Job Discussion Forums

[11:59]

[wildnfree]

I'm suprised no one mentioned the nosiness of the chinese. It is acceptable to stare, point, and talk about someone while making it really obvious you are talking about them.

[kowlooner]

I was wondering which rabble-rousing racist 11:59 was a reincarnation of, so I guess it's not WNF now that he's weighed in. Unless it's a dual identity. Anyway, it's clear that 1159 spent quite a lot of time collecting various stereotypical complaints and observations before posting them en masse, and that this was not intended to educate but to bait. Not much different from what one might find on the China Daily BBS, except going in the opposite direction.

[Serious_Fun]

[killarobs]

With all the complaints and obvious discontent with the Hong Kong culture and its people, my question is why do people like 11:59 continue to degrade him/herself by remaining in such low-end place? Why can't you head back where you came from and enjoy the pristine culture and place that you place so highly of?

Not to initiate any further juvenile arguments on such matter, but can I, as a Chinese born Canadian, formulate my own stereotype on the Westerners who go abroad and teach? In my own observation, I've seen two types that do go abroad,

1) Ones who are unsuccessful in their own country (ie. can't find a career and stuck flipping burgers or doing some mundane 9-5) and decided to go abroad to be 'free', 'independent', 'to get away' and/or make the amount of money that they cannot make in their own country.

or

2) Ones who are really open and receptive in new cultures and experiences that they understand the differences in people due to the cultural and societal differences. Most of these teachers are usually warm, receptive and kind to most that they encounter.

I cannot exactly disagree with 11:58 since I have observed some of them to be true, but what I do know is that it doesn't help anyone or the culture any bit by doing what you are doing.

2 cents

[11:59]

[lambada]

I laughed, but I think it might be what I like about HK. If I want to clear a space (whole carriage), I just start to cough and gurgle. I smile all the time. I enjoy the fact that the only people who talk to me are either drunk or insane - usually insane. Nobody will sit next to me (sometimes won't even get on a minibus if the seat next to mine is the last free seat) but girls always give me their phone numbers when I ask them. How weird is that? My Thai g/f thinks my eating habits are disgusting but I like to burp and slurp now - it's cool. She says I don't even chew any more. Waste of energy - i say. I like lots of gadgets sticking out of my head and I mix and unmatch my clothes as the mood takes me. Now wheres my pink platform shoes?

[Travel Zen]

This post is by far the funniest I've read on Daves' Hilarious !!! 11:59 you crack me up!

Every point you have, I have seen personally, but I wouldn't say ALL HK'ers are like that. No, that would be racist.

Funny as Hell.

It seems to bug you ALOT. I would suggest, as a friend and admirer of your post, to just leave HK altogether and go to another racial group that has different (I didn't say better!) cultural traits.


In the end, WE are ALL Human.

#1 Funniest Post Award

[lambada]

I think 11:59 has left - possibly on the 11:59.

[robsbay]

Oh dear. Marbles on the floor...really.

[Horizontal Hero]

11.59 has had a few bad days of late, I suspect! Still, I couldn't help but laugh or wince at some what he wrote. The sitting on the aisle seat of the bus is the most annoying thing imaginable! Often when I get on a mini-bus, a skinny little woman sitting there will move her legs aside to make me, the 195cm foreigner, squeeze in beside the window! I admit I have asked some of these people to move it over now and again!

Did anybody mention the people standing in the middle of the door-entrance on MTR/KCR stations, and then shoving their way on before anybody has gotten off? This is just so rude that I, the enlightened foreigner, have dispensed with accommodating such ignorance. When getting off the train, if there is someone standing in the middle of the doorway shoving their way on, I simply walk forward and off the train in a straight line. The offender is promtly bounced backwards or sideways onto the platform- and rather justly so in my opinion! One time the doors swung open and this middle aged women stomped onto the train right in the middle of the doorway. I saw her as the train was pulling up, and saw that she was not going to bother to see if anyone was getting off. As she scurried forward directly at me, head down, I just moved gently forward to get off. As her head was about to strike me directly in the abdomen, I simply tensed and dropped the shoulder. She hit me and bounced off me like a crash-test dummy being flayed backwards after impact. Her husband, who was beside her actually scolded her. Meanwhile I gracefully exited the scene, nose held high.

[Horizontal Hero]

DP

[Darrell]

very funny quote. he does have a point. But if you are unaccustomed to the life in HK why stay in HK? may i suggest korea or japan?

[11:59]

41. Why do so many Hong Kong Chinese people seem to evince little if any of what we in the West would term general knowledge? One often sees references to � and hears jokes and quips about � the embarrassing lack of general knowledge displayed by, for example, your average naive North American university student ('what country is Africa in?' for example), but that is quite obviously nothing when compared to the utter and complete deficiency in this area shown by your run-of-the-mill Hong Konger, and that's the 'educated' adults I am referring to (who are often teachers themselves). The kids are even worse. They seem to know nothing � absolute zilch � about anything other than the meaningless, pointless, and useless trivia of their own subculture (such as what colour T-shirt Gillian from The Twins is wearing this season).

