stalk: verb. 1. to walk in a stately or imposing manner. 2. to track or pursue (game etc.) stealthily. - stalker noun. stalking-horse noun. a person or thing used to conceal one's real intentions.
A FEBRUARY evening, the day after St Valentine's Day. Sheila Chan Suk-lan had a dinner date. She was late, but that was the least of her worries. As she inched her BMW through the congested Kowloon streets she had a vague feeling she was being followed. When she reached the comparative space of the Tolo Highway and hit the accelerator she knew for sure. 'I drove really fast but they stayed with me,' says Chan weeks later. When she reached her destination, 'they' arrived too. Was she petrified? 'Actually I wasn't,' she says with a smile. So what were her feelings? 'I thought: 'Wow, these guys are good at their job.' ' In the close-knit, incestuous world of the Hong Kong celebrity, Sheila Chan is famous, but far from unique. Like many, she first walked into the spotlight as a pretty young starlet who took bit-parts in TV dramas and movies. She has since climbed the ladder and today hosts a TV show, is a DJ on Commercial Radio and runs her own public relations company. She's no Madonna but she's certainly successful, and that's enough to make her newsworthy. Which is why on that February night, Chan was not afraid. She had quickly worked out that the guys shadowing her were from the press. What were they after? They wanted to know if she was dating comic-book tycoon Kei Man-kit, and after following her for a few days they got their story. The front cover of the February 20th issue of Next Magazine was a full-page picture of Chan and her supposed man. 'Sheila Chan and Kei Man-kit's intimate relationship exposed!' screamed the headline.
'At the time it wasn't that nasty,' says Chan, seated in a plush office in the Commercial Radio labyrinth, talking about being tailed by photographers from Hong Kong's biggest-selling weekly periodical. 'You know who it is and you know what they are going to do - follow you everywhere then try to make a story out of it. What really shocked me', she continues, 'was the extent to which they get hold of your private information. They can find out all this stuff about your housing, about your car. They knew I had a meeting here, a meeting there, they knew where I was going next. When I changed my route they even knew which way I was going to drive. They get to the people around you, they can find out a schedule, they can get into apartments around you by buying off a security guard. You might be somewhere, and if someone starts looking at you for more than a few moments you start worrying. You start thinking, 'Is that them again?' That's really the scary part.' Hong Kong has a free press and, we are told, is proud of it. It's a press at liberty to write about government, free to expose corruption and free to tell the world whom Sheila Chan is dating. The million and one journalists who laid siege to the territory during the handover liked this about Hong Kong. They also liked to tell the world about how those bad boys in Beijing might want to change it all. Yes, Hong Kong has the Basic Law, they pointed out - but they thought there was as much chance of it being honoured as there was of Chris Patten and Jiang Zemin dancing a farewell tango.
The microphone-waving harbingers of doom didn't get it quite right. Nobody has yet ripped up the Basic Law. Article 27 of the sacred text states: 'Hong Kong residents shall have freedom of speech, of the press and of publication; freedom of association, of procession and of demonstration; and the right and freedom to form and join trade unions, and to strike.' These are collective rights the free world has fought for and defended during the last century, and these rights still apply in post-1997 Hong Kong ... although the 'association, procession and demonstration' guarantee is showing signs of strain.
But as this century draws to a close there are certain 'modern rights' some of us want to be protected from. Living in the hi-tech global village means we can bounce our thoughts and feelings around the ever-shrinking world. With ease, we can talk to and watch others. The downside is that others can watch us. Paradoxically, as the century has progressed and society has moved away from communal living to individual, cell-like existences, so the private sphere has become more public. But whatever we might say in public, in private we know it too well: humans like to watch. Which for Sheila Chan or any other celebrity is fine when they are centre-stage. But at home? Chan shrugs off the February intrusion. 'I earn the money, I pay the price,' she says with a laugh. 'Everyone buys those magazines. I buy them every week and sometimes think, 'Why only this much? Why don't they give us more details?' ' That may be so, but the fear she described is an emotion many will sympathise with. We don't like the security camera in the lift, so how about dozens of press cameras permanently outside the front door? As Chan later admits, 'When I look at the stuff about me I think, 'Oh my God, oh my God, this is about me! How can you do that to me? How come you never asked me?' ' Last summer, it seemed as if the world was so shocked at an appalling infringement of privacy that for a few weeks it shouted a collective 'Oh my God'. A couple of months after the international media had trumpeted the importance of a free Hong Kong press, then packed their trunks and headed for Kai Tak, a story broke that eclipsed the handover, a story that brought the topic of press freedom back to fore.
Diana, Princess of Wales, was killed in a Paris underpass in August, and suddenly the consensus was that the media had gone too far. 'Paparazzi' was a dirty word, and 'press control' became the popular cry.