Living with disabled parents

March 9, 2017

Children with disabled parents gain different perspectives on life

By Marilyn Ma & Nancy Mak

On a chilly winter morning on the campus of Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU), 21- year-old Mandy Wong Man-ling walks slowly beside her mother, who is using a crutch. Wong watches her mother closely, anticipating her needs and holding her tightly when she walks down a steep slope. Later, when the mother and daughter sit down to talk to Varsity, Wong puts a few pillows on the sofa before her mother sits down.

Wong is in her final year of a social work degree at PolyU and intends to become a social worker after she graduates. It is a vocation influenced by her parents, who are both disabled due to childhood polio which affected their mobility.

Wong’s mother, Jenny Tsang Lai-kwan has a more serious condition than her husband because infections of her central nervous system caused back damage and she is now mostly unable to take public transport. Tsang uses crutches most of the time and relies on taxis and rehabilitation buses to get around the city.

Luckily, her daughter has been at her side and helping her since she was small. Tsang recalls that from around the age of eight, she would take Mandy out during school holidays to develop her awareness and alertness to her needs. Whenever they took public transport, Mandy would learn how to prepare her mother to alight from the bus one stop ahead, help her get off, and be aware of locations for disabled access.

“I think I’ve been used to paying attention to others’ needs and contingencies since I was small, so I have a higher awareness of the people around us and greater willingness and motivation to work as a frontline carer,” says Wong.
Due to her disability, Tsang was unable to take the young Mandy out to many places for exploration and discovery. So she chose to spend more time with her daughter instead to make up for it. Tsang retired from her job as an assistant clerical officer in a Government department when Mandy was studying in primary three so they could have a closer relationship and more communication.

“I want her to understand more about me. In terms of the way I live, I’m different from the others,” says Tsang. “I don’t want her to feel inferior because of me.” As Tsang suffered from low self-esteem as a child, she wanted her own daughter to have a happy childhood.

Wong spends much more time with her mum than many others of her generation. They have breakfast together every morning and go to church together at the weekends. Tsang makes a point of getting to know her daughter’s classmates and friends without being afraid of letting them know about her disability. When Mandy was in secondary school, her mum would come to her school during lunchtimes and have lunch with Mandy and her friends. She wanted Mandy’s friends to know about her.

As a result, the pair has established a very close relationship. Wong likes to share everything with her mother and feels much love in her family.

“[My] parents’ disabilities are a kind of blessing, which have had a positive effect on me,” she says.

Don’t Trust the Label

March 9, 2017

Cautious best-before dates cause unnecessary food waste

By Jade Li

At a street stall, chocolates, crackers and a variety of snacks are placed on trays for passers-by to sample. It is not long before a group of children gather in front of the stall to try some M&M chocolates from two different containers. Afterwards, they are asked which chocolate they preferred. As they struggle to recall any difference in how they tasted, they have demonstrated the point of the experiment – that it is almost impossible to taste the difference between sweets that have passed their “best-before” date and those that have not.

The activity was organised by After Best Still Good, a group devoted to reducing the amount of food wasted due to expiry dates. One of the expired snacks they gave out during the activity were Frutips, a gummy confectionary that was found dumped in huge quantities on January 15 this year. An estimated 10,000 packets of the sweets marked “best-before January 2017” were discarded at a rubbish station in Yuen Long. As news of the haul spread, many people went to “save” the candies that were still good to eat before they were tossed into a landfill. Some found their way to the After Best Still Good street stall.

A child takes part in the food testing activity.

Unfortunately, food nearing its expiry date is dumped en masse more frequently than we might think. Within a month of the Frutips incident, batches of best-before potato crisps were found in a refuse collection point in Tuen Mun. Although warehouses and supply chains are likely to be the ones at fault in these incidents, environmental groups are also concerned about the day-to-day disposal of expired food from ordinary households and about how the public understands the concept of expiry in food items.

