USA vs. HK #4: Education

By most objective measures, this should be an easy one for HK.  In 2007, HK ranked among the best in the world on most measures of math and science science performance, ranking among the other developed Asian countries like Japan, Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea.  The US is toward the middle of the second tier, not as horrible as the media makes it seem, but not competing with East Asia.  (The US is way ahead of China though.)  So Hong Kong seems to be doing a much better job of teaching math and science to it’s children, at least on average.  But what about higher education?

The US still has the best universities in the world.  But on a per capita basis, the US and HK are pretty comparable.  Because of it’s protection of freedom of expression, and it’s high per capita income, HK is one of the leading centers of education in Asia, and the world.  The US has historically had a big advantage in this area, because there was a long period of time when it was one of the few places where academics could work without fear of the government looking over their shoulders.  This is the primary reason China will never have world class universities under the current regime, and why HK and Japan have such a regional advantage in Asia.  Asia is catching up in higher education and Hong Kong is a big part of that advance.  For a look at the world rankings of universities, according to the Times of London, check out this link:

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=408560

Since we all know that K-12 education in the US sucks, and the US doesn’t have a big advantage over HK in higher ed, why am I still writing?  Doesn’t HK win?

I guess it depends on what the purpose of education is.  Basically all the school systems in the world were designed to train workers for the industrial age.  The goal was to teach basic literacy and computation skills, and to make people good at following schedules and obedient to authority.  Nobody explains this better than John Taylor Gatto, and his  basic argument is here.

Americans have never been the obedient type, blind obedience to authority is not an American value.  Years ago, I remember crossing a street with no traffic in Berin, watching the Germans wait for the light to give them formal permission to cross, rather than decide for themselves when it was safe.  The Chinese do not wait for the signal, they just go.  Obedience to authority is a Confucian value though, and it can stifle  creativity.  American schools have been much less successful in training obedience than Asian schools, and this helps explain why innovative companies like Apple and Google are located in the US, not Asia or even Europe.  Confucian values teach students not to question their teachers and professors.  So when a Chinese student has a new idea, and it conflicts with what the prof is saying, I have a feeling that student is less likely than an American student to decide that they might be right and the prof might be wrong.

Because of Americans’ issues with authority, they often have difficulty the hierarchical rigid environment created by most schools.  So even though American schools are failing to teach math and science as well as HK schools, they’re also failing to teach blind obedience.  In the age of the Google search and the smartphone, being able to do calculations quickly and memorize information is not a particularly useful skill; it’s creativity that counts.  Since public school systems all over the world teach how not to be creative, American schools succeed by failing.

The winner, in a shocker, is the USA.  It’s all tied up after 4: USA 2, HK 2.

False Dichotomies

dichotomy is a splitting into exactly two non-overlapping parts.  Those two parts must be mutually exclusive (nothing can be in both) and exhaustive (nothing can be in neither).  A false dichotomy is a seeming dichotomy that fails one or both of those criteria.  Hong Kong is full of ‘em.  Here’s a quick list.  It’s far from exhaustive.

East vs. West: HK is mostly a Chinese city, but it has considerable Western, Indian, Malyasian, and Filipino influences.  The culture is Chinese, but the economic and political systems are Western.  What’s interesting is how naturally they seem to go together.

New World vs. Old World: China and everything Chinese is about as Old World as you can get.  But HK is a very new city, much newer than NYC.  The architecture is New World, but the culture is very old.

Big vs. Small: people often talk about how HK is a very small big city.  This is particularly true if you’re an expat.  I randomly run into people I know in this city of 7 million much more often than I did in Boulder (population 100,000 or so).

Left vs. Right: except on the streets, where everyone faithfully keeps to the wrong side, HK lacks a left/right convention, and it’s really annoying.  Sometimes you’re expected to keep left, other times right.  The lack of an established convention in this area makes walking considerably more chaotic and difficult than it needs to be.

Freedom vs. Authority: The political system here has some superficial democratic elements, but at the end of the day the only real power players are Big Beijing and big corporations. Mussolini would approve.  On the other hand, freedoms of speech, assembly and religion are protected.  J.S. Mill would approve.

