Paymaya, the Concept

What is Paymaya? I'd like to try and provide a conceptual answer to that question. As a proud member of Gen X (1965-1979), I consider my generation to be the last that provides conceptual answers to questions. Not to generalize too much, but it certainly seems like, to me at least, that when you ask a millennial (Gen. Y 1980-1994) a question of what something is, he/she will generally reply not with what it is, but rather with what it can do.

What is Paymaya?
Gen Y answer: You can use it to pay for things at any establishment that accepts Paymaya.

Ask a Gen Z'er (1995-2015) the same question on the other hand, and you are bound to get the most basic of replies.

What is Paymaya? Gen Z answer: App siya.

If you're lucky and the Gen Z'er hasn't gone back to playing Mobile Legends, you might get snippets of how to get the App to work, but rarely, it seems, information about what the app is, in concept.

 I haven't figured out why there seems to be this difference across generations. And mind you, I am definitely  not implying that there is a difference in intelligence. Your average Gen Z'er for instance, has so much information in his brain that I suspect he answers the question like that precisely because he couldn't decide where to start and thus ended up defaulting to "app sya.."

I guess it is somewhat related to the differences in the way life presented itself to these different generations, which in turn, led to differences in how we view the world and process and thus exchange information. But exactly how, I don't know. For all I know, it is perhaps not a difference in generations but a difference in age. Maybe answering questions in conceptual terms is something that kicks in at say, 36 years of age. Maybe this is the only reason Gens Y and Z still don't seem to answer questions in conceptual terms, I don't know. So, for today at least, I am sticking to talking about Paymaya.

 At its core, Paymaya is a digital wallet which allows money transfers to other Paymaya users. If you are a Paymaya user, you can convert your cash into digital form and store it as credits on the Paymaya app which resides on your phone. From this app you can then send credits to other Paymaya users, who can either choose to keep them as credits on their phone or exchange them back into hard currency.

Sample of QR Code

In its purest form, a Paymaya payment from a user to a commercial establishment is essentially such a money transfer. The commercial establishment is also a Paymaya account-holder, although they have a business account instead of a personal one (a minor detail for purposes of our discussion) and when you pay them you are essentially sending money from your account to theirs. The way you tell your app that it is their account you want to send money to (and not some other establishment's) is by inputing their account number (often a cellphone number) into your app - and the shortcut to this is scanning their unique QR code.

That's it. At its core that's what Paymaya (and GCash for that matter) is.

 But like any commercial products, there are of course, bells and whistles. It's these bells and whistles that often make things seem more complicated than they really are - especially if we delve into the bells and whistles before taking the time to understand the central concept behind the product.

For a digital wallet to really be useful in everyday life, it must also serve as a payment solution. That is, there must be an easy way for you to pay for things in everyday life with credits from your digital wallet. With Paymaya for instance, the basic way to pay is to send money from your account to the account of the commercial establishment from which you purchased something. But as we've mentioned before, this can only be done if the commercial establishment or vendor is also a Paymaya account-holder. To make Paymaya more useful, the people behind it needed to give users the ability to pay even vendors who were not Paymaya account-holders. Enter the Paymaya debit card. The Paymaya debit card is an add-on to the basic Paymaya account. You can easily buy one from Paymaya or its distributors, and it will be accepted anywhere that VISA or Mastercard is accepted (it's your choice which one to have, or both if you buy multiple cards.) You can then link the card/s to your account and your payments will flow as digital credits on your phone, through the debit card, to the vendor who accepts either VISA or Mastercard. Each debit card costs around P200 (I'm not sure exactly) and you can link more than one card.

 Each Paymaya account also has a virtual card which you can choose to activate. With a virtual card you have card details (i.e. card number, expiry date, security code) but no physical card. The virtual card will be powered by either VISA or Mastercard. The user doesn't get to choose which of the two as this depends, I believe, on the network his phone is on. The advantage of the virtual card is that it's free. The disadvantage is that while it can be used for online purchases, most brick-and-mortar establishments will require a physical card. So in short, if you expect to be using your Paymaya account purely for online payments, then a virtual card is sufficient; but to be able to use your Paymaya accounts in physical establishments (especially for non-Paymaya vendors), you will need to buy a physical Paymaya debit card and link it to your account. Once you have a physical card, then the virtual card becomes redundant and unnecessary, though you are perfectly free to keep using it of course.

I should also add that while setting up the most basic Paymaya account takes, quite literally, less than five minutes, once you want a card - be it a virtual or physical card - you will need to verify your account by sending in more identification information. To make sure you are a living, breathing person, Paymaya will also require you to take a video selfie (I kid you not) at this stage. Video selfie, not photo selfie. All in all, these are still manageable minor inconveniences in exchange for a fairly complete digital-wallet-and-payment system.

As a way to recap the things we've gone through, let's take a look at a real world situation that I personally find interesting.

When you go to McDonald's and one of its NXTGEN ordering kiosks, you will almost always see "Paymaya" prominently displayed on the payment interface of the kiosk. And yet, McDonald's is actually not a Paymaya vendor in the truest sense of the word - at least not currently, and at least not in the way I see it. For me, a "true" Paymaya vendor lets you send money from your Paymaya account into theirs, and they have a QR code to identify their account - and at this point in time McDonald's does not. While it is true that the McDonald's kiosks allow you to pay using a Paymaya debit card, it also allows all other debit/credit cards that use the VISA/Mastercard systems. So, the more correct description, currently, is that McDonald's accepts all VISA/Mastercard cards, and that includes those that are linked to / funded by Paymaya accounts. So, I find it very interesting why the Paymaya logo is so prominently displayed at those kiosks, perhaps McDonald's and Paymaya have grand plans that just haven't been launched yet.