The definition of expiry under the government’s food label policies can seem confusing. Under the Food and Drugs (Composition and Labelling) Regulations, there are two kinds of expiry labels in Hong Kong. “Best-before” dates suggest that if the food is stored properly, it can reasonably be expected to retain its specific properties up to and including the specified date. On the contrary, “Use By” dates are used in the case of highly perishable foods such as meat and dairy. Consumption of these food items are not recommended after the use-by date as they are likely to constitute an immediate danger to human health. However, members of the public have little concept of the different meanings of the two food labels. They have a limited understanding of expiry and blindly trust the printed dates instead of their senses. The result is wasted food.

Chung Hau-yin, associate professor of the School of Life Sciences at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, says that from a microbiological perspective, people should be more careful when consuming food with “Use By” labels. Since these items are prone to bacterial growth, it is better to be safe than sorry and not consume them. Meanwhile, “best-before” dates only relate to quality. Food might not be at its optimum quality once past the date but it could still be edible.

Chung says people are just not used to eating food that is not at its best so they may mistakenly think all food is inedible once it passes the date on the label. “People will know when food has gone bad, there will be a smell and they can taste it,” Chung says. Although the labels are useful guidelines, Chung thinks people should trust their instincts too.

Seria Choi Siu-ling started eating expired food two years ago because she thinks it is wasteful to throw away edible food. “In the past, we did not have such a thing as expired, we trusted our senses – smell, sight to see if it [food] had gone off,” she says. “We grew up like that; we can’t change just because of a date.”

Choi gets some of her expired food from a Facebook page called Free Food Flow. The page serves as a platform for members to exchange expired food to reduce food waste. Cat Chan, 44, is an active member of the page. Chan has been eating expired food for more than 10 years, and feels strongly about people wasting food.

“I work in the catering industry, and I can’t bear the way they dump food,” she says. “For a restaurant that closes at 10 p.m., when someone orders rice at around 9 p.m., they cook a fresh bucket just to serve two or three customers. The rest is thrown away if it isn’t sold.”

Many people overlook the fact that some pre-packaged food, such as canned foods and biscuits, have a very long shelf life. But for the sake of food safety, expiry labels are believed to set a buffer period before the actual expiry date, while “best-before” dates guarantee quality rather than safety. Under existing regulations and practices, a lot of food is thrown away before it reaches consumers.

Wong Man, 19, a former cashier at a ParknShop supermarket, says food is marked down to 40 per cent of its original price when it approaches expiry. In an effort to reduce food waste, ParknShop has been donating surplus edible vegetables, fruit, bread, meat and packaged food to charities since 2012. They also participate in the non-edible food recycling trial programmes organised by the government and various organisations. However, under the Trade Description Ordinance, it is an offence for supermarkets and food retailers to sell and give away any expired food that is past either the “best before” or “use by” date so it is written off and thrown away, says Wong.

Learning by looking

March 9, 2017

Picture books seek survival in Hong Kong

By Crystal Wu

The winter sun shines down warmly on the families gathered for a reading activity at the spacious lawn of the Peak’s Mount Austin Playground. It is a lazy Sunday afternoon, and parents and children bask in the sunlight, reading picture books they chose from a pile on a red, white and blue nylon mat at a picture books and music festival to promote parent-child reading.

Although picture books have been around for a long time, they have only grown in popularity among Hong Kong parents in recent years. According to Ada Ling, deputy manager of the retail management department of Joint Publishing (Hong Kong), sales of picture books had been flat for many years and then, in 2012, they began to increase significantly. Designed for younger children, this genre of children’s books is usually hard-backed and has pictures that take up about 90 per cent of the page.

A father of a two and four-year-old at the reading event says he chooses picture books for his children because they are simple. “They have trouble understanding books with too many words, so they would come ask me about it all the time. But with picture books I just need to give them a little guidance and they can continue reading on their own,” he says.

A parent and child reading together at a picture books and music festival.

Picture books are also a way for parents to open their children up to the world without exposing them to technology or the internet, which can be addictive and dangerous. It provides a safe environment for children to learn about their world and how to cope with different situations they may meet in the future, says Adeline Ko Pui-chung, a mother, picture book author and founder of the publisher Picture Books Cultural Industry.

