the daily hku grind

My final project will be to find out how the Jockey Club has helped to build Hong Kong since the 1950s when it formally declared part of its surplus earnings to charity and community projects.

The first story angle I will try to pursue is to find out what kind of impact will the financial crisis have on the Jockey Club. Are they really at risk of going into the red (for the first time since their establishment), or are they hyping up the risks to persuade the government to lower the Jockey Club’s betting duty?

In order to answer this question, I will need to secure interviews with financial analysts and with a spokesperson from the Jockey Club. If these interviews fall through, then I will go to plan B, which is to take a look at the two sides of the coin that is horse racing in Hong Kong — on the one hand, gambling on horses is frowned upon as a social ill that nonetheless is legal and popular; on the other hand, the profit from the races has a long history of supporting an incredible amount of Hong Kong’s civic and social needs. In this case, I might speak with the Gambling Addicts Society and the Chinese Mental Health Association.

This Tuesday evening I will be at the races and will try to capture good images to be used in the project. I will also do vox pops with spectators and try to record some ambient sounds.

Audio soundslide of cage homes can be found here:

http://www.hkstories.net/mj2008_fall13/cage_home_photos/cage_home_photos/

CAGE HOME: transcipt

Narrator
Fuk Tsuen Street, ten minutes from the shopping malls of Mongkok. Here, in an otherwise unremarkable building, more than a dozen men share a run-down flat. They live in cage homes.

Gong Tsiu Gau rents a cage bed in this flat. He is 62 years old and has been unemployed for over ten years. He survives on 3,200 dollars of social welfare a month.

Gong Tsiu Gau
“I used to be a street vendor, but I kept getting chased away by the police. I’ve been unemployed for over ten years, I tried getting a job, but couldn’t get one.

There is no kitchen here. I can’t cook my own food. I can’t even boil a vegetable. I have to spend about 46 dollars a day on two meals.”

Narrator
1.3 million people in Hong Kong live in poverty. 100,000 live in cage and cubicle homes, the cheapest forms of housing in a city of ever-rising rents, where there isn’t enough public housing to meet demand.

Cage homes date back to the 1950s, when they provided affordable, if uncomfortable, shelter for refugees from mainland China. Now, most cage home dwellers are single men who survive on an average of 2,895 dollars per month. 1,400 dollars of that goes to rent.

Chow Kam Chuen once lived in a cage home. He was a restaurant worker when he lost his job during the SARS crisis in 2003. He survived by working odd jobs and finding the cheapest housing available – a cage that cost 900 dollars per month.

Chow Kam Chuen
“People who live in caged homes, they are down and out, they’re single, they’re mentally ill, physically disabled. Some are mainlanders, some are Southeast Asians, and some are blacks. It is like the United Nations.”

Narrator
The Society for Community Organization, a social welfare group, works to improve the living conditions of those who live in cage and cubicle homes. Earlier this month, on World Habitat Day, they staged a protest demanding more action from the Hong Kong government.

Protestors chanting
“[Cage homes are] the shame of Hong Kong!”

Legislator Leung Kwok Hung
“I lived in a cage home when I was a kid. It was just for one month. I couldn’t stand it. I used to believe that cage homes no longer existed, but then I found out that they still exist. The government’s policy is not to get rid of cage homes – just to control them.”

Narrator
On Fuk Tsuen Street, life is bleak.

Gong Tsiu Gau
It’s not good to live here. The air is not good. Most people are sick. A few days ago an old man passed away. He lived in that bed right there. Sometimes people get really down, they get frustrated. They go out, they get drunk. This old man drank too much and passed away. He was about 70 years old. He was in a bad mood. Everyone who lives here is in a bad mood.

[END]

The SCMP published a story today about the Jockey Club going into the red for the first time because of a lower turnover amid the economic downturn.

Racing turnover has already dropped by 6 per cent compared with the same period of last season. The club expects that the annual drop in turnover could reach 10 per cent by the end of the season. If that happened, then losses could amount to HK$100 million.

For my final project I have a couple of ideas.

Proposal 1

I would like to explore the role of horse-racing and the Jockey Club as a part of Hong Kong’s heritage.

The races are, by no means, just some colonial past time far removed from Hong Kong’s culture. In fact,  racing has become completely absorbed by Hong Kong and it is now an integral part of the city’s identity. Moreover, the Jockey Club is one of the oldest institutions founded in Hong Kong, dating back to 1884. It is now one of the largest charitable organisations in the region and is involved in everything from the promotion of Chinese medicine to scholarship programmes to the arts.

On a recent visit to the races, I noticed that the spectator stand was barely occupied. I am guessing that the current global financial crisis may have caused Hong Kong people to cut down on betting at the races. Is this true and how does this affect the Jockey Club? How will the financial crisis affect the Jockey Club in general?

