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    • Hans Ebert
      • 3 days ago
      • 5 min read

    Personally speaking...


    Maybe we thought that The World’s Longest Cocktail Party and Chinese banquet would last forever. Maybe we were careless and pretentious and shallow and couldn’t, or refused to see what was real and what was fake? Whatever it was or might have been, at least for me, the Hong Kong I once knew is no more.

    Being angry isn’t going to bring it back. Maybe there are lessons to be learned from what has happened to a once vibrant city that had it all-and more- including a heartbeat and a soul. Looking back, something I am loathed to do as the past belongs in the past, there’s the feeling that we took so much for granted- the lifestyle, seeing nothing wrong in flaunting being nouveau riche and legends in our own lunchtime.

    Many of us watched the rich get richer and the poor, well, see the poor stay where they were and did nothing. My, how the rich in Hong Kong behaved- and still behave. Maybe this is why they’re referred to as “filthy rich”?

    What was both interesting and rather nauseating was how many wanted to be just like them- the filthy rich. Many still do. Just scroll through Facebook and see the fawning process and the posturing that goes on. Greed is an addiction and Hong Kong grew so fat and rich that it fed this greed with a mighty big shovel. We were Gordon Gekko before the character was even created.

    We were too busy having our long lunches and long drinks and getting lost at that long buffet table serving everything and everyone that it didn’t matter. Entertainment expenses covered this excess plus the costs of all those who came along for the free ride. We were happy to get lost in all that nothingness that we thought was something like finding the Yellow Brick Road.

    That supposed Yellow Brick Road usually led to the gilded cage in Tsimshatsui and the very expensive Club BBoss or somewhere else equally ostentatious and superficial with your own mamasan.

    There was nothing wrong with this. It was Hong Kong, baby, and Shirley Bassey was singing “Hey, Big Spender”.

    We were Beautiful People making the scene. Hedonism was making our heads spin though it was all just a silly phase we were going through. We just didn’t know it. In-between blowing air kisses across the dance floor, we also made mediocrity something special. We lowered ethics and standards and created and bought into that shallow dream. Remember all those who bought into the beautiful life of FashionTV? And... Thankfully, many of us were fortunate enough to have enjoyed some wonderfully kinda innocent secondary school years in Hong Kong.

    We did through the friends we made, took a few walks on the wild side, and also because our parents picked up the tab. Did we ever think that their lives might not have been exactly rosy? Mine, sure as hell were not though my father found a way to always be impeccably dressed. Mum suffered in silence and I often wonder these days when exactly did horrible Alzheimer’s enter her being.

    Politics in Ceylon forced them to arrive in Hong Kong penniless. They did their best with the scraps thrown their way. Through some miracle, they gave me everything they could until it was time for me and my pet kitten to become some Asian Dick Whittington in search of the next phase of my life.

    Through trial and error, I succeeded in what was then a British colony where many knew their place and married “their own”. Not knowing what my “own” was, and being some strange child of the universe, I somehow met the pretty white American girl and daughter of a Lutheran minister and his lovely wife who swept me off my feet. We became one until becoming three.

    None of this didn’t come without warnings and career obstacles. She lost the small job she had being the pretty handbag for a gay Filipino film reviewer in Hong Kong still in the closet and who needed “cover” for his socialising. He didn’t approve of us being together. He thought it was beneath her to be with an “Indian”. We were warned that our daughter would be classified as a “half breed”.

    She turned out okay, my wife and I had our good times and we have Hong Kong to thank for all that and the life it gave us. She and I are self-made people and what we have intact is our integrity. Integrity is priceless and is that intangible commodity that’s often forgotten. She and I might not be together anymore, but this city shaped us and our time together. We owe Hong Kong so much.

    Each of us who grew up here should think how we are going to repay it. Right now, Hong Kong is looking frail, vulnerable and even discardable. It’s not deserving of this. I made a promise to myself recently that I am not going to play the Blame Game. That gets us nowhere. Many of us have seen the best, and have enjoyed the best of times, thanks to being in Hong Kong.

    Where else could a kid from Ceylon, who didn’t know how to use cutlery nor had never been in an elevator go from working as a cub reporter for the Hong Kong Standard to being an Executive for two major International music companies, help launch McDonald’s in Hong Kong, and create the Happy Wednesday brand for the Hong Kong Jockey Club?


    In-between, there was time to enjoy tea at the Peninsula, practically live at the Grand Hyatt, enjoy a five star lifestyle and get to meet everyone from Sammy Davis Jr, Roman Polanski, Martin Scorsese and Quincy Jones to the Rolling Stones, David Bowie, George Harrison, Billy Joel, Peter Sellars, Keanu Reeves and so many more.

