Video produced by Vicky Feng, Lea Li and Kathy Kao for the South China Morning Post
Today (May 16, 2016) marks the 50th anniversary of the outbreak of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China. Hong Kong couple Chan Hak-chi and Li Kit-hing share how they escaped from the mainland and started a new life in the city.
Video produced by Vicky Feng and Robin Fall for the South China Morning Post
Entry is for mainland citizens only – and even then, intense screenings apply. The destination is the South China Sea’s disputed Paracel Islands, an area that has become the flashpoint of a global sovereignty row. As we count down to the United Nations ruling over China’s claims to the waters, the SCMP joined a one-of-a-kind cruise for a sneak peek at one of the world’s most unlikely tourist hotspots. Stay tuned for more exclusive reports in the coming days.
Video produced by Vicky Feng for the South China Morning Post
Zou Xiuhua, 30, has been suffering from leukaemia for almost two years. He believes the illness was caused from exposure to harmful chemicals in a Hong Kong company’s Shenzhen factory where he worked for 18 months. SCMP.tv visited Zou in a Guangzhou hospital in December.
Video produced by Vicky Feng and Tomasz Wiktor for the South China Morning Post
Text by Vicky Feng
On a balmy autumn night, a Chinese woman walks under colourful LED lights on a street in Shanghai. She just wants to be called by her Japanese name Hikaru, which means light.
The 28-year-old real estate agent has a past that many women of her age can never imagine — she realises now that she lost her innocence.
“This job changed me. I am not a pure girl any more. I have become a materialistic and pragmatic woman,” Hikaru told The Post in her aunt’s Shanghai apartment.
Hikaru went into her mother’s profession as a bar hostess in Tokyo after she moved there in 2007. She had just graduated high school and was studying at a language school to prepare for university.
Her move is like that of more than 400,000 Chinese students who have chosen to study in Japan since the early 1980s. And at that time, many Chinese students took up bar hostessing to finance their study in Japan, said Chinese-Japanese scholar Gracia Liu-Farrer.
After working part-time in a restaurant far from her home, she was on the metro and fainted from the heavy workload.
Her mother offered to bring her into the world of hostessing and for more pay and less work she agreed — she went on to spend more than five years in the industry.
Being a hostess doesn’t necessarily lead to moral corruption, and in the end Hikaru successfully made a new life for herself.
But in the process, she dated a much older man, had two abortions and learned the hard way that men can change under the influence of alcohol.
In Japan, hostess bars and clubs are entrenched in the nightlife industry. Men go to have hostesses accompany, entertain and flirt with them.
The first bar Hikaru worked at had eight hostesses from different parts of China, owned by a middle-aged Shanghainese woman.
The bar was in Tokyo’s central Kanda district surrounded by office buildings and restaurants. The tiny 60-square-meter bar, awash in yellow light was filled with white-collar workers aged from 30 to 50 crooning on the karaoke machine. Customers would come to the bar alone, with colleagues or friends.
They pay 3000 yen an hour (about HK$191) for their own alcohol and 1000 yen (about HK$63) for each drink the hostess has.
Hikaru was the youngest at her bar, aged 20, and would work from 8pm sometimes until 4am. Workwear usually meant a short tube dress and heavy make-up, her role was to drink, sing and try to talk with her customers in broken Japanese.
“When I first started, I was very nervous because I knew nothing. I observed arguments between women and tainted relationships between men and women,” she said.
As her Japanese improved, so did her experience. She learnt to fake her smile and tell racy jokes. And she learnt ways to deal with customers by observing and discussing with other senior hostesses.
“If a customer touched my breast, I would bow down and pretend to pick up something that drops on the ground or I would make him a drink and divert his attention,” Hikaru said. “I would have a smile on my face and not let him feel that I hate his behaviour.”
While Hikaru became experienced at playing the game with men, the beautiful impressions she used to have towards men shattered.
“After drinking, some men who are decent office workers during daytime would argue with you, touch you and insult you at night,” she said, “some of them would even take off their trousers, kneel down and ask you to lash their bottoms with a belt.”
Hikaru’s starting salary was 1800 yen an hour (about HK$115) and it rose to 2000 yen an hour (about HK$128) three months later. At its peak, her monthly salary rose to 400,000 yen (about HK$26,000), while the average monthly salary in Shanghai at that time was about the equivalent of HK$4000.
However, she spent it all.
“You earn money easily, so you spend it easily”, she said.
Bar hostesses are not supposed to provide sex services, but the topic inevitably comes up. The salary system applied by some hostess bars and the job environment can incentivise hostesses to have a sexual relationship with their customers.
“Customers gave jewellery and designer bags to some hostesses as presents. As a woman, I felt bad when others had them and I didn’t. And every hostess was involved in this kind of exchange. So I also lied and sold my body for it, ” Hikaru confessed.
On the other hand, she was romantically involved with her customers. She dated a 44-year-old Japanese software engineer for six years and had two abortions for him.
