HONG KONG - Everywhere you look these days there are signs of the social fabric
of this city of 7.1 million tightly packed but widely divided people fraying at
the edges.
Radical legislators have made hurling fruit and invective an eagerly
anticipated ritual whenever the city's top officials appear in the chamber of
the Legislative Council, Hong Kong's mini-parliament.
Youthful protesters have laid siege to the corporate headquarters of Li
Ka-shing, Hong Kong's richest man, claiming that "Superman", as Li is known in
business circles, is the city's de
facto leader (not Chief Executive Donald Tsang Yam-kuen) and that profit and
greed are the key components of its unspoken creed.
And, perhaps even more worrying, middle-aged, middle-class apartment owners are
staging mass outdoor "lie-ins" at the Mei Foo private housing estate, in the
hope of preventing a property developer from spoiling it with further
light-blocking, noise-producing, profit-boosting and high-rise construction.
Yes, lots of Hong Kong people are fed up and, increasingly, they are speaking
and acting out on their frustrations. They are mad about Hong Kong's
dysfunctional political system, which makes a pretense of democracy while the
city's leaders make a habit of kowtowing to puppet masters in Beijing.
They are angry because their property prices are the highest in the world, and
they can only dream of one day owning a home. And, at the bottom of the social
ladder, there are those who are beyond dreaming, the nearly 20% who live below
the poverty line in a city with one of the biggest wealth gaps in the developed
world.
Now there is a new twist to this ongoing story: One particular member of that
bottom-dwelling underclass - a 74-year-old street hawker named Ng Yuk-fai - has
recently become the most powerful symbol yet of the growing defiance here
against a city authority whose political decisions appear to be dictated in
Beijing and whose economic strategies could have been concocted in the
corporate boardrooms of Li and his cronies in Hong Kong's tycoon class.
Ng has been arrested six times already this year for illegally selling egg
waffles in the city's Causeway Bay district. He has been making and selling his
waffles in the district's streets for 30 years; indeed he has become something
of an institution in the Tai Hang neighborhood, where residents crowd around
his cart holding out HK$10 notes and coins to pay for a taste of his homemade
treats, baked on a charcoal stove.
Although he says he makes an average of HK$6,000 (US$770) a month, every time
the police arrest him and confiscate his wooden waffle cart, he pays the
required HK$800 fine for his release and then goes home to build another cart,
make some more delicious waffles and hit the streets and do it all over again.
Finally, his stubborn perseverance appears to have paid off. Following his most
recent arrest on Sunday - which drew boos and protests from a throng of
would-be customers on the street as a small army of city inspectors and police
officers seized him, his waffles and his cart - Ng's story appeared widely on
television and in the city's newspapers. It also caused an Internet sensation,
turning the harassed street vendor into a local celebrity and hero, the
embodiment of the Little Guy standing up against the Evil System, even though
he can never win.
Or can he? So far, 4,000 people have signed up to a Facebook group supporting
his cause, some of them volunteering to pay his fines. Sensing a
public-relations moment, Hong Kong's Secretary for Food and Health Dr York Chow
Yat-ngok stepped into the controversy with an expression of admiration for Ng's
can-do spirit and work ethic, offering to find him a place where he can legally
ply his trade.
"We would like to give him suggestions on locations, such as wet market stalls,
where he can operate legally," Chow said.
After all, as Ng's Facebook fan group may have forgotten, Hong Kong has not
issued licenses to hawkers to sell food on the street for more than 30 years.
And the reason for this is not to punish old men with waffle carts but, rather,
to assure that proper standards of hygiene are maintained.
Ng himself has said: "Yes, they should arrest me; I don't have a license."
But let's not allow facts to get in the way of a good story.
Ng arrived in Hong Kong in 1958, pushed out of the mainland by Mao Zedong's
disastrous Great Leap Forward, and started a watch business. After that went
bad, he took up his current trade and has been known ever since as the
"egg-waffle man".
Ng's family - a wife and three teenage children - live in the city of Lufeng in
southern Guangdong province, and he sends the bulk of his monthly earnings home
to them while living a Spartan life in a self-made wooden shack in Causeway
Bay. The HK$800 fine he must pay each time he is arrested - as well as the cash
he must dish out for materials to build a new waffle cart and resume his
business - are adding up, making an already hard life even harder for him and
his family.
Heroically, however, he carries on, refusing to retire his waffle cart and go
on the city's welfare rolls.
As one irate witness to Ng's latest setback shouted at the arresting officers:
"Give the old man a break. At least he's making his own living and not
collecting social security."
Other witnesses complained that, while Ng has been targeted repeatedly by city
inspectors, other hawkers selling fake designer clothing and accessories and
pirated DVDs in the same neighborhood are allowed to do business unimpeded.
And it is this perceived injustice, on top of the rest of Ng's compelling
story, that has tapped into a much larger feeling that the game is rigged in
Hong Kong to allow the rich to get richer as the poor get poorer and everyone
else just scrapes along.
While Hong Kong's economy is estimated to have grown by a robust 6.3% in the
first quarter of this year after 5.7% growth last year, housing prices in the
city have soared 50% over the past two years and continue to rise as wages
remain niggardly for laborers at the lower end of the pay scale. Government
statistics since 2004 show a decline in income for the city's poorest residents
as earnings for those at the top have boomed by 20%.
After more than a decade of unseemly wrangling, the city's legislature finally
passed a minimum-wage law this January, but the wage was set at a paltry HK$28
(US$3.60) an hour and the legislation leaves unclear whether workers should be
paid during meal breaks and days off, as many of them were previously.
Not surprisingly, greedy Hong Kong bosses plan to exploit that ambiguity and,
in the end, their employees could wind up earning less under the minimum-wage
law than they did under the old let-the-market-decide ethos.
Meanwhile, the Hong Kong millionaires' club continues to grow at a record pace.
In 2009, the number of US-dollar millionaires in Hong Kong more than doubled to
76,000 - a 104% increase that was the highest in the world. In 2010, a Citibank
survey showed that the number of Hong Kong-dollar millionaires also reached a
record high, surging 42% to 558,000. That means that, while one in five
families in the city now lives in poverty, one out of every 14 adults is a
millionaire.
It is figures like these, along with city officials who are seen as being in
collusive partnership with the business elite, that can turn a lowly
septuagenarian egg-waffle vendor into a Hong Kong hero.
Kent Ewing is a Hong Kong-based teacher and writer. He can be reached at
kewing@netvigator.com
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