Wasteful vs. Efficient: The amount of trash this city produces is insane, and I think it’s higher per capita than even the extreme wastefulness of a US city.  And recycling bins are so rare that I often find myself throwing plastic bottles away.  But those bottles, along with much of the reusable garbage, gets recycled anyway.  If something has value, Chinese people are loathe to waste it.  There’s a huge array of small businesses and individual poor people who make sure that much less gets wasted here than in HK.  More on this later.

I am e

If you’re in the USA, type the title of this post into Google.  If you’re in HK, go to Google USA and do the same.  Wait for autofill to do the rest.  If you’re in China…well, if you’re in China, you may or may not be able to read this blog or use Google at all.  And that’s because if there’s anyone who’s extremely terrified of Chinese people, it’s Big Beijing.

I went to Shenzhen yesterday.  It was a day trip and I was working, so I didn’t get a chance to see much of the city.  Part of what I did see reminded me of my old home (the USA).  And part of what I saw made me really appreciate my new home (HK).

I’ve mentioned this before, but in Shenzhen I was constantly reminded of how cheap life is in China.  From the wreckless driving and biking to the stories of kidney theft, kidnapping and murder, Shenzhen is a dangerous place.  As far as the crime goes though, I think I’m pretty unlikely to be the victim of anything serious.  Chinese lives are cheap, but diplomatic trouble with the West is expensive.  In other words, killing a honky gets you in more trouble than killing a honkie.  And the people know this because the cops know this.  So yes, my passport and my skin keep me safe.  It’s not fair, but it’s reality.

In the USA, the same legal logic applied whenever I was the only white person in a “minority neighborhood” that white Americans would consider dangerous.

To all the white Americans who get freaked out when they’re suddenly in the minority: Just remember that they’re more afraid of you than you are of them.

The Pint and the Pub

In response to my last post, one of my facebook friends posted this to my wall:

“The pub brews revolution more than the tea house. Just a thought.” Dude, if this were true, the amerindians would’ve all joined AIM [American Indian Movement]! Grievance-sharing, sure, but grievance construction is quite another thing!! The Green Dragon Tavern where revolution was brewed in Boston still doesnt sport TVs, but that is the exception to USer bars these days. the causes and dis-causes of revolutionary activity, or even plain political involvment in general, far outstrip the pint-factor, true though it may be.

He also mentioned the use of alcohol as a tool of distraction and repression.  And I generally agree, so let me clarify myself.  Alcohol can be useful in getting people to open up and express sentiments they wouldn’t otherwise express.  But what’s more important are gathering places.  The pub is more potent than the pint.

Big Beijing knows this.  In Mainland China, gathering places, whether physical or virtual, are rare and monitored.  Pubs aren’t a major concern because Chinese people don’t drink much, and when they go to bars it’s usually more about status than sitting and talking.  In HK, foreigners sit in the bars and drink; Chinese people take pictures of each other outside the bars.  This is such a familiar scene in all the high-status nightlife areas of the city, that it makes my local pub very special to me.  It’s a rare place in HK where people gather to just have a few pints and discuss what interests them.

The Hong Kong Basic Law protects freedom of expression and assembly, and those protections are actually pretty robust, similar to the US.  What’s also similar to the US is the way the rulers use commercialism and other distractions (like beer and sports) to keep people from engaging in politics.   In both places, there is a small minority of citizens who actually use their freedoms of expression and assembly to try to gain a voice in the political process.  In both, citizens are still working to get a voice, not using that voice to effect change directly.

An example of this is the current “debate” over Hong Kong’s proposed construction of a high speed rail link with Beijing.  But what this debate is really about is democracy: the protesters want universal suffrage.  What universal suffrage means in Hong Kong (where all adult permanent residents can vote already) is the elimination of the functional constituencies which effectively give corporations and Big Beijing direct representation in the Legislative Council  (This council is appropriately called “LegCo” and the head of the executive branch is Chief Executive.  Hong Kong is basically a Chinese corporation, and the people are its consumers.) So while the government builds infrastructure that will probably benefit a majority of citizens, those citizens protest because they weren’t consulted.  In the US, the health care debate is stalled because of a corporate sponsored backlash masquerading as populism.  In the end, the people are manipulated into fighting against their own interests because they feel manipulated; the real issues are forgotten, and the protests prove paranoid.

