Inevitable

Crawling through the Night Market of Mong Kok is one of those Hong Kong experiences we must inflict on ourselves regularly.


I do not know why we do it. It takes two hours, we invariably split up in five directions, I get fleeced, the kids lose all sense of responsibility over twenty dollars, and Dig is extruded from the other end starving and short tempered.


And it is not as if we buy much that is useful. This time, a splat ball shaped like an egg (Dig) a picture of a bee (Squirrel), another watch (Tiger), a hair comb (Shark) and an extremely beautiful and classy handbag that was a total bargain and nothing should be said against it, and No it does not make me look like I am carrying a dead zebra under my arm, now shut up (Grit).


Maybe we just do it so we can say, We survived the crawl through Mong Kok. And yes, the bags are a bit pricey but who in their right mind could refuse a sales patter that began Hello Missy Missy Beautiful Missy?

If only we could see the possibilities like children

Arriving at the tucked away, totally littered beach on the island walk, we foolish adults think, What a mess! This beach is full of crap!

Whereupon the nine kids we brought dive straight into the beach-skip, tow junk up and down for the next two hours, put up a gate, patrol the borders, and start charging entrance fees.

What a waste

I've been half heartedly following the story of landfill extension in Hong Kong. Don't ask me why. It's better than the other thing I do these days, which is try to coach my three proto-ladies in the etiquette of How to leave an argument you are losing.

This, as everyone knows, is simply to depart with your head held high, whilst uttering an incomprehensible statement as if that is your final word. Your moral ground assured, your dignity intact and your interlocutors momentarily silenced while they try and puzzle out what is going on, all gives you the necessary pause to collect your thoughts and your handbag and make for the door, which is hopefully the right one.

My three proto-type ladies are not doing that. Not at all. They are standing yelling at a situation until their faces turn blue and their lungs collapse. By that time, both parents are initiating lock down, the emergency vehicles are on stand by, and the neighbour is in hiding at the emergency nuclear bunker.

But I bet we are not alone. I bet there are similar scenes played out in Hong Kong power buildings everyday, over similar issues to who claims ownership of the paint brush and whose turn it is to throw Dolly off the roof.

Some of them are saying, Let's tear up the country park to dump sixty billion plastic bags in a pit! and I bet their opponents answer, No, that is a crap way to use land. We could build two hundred tower blocks instead! Then they both fall to fist fighting until the security forces are called and everyone gets sent to their rooms to think over how badly they just behaved.

What no-one in the Hong Kong government seems to me to be doing is pushing through any serious measures to reduce waste in the first place.

For example, Hong Kongers have a 50 cent tax on government approved plastic bags. Big deal. Each day shop keepers give away several thousand of the non-chargeable alternatives: one of the worst is a thick, bright orange plastic bag. It feels to your touch like a raw molten polymer squeezed straight out a squeegee plastic maker machine. They give away one of those for every two onions and a carrot.

Apart from fannying about with a biodegradable shopping bag, what else this Hong Kong government is doing to reduce waste I cannot tell. There is no serious investment in recycling facilities, no priority or commitment to waste reduction, no discussion of waste management that is reaching the consciousness of the shopkeeper with whom I am currently at war. There is nothing I can see that's going to change much, so sorry about the waste that this part of the world is currently dumping in your ocean, sky, and land.

I do something of nothing too. Each day, armoured with my old home-made cloth shopper, I head to the veg stall and make a grab for my carrot and onions from the weighing scales before that shopkeeper tips them in an orange plastic biohazard bag and hands them to me with a smug beat you to it, hippie!

If he does it again tomorrow, I shall merely depart the shop with my head held high. I shall say, Three flowers and an ostrich do not a triumph make.

Sitting on the roof, playing with the stars

In keeping with her new found hippie status in Hong Kong, Grit has been dumpster diving.

This is exhilarating, isn't it? In one of the swankiest cities in the world, coming up for air behind the bins.

There, in the trash, I found a treasure trove. Jewels, magic spells, fantastic creatures, golden gardens, and stars.

A school dumped the contents of its craft cupboard in preparation for deliveries. The new academic year is starting. Acres of children are readied in their uniforms. Ipso facto, my little grits are now sitting on the roof, busy unrolling rejected coils of string, spirals of paper, loops of wire. Anticipating decoration, they have at the ready fold out fans, pots of paint, tubes of glue, assortment of oil pastels, and a set of diy lantern kits.

Of course in the middle of their excitement about the infinite possibilities of creation, it set me thinking. Not only that you parents pay for this mostly unused stuff the educational system merrily boxed up and dumped. And not only that Hong Kong desperately needs a scrapstore and recycling system.