But despite increasing sales, picture books still fall behind other genres. Not a single picture book made it to Joint Publishing’s December 2016 Top 20 bestselling book list, which is mostly occupied by novels, feng shui books and travel guides. Picture books by local authors are also hard to find on bestselling lists of children’s books.

Ko says parents have often scorned picture books. “People are very utilitarian in Asian societies. They think picture books, with few pages and words, are useless in getting their children to learn,” she says.

Parents want children to learn concrete information through reading instead of just reading for pleasure. Even when they buy picture books, they prefer books that are academically instructive. Lift-the-Flap Times Table and Mathematics is Fun (數學好好玩) are some of the top-selling picture books at Joint Publishing.

But Catherine McBride, a developmental psychologist and professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, says children only start reading to learn at around eight years old, according to studies in the United States. In Hong Kong, this may happen slightly earlier because children start reading at a younger age. Before that, they are just learning to read. It is important to let young children have positive emotions towards books in order to develop a reading habit, which will help them learn a lot better in the long run.

This is where picture books come in. Children at age one to two years cannot understand written words but find pictures stimulating and more interesting than their familiar home environment. “Young children won’t look at text even when parents want them to,” says McBride. From an evolutionary psychology perspective, she says, it takes effort and is unnatural for humans to look at text because throughout their evolution humans have been geared towards survival. “Learning to read is not something you need to survive. Looking at pictures and the environment is. You need to be able to distinguish what’s going on. It’s very natural,” she explains.

McBride says reading to kids with picture books even when they are one month old is good because babies love to listen to the sound of their parents’ voices before they can understand anything. Parent-child reading is especially important when the child is two years old. The child feels an attachment to reading because books serve as a point for conversation with their parent. McBride says kids always learn through pictures and listening to what parents say, and a live parent is almost always better than books presented on computer screens, even interactive ones. “Computer programmers always like to add little movements, like having a dog move its nose or wag its tail. It’s actually distracting to learning if it’s not related to the text, but adults like it,” she says.

Most of the time, when Hong Kong children are asked questions, they are expected to give one right answer. To stimulate thinking, McBride encourages parents to ask children open-ended questions when reading, such as “What do you think he’s going to do next?”, or “Why is he angry?”.

While picture books may not seem as practically useful as academically instructive books, McBride says the chronology of storytelling is useful for children to learn about timing and structure. They also offer a wider range of vocabulary and teach children different ways of expressing emotions.

She also points out that most of the reading Hong Kong children do in school is very regimented. Children rarely get to choose their own materials to read because homework takes up so much of their lives. She suggests schools allow children more time to pick their own books to read.

Fok Yuk-ying, an associate professor of the Education University’s Department of Literature and Cultural Studies and founder of the Children’s Literature and Culture Association of Hong Kong, says most primary and secondary schools try to get students to read by making them do book reports. “How do you do a book report? It’s easy – by copying. Last summer I was at a bookstore and saw a kid just copying the blurb of the book. He did the book report, but he didn’t read the book,” she says.

A Philosopher Rapper

March 9, 2017

Hip-hop artist MastaMic brings book learning and fine art into the mix
By Jennifer Leung

In a studio located in the same buildings as three hourly “love” hotels, a man in a hoodie and a pair of big round black-framed sunglasses is editing the tracks of a new song in front of two computer screens.

The unassuming studio, known as 2nd Floor Back Suite after an album by legendary local rock band Beyond, is rich in Hong Kong music history. This, after all, is where Beyond spent most of their time producing music and this is where the man in the glasses, rapper MastaMic, holds sway – at the invitation of Beyond’s Yip Sai-wing, who owns the place.

MastaMic, or Master of Microphone, is a 30-year-old Cantonese rapper. For those who have watched RTHK’s satirical show on current affairs, Headliner, MastaMic is the voice behind many of the rap songs skewering local politics.

MastaMic first got into hip-hop at secondary school. His friends were listening to Suede and Oasis, but he was more attracted to the wave of hip-hop music hitting Hong Kong at the time, through artists like Eminem and local outfit LMF, in addition to the associated skateboard culture.

