Category Archives: Hong Kong

Social Media in Asia

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The following infographic is quite interesting is highlighting how the internet is used across Asia.

One caveat to this infographic is that it omits mobile usage so the figures for , especially “Social Networking” are probably under-represented for countries with high smartphone penetration such as Hong Kong, China, Japan, etc.

One interesting observation is the prominence of “Video Watching”, particularly in East Asia. In Hong Kong, China, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam and Taiwan it was the most common use of the internet cited. It seems that the future of the internet really is video. This only confirms the value of the efforts we have been placing in making use of online video in ministry. Even remembering that the social networking figures are probably under-represented for all of these countries, it must be remembered that video is now also a big part of social networking. Over 90% of Hong Kong internet users watch video on the internet.

Also of interest is the fact that the three of the four largest internet markets shown (China, Japan, and South Korea) are not yet Facebook dominated. Undoubtedly Facebook is making inroads into these markets (even China, where Facebook is officially blocked, people still seem to find ways to sign up and use it!) but as yet it has not overcome the local competitors. [Update: still less than 10% in each of the three markets]

(Thanks to Tony Whittaker at Digital Evangelism Issues for the link.)

A Hong Kong Apologetic

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The following is the responses from our staff during a session I helped lead on apologetics. It was a challenge for some of them to begin to think about how to answer the apologetic questions of their culture without being given the answers, but it is an important skill to learn. Moreover, it provides a good base for building an understanding of how to build an apologetic for our culture. It is interesting to see how some answers come up more than once, particularly the need for a relational component to our evangelism, and the ‘practicalness’ of the gospel. Food for thought.

How has Western thought interacted with Chinese thought in Hong Kong?

  • HK people’s focus: Is that practical?
  • HK has a mixed culture.
  • Our parents still emphasis the value of a family, the virtue of respect. HK academic institutions value how to develop critical thinking, independence and profession.
  • When we consider doing operation, we’ll find western way, but for nurturing a good health, we think Chinese medicine is more effective.
  • Universities in HK also very practical, so more and more departments need placement/intern as an assessment of their academic performance.
  • In the course evaluation of the universities, the evaluation on whether there is an all-round development is depends on whether one is living up to the standard of the employers, which is very practical.
  • HK is very practical and focus on money. People don’t care much about whether the society is a closed one, but personal prosperity. There is a contradiction between democracy and harmony in HK.
  • The concept of “family” may not be that of ancient China, who favors for “Big family”(many family members), but the importance of a family in a person’s life is still unchanged.
  • For the food in HK, we can also see the mixture of different cultures, like cha-siu spaghetti.

What is a good apologetic for Hong Kong?

  • People is fear about the loneliness and shame after they are converted. So they may need to know more about the identity in Christ, being the daughter and son of God.
  • People always ask: Is it useful to believe in Jesus? Can I have a better living (materially)? They are fear / wonder if conversion is valuable.
  • As HK people concern practical much, they regard the Gospel as something, which is academic, separated from their daily lives. They may need more really life testimonies, especially those telling about inter-personal relationship, to let them relate the Gospel to real life.
  • Chinese always need to be praised, confirmed. We always care about the expectation of others. So maybe we need to honor and please them.
  • Many people always saying that Gospel is only for the inferiors, together with materialism and feeling-oriented, how can we do apologetics? Feeling? Thinking?
  • For guilt, shame and fear, these are inaccessible for Chinese because of self-esteem (“face”). Chinese need acceptance and have difficulty in trusting others. But that is their need. So how can we access to that part of a person? Is internet a good tool to express and respond? It seems that we need to do good through relational network.

View From Above

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This week I took a day to get away and hiked up the mountain at the back of our place. It is called Ma On Shan, which means Horse Saddle Mountain because it has two peaks, one 706m the other 660m. It was great being able to see the neighbourhood from up above, although it would have been better if I had gone last week. The day I went was a bit hazy so visibility wasn’t so clear in the distance. Last week there was no haze at all. I’ll have to try to get up there on one of those days sometime. It was also a bit of an adventure getting up there as I had to play things by ear a bit in terms of finding which was the right path to take. I ended up going up the longer route and coming down the shorter one. So I know which way to go next time.

This is a 360 degree view from the highest peak.

