A really chilling look at why Google may not be as good for you as you think.
(Courtesy of Scripting News.)

Brilliant red lanterns are hanging everywhere tonight, marking the end of the Spring Festival and celebrating the passing of winter to spring. (I will believe that when I see and feel it. Winter is still alive and well here in Beijing.) Fireworks can be heard going off all over town, and it was a day for dragon dances and celebrations everwhere.

Yesterday was a different holiday, but its effects were no less dramatic than today’s. I’m referring to Valentine’s Day, of course, and I was surprised to see just how seriously the Chinese take this most Western of holidays. Restaurants last night were totally booked, and it was quaint seeing just about everybody walking around after work holding either a bouquet of flowers or a single plastic-wrapped red rose. I had no idea the Chinese celebrated Valentine’s Day, and I suspect that of all the Western holidays this is the one that is closest to their hearts.

I am so out of touch with America right now. I see the various Web pundits pounding away, either aggressively in favor of war with Iraq or dead-set against it, and I wish I could experience for myself what the political climate back home feels like. (The latest news blackout here in China isn’t helping any.) I’ve always been conflicted, more than with any other issue, because I do not like our president but I can’t help but wonder whether the liberation of Iraq could be a step toward transforming the Middle East into a kinder, gentler place (to use his father’s words). And yet, now I am reading in fairly moderate zines like Slate of Powell’s “cynical backflips.” Who knows what to think, what to believe? I’ve gone back and forth at times, but am now leaning against the notion of any war in Iraq; it probably would not be liberating and instead would lead to lots of bloodshed. being truly liberating.

What I do know — and pardon me for being redundant on this point — is that had Bush been a kinder, gentler leader pre-911 he wouldn’t be facing this unprecedented vacuum of support today. You really do reap what you sow. After proclaiming America was going to go its own way and to hell with past agreements, how could Bush expect the world to suddenly see him as a team leader and coalition builder? And still, Andrew Sullivan and Instapundit are baffled that the American public, let alone the rest of the world, hasn’t fallen into lockstep with George W. & Co.

I have been feeling down all day, uninspired and mentally sterile. In search of inspiration, I rummaged through my old documents where I rediscovered an “essay” (or something like that) that brought back a flood of memories. I wrote it nearly a year ago when I was still living in Hong Kong. I realize it is similar to my recent post on the plight of China’s gays, but there are marked differences.

I have no idea why I write things like this, which then linger, cobwebbed and ignored, on my hard drive, but it’s definitely compulsive. Now that I’m actively blogging I may, from time to time, drop some of these carbon-dated gems onto this site. Here goes, unedited and unchanged:

Gay in HK: The Agony and the Ecstasy

This is a difficult essay for me to write and I had a lot of concerns about it. Finally, I decided to go ahead with it (obviously), mainly because I have such strong feelings on this subject.

Hong Kong’s is a conservative culture. I met a young man recently who told me his father threw him out of the house at the age of 16 upon learning he was gay. No, that’s not typical. Most parents here do not know, nor do they want to know, if their children are homosexual. Hong Kong families follow a strict “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, even if the parents have recognised that their son never goes out with girls and spends his free time writing poetry instead of playing football. There is no gay rights movement here and no Gay Pride Festival. It’s not a matter of intolerance or closed-mindedness. It’s just that such things would make the people here uncomfortable — the gays and the straights. It is just not part of the cultural landscape. The gays here would not understand why on earth they should cause such “unnecessary disharmony” by letting those around them know their sexuality. That is something you do only at night, in the gay hangouts.

One thing I enjoyed about living and working in New York City was the spirit of sexual toleration. Lots of people were “out” at work and no one minded. Here in Hong Kong, most gays (virtually all I’ve met, including myself) feel they have to live behind a front, and I am finding it uncomfortable and, on occasion, painful. For example: I’ve become friends with a classical music lover who is as fanatical as I am about Wagner, and we’ve gotten into the habit of meeting for lunch on Sundays at CitySuper [a huge eatery at HK’s Times Square]. Hong Kong is a notoriously small place, a village really, and inevitably one of my colleagues bumped into us there one Sunday. Automatically, before I could even think about it, I was making up a story about how this guy is teaching me Chinese and we meet at CitySuper because it is so centrally located. I made up a lie (and a pretty lame one at that) because I feared my colleague would wonder what I was doing alone with another guy. I felt sick, but it was a reflex action — so strong is the “hide your sexuality mentality” that it caused me to lie when, in retrospect, I didn’t even have to. Why didn’t I just say, “This is my friend, and we met for lunch to talk about music.” But it s easy to become paranoid in HK and as I said, the lie was more of an instinctive reaction than a reasoned calculation.

