A Chinese Sports Day

Sports Day in the calendar in a Hong Kong school is a much anticipated affair, mainly because it means two days off teaching and usually an extra day’s holiday to recognize the hard effort staff and students have provided. For me, it was just another part of a long list of misunderstandings and being oblivious to what was going on around me, but a fun couple of days nonetheless.

Prior to the day proper I get my usual couple of emails all in Chinese. I usually ask my neighbour in the staffroom, Mr Put, to translate them for me or to give them a quick glance. Actually, his job assigned by the panel chair (HOD) is to read all the group emails first and then translate them for me but as he never reads his emails, it is up to me to decide whether any may be important—I try and do this by looking at dates and if my name is there. My name sticks out likes dog’s balls because the rest are written in Chinese characters—I always ask in this case as I assume this may be important. More often than not it’s not—they just like announcements here. On one particular email it had my name and the dates of the sports days so I requested a translation. This translation came back at that I’m assisting in using the starting gun. I got very excited because that meant loading cartridges, gunpowder on the hands, and I could fantasize about being a gangster or cowboy shooting in the air in celebration. One morning I heard my name in the midst of an announcement in Cantonese during a class and I looking pleadingly for a translation, but the kids would have got it more wrong than the teachers who told me later that my name had been left off the programme advertising ‘activities’. Sadly the translation stopped there, and I couldn’t shed any light on what ‘activities’ meant.

My colleagues are very caring and considerate and many of them asked how I was planning to get to the stadium, as it was held in a purpose-built venue. Many offered bus numbers and trains to take. Brian, the organizer and head of PE, had already given me some maps with a bus I could take to Tsing Yi (pronounced Ching Yee), an island not far from the school.

On the appointed day I went to the designated bus stop but had to wait about 20 minutes, I must have just missed the previous bus. Unfortunately, instead of going directly to the destination like my school bus, this one meandered around the place going to as many stops it could. Instead of taking 25 minutes like my usual bus, it took an hour to travel a similar distance. I got to the bus stop and terminus and had to look for the sports ground which was well signposted but 30 minutes late. I had many calls from concerned colleagues worried that I might be lost. I eventually made it in time to see the Chinese flag being paraded around the ground. I’m just disappointed I missed the female militia in miniskirts and boots.

The first races are the hurdles and I am excited about the starting gun, we go over to get ready and I am handed the gun, which is actually just an air horn connected to a microphone that trips the timer. I was gutted but tried hard not to let my disappointment show. My job was to start the races but sounding the horn and dropping a red flag (note the symbolism). Some student helpers did the “on your marks, get set…” then I fired, I mean, pressed the button. I thought the 'on your marks' was some kind of universal expression, much like OK and 'testing' when they speak into a microphone and it starts cutting out--you'll hear a whole lot of Chinese and then, "...testing, testing.." but I later found out that they had taught the whole school the English race start for my benefit.

Later in the day, Brian informed me that I was running in the 100 metre C grade final. I thought this was the activity that I was entered into. This would be easy, I thought. When I was a kid I always was in the 100 metres final at high school. What does one do in this situation? Let the kids win because it wouldn’t be fair if the teacher beat the kids? It was the C grade so they couldn’t be fast and I didn’t want to show them up.

Later in the afternoon it was time to have the finals, and it was time. I lined up with the racers, some of whom asked if I was nervous. I had an interview with one of the senior students over the stadium loudspeaker. I reached my mark, got set and the horn went off. All the boys raced ahead of me leaving me chugging away on the track. The kids in the crowd cheered, or laughed at this bald, middle-aged man being thoroughly thrashed—these kids were fast! I was embarrassingly slow. I think my time read 19 something seconds—I think I used to do it in 14 seconds at school—not hugely fast, but respectable.

