Island Escapade 小島偷閒
I grabbed my carry-on luggage and headed out of the office at lunch time. An in-flight movie and two rounds of drinks later, I found myself at the island airport greeted by a smiley hotel chauffeur reminiscent of Tattoo from Fantasy Island — minus the white suit.
I had booked myself a private villa on a remote Thai island overlooking the South Pacific horizon. The spacious one-bedroom suite, complete with its own infinity edge pool, a teakwood patio deck and a verdant landscaped lawn, was to be the perfect setting for a weekend getaway.
At least that's what I thought when I planned the trip several weeks ahead of departure...
Paradise on earth
Read the rest of this essay in HONG KONG State of Mind, available at major bookstores in Hong Kong and at Blacksmith Books.
HONG KONG State of Mind
"As I See It" has moved to www.jasonyng.com/as-i-see-it
As I See It has a new look and a new home!! Please bookmark www.jasonyng.com/as-i-see-it for the latest articles and a better reading experience. Legacy articles will continue to be available on this page. Thank you for your support since 2008. www.jasonyng.com/as-i-see-it
From Street to Chic, Hong Kong's many-colored food scene 由大排檔到高檔: 香港的多元飲食文化
Known around the world as a foodie's paradise, Hong Kong has a bounty of restaurants to satisfy every craving. Whether you are hungry for a lobster roll, Tandoori chicken or Spanish tapas, the Fragrant Harbour is certain to spoil you for choice. The numbers are staggering. Openrice, the city's leading food directory, has more than 25,000 listings—that's one eatery for every 300 people and one of the highest restaurants-per-capita in the world. The number of Michelin -starred restaurants reached a high of 64 in 2015, a remarkable feat for a city that's only a little over half the size of London. Amber and Otto e Mezzo occupied two of the five top spots in Asia according to The World's Best Restaurants , serving up exquisite French and Italian fares that tantalise even the pickiest of taste buds. Dai pai dong is ever wallet-friendly While world class international cuisine is there for the taking, it is the local food scene in Hong Kong that steals the hearts of residents a
The Moonscape of Sexual Equality - Part 1 走在崎嶇的路上-上卷
There are things about America that boggle the mind: gun violence , healthcare costs and Donald Trump. But once in a while – not often, just once in a while – the country gets something so right and displays such courage that it reminds the rest of the world what an amazing place it truly is. What happened three days ago at the nation's capital is shaping up to be one of those instances. From White to Rainbow Last Friday, the Supreme Court of the United States handed down a 5-to-4 decision on same-sex marriage, the most important gay rights ruling in the country's history. In Obergefell v. Hodges , Justice Kennedy wrote, "It would misunderstand [gay and lesbian couples] to say that they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find fulfillment for themselves… They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right." With those simple words, Justice Kennedy made ma
The City that Doesn't Read 不看書的城市
The Hong Kong Book Fair is the city's biggest literary event, drawing millions of visitors every July. The operative word in the preceding sentence is "visitors," for many of them aren't exactly readers. A good number show up to tsau yit lau (湊熱鬧) or literally, to go where the noise is. In recent years, the week-long event has taken on a theme park atmosphere. It is where bargain hunters fill up empty suitcases with discounted books, where young entrepreneurs wait all night for autographed copies only to resell them on eBay, and where barely legal – and barely dressed – teenage models promote their latest photo albums. And why not? Hong Kongers love a carnival. How many people visit a Chinese New Year flower market to actually buy flowers? Hong Kong Book Fair 2015 If books are nourishment for the soul, then the soul of our city must have gone on a diet. In Hong Kong, not enough of us read and we don't read enough. That makes us an "aliterate" people: able to read bu
The Beam in Our Eye 眼中的梁木
With 59 confirmed deaths and over 500 wounded, the Las Vegas mass shooting is the deadliest one in modern American history. Places like Columbine, Aurora, Newtown, Sandy Hook, Orlando—and now Sin City—are forever associated with carnage and death tolls. They don't get it Not a week goes by in America without a horrific gun attack in a shopping mall, a school or a movie theatre.People outside the U.S. can't fathom why the world's wealthiest country can be in such denial over a simple fact: more guns means more gun-related deaths. But they don't get it, don't now? Instead, they tell us foreigners to stay out of the debate because we don't understand what the Second Amendment means to the Land of the Free. So the anomaly continues: each time a shooting rampage shocks the nation, citizens respond with prayers and tributes for a while, but their lawmakers do nothing to change gun laws. And we—the foreigners—shake our heads in disbelief and wonder how many more innocen