Because Americans and HongKongers lack real power to influence policy, they rebel against “big government spending” even when that spending is arguably in their interests.  Fed up with a political system dominated by corporate interests and a government that doesn’t listen to their demands, Americans fight the government’s attempt to provide better health care and HongKongers  fight the government’s attempt to provide more efficient infrastructure.  When people are this manipulated by the media and this frustrated by their own inefficacy, no amount of conversation, no matter how honest, will do them much good.

Of Pints and Politics

When men drink, they become more honest.  They discuss what they want to discuss, and they say what they really feel.  They argue.  They agree.  They pat each other on the back.  They discuss sports, culture, and politics.  Unless someone has a specific problem they need help solving, women are usually an afterthought in these conversations…something to mention just to make sure there’s no misinterpreting that pat on the back.

Two things Westerners often observe about the Chinese: they don’t drink much, and they don’t discuss politics much.  I think there might be a connection.  But I think it’s natural for me to talk about politics.  Politics, by definition, matters.  If the rulers are screwing you over, it matters.  So it takes some work to get people not to discuss such things.

Like Americans, Hongkongers have been distracted from what really matters by a media that focuses on two things: celebrity gossip, and want creation.  The mindless materialism in this place is overwhelming.  It drives me to drink; it drives the locals to shop.  As far as destructive leisure activities go, drinking is undoubtedly harder on the body; shopping is harder on the mind, the body politic, and the planet.  So I go to my local pub, and I talk with Englishmen, Aussies, and a few Chinese (mostly raised in the UK or North America).

Contrary to popular belief, the Chinese are not blindly obedient to authority.  The Confucian concept of The Mandate of Heaven is not the same as the European concept of the Divine Right of Kings.   Confucianism teaches that when the ruler does not rule with the best interests of the people in mind, it is within the people’s right to disobey that ruler, and even overthrow him.  Chinese authoritarianism is not as Hobbesian as it appears (order is not valued over all else, though the competing value here seems to be prosperity, not freedom).  When the Chinese don’t respect an authority figure, they don’t confront that person directly.  They’re more likely to use passive-aggressive strategies to subvert that authority, like doing their job, but doing it badly.  They will often still appear to respect that authority.

After a few drinks, people are much less likely to pretend to respect authority figures.  And when a group of people get together over drinks, each may come to realize that he is not the only one who feels who hates his boss, or the government, or whatever.  Without this realization of shared grievances, collective political action is impossible.  Alcohol facilitates this feeling of shared antipathy toward authority.  Perhaps this helps explain why societies that don’t drink much also don’t tend to succeed in winning political rights from their rulers.  The pub brews revolution more than the tea house.  Just a thought.

Sex (and race) in the City

My girlfriend visited me in HK over the holidays.  For the 17 days that she walked by my side, I was visible.  She’s Vietnamese-American, but seems to look Chinese enough to pass for a local here in many instances.  People frequently spoke Canto to her, something they never do to me.  They also stared at her constantly.  Men stared at her in a way that would be considered lecherous in the West.  I remember my former boss, who’s a Chinese-Canadian woman, telling me about this behavior, and how much it bothered her.  I had been out with Chinese women in HK a few times before this, and had seen the stares already, but until these last few weeks, I really had no idea.  We couldn’t walk anywhere without men staring at her face, her chest, and her legs.  It was as constant as construction.  Now that she’s back in Colorado, my powers of invisibility have returned.

In Boulder white man/Asian woman couples are considerably less common than they are in HK.  But here, we (or maybe just she) attracted lots of attention, and not just from men.  Women would stare at us as well, they would see her with her gweilo and then look her up and down.  The funniest incident occurred on New Year’s Eve, when some pseudo model walked by us, pausing briefly to give my girlfriend a very serious, aggressive and perfunctory peace sign.  We were unsure exactly what it was meant to communicate, but it certainly wasn’t “peace.”  The cops also noticed me a lot and gave me really dirty looks  (previously my powers of invisibility were so powerful with the police that I was considering a crime spree).  In short, we got a lot of attention.  This really was my first real experience with the stare.

