China Droll has relocated to our own domain.
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China Droll has relocated to our own domain.
We will no longer be posting at this site and comments have been disabled. You can get back into the fray at our new domain.
Hallo all ye faithful readers.
China Droll has moved to its final destination:
Please visit vigorously.
Spam, spam, spam, spam, lovely spam, beautiful spam. I wish I could get more of it. Talking of which, one of today’s 2788 spam messages offered the following astonishing insight into the male psyche:
“Sexual performance and sperm volume are the most intimate men’s sexual concerns. WonderCum is designed to solve them in a careful, safe and efficient way.
Studies show that a greater sperm volume means more pleasure for both partners. WonderCum increases your fertility and allows you to have multiply orgasms. 100 % natural ingredients – only minerals and herbs – will boost your sperm volume and potency in a safe and natural way. “
I had no idea! Having only been on the receiving end as it were, I never even thought of measuring the output – yes I’m embarrassed to say I never gave it a thought.
Now I know why some men are such plonkers in bed: They simply can’t come up with the required literage.
Well, I’m off to gather herbs. And minerals. As we say in Norwegian: When you have the bridle, you will get the cow. (“Build it and they will cum.”)
It was the familiar nightmare against which I thought I had prepared myself so well by being hyper scrupulous with the whereabouts of my belongings:
Got off the ferry this morning and skipped lightly to the MTR (“metro”) station to go and teach Cantonese in Causeway Bay. Reached into bag, or rather, started wurzeling in my bag ( new Cockney rhyming slang: Wurzel Gummidge, rummage) – where was my wallet?
Oh no! I had left it on the bloody ferry!
Anybody who has ever left anything on the Lantau ferry knows this: It’s the black hole of belongings. The ferry guys take everything they find, including children’s shoes, books by Ian McEwan and even food, to supplement their meagre incomes.
Knowing that my wallet with a not insignificant amount of money in it was gone forever, I nevertheless started legging it back to the ferry pier with a huge, resounding F word filling up all my brainwaves.
My phone went and an unknown number came up. “Wei, did you just lose your wallet? It’s in the office at the ferry pier.”
There is a god. Or something.
Still, I know it was the ferry guys who took the laptop I accidentally left under some newspapers on the ferry last January, and not some opportunist thieves living in Mui Wo; the opportunist thieves, in fact, on whom the ferry company normally blame all losses. There just can’t be that many thieves living in such a small place.
But I’m happy today, oh yeah. Now I won’t have to sit for a whole day in Immigration Tower waiting to get a new ID card, listening to HK people trying to quack out Filipino names. Yes there is a god.
I’m just thinking of the passenger who had a bag of cannabis planted in his/her luggage going through Narita airport https://www.scmp.com/portal/site/SCMP/menuitem.2af62ecb329d3d7733492d9253a0a0a0/?vgnextoid=225018a4db52a110VgnVCM100000360a0a0aRCRD&ss=Hong+Kong&s=News
(someone please tell me how to turn this link into one word?)
for sniffer dogs to find, but because of dogs’ inability and customs guy’s stupidity (let’s see…. what black bag was it again?) was allowed to wander out of the airport with HK$ 75 000’s worth of dope.
I was just thinking, wouldn’t it be hilarious if the person just stayed one night in Tokyo, not checking the outside pockets of his/her bag, and then flew the next morning to Singapore? Or Saudi Arabia?
“Wait officer, I can explain, it must have been the customs men at Narita putting it there to test their sniffer dogs!”
“Yeah right! Now, I forget… is that twenty lashes plus hanging or just hanging?”
“I have no idea how that bag got there! Must have been those guys at Narita.”
“Yeah right! I forget … is it supposed to be a hundred lashes, right hand cut off and beheading, or just beheading?”
I’ve just come back from what should have been an invigorating walk with Piles; a walk training not only the calf muscles and improving my overall well-being and benevolence, but my arm muscles as well seeing I have to drag Piles the whole way. That boy hates heat and should live in Norway, leaving balmy HK to us amphibians.
Anyway, the walk turned out not to be invigorating at all but a kind of nightmare, the reason being CARS.
Pui O on Lantau Island where I have been living for five years; no, not only Pui O, the whole island actually, has turned into some kind of haven for lazy show-offs. Not only can they not walk five meters, when they get their sacred cars (at least two per household) it has to be enormous, fkuc-off SUVs, covered in stickers saying “Save nature!”
Pui O is the countryside and has country roads. These bastards drive as if they’re on the Tolo Highway, clearly vexed at having impertinent pedestrians like Piles and me being in their personal space which they and only they own. They glower. They stare. they honk their horns. 
Here I am saving the world’s resources for their children and I get grief?
Because they can’t be arsed to ride a bike to the bus stop 200 meters away or walk, I won’t have shampoo in ten years’ time. The whole world’s everything is based on oil, but they use it like they have their own personal oil-well which will never run out, tucked away somewhere behind Park’n’Shop.
But the worst thing about cars is they’re so incredibly ugly. Everywhere I go, they are, marring the scenery, making it impossible to take photos or let the eye get a good nature workout.
Now Pui O is being swamped by pilots who, not happy being away from their planes for any amount of time, need cars the size of a Boeing 747, to feel more comfortable as they drive a bottle of laxative home from the shop.
Meanwhile the entire Pui O is looking more and more like the gigantic parking lot outside a mall for people with particularly bad taste.
And the ever helpful government doesn’t have to be asked twice: To ensure that these people and their families will soon lose the use of their legs from atrophy, our civil engineering/transport dept is building more and more roads, widening roads, flattening roads and taking away nasty trees dropping leaves on roads, all for the purpose of letting guys with cars the size of houses feel they’re living back in the States or Oz.