The kids were pretty good about it and I thought that’s good, it’s over. But no, the ‘activity’ hadn’t been run yet as I was to find out the next day. Day two, a Friday, saw more finals and the relays. The bonus too, was that it was only half a day so we could have a three and a half day weekend as Monday was a holiday. The kids all had T shirts of different colours for their form classes and all their entries went toward a grand prize for the form class with the most entries etc, which encouraged a lot of participation. The relays were also run as an interclass competition with each class sitting together in the stands chanting slogans creating a fantastic atmosphere. After the relays I was dragged over in front of the stand to be in the egg and spoon staff relay. We were in three teams, representing the three school houses. Brian was in my team and brought up my race the day before. He said some thing which sounded like. “You just need to get fitter”, but what he actually said was, “you fatter, when you first come you have no stomach.” I put it down to all those yum cha lunches. I vow to cut back on BBQ pork. For the race we couldn’t use eggs because they would mess up the track so we had to use ping pong balls. They are quite difficult to keep on a spoon I can tell you. We seemed to do quite well but I’m sure we had an extra team member because we managed to come last.

Jo and the kids came for a visit and managed to see the awards ceremony, which they do with a podium and medals and there were short speeches. The kids loved the sense of achievement and the ceremony. This included me as I was brought up to receive my bronze medal for coming third in the teachers’ relay!

Mid-Autumn Festivities

The word festival is always a delightful one to hear but here in Hong Kong it always seems to have more significance. The word comes from the word or feast, meaning some type of gluttony is officially encouraged, just as the same way carnival comes from the Latin word for meat. A celebration where lots of meat is eaten. At the moment it is Mid-autumn festival where the order of the day seems to be mooncakes. They are mad on mooncakes. Months before the festival there are displays in the supermarkets and women dressed in a traditional costume selling their brand of mooncakes. It’s very much like out lead-in to Christmas, and they have that too. Or Easter, and they get that one too.

Mooncakes are pastries which have a sweet crust and filled with lotus seed paste and have a salted hen’s or duck’s egg in the centre. They are very rich and delicious. The idea is the egg is supposed to resemble the full moon.

The mid-autumn festival celebrates the harvest and is timed with the full moon, usually in early October or late August, depending on the phases of the moon. As with most important festivals here it is a public holiday, although this year it fell on a Saturday. Thursday was a holiday for National Day and if we were in Mainland China we’d get a week off, called the Golden Week. No worries, we’ll get a long weekend in a couple of weeks for Tomb Sweeping day when people go and tend the tombs and pay respects to their ancestors.

So along with eating traditional mooncakes and new types, like the ‘Snowy’ (covered in white icing and with a huge range of very sweet fillings, intended to be eaten cold or frozen) people will come out late at night to view the full moon and turn on their lanterns. Kids have all different types from cartoon characters to butterflies and they stay out really late. They used to have traditionally candle-lit lanterns but some kids used to make little bonfires of them leaving piles of wax and soot for the council to clean up, so they just simply banned them. Now they have to have battery operated ones—think it’s a conspiracy from the battery makers personally.
Poppy thoroughly enjoyed her Mid-Autumn Festival with her cousins, staying up late and getting to eat ice-cream in the warm evening under the glow of a full moon and thousands of coloured lights.

Cheung Chau

Hong Kong is not only a land of skyscrapers and high density housing, it has hundreds of islands scattered throughout the territory. Lantau is the largest and now seems connected to Hong Kong, although it’s a pretty impressive bridge. When you fly into Hong Kong you will land on Lantau, also home to Disneyland. Yet, and because Hong Kong is a land of total contrasts, the other side of Lantau is like going back in time. You can take a ferry to a village called Tai O which typifies some of the traditional fishing villages, with houses on stilts and many houseboats.

Last weekend we went to one of my favourite islands, Cheung Chau, which lies to the east of Lantau and the south of Hong Kong and Lamma islands. Jo and I went here back in 04, took a sampan across the harbour and walked around the southern part of the island and had a nice cold Blue Girl before heading back on the ferry. It was a truly magic day. This time it was to celebrate my nephew Eddy’s 4th birthday.

