When Brother Ming meets students and keyboard fighters
Updated: 2013-04-03 05:25
By Jony Lam(HK Edition)
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Guess which topic is most discussed among the "post-90s" in cyberspace? Certainly neither the strategic merit of "Occupy Central", nor the campaign organizers' attempt to keep young people aged below 40 from participating. Last week, all serious discussions - those written in more or less grammatically correct, standard Chinese, resulting in complete sentences adding up to 500 plus words - focused on one epic event: Brother Ming's encounter with sponsorship-seeking university students and keyboard fighters.
Brother Ming is the owner of the Beihe Shaola Restaurant in Sham Shui Po. The restaurant may be shabby, and the food merely alright, but the place nonetheless espouses universal values, as Brother Ming provides discounted meals for the poor day after day. On top of that, Beihe also works with the Society for Community Organization (SoCO) to provide 500 free rice boxes to the homeless each day.
Often seen wearing plain clothing with worn collars, 60-year-old Brother Ming is the symbol of goodness in the community. He reminds us of another side of Hong Kong, where less-well-off people do good deeds despite the fact that no buildings will be named after them. While they remain unsung heroes, it is not an exaggeration to say that it is the aggregation of their minute kindness that sustains the fabric of our society.
One day, Brother Ming encountered a problem with another line of charity work he does, namely, giving out free food to university students for their activities. University students are a well-known disadvantaged group. Most of them are in debt, and their adolescent bodies swim in calories. Years of advanced schooling forbids them from begging on the street, so they devise clever schemes to achieve the same result: they form societies and ask for sponsorships.
To cut a long story short, the message spread among students that Brother Ming was the place to go for free food. So, starving young people soon lined up in front of Beihe with proposals titled "inauguration ceremony" (read the first party), "high-table dinner" (read party with fancy gowns), or the "annual general meeting" (read the final party).
While giving free chicken wings may or may not be a financial burden to Brother Ming, justice in the form of keyboard fighter Benson Tsang came to the rescue. Outraged by how the students exploited Ming, Benson posted a photo of Ming on Facebook with a few words and tagged a bunch of people. Uproar emerged in major social media sites. It didn't take long before the anti-big business Facebook page named "Say No to Evil" followed up on the campaign, pushing it to new heights, and gained a few thousand likes along the way.
Important philosophical and moral questions were asked in the subsequent debate, and much soul-searching was wrought. Is sponsorship-seeking morally justifiable? Is it wrong in principle, or acceptable, if free food comes from evil multinationals? Is Brother Ming a bourgeoisie or a proletariat? Is social class defined by a relationship to the means of production or by type of clothing?
The sponsorship agreement also came under attack. While it can be said that a contract was formed between Brother Ming and the students, keyboard fighters claimed the agreement unfair because Ming was too kind to reject unreasonable requests. But to the students, this type of sponsorship is not pure donation, as supposedly they would advertise Ming's restaurant in return.
In the past week, agitators in the cyber world - also known as keyboard fighters against all forms of injustice - achieved two remarkable feats. First, they made students dig out Karl Marx's Das Kapital and John Rawls' A Theory of Justice from under their beds and read them, something their professors have tried in vein for semesters.
Second, the keyboard fighters created an issue out of a non-issue, won a case without a claimant, and exposed a crime without a villain. There never was evidence showing that Brother Ming sponsored the students reluctantly. At the same time, no one could explain clearly why students should not have approached an adult who is capable of making decisions himself.
Although the word cyber has become a cliche and is shudder-inducing, I still have to say: score one for the keyboard fighters and their cyber prowess.
The author is a current affairs commentator. You may contact the author at jony.lam.kh@gmail.com
(HK Edition 04/03/2013 page9)