Hong
Kong's $500 million marriage
proposal By Kent Ewing
HONG KONG - As Hong Kong's increasingly
assertive gay community last week launched Pink
Season - a two-month-long festival intended to
celebrate LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and
transgender) lifestyles in the city - organizers
received a huge if inadvertent boost from an aging
tycoon who is also a noted playboy and homophobe.
Cecil Chao Sze-tsung, the 77-year-old
owner of property developer Cheuk Nang (Holdings),
also chose last week to make his public
offer of HK$500 million
(US$64.5 million) to any man who could win the
hand of his openly lesbian daughter, Gigi.
The tycoon, who boasts that he has slept
with 10,000 different women, announced his
extravagant marriage bounty after reports from
Beijing a week earlier quoted Gigi, 33, as saying
she had "wed" her same-sex partner of the past
seven years, Sean Eav, five months ago during a
holiday in France.
Her revelation created
some confusion, as the laws of France do not allow
same-sex marriage, although civil unions are
sanctioned. But such fine distinctions appeared to
matter little to the elder Chao, who dismissed
"false reports" of his daughter's union with Eav
and said of his HK$500 million manhunt: "It just
offers her one more choice in life. She is in
charge to make the final decision. People have
been mistaken in thinking that I would pick the
man for her. How is it possible? It's not Romeo
and Juliet, and I won't stop her from seeing
anyone."
As for Gigi, executive director
of Cheuk Nang and a well-known socialite in her
own right, she is taking Daddy's eccentric
behavior in stride. Saying she was "touched" by
his offer, she would neither confirm nor deny a
civil union with Eav. Instead, she asked the Hong
Kong media to pass along birthday greetings to her
father, who turned 77 last Saturday.
"Please wish him a very happy birthday,"
she said. "His baby girl will always find him the
most handsome man in the known universe and
irreplaceable as a father and love him very much."
Those words of affection notwithstanding,
Chao's daughter was clearly annoyed by the
1,500-plus proposals she has received on
social-networking sites and called on her father
to shut down his campaign to find her a husband,
adding: "I'm sure Daddy is enjoying being the
king, seeing all these handsome men from distant
lands beg for his daughter's hand. I hate to be
the one bursting his daydream bubble but, hello,
it's 2012."
So far, dad and daughter have
not talked directly to each other about their
differences over Gigi's future love life but have
chosen instead to communicate through the
gossip-hungry media in this city of 7.1 million
people. That shouldn't surprise anyone who has
followed the shamelessly flamboyant life of one of
Hong Kong's most notorious Lotharios.
Chao's boast of bedding 10,000 women may
be nothing more than macho bravado - and, whatever
the count, surely it has diminished considerably
as he enters his late 70s. In his younger years
and well into middle age, however, Chao did his
utmost to establish a reputation as Hong Kong's
Casanova.
Although he never married, Chao
has three children by three different women. Gigi,
his only daughter, is the product of a liaison
with former actress Yiu Wai.
The woman
many regard as Chao's most impressive catch - the
beautiful Vietnamese-American model Terri
Holladay, who bore him a son - believed she had
wed the property magnate in 1993 in Singapore but,
when the couple fell out two years later, the
Singapore ceremony was found to have no legal
validity.
Chao's prolonged fling with
Holladay, 30 years his junior, made him the
darling of Hong Kong's racy tabloids, a role he
obviously relished. Even as a septuagenarian, he
is loath to see the tabloid spotlight cast on
other geriatric epicures among Hong Kong's
multimillionaires.
Last year, after
another aging tycoon - Lam Kin-ming, chief
executive of Crocodile Garments Ltd - posed for a
Hong Kong magazine in the company of a bevy of
adoring floozies, Chao answered back on the pages
of a rival magazine that ran photos of him
cavorting with bikini-clad models.
If all
this seems a bit silly, embarrassing and immature
for a man who is supposed to be gaining wisdom in
his golden years - well, it is.
Ironically, however, Chao's latest
publicity stunt may serve to benefit the very LGBT
group it is meant to slight. For years, Hong
Kong's gay community has lived in the shadows of a
city that, despite its long history of interaction
with the West, regarded homosexuality as a
perversion. Now, thanks to Chao, gay-rights
activists have a new and much-improved poster
girl: his daughter, who has politely, lovingly but
firmly refused his HK$500 million bribe.
Meanwhile, however, Hong Kong continues to
offer virtually no legal protection against
discrimination to Gigi Chao or anyone else like
her. The city did not decriminalize consensual sex
between men until 1991 - and, even then, set the
age of consent at 21 (as compared with 16 for
heterosexuals) and ignored lesbianism altogether.
In 2006, after Hong Kong's High Court
ruled the higher age of consent for homosexual men
unconstitutional, the government - then led by
chief executive Donald Tsang Yam-kuen, a devout
Catholic - launched an appeal of that judgment,
which failed.
At the time, gay-rights
advocates celebrated this decision as the
beginning of the end of discrimination against the
city's LGBT community. But progress has been slow
coming.
Hong Kong's Legislative Council,
the city's mini-parliament, recently enacted
anti-discrimination legislation, but it covers
only racial minorities and ignores sexual
orientation. Employers can - and still do - fire
employees who do not fit the heterosexual mold,
and homosexuality remains mostly a taboo subject
among Hong Kong families.
But there are
signs of change. Beyond events like Pink Season -
regarded by most people as a strange sideshow -
there is increasing evidence of a shift in
attitudes. For example, Hong Kong now has its
first openly homosexual legislator - Raymond Chan
Chi-chuen of the radical People Power coalition,
although it should be noted that Chan waited until
after his election last month to come out of the
closet.
Skittish and belated though it may
have been, Chan's announcement nevertheless
represents another crack in the wall of
traditional prejudices against homosexuality, and
the cracks are getting wider. A recent University
of Hong Kong survey shows that, contrary to
popular perception, a majority of people in the
city are either "accepting" or "somewhat
accepting" of homosexual or transgender colleagues
in the workplace and that a much larger majority,
85%, want to see greater acceptance of LGBT
lifestyles in general.
Clearly, Cecil Chao
is not part of that majority - but his daughter
is, and Hong Kong supports her.
Hello,
this is 2012.
Kent Ewing is a
Hong Kong-based teacher and writer. He can be
reached at kewing56@gmail.com Follow him on
Twitter: @KentEwing1.
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