Now for a Limited Time Only in Hong Kong--Pink Dolphins

                                                
                                                        



Copyright: Ken Fung, Hong Kong Dolphinwatch



Copyright: Ken Fung, Hong Kong Dolphinwatch

As you can see from the photos, there are bubblegum pink dolphins on this planet. Some live in the Amazon. Some live in China. The latter are known as Chinese white dolphins, (because they can be white or pink), and they are rare. Only about 2000 are thought to inhabit the South China Sea. Those found in Hong Kong reside only in the western waters around Lantau Island where I also live. And yes, I have seen them.

An ad I came across recently for a popular Lantau dolphin boat cruise could have been written by a side show carny, "Be amazed! These dolphins, found between Hong Kong and Macau, live within a few km of one of the world's busiest shopping centers and most densely populated urban areas."

 But maybe not for long. Back in 2000, the number in Hong Kong was estimated at 213. Chinese white dolphins belong to the Indo-Pacific humpback dolphin (Sousa chinesis) species. Researcher T. Jefferson optimistically wrote in Wildlife Monographs, "Overall, the population of humpbacked dolphins that occurs in Hong Kong waters appears viable and should be able to survive with appropriate conservation efforts."


On June 6, 2012, The South China Morning Post reported that Hong Kong's pink dolphin numbers have gone down almost continuously during the past decade. There are now only 78.



Are the dolphins leaving because they don't like shopping? According to the Hong Kong Dolphin Conservation Society (http://www.hkdcs.org/), perhaps indirectly. Lots of shopping means more people who require boat and high speed ferry transport to the stores on the various islands that comprise Hong Kong. This traffic makes so much underwater noise, the dolphins can no longer cope.

The Conservation Society chairman, Dr. Samuel Hung Ka-yiu says, "Dolphins are acoustic creatures that rely on sound to detect their environment, search for food, and communicate." Since dolphin moms and babies maintain contact by communicating through sound, "the babies may wander off and get lost when it's too noisy."



We humans don't hear well underwater. When we submerge our heads, the ocean seems silent because our ears are designed to hear in air and have little sensitivity to the medium of water. Dolphins on the other hand, hear very well underwater. Hearing is their most finely tuned sense.

 Perhaps the following tale helps illustrate. Not long ago, the school where I work as a counselor in Hong Kong had a talent show. During the month prior to the event, students aspiring to perform as heavy metal rockers amped up and played in the music practice rooms directly beneath my office.  The walls are thin in my school, so for weeks, items danced around on my desk and the windows of my office rattled. I could not hear my phone when it rang.

 In order to get away from the sound, sometimes I went someplace quieter--like to the train station across the street. Unfortunately, escaping to the station is not an option for dolphins.

 Like my office, not only are the territorial waters of Hong Kong loud, they are highly contaminated with heavy metal. The difference being that the metal is mercury. Unlike my office, there is also sewage waste discharge. Hong Kong in recent years is said to have dumped 120 million gallons of semi-processed sewage a day into its harbors.

 Having such total disregard for dolphins is odd considering that human beings claim to like them.  Nor is this affection a recent fad. Over the centuries, many friendly and helpful deeds have been ascribed to the creatures.

Stories of dolphins protecting humans from sharks, preventing struggling human swimmers from drowning, and rescuing sailors or ships in trouble, recur often in the folklore of many cultures, including that of the Chinese.

Some of the earliest stories about dolphins appear in Greek mythology. Apollo, for example, was said to have assumed the form of a dolphin when he founded the oracle at Delphi. Along with the Romans, the Greeks considered dolphins to be messengers of the gods. The ancients thought it was a terrible crime to harm a dolphin--one that brought dreadful luck to the human who had committed it.

It wasn't just the ancients who thought this. A more modern and documented tale of Pelorus Jack describes a Risso dolphin who, in the early twentieth century, guided ships through a dangerous stretch of the Cook Strait at the northern tip of the South Island of New Zealand. As soon as ships arrived in the treacherous water, Jack appeared and guided the vessels through. He departed once the ships had made safe passage.

One day in 1904, a drunk passenger on the SS Penguin shot at Jack as the dolphin was guiding it.  Fortunately, Jack was unharmed and fled. Weeks later, he appeared and resumed guiding ships. But Jack refused to guide the Penguin ever again and in 1909, it wrecked in the rocky strait.

So what is to become of us humans--we who kill dolphins on a grand scale, including the amazing bubble gum pink ones? The gods don't like it when their messengers are killed.









It's Tough to Be a Security Guard in Hong Kong

John, a 78 year old security guard in Hong Kong, is making ends meet earning 13 Hong Kong dollars per hour. (That's roughly $1.62 USD per hour.)

The minimum wage law, which is 28 Hong Kong dollars per hour ($4 USD per hour), has been in force for almost a year. Prior to one year ago, there was no minimum wage in Hong Kong.

The average monthly income for half of Hong Kong people is $100 USD per month. Hong Kong is not a cheap place to live. Rent in Hong Kong is among the most expensive in the world--a tiny apartment that is 400 square feet can cost $1250 USD per month (not counting utilities). John makes $593 USD/month. You do the math.

Not being able to afford rent, the security guard has chosen to live in a stairway in the building where he works. He somehow manages to survive on $4.30 USD per day. The rest of his money he sends to a relative in mainland China who has cancer.

There was a lot of heated discussion about instituting a minimum wage law in Hong Kong last year. And although it finally passed, the law has not helped the 10,000 workers, according to the Society of Community Organisation, who fear they will be fired if they complain that they are not earning the minimum.

Also not helped are whole classes of workers like the thousands of women imported from the Philippines for domestic labor who were excluded from coverage.

Nor has it helped the thousands of workers whose employers, upon passage of the law, decided to make their employees monthly contract workers. This move thereby offered employees a monthly flat rate while eliminating them from hourly minimum wage stipulations. Employers then raised the hours that employees must work per day and week. The result has been a net reduction in employees' pay.

John, who refuses to give his real name because he is afraid of losing his job, works 12 hours per day, seven days a week. "I am too old. No one will employ me," he said wearing a face mask to avoid recognition.

There are many such stories about people like John in Hong Kong.There are stories about working people who live in cage apartments.The apartments are called that because they look exactly like small cages. There are stories about families who live in flats that have been subdivided into many tiny cubicle "flats". And then of course, there are the people who live on the streets...or in staircases.

Hong Kong has one of the largest gaps between poor and rich in the world and it is growing, much as it is growing throughout the US, mainland China, and the rest of the world. As developers build more and more luxury apartments for rich Chinese mainlanders who are eager to grab property in Hong Kong, estimates are that more than half of the Hong Kong population await affordable public housing by waiting on lists that extend out for years since affordable housing construction has not kept abreast of the need.

It has been quite an experience to live in a city, full of first world opulence and opportunity. Hong Kong has neighborhoods abundant with beautiful, spacious apartments, glittering malls packed with Gucci and Prada, and expensive private schools.

 These neighborhoods are elbow to elbow with crumbling overcrowded slums for people who cannot afford typical Hong Kong rents, not to mention designer shops and overpriced schools.

Although this state of affairs is all too familiar to me having lived in America, the things missing are the anger and crime that accompany this gap between rich and poor, typical in the US. Anger and crime are just not culturally accepted here in the way they are in the US. I have yet to figure out why, but it has been a relief to escape them.

But poverty is ugly everywhere. And in a place like Hong Kong where the local people are, by and large, gentle, kind, welcoming, and tolerant, somehow, the poverty seems even uglier.

Alive and Well: Humor in Hong Kong

When I first arrived in Hong Kong, one of the things I noticed was that Chinese people didn't laugh at a lot of the things I thought were funny. In fact, although they smiled more often than me and most Westerners I know, they didn't seem to laugh much at all.

I began to explore one of my previously unacknowledged and therefore unexamined stereotypes about the Chinese, namely, that they are super serious and humor deprived.

A few months after my arrival, the local paper ran an article that compared the values of Americans with those of the Chinese. It noted that sense of humor is highly prized by Americans. To us it denotes intelligence and creativity. Although the Chinese appreciate a good sense of humor, it was not as highly prized and did not carry the same significance. Hmm, I thought. Being around people who are humor deprived-- by American standards-- didn't sound like a lot of fun. But then I wondered if this was really true? I mean, how could a group comprised of a billion plus people, many of whom live in very close proximity to one another, survive and even thrive without a good sense of humor?

Hong Kong is one of the most densely populated places on the planet. Yet it doesn't have anything that approaches the current theft and murder rates of cities in the U.S. Educated in the mythology of the West, I had always been told that dense population and crime went hand and hand. Yet clearly here, they do not. (And no, Hong Kong does not have the death penalty or people who disappear into police custody never to be seen or heard of again.)

It's true that the Chinese have a rough history full of war and chaos that stretches back centuries. Not too much to laugh about. Only recently have order and prosperity emerged and they are too new yet for the average Chinese to trust that they are permanent. Nonetheless, China is in bloom. The country has issues--many of them--but it is full of a vibrancy and optimism that jaded Westerners like me cannot appreciate until we actually come here.

Besides vibrancy and optimism, I have started to notice that the Chinese do laugh. A lot. Perhaps it's a matter of taking cultural blinders off and/or relaxing into a new way of being. Maybe people around me are relaxing, too. Or all of the above.

My friend Nat is teaching public speaking at an English language school for non-native speakers in Hong Kong. The school (not my friend) put out a flyer before his last workshop. It read, "At tonight's Public Speaking Seminar, you'll find your inner confidence and see that public speaking is no sweat. You'll realize that at networking functions, striking up a conversation is a dance that goes something like this:

A) "Hi..., nice to meet you, what's your name?"
B) "It's Linda, what's yours?"
A) "It's Dan."
B) "Nice to meet you, Dan. So what do you do?"
A) "I'm a salesman. Yourself?"
B) "I'm a clerk. What are you doing here tonight?"
A) "I'm trying to pick up some tips to help me get a promotion. How about you?"
B) "Oh, my manager told me tonight's speaker, Nat Hix, is fantastic and I'd be a fool to miss his seminar."A/B) "HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA."
A) Well we certainly are not fools then.

Not fools indeed. 

And not humor deprived, either. 

Touch Your Heart: Chinese Food Hong Kong Style

My friend Annie is a native lifelong Hong Kong resident. I first met her on an excursion hosted by my school for staff and their families.

We met on the security guard bus. I am not a seurity guard so why was I on the bus? Let's just say it had to do with jet lag and being profoundly directionally impaired. Annie had brought along a friend but seeing that I was alone immediately took me under her wing. She introduced me to her friend as well as to all of the other security guards onboard. Although Annie was the only one who spoke English, her introductions and encouragement helped everyone relax. We became one big affable group.

I lost track of Annie after we arrived at the Tsim Sha Tsui boat dock. This was a work day for her and she was required to herd several hundred staff and their families around the various islands we visited and through the restaurants where we banqueted that day. But afterward, we became friends. She generously introduced me, and later my husband after he arrived here, to the tastes of authentic Hong Kong.

There are many types of cuisine in Hong Kong but dim sum is my favorite Cantonese food. In Chinese, the characters for dim sum literally translate "to touch the heart". They are small plates or bowls of dumplings, buns, meats, and vegetables. The easiest way is to think of them as Chinese tapas. Dim sum are eaten and then washed down with gallons of tea. Annie says it is considered brunch food for retired people by the younger Hong Kong set. However, when we have dined on weekends, dim sum appears to be very much a family affair. Dim sum for breakfast (with lots of tea, of course) is called yum cha.

Typically the dim sum restaurants where we have dined have looked like huge banquet halls. Imagine seas of circular white robed tables that seat 8-10 people with bright lights and lots of people and noise. What the restaurants lack in ambience however, they make up for with great food. Cha siu bau, (steamed sweet barbeque pork buns), shiu mai, (steamed minced pork dumplings), and har gau, (translucent shrimp dumplings) are my favorites. Phoenix (aka chicken) feet are a lot of work to eat but are surprisingly good. If we tire of dim sum and order chicken or fish, the dish comes to the table completely assembled with head attached. Pretty much everything is eaten, (ok, not the bones). When I asked one Chinese colleague who dined with me at a Family Day banquet why the feet and head come to the table with the chicken she said it was so you knew you had gotten what you ordered and not some sorry substitute.

My Chinese principal gave a more philosophical answer. She said it is related to the Chinese love for whole things as opposed to mere parts. This love is borne out by how the Chinese think about many things in addition to food, including health and medicine. No part is treated without consideration of the body as a whole.

Exploring this world view through food has been fun. There is a lot to be said about considering wholes as opposed to just parts. So in that regard, dim sum is a misnomer. It, like Hong Kong, has touched not only my heart but my whole self.

Must Love Dogs

Yesterday, just as on most Sundays for the past few months, my husband Nat, and friends Dennis and Monica, have been walking dogs for PALS. PALS stands for Protection of Animals South Lantau. (They wisely chose this name over South Lantau Animal Protection, or SLAP, after some discussion.) PALS describes itself as a small but dedicated group committed to do their best to rescue and rehome abandoned and unwanted animals on Lantau Island. PALS not only rescues dogs but also cats, water buffalo, and snakes.

Speaking of the latter, one recent Sunday evening in February, boxes upon boxes of live snakes were discovered by a lady walking her dog on Pui O beach near the PALS shelter. She called PALS who called the police. PALS then began the task of hauling seventy boxes containing large snakes near the waters’ edge onto drier land. Altogether, 188 boxes containing 789 tightly packed Chinese venomous cobras destined for the mainland China restaurant trade were salvaged.

All in a day’s work.

Although we like snakes, cats, and water buffalo, we travel by public bus up and around and down the roads of Lantau to walk dogs. Once we arrive at the sleepy fishing village of Pui O, we wobble off and turn around in the direction we just came from to trudge up a mighty hill. (Mighty hills are plentiful on Lantau as well as throughout Hong Kong.) The sidewalk narrowly edges the road. We can almost touch the buses, cars, and bikes whizzing past. Finally, we arrive at a mailbox underneath the big striped umbrella that shelters it from the elements. (PALS must get some pretty important mail.) We turn right and go up a flight of stairs bordered by jungly trees, flowers, and vines and head toward the metal gate surrounding the well maintained three story building that houses the PALS shelter.

It looks like a residence because it is. Expat Okka Scherer and her veterinarian partner, Dr. Joe Laraya, live here along with 100+ rescued dogs, an odd assortment of cats, and two water buffalo. (The buffalo live outside.) On a previous visit, I invited myself inside. There were no cages, so the dogs roamed free about the house. It all was remarkably clean, orderly, and peaceful.

We called out to announce our arrival. At first, it was quiet. The rescued water buffalo tethered under a tree in the yard just to our right lifted its head lazily to stare at us and chomp grass. We watched a milk white cat on the second floor play with some netting stretched across the entire width, length, and height of the balcony. This netting seems to prevent cats from acting out their ideas about flying from balconies.

Then the symphony of barking began.

Anka came out. (Often she is accompanied by, Andy, one of the paid helpers but this Sunday was his day off.) Anka and the helpers walk the dogs three times a day, and feed, bathe, and love them. The dogs seem pretty happy.

Quickly, Anka grouped and leashed the dogs. She opened the gate and handed them off to us. Nat and Dennis usually walk four dogs a piece. Monica walks two and I walk three. We make two or three trips with different groups of dogs down the hill path leading directly from the house across the treacherous road to Pui O beach and then back.

The dogs are, to put it mildly, characters. Although PALS has names for all of them, we have names of our own for some of them. There’s the Leaner-a lopey doe eyed Afghan who loves to slant into you when you walk together. Greasey is a greyhound mix that enjoys slipping her collar upon arrival at the beach. “Hey, you know you love to chase me!” she signals while wagging her rump.

Then there are all the black nondescript but eminently walkable ones we ironically call Chinese dogs because we have been told the Chinese don’t like black dogs. They think they attract ghosts. Too bad. They are great animals.

At first, when we walked the dogs, we were being pulled up and down the designated route. But now that we have watched many episodes of The Dog Whisperer and the dogs have gotten to know us, they settle in nicely and off we go in our respective packs.

Making friends with lots of dogs is grounding and relaxing. The dogs are always happy to see us. They don’t care how we are dressed or what language we speak. Witty chatting is lost on them. They are just thrilled that you are there with them and that together you will explore the beach. I can’t think of a better way to spend a Sunday afternoon.