By Toh Hsien Min

Let me start by saying I like Hong Kong.  Ish.  I have really good friends there, and a goddaughter who has me wrapped around her finger.  The city has a lot of character.  The food is, as in Singapore, full of bright spots.  I've been often enough earlier this year that some friends there have stopped rearranging their schedules to meet up apparently because I'll be there again before too long.  One of the main reasons for that is work.  I've had the occasion to make multiple business trips this year... to Shenzhen, a city that at the start of the year I had never seen before.  In February, I had to put together a small file of research on the best ways to get where I wanted to be, which (for now) all involve flying through Hong Kong.  The city is, unlike its neighbour, all spacious and modern and clean.  I mean Shenzhen of course; Hong Kong is cramped and beaten up in comparison, even before recent events.  I would have to admit, less grudgingly than I would have thought, that it is actually likeable in a way that neither Beijing nor Shanghai is.  For all the infrastructural contrast, underlying the hardware the people on both sides of the Sham Chun River have many commonalities, being both extremely hardworking (more so than Singaporeans, without a doubt), creative and vibrant.

So it saddens me to see Hong Kong turning itself into a warzone.  The temptation is to label it the failure of one political system or another - which one chooses according to one's tastes - but I'm not going to.  I'm not going to mainly because I don't feel I can.  Any opinion I express, beyond the vanilla fudge here that I like both sides of the border, can and will be interpreted by someone on either side of the border as offensive.  So officially I have no opinion, and nothing to say.

It makes me think of Teo You Yenn's post, or repost, in the wake of recent controversy in Singapore.  She says "there should be no such thing as speaking out of turn".  She elaborates that "A democratic society is one where people have rights — substantive, and not just as formality — to have thoughts and express them."  I do not think that she is saying that with irony.  It is indeed correct that the people who are disempowered that she writes about in This Is What Inequality Looks Like should have help with having a voice.  But I do not know what this sort of counter-claim means for the concrete individual as concrete subject when I realise that again I am left with nothing to say.

I think of Barack Obama calling out (also without any irony whatsoever) ideological purity tests and judgementalism, and am reminded why he remains one of my heroes.  Sad to say, given his office, he probably didn't get that far either.

So for me Teo You Yenn is wrong to put the focus on having thoughts and expressing them.  Speaking up, so to speak.  Speaking isn't really the problem; or, from another lens, it arguably is the problem.  Given the will, speaking isn't that hard; in fact, it's relatively simple, particularly in our social media world.  What is unintuitively difficult beyond belief, and what our societies need more of, in place of speaking, is truly, sensitively and non-judgementally listening.  Not just listening to find holes in arguments or to wait one's turn to speak, but to properly understand a point of view that isn't one's own.  Then, in the words of the immortal Crowded House, the world will just be a great place.

I did sort of have in mind to write a review for this issue, but the book I was thinking of wasn't quite so compelling that I knew with certainty what I wanted to say about it, but Stephanie Ye certainly knew what she wanted to say about Loss Adjustment, the surprise, poignant bestseller of this quarter in Singapore, on a subject that takes some real courage to speak up on.  In Extra Media, Shu Hoong writes about a film that centres on the Asian unspoken, giving an unscripted shine to this issue's theme.  More generally, the sprinkling of articles in the various sections shows our writers not having the same challenges I had, and in particular I would flag some sweet if coincidental juxtapositions in the poetry section.

Thank you for listening.

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