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1. Joining the clean-up revolution above the City of Strife

1. Joining the clean-up revolution above the City of Strife
Sunday Morning Post, 4 May 2003

It was a day you couldn't order from room service. It was too perfect. It was pure tonic. A public holiday covered in sunlight in a town desperate to breathe again, desperate to exhale. There was an unusual calm in the streets of this leper colony that belied a searing sense of insecurity. The town was reeling.

There was an NBA and an NHL playoff game on TV to enhance my mood. But how was that going to help Hong Kong in its most desperate hour? Maybe I was full of same hollow rhetoric I abhor. If I really wanted to make a sporting gesture, I would turn the games off and go find some hope, go spread some good.

I decided to make myself accountable. I would search for a way to help and I would use this pubic holiday to find some hope in a place I had called home for the past 12 years and for the foreseeable future. So I took to the sprawling hills that majestically frame this town in search of hope. The great outdoors are easily the most underrated asset of this metropolis. From the causal walkers to the hard core sports-nut, it was all there and it was all waiting. The only question was: Should I bring one beer or two on my hiking odyssey?

The trails above Braemar Hill were bustling with faces that were gleefully liberated, nodding and even smiling. They were so excited that many surgical masks had simply been discarded on the side of the trail. A couple passed me in a most provocative way. They were dressed in laminated sandwich boards, the husband leading the pace. On the front, he had a drawing of someone coughing without covering their mouth. His wife followed with a pair of oversized salad tongs in her hands and a blaring message on her front in English and Chinese: Please collect your trash!

They looked rather peculiar, some of the other hikers may have even thought silly. But they hardly cared so I had to ask her: "Excuse me, are you a city worker?"

"No," she replied, "I'm a volunteer, my husband and I do this with some friends." She told me her name was Vicky Lam and that she lived nearby. When I asked her what was in the trash bag, she became downright evangelical. "I have plastic bottles," she said opening the bag, "and look at all the dirty tissue! You know the lady come up here and go like this!" She turned and squatted like she was positioning herself over a loo. "And the dog do the same and they use the tissue and leave the mess with the tissue on the trail and the sun and wind come and the germ get in the air and everybody get sick!"

She apologized for her poor English and told me we need to stay clean always. "We need to change the culture of the people," she said with vigour. I thanked her so many times for her efforts that she blushed as she walked away.

She had thrown down the gauntlet, not only to me but to the whole of this Special Administrative Region. Nothing short of a cultural revolution could save this place. But unlike the one on the mainland some 30 years earlier, there was no need to sacrifice one million lives because of ideological bent. And if we must purge a gang of four again then let it be Hong Kong's Chief Executive, Secretary for Health, Welfare and Food, Financial Secretary and Secretary for Security. Hopefully, the good people of southern China would be sacrificing their time, not their lives. Hygiene, transparency and, most importantly, community would be the bedrock of this revolution.

I tried to find my role in this revolution and could see myself as on of Vicky Lam's vigilantes, a true sportsman combing the hiking trails of Braemar Hill carrying a garbage bag and wearing a sandwich board. I picked up a few plastic bottles as I started to climb and then I veered into a clearing and stopped.

It was a staggering view of Hong Kong. Even the vulgarity was magnificent. The southern side of Kowloon Peak had been stripped bare of its greenery by imprudent developers and it was now a mountain of bad feng shui towering over the frighteningly dense housing estates of Kowloon Bay, including one apartment complex that had become the most notorious building in the world. To the west, the concrete towers of the Central area kicked a hole in the sky while a thin file of pollutants shrouded the setting sun. It was a view without peer; the most stunning urban vista in the world. And it was sad, so sad that I couldn't help crying for Hong Kong. Good people, bad times.

But tears would not clean the trails so I advanced on a pile of tissue before hesitating. Underneath it were the droppings of perhaps one of the ladies Vicky had spoke of, or even a dog. But a dog using toilet paper? Hmmm, and me with no oversized tongs to clean the mess. I stared thinking, maybe I could hurry home and watch a tape of the hockey game, maybe if I came back tomorrow this mess would be gone. Then I realized, serving the community should never wait. And no one ever said a revolution would be without sacrifice.