    There have been the musical opportunities to bring Bollywood to David Bowie, Robbie Williams, Norah Jones, John and Yoko and Nelly Futardo, write original music for Jacky Cheung, Faye Wong, Sam Hui, the Wynners and A&R a massive hit for Danish band Michael Learns To Rock.

    This all happened because of being in Hong Kong. This is home and not some temporary shelter from the storm. When trying to understand myself better and get my priorities straight by taking an extended break recently from Hong Kong, what became more and more clear is that in those other ports of calls, I was a stranger in a strange land.

    Rightly or wrongly, I didn’t feel I belonged in any of those places. It wasn’t just missing the dim sum. It was missing the then some and more. It was missing the place where all my memories live. There was the realisation that it’s these memories that show the way forward even when what lies ahead might be fuzzy. There’s usually a clearing somewhere that gives you a glimpse into answers. But you must get out there and find it for yourself.


    It’s not something that’s just going to appear out of nowhere and take you on the next part of your journey. It takes work to get there- wherever “there” is. Once there, everything becomes more clear. It’s not unlike listening to the music that Hong Kong band Andy is Typing... is creating and knowing how this might help this city hear something that is new, has baby legs and can travel...and make a difference.


     


     



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    • Hans Ebert
      • 4 days ago
      • 2 min read

    Hong Kong and its Insane Clown Posse

    https://www.scmp.com/sport/rugby/hk-sevens/article/3187141/hong-kong-sevens-return-first-time-2019-officials-give-go

    Just when you think that Hong Kong can’t look any more ridiculous to the outside world than it already is, the powers that be manage to outdo themselves. It’s quite a feat.

    While a totally ill-prepared government and its health officials dither with quarantine measures, and more and more additions and colour coding to apps, all of which takes the fun out of going out for lunch, let alone dinner, and an airport that’s such a disaster area that it’s not even in the Top Ten Airports in Asia- forget the world- but Asia, comes today’s exclusive announcement in the South China Morning Post that the Hong Kong Rugby Sevens will return to the city this November at the Hong Kong Stadium after a three year break.

    In the latest edition of the story, Hong Kong Rugby Union CEO- Robbie McRobbie, below- is this sounding even the tiniest bit Monty Pythonesque?- is quoted throughout and sounds so happy that he could kiss the sky and play air guitar with his teeth.

    With the go ahead said to have been given by the “highest echelons in the government”, Robbie McRobbie describes it as a “watershed moment” that positively SCREAMS out to the world that Hong Kong is open for business.


    Let’s just hope that all the obstacles in its way have been tackled in ways needed and where Hong Kong doesn’t fall on its own sword and embarrass itself. Again.


    Let’s try and be positive for now that the colourful event which always brought the world to Hong Kong happens- and not in some half-arsed way where the “watershed moment” becomes nothing more than a weird version of the Flowerpot Men.


    The hitherto unknown Robbie McRobbie has much riding on this. Very very much.


    How this news is greeted by those at the Hong Kong Jockey Club with regards to its own Hong Kong International Races will be very interesting to know...


    Approval from “upper echelons of the government” when there are so many other fires to put out in Hong Kong, which are affecting the daily lives of the far less fortunate, comes at what could be a very wrong time.


    Of course, the 2022 Hong Kong Rugby Sevens- and it’s a constantly evolving and strange little story with different bylines- comes attached with a raft of rules.


    What in Hong Kong doesn’t these days?


    There’s no food allowed into the Hong Kong Stadium, but bringing in drinks is allowed. Thank gawd for that.


    Players and officials involved in the event will have to adhere to a closed loop system that will, most likely, have them confined to their hotel and the stadium.


    There’s some other stuff on the laundry list, but we have to wonder which teams would be coming to Hong Kong and how long they have trained for the event?


    Do they even know about it?


    As for overseas visitors, how many are ready, willing and able to pack their bags and fly into today’s Hong Kong and constantly changing quarantine measures for the November event?


    Who will be sponsoring the event? Cathay Pacific? HSBC? Standard Chartered?


    Robbie McRobbie and Big Balls Associates?


    One also can’t help wondering about the event being approved by “the upper echelons of the government” and who they could be?


    Is good old Duncan Pescod back in Hong Kong?


    #hkrugbysevens #robbiemcrobbie #hongkong

     


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    • Hans Ebert
      • 5 days ago
      • 4 min read

    Going Solo

    On August 1, 2022, and after over three hours of walking and walking and walking around and around and around the airport along with other arrivals to Hong Kong from Singapore, where I was prodded by various masked people in blue overalls to go here, there and everywhere to various testing and “holding” areas, it was off for a one week mandatory incarceration at a COVID-19 quarantine hotel in the backwaters of Kowloon.

