Opinion | Is Hong Kong heartless?
By Philip Yeung, university teacher
PKY480@gmail.com
In France, citizens are fighting the government tooth and nail in the streets over its proposal to extend the retirement age to 64. Here in Hong Kong, a 94-year-old lady is hauled before the courts for unlawful street hawking, with her only means of livelihood, a chestnut push-cart, confiscated. That is a 30-year gap that can never be bridged, culturally or politically.
I have an idea. Why not export our hardy great granny to France and let President Macron make her an honorary French citizen to shame their protestors into silence?
Hers is among a spate of episodes involving livelihood-related offenses by the elderly. The 94-year-old dusty old dodderer holds a valid hawker’s license but apparently took a half-hour bathroom break, with a male relative bailing her out. At that precise moment, six public hygiene officers swooped on the scene and seized her hand-pulled cart. She cried her eyes out when they took away her sole source of income. The cold-hearted control officers did not bat an eyelid in whisking away her bread-and-butter cart.
In a separate case, a 75-year-old woman was charged with hawking without a license and disrupting public space. After 14,000 signatures clamoring for leniency, the charges, thankfully, were dropped.
Days later, another senior citizen hit the headlines. This time it was an 84-year-old cab driver who ploughed into pedestrians, injuring six. This followed hot on the heels of a 71-year-old cab driver who rammed his car into an escalator, injuring two.
There was an immediate outcry to tighten measures to test the physical fitness of elderly cab drivers.
But a larger issue is staring us in the face: why are senior citizens in their 70s and 80s still forced to drive a cab to put rice on the table? In a filthy-rich city, why is there no social safety net for people long past retirement age? Have we no shame to see so many hunched-back old women scavenging in the back alleys or pushing chestnut carts to stay alive?
These brave ancient workers share one thing in common: they are fiercely self-reliant, and too proud to beg for a handout. They will stay on their feet until they draw their last breath.
Does Hong Kong only care about its GDP, when its poor are squirming in cage units or sleeping rough? In our city, if you are poor, you can’t afford to be sick, or even go to the bathroom. In a European country, retiring at 64 is an unacceptable cruelty; here, it is an undreamed-of luxury. Hong Kong has a long way to go before it can call itself a humane society, in a culture that supposedly venerates age.
How can our city go after a 94-year-old woman for an offense involving no moral turpitude? At that age, she should be pampered, not punished. In the name of fiscal prudence, our government has nickel-and-dimed our aged poor to death. How can they survive on $4060 government monthly living allowance when it barely covers rent for a coffin unit?
Angry condemnation is pointless unless it results in improving the plight of the poor. The government has within its grasp a workable solution to snatch the elderly from the jaws of utter poverty: Relocate them to the Cantonese-speaking, livable Greater Bay Area where rent can be 15 times cheaper than Hong Kong. Better still, build public housing units for the unhoused. Then top up the monthly welfare payment by an extra thousand dollars—a mere drop in the bucket. This way, our senior citizens can live out their twilight years in dignity.
When times are tough, rules on curbside hawking should be relaxed, so that the destitute can earn crumbs to survive. Street hawking and road-side eateries used to be part of Hong Kong’s indigenous culture. Sociologically ignorant bureaucrats tend to see gleaming shopping plazas, concrete canyons and amusement parks as symbols of modernity, dismissing local street culture as an eyesore. But Singapore has proved that indigenous culture is inherently alluring for tourists.
With a greying population, and no safety net, brace for more ugly mishaps with the elderly as victims and inadvertent victimizers. A city that has no heart has no soul, whatever its GDP.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.
Read more articles by Philip Yeung:
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