Common sense

When you have a complain, why on earth does the Lands dept, Water Supplies, Drainge dept, PCCW, CLP, etc would send someone to your house who does not speak english everytime and by my family name they know that I am not a chinese and there is no one chinese in my house because they normally phone you first. And oh, the water dept, drainage dept, lands dept people would even come in sets of 5 as if there is a reunion in your house but no one speaks english and all they do is stare at the problem! Why not hire one efficient person who can at least talk to the client instead of having to pay 5 people who know and do nothng!

It's their country. We are the guests. If a Chinese person is in he US, surely you wouldn't expect the utilities to send a Chinese speaker?


These problems are easily remedied by getting help from a guard, or a customer service person on the phone. Heck, learning 20-30 words of Cantonese solves most simple communications issues.

If you clearly request an English speaker, gov't departments and utilities will usually find one. It may take a few extra days since they only have a few "designated" speakers. Tons of residents with expat names do have Chinese speakers at home, and so leaving the dept to surmise your situation is just not in your interests.


Yes, English is an official language, but Cantonese is the predominant language. If you want service in English, then you must clearly request.


5 people to do one job.... this is governments worldwide, and not just HK.

"As a self-effacing rhetorical flourish, it's nice to say that we're guests, but (taken as a group) we make disproportionately large contributions to the life of the city, esp. economically. I'd wager that flokhk lives here, pays taxes, rent, etc., so he's entitled to more consideration than a guest or some sort of refugee. :)"


Granted, and I do myself have difficulties sometimes. But we don't live in a vacuum. It never seems to be a huge problem to find some way to translate, whether someone on the phone or with good old drawings.

It's their country. We are the guests. If a Chinese person is in he US, surely you wouldn't expect the utilities to send a Chinese speaker?


"These problems are easily remedied by getting help from a guard, or a customer service person on the phone. Heck, learning 20-30 words of Cantonese solves most simple communications issues".


20-30 words of cantonese won't help if you have a technical issue that really needs explanation from both sides. Try explaining about an erosion under your garden tiles to the Lands Dept and who is responsible for that? ( We pay them $10,200 a year to rent this garden.) At the end of the day when nothing happened bec of lack of "language understanding", and we lost our patience we spent more than $30k to fix the problem. This is just one stupid example of so many. The current issue is a leak in a pipe drainage in my garden ( again) but is not our drainage obviously and we phoned all agencies we thought would be "responsible" for such prob. That was 2007 when we phoned them and complained!!!! Drainage people, water supply, Sanitation dept, water supply people said they will contact the Lands Dept. blah blah blah... This leak is flooding my drainage with sand and soil and stink like hell not mentioning the millions of mosquitoes that breed!!!!! Now is 2008 soon 2009, has it been fixed, has anyone found out what was wrong? Nah! If it is once or twice people comes to your house and don't speak english then fine. These people has been to my house loads and I mean loads of times and they still send non speaking english muppets! Now tell me that I have to learn their language for them to understand me. If they come to live in the UK, they easily learn the language. The english langage is made of alphabets that you can read and sometimes pronounce as they are spelled. It is not easy to learn their langage that is made of lines and strokes and you couldnt even determine which are the alphabets. They call HK a world city. Well they better start learning the english language if they want to be called that.

"If they come to live in the UK, they easily learn the language. The english langage is made of alphabets that you can read and sometimes pronounce as they are spelled. It is not easy to learn their langage that is made of lines and strokes and you couldnt even determine which are the alphabets."


Actually the Chinese find it rather hard to learn English unless they started very young. You cannot arbitrarily pronounce that the Chinese writing style is more difficult than the latin one.

To axpatguy, its as much our country as 'theirs', this is where we call home. Have lived here 11 1/2 years, have had 2 children born here. It bugs me when people say that as white expats we don't really belong and are just guests etc in someone else's country.

as to the OP, yes sometimes its frustrating not being able to make ourselves understood, but usually it works out in the end, and we find most things very efficient here.

"To axpatguy, its as much our country as 'theirs', this is where we call home. Have lived here 11 1/2 years, have had 2 children born here. It bugs me when people say that as white expats we don't really belong and are just guests etc in someone else's country."


I didn't say we don't really belong. But let's face it, the vast majority of the population is Chinese speaking and ethnically Chinese. Even when the place was under British rule I'm pretty sure Chinese was the norm.