Lifestyle
This is Hong Kong
How job pressures can cause a simple encounter to blow up. By Augustine Tan. Asia Times
Jun 13, 2006

HONG KONG - Ex-con, liar, compulsive gambler, coarse in mouth and manner, Roger Chan Yuet-tung, 51, is the least likely candidate to be a catalyst for social change in Hong Kong.

He is not even referred to by his real name. Nowadays he is simply called "Bus Uncle" (in Cantonese Bas-see Ah Sook).

Yet he has sparked changes in the everyday speech and attitudes of Hong Kong people, forcing them to take a fresh look at the city's hectic lifestyle and the questionable values being passed on to the younger generation.

Bus Uncle earned his name for being the unwitting star of an amateur video - now widely circulated - shot while he sat on a bus and severely reprimanded a fellow passenger who had asked him to tone down his voice while speaking on a mobile phone.

Not that Bus Uncle is a universally popular man. Just when it seemed his fortunes were about to make a spectacular turn for the better, four men wearing surgical masks burst into the steakhouse where he had begun work only two days earlier and clobbered him senseless.

Appropriately, this beating was captured on camera, as the whole saga had begun.

By his own account, Bus Uncle was contemplating suicide on the long bus ride home on the night of April 27.

He had just quarreled with his girlfriend, who had no idea that the near-balding man with a ponytail had been jobless for years and was living on HK$1,800 (US$232) a month social security.

In desperation, he called Samaritans on his mobile phone to pour out his sorrows at the top of his voice - until a young man seated directly behind him, Alvin Ho, tapped him on the shoulder and suggested he speak quietly.

The rest is Internet history. YouTube, to be exact. It is seven solid minutes of non-stop ranting by Bus Uncle, starting with his now-famous phrase, "You've got pressure, I've got pressure!"

Other quotable quotes are sandwiched between layers of abuse before ending with another line that has also captured the public imagination, "Not solved! Not solved!"

These lines now scream out from T-shirts, mugs, boxer shorts and advertisements and are heard all over town.

The bus incident might have gone unnoticed if not for a student sitting across the aisle on the upper level of the double-decker. He sells mobile phones to pay for his studies, so is invariably armed with the latest third-generation (3G) model.

After uploading his video on YouTube, a free-for-all website catering to video enthusiasts, he thought he had washed his hands of the whole episode.

But it was an instant hit - even The Da Vinci Code was left far behind. More than a million viewers have since seen the clip. Even bloggers as far away as California and Kolkata were on the trail of the loss-of-face incident and its other social implications.

Newspapers and newsmagazines have since churned out reams on "Bus Uncle" frolics at karaokes and brothels, accompanied by stories of his "colorful" past, larded with his own comments on social and political issues.

It turns out that Bus Uncle had tried to court Hong Kong people on at least three occasions - as a candidate for elections of a chief executive in 1997, in 2002 and last year.

This much about his life is at least true, and documented, even if, for the most part, the media and the general public ignored him at the polls. Also true, it appears, is the fact that he spent four years in a Belgian prison from 1990.

In great doubt are his claims to have won millions of dollars while studying in Australia, which he said he frittered away in an astonishing nine months; that he had earned several degrees and picked up the French and German languages while in prison.

He also said he spend time in British and German jails before returning to Hong Kong in 1994 - to join the ranks of street-sleepers.

Since the law requires a chief-executive candidate to have resided continuously in Hong Kong for not less than 20 years prior to the election and not to have a criminal record, Bus Uncle clearly told some very big lies in filing his candidacy, or maybe he just has a good imagination.

In between such revelations were Bus Uncle's accounts of decadence, proudly claiming to have bedded more than 1,000 women, his love-making techniques and trips to Shenzhen across the border in mainland China for more women - courtesy of the media.

In one account, two reporters took Bus Uncle to Shenzhen for a night of unbridled fun, then handed him over to two other reporters from another newspaper for more fun and games.

Public fascination appears to have only fueled the media antics, and his bus rant has now been remixed as rap songs.

One even features Taiwan's embattled President Chen Shui-bian. There are adaptations to suit the young, the old and the women.

The rant is simply a runaway success.

So fortune is turning for Bus Uncle. Unless the assault thrashes his job as well, he is set to earn HK$9,000 a month from the steakhouse and get a cut from the sale of some T-shirts.

This has infuriated academics, social workers and educationists, who say he should not benefit from his uncouth rant.

But Bus Uncle says, "So what's new? Everybody is under stress. You hear foul language everywhere, every minute! All over Hong Kong. I didn't put the video on the Internet.

"I didn't ask to be interviewed by the media. They looked me up, they took me every where. They paid for everything, I didn't spend a single dollar."

The Hong Kong media couldn't care less, either.

Two years ago, just hours after a distraught wife jumped to her death over her husband's philandering, reporters from a mass-circulation daily picked up the man and took him across to Shenzhen and straight to a brothel.

This is Hong Kong, with warts all over.

Augustine Tan is a Hong Kong-based freelance journalist.