I’m certainly not the first blogger to tackle the white man/Asian woman phenomenon, but I’ve now been half of that pairing on two different continents, so I’ll share my observations.  Particularly since there’s so much nonsense devoted to this topic on the internet.

White people are bigger, taller, hairier, fatter and more muscular than Asians (on average).  Asians also look younger longer, and have fewer flaws in their skin.  All these traits are all either more attractive or less off-putting in men than women.  Hair, muscles and large physical size are all masculine traits, they advertise high testosterone levels and hence high gene quality, and as a result women prefer men with these traits, particularly as short term mates.  Being overweight (i.e. having a high hip to waist ratio), having flawed skin and looking old are both associated with low fertility in women, which explains why these traits are much more important cues for men than women.

There are cultural factors as well, the most obvious of which is the high social status of white men in HK and elsewhere.  That gap is closing though, and many Chinese women will eventually prefer a more culturally competent (in Asia) Chinese man as a long term mate.  But many of these mixed pairings are long-term, and that’s where the cultural factors kick in.  Both white men and Asian women feel like their getting something from the other race that they’re not getting from their own.  Many Asian women (including my girlfriend) complain that Asian men are either chauvinistic and authoritarian toward women, or they are timid.   Many white men (including myself) complain that white women are just too confusing.  Do I pay the tab or not?  What kind of signals is that sending?  I don’t want to appear chauvinistic, but I also don’t want to appear cheap.  Asian women have more straightforward rules.  With them, men can be men; we don’t have to be the perfect man and the perfect woman at the same time.

White women have a hard time dating in this town, and not only because all the white guys are with Asian women.  I’ve met several Chinese men who say they simply aren’t attracted to white women, and many white women who say they aren’t attracted to Chinese men.  There’s definitely something to this, because in HK I’ve never met a white guy who says he isn’t attracted to Asian women (excluding gay men), and I haven’t heard an Asian woman say she isn’t attracted to white men (though I’m sure there are plenty such women, I just don’t run in very Chinese circles).  One of my Chinese coworkers is bisexual, and she says she’s attracted to gweilo and Chinese women.

High Fidelity

High fidelity, or hi-fi, reproduction is a term used by home stereo listeners and home audio enthusiasts to refer to high-quality reproduction of sound or images that are very faithful to the original performance.

Reproduction, or replication, is a definitional characteristic of life.  DNA, cells, organisms, and cultures are constantly replicating themselves into the next generation.  Hi fi and lo fi replication have different advantages and disadvantages depending on the context.  With DNA and cellular reproduction, hi fi is usually preferred.  I’m no cellular biologist, but I think lo fi replication at this level is often called cancer.

At the level of organisms, particularly those with long life span, lo fi begins to assert its advantages.  Compared to asexual reproduction, sexual reproduction is lo fi.  Because sexual reproduction creates organisms that are not exact copies of their parents, it allows for faster evolution.  As the world’s largest ethnic group by a wide margin, the Han Chinese are the best replicators of our species.  In Darwinian terms, the Han are most successful primates on the planet, making up roughly 20% of the global human population.  They are the master replicators, and it’s not just their genes that they excel at reproducing.

Culture is also spread through replication, and the basic unit of cultural replication is the family.  And at this level as well, the Han are the master replicators.  Confucian cultures stress the importance of family, and of loyalty and obedience to one’s parents.  Chinese people often live with their parents until they get married, and there seems to be a good deal of (overt) harmony between parents and children here.

In the US, things are different.  Much of the popular culture encourages children to rebel against their parents, and living with one’s parents beyond the age of 18 is frowned upon.  Because US culture has changed so much from generation to generation, there is often stress between the generations, much more than there is in HK.