UPDATE December 12, 2019 : So, indeed, the scan-QR-to-pay facility has been enabled in McDonald's stores. I thought it was probably coming given how prominently the Paymaya logo had been displayed on the payment terminals attached to the ordering kiosks -

Another question I used to have is why these telecommunications companies like Globe and Smart ventured into the payments space. At first glance it seems like a business quite different from their core businesses of providing telecommunications services. I was even more intrigued when I learned that the payment services did not even require you to use the sister-company as your telecom provider - i.e. you can open a Paymaya account with a Globe number and a GCash account with a Smart number. Then at some point I realized that if these telecommunications companies can nudge us towards a world where our wallets come to reside within  our phones, and thus make our phones even more indispensable parts of our lives, then it can only mean good things for them over the long haul because their market expands. It's true marketing in a way - to create sales and revenues not by pushing things down consumers' throats but by creating a world where consumers have greater and greater need, whether real or imagined, for the core products you provide. Pretty cool actually.

The Pitfalls of Wazing in Manila

Waze is incredibly useful. I have to admit that through the use of the app, I've discovered dozens of routes previously unbeknownst to me even as a lifelong resident of Metro Manila. Furthermore, knowing my ETA really takes away one form of stress from my commute.

That said, through the years of using the app, I've learned to be watchful of certain pitfalls. Now mind you, these pitfalls are probably not unique to the use of Waze in Manila. I do think however, that because of the nature of Metro Manila roads and traffic, these pitfalls do tend to be more pronounced in Metro Manila.

PITFALL #1 : The Scrimper Pitfall

Ever tried to scrimp when buying something, only to realize soon thereafter that the inferior quality of that thing you bought actually cost you more, sometimes in other ways, over the long run? The Waze equivalent of this is when it gets us to follow highly complex routes through small, crowded streets because it is perhaps 11 minutes faster than the route that mostly uses the major thoroughfares.

These complex routes can be costly in a number of ways: First, when we're using these complex routes for the first time, through crowded streets with many permanent and semi-permanent obstructions, we probably take a longer time to navigate the route compared with what the data on the app suggests - the data having been compiled from the journeys of Waze users who are likely much more familiar with those narrow streets. Second, for me, the stress from your commute is a very real cost, and obviously a complex route is a much more stressful drive than a more straightforward one. Then finally, the increased probability of scrapes, bumps, and even road scams is also a very real cost.

Whenever I share this observation with other Waze users, especially more casual users, they will usually point out that you're given three options and it is your choice whether to use the fast-but-complex route. This is somewhat true, but, there are also many instances that all three routes given will contain the same complex section of a route and are just variations off of that core section.

I have long felt that there's an elegant solution to this which would not be too difficult for Waze to implement if it were so inclined. Waze can ask for user preference on the complexity-vs.-speed tradeoff and incorporate these preferences into a decision on which routes to recommend to a specific user. Specifically, it can ask the user to define how much complexity he is willing to accept to get to his destination 5 minutes faster. As a stand-in for complexity, the number of turns can be used. i.e. how many additional turns are you willing to make to save five minutes of travel time? On one end of the spectrum you'd have the user who much prefers straightforward drives and would not want to make even one additional turn to save five minutes. On the other end you'd have the user who values speed above all else and is indifferent to the number of additional turns, just as long as he can arrive earlier. Waze can have some kind of slider bar for the user to fine tune the exact level of preference between these two extremes.

For all I know, maybe Waze already has the algorithms to detect user route preferences by mining the data from all of his previous drives, and maybe the reason I do not sense this ability in Waze is because I've never ever bothered to set up an account and sign in. Serves me right then eh? For not being an upstanding member of the Waze community.

PITFALL #2 : The Siren Pitfall

In Greek Mythology a Siren is a partly human creature of the ocean, a temptress who would lure mariners to their destruction with the seductive sound of singing. On days of extremely bad traffic that Metro Manilans have come to refer to as "Carmageddon" in equal parts humor, affection, and resignation; sirens come in the form of little known routes that suddenly pop up and promise travel time half of the more well-known routes. Alas, invariably, these routes rely on very narrow streets through densely populated areas (it's those narrow streets again), and the moment Waze recommends these routes the ensuing rush to them cause gridlock at the narrow streets. There are few worse feelings in the world than to be stuck in traffic on a narrow road and to repeatedly hear Waze chiming to inform you that your ETA has been pushed back because "traffic is building up".


PITFALL #3 : The Right Love at the Wrong Time Pitfall

Metro Manila is a very dense metropolis whose streets are particularly susceptible to periodic "rushes" of traffic. For instance, traffic on roads around schools and churches will usually get quite heavy in the thirty minutes right after classes or mass ends. There are times when Waze, with the best of intentions, recommends a route that is great at the time you start your journey, but which, unfortunately, brings you to an area that experiences the aforementioned periodic rushes just around the time that these rushes are about to be experienced. Sometimes this can be quite costly in that you are already committed to that route and have no realistic option to circumvent the problematic pocket. I think a somewhat more predictive intelligence can, and probably will, be one of the next steps in the evolution of navigation apps. To the extent that there is a predictable pattern to traffic buildup, an app like Waze ought to be be able to, and probably will, mine the data they have and proactively keep you away from a route wherein a buildup is expected at sometime along the route just as you will get to the area. But I don't think we're quite there yet.

