Just Saying | Don’t just criticise Hong Kong youth, the elderly can be worse
Yonden Lhatoo complains that while we chastise the city’s junior residents for bad behaviour, we give a free pass to miscreant senior citizens for no good reason
Stuck in a traffic jam on a crowded cross-harbour bus to Causeway Bay recently, I watched a local senior citizen berate an elderly South Asian man over a seating dispute.
After all these years in this city, I still find myself shaking my head in wonder at the life-and-death intensity with which Hong Kong commuters approach the daily task of securing an all-important seat on public transport that is clearly designed to provide comfortable standing as well as sitting room, but I digress.
Watch: Hongkongers pushing and squeezing onto a bus
Back to my bus story, in which the enraged Chinese man was bludgeoning the subject of his ire with the choicest abuse the Cantonese language has to offer, punctuated with racist epithets against “Indians”. The target in this case could have been of any ethnicity, from Pakistani to Maldivian, but who am I to question the accuracy of the race-sniffing, built-in radar that xenophobes come equipped with in this town?
Angry Man’s one-sided shouting was so loud and obnoxious that I took it upon myself to feel embarrassed on behalf of all the seemingly unaffected silent spectators on the bus and offered “Indian” Man my standing spot by the door. He grabbed it without a word, looking frail and disoriented.
It should have ended there. But the expletive-ridden tirade went on and on, forcing me to yell back at Angry Man – who was by now comfortably seated, yet somehow dissatisfied – to cease and desist. That prompted a commuter rubbing shoulders with us to suggest that I should not be too harsh on an elderly man, even if he was clearly a jerk begging for a beating.
That really sums it up, doesn’t it? How we compensate for senior citizens behaving badly. Somehow, because of their age, it’s acceptable for them to be rude, racist and abusive.