My Take | The two faces of Hong Kong: incredible kindness and outright rudeness
Locals do often show empathy for those in need but there are times when overt racism raises its ugly head, as we have seen time and time again
Chugani found himself in a crowded carriage and asked a woman to vacate her seat, which was reserved for the elderly and handicapped, for the old lady. The woman refused.
He made her even angrier by taking a photo of her with his mobile phone, so she used a derogatory Cantonese phrase, which roughly means a “dead Indian”, even though Chugani was born and raised here.
Tsao’s post was picked up by popular online news sites such as Stand News and HK01, and a media storm started in another teacup. Many comments supported Chugani, though quite a few were very unkind to him.
The incident itself may not qualify as news, but reactions to it say something about us. Like many other unruly MTR incidents involving misbehaving passengers, whether locals or mainlanders, it is a kind of an inkblot or Rorschach test, where people read their own preconceptions into it and draw their own conclusions from there.
There are roughly two camps: those who think the woman’s discourtesy and overt racism are fairly commonplace in Hong Kong; and those who think the woman is not representative of Hong Kong people at all.
How do we even know, some ask, if the woman is not from the mainland?