Satire With Chips
April 2nd, 2009The problem with Chip Tsao’s column ‘War at Home’ for HK Magazine, which has got him barred from the Philippines, is not that it was offensive but incompetent. It was not a very long piece to have got lost in but he managed that early on. It bawled desperately in the middle, which is where he got himself into trouble and it tumbled to its end, bouncing off the margins, barely coherent.
Many people will have been struck by the paradox of one of the world’s poorest and most chaotic nations vying for territorial rights over the Spratley Islands with some of the biggest and the richest. A few columnists may well have given it a thought as a topic but moved on because if you embark on between five to seven hundred words of social and political satire which has to be seamless, taut and silver with wit even through the conjunctions, the basic conceit has to be loaded enough to carry you through.
A columnist often looks at a prospect, weighs it up against the needs and lets it go, reluctantly sometimes because it has seemed such a honey to begin with. Tsao did not do that. He blundered on with a passion, which is a ruinous emotion to have upon if you are writing satire.
Tsao’s patronizing bemusement over the Philippines got all legged up with an introspective annoyance over his Chinese-ness. Both these emotions are perfectly good starters for a column and if he had just taken one or the other, he could have coasted in nicely at around 400 words.
I am not being paid for this so I’m not trying very hard but you could have quite a lot of fun describing a coordinated sea and land offensive by and armed forces best known for invading 5-star hotels in its own capital. You could tell of how all the Filipina maids overseas would be called home to battle since they were the only gender and class in their country that could be relied on to fight . That really would be worth being barred from the Philippines for saying.
Turning on the local Chinese, you could describe how flats smelt, fresh produce went unpurchased, children wandered the streets, uncared for and losing what little English they had ,old people and dogs lay indoors , unwashed and not walked and all because the maids left at the beginning of the Great Patriotic War against the Philippines.
Still, there is no use crying over a spilt column by an unsyndicated writer in an obscure English free paper given away in limited neighbourhoods of Hong Kong. Not that is, unless you are the government of a country in which 97% of the wealth is held by 40 people and journalists reporting on it are murdered by the score. But I really should let Chip say that if he’s passionate.
Chip Tsao enjoys buckets of fame and I hope equivalents in cash through the Chinese media. One wonders what he is doing on the English side of the line and in a style zone where the near erogenous sensitivity to nuance means that its best trod by people who can pick their way like a native. Perhaps Chip regards himself as one- which would also be fun fodder for a column -or perhaps HK magazine won’t afford one.
As you see, most writers can find it in themselves to be unkind although most of them are aware when they are doing it. I knew I was being so about Swedes on unemployment benefit in a piece some ten years ago but I did not expect to upset the Hong Kong Swedish Chamber of Commerce so badly that I still have to duck in doorways to avoid a beating if I spot anyone tall, fair and melancholy. Yet I have never, come anywhere close to offending an entire nation state to such noise and for that, if nothing else, I take my hat off to Chip Tsao.
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