42. Why do so many people here, especially in the New Territories, insist on cutting their fingernails on public transport with those spring-loaded nail cutters? And why do they all seem to have nail cutters on their person in the first place anyway? Do they take them out so that they can cut their nails on the bus rather than do it at home? ('Oh, I know, I don't want to have nails cuttings everywhere on my floor at home so I'll do it on the bus tomorrow then some other poor sod can clean up after me.') Anyone who has ever taken a minibus on more than one occasion will bound to have heard that 'cling, cling, cling, snap, snap, snap' of the cutters causing another piece of nail (invariably caked in dirt and grit) to ricochet off at a tangent into some else's lap or into their eye. And why on Earth do they cut their nails for so long? What are they doing? Are they taking their actual finger down to the knuckle joint or what?

43. Staying for the moment with self-centred peasants on public transport, why do so many workmen 'shave' with 20-cent coins when on the bus and train? I employ scare quotes around 'shave' as plucking ridiculous little bum fluff-like hairs from one's chin on an individual basis can hardly be termed 'shaving' in any normal sense of the word, but the meaning will be clear. Along with the cutting of fingernails on public transport above, is this what the Hong Kong Chinese mean when they point to 'hygienic practices' being one thing that separates the territory and the Hong Kong Chinese from the Mainland and the dreaded Mainlanders?

44. Why, when one ventures to the 'Avenue of 'Stars'' at TST and is thus invariably accosted by the omnipresent giggling 18-year-old students doing surveys for their 'English/tourism/marketing project', do they without fail bury their head in their collection of papers and say � of course reading from the said papers without making any eye contact � 'My name is � I'm from x school/college/institution � and I'm doing a survey for my �'? Don�t they know their own name or that of their school, etc.? Why do they have to read it from a sheet of paper? And why, as they rarely if ever have more than four or so questions, do they have to read them from their notes? Can't they memorise them for crying out loud? How difficult can it be exactly to learn to ask 'Hong Kong - you stay - how long?' without staring intently at a sheet of foolscap as if it displays a telex message scrolling across it?

45. Why does the government seemingly insist on adding � and stressing � the caveat 'to excess' to the televised public service announcement advising people not to gamble? You know, it is the one in which you see (surprisingly well dressed and affluent looking) 'down-trodden' gamblers throwing boxes of cash into Victoria River, sorry, I mean Harbour. Why not simply advise the public to not gamble at all, full stop? Am I really the only person to see the potential dangerous nature of this message to the youth of Hong Kong (as well as adults lacking the requisite self-control)? The received wisdom is to 'Go and gamble! Go on, get out there and gamble', but not too much, not to 'excess', make sure you at least leave yourself enough with which to buy the must-have new model mobile phone every two months or so. Does the government really depend so heavily on revenue from the Hong Kong Jockey (or is it c_ocky) Club that they can only pretend to try to limit the amount people throw down the toilet, rather than attempting to eradicate the practice/habit/addiction totally? After all, how many gamblers are there exactly who can control themselves and not gamble 'to excess'? In fact, surely from the viewpoint of an orderly and healthy society, any gambling is by very definition gambling to excess? Also, can you imagine the UK or any other government elsewhere having public service announcements of the following type? 'Don't speed, frequently', or 'Don't smoke, at least not in excess of 40 a day'.

46. Why are balances displayed on ATMs for so long? Is it 10 seconds everywhere or is it just the one machine I tend to use? Is this to give everyone behind you in the queue enough time to have a good gape over your shoulder and make a mental note of the amount of dosh in your current account? Why don't the bank just have done with it and have balances flashing on one of those digital billboards so that everyone in a one mile radius can see it in an unimpeded fashion?

47. Why does Hong Kong have what I can only describe as zones of behaviour? Is there a map publicly available somewhere that instructs Hong Kongers how to act and behave according to where they happen to be in the territory? And does it mark the borders of these areas so that everyone knows when to modify their outward behaviour? I truly see no other way of accounting for this particular phenomenon in Hong Kong. Boarding a bus or train in, say, Central, is reminiscent of the same physical act in Orchard Road in Singapore (i.e., a highly civilised and courteous affair), but, once one gets to, say, Kowloon Tong, things have already changed, often quite overtly, with people shouting, and pushing and barging onto and off trains and buses. And once one goes past, say, Tai Po Market station on the KCR line then one might as well be in Mainland China, at least as regards the behaviour of the passengers. And of course, once one gets to the closed area around Sheung Shui then unless you get your knees and elbows up and out in all directions you are simply not getting on that train or bus. I have seen old women get unceremoniously pushed out the way by men in suits and young children get trodden under foot by women in brand name outfits. And all of this within but a thirty minute ride from Central where the same people would never dream of behaving in such a manner or fashion.

48. If you will pardon the pun, why, for Christ's sake, does there seem to be an inordinate number of Hong Kong Chinese Born Again Christians, and why are they without fail always creationists, and why do they all insist on everyone � Christian or not � saying grace before every meal? Why, pray tell (pun intended), do they insist on projecting their irrational beliefs onto others? How would they like it if I always attempted to project my staunch atheism onto them? (What was that about treating others as you yourself would want to be treated?) And why is their 'understanding' of the central tenants of Christianity (and religious beliefs in general) always seem to be so embarrassingly shallow and puerile, like one would expect at a Sunday school for infants? A colleague instructed me recently that there 'must' be a God as it says so in the Bible and that the Bible 'must' be the word of God because it says so, in the Bible. The concepts of 'self-reference' and 'circularity' spring to mind. When I employed similar logic and retorted with 'Well then, so there must be a real Biggles because it says so in Captain W. E. John's books of the same name' I was informed in real Old Testament style that, as an unbeliever, I would be punished by having to spend eternity in Hell. Charmed, I'm sure! (The same Hong Kong Chinese colleague also informed that it was an easy task to dismiss Darwin's Theory of Descent with Modification. All one had to do was watch a cat for a few hours and observe that it never turns into a dog. So therefore, I was informed, things do not evolve. The words 'argument' and 'strawman' come to mind.) Actually, to be quite honest, if going to Heaven entails spending eternity with the eternal souls of the Hong Kong Chinese Born Again Christian Creationist population then I'll take my chances on the shores of Acheron with old Nick thank you very much. Also, we must note that for most of these Born Again Christian Hong Kong Chinese, proclaiming to be 'Christian' rarely if ever prevents your average God-fearing Hong Konger from openly treating their (seemingly compulsory) Filipino 'domestic helper' like the dirt on the bottom of their shoe. Or is all this stuff about believing in Christianity just mere bravado? Is it simply (yet another) strategy they employ in an attempt to further distance themselves from their (for the most part, atheist) Mainland cousins? And/or is it just another way of trying to make themselves more Western, like wearing blue-tinted contact lenses and peppering their Cantonese with English words, phrases and expressions? Also, If one goes to a church here in Hong Kong then one cannot fail to be immediately struck by the pictures and images they have of Jesus up on their walls. To say that he does not look overly Semitic is to put it lightly. There are certainly no features commonly associated with this ancient and proud race, i.e., short curly hair, larger than average (usually hooked) nose, and, typically, a quite pronounced chin. And of course let's not forget the olive-coloured skin, a very real racial characteristic of this particular gene bank. On the contrary, the pictures and images they have of Christ on their walls in the churches here are distinctly Germanic looking, if not Teutonic, if not downright Aryan. Indeed, some resemble nothing other than a Waffen SS officer from a Nazi propaganda poster or a Frankenstein-like creation from the film 'The Boys from Brazil': viz., tall, blonde (even a blonde beard!), blue eyes, high cheekbones, sharp facial features, and of course extremely fair skin, with not even a hint of the beginnings of a sun tan. In short, not a single Semitic feature in sight. I wonder how your average Hong Kong Chinese putative Christian would react to discovering that, if Jesus indeed existed, then since he stemmed from Judea his skin would have been about the same sort of shade as their Filipino maid? Actually, I once brought this up with a young Hong Kong Chinese Christian couple and I was informed in no uncertain terms that Jesus was 'colourless'. Yes, he is colourless in the abstract, as long as he is portrayed as being strictly white in their pictures and on their life size posters.

49. Why do so many people drag their feet when 'walking'? I fully understand and appreciate that many are sales staff and so are on their feet all day in shops and whatnot, but I would submit that striving to look like an ice skater without ice skates, on a pavement without ice, seems to be going a tad too far.

50. Staying briefly with bipedal locomotion, why do most Hong Kong Chinese people only seem to have two speeds (or gears or modes) when walking? There is the 'full steam ahead mode' which is adhered to with little if any regard for any obstacles which may happen to be in their way (such as mere people) and 'dead slow' which is actually fairly reminiscent of a go-slow race at a UK primary school sports day. Indeed, sometimes the locals here walk so slowly that it is somewhat difficult to actually term it walking as such, it certainly stretches the lexical semantics of the term. I would prefer to say that they are merely being shuffled along by the vibrations caused by the traffic.

[anninhk]

Just an example of racist behaviour. My friend told me she was observing a local teacher using a world map and under the word Africa she had drawn a cooking pot with a person inside! When my friend asked her why she said it helped the children remember the name!