He says there is nothing in particular about his childhood experiences that directed him towards becoming a rapper. But a breakdown in his relationship with his family set a series of events in motion that pushed him towards his current path.

MastaMic grew up in a traditional Chinese family and his parents had high expectations for him. He got satisfactory grades in the public exams but his rebellious nature landed him in trouble at school. He was not exactly expelled, but, “my school used another way to kick me out of school by suggesting that I leave school myself,” he says.

This created a huge conflict with his family, which he thinks was because they thought he had brought shame upon them. “My dad was very determined to kick me out,” he says. Ironically, MastaMic thinks his estrangement from his family relieves him from the pressure of conforming to other people’s expectations. He says many young musicians tell him their families hold them back from pursuing their dreams.

After staying at a hostel for a while and then with relatives, MastaMic eventually continued his studies in the Mainland through a government-sponsored scheme. He attended Wuhan University, where he studied law. “It is rubbish. It has no meaning to me,” he says. He spent most of his time rapping in his room. In his third year, he decided to abandon his degree.

“I heard a voice telling me that I should be a rapper,” he says. At first he was not sure if he really had the commitment but the voice would not go away. He dropped out and returned to Hong Kong.

Without academic or professional qualifications, MastaMic had to push forward with his plan. “I got no choice man!” he exclaims. He started out by busking in Mong Kok’s Sai Yeung Choi Street. Hong Kong audiences had not seen freestyle rappers performing in the street before. He says they had no idea what he was doing. “They were just watching a circus,” he says.

MastaMic says Hong Kong audiences did not respect rapping as an art form and the situation still has not changed. He gets annoyed when he performs in shows where he is asked to rap about anything on demand, including about other participants. “Why don’t you ask [Cantopop group] Supper Moment to sing about the guests?” he says.

It all stems from a lack of respect for and understanding of hip-hop that extends to the music industry. MastaMic was invited to join a record label, CMD, in 2008 but it was a move he regrets because the company was not willing to invest resources to nurture him. Disappointed, he left the record label and started his own, Masta & Co., with a mission to promote urban music in Hong Kong and aid the development of urban music.

In striking out on his own, he trades resources for freedom. The budget for production is tight and he always has to strike a balance between artistic choices and financial constraints. The small scale of the company also makes it harder to reach out to different media and other organisations. Not that it is ever easy to promote hip-hop in Hong Kong, something that is a source of frustration for MastaMic. “Zero, it is zero,” he says when asked if there is a supportive environment for the genre in Hong Kong.

“Hong Kong people don’t accept Hong Kong hip-hop, but they do accept Korean hip-hop,” he says.

He recalls that once, when he was performing in a bar, the audience started heckling and hissing when the host introduced him as a Cantonese rapper. “Most of you are from Hong Kong. What are you grumbling about?” he countered.

A Radical Takes Root in the Democratic Party

March 9, 2017

How one-time angry young man Au Nok-hin found his niche in a party of moderates

By Brianna To

On February 28 last year, Au Nok-hin posted a picture of himself on Facebook wearing a tuxedo, standing beside his bride. In the picture, the couple are pointing to a big yellow banner next to them that says: “This Way to Polling Station”.

Au Nok-hin and his bride pose by a sign to a polling station for the New Territories East Legco by-election in February 2016 (from Au's Facebook page) — Au Nok-hin and his bride pose by a sign to a polling station for the New Territories East Legco by-election in February 2016 (from Au’s Facebook page)

The humorous gesture is typical of the 30 year-old political geek and district councillor for the Lei Tung I constituency. Even on the day of his wedding banquet, he did not want to pass up an opportunity to urge people to vote in the Legislative Council by-election for New Territories East.

Au has been immersed in politics since his undergraduate days as a government and public administration major at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). During his student years, he was active on the campus radio station and served as an officer in the Student Union. These roles gave him his first taste of political activism.

“I experienced different kinds of political incidents at that time,” he says. The ones he remembers most clearly are the controversy over an article about sexual taboos like bestiality and incest in the Student Union magazine, Chinese University Student Press, which was slammed as immoral and obscene by groups outside of the university, and the tensions between students and then vice-chancellor, Lawrence Lau Juen-yee. Au was a member of a student group set up to monitor Lau’s university policies.