The improvements we discussed, while definitely doable, may not be high on the priorities of Waze developers if these are not deemed to be indispensable in Waze's core markets, of which the Philippines is probably but a small part, if at all. So, it's not entirely silly when we hear people saying that with Metro Manila traffic, pati Waze nasira ang ulo.  



 

That Jenga Tower

The 2015 film The Big Short had a huge, almost gargantuan task. The book upon which it was based, Michael Lewis' "The Big Short" had already taken on the difficult task of explaining the causes of the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis in relatively understandable terms. The film not only had to condense the book into 140 minutes of screen time, it also had to do so in a way that would be interesting to a broader audience, and thus keep their attention for the entire 140 minutes. To that end I think the film did an admirable and fantastic job. Of course, it is to be expected that the film couldn't be absolutely thorough, and might give some slightly ambiguous impressions.

One of the most iconic scenes from the movie was the one wherein the Ryan Gosling character (named Jared Vennet in the movie but actually based on real-life Deutsche Banker Greg Lippmann) used a Jenga Tower to illustrate the vulnerability of Subprime Mortgage-Backed Securities.

The scene no doubt provides a creative visual analogy, but one that unfortunately is bound to have left those wanting to have a deeper understanding of mortgage-backed securities with a nagging feeling of inadequacy. For instance, while correctly stating that mortgage-backed securities consisted of "tranches" of mortgages, it stops short of explaining why there is need for such tranches to begin with. I'll try to fill that gap to the extent that I am able -

It was sometime in the late 1970s when bankers at Wall Street tried to make home mortgages into standardized bonds that they could sell to big institutional investors like pension funds, insurance companies, mutual funds, and the like... Precisely because these institutional investors are the big boys, they of course do not want to get into the more messy business of extending home loans to individuals. Note that it wasn't that they weren't willing to loan their investible funds to homeowners, but they did not want to have to deal with homeowners individually. To fulfill its role as a market maker, Wall Street needed to come up with a security that would enable the institutional investors to make loans to groups of homeowners. This seems simple enough, just group mortgages together into standard pools (use a Jenga tower to visualize). There remained a problem though. Unlike say, a corporate bond wherein the entire bond is issued by a single company, pooling individual mortgages to form bonds meant that behind each bond were groups of diverse individuals whose lives and decisions were separate and distinct from each other. This further means that the buyer of a mortgage bond would be subject to more uncertainty vis-a-vis other types of bonds. Imagine for instance, a pension fund buying a mortgage bond thinking it had locked in an investment at x% over y number of years, only to wake up next month to realize that Jack over at 100 Elm Street had pre-terminated his mortgage and that thus, some part of their investment had been returned in cash. It would wreak havoc on financial planning. To solve this problem, at least partially, the bankers separated each bond into tranches. Some tranches would pay more interest, but would be hit with prepayments and defaults first (the BBB / BB / B tranches), while some tranches would pay less interest but would be the last to be hit with prepayments and defaults (the AAA / AA / A tranches). An investor could choose which tranche he wanted to invest in depending on his appetite for yield vs. uncertainty. While this separation into tranches is not a perfect solution to the problem of diverse individuals behind a bond acting differently from each other, it at least provides a partial solution - an investor who values certainty for instance, could invest in the AAA tranche knowing that before the consequences of individual homeowner circumstances reach him, these would have to go through all the other tranches first. 

When looking at the Gosling/Vennet's tower of mortgages, it is absolutely critical to understand that the AAA's are different from the B's not because the underlying mortgages are somewhat better, but primarily because the tranche is more senior (i.e.. gets paid first in the event of defaults) than the B's. Without this understanding, the more inquisitive viewer will be left to wonder why there is a need to mix different quality mortgages into a single bond to begin with. Why not just put them in separate towers to begin with? It is not that different quality mortgages were mixed together - the mortgages were all of roughly the same quality, but what made an AAA an AAA is that the tranche would be the least susceptible to the uncertainties of prepayments and defaults. What made a B a B was that it was the most vulnerable. Again, the need for tranches is a characteristic specific to mortgage securities because each bond is effectively issued by groups of individual homeowners, each of whom has a different financial story, with different consequences for the debt that he owes.

So, when Gosling/Vennet (or more accurately, the scriptwriter writing his lines) says that "somewhere along the line, these B's and BB's went from 'a little risky' to 'dogshit'!", it is not 100% accurate. I think it would be a lot more accurate to say "somewhere along the line, the whole tower of mortgages went from 'a little risky' to 'dogshit', and these B's and BB's, as the most junior tranches in the tower, are most vulnerable to the fact that the whole tower has turned into dogshit." There, no wonder I'm not employed as a scriptwriter; but if you're here to try to clarify the concepts, there you go..

While this is meant to be neither a review nor a critique of the film, I'd really like to say that it covers a lot of ground in that it then goes on to explain, creatively and accurately, why the crisis blew totally out of proportion. Synthetic CDOs, which allowed speculators to bet on the tower of mortgages many times over (as illustrated by Selena Gomez's blackjack hand), could probably be thought of as the gasoline that turned a fire into a firestorm.

Finally, yes, the most interesting question is why the original tower of mortgages turned into dogshit. To that question I think different people will have different answers, The film certainly presents one thesis, which is Michael Lewis' thesis. Again because of the difficulties of book-to-film adaptation, the film presents a somewhat diluted version the Lewis thesis. For a more forceful presentation of the Lewis thesis one has to, quite naturally, read his book. There are those, of course, who would as forcefully reject Lewis' thesis. The Wall Street Investment Banks and the Rating Agencies come to mind.

In the end, whatever the accurate explanation of the causes of the 2008 crisis, it further convinced me of two unassailable (for me at least) truths about human behavior - 1) we'll all respond to the most immediate incentives, and 2) we will build a house right on top of a fault-line if we haven't had an earthquake in 10 years.



