Vicious Rants of an Angry Yellow Man

Happy Chinese new year!  Since it is Chinese new year, we will talk about Hong Kong today.  As you know it had been a year of turmoil in HK.  A long protest called the umbrella movement put light on Beijing's rule of HK.  Although the street occupation by protesters have been stopped, I think we will be revisiting the same in the near future.  So it is interesting that the very unpopular chief executive of HK, C,Y. Leung came out with a statement asking the people of HK to behave more like sheep in this the year of the sheep.  Sheep are considered to mild and gentle and live in groups without fighting.  Of course, Leung is called the wolf by his critics.  So this is not lost on the people of HK and all kinds of jokes or serious discussion will come out of this.  The word for sheep, goat or ram are all the same in Chinese.  Since I am born under this sign, I will prefer to say its is the year of the ram since I think the ram is tougher than goats or sheep.  I mean the LA Rams sound a lot better than LA Sheep or Goats.

Also from HK, a Filipino domestic worker recently won a scholarship to NYU to study photography after her photos of Filipino domestic workers in a shelter for abused migrant workers in HK came to light.  There are 320,000 foreign domestic workers in HK.  When I was there in 2007 I walked into a park on a Sunday where many of these women were congregating.  This was the one day off they had and since they can't afford other entertainment, they gathered there to visit with each other.  I felt a little uncomfortable then even without knowing that some of them were abused.  As a land that was colonized for much of recent history and now being governed by a communist government, I would think the people of the land I was born, would be very cognizant of human rights.  I think now that HK people are well off financially, they should be treating others as well as they wanted to be treated when they were under British rule.  Now that they are demanding more human rights from Beijing, they should be giving more rights to their foreign workers.  I see some abuses are being tried in court and there are calls for laws improving the lives of foreign workers.  I hope HK will continue to make improvements in this sad situation.