Hong Kong In The Shit
By Chip Tsao | published Oct 07, 2010
Some children of mainland Chinese tourists have been literally taking shits in corridors at shopping malls around Hong Kong. Several short clips have been flooded with abusive slogans such as “Go back to your own country and crap there,” echoing the Japanese fury over the Senkaku Islands.
As a liberal and a global citizen, I’d rather assess the matter sympathetically from a multicultural perspective. We are now one family since the 1997 handover. Should we be tolerant and refrain from condemning our fellow countrymen for being selfish, disgusting and barbaric? At least in one of the cases, the mother of the defecating child was seen caring enough to wrap up the offending product with a few tissues afterwards instead of leaving it to a security guard. A huge step forward.
Open defecation is a daily norm in rural, agricultural China. Smiling peasants easily take care of their business in paddy fields. Scenes of a three-year-old girl squatting for a pee aided by her mother in a waiting room of a crowded train station are as common as a dog raising its hind-limb by a tree on a Paris street. The Chinese consider human excrement as fertilizer, a recycling product from Mother Nature. We Hongkongers as former colonial subjects have long been indoctrinated with the Western hegemonic concept of a flushing toilet—invented in the Victorian era—assuming that doing your business in a closed cubicle in your own privacy and flushing it after use is the supreme form of civilization. How prejudiced we are. With China’s economic might proudly climbing up to the global scale and now overtaking even Germany and Japan, let alone Britain—it is time that we redefined words like “decency” and “civilization” in the Chinese way.
Even from the Marxist point of view, open defecation as a Chinese custom could help Hong Kong build into a more classless and what Beijing calls a “harmonious society.” Our Southeast Asian domestic helpers could at least enjoy a brief and proud moment by offering some instructions for hygienic precautions by slipping a newspaper between the floor and the child’s bottom in time. It would be a rare break from the it’s-always-what-your-Chinese-master-tells-you-what-to-do racist rule.
Winston Churchill once called Gandhi “nauseating” when he caught sight of the Indian national hero wearing a fakir “striding half-naked up the steps of the vice-regal palace.” Gandhi never changed his attire when invited for peace talks in London. Leaving a few stinking turds on the floor of the Paris LV department store would make us all proud as long as someone has paid for dozens of luxury handbags. The West needs our cash to save its economy. It would serve as a refutation to the US government’s constant accusations that we Chinese are a big nation but never gives a shit about the world.
Some children of mainland Chinese tourists have been literally taking shits in corridors at shopping malls around Hong Kong. Several short clips have been flooded with abusive slogans such as “Go back to your own country and crap there,” echoing the Japanese fury over the Senkaku Islands.
As a liberal and a global citizen, I’d rather assess the matter sympathetically from a multicultural perspective. We are now one family since the 1997 handover. Should we be tolerant and refrain from condemning our fellow countrymen for being selfish, disgusting and barbaric? At least in one of the cases, the mother of the defecating child was seen caring enough to wrap up the offending product with a few tissues afterwards instead of leaving it to a security guard. A huge step forward.
Open defecation is a daily norm in rural, agricultural China. Smiling peasants easily take care of their business in paddy fields. Scenes of a three-year-old girl squatting for a pee aided by her mother in a waiting room of a crowded train station are as common as a dog raising its hind-limb by a tree on a Paris street. The Chinese consider human excrement as fertilizer, a recycling product from Mother Nature. We Hongkongers as former colonial subjects have long been indoctrinated with the Western hegemonic concept of a flushing toilet—invented in the Victorian era—assuming that doing your business in a closed cubicle in your own privacy and flushing it after use is the supreme form of civilization. How prejudiced we are. With China’s economic might proudly climbing up to the global scale and now overtaking even Germany and Japan, let alone Britain—it is time that we redefined words like “decency” and “civilization” in the Chinese way.
Even from the Marxist point of view, open defecation as a Chinese custom could help Hong Kong build into a more classless and what Beijing calls a “harmonious society.” Our Southeast Asian domestic helpers could at least enjoy a brief and proud moment by offering some instructions for hygienic precautions by slipping a newspaper between the floor and the child’s bottom in time. It would be a rare break from the it’s-always-what-your-Chinese-master-tells-you-what-to-do racist rule.
Winston Churchill once called Gandhi “nauseating” when he caught sight of the Indian national hero wearing a fakir “striding half-naked up the steps of the vice-regal palace.” Gandhi never changed his attire when invited for peace talks in London. Leaving a few stinking turds on the floor of the Paris LV department store would make us all proud as long as someone has paid for dozens of luxury handbags. The West needs our cash to save its economy. It would serve as a refutation to the US government’s constant accusations that we Chinese are a big nation but never gives a shit about the world.
Labels: Politically Incorrect, 陶傑
posted by Gemini Saga at 12:00 AM
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