                

A Silent Witness

Old hotels fascinate me.

They fascinate me because they've been witness to so much history. As places that provide transient accommodations and as points of rendezvous they inevitably serve as vital crossroads for interesting people and produce stories that are often more interesting than most.

The original Manila Hilton was put up in 1968 and in the ensuing 50 years before a fire engulfed it in 2018, served as the setting for many tales of the sort I personally find interesting.

When Muhammad Ali visited Manila in 1975 to fight Joe Frazier in the Thrilla in Manila, he stayed at the original Manila Hilton. At that time he was still very much married to wife Belinda Boyd, but had already met, and was apparently totally smitten with, future wife Veronica Porche. So on his trip to Manila he left Belinda stateside, and took Porche. By her own account, Belinda had an idea what was going on, and was, surprisingly, even willing to go along, up to a certain extent. The limits of her longsuffering however, were apparently exceeded when Ali took Veronica to a reception in his honor held at Malacanang Palace, and with the international press present, allowed everyone, including First Couple President and Mrs. Marcos, to assume that Porche was his wife.

So Belinda hopped on the next plane and flew to Manila. By most accounts she "swept regally" into the Hilton, headed straight to Ali's suite, and proved once and for all that even the greatest of heavyweight boxing champions was no match for the fury of a woman scorned.

Even more fascinating for me is the story that supposedly, for years, a suite at the old Manila Hilton was home to one Severino Garcia Diaz "Santy" Sta. Romana, a man so mysterious that the only way for me to tell you about him is to tell you what I have come to believe about him. I hope that serves as a sufficient disclaimer that the story I am about to tell you is probably partially true, partially false, and partially unverifiable. It is merely a composite of different things I have read about Sta. Romana, and cobbled together with the glue of what makes the most sense to me.

"Santy" Sta. Romana was a Filipino who supposedly controlled a staggering amount of wealth all over the world. I purposely used the word "controlled" because no one knew exactly who the real beneficial owners of that wealth was - whether it was actually Santy or some other parties - but he was nominal account holder of an incredible amount of wealth in many forms - ranging from cash to stocks to gold bullion and gold certificates. In their book "Gold Warriors", Sterling and Peggy Seagrave quotes Tarciana Rodriguez, a Filipina accountant and cousin of Santy's mistress, who served as something of an executive assistant to Santy for years: "It was in my mind then that he must be somebody because, to be billeted in a five-star hotel in the 70s was an indication of a... VIP, especially he was only a Filipino. In my going to and fro to his hotel accommodation, what amazed me so much, there were many people of different nationalities who often visited him... Bankers, Brokers, Business associates... he was a very famous personality especially to all the Banks concerned throughout the world." Both Rodriguez and her cousin Luz Sambrano, Sta. Romana's mistress, also spoke of transactions in tantalizing amounts - a $43M deposit in the Manila branch of the First National City Bank, a $500M wire transfer to HSBC Hong Kong, 20,000 metric tons of gold in UBS Geneva, transactions in amounts that sound incredible but with details that provided a ring of authenticity.

Personally, I find all of this to be plausible, because Sta. Romana emerged from the second world war an intelligence operative. As a spook he probably served multiple masters, but primarily Bill Donovan's Office of Strategic Services. He was, in fact, likely the most prominent Filipino operative of the OSS and all the OSS's future iterations and mutations. After the Japanese surrender in 1945, one of the OSS's primary objectives was bound to be the discovery of where the Japanese war loot was, and this Japanese war loot from World War II was legendary in its size:

As the Japanese Imperial Amy had swept through Asia in their march towards regional domination, it was well-known that they had accumulated vast treasures every step of the way. Much of this war loot had found its way to the Philippines to be catalogued, inventoried, and readied for eventual transport back to Japan. But as Japan started to lose the war to the Allied Forces and made plans for a retreat, the decision was made to bury the loot for later retrieval. It is, to me, only logical that the OSS surely made it their top priority after the Japanese surrender to discover where this loot was. Furthermore, it makes perfect sense to me that any part of the treasure OSS operatives did find was not officially transmitted to the US government but kept as a slush fund for intelligence operations. Intelligence organizations operate in, at least partial, secrecy and cannot constantly be justifying requests for funding to Congress. It is only to be expected that they would want alternate sources of funding that they have full control over, to be used in what they deem to be the patriotic task of fighting imperialism and communism and thus preserving the American way of life.

As a top operative of the OSS in the Philippines, Sta. Romana would have participated in every step of the process: from extracting information from Japanese military officers by whatever means necessary, to digging up war loot, to setting up safekeeping arrangements. Since, as I have speculated, any recoveries would have been set aside as an unofficial slush fund so critical to black operations, it was even highly likely that Sta. Romana was assigned to be something of a placeholder of sorts, a dummy in short, for wealth recovered by the OSS. It makes a lot of sense, Sta. Romana was not an American, not answerable to the US government, much less the US Congress, and as someone who had fought in a World War side by side with OSS Warriors, was someone they felt they could trust. Hence, his shadowy life, times, and evident control over much wealth.