And this is a view of our neighbourhood from the shorter but closer peak. Our building is on the far right, in front of the bright green buildings (which are under construction).

Gwailo

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I got an email noting that I used the word gwailo in my previous post. The literal meanon is “Ghost man”, and gwaipoa, gwaijai, and gwaimui are “Ghost woman”, “Ghost boy” and “Ghost girl” respectively.

It is sometimes used derogatively but for most it is a pretty harmless tag, similar to Pakeha or Palangi. For some people it is even a badge of honour.

Even more interesting is that sometimes kids of mixed heritage are sometimes called bun-gwai-bun-yan – literally “half-human-half-ghost”.

I guess that means we have two-and-a-half ghosts at home. I wonder if Charlie Sheen could make a sitcom about that?

Chinese New Year

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Kung Hei Faat Choi! (which is the standard Chinese New Year greeting. Tomorrow is the first day of the year of the pig, and all over Hong Kong things are moving to holiday mode. Today we went to the New Year’s flower markets (fasi);. Zac and Vienna’s kindy had a stall at the markets so they had to go and help for an hour. We spent another hour or so looking around at all the different stalls. The stalls are kind of like the Easter/Winter show in NZ but with food, and pinwheels, balloons and all that sort of stuff to buy and sell. The kids got a chinese lion marionette each. And we got stocked up on Chinese New year food.

October update

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I know it’s been a little while since you last heard from me. Let me give you a recap of what has been going on in the last month or so.

On September 15 we moved into our apartment in Ma On Shan. As I mentioned before, it is a good size for our family and quite convenient for us. Our container also arrived and so we began the process of unpacking and sorting out our stuff. It seems that no matter how ruthless you are with getting rid of things before you go, there always seem to be thing that you wonder why you brought.

On September 20 we got our phone and internet connected.

On September 21 we found out that we were able to receive visas to stay in Hong Kong (That’s for Karl and the kids – Amy’s a citizen and can stay regardless!)

On September 23 we had a day-trip to Macau to validate our visas.

On September 24 our computer crashed. It turned out to be the hard drive that crashed, which began a lengthy procedure of figuring what was wrong and then trying to recover the data off the hard drive. The good news is that we recovered all of our data apart from Karl’s emails., and it wasn’t as expensive as it could have been.

On September 26 we went to Disneyland for the day as a family to celebrate Zac’s birthday. It was a wonderful day. We didn’t quite know what to expect from Disneyland as we’d heard mixed reports of the quality of Hong Kong’s Disneyland. Hong Kong’s Disneyland is quite a lot smaller than ones at LA or Orlando, but what is there is great, and one day is about perfect to see everything.

On October 5 I (Karl) had my first day on campus. I went along to Chinese University of Hong Kong (CU) for their weekly student meeting. There I met Lincoln, who I had discipled for a semester at Waikato University when he was dong an exchange year there. It was great to see his face again. I also met a student called Tim, who is a Canadian Chinese student who has just returned to Hong Kong with his family. Culturally he feels more Western than Chinese and so he was quite excited when he heard that there was going to be another outsider around. He is very keen to reach out to his fellow international students, and we are probably going to do a few things together this year.

On October 6 we celebrated Mid-Autumn festival (otherwise known as the Mooncake Festival because it usually involves eating lots of mooncake!) with a family get-together with both sets of grandparents.

These last couple of weeks have been particularly hectic with health converns for the kids. Vienna’s kindy teacher was concerned at the amount of bruises that Vienna had and recommended we take her to a doctor. Amy took her to a doctor who said that she might have leukemia and said we needed to check her into a hospital for three days for them to do tests. We thought that that was rather drastic action and decided to get a second opinion. The second doctor we took her to said that he didn’t think there was anything wrong but we could get a blood test at the doctor’s clinic and if that showed any problems then we could go to the hospital (A much more sensible line of thinking). The blood test came up with no problems. The first doctor, as it turns out was affiliated to a certain hospital and probably would have got a commission from sending us there! It’s all a bit different from the NZ health system.

Well, just a day after that drama, Lukas started vomitting and diarrhoea and couldn’t hold any food down. And since it was a Sunday, we didn’t have any alternative but to go to hospital (a different hospital, mind you). He ended up spending three days in hospital, and in the end it seems like he just caught a nasty tummy bug. He’s at the age where he’s starting to explore and he likes to put everything in his mouth, so it’s kind of hard to insulate him from germs around the house. Anyhow, he has made a full recovery and is back to normal.