    It was the only hotel available to me. It was a hell hole.

    Everyone is different. And the mind is a fragile place.


    The stay in isolation in a tiny room where no windows were allowed to be opened, no one was allowed in to clean the room, three meals placed outside my front door daily with a Big Book of rules and regulations to read, and the warning that breaking any of these rules would see me fined and in jail, has changed me forever.


    How much that one week has changed me, only I know.


    This isn’t some competition to see who has gone through a worse time.


    I know what I know and I also know what I am not supposed to know.


    It’s was not the Midnight Express, The Shining or the Walking Dead, but this was happening in what once was “Asia’s world city”.

    This was taking place where, once upon a dim sum, Hong Kong was the most exciting and vibrant city in the world and “The Gateway To China”.


    Today, Hong Kong is Humpty Dumpty with no one knowing how to put the cracks giving it no centre back together again.


     

    There’s no need to even think of being with someone these days. You know who’s still around, you’ve heard all the stories before, and, without wishing to sound cruel, they have nothing to offer. Maybe they never did?

    Listening to them could start different triggers twitching and rockets going off as these days patience is not a virtue.


    Patience is an albatross, or an unnecessary intermission, because you’re now wired differently.


    You’re in a Hong Kong you don’t recognise, and where you don’t belong.

    Credit: @surrealhk


    It’s a city that’s waiting to be found, but which is difficult when lost and confused with no sense of history and, seemingly, an orphan with no plans for a future.


    The thought of being around certain people makes you feel ill. It makes you wonder when and where and how things changed and might be rearranged and change. But change into what?


    Your past has pretty much been wiped clean. Where you find yourself now is Blade Runner territory, and all you have for company is the new Solo you.


    Do you miss any of the people who might have once been in your life? You think you might, but no, you don’t.


    Maybe this is a good thing as its a helluva lot more interesting and challenging than falling back on old ways and remaining there being comfortably numb and going through life by numbers.


    The most interesting person you know is this new you and you still haven’t figured him out.


    Who has he become? And who’s that with him?

    I am writing this on my mobile phone while “Mr And Mrs Smith” is on television.


    I have never seen it and realise how fortunate I have been. It’s an unmitigated disaster and with some truly terrible formulaic acting.


    Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie keep running around killing people while maintaining their secret other life and that’s pretty much it.


    If you haven’t seen this piece of shit before, you don’t need to. I just waltzed you through the whole story.

    Yesterday I watched something called “The Lovely Bones” about the living looking for the dead and the dead looking after the living. Something like that. It was directed by Peter Jackson and is a garbled mess.

    The one redeeming quality to it was watching Susan Sarandon playing pretty much the same role she’s been playing for almost two decades. I love her voice, find her intelligent and sexy as hell.

    Susan Sarandon, I would love to meet along with Diane Keaton and Sandra Bullock.


    There’s something very special about these three women. They have that something called substance. Their voices say so much and more. You know that they won’t speak emoji.


    I dated a Danish girl for a few years who looked like Sandra Bullock. I now realise that was the only reason for my unrelenting pursuit of her and trying to make it last when there was nothing more to her. Not even a good taste in shoes.


    Shallow? Guilty as charged.


    Jeez, just how guilty have I been by continuing to play that shallow shell game?


    How many times did I mute the voice inside me trying to make itself heard by speaking the truth?


    It’s embarrassing thinking about how much crap I tolerated instead of just calling things for what they were- nothingness.


    But where’s that somethingness?


    Is that even a word?


    If not, it should be.


    Everything around you that matters should have some somethingness.


    This is what’s going to make every aspect of living life to the full filled with somethingness that matters.


    This is where I believe Hong Kong, and many of us who live or lived here, have gone wrong; we were shallow and accepted everything and nothingness without questioning what we were allowing in.


    This is why we are now burdened and bloated with so much fatuous stuff.


    We refuse to address the elephant in the room called Nothingness in the shape of pretentiousness and gorging on a nouveau riche lifestyle and ignored anything even close to Somethingness.


    This is where maybe Hong Kong became derailed and continues to keep going down the wrong paths.


    Priorities are either all wrong or maybe never existed...


    This allowed in Pandora and what she had in her box.

    I’m sure we saw it happening, but we still allowed her in because of being dazzled by all that glitters and which turned out to be Fool’s Gold.


    You remember that “celebrity chef”, too?

    It was during these halcyon days in Hong Kong that characters like this were welcomed in and fawned over by the city’s socialites and attention seekers without bothering to check any curriculum vitae and see what was waiting around the corner...


    Hong Kong was caught napping and asleep at the wheel and totally unprepared for the multi headed beast unleashed...


    Copyright © Hans Ebert, August 12, 2022


     


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