Check this out, Dawg! (oops, too much American Idol) These green boxes they have all over the market streets of Wan Chai! Know where they came from? Gifts to the stall holders from Japanese soldiers during WWII. No, seriously! Given what went down all over HK, but particularly in Wan Chai, during the Japanese Invasion - all that hideous unspeakable brutality - I simply cannot believe they did this.
Like, I can't even begin to visualise how this all went down. Like, was it "Hey, sorry we stuck that bayonet into your ten-year-old. To make up for it, here, have a box to keep your wares in overnight!"?
The offending boxes!
But it happened. And those boxes are still there. If this were me, right!, given one of these, I'd have taken a sledgehammer to it and smashed it to smithereens, either right in front of them or the moment their backs were turned. Or at least to celebrate the Japanese defeat! I cannot even begin to image the mentality of anyone who'd do otherwise.
But no one did. Everyone kept their box and even went on maintaining it after the war ended. And they are still all there, on every Wan Chai market street, looking, apart from the obvious wear-and-tear, exactly as they did back in 1942.
I think this says more about Cantonese pragmatism than anything else possible.
The offending boxes!
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment