toastykitten

The Hong Kong government just put out a "rap song" lamenting the recent protests. HKFreePress has embedded it on their Twitter. The HK govt has helpfully translated it into English for us, giving us such great lines as:

So-called peaceful demands
changed to violence on the streets
So-called strike on three fronts
But the trains can't move
Roads are blocked
Stopping people getting to work...

Just watch the rest. 

The Hong Kong Human Rights & Democracy Act is one of the swiftest-moving bills I've ever heard of, with mostly bipartisan support. At the same time, I'm a little leery of it. Lausan.kh has a few critiques of it. I'm also pretty disgusted by the US rightwing hijacking of the cause, and dismayed to see so many Hong Kongers just welcoming them like rock stars, with the only exception being maybe Steve Bannon. 

We'll see how things go. 

Deadspin has a post about some of the fallout with the NBA. Interesting because this one has a rather long essay(?) from one of the Chinese former ESPN NBA reporters. In it, he conflates government censorship with the workplace practices of not allowing racism and sexism to run rampant. It's of course, a shallow analysis, because the premise isn't even true! Donald Trump is president! And then also laughably talks about how we're all taught that Taiwan, Macau and Hong Kong are separate from China. Joke's on you, dude, because I don't think Macau or Taiwan even registers on most Americans' minds at all, if it was ever discussed in school. 

I've missed these guys. (Sorry, my Canto isn't good enough to translate the lyrics.) LMF is/was a Cantonese rap group and they're rare in that their music is full of profanity about daily life in Hong Kong and its discontents. This is their antiELAB song, 2019.

The chorus is translated as:

"Pay for it with 10 years
Sentenced to 10 years, jailed for 10 years
Chaos in the anti-regime era"

to look into later

https://lausan.hk/

Lausan 流傘 is a collective of writers, researchers, activists and artists from Hong Kong and its diasporas, engaging with the city’s political struggle. Through translation, creation, and education, Lausan 流傘 aims to build solidarity on the international left with Hong Kongers’ unfinished fight to imagine emancipatory futures after colonialism, against both Chinese and Western imperialism.

Song composed by Hong Kong protesters





Tear gas is made in US sweatshops, then shipped to other places to put down protests.
Translated screenshot article of a profile of a 15 year old extinguishing tear gas canisters this summer.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the Hong Kong protests is how quickly they are able to disseminate information, come to a consensus, and also, one of the most overlooked aspects, is how fucking good their art is. This is an article on the zines they've created, one of the cheapest ways to distribute information, especially offline. (I don't know why they don't explain that the term "salty wet', one of the names of the zines, is Cantonese slang for "perverted/perversion".

And how regular people in China think Hong Kongers are getting paid off by the CIA and my reaction is basically that just assumes way too much competence for the CIA. 

Also this video of this little kid shouting "HongKongers!" and getting a crowd response back is too fucking adorable for words.

Another strike possible. 

By the way, fun times listening to my mom argue with my sister about Hong Kong. My mom is so prideful and so nationalistic - "they should just be part of China, none of this two systems". 

I have been thinking about and re-evaluating a lot of things about my childhood - not for any particular reason, but it's fucking weird to see people being nostalgic about the 90s. Anyway, part of that is also just kind of revisting the pop culture world I lived in at the time, which was Cantopop and anime for the most part. 

Leslie Cheung lived as an openly gay man in Hong Kong is the nineties. It was hugely controversial at the time, and also he committed suicide in 2003. My friend told me that he basically came out in a concert and it was a huge deal. Also a huge deal was his experimentation with gender and fashion, which got him insulted a lot. None of this really entered my consciousness as a kid - he was just an actor I really liked who was in a bunch of funny movies. My sisters claimed they preferred his acting to his singing, and that his singing voice wasn't that good. But I dunno, sounds pretty good to me:

This has a long intro, in which he dedicates the song "Moon Represents My Heart" to his mom and his boyfriend, "the two people closest to my heart".


Controversial song, "Red", in which he wears red heels for most of the song and dances sultrily with a male partner.