But this inter-generational harmony has it’s price.  Compared to American culture, Chinese culture evolves slowly.  When Chinese culture does change, it is usually dictated from above (this is consistent with the Confucian ethic of obedience to authority).  One of the positive legacies of Chairman Mao is the status of women in modern Chinese society.  In China before Mao, women were subservient to men.  But Mao thought women should be equal, and one of the lasting impacts of the Cultural Revolution is a high degree of economic equality between Chinese men and Chinese women, at least compared to most places on Earth.  This contrasts sharply with Japan and Korea, where the old Confucian ideals of female subordination to males still has a big effect on the culture.  In HK, the British also emphasized a good deal of gender equality, so when HK’s rulers switched from London to Beijing, the status of women remained unchanged.

Fidelity also means loyalty.  In Chinese, like in European languages, the term is connected to the loyalty of subjects to authority.  Chinese culture can change, but this tends not to happen unless authorities dictate that change.  American culture, with it’s emphasis on rebellion against authority, individualism, and adaptability to different environments, evolves in a way that’s much more organic, more bottom-up.  Top-down cultural change depends on individual rationality, which is highly fallible.  Bottom-up cultural change responds more to environmental pressures that large numbers of people are feeling, and is more inherently adapted to new environmental conditions.  Many minds converging is more organic.

Most cultures are adapted to very specific environments.  Han culture, like American culture, has features that allow it to exist over a large, geographically diverse area.  In terms of geography, the US and China are remarkably similar.  Yet one culture has adapted to this geography over thousands of years and the other has adapted to it over hundreds of years.  This difference in time span requires different cultural traits.  If I can generalize to an absurd level of abstraction: American culture succeeds through adaptability while Chinese culture succeeds through complexity.

For the sake of comparison, the Americans first: during a span of roughly 400 years, the United States evolved from a few European settlements along the East Coast into a coherent, continental nation state with a fairly homogeneous culture.  At first, this was done by importing European culture into North America, but as settlers moved west, and the environment began to differ sharply from that of Europe, American culture began to diverge just as sharply: it readily adopted traits from non-European cultures, and it invented new cultural traits.  An emphasis on individualism and self-sufficiency began to replace the more communal and static European values.

Chinese culture is even more communal and static than European culture.  Even though Chinese culture changes less quickly than American culture, it has several features that allow it to exist in disparate environments.  For example, Chinese cuisine is incredibly diverse.  Chinese people eat basically any plant or animal that can provide sustenance.  And they eat any edible part of those plants and animals.  And “edible” is defined quite broadly, by my standards.  Chinese cuisine is incredibly diverse compared to European cuisine.  All European cultures eat some kind of bread, and some kind of cheese.  Chinese cuisine has no such commonalities.  And, no, it’s not true that all Chinese people traditionally eat rice.  Before food became mass produced, it had to come primarily from the local environment.  The land near Beijing is not suitable to rice growing, which is why Beijing has only recently started to eat rice as a staple.

Another example of a Chinese cultural trait that has helped Chinese culture exist over such a wide geographical area is the Chinese system of writing, and that system is incredibly complex compared to phonetic writing systems.  The simplicity of phonetic writing systems made them much easier to learn, but that simplicity had a price, particularly before mass communication technology allowed for the standardization of spoken language.  Before the advent of radio and television, spoken language was very regional.  So regional that different dialects quickly evolved into different languages, making communication difficult from region to region.  The Chinese writing system nicely solves this problem.  Because the characters represent concepts, the same character means the same thing to Cantonese speakers and Mandarin speakers, even though the languages are mutually unintelligible when spoken.   Phonetic writing systems, despite all their advantages, do not solve this problem of mutual unintelligibly.  Perhaps this helps explain why China has been politically unified for a much larger percentage of it’s history than Europe or India, both of which use phonetic writing systems…but I digress.

Both cultural and genetic evolution occur through imperfect replication.  When traditions, language and beliefs are transferred unchanged from one generation to the next, culture evolves slowly.  Throughout most of human history, there hasn’t been much need for culture to change rapidly.  Cultures adapt themselves to specific environments, and when those environments are static, it makes sense for cultural transmission to be high fidelity.

Authoritarian governments are in many ways more adaptable than democratic governments.  When Mao recognized that Chinese culture needed to respect women more, he dictated it from above, and it happened.  This process began earlier in the West, but at this point, China and the West seem to be at about the same stage in this process.  But authoritarian governments adapt only as intelligently as their rulers do, and Mao made many mistakes which put China at a disadvantage.