By the way, it is also quite clear that Sta. Romana had dealings with Ferdinand Marcos, but that is a part of this story so complex I choose not to go there, except to say, in much simplified outline form, that there are some who firmly believe that Marcos learned about Japanese war loot from Sta. Romana, got his hands on some of it, became a very rich man even before he became President of the Republic of the Philippines, and continued to dig up buried treasure long after he became President. Marcos' hoard supposedly grew so large that if all of his overseas deposits were ever turned over to the Filipino people, we would be able to pay off all of our external debt with much left over. For precisely that reason, the developed countries cannot ever allow the Marcos Gold to ever be returned to the Philippines, because it would totally mess up the global financial system as we know it today. Now you know why, apart from mentioning this "theory" floating out there, I refuse to really dwell on this part of the story, it makes me sound too much like a crackpot. 😁

It's enough for me to believe that Santy Sta. Romana was a living person, that so few know his name in spite of the outsized role he played in Philippine history as an operative for the OSS/CIA complex, and that he used to stay at the old Manila Hilton and walk the surrounding streets. It reminds me that old Hotels stand in perfect, if silent, witness to so much history.  

The old Manila Hilton during its glory days:

Philippine History and Architecture @ Facebook

The new Hilton, located at the Resorts World Hotel and Entertainment Complex:

How to Keep it Up Longer

In the 2008 film Gran Torino, there was a scene wherein Clint Eastwood said that any man "worth his salt can do half the household chores with just... WD-40, vise grips, and a roll of duct tape." What he meant was that a man "worth his salt" would understand the basic principle underlying common handyman tasks and thus would be able to improvise accordingly. Yesterday, I replaced the insides of an aging toilet tank with spanking new fittings, including, of course, the central stem and its flapper, as pictured on the right. Soon after, I realized that the flapper would not seem to stay up long enough to get a good, proper flush. I could still get a proper flush if I held down the flush lever long enough, but I knew that ideally, for a system working perfectly, I only needed to press the lever once, and the flapper would take care of the rest. Since I think of myself as a man "worth my salt", I immediately thought I knew what the problem was, the chain that pulled up the flapper was probably too long and loose, and therefore it wasn't pulling up the flapper far enough for it to stay open. But after adjusting the chain and making sure that it would pull the flapper as far up as it could go, I found that the flapper still would not stay up and would clamp shut as soon as I let go of the lever.

I went to YouTube for answers. (See, it isn't true that men refuse to ask for directions. We do ask for help, as long as the source is not a living, breathing person and we can still feel that it was our own "research" that came up with the answer.) Anyway, what I discovered on YouTube absolutely...

...blew. my. mind.

Okay so apparently, these flappers that are so commonplace that we take them for granted are actually works of high science. Seriously. Turns out that the flapper stays up while the cone shaped thing is still filled with water. The water serves as a weight to hold the flapper in an upright position. As the tank empties of water as we flush, eventually that hole at the bottom of the cone is no longer covered by water and the water inside the cone flows out also. Once the cone is empty, then there is no longer any weight to hold the flapper in position and it clamps back down.

Wow. Who knew?

And get this, that's only half the story. There's more good stuff.

Think back to when you were a child and first learned to punch a hole in a can to pour the contents out. To get a good flow it's not enough to have one hole right? You need to punch a second hole to get a good flow going. The reason is because to get a good flow going, air has to flow into the can, and if you only have one hole, that single hole cannot accomplish the dual tasks of letting fluid out and letting air in. Anyway, the reason is not even important. We just have to remember the principle we learned with those cans and understand that it applies to our flapper cone as well. To get water flowing out smoothly, that one hole at the bottom is not enough. We need a...

 ...second hole!

sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit... (said in a low and awed tone).

And all this time I thought the small hole was just there for decorative purposes. And if your mind isn't totally blown by now, there's even more! That second hole begins to serve its function of allowing water inside the cone to flow out of the first hole when, and only when, it itself is no longer submerged in water. So on some of the newer flappers you can even control when the second hole becomes exposed. In so doing you decide when it begins to serve its function of allowing water to flow out of the first hole. Controlling when water flows out of the cone allows you to control when the cone empties, because in controlling when it empties you also control when the flapper drops back down. I want to know who the people are who sit around thinking up these things! They are geniuses whose names need to be in science textbooks that are used in our high school classes.

So to keep water inside the cone for as long as possible, you need to move the small hole to a lower position, say from (1) to (2). This way, water in the tank will have to have dropped to a lower level before the small hole is exposed and it begins to let water inside the cone flow out. The flapper stays up much longer because only when the flapper cone is finally empty of water does it clamp back down.

As a last word, all this doesn't mean that adjusting the chain is unnecessary. You still need to adjust the chain so that it pulls the flapper up to the correct starting position whenever someone flushes. However, whether the flapper will stay up, and how long it will stay up, is not related to the chain at all. 

whoa!

Roaming with a Cherry

I recently purchased a CherryRoam - a roaming pocket wifi unit. My thinking, and hope, was that it would be a good investment that would save me money in the long run. When one is abroad it is often difficult to find the best deal for data service. One is often forced to make a choice on the basis of what is available (whether it be SIMs or rentals or network access) and not really what offers good value, so sometimes the choice might be less than ideal. Worse, one is sometimes forced to knowingly over-pay for data service simply because the urgency of the situation demands it. So I figured if I had my own roaming pocket wifi I would, in theory at least, always have internet access at a cost that I would know in advance, and could manage.

I've since used the CherryRoam in two foreign countries, and I would have to say that I'm pretty happy with it. Tuwang tuwa is a good way to describe how I feel. I first used it in Hong Kong but held off coming to any conclusions about it at that point given how famously good Hong Kong's data infrastructure is. I then had the opportunity to use it in South Africa and there wasn't a significant drop-off in the quality of service so now I can really say that I think it's great. In fact, I had it with me on safari and was still able to send messages, images, and videos with no issues. I must point out that it was very much an entry-level safari and not some grand adventure in the wilderness. But still, there was often not a building or man-made structure anywhere in sight so I had some uncertainty about what to expect.