To get to Cheung Chau you need to take a ferry from Hong Kong Island itself, under the shadow of the monolithic IFC tower. If you saw the latest Batman movie, this is the one he ‘flies’ down from. Across from this tower is the International Commerce Centre, which is still under construction and will be taller than the IFC when finished next year. It was planned to be even taller but had to scaled back to some regulation stating that buildings can’t be any taller than the mountains surrounding the city. It will be the third highest in the world. So between these two behemoths is the ferry terminal to Cheng Chau.

It’s a pleasant 50 minute cruise to the island and you approach the island from its western side, through a typhoon shelter ( I now understand why having been through one already) and this artificially sheltered harbour is filled with all sorts of vessels, from small sampans to quite large residential junks. We had a yum cha lunch at one of the many restaurants that line the waterfront and then walked to hundred metres or so to the other side. Cheng Chau is a bone shaped island with two wide clumps at the north and south. It is very resorty, but not in a glitzy way, it reminded me of a cross between the less touristy parts of the Greek Islands. On the other side there is a golden sanded beech and we settled down on the beech to have a swim and to relax.

The beach sits on a nicely concave bay and it looks over to Lamma Island in the foreground and the southern side of Hong Kong Island in the distance—that is if you could see it past the pollution. Not only air pollution but there were all sorts of things floating in the water—I need not elaborate. In a similar way that we advertise the fire danger there was a dial near the lifeguard station that read ‘water temperature 28 degrees; water quality, very good. I would hate to see what ‘bad’ was. But all in all, it was a relaxing time. True to what usually happens in public places there seems to an endless list of things you cannot do at the beech or park. One of these was play ball sports, so that put an end to the idea of beach cricket. A woman life guard came over to tell the kids off, whereby my sister-in-law, Natasha, asked her to get somebody to clean the beach up in a tongue-in-cheek way. A few minutes later, a Hakka woman in her ubiquitous black hat came along, cleaning the beach. Too bad about the blue condom still floating in the water.

Of course all good things must come to an end and we had to head home. On the way back to the ferry we stopped off to have a fruit kebab—frozen pieces of fruit on a stick. Totally delicious and thirst quenching. At the ferry terminal we bumped into a young couple from the restaurant who had been taking photos of the kids and asked to take more photos and to pose with us. At the beach I had taken Poppy to the toilet a couple of times and people stopped to take photos of her and us. I am probably on Facebook somewhere in China with my pasty white body walking topless and barefooted on the footpath with a little blonde girl.

When we got back to Kowloon after another quick trip on the Star Ferry we went o the biggest mall I’ve ever been to—Harbour View. Lily took us to the food court there, and no McDonald’s in sight. You went around and ordered your food, all displayed with very realistic plastic models and then paid at a central till and then collected your food. Talk about delicious and cheap. Across from the food court we spied a bookshop. This was exciting as Bookshops selling English books are not very common where we live in the New Territories. It was a PageOne store and made Borders look a bit silly really with its extensive collection. Books are the only things that seem quite expensive so far, about the same price as back home. Because I am reading a book a week here I could live with paying a normal price for something.

Happy Anniversary China

Today is the 60th anniversary of modern China and it is a holiday. Sixty years ago Mao Tse-tung proclaimed the beginning of the People's Republic of China. In 1997 Hong Kong was handed back to China. Today they proclain One country, two systems, which means that Hong Kong can still be a capitalist powerhouse and decide its own internal affairs while still being part of the great republic. This supposed contradiction is quite typical of this place. We took the kids for a walk to our local park and it was full of people celebrating. The centrepiece of this was an American style marching band, peopled by hundreds of school kids (actually all girls) sweating away in these ornate uniforms. Now is it just me, but does it seem ironic that these people are celebrating a communist victory in a territory, still capitalist, once owned by Britain, with a traditionally Americain parade?