Art is all about lo fi.  What an artist does is take an existing art form, and create a new work of art that is in many ways similar to other works of art within that genre.  But if it’s a hi fi copy, it’s labeled derivative and uninteresting.  When art is too original, it’s either brilliant, or, more likely, it’s considered garbage because nobody can understand it.

Technological innovation functions similarly.  But here, there’s still an advantage to hi fi, as long as you can do it more efficiently than the next guy.  As I’ve mentioned before, the Chinese have trouble with innovation, and this is because they’re too hi fi.  What has historically been one of their greatest strengths may soon become a weakness, because culture, technology and indeed the planet are changing faster than ever before.

The Chinese excel at hi fi, and that’s why they’re so good at taking technology developed elsewhere and using their advantages in cheap labor and good infrastructure to make that same product cheaper and more efficiently than the inventor.  This has so far been a huge advantage in the modern global economy.  But if the future is about innovation and adaptation then the future is lo-fi, not hi-fi.

USA vs HK #3: The Mental Environment

At first, I had planned to make this competition about “the environment.”  But I’m finding that issue too complex, so I’m breaking it down.  I’ll tackle sustainability in a later post, but this match will be determined strictly by how the environment makes me feel.

If you read my last post, you may think this is going to be an easy win for the USA.  But it’s not that simple.  To make things extra tough on HK, I’m going to compare it to the city I lived in before I left: Boulder, Colorado.  If I were to compare HK to some sprawling suburb, it would be a blowout.  To make this match-up competitive, I’ll exclude the parts of the US that make me want to stick a fork in my eye (and a good bit of the country falls into that category, unfortunately).

Boulder is bright and beautiful, but a bit boring.  I don’t have a whole lot of negative things to say about the place, in terms of the environment.  It has nice bike paths, which I miss using.  It has the Flatirons to the West (not the most dramatic mountain view on the Colorado front range, but picturesque nonetheless).  It has fairly clean air, beautiful little creeks coming down from the mountains into the city, and trees on every street.  Best of all, billboards are banned within the city limits, so you aren’t bombarded by advertising.  The Pearl Street Mall is lovely, particularly in the winter, with the snow and the Christmas lights.  It’s like Switzerland with more sunshine…too much like Switzerland in my opinion.  It’s all just a little too nice for me.  I recognize that reasonable people with disagree with me on this.  Part of this is my personality: I’d rather alternate between elation and misery than just feel ok all the time.  But it’s my blog, so I’m the judge and jury.

I have a lot of complaints about HK.  It’s smoggy and loud.  I can’t escape the constant advertisements.  And I’m a big fan of adbusters, if that gives you any idea how much I hate marketing.  But I’m not going to get into why I think advertising sucks so much.  That’s not the point of this post.  Just know that I can’t get away from it here, and it bothers me quite a bit.

So how could this be a close competition?  In a word, complexity.  I’ve always loved New York and Chicago.  The energy, the richness, the density and the vitality of those cities is unparalleled in the US.  HK has all the gritty urban beauty of NY but virtually none of the crime.  I can walk down dark alleys with my headphones on at 2am in HK, something that would be super stupid in Chicago.  The energy in HK is infectious.  Much of the energy Boulder has is drunken frat boy energy, otherwise it’s just a little too nice and laid back for me.  I left because I was bored.  I’m not having that problem anymore.

Many of the things that used to give me gas bladder isssues are the things I’m most in love with today.  Now that my brain has adapted to the initial shock of the visual bombardment that is HK, I’m really appreciating the urban beauty.  It took me a while to really “get it” here; I recognized it in NY and Chicago immediately.  But now that I can see it, it’s so much more beautiful, so much more dense and complex than what NY or Chicago have to offer.   I can’t really explain it, so I’m hoping my pictures can augment my words here.  Problem is, I’m visually challenged (maybe that’s why I had so much trouble adjusting) and I have no talent for taking photos.  And all these pictures were taken with a 5 MP camera-phone.  I’m hoping they can do some justice to what I love about the look and feel of HK.  But I know they can’t, and neither can my words.  Hopefully the combination can convey my feelings to some extent, but you really have to experience it yourself, for a couple months at least, to really understand what I’m talking about.