And so that brings us up to now. And now that thngs are a bit more settled down I should be able to keep things up to date on our website (www.hongkongudy.com/wordpress) so please do visit.

I recently had a few meetings with the CCC leadership in Hong Kong and my weekly schedule is probably going to look something like:
1 day a week on Chinese University
1 day a week on University of Science and technology
1 day a week language learning
2 days a week helping facilitate and develop training, resources and strategies for evangelism.

Please pray for:
- Health for all our family (especially Lukas)
- Our landlord. We have had a few difficulties getting her to fix things around the house (like toilets, air conditioners, etc). Sometimes getting her to do things feels like pushing water uphill.

Thanks again for all your prayers and support.

In Christ,

Karl, Amy, Zac, Vienna, and Lukas

Somewhere to live

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When we arrived in Hong Kong we started looking for a place to live in Tseung Kwan O, which is in the New Territories just to the east of Kowloon, and connected to the MTR (Mass Transit Rail). We found some places there which were (just) big enough for us to live in, and around our budget, but we found it difficult finding a place we could actually move into. The first place we liked the landlord came back and said that he didn’t want children living there. Another place had furniture fixed in which would make it hard for us to use all the rooms (one of the bedrooms had a desk covering half of the room). So we decided to take a step back and look at other places. We decided to look for places in Ma On Shan, which is in the northeast of Hong Kong’s New Territories and has a rail link, but is further away than Tseung Kwan O. We went and looked at some places and found one place that was a lot larger than the places we were looking at in Tseung Kwan O (988 square feet vs 796 square feet) but a bit more expensive. We told the agent what our budget was – about 80% of the asking price – and she told the landlord. We didn’t expect the landlord to accept, and went away content to go back and look at some more places in Tseung Kwan O, then we got a reply from the agent saying that the landlord had accepted the offer. Upon further investigation we found that the complex has free shuttle buses both to the university nearby and to one of the MTR stations that is close to the Hong Kong Campus Crusade for Christ office. There is also an extensive clubhouse available for the residents there and the area of Ma On Shan has cycleways throughout and lots of green spaces, so it should be a great place for the kids. We’re thanking God for His provision because we didn’t expect to have a place this good, and we have no idea why the landlord decided to rent it out at such a low price – we took one of our colleagues here along to check things out and she agreed that the price is very low for what we’re getting. We signed the contract yesterday and we start renting in the middle of next month. Now we just need to find school and kindy for the children and then we can start really settling in.

Getting Settled

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We are doing our best to get settled in Hong Kong. We have been apartment-hunting and have largely settled on the area we want to live in. It is a place called Tseung Kwan O which is in the New Territories just to the east of Kowloon. Just downstairs from the apartment complexes is a large shopping mall (well, large from a NZ mindset at least) and an MTR station. So it is very convenient. Although the places are advertised as being 796 square feet, in reality they are nearer to 600 as the quoted size includes a portion of the lift lobby! So we are going to fit our stuff into an area about 1/3 the size of our house in NZ – good thing we sold a lot of stuff!
The area is quite popular with young families and there seem to be good schools and kindergartens in the area. There are even some CCC staff families living there, so we should hopefully be able to make friends in the area quite quickly.
The only thing left now is to actually come to an agreement with a landlord to rent a place. We should be able to do that sometime this month.

Arrived in Hong Kong

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Well, here we are in Hong Kong. After a bit of a delay, due to Lukas being diagnosed with a serious ear infection on the eve of our travel, we finally got here four days late, which strangely enough was the date we had originally chosen to arrive in Hong Kong. Our delay allowed us to take a few days at a slower pace and also to finish a few jobs that we hadn’t quite finished. Unfortunately we couldn’t get tickets at the same price we had booked earlier (which was bargain basement prices) but thankfully our travel insurance will get us the money back from our original tickets. So on Tuesday evening after a long (but pleasant) flight we arrived in Hong Kong. It is the end of summer here so it is very hot. Just going‚ outside works up a sweat! We are staying in the 60th floor at my parents apartment in Tsim Sha Tsui. It’s funny living at about the same height as the Sky Tower observation deck.