Brexit Lessons for Hong Kong 脫歐的教訓
It was an otherwise beautiful, balmy Friday in Hong Kong, if it weren't for the cross-Channel divorce that put the world under a dark cloud of fright and disbelief. Asia was the first to be hit by the Brexit shock wave. BBC News declared victory for the Leave vote at roughly 11:45am Hong Kong time – hours before London opened – and sent regional stock markets into a tailspin. The shares of HSBC and Standard Chartered Bank, both listed on the Hong Kong Exchange, plunged 6.5 and 9.5 per cent, respectively... It ended in divorce ________________________ This article appeared in the 29 June 2016 print edition of the South China Morning Post . Read the rest of it on SCMP.com as " After Brexit, Hong Kong voters should take a careful look at what our own localist parties are really selling localist politics ." As published in the print edition of the South China Morning Post
A Farewell to Arms 永别了,武器
America is a bizarre country. To be an American — or to live in America — is to accept a few things that defy common sense. For starters, pizza is considered a "vegetable" under federal law. Two tablespoons of tomato paste on the dough is enough to make the pie healthy enough to be served at every public school cafeteria. Speaking of health, emergency rooms across the country routinely turn down trauma patients who fail to produce proof of health insurance. Facing skyrocketing healthcare costs , the uninsured are left for dead and the insured are worried sick about rising deductibles and annual premiums. Not bizarre enough? Here's another good one: gun shootings have become so commonplace that the evening news no longer reports them unless they are deemed a "shooting rampage." And each time after a massacre, gun enthusiasts line up outside Wal-Mart to stock up on assault weapons for fear of tougher gun laws. That's right, in America you can buy a military-style semi-automatic rifl
Dining Out... - Part 1 出街食-上卷
The Michelin Guide published its first Hong Kong/Macau edition in 2009. Since then, the little red book has sparked spirited debate and sometimes even nationalistic rumblings among citizens. Hong Kongers balk at the idea of a bunch of foreigners judging our food, when most of the undercover inspectors sent by the guide can't tell a fish maw from a fish belly or know the first thing about dun (燉), mun (焖), zing (蒸), pou (泡) and zoek (灼) – to name but a few ways a Chinese chef may cook his ingredients with steam. For many of us, it seems far wiser to spend the HK$200 (that's how much the guide costs) on a couple of hairy crabs currently in season than on a restaurant directory published by a tire manufacturer. The launch Food is a tricky business. It confounds even the most sophisticated of cultures and peoples. The English and the Germans, for instance, excel in everything else except for the one thing that matters most. Young nations like America, Australia and Canada..
The Art of Profanity 粗口藝術
We react to life's little vicissitudes – nicking the car door, dropping the phone on a concrete pavement or losing hours of work to a computer crash – with a curse word or two. If some brute walks by and knocks the coffee right out of our hand, the appropriate response is: What the fuck? Swearing is one of those things that we do everyday and nearly everywhere. But like breaking wind and picking our nose, profanity is only bad when someone else does it. Most of us are too squeamish or sanctimonious to own up to it. Rarely in the human experience has something so universally shared been so vehemently condemned and denied. Turning society into a nanny state Profanity exists in every culture. Curse words are the first vocabulary we learn in a foreign language and the only one we remember years later. The linguistic phenomenon can be traced as far back as Ancient Egypt and Babylon. Literary giants like William Shakespeare, James Joyce and George Bernard Shaw were known to u
Kowloon Complex - Part 1 九龍的心結-上卷
A Little Bay No More 灣仔的成長
Christmas in Hong Kong - Part 2 香港過聖誕-下卷
My Pet Peeves 無名火起
Hong Kong State of Mind - Part 2 香港情懷-下卷
The Case for a New Holiday 不俗的新節日
An Epiphany In the Most Unlikely Place 出乎意料的啟發
Book Review: Ghosts of Memory by Vincent Mak 書評:麥...
A Matter of Taste 觀點與角度
The Vindication of Eric Shinseki 艾力新關的平反