Hong Kong Quotes

“How about this? Hong Kong had been appropriated by British drug pushers in the 1840s. We wanted Chinese silk, porcelain, and spices. The Chinese didn't want our clothes, tools, or salted herring, and who can blame them? They had no demand. Our solution was to make a demand, by getting large sections of the populace addicted to opium, a drug which the Chinese government had outlawed. When the Chinese understandably objected to this arrangement, we kicked the fuck out of them, set up a puppet government in Peking that hung signs on parks saying NO DOGS OR CHINESE, and occupied this corner of their country as an import base. Fucking godawful behavior, when you think about it. And we accuse them of xenophobia. It would be like the Colombians invading Washington in the early twenty-first century and forcing the White House to legalize heroin. And saying, "Don't worry, we'll show ourselves out, and take Florida while we're at it, okay? Thanks very much.”
― David Mitchell, Ghostwritten

“Now, I don’t think I’m a stupid guy. I’m just an average guy who does
stupid things.”
― Chris Thrall, Eating Smoke: One Man's Descent Into Crystal Meth Psychosis in Hong Kong's Triad Heartland

“You can leave Hong Kong, but it will never leave you.”
― Nury Vittachi, Hong Kong: The City of Dreams

“The clown was an evil one. They’re either good or bad, and this one was definitely the latter.”
― Chris Thrall, Eating Smoke: One Man's Descent Into Crystal Meth Psychosis in Hong Kong's Triad Heartland

“He puffed out his pigeon chest and waddled across the room towards me. With his feet pointing outwards, he looked like a fat duck with a grievance.”
― Chris Thrall, Eating Smoke: One Man's Descent Into Crystal Meth Psychosis in Hong Kong's Triad Heartland

“... a fine way to capture a piece of the magic of a unique city. The drama, the charm and the beauty of Hong Kong is all here-just as is its breathless energy.”
― Nury Vittachi, Hong Kong: The City of Dreams

“[F]or all its reputation for conservatism, cricket in its history has demonstrated a remarkable capacity for innovation. What game has survived subjection to such extraordinary manipulations, having been prolonged to 10 days (in Durban 70 years ago), truncated to as few as 60 balls (in Hong Kong every year), and remained recognisable in each instance?”
― Gideon Haigh

“I guess you probably won't be drinking the Johnnie Walker Black Label I brought for you," Corinna remarked.

"I honor your gesture, but I only drink reverse-osmosis water these days, " Bernard said.

"I honor your gesture?" My God, look what happens to Hong Kong men when they move to California, Corinna thought in horror.”
― Kevin Kwan, China Rich Girlfriend

“China was the opposite world. If you want to know what Hong Kong would have looked like without the British, you only need to take a look across the border.”
― Bruce Gilley

“Tony Blair had just been elected prime-minister and he and his foreign secretary, Robin Cook, were totally uninterested. In the pouring rain they were looking at the military parade from underneath their umbrella, for the transfer at midnight. Their entire attitude signalled something like: ‘’Can we go now?”
― Bruce Gilley

“I often end up biking home with a paper bag in my basket, a warm boluo bao inside. Whatever the time of year, they remind me of sun, tropical heat, being with family. Mooncakes, the little cakes eaten during the Mid-Autumn Festival, are meant to look like moons. Boluo bao look like shining suns.”
― Nina Mingya Powles, Tiny Moons: A Year of Eating in Shanghai

“His colleagues at the Bar called him Filth, but not out of irony. It was because he was considered to be the source of the old joke, Failed In London Try Hong Kong. It was said that he had fled the London Bar, very young, very poor, on a sudden whim just after the War, and had done magnificently well in Hong Kong from the start. Being a modest man, they said, he had called himself a parvenu, a fraud, a carefree spirit.
Filth in fact was no great maker of jokes, was not at all modest about his work and seldom, except in great extremity, went in for whims. He was loved, however, admired, laughed at kindly and still much discussed many years after retirement.”
― Jane Gardam, Old Filth

“[HK protests have been] mob demonstrations...[T]hey were conducted in a way which most societies would consider unacceptable because they involved attacking property, attacking the police, and of course occupying the airport.

