What Kills Us This Week!

Back in HK's British Colonial Days, the colonial officers used to always describe the Cantonese as "Hardworking, healthy, handsome, honest and honourable!" and in my seven years here I can only endorse that.

Yes, yes, I know I'm forever making fun of their nerdy, girly-swot, over-cautious, Chicken-Little-ness ... but that doesn't mean I have anything less than the greatest respect for them as a people. However ...

Currently, over the course of this week, there's been the inquest into that police shooting of the Nepalese guy Limbu. You remember all that? I wrote about it all here.

Well, this trial's all been really awful and I'm bleeding for Limbu's poor family, all over here from Nepal and Britain, Gurkhas mostly, who are trying to be Limbu's Voice in the proceedings but who are being treated really badly, with everything conducted in Cantonese and HK not providing interpreters and lots of ugly and mean-spirited things of that ilk.

But the thing that really got to me, really stuck in my craw, really really disappointed me is ...

... the initial phone call to the police that started this entire ugly spiraling maelstrom. OK, we're only hearing it in Cantonese with a translation written underneath, and something indeed may be lost in the translation, but it goes like this:

Woman rings emergency number and says "There's a dark skinned man on the hill outside my window."

You would expect, wouldn't you, that the reply from emergency would be "And ...?" or "Is he doing anything suspicious?" or "Is he doing something illegal?"

... but no ...

... this emergency guy replies merely: "We'll dispatch police officers right away!"

Yup! That's how the whole thing started. And then she rang back and said "He urinated. I saw him urinate!", and that's the crime for which Limbu was shot in the head: urinating in a jungle on side of a hill! And just look at the youtube clip and see how far away he was from the lady who claimed to be so outraged and offended.



So that's my choice for what kills us this week:

THREATDOWN

Being in possession of dark skin and a penis!