The Way We Dance

I didn't like dancing or seeing people dancing, and never found myself able to appreciate any part of Hong Kong's popular youth culture (so some people said I was cynical and 老人精). But when I was leaving the cinema, I missed all the movements, all the steps, all their pain, and all their smile, all against the background of dance music. I have a hunch that《狂舞派》("The Way We Dance") will be considered by many film critics as a remarkable Hong Kong movie of all time.

Crying in the Party

As many Hong Kong people know, this is a Cantonese song sung by Eason Chan. It tells a story about a young man bursting into tears after swigging a few glasses of alcoholic drinks. The joyful party music was then brought to a halt and his friends came around him. The story ends with the consoling thought (or the thought consoling to the lyric writer himself) that when all young tears run dry (!) you will find yourself a mature person missing the old days. Physiologically speaking, however, tears are secretions that can be repeatedly produced through lacrimation as long as you are not dead.

Understandably, "young tears" may be different. I have heard from many people that they sometimes felt extremely lonely when in the loud laughing crowd, but would not cry in the public after a certain age. Deep loneliness cannot be dissolved easily by talks about the bright side of life or the eternality of anything. Loud laughs in the party are but flavourless background music when your mind plunged deeply into loneliness.

Fortunately, there are some people who often laugh from the bottom of their hearts, without a gleam of melancholy. Perhaps that may be a stage that will pass eventually. Yet they deserve to be envied by any “mature person.”

Ah, Hong Kong People Hate Chinese Mainlanders...?

BBC Radio Oxford has also reported the news that a full-page advertisement was published on a Hong Kong newspaper complaining about Chinese mainland “locusts” swarming into the territory. Perhaps many British people believe that a large part of us, Hong Kong people, hate Chinese mainlanders, and they feel proud of their colonial rule.

In Hong Kong, there have been two sorts of responses to that advertisement: that it is always wrong to discriminate against the mainlanders; and very differently, that we can make use of the discrimination to resist the Chinese Communist Party. The latter suggestion is a chimera; at least it is so at the present stage of Hong Kong politics. How about the wrongness of discrimination?

Discrimination causes two kinds of harm: harm to others and harm to self. Obviously, it can harm others, for in most cases discrimination is motivated by malicious stereotypes, which are seriously disrespectful to the victims, and these stereotypes may lead to the outcomes that are much more violent than disrespectful attitudes. A friend of mine has explained that nicely: “A stereotype needs not function as a valid and sound accusation against a group of people to be dangerous; all it needs to do is implant a certain image in people's minds, which is inevitably and subconsciously invoked when we interact with that particular group of people.” This kind of implanted image, being the product of oversimplification, can be very effective in motivating actions (consider the Holocaust and Nanjing Massacre).

What, then, is the self-harm of discrimination? Very often, we discriminate against others because of ignorance and arrogance on our part, but ironically, we are inclined to give moral reasons (the superficial ones, of course) for why we discriminate against others. In such a way, we are being inconsistent and morally ugly: the inconsistency needs no further explanation, and moral ugliness is nevertheless ugliness whether we love to scorn at morality or not. These can count as self-harm. There is another kind of self-harm, a more tangible one. Stereotypes, as said, are products of oversimplification; interestingly, they in turn encourage further acts of oversimplification. In our case, some Hong Kong people’s stereotyping of mainlanders must have made themselves even more ignorant about their countrymen through oversimplification, and oversimplification, in this wonderful self-sustaining cycle, encourages more arrogance and laziness of thinking, both of which are fantastic cheerleaders for discrimination. (First draft on 10th February)