“I believe he loves me but he doesn’t want to marry me,” she said.
After graduating with a degree in business psychology this August, Hikaru decided to return to China.
And she has no regrets. “I don’t think my previous work was dirty. I used my wisdom and made great efforts to support myself,” she said.
Video produced by Vicky Feng for the South China Morning Post
For her first day ever at school today – the first day of Hong Kong’s school year – six-year-old Ma Ho-chun will take at least two hours to get to her primary school in Wong Tai Sin from her home in Shenzhen. Ho-chun’s sister, seven-year-old Ma Wang-ka, has been doing this for a year since she was admitted to Baptist Rainbow Primary School, the same school Ho-chun will be studying at.
Video produced by Vicky Feng and Robin Fall for the South China Morning Post
Club 71 in Hong Kong’s Central district looks like an ordinary bar but, it is far from it. It opened as Club 64 in 1989 in response to the Tiananmen Square massacre on June 4th. SCMP’s Bernice Chan speaks to now-owner Grace Ma Lai-wah about how the bar and Hong Kong has changed since then.
By South China Morning Post Staff
Wednesday marks the 25th anniversary of a brutal military crackdown on pro-democracy protests led by students and residents in Beijing. Hundreds of people were killed and many more were wounded when People’s Liberation Army units rolled into Tiananmen Square, ending more than a month of peaceful protests seeking political reforms.
In the following pages, former government officials, student leaders and other eyewitnesses revisit the momentous events of spring, 1989. These personal accounts, gathered from recent video interviews, as well as memoirs, shed new light on the hope and despair left by those days, which continue to haunt China a quarter century later.
Video by Vicky Feng and Robin Fall for the South China Morning Post
Text by Vicky Feng
Giant eight-metre waves, weeks alone at sea and a severe lack of sleep may not be unusual for a seasoned sailor, but for first time seafarer Wan Jinyu they were all part of an incredible adventure.
The 52-year-old businesswoman recently arrived in Hong Kong after a remarkable 497-day trip – and said she wanted to keep on going.
Wan and her Swedish husband Rolf Nylander set off from a Mexican beach on November 8, 2012 – their fifth wedding anniversary – before travelling south to La Paz, and then taking in a host of exotic destinations such as French Polynesia, Tuvalu and Samoa.
The mammoth journey, which took in a total of 39 destinations, ended with a trip through the Philippines before they docked in Hong Kong on March 19 this year.
The longest the couple went without seeing land was a lonesome 38 days.
“Going on a transoceanic voyage was Rolf’s lifelong dream,” explained Wan. “After we got married, we started to plan it.”
Supporting her 62-year-old husband’s ambition was a brave decision for Wan, who had no sailing experience whatsoever.
Travelling with her seasoned voyager husband made her feel safer and more relaxed, but Wan still faced challenges as things easily done on land become significantly more difficult on a bobbing sailboat.
“Cooking on the boat is very difficult,” said Wan, “I had to try to stand firm and use a towel to wrap the pot to stabilise it. I had to hold something with one hand to keep steady and use the other hand to cook the food.”
The feat wasn’t without its dangers and splashed cooking oil left her with scars on her neck and ankle.
Sleeping properly became a luxury during their life on the ocean. Space in the 39-foot sailboat was limited, with the couple spending the nights on a small bed that folded out during the day to double up as a table. And even when they were asleep, they had to keep an ear out for the potential dangers of the changing weather.
“We just slept five to six hours intermittently every day,” Wan said. “When the weather was really bad and waves were big, we couldn’t even sleep.”
Life on the sea was more dangerous than she had imagined, with four- to five-metre waves often tossing their boat around. But it was a storm on September 10, 2013, which was most terrifying.
“Waves were seven or eight metres high. From 8am to 4pm, for the entire eight hours, the day looked like night,” Wan recalled. “Our boat was hit by the waves. The wind was strong. It was horrible.”
Apart from the dangers, life on the ocean wave left Wan with some unforgettable memories. One night she was lucky enough to see a “moonbow” – a rainbow produced by light reflected off the surface of the moon.
“It was the only time in my life,” she said excitedly. “Words are not enough to describe its beauty. It can only last in my memory.”
So would she put herself through such an ordeal again? Absolutely.
Braver and more confident now, Wan and her husband are planning to travel from Hong Kong to Gothenburg in Sweden – their home country, setting off in October or November this year.
“I’ve accomplished things I never did before, and I think I can do more,” Wan said.
Video produced by Vicky Feng and Jeff Chen for the South China Morning Post
Antonio Bacino is on his tenth trip from Italy to Hong Kong.But unlike many other Europeans who travel to the Pearl of the Orient each year for business and pleasure, Bacino’s Hong Kong pilgrimages always involve Wing Chun — an ancient form of self-defence which achieved world renown in 2008 with the blockbuster film Ip Man.Read the full story here.
A Moveable Feast 