The CherryRoam device is managed via an app that you download onto your phone. The first step is to associate or pair or bind (whichever word you want to use) your device to your app. This
is, of course, so your app will "know" which device it's supposed to communicate with and subsequently command and control. This process is not too difficult, especially if you have enough tech savvy to consider owning a pocket wifi device to begin with. After this associate/pair/bind process, the only other thing you do on the device itself is to define a password so that you don't have unwelcome parties connecting to it. From thereon the only other thing you do on the device itself is to turn it on and off (and charge it of course). All interaction from this point onward is done on the app. On the app you load money into your account, and use this money to buy data packages. Paypal is the only alternative for loading money. Some might find this limiting but I actually like it because Paypal adds an additional level of security. Besides, you can add an almost limitless number of credit cards, debit cards, or bank accounts to your Paypal account right?

Once you have money in your account then you can buy the data package that's best suited to you, and this is the part that I like best about CherryRoam. Aside from day passes they also sell bulk data - say, 1GB good for three days, or 3GB good for seven days, and so on and so forth. Being able to buy data like this is a great way to manage costs - because if you actually sit down and analyze your data usage, you'll quickly realize that especially when abroad, your usage will actually be quite inconsistent from day to day - so paying the same rate everyday isn't exactly the most cost-efficient thing to do. With bulk data you can pay only for what you consume to a larger degree. Take note that I said "to a larger degree" because of course you're never going to get it perfectly - i.e. that 3GB you bought isn't going to run out exactly as you're about to board the plane for your flight home. Still, this kind of flexibility is a lot more cost-efficient for the variance in daily usage you're bound to encounter. Additionally, CherryRoam adds an additional layer of flexibility by selling bulk data that's good for regions - say "Asia" or "Europe" or "Middle East" - and not strictly for specific countries. This leads to even greater cost-efficiency especially if you're visiting multiple countries. Not only do you more or less pay for only what you consume across multiple days, but also across multiple countries. I imagine it would be particularly useful for European trips.

Just a tip - the app needs an internet connection to function so remember to do your work on the app - loading it and buying the applicable package - while you still have internet access (say while you're still in your home country) - lest you be caught in a situation wherein you don't have the internet access necessary to get internet access. Don't worry about your validity clock (i.e. the "three days", for instance, in the "1GB for three days") starting to run. It will start to run only when your device initially connects to networks in the region that you bought data for.

The one gripe I have with the CherryRoam, and it's a very small gripe, is that the home screen on the device shows the network name and the password that the owner created. So if you ever turn on the screen in a public area, it's practically an open invitation for strangers to connect to your device because the credentials they need to do so will be prominently displayed. While there's no way to change the display, it isn't a huge problem because you just have to remember not to expose your screen if and when it's lighted.
 
I do wonder though, if all the things I like will be sustained. As they get more and more customers, will they have enough bandwidth with their foreign telecom partners to keep up the service level I experienced? As my device ages, how will battery life hold up? Currently, I was impressed with their customer hotline because every single rep I spoke to turned out to be truly knowledgeable about their product; but as they grow their market  share they'll have to increase the number of reps and I wonder if this will dilute service quality. Finally, as they win more market share, will they start to raise prices and reduce the flexibility on their data packages? These all remain to be seen; and as I'm more than satisfied with my CherryRoam thus far, I truly hope this product won't be a victim of its own success. 

A Voluntary Delisting

The recent announcement by Travellers International Hotel Group, Inc. (PSE: RWM), the operator of entertainment-gaming complex Resorts World Manila that it would voluntarily delist from the Philippine Stock Exchange surely raised a few eyebrows. Most of us have come to think of delisting as something bad, something done by, or more commonly TO, companies that are in trouble. Indeed, probably the two most common reasons for a company listed on the PSE to be delisted are: 1) business is so bad that there remains little public interest in its stock, and its public float (i.e. proportion of shares held by the public) has gone under the minimum level required by the Exchange; and 2) the company has somehow found itself "unwelcome" by the Exchange, usually due to the actions of its officers and/or majority owners.

However, there are various legitimate reasons why even healthy and robust companies may choose to delist. Below I will enumerate three of these reasons. I emphasize that these are general reasons that may or may not apply specifically to RWM. It is up to the reader to ultimately decide on RWM's reasons and motivations.

But first, some basics: what does it mean when a company delists or is delisted from an Exchange? Simply put, the company is removed from the roster of stocks that are traded on that Exchange. Ownership tends to be reduced to a much smaller number of parties because the general public will no longer have easy access to the company's shares. Additionally, without the liquidity, infrastructure, and attendant safeguards provided by an organized exchange, the general public will also have much less interest in ownership in the company. But wait, before that happens, what happens to all the existing owners whose stakes were gained by buying shares in the stock exchange? The company is required to conduct what is called a tender offer to buy back their shares at a fair price. While an investor may choose not to participate in said offer and to hold on to his shares and remain an owner, this is usually not too desirable, especially for the smaller investor, because as the company comes to be dominated by a few majority owners, the small investor will have no easy way to get information, will have practically no voice in management decisions, and will have no easy way to liquidate his shareholdings if he wakes up one day and decides that is what he wishes to do. The net effect of all these is that in short, once a company delists, it will usually become primarily a privately-held corporation (i.e. collectively owned by a few) instead of a publicly-held one (i.e. collectively owned by many). As with most things in life, there are advantages and disadvantages to being a privately-held company instead of a publicly-held one. The main disadvantage is that if and when the company needs to raise capital, it must now rely on a much smaller pool of investor-owners. As money is always important, this is a significant disadvantage to the privately-held company. Still, conditions do exist wherein being a privately-held company may be deemed desirable by the majority owners, and below we will take a look at a few of them -