“I think I was an angry youth (fenqing憤青) when I was still studying in university,”says Au. Asked to define an “angry youth”, Au ponders a while before saying it should involve a sense of romantic idealism, the idea of a university student who cares about society and enters society to try to change it.

Over the years working in the nitty gritty of politics, Au thinks he has learnt to temper his idealism in order to realise his ideals, while holding onto his pledge to “never forget the original intention”.

After following up his first politics degree with a Master of Philosophy degree in politics, also at CUHK, Au entered politics with one goal – to join a district council to give a voice to the public. He joined the Democratic Party in 2009 because it was the pro-democracy party with the most developed district work and community networks.

Au having a meeting in the Southern District Council Secretariat.

At the time, Au’s district council goal seemed foolhardy. He recalls the pan-democrats had taken a terrible beating in the 2007 district council elections, reversing the enormous gains they had made on the back of the massive July 1 protest in 2003. Au says an influential newspaper article at the time revealed the extent of the pro-establishment camp’s grip on local politics, the effectiveness of its district organisation and its vast resources. This only strengthened his resolve to break the camp’s grip on local government.

“If the situation continues, all seats in the council will belong to the pro-establishment camp. I thought I should come out and stand for the election. I wanted to prove that the circumstances can actually be changed,” says Au.

Two other factors influenced Au’s decision – one was his time as an exchange student in Japan. During his year in Tokyo, Au was struck by its community administration and how much autonomy its communities had. “They even designed their own drain covers and street lamps; they have their own community halls,” he says admiringly. The other was his university thesis on district council funding mechanisms, which he concluded were unfairly skewed towards pro-establishment organisations.

After volunteering as a community officer for the Democratic Party’s Kam Nai-wai, Au stood and won in the mainly working class district of Lei Tung I in 2011, at the age of just 24.

Au is considered to be a relatively radical democrat and many have wondered why he joined the relatively moderate or some would even say conservative Democratic Party. He admits he has struggled over this himself. He says he does disagree with the party over issues such as how to best achieve the democratic aims of true universal suffrage and the building of the third runway at Chek Lap Kok airport. But he keeps going back to the party’s role in district work. “Back then it was hard to imagine that one person could organise a list and run in an election,” he says.

Au has served in the party’s central committee and twice run unsuccessfully for the party leadership. He says he saw his role as something of a “young turk” trying to modernise and change the party but he thinks that role should now be taken up by the young democrats who have been elected to the Legislative Council.

“I felt like I’m urging the party to change its position and stance and I’ve experienced a tug of war,” Au says. “The struggle ended when I finally figured out my role last year.”

That role is as a connector between the Democratic Party and other pro-democracy forces and civil society organisations. He wants to help build a platform to help progressive forces to work together on common causes. It was in this spirit that he accepted the job as the convenor of the Civil Human Rights Front.

“I think the Civil Human Rights Front can serve as a platform to gather and consolidate mainstream discourse among democrats to respond to the challenges brought by the regime,” he says.

Square Peg in a Round Hole

March 9, 2017

Cesar Harada, a man of many titles, started out with only one.
By Grace Li Yang Xin He

At the closing session of the TEDxSummit in Doha in 2012, a young man with a beard takes to the stage wearing a casual graphic tee-shirt and baggy trousers. “What is the common point between oil, plastic, and radioactivity?” he asks in accented English.

The accent, like the young man himself, is hard to place. In fact Cesar Harada, now 33, is the child of Japanese and French parents. He was educated in France and Britain, studied animation, graphic design and industrial design and has worked in Britain, the United States and now, Hong Kong. It is hard to categorise Harada because he has so many interests and works in so many fields – environmentalist, inventor and entrepreneur are the descriptions on his TED (technology, entertainment, design) biography.

Harada speaking at TEDxTallinn Estonia. Photo courtesy of Ulrika Rosenblad.