I will try to interview someone from the Racing Museum and also try to speak with someone representing the Jockey Club. Hong Kong University’s Faculty of Social Sciences have done studies on Hong Kong’s gambling trends, so I am sure I can speak to a professor in more depth about the races in particular. And, of course, I will speak with the regular folks in the streets of Hong Kong to gauge their (changing?) attitudes towards horse racing and what the Jockey Club means for them. I will try to find an interviewee who is a gambler and do a more in depth study on that person.

Proposal 2

Another idea I would like to explore is how “Q mark” brands, such as Lee Kam Kee, reflects Hong Kong’s changing identity.

Lee Kam Kee began with a popular bottle of oyster sauce in 1888 and is now one of the most widely recognised Hong Kong names in Chinese cooking, domestically and abroad. The brand has been constantly reinvigorating its brand image and expanding its products in the face of competition from Mainland brands. This is in tune with Hong Kong’s economy as a whole reacting to competition from the Mainland and the focus that has shifted away from low-end processing based manufacturing to high-end products and businesses geard towards branding.

I will try to speak with a representative from Lee Kam Kee and also somebody from the Hong Kong Brand Development Council. I would also like to gauge the street’s loyalty towards Hong Kong’s brands.

Hong Kong – JMSC Three babies have died on the Chinese mainland and a 3-year-old girl in Hong Kong developed kidney stones after drinking milk spiked with melamine. Yet, these figures are hardly shocking to consumers who have come to expect little from China’s food safety administration.

We went on the streets to chat with people about their reaction to the Chinese toxic milk scandal, whether it affects their consumption habits, and if they are surprised that  another food safety scandal has emerged from China.

Mr. Li works on the Chinese mainland and will not buy Chinese dairy products. He’s not surprised that the scandal has emerged.

Stella used to eat White Rabbit candy, which has since been found to contain melamine.

Mike has been living on the Chinese mainland but he buys milk packaged in Hong Kong.

Our sound slides project will be about the caged homes that remain in Sham Shui Po. I will be taking on the role as primary interviewer as I am the only Cantonese speaker in my group. My main responsibility will be to make contact with cage dwellers and interview them. I will also be taking photographs and editing the sound slides.

I think I have the most interesting role in my group as (if everything goes well) I will get to speak directly with a cage dweller and gain insight on what it really means to live in these cages and the role that these cages and their inhabitants play in Hong Kong. The difficulty will be in not being sentimental or sensationalistic about our interview subject, and to focus on finding a good journalistic story. It will also be challenging to find someone who is willing to talk to us and answer our nosy questions and be photographed and share with us students the very real and dire problems in their lives.

We plan to pursue several channels to make contact with the cage dwellers. First we will speak with NGOs, social workers, and other grassroots organisation to see if they are willing to put us in touch with interview subjects. We think this is the best channel. Other channels to explore is to try and contact journalists and photographers who have reported on cage dwellers before and see if they have any advice or even contacts that they are willing to share with us. Our last resort will be to directly approach people at the caged homes and tell them we are students from HKU doing a project on Hong Kong housing and hope for the best!

steaming hot, freshly cooked

Originally uploaded by zzzzzoe

Dai pai dongs are street-side stalls that serve cooked food. Customers perch at grimy tables and shout their orders out to the cooks. Within minutes, their order is whipped up and served piping hot, fresh out of the wok.

First appearing after the second World War, dai pai dongs are a great example of Hong Kong’s living heritage. Despite cramped and unhygienic conditions, they are immensely popular to this day. However, the government has taken measures to gradually phase out these eateries, and dai pai dongs are slowly dwindling in numbers. The dai pai dongs in these photos can be found in Central.

Hong Kong’s Living Heritage

Skimming through other students’ blog postings through my google reader, and also inspired by some posts on our class wiki, I thought more about what constitutes Hong Kong’s “living heritage”. Googling “Hong Kong Living Culture” did not get me very good results immediately, but I came across “The Culture of Hong Kong” which links to a wide range of resources (anything from The History of Blogging in Hong Kong to Adventures of a Big White Guy Living in Hong Kong).

I decided to narrow my subject down to Hong Kong’s food heritage, as food is such a big part of Hong Kong’s culture and is something that Hong Kong people are very passionate about. Conserving dai pai dong culture has also been a recent big issue and it ties-in with the redevelopment of the Graham Street market as dai pai dong in that area is popular. A quick search on wikipedia was fruitful particularly for the links it provided at the end of the page, such as this tongue-in-cheek video about dai pai dong,  this short report by RTHK on the disappearance of dai pai dong culture debated by legco members (in Chinese) or this presentation by past HKU students on dai pai dong and both English and Chinese pages which list the reputable dai pai dong areas in Hong Kong.

interview test, check out the latest interview, it’s great!

Our correspondent, Nathan Leung, gets the latest feedback on the post-Olympic comedown from the streets of Beijing. Listen to the podcast here: 

interview-nathan-and-zoe-mp3