s devote another minute to think of the poor kids who came over at great expense to be fucked over at further expense by a deluded individual whose misguided appropriation of power and delusional self-belief borders on psychopathy**! * In no way do I claim that this individual abuses or has ever abused drugs; only their position. ** I have used the term psychopath in reference to an individual whose own convictions completely and utterly fail to accommodate the obdurate reality of the world.