I was nervous writing about people in Hong Kong, considering my Cantonese skills. After 10 weeks of lessons, I've mastered "mh goi," which means "excuse me" and "thanks," "joh san," which is "good morning," and counting from one to 10. That is where my knowledge of Cantonese ends, much to the chagrin of my instructor, Teacher Chow.
It turns out I should not have worried too much about learning the language - even reporters here don't always know it.
I had just boarded the KCR express train, which takes passengers from the Chinese border at Lo Wu to downtown Hong Kong in under 40 minutes. The train was packed full of shoppers, who, much like myself, had spent the day buying clothes, shoes and household goods, which sometimes cost as little as one-fourth the price in Hong Kong.
The passengers and their numerous new possessions left little room for anyone to sit down, especially a foreigner like me. I found a seat in a far corner of the train.
There I met Sam, as I will call him, who I soon found out worked as a football reporter for a local English newspaper, the Post. (Hong Kong is a former British colony, so I really mean soccer.) He was friendly, spoke quickly, and seemed very interested to meet a budding reporter.
Sam had turned his post-graduate travels into a career by taking reporting jobs in Europe and Africa. His last assignment had taken him to Iraq. This was in between the two Bush invasions.
"It was a really nice country; I'd love to go back there someday," he said.
He accepted an invitation from the Post to join the staff as a football reporter. He had just come from a match in Shenzen, the same place where I had been searching for fake North Face and Puma.
"How do you report on the football games?" I asked.
"You have to find a way to make it work," he said. "Sometimes I bring along a translator, and if I can't do that, I can swap quotes with the local reporters."
I raised my eyebrows a bit.
"It's not ideal, but we make do," he said. I have been reading the Post for several months now and have constantly been amazed at how the paper is able to "make do." The population of Hong Kong is less than two percent Caucasian, but manages to support two daily English newspapers.
But all is not right at the paper. Sam was worried that his newspaper was afraid of criticizing the Chinese government.
It was a theme that was echoed by the students and teachers at my university. In my Hong Kong politics class, I had a TA who would complain at length about the increasingly pro-Chinese leanings of the paper. Other students in the class suggested that the paper would soon be no different than the China Daily, the official - and officially boring - English language publication of the Chinese government.
The paper's changing politics, Sam worried, could even have an effect on the story he was working on right then. Several players on the Shenzen team had been accused of rigging matches. One player even admitted to fixing games in the past. Sam was worried about how the editorial staff would change his story, which was critical of the team and the football league.
At points during our conversation, Sam began to scribble down sentences that would appear in his article, which he would have to turn in two hours after the train arrived downtown. He didn't look nervous at all - rather, he was constantly switching from re-writing his lead sentence to telling me his grievances with his employer.
"I don't know how much longer I'm going to stay here," he said. "When I came here, I was promised that I was going to be able to do in-depth reporting." Despite some sympathetic editors, he said that he had rarely been able to do these types of stories.
Before I left the train, Sam shared with me one more concern: the placement of his article. He was worried that the paper would try to bury the story and the associated cheating scandal.
The next day I opened the paper to find that he had in fact made the front page of the sports section, but probably not where he wanted. His article ran last, right at the bottom of the page.
