4th December ‘06 Hong Kong

Other People’s Stories

I - Mike’s Shoe Tale

Travelling back and forth between CC & HK I frequently meet a chap called Mike, who is an actor, director, and to make a living, a teacher.

He came out here over twenty years ago to join an English language theatre co.

He’s got some great stories, and perhaps my favourite involves an instant of mistranslation.

It was told to him by a friend, who, if my memory serves me right, had been in the police force here.

If you’re of western origin and you want to join the HK police force, you have to take a X week long immersion course in Cantonese, where you speak nothing but, well, Cantonese.

At this chap’s passing out parade the gentleman who was assessing the graduates on parade was an Anglophile by origin, and supposedly spoke good Cantonese, as he was high up in the force.

So, the Hi Heid Yin is wandering about lording it over the graduates, flicking the odd lapel and so on.

He comes past a young lady, and then he stops, stares down at her shoes and says very loudly, so that the whole audience of families, dignitaries and so on, can hear:

“My dear lady your shoe is dirty”.

At least that’s what he thought he said.

What with the tonal differences in certain words here, one sound can mean many things, with slight tonal variations, making it mean other things.

What he actually said was:

“My dear lady your [exceptionally offensive word for a lady’s front bottom, favoured by Derek & Clive, that sounds a lot like King Kanute] is dirty”

Oh dear.

II – Sean & Bonnie’s Old Man Tale

Sean and Bonnie (who run the company) were working in Berlin earlier in the year, and one night they went looking for some food, and were told by a restaurant, which was full, that the bar around the corner did good food.

So they went along to the bar.

Sitting down at a table, Bonnie picked up a place mat and looked at it for a moment. There was a face on it that she recognised.

A craggedy faced old Chinese man.

She showed it to Sean and they figured out that it was an old chap from Cheung Chau who they frequently see wandering around, and indeed, who we saw last night, whilst currying.

This fellow is an old loner, who only has one arm and a really interesting, craggy face.

It turned out that the owner of the bar had been in HK for one day, on his way back from somewhere else, and decided to take a trip to CC, when he espied the gentleman on the ferry. He surreptitiously took a couple of snaps of the old man from a low level.

And now the image of the old man’s face is the brand image of the café, it adorns the front of the shop, it’s on their coasters and bottles of Vodka.

Of course the bar owner didn’t ask the old man’s permission, so he is totally unaware, that on another continent, there is a bar festooned with his visage.

How very, very odd.

Just imagine that it was you…

It reminds me of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, when Arthur Dent finds a huge statue of himself on a far distant planet, after a dispute with a tea making machine.