I’ve written about this before and no doubt I’ll get back to it again and again.
You really want to do something for your children? Don’t drive!
I’ve never even pretended to have any insight into the human mind and its workings. Everything people say, do and think is a source of constant bafflement for me.
But I know one thing about people: They will always do the opposite of what I tell them. In that they are not unlike my dog Piles. If we’re on the beach and I say for example: “Piles, don’t eat that three day dead fish and puke it up later all over the living room floor,” then that’s exactly what he’ll do.
So I’m not at all surprised, when I tell my helper to take Piles for a one hour walk, that she tidies my underwear drawer instead.
Or that she, when I tell her not to use binliners or plastic bags for rubbish but empty the kitchen rubbish bucket straight into the communal rubbish bin (already with thick black bin liner) thus saving one layer of plastic, takes in binliners from outside, pours the rubbish into it and leaves the whole thing on the kitchen floor.
I’m not at all surprised, when my Canto students ask me what’s the best way to learn Cantonese and I tell them talking to some of the 7 million free teachers milling around Hong Kong, ( the old “talking and listening” technique they used as a child to learn their mother tongue in fact), that they instead get Lonely Planet’s Cantonese glossary and only ever talk English with Chinese people, reserving their Cantonese for me.
And when people congregate on my roof for a Sichuan meal and ask me where the ashtrays are and I tell them just to chuck their cigarette butts on the floor (of the roof) because my roof is the Free State Of China and I’ll sweep up everything the next day and isn’t it lovely to be able to chuck stuff once in a while – then I’m not at all surprised that they don’t chuck a single fag end but instead push them into the soil of my flower pots, poisoning the plants.
Not suprised at all. But maybe a little bit baffled.
Then again I don’t listen to what people tell me either.
But of course!!!! Now I see clearly. The answer has been right under my nose, literally, for years.
I have complained many times, both in this forum and in general, about Hong Kong (and increasingly, mainland) people’s irritating and not a little insulting habit of answering in a completely different language when addressed in Cantonese.
When asked why they inevitably answer: “I’m afraid you wouldn’t understand, ” which is even more insulting.
Yesterday, however, I found the real reason: They’ve been brainwashed to death since childhood. Why haven’t I put two and two together before!
I was getting on the ferry and behind me were a couple with their young child in a tram. I mean pram. Feeling particularly benevolent I said to the child: “細佬, ä½ å¥½! ä½ åŽ»é‚Šå‘€. ” wherupon the parents, like millions of parents before them, started prodding the poor tyke and pointing at me, screaming: “Say ha-lou! Say ha-lou!” in a kind of English, in that unnaturally high-pitched, over-bright way that some parents think is easier for children to understand.
The kid looked rather put out and said nothing, certainly not “ha-lou”, so I walked on quickly, cursing myself for even trying.
Then: Bang! Epiphany.
But of course: This “say ha-lou” thing happens every but every every every bloody single time I speak to a child. Therefore it is to be presumed that all parents do it to all children all the time. The habits rammed down one’s throat in childhood are difficult if not impossible to break, and so it is that Hong Kong people, like linguistic Pavlov’s dogs, on seeing whitey invariably break into English. Or Honglish.
It’s an involuntary reflex, like closing your eyes when someone approaches your face at high speed wielding a pair of scissors.
To understand everything is to forgive everything, allegedly. So will I now treat people who answer me in a completely different language when I address them in Cantonese, with more compassion? Probably not. No, definitely not. But from now on I’ll go straight to the root of the problem: The “say ha-lou” parents. Hoi hoi, I’m going to turn this thing around, you’ll see! And in twenty years we’ll have a whole generation answering people in the same language in which they’ve been addressed!
Halleluja.
This dude was sitting behind me as I gave a lecture on quacked out a few words in Cantonese in Ye Olde Teaee Shoppee last night. That place is highly recommended by the way.
Smack in the middle of Central, in Wellington street to be exact, the 欒 香 園 å’– å•¡ 室 (Happy Fragrant Garden Coffee parlour) (which isn’t a coffee parlour at all but a greasy spoon, ) features ridiculously low prices, fairly insane staff (one drunk from 10 am) and a laid-back atmosphere.
That’s where I build up my secret guerrilla force to fight back against the evil hegemony of Mandarin.
Anyway, this beautiful guy was sitting behind me, blogworthy. I said “You’re so handsome, can I take your photograph?” but the poor guy kept ducking from side to side – he thought I wanted to immortalise the tiles behind him.
How modest can you get?
So yeah, my dog Piles, a pain in the arse. After all this sorrow, despair and incomprehension over the sheer magnitude of the last ten days’ events; Myanmar, Sichuan, human error and evil, all the things that a brain that’s safely ensconced in Hong Kong can’t possibly take in, there comes a time when one wants to bond with one’s nearest and dearest.
In my case: Piles. So I bought him this ball (HK$75.00) , thinking we could have some fun on the beach together; something Beckhamesque: Tackling, some sliding tackles perhaps, Brazilian back-kicks, generally running together with a ball like men do.
Yeah, right. Piles’ idea of playing footbal is this: He takes the ball, crushes it between his not insignificant jaws and instead of heading it back to me, runs down the beach with it, with me galloping behind him, squeaking: “Offside! Yellow card! Nil points!”
Then he eats the shit out of it.
So much for male dog bonding. In future I’ll only do bone-ding with that ingrate. If a dog can show so little appreciation of my efforts but instead quite frankly shit all over my god intentions, how can people ever have children? In my next life I’ll be a technical appliance. Then I’ll get the gratitude and good treatment I deserve.
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