Asia City Online September 27, 2012
Most of the mainland Chinese I¡¦ve recently spoken with have angrily held that we Hongkongers are natural-born traitors of China. We still watch Japanese porn. We are still glued to Panasonic 46-inch HD screens showing Japanese dramas. Honda and Nissan cars are driving down Queen¡¦s Road Central and King¡¦s Road right now without even the slightest fear of being smashed or set ablaze. And we can¡¦t get rid of our bad habit of the cheap narcissism known as karaoke¡Xa Japanese invention with which the Chinese are madly obsessed.
Call us hopeless Japanophiles and feel free to be jealous. We Hongkongers have been granted the great mindset of ¡§One Country, Two Systems,¡¨ so we can enjoy the right to refuse to hate Japan. We are proud of such privileges as having CNN and the BBC free to broadcast the anti-Japanese violence on the streets of Shenzhen and 50 other cities, with Chinese-owned Japanese restaurants ransacked, Japanese cars overturned, and countless other Chinese people over the other side of the border ranting about nuking Tokyo. Hopefully, the world will not include Hong Kong as part of this Chinese mass hysteria.
We are glad that we have managed to be so different so far. This is largely thanks to the fact that underneath the Union Jack flag, we were also able to remain a happy Japanese economic and cultural colony since the 1950s. While mainland Chinese were plunged into famine and poverty by their great leader, Hongkongers of the last generation were nurtured with rice immaculately cooked in Japanese-made electric rice-cookers and coddled with stationery and toys purchased from Daimaru and Matsuzakaya department stores before the teenagers today ever knew of Hello Kitty. We read the detective stories of Matsumoto Seicho alongside Agatha Christie and Sherlock Holmes and admired the Japanese creative genius, while our compatriots were reciting Chairman Mao¡¦s quotations from the Little Red Book and recognized red as the only legitimate color in life. We love the animated art of Miyazaki Hayao more than the minute-long Chinese national anthem clip broadcast every evening prior to the TVB main news. No wonder we are hated by many patriotic mainland zealots. Oh no, there is no way we will defend those troublesome rocks with our lives, and we don¡¦t believe that you mean what you rampage about either. We are glad that Hongkongers are exempt from conscription so that when a Sino-Japanese war breaks out, we have the privilege of not having to go to the frontiers just like the siblings of the Politburo and other government officials.
Call us a special breed of traitor, but we are simply impotent of such hate, which has perhaps made an even more urgent case for why we need national education. To our guilt and pride, we are simply not Chinese enough, an error that will take CY Leung much more time to correct¡Xand almost certainly not before his sons complete their full education in Britain.