Now I realize that most people don’t prefer urban grime to mountain majesty .  But here’s the kicker: HK has both.  80% of HK is actually green space.  It has mountains, forests and ocean views.  And that’s what really seals the deal.  HK can actually compete with Boulder on Boulder’s home turf.  On HK’s home turf, Boulder has nothing to offer.  Discovery Bay is a town on Lantau Island, HK’s largest island.  Lantau is sparsely populated and heavily forested.  It’s quiet, except for the birdsong.  Discovery Bay actually reminds me of Boulder, which is probably why it’s so popular with the gweilo.  By American standards, Boulder has great transportation.  Public transportation is efficient, and the bike lanes make getting around without a car pleasant and easy.  But Discovery Bay beats Boulder here; there are no cars allowed in the town (just golf carts and bikes).  The lack of cars makes it a great place for kids to run around with dogs, and creates a vibe more laid back than a vegan co-op in North Boulder.

The winner, in a colossal upset, is HK.  The score so far, USA 1, HK 2.  This was a competition between two winners, but somebody had to come out on top.  Sustainability is next, and there the USA and HK are both losers, but somebody has to win that one too.

The Wall

As I sit in my little apartment listening to the HK cabbies wail away on their horns, I’m realizing I’ve hit a wall.  I was warned about this.  It’s part of the adjustment process.  Most expats go through this, I’m told.  At first, the new place is so different, so exotic, so unending interesting that you don’t have time to get bogged down by the annoyances come with any culture and place.  But they’re really starting to build up in me.  I’m not a tourist anymore.  I live here.  Now that I’m a little more invested in the place, it bothers me more when people disrespect it.

The cabbies outside are frustrated.  There’s a delivery truck in the road, and it’s way too big to get around the corner.  So they’re just holding down their horns until it moves.  It’s like they are literally trying to blast it out of the road with sound.  Needless to say, it doesn’t work.   In order to get around this corner, the truck is gonna lurch back and forth, blocking the intersection for twenty minutes or so, and all the honking in the world isn’t gonna make the driver change his mind, nor will it speed him up.  But the cabbies won’t go around, and they won’t stop pounding on their horns.  Through their horns, they’re transmitting their anger into my brain.  And thousands of other brains in the immediate vicinity.

The cabbies are symbolic of my two biggest frustrations in HK.  The first is noise pollution.  The second is the complete disregard for the feelings of strangers.  They’re related.

The auditory environment here is really difficult to deal with.  Besides the constant blare of car horns, there’s construction everywhere.  All the time.  I love music, but I’d rather not wear headphones all of the time that I’m outside.  But that’s what I find myself doing.  At night, I play white noise in my bedroom to drown out the car horns.  During the day, my desk is right next to the window, and they’re doing construction on my building.  They’re doing construction on all the buildings.  All the time.   It feels like they’re drilling directly into my skull.

It’s like every aspect of the environment has been designed to maximize short-term profit, and all other concerns are irrelevant.  When I first moved into my apartment, it had just been remodeled. Whatever products they used were really toxic, and the air in the common areas made me feel sick.  I bet those products were cheap though.  The only time people here seem to think about the impact of the physical environment on human happiness is when it directly relates to profit.  Like, if we make the environment in this bar nicer, it will attract more wealthy customers.  But that’s it.  If you’re not someone who might give me money, then I don’t give a shit about you.  That’s free-market fundamentalism.  If I left the US to get away from that mentality, I moved to the wrong place.

Despite my appreciation for the potential benefits of the Chinese way of walking, it still annoys the hell out of me sometimes.  I have yet to master the the Tao of walking.  Sometimes, in the big crowds, I get in the groove, and it’s fun.  In the morning, when I’m  trying to get somewhere, it’s not fun.  When I’m walking down a narrow sidewalk, and some guy wanders out in front of me, looking up at nothing and milling about as if he’s the only human in the city, it’s annoying.  When he still can’t see me, even though my face is 5 inches from his, it’s aggravating.  When I say “excuse me” right in his ear, and looks around bewildered, and slowly gets out of my way, completely shocked that someone might be trying to use this busy sidewalk for transportation….let’s just say it remains a good thing that I don’t have access to firearms.