Harada was born in France and received most of his schooling there. Unlike his brother, who he describes as a “super intelligent guy” who is currently a lawyer, Harada says he was always seen as the “idiot in the family.” As a child, he says his teachers would even humiliate him and tell him that he had no “academic capacity”.

“I was so angry at them,” he recalls. “I pretty much just dropped out of high school and studied very, very hard. Independently.” A year later, the 18-year-old Harada took the French Baccalauréat, the national examination, and achieved stellar results.

This experience had a powerful impact on the teenager, who came to the realisation that as students, we can give up on mainstream education, but we have no excuse to give up on ourselves. “The world needs all kinds of intelligence,” he says. “And the normal education system doesn’t work for everybody.”

Although he struggled in the mainstream education system, Harada is actually obsessed with learning, and even compares it to “a drug.” After completing his public examinations, Harada embarked on a journey of life-long education and has not stopped learning since. He spent his next 10 years travelling, studying, researching, and teaching around the world.

In 2014, Harada arrived by ship in Hong Kong, as a participant in a global entrepreneurship programme called Unreasonable at Sea. The programme is designed for entrepreneurs to take their ventures into new international markets, sailing through 13 countries in the span of 100 days. Harada’s venture was a low-cost, oil-collecting robot called Protei which he is developing to clean up oil spills.

He ended up deciding to build the robot in Hong Kong because it was too expensive for him to do so in the United States where he was based at the time. Harada had originally planned to move to Shenzhen, but was drawn by the city’s potential and international culture. “I think a lot of Hong Kong people underestimate the power that is in their hands,” he says, adding that Hong Kong “has all the ingredients” to be a centre of innovation, including talent, technology, convenience, proximity to China and affordability of materials.

Harada fixing the prototype of Protei in Lamma Island, Hong Kong in 2014.

But while we may have all the ingredients for innovation at our fingertips, Harada says there needs to be systemic and cultural change in Hong Kong’s education system. Given the strength of Harada’s belief in the need for change, you might expect him to be leading rallies and marches to demand it. However, Harada says the days of protest are over for him. “I used to really be on the front line,” he recalls with a shy smile. “I was really radical.”

Now, he says he focuses less on “pointing fingers” and more on “finding the solution”. He believes that technology, culture and education are key components to positive change and to save the environment. This is why he is trying to combine these three things through his teaching. Instead of cramming their minds full of facts for tests, he wants to guide students towards deeper understanding and knowledge of the underlying issues. What he wants to do is to motivate young people to develop technologies that will benefit both people and the planet.

Harada put his skill and enthusiasm for teaching to use at The Harbour School, a private international primary and secondary school in Hong Kong that adopts a customised approach to learning. This approach generally revolves around innovation, creativity, and teamwork. The school started off as an institution for students with special needs.

During his time there, Harada organised short-term science workshops to teach students about how to reduce the use and production of plastics and ocean pollution. The workshops were popular with students and parents, but Harada says some teachers “hated him” because of the dust and noise they produced. A year after he started teaching there, The Harbour School relocated to another site and there was no space for Harada’s workshops.

As a result, Harada taught his students for a year in the premises of MakerBay, Hong Kong’s first “makerspace” for designers, inventors, engineers, artists, and entrepreneurs, which he founded.

Same Same but Different

March 9, 2017

See beyond the similarities of twins and celebrate the differences

By Jasper Cao & Jody Yu

Edited by Maggie Suen

If I Had a Hammer

March 9, 2017

Get your hands dirty, pick up a hammer and make your own stool

By Jody Yu

With its name painted in bright red on four rough steel plates, carpentry workshop Chingchun Warehouse fits in well among the cluster of grungy garages and car repair shops in To Kwa Wan’s 13 Street area.

After the sun has set on Fung Yi Street and all of the other shops have rolled their gates down, a yellow light illuminates the little workshop and 82-year-old carpenter Master Lung Chun begins his lesson inside.

Yan Yung, 30, one of the co-founders of Chingchun Warehouse, met the veteran carpenter in To Kwa Wan after she came back to Hong Kong from a one-month carpentry course in Taiwan. Their enthusiasm for the craft brought them together and they started Chingchun Warehouse in 2014 to promote the joys of carpentry.