The Western media have been hypocritical.”
― Martin Jacques

“Standing unseen in their midst was this damaged product of American democracy, singularly embodying everything that has gone wrong with what the protestors were advocating.”
― Tom Carter, An American Bum in China

“面對著如此混亂的香港社會，我們必須習慣，同時也絕不能習慣。”
― Lo's Psychology, 社運心理學

“Sadly, no one named Victor has written a definitive history of Hong Kong. So we’re left with three versions to choose from. The British version: Provoked into war by Chinese duplicity toward honest European traders, Britain—reluctantly, mind you—took, as a wee little concession, an uninhabited “barren rock with hardly a house upon it”, where they kindly implanted civilization, rule of law, and the most successful, freewheeling capitalist economy the world has ever known. 156 years later they magnanimously gave it back, and everyone lived happily ever after. The Chinese version: Hong Kong was a modern, thriving coastal commercial centre, seized by devilish foreigners during the greatest humiliation ever perpetrated upon China, a heinous act never to be forgotten for the next ten billion years. Thanks to the omniscient leadership of the Communist Party, China’s pride and joy was at last restored to the benevolent embrace of the Motherland, for which all Chinese around the world feel avenged. And by the way, Taiwan’s next.
Finally, the most commonly-held version of Hong Kong history: I dunno. You mean I should care?”
― Larry Feign, A Politically Incorrect History of Hong Kong: Cartoon Stories and the Tale of a Bootleg T-shirt

“Hong Kong was founded by scoundrels, populated by refugees.”
― Larry Feign, A Politically Incorrect History of Hong Kong: Cartoon Stories and the Tale of a Bootleg T-shirt

“The travel agency will provide you by more information.”
― Petra Hermans

“The Chinese and the British were not exactly saintly. What they called the Join Declaration and the Basic Law are just another form of confusion and exploitation. There will be no peace in Hong Kong. An expiry date of 2047 is a curse.”
― Kit Fan, Diamond Hill

“All immigrants are dreamers, I suppose, and nearly everyone in Hong Kong is an immigrant one way or another.”
― Kit Fan, Diamond Hill

“We are in a state of transition here. In fact, everyone in Hong Kong is obsessed with one single date: 1 July 1997. The whole city is in a state of violent change, moving from one regime we are used to loathing, to another one we are loath to get used to.”
― Kit Fan, Diamond Hill

“I wondered how there could be a custody battle when Hong Kong was already a fully grown adult and all she wanted was exactly what her parents did, the wealth of the entire globe.”
― Kit Fan, Diamond Hill

“因為當你唔可以再擁有o既時候，你唯一可以做o既，就係令自己唔好忘記。很多年之後，睇住個世界係咁變的我終於明白《2046》的悲哀。”
― 月巴氏, 愛了——愛情電影•哲學時間

“Hamsters & Covid.
My, how bats love to travel.”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“I was at the American International School for three years in Japan, and Singapore International School for two years in Hong Kong.”
― Janice Wong

“Loại người tự cho mình là hiện thân chính nghĩa, bênh vực kẻ yếu, nhưng thực chất chỉ là đồ hoang tưởng, chuyên đạo đức mồm, đòi diệt trừ tất cả những ai không hợp ý mình.”
― Chan Ho-Kei, 氣球人

“[Hong Kong] was indeed (in the words of the Chinese journalist Tsang Ki-fan) the only Chinese society that, for a brief span of 100 years, lived through an ideal never realized at any time in the history of Chinese society — a time when no man had to live in fear of the midnight knock on the door.”
― Chris Patten, East and West

“British colonial disdain for human rights even left its mark on the English language. The word “coolie” was borrowed from a Chinese word that literally means “bitter labor.” The Romanized first syllable coo means “bitter” and the second syllable lie mimics the pronunciation of the Chinese logograph that means “labor.”