This inability to recognize the existence of other people has caused some Europeans I’ve met here to speculate that Asian people have some physical problem with their peripheral vision.  I don’t buy it.  I’ve met too many Asian-Americans who have normal peripheral vision.  This is a cultural difference.  When I was in a toy store last week, I got to watch this cultural difference develop.  In the US or Europe, when a child is standing in the middle of an aisle or hallway, and he’s in someone’s way, his parents will bend over and physically focus his attention on the passing stranger.  They will put their arms on his shoulders, turn him in the direction of the human he’s ignoring, and move him out of the way.  In this way, he learns to be conscious of the existence of others in his immediate environment.  Even when there’s no possibility that they will give him something, he’s still expected to be considerate of their need to get past.  In HK, and in China, children are not corrected in this way.  I made the mistake of walking to the back of this toy store, just cause I was curious what kind of toys they have here.  Once in the back, I had a ridiculously hard time getting out.  Kids just wouldn’t get out of my way, and when I looked to their mother for help, she were just as oblivious to my presence.  When the mom did notice me, she didn’t seem to think there was anything wrong with the fact that her children were wandering back and forth, waving their arms, and just generally taking up so much physical space that it was impossible for me to past.  In the US, a mother would put her hands on her child’s arms, and gently force the kid to take up less space.  But here, because I have only the right to the physical space my body is currently physically occupying, this isn’t seen as a problem that a parent should correct.

To avoid the otherwise inevitable #2 segment to this post, let me clarify from the beginning this time.  I remember where I came from, and the grass ain’t greener.  I have no desire to go back to sitting in traffic jams.  When I lived in the US, there were lots of things that annoyed me about the culture of my own culture.  Lots.  But right now, I’m not experiencing American culture, so I’m not venting about it.  I’ll do more of that in my ongoing USA vs. HK segment.  Right now, I need to get over this wall.  I’ve been a level 2 gweilo for too long at this point.  Level 3 is on the other side, I can see it, but this wall is in my way.  Like the cabbies, I’m naively hoping that venting my frustration with the obstruction will eventually force it out of my way.

Health Care Update

So I visited the doctor for the first time in HK today.  I have a sinus infection.  Normally, I just wait these things out, but this one had been persisting for a while.  So my coworkers encouraged to see a doctor, and they helped me find one.

When I got there, they didn’t ask me if I could prove that some corporation certified to my right to see a doctor.  They just took my name, my temperature, and some basic information.  There was a wait, but we made the appointment literally 5 minutes ahead of time.  I asked how long it would be, she said a 45 minutes, so I left and came back then.  When I got there, I waited another 5 minutes, and I saw the doctor.  He checked me out, listened to what I had to say, asked me some questions, and prescribed me some decongestants.

This is western medicine, “Chinese style.”  Chinese style means lots of different little pills, rather than one pill that has all those ingredients.  Chinese people trust medicine like this more, because it is more similar to traditional Chinese medicine.  So the placebo effects are better this way.  The decongestants seem to be working about as well as what I would get in the US, but don’t make me as drowsy or jittery.  The little pills make it seem gentler…

The doctor didn’t prescribe any antibiotics, which I respect.  I’m not that sick.  But he told me that if it gets worse or persists, that he can give me some.  The whole visit, with the drugs, cost me $160 HK.  That’s about 20 bucks.  Less than a haircut.  The whole deal seemed entirely reasonable.  As an American, I must admit that I was somewhat flabbergasted by the reasonableness of it all.   No political power players politely picking my pocket.  And no perpetual payments.

I wish the Democrats well in their attempt to tame the middle-men, even though what is really needed is to gut them.  But I fear that the prostitutes in the Party are permanently paid-off by the same power players pocketing my payments.

I am officially not afraid to go to the doctor anymore!  Well, I wouldn’t go that far…better google what’s in those pills…