I wasn't in Hong Kong during SARS, but I had heard that people were afraid to touch doorknobs and elevator buttons for fear of contracting some deadly disease. Like SARS. To minimize the chances of contamination, people used keys, pens, or whatever they had on hand to push the buttons instead. (The really lucky ones used either telekinesis or paid their housekeepers to push the buttons for them).I suppose that wearing surgical gloves everywhere you went might have been a bit too drastic, although if you were already knocking about in public, you were probably already wearing a surgeon's mask as well, so why not complete the look?
Living in post-SARS Hong Kong, and with avian bird flu the current pandemic in Asian news and on people's minds, I often see signs that Hong Kong people have turned to a culture of fear. Specifically, this fear of the unseen. I took this picture of the elevator in the Consular Visa Office when I went to apply for a visa to travel to China. (A word about Chinese bureaucracy: it is less devastating and far less nerve-wracking to contract a deadly disease than it is to apply for a visa to enter China.)
Of course, I'm a cynical guy. So I highly doubt that someone actually cleans the elevator buttons every single hour in every single day. That's just too difficult for me to believe, knowing how lazy people can be. I imagine, at best, that some cleaning lady gets in the elevator every 4 hours or so and arbitrarily wipes the buttons for some floors, and ignores the buttons for the rest. To be honest, I can't blame her. If I had such a mundane task as that to look forward to every morning I rolled out of bed, I'd try to make it as interesting as possible too. I'd sterilize my phone number, followed by all the phone numbers of my friends and family, followed perhaps by the GDP of all the countries beginning with the letter "U" between 1965 to 1988.
What is strange is that I didn't really feel better at all after seeing this in the elevator. I mean, after all, heaven knows what lurks on door handles to public bathrooms, payphones, and restaurants.
Restaurants. I need a whole new blogsite devoted just to talking about Hong Kong restaurants. It is an experience in and of itself to sup in a Hong Kong eatery (in this case, I'm referring to the shadier dumps... uh, I mean establishments... where you get cheap and fast food). In Cantonese, they're called "Tea Cafes" or "Tea Restaurants." I remember when I was a little kid, I used to eat lunch with my uncle at one particular tea cafe near his office. We shared our daily gastronomic enchantment with old men who sat with barefeet propped up on the chairs, picking away at rotted or dead toenails, coolies in filthy uniforms, lit cigarettes, with an inch of ash threatening to fall into their rice, permanently affixed to their lower lips, brass spittoons that were more often than not, overflowing, and... cockroaches. Everywhere. On the floor. On the walls. Dangling precariously from the ceilings (if I had paid more attention, I probably would have seen them drop like silent ninjas into the soup of some unsuspecting lunch-goer).
Nowadays, restaurant health codes are a bit stricter. (You can still find some roaches here and there if you look carefully enough. Which is to say, so long as you have at least one working cornea, you're bound to see one). What you do find now in most tea cafes is a large bowl of hot water to "wash" your chopsticks, spoon, rice bowl, etc, before you eat. I would highly doubt that water at well below boiling point makes for an effective sanitizer of eating utensils, but I could be wrong. But, I suppose, more important than the actual sterilization, is the notion that you are cleaning something before you put it in your mouth. The Placebo effect, as it were.
Sorry. I'm just not fooled. Besides, regardless of how clean and bacteria-free my chopsticks might be, doesn't it all kind of just go to hell anyway when I have to use them to pick a dead roach out of my soup?
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