It set me thinking about who these craft kits were destined for, and how the school casually dumped them. I don't blame them. I know. I've been there. I've been in the department where on September 1, Mr Edgely threw the GCSE coursework in the skip. When Marcie Baxter of previous class 5G, returned for A level, passed by the non-collected skip, she went off-the-scale-bananas. So did her parents. Word spread. The departmental memo came round. Next time: Dump discretely. Mid-way through August.

I know why the school dumped perfectly good, unopened, craft sets - the ones to make a paper fish, desk tidy, wooden dolly, Christmas stocking. They're the single kits left over after the class sets were handed out. What use is one craft kit in a class of thirty? Unless you're one child who would find it an absolute delight, that is.

But it blows the gaffe on schools in general. Catering for the creativities and sensitivities of individual children is not what they do, not what they can do, whatever they say. They cater for a mass amount of kids, moving through the system, all at once, doing the same thing. A process geared to fit simply and neatly to the curriculum delivery and assessment administration.

Doing the same thing - and then being assessed on how you did the same thing compared to everyone else - is one element of school that I find most objectionable, so I may now uncover my soap box.

The craft kits we raided are complete. In every way. Every bit to make a wooden train is there. Wood blocks are cut to fit, sanded, ready for glue. The size and shape is pre-determined. The pack includes instructions. Even in Mandarin, it's pretty clear what you must do. There is an order. Instructions are to be followed. It takes a pre-set amount of time. A classroom hour, with introduction and conclusion. Changing direction, making a flower grow from your train, balancing the wheels on the engine, taking a break to make a story about a train gone to the moon, it ain't going to happen. Anyway, you'd ruin your mark if you made a different train. How disappointed everyone would be!

When I started home educating my kids, I met a woman who'd just sent her kids to school. She looked at what we'd made that week - glue and sand and bits of twisted wire - and her face fell in hurt. She said, 'I went to pick up Elly from school, and they'd done art. In the window, there were thirty owls, made of clay. And all the thirty owls were exactly the same. I couldn't tell Elly's owl from all the rest. I could've cried.'

I hear that conversation, when Shark's concertina book unpleats, with cardboard, string, and foil. Or when Squirrel twirls her princess made of leaves, twigs, a seed head for a crown. Tiger makes a horse, wobbling improbably, between chicken wire and pipe cleaner. The one-off oddball madness of each thing; each child's individuality, our indifference to measurement on all creativity, is a delight to me.

I won't say my children won't ever need the discipline of structure, that they won't ever ask for that, or that it does not provide a language or a pattern, but for now, I want my child's early adventures into art to be sparkling, unquantified, ridiculous, bonkers. I want Shark, Squirrel and Tiger to take our newly raided craft kits, sit on the roof, wind the string around the lantern, dance the dollies, and send their trains wind sailing to Japan. Then I want to hear the stories that went with them. Horses who have wings, dollies who can fly, and lanterns that sparkle like stars. Those things I found behind the bins.

And dumpster diving? I heartily recommend it.

I make a promise to a polar bear

Before I go any further, I need to apologise to the environment. No, I need to throw myself prostrate on the floor, beg forgiveness, self flagellate, stick pins in my right hand and turn off the air con.

I am experiencing major guilt crisis over this. An extramarital affair probably pales into insignificance. Because what I am doing is trashing the prospects of a tiny polar bear cub. Right now, it is staring at me mournfully, the last limp fish of the ocean flopping at its feet, polar bear tears dripping from its big brown eyes, with the melting ice cap disintegrating all around, and it is pleading Why Grit? Why?

So far, since we arrived here, we have carelessly thrashed every air con unit in the house to within an inch of its life. All thanks to our pathetic maladjustment and the hot and steaming temperatures climbing daily through the Celsius 30s all around us.

And there's worse. We have committed crimes much worse. Because my intuition about how to negotiate an overheated house is at deep variance to the technology that exists here to cool me down.

I open the windows, forget that I did that, then switch on the air con, meanwhile everyone leaves the room. Two hours later I come back in and think Hmmm, the air con is not very effective, is it? Better turn it up. Ignorant all the while that no-one had the thought to shut the bloody windows, and the fact that I didn't check is all everyone's fault too. There is only so much of this heavy guilt trip I am making alone.

But if only that were it. When we have wasted all the day's energy produced by Lamma power station, disintegrated the upper atmosphere, stood in front of the open fridge door having a fifteen minute debate about the pros and cons of grape juice versus peach drink, then we go down to the shops and buy the imported tin of baked beans. Produced in Middlesex, shipped all the way over to Asia, scorned by the kids.

Enough is enough. I have imposed a ten-minute rule on the air con, found the sad cat charity shop, eye-spied the local bins, located the recycling aluminium point, and renewed my vows to the land of hippie living with the acquisition of a slab of local hand pressed bean curd and an extra large sack of noodles from the noodle shop.

It's not enough, and we're all doomed. Baby polar bear, forgive me. Now I need to keep the fridge for the beer, but be assured that from this point on, you can come and live in it, anytime you want.