1. Business is Extremely Good, but not Necessarily Growing

Let's say your business is going great, but you do not think you will have much room to expand - perhaps you operate in a mature market where the lucrative market segments are no longer growing; or perhaps the government has become less friendly to your industry; or perhaps the environment has become increasingly challenging. You will now find yourself in a position wherein you are awash in yesterday's and today's profits, but do not see opportunities to put those profits to work for tomorrow. What do you do then? One thing you could do is to eliminate some owners, return their capital to them, since these are not needed anymore, as you have more than enough retained earnings to serve as capital. This may, to some, sound heartless. You invited these investors in when you needed them (by listing your company at the Exchange in the first place) then cut them loose when they, or more accurately, their capital, became expendable. Unfortunately however, this is how capitalism is meant to work, and I mean that in the best way possible. Capital should always be seeking out its most efficient use, so when you no longer have a good use for capital, you should liberate it.

2. You Feel the Stock Market is Undervaluing your Stock

The price of a company's shares in the stock market - its market price - is the end result of thousands of trades, so effectively, it reflects how the investing public values the shares; which is to say that if more people felt that the shares ought to be trading at a higher price, then they would be more willing to buy and less willing to sell, thus driving the price higher; and vice versa. In short, the price at which a stock trades is a clear reflection of how both buyers and sellers value it. In fact, a trade only results if both sides can come to a agreement as to what that value is. Sometimes, a small group of owners, usually the majority owners who have the best view of the company's prospects, may feel the company's shares have been trading for a prolonged period at a price they deem to be too low relative to the company's true value. The fact that the stock has been trading at that level for a prolonged period tells them that the investing public, "the market at large", deems that price to be correct. But they themselves deem it too low. Rather than trying to convince thousands, perhaps even millions, of market participants - arguably an impossible task - what this small group of owners may choose to do is to buy up all the stock and take the company private. Put another way, it is as if they saying "ok fine, if this low price is what you believe our stock to be worth, then by golly we will buy everything and prove you wrong. We'd be buying a great company at a discount." In a way, it's the same act of returning capital and reducing owners but with a different twist - this time, in a very real sense, the remaining owners reduce owners because they feel that these owners do not fully appreciate the value of what they have been given the opportunity to own. (People might not necessarily think of these transactions in exactly those slightly melodramatic terms, but if you think about it, that is exactly what their actions mean at the end of the day.)

These "buy-outs", as what they effectively are, become even all the more feasible when interest rates are low, because then the group doing the buying out can even go out and borrow cash if they do not have enough equity themselves to do a buy-out. While debt is a more dangerous form of capital because one cannot delay interest payments in the same way that one can delay dividends, if the stock price is low enough and therefore attractive enough, then at some point replacing equity with debt becomes tenable.

As a small side note, in the late 80s and early 90s, with the US stock market depressed, the Leveraged Buy-Out came into vogue. Stock prices of some good companies were deemed too low that financial entrepreneurs were encouraged to borrow money and buy enough stock in the open market to gain control of good and valuable companies. As equity was replaced by debt, companies were forced to cut costs, become more efficient, and in the end become even more valuable. This is actually what Gordon Gekko meant when he uttered his cult-favorite line "Greed is Good." I feel that the line has been over-simplified through the years. He was actually espousing a more complex view that what starts out as greed, ultimately serves to provide the incentive for efficiency and the increase of economic value.

But I digress, as I often do..


3. Your Business Operates in an Environment which Requires Quick Decisions and Quick Actions
  
One of the primary reasons a company goes public is to raise capital from a large pool of investors - the "public". Having a large number of "owners", has both pros and cons. One of the disadvantages is that the company might not be able to move quickly, as major changes would require concurrence and approval from the same large number of "owners". At some point, a company might feel that the challenges in its business environment require that it be able to move more quickly, and perhaps with more discretion, than would be practicable while having many "owners" to report to, and in cases such as these a company might willfully choose to go private.

So, as far RWM specifically, or any stock that is going through voluntary delisting for that matter, what should a PSE investor who owns the stock do? Actually, there aren't that many options - the most practical thing to do is to participate in the tender offer and get cash in return for your shares. If you have so much confidence in the future of Resorts World Manila that you would like to go on owning shares of stock in the company, then by all means hold on to your shares. The delisting does not render the shares worthless, you would still have a valid claim over a piece, however big or small, over the company. What the delisting does extinguish is your ability to quickly sell your stake if you decide to. Like a true owner, you would be in it for the long haul. If Resorts World Manila makes so much money and pays out big dividends, then good for you. But keep in mind that if Resorts World Manila decides to use those profits to expand in a direction you don't like, there's not much you would be able to do about it, and no easy way to liquidate your stake. Your financial fortunes from this particular investment will be inextricably linked to the company, as a true owner's would.  


  

That Lady in Red, Explained

One of the great things about social media is that the mere act of going through one's feeds ascertains that one will usually not be left too uninformed about current trends. Well, beginning one or two weeks ago, I began to notice pictures of this lady in red, with a red suitcase, showing up on my feed, usually in memes or similar instruments of comedic effect. It wasn't until last Monday, when the image below crossed my feed, that my interest was really piqued:

Okay, so upon some research, the original lady in red pulling a red suitcase is Daniela Mondragon, a lead character in an ABS-CBN teleserye with the title Kadenang Ginto played by actress Dimples Romana. Apparently, in a scene from the show's current season, Daniela found herself dressed to the nines, fully accessorized and color-coordinated, but walking along a busy street in a working-class neighborhood, and the internet went crazy.