This Chinese word sprang into existence shortly after the Opium War in the nineteenth century when Britain annexed several territories along the eastern seaboard of China. Those territories included Hong Kong, parts of Shanghai, Canton city (Guangzhou) and parts of Tianjin, a seaport near Beijing.

In those newly acquired territories, the British employed a vast number of manual laborers who served as beasts of burden on the waterfront in factories and at train stations. The coolies’ compensation was opium, not money.

The British agency and officers that conceived this unusual scheme of compensation—opium for back-breaking hard labor—were as pernicious and ruthless as they were clever and calculating. Opium is a palliative drug. An addict becomes docile and inured to pain. He has no appetite and only craves the next fix. In the British colonies and concessions, the colonizers, by paying opium to the laborers for their long hours of inhumane, harsh labor, created a situation in which the Chinese laborers toiled obediently and never complained about the excessive workload or the physical devastation. Most important of all, the practice cost the employers next to nothing to feed and house the laborers, since opium suppressed the appetite of the addicts and made them oblivious to pain and discomfort. What could be better or more expedient for the British colonialists whose goal was to make a quick fortune?

They had invented the most efficient and effective way to accumulate capital at a negligible cost in a colony. The only consequence was the loss of lives among the colonial subjects—an irrelevant issue to the colonialists.

In addition to the advantages of this colonial practice, the British paid a pittance for the opium. In those days, opium was mostly produced in another British colony, Burma, not far from China. The exploitation of farmhands in one colony lubricated the wheels of commerce in another colony. On average, a coolie survived only a few months of the grim regime of harsh labor and opium addiction. Towards the end, as his body began to break down from malnutrition and overexertion, he was prone to cardiac arrest and sudden death. If, before his death, a coolie stumbled and hurt his back or broke a limb, he became unemployed. The employer simply recruited a replacement.

The death of coolies in Canton, Hong Kong, Shanghai and other coastal cities where the British had established their extraterritorial jurisdiction during the late 19th century was so common that the Chinese accepted the phenomenon as a routine matter of semi-colonial life. Neither injury nor death of a coolie triggered any compensation to his family.

The impoverished Chinese accepted injury and sudden death as part of the occupational hazard of a coolie, the “bitter labor.” “Bitter” because the labor and the opium sucked the life out of a laborer in a short span of time.

Once, a 19th-century British colonial officer, commenting on the sudden death syndrome among the coolies, remarked casually in his Queen’s English, “Yes, it is unfortunate, but the coolies are Chinese, and by God, there are so many of them.” Today, the word “coolie” remains in the English language, designating an over-exploited or abused unskilled laborer.”
― Charles N. Li, The Turbulent Sea: Passage to a New World

“A newspaper article predicted that we would no longer see any mountain peaks, seas, or adult bodies that were whole in twenty years. We had grown accustomed to these horrifying speculations, the same way we read about faraway countries with long and foreign-sounding names wrecked by war, earthquakes, storms, and massacres. There would be a moment when we fell into wordless grief, but with the turn of a page, we would get inundated by job and real-estate listings and restaurant advertisements again. People weren’t indifferent; it was just that, for those of us who lived here, the future always felt so surreal.”
― Hon Lai Chu

“Somewhere to the south of your tiny refuge, Hong Kong is currently surrendering to Japan this very afternoon. The history textbooks will refer to this day as Black Christmas.

Soon, troops will move in to establish martial law and subjugate the population. Soon, thousands of men will die in prisons and POW camps, while thousands of women will face rape and sexual slavery. Thousands more will starve because there is no food coming into the ports, while many will die screaming from torture.

I cannot help most of them, and my heart bleeds for this.

The darkest hours of your city are here, and they will last for three years, eight months. The legacy of pain they leave behind will last even longer. It is everything your parents feared would happen, and more.”
― Sunyi Dean, The Girl with a Thousand Faces