What's Mine Is Mine and Not Yours

February 14, 2010
Hong Kong

That is, except when you and your gangster cronies take it from me and make it yours.

Chinese New Year coincided with Valentines Day this year, and Hong Kong was ablaze with hearts and flowers and young kissing couples as well as lanterns, dragons, firecrackers, babies dressed in red, kids with furry tiger hats and lots and lots of people out for the holiday. Perhaps most crowded were the malls. Hong Kong is littered with malls: multi-level, on top floors of high rises, in the subway. Food courts are a cheap and easy way to feed the masses, and man, do the locals congregate there.

One such mall was the passageway supposedly leading to the metro stop near the famed Peninsula hotel. On the first day of the new year, we had walked down to the southern part of Kowloon, near the water, to scope out a spot for the evening's parade. Streets were blocked off with barricades along the route, which made crossing particularly challenging. One thing to be said of the Chinese – these folks don't have much concept of personal space and they have no qualms about pushing and shoving to get wherever it is they are going. I was getting used to it, so I thought nothing of it when a group of well dressed young thugs got in our way at a crosswalk. Their rudeness was maybe a notch higher than the norm, but I just assumed they were being obnoxious idiots, as packs of teenage boys often are. The crossing of that intersection led not to the subway, but into an underground shopping center maze, whereby we stopped to watch an impromptu lion dance. I spotted the boys from the street also watching the dance, and assumed they were tourists just like us. Quickly realizing that this mall did not, in fact, lead to the tube stop, we ascended the stairs. Lo and behold, the same group of boys were again seemingly going the same way we were. I know one of us got shoved walking up the stairs and we were all commenting under our breath about what brazen assholes these kids were. 20 seconds later, we were on the street and my little purse had been de-velcroed and unzipped and my blackberry was gone. My friend's bag was also unzipped, but nothing had been taken. The luck of the tiger was with her. He obviously forgot about me.

In that instant I wanted to run down the street with a machete chopping off the faces of anyone with spiky hair, and had rage fantasies of finding and kicking in the teeth of each of those 4 little shits. In fact, if I think about it long enough I still hope they all get run over by a bus or stabbed in the throat. Save for a bug net in Thailand, I've never been robbed before. It is an awful feeling. Hopefully the Mongkok Acid Man gets them (incidentally, there is a madman running around the area of town we stayed in throwing acid on people from the high rises above).

But of course, they were long gone before I could do anything about it. So a day that had started off with some exquisite dim sum and a great mood detoured into the Tsim Sha Tsui police station. I assume this kind of thing happens often as there was a designated theft desk. Not only did the police not need to see my passport (I didn't have it with me, so that was a good thing), they didn't even ask for a description of the culprits. 15 minutes later and I was less one Blackberry, out of all my contacts and personal information, and in possession of a Hong Kong police report. Funny how an hour earlier I was commenting about that being one part of the city I hoped never to see. Not as auspicious of a start to this trip as I'd hoped. In fact, quite the opposite.

Hopefully my insurance will cover the loss of the phone. The years of contacts and lack of technology unfortunately cannot be so easily replaced. (I'm writing this in Vietnam, where Facebook is illegal. If I had my blackberry, I'd be able to access it. No such luck on a laptop.) Somewhere out there, somebody in Hong Kong has a list of all my friends and colleagues. If they are looking for even a little retribution, they have my blessing to start by prank calling Dave Mustaine.