I could be wrong, but from how I understand things, it isn't even important exactly why she found herself in that situation, Filipino netizens simply loved the disconnect between her attire and her circumstances - and I'm fascinated by the question of why exactly that is..

Let's face it, there's something about scenes like the one described above that touch a chord within our collective national psyche. Just a month or two ago, I was discussing cheap luggage with a friend of mine. We were imagining a woman, otherwise expensively dressed and walking imperiously through an airport terminal, suddenly have someone chase after her with a wheel that had fallen off from the luggage she was pulling; we both had a good laugh out of that. I also remember a gathering I was at, years ago, where someone talked about how good the "Cliffhouse" sandwich was at UCC Cafe. Someone else then pointed out that the former probably meant the "Cliffhanger", which, in fact, he did. Immediately, a third person thanked the second person for the correction, stating that she would hate to be in the position of being at UCC, and ordering the "Cliffhouse" in a somewhat snooty tone, only to be told that there is no such thing. Everybody cracked up.

I don't know exactly why we find so much humor in such situations. Mabenta so to speak. Is it because we are fascinated by the financial ups and downs of people's lives and are much titillated when we encounter evidence of lifestyle inconsistencies? Is it because we dislike social climbers and celebrate gleefully when we see them meet a comeuppance we feel they rightfully deserve? Is it because we all remember occasions  of being slightly embarrassed when we need to dress up formally and therefore have a need to make light of such instances? Is it because we daydream of a world that we deem beyond our reach and thereby choose to just joke about the unattainable? I really don't know, perhaps it's a little of all of the above.

I do think that whatever the reason, or the combination of reasons, it does hint upon an inferiority complex we all share, borne out of being part of the Third World. I think we've all been conditioned to believe, and instinctively assume, that people in general will always try to seem more affluent than they really are, and so we find it hilarious when we feel such "projections" have gone awry.     

 

Schnitzel with Noodles

Cream-colored ponies and crisp apple strudels
Doorbells and sleigh bells
And schnitzel with noodles
Wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings
These are a few of my favorite things

This is meant to be an ever-expanding post containing my favorite foods. I've gone to great lengths not to use the word "best" so please don't give me a hard time. 😉 Taste is such a subjective, personal thing under the best of circumstances; and experience has also taught me that mine are not exactly similar to the majority, usually..

FAVORITE WINGS : Buffalo's Wings N' Things

THE WHY : First, the weird of it.. I take my buffalo wings without the sauce/dip that they are meant to be tossed in. If you tell me that it is therefore not Buffalo wings that I like but just plain fried chicken wings, I would agree totally. A BWNT wing, even with the sauce set aside, is seasoned in and of itself, and the amount of coating is perfect for my tastes. Lastly, the ligaments are all there, perfect for me to chew on and savor.

FAVORITE COOKIE : Mo's (also known as the Mess Hall Cookie)   

THE WHY : I couldn't tell you why because I don't know why. I only know that for me, as far as cookies are concerned, there's Mo's and then there's the rest.

FAVORITE PALABOK : Susie's
 

THE WHY : I'm not certain about the exact difference between Pancit Palabok v Pancit Malabon v Pancit Luglug. I think Malabon usually has thick noodles that are cooked in the sauce and topped with seafood. Palabok is on the other end of the spectrum, thin noodles that are only boiled and then topped with the sauce and some variant of pork. Luglug falls somewhere in between, more similar to Palabok but with thicker noodles, though not as thick as Malabon. Susie's serves Palabok and Malabon. I like their palabok very much because the thickness and firmness of the noodles are perfect for me. Come to think of it, the thickness of Susie's Palabok Noodles are probably more Luglug than Palabok, but Palabok is what they call it.

FAVORITE ICE CREAM : Baskin Robbins 

THE WHY : Because it's not too creamy. That's probably a statement of weirdness right there because there's "cream" in the name "ice cream", and I know that premium ice cream brands talk up how creamy they are, so most people must appreciate the creaminess.

But well, like I've said previously in some other shape or form: Shoot me.

A piece of trivia, in Japan Baskin Robbins is mostly referred to as "31 Ice Cream". The obvious probable reason being that 31 is much easier to remember for a non-english speaker than "Baskin Robbins" or even "Baskin". So even though there are literally thousands of Baskin Robbins branches in the Land of the Rising Sun, never look for it by name. Look for "31 Ice Cream".


FAVORITE FRIED CALAMARI : Chili's

Like everything else at Chili's, the fried calamari is priced a bit on the high side relative to the value proposition of this particular restaurant. This shouldn't take away from the fact that it's pretty good, and what I really appreciate is the consistency. With some smaller restaurants sometimes you can't be quite sure what you're getting, I guess it's not exactly easy to source calamari regularly. So I've noticed that sometimes you can get calamari, sometimes you get squid, sometimes you get large squid (lumot) and sometimes even cuttlefish. At Chili's, probably because it's a large chain and has stricter rules governing it's purchasing and sourcing and a more stable supply chain, you almost always get exactly what you thought you'd be getting when you order. Since my tastes are pretty bland, the vanilla-variety tartar sauce is perfect for me, and you do get a slice of lime that can give you a tinge of flavor that you can control precisely to your preference.




FAVORITE BOLA-BOLA SIOPAO : Emerald

This is not to be confused with its more famous celebrity cousin, the Emerald Siopao. The legendary Emerald Siopao is more than twice as large as this, has other ingredients like sliced asado, chicken strips, and of course, a section of boiled egg in there