They first established their workshop in an industrial building in the area, but they were forced to leave because neighbours complained about the noise they made when wedging and ramming. In the end, they found their home on 13 Street. Yung hopes to interact with their community through carpentry, and has made stools to give away to their neighbours and people living in the area.

Chingchun Warehouse offers both short-term and long-term courses, and charge around HK$200 for each three-hour session. In the short-term course, which consists of four sessions, students are taught how to make a wooden bench. The classes are usually held on Saturday afternoons or Monday evenings.

The long-term courses provide a more in-depth knowledge of carpentry. First, you will learn the proper usage of different tools. Then, you will learn basic carpentry skills such as tenoning, which is a way to make joints without the use of nails. Students can also work on their own projects, like toolboxes. Usually, a long-term course has 12 sessions.

How to make other items, such as tables and wooden toys, can also be taught on request.

Carpentry takes a lot of time and patience, but that’s the point. “We hope to see our students enjoying the whole process and relaxing instead of rushing to come up with the final product,” says Yung.

While it can be fun, Yung warns that carpentry is also physically demanding. Instead of treating it as any other hobby, Yung says potential students need to be persistent in order to make progress.

For more details, search 青春工藝 chingchun warehouse on Facebook.

Edited by Maggie Suen

Pups on Board

March 9, 2017

And the dog comes too on this bus

By Jasper Cho

Unlike most bus companies in Hong Kong, 99Bus only operates on Sunday mornings and its itinerary changes every month. It only has around three different routes, but its bus stops are scattered around Kowloon and the New Territories. That’s because 99Bus was not set up for the average commuter but for dog owners who want to take their pets out to somewhere further from home.

Before 99Bus came into operation in 2012, owners had to pay a lot for rental vans and taxis to take their dogs out. 99Bus charges HK$99 for a round-trip bus ticket to a pet-friendly place.

A poodle traveling with its owner on 99bus.

Some people may worry about the hygiene conditions of the bus, but co-founder Kamric To Kam-wai says owners and their dogs are well-disciplined. When 99Bus first started operating, they couldn’t find anyone who would rent them air-conditioned buses because the bus companies were worried about hygiene issues. So they ended up using an open-top double decker bus for their inaugural ride.

One of the passengers on the bus at that time, surnamed So, has been using 99Bus ever since it first started. She says even though the destinations of 99Bus are repeated, she still takes the bus as a way of supporting it and hopes it will continue to run because she gets to spend the weekend with her dog travelling to different places at an affordable price. But To’s ambitions lie further. “I want pets’ presence in the public to be widely accepted,” he says. “So pets can also go shopping or take public buses with their owners.”

To get on 99Bus, dog owners are first required to sign up for membership on its website http://www.99bus.org/ in order to purchase tickets. Dogs that need to occupy a seat will require an extra ticket. Otherwise, they will not be charged.

Edited by Maggie Suen

Chief Executive Election 2017 Terminology – Lesser Evil

March 3, 2017

“Lesser evil” refers to supporting a less undesirable pro-establishment candidate in the small-circle Chief Executive election. Among the four candidates, former Financial Secretary John Tsang Chun-wah seems to take a milder stance on politically controversial issues such as the enactment of Article 23 and the political reform than Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor and Regina Ip Lau Shuk-yee. He is also more popular among the public. Some democrats believe they should support him as he has a bigger chance of winning than the more liberal candidate, retired judge Woo Kwok-hing.

However, some democrats believe that “lesser evil” is still evil, and insist on upholding the basic principles of the democratic camp, which includes opposing the “831 decision” of the NPC Standing Committee on the election framework and Article 23. These are still included in John Tsang’s political platform. League of Social Democrats vice-chairman Raphael Wong Ho-Ming believes supporting Tsang violates the democrats’ principles and consensus.

“The democratic camp should not support and endorse this small-circle election,” Wong said.

Wong supported legislator Leung Kwok-hung who said he would run as the pro-democracy candidate if he managed to get 38,000 civil nominations, but withdrew when it became clear he would not be able to hit the mark in time.