Oh, well. I’m sure it’s much worse in Beijing and other places [I certainly got to discover that for myself!]. It’s just such a shame that people anywhere have to live a secret life and make up lies to perpetuate the disguise. It adds a level of stress and tension that are definitely unhealthy. Still, I realise this is part of the culture and I respect that.

Before I moved here, I was working in one of the most conservative states in America. Still, a young lady at my company kept a photograph of her and her lesbian lover prominently displayed on her desk. I always thought that was wonderful. And I was so happy that the people in my office also thought it was great that she could be so open and proud of her relationship. Of course, it was a high-tech company and most of the people there were 20-somethings, and they were a lot more open-minded than the generation before theirs. Is it that way in Hong Kong, too? Could I put a photo of my lover and me on my desk here, where the staff is also young, and be admired for it? I doubt it, and I’m not in the mood to experiment — as I said, I respect the culture here and would not attempt to change it or criticise it. I am very close friends with some of the people who work with me, and I wish so much that I could read their minds and know how they would react If I told them my secret. These relationships are all incomplete, based on a deception, and therefore they are never fully satisfying.

So I am always on my guard, always cautious about every aspect of my private life. I am always looking over my shoulder, no matter where I am. It’s just a minor heartache that I’ve got to live with. There are many joys in the gay world of Hong Kong, and some pain as well. When it comes to pain, perhaps this aspect — the obligatory double life — is the most painful.

Google Blocked Again

This is just great. You can get onto the Google site, but once you type in your search word and press Enter, nothing happens. For a split-second, you can see the results, then they promptly disappear and you get the Cannot Find Server page. In the past week, they have blocked my four most-visited sites, NY Times, Washington Post, A & L Daily and Google. Just as I was beginning to feel more at home in Beijing (especially as the weather improves) I am forced to reconsider.

KFC Invades My Space

Was this inspired by my blog? Here’s the headline:

“KFC offers Beijing duck-style entree in China”

I wonder if you have to order it a day in advance….?

What are they so afraid of?

Has anybody else in China noticed that The New York Times, the LA Times and the Washington Post remain blocked by The Great Firewall? And now I can’t get in to the best portal on the Web, Arts & Letters Daily! Some of the English dailies now appear to be blocked as well, and god knows how many other papers are now inaccessible.

This sudden blocking of so many news sites strikes me as unprecedented, though I haven’t been here long enough to state that unequivocally. At least I can get into the Boston Globe (where I’m delighted to see they are running a series of articles exposing the sins of the ultra-secretive company Bechtel), but that doesn’t mitigate the frustration. Yes, I know there’s a way to get around it, but it is tediously slow and a major pain.

So why do they do it? Do they believe this increases the public’s faith in the government and its infinite wisdom? Do they believe it achieves anything aside from generating ill will? A pox on those companies that took money to custom-build this censorship machine (are you listening, John Chambers?), and on the small-minded stooges who are now pushing the buttons.

A very moving plea from the Gweilo Diaries to support Bali, where tourism rates have plunged and heartbreaking tales of woe abound. I was there only a few weeks before the Big Blast, and my heart goes out to the delightful people there, most of whom were poor enough before the tragedy and who must now be near the breaking point.

At the Web site up ahead, you’ve just crossed into…The Twilight Zone

For those of you with a taste for the macabre, a fascination with the other-worldly, a morbid curiosity regarding “life” in the world’s last die-hard bastion of Stalinism, you simply must visit the official Web site of the world’s most peculiar country.

This site caters especially to those with an affinity for the novels of Huysmans — those who marvel at things that appear to be not-of-this-earth, unreal and bizarre, weirdly “off.” Wading through its pages is an exercise in pure creepiness. It seems that the nation’s official Web site was designed by a zit-faced freshman at a community college trying to master Frontpage, with decidedly mixed results. Similarly, the “text” must have been written by a Pyongyang lad who flunked out of his English As a Second Language course. This is a true experience. Here’s a little taste of what lies inside:

I wonder who does Dear Leader’s pompadour. Anyway, that’s just for starters. Check it out.

Matters of Opinion

Once again I revisit China Hand’s thoughtful and on-target commentary on the hubris of the Honkies, especially his observation that “Hong Kong people have always had a feeling of separateness from the rest of the black, hair, black eyed, yellow skinned people. The Chinese students in Australian universities right from the very early days quickly divided into two groups: Honkies and the rest. Honkies of course were a cut above the Taiwanese, Malaysian, Singaporean, and mainland students. Of course it was obvious.”

Having lived in HK for nearly two years I understand this all too well, and it was driven home dramatically during my recent trip to Thailand. One morning at breakfast I started chatting with a fellow from Hong Kong, who pointed out a group of Singaporeans also staying at the hotel and suggested I might want to practice my Mandarin by talking with them. When I asked him if they were in Bangkok for business or pleasure he astounded me with his reply: “I don’t know. I refuse to speak with people whose native language is Mandarin.” He went on to tell me in the nastiest tones how he is sickened by all the Mainlanders visiting Hong Kong. They are the worst of the disgusting lot, he said, with people from Singapore and Taiwan only a bit less vile. I was taken aback at his having no qualms whatsoever about revealing his prejudices.

I did meet up with the Singaporeans, where I had a similarly unexpected conversation. One of them told me how “a friend” he knows was absolutely delighted with the September 11th slaughter. He went on, always prefacing his remarks with words like, “Now, I don’t think this way, but my friend says…,” and he’d go on to cite a litany of reasons why Americans had it coming to them for their vanity, their cocky attitude about the world being their playground, their contempt for non-Americans, their racism, their obscene wealth, their smugness, etc., etc. It didn’t take me more than a minute to know that there was no such “friend,” that he was stating his own repellent beliefs. I listened to everything he said and I just smiled. When he was done, I said I had to go get some coffee and walked away.

It has been vastly interesting living overseas and seeing how certain people think and how they view us. Generalities are always dangerous — there are, for example, plenty of absolutely magnificent Hong Kong people. But one cannot help noticing how certain peoples have certain characteristics and beliefs, just as they have different ways of stepping into elevators. I found wherever I went that English people, for example, held similar thoughts on Israel (diametrically opposed to my own). Honkies in general view Mainlanders with a mix of contempt, nausea and, increasingly, a sense of jealousy. The only topic where I heard total unanimity irrespective of race or creed was the perception of President Bush. I find it truly extraordinary that every European and Asian I’ve met has identical thoughts on our leader. Identical.

Two milestones this week:

1. Today marks my being in Beijing for an entire five months. In a strange way, the months have gone by quickly, while the individual hours and days have at times seemed to drag on for an eternity.

2. Tomorrow is the anniversary of the death of Richard Wagner, the musician who more than any other single force has shaped me into the person I am today. I don’t have the time or energy to go into my love of Wagner’s music right now; suffice it to say that, although I rarely listen to his music (I save it for the most special times), it is integral to my entire existence, it is my lifeblood, my inspiration for living and striving and working and loving. There are moments in Wagner’s music that I know were written for me and for me alone, moments that speak to me on a level that is wholly unexplainable and indescribable, a level that is so intimate and so intense that I can only describe my relationship to it as a mystical one.

Shit, I said I wasn’t going to write about Wagner, and look what happens. Let me stop here while I can. But also let me add that not only Wagner’s music possesses me; there are works of Mozart and Bach and Faure that affect me similarly, but they always fade away as insignificant once Wagner comes on….

Interestingly, I taught a seminar on classical music to my Chinese colleagues today, but included no Wagner — his music is truly an acquired taste, and never easy to digest for newcomers. Instead I played Mozart, Bach and some excerpts from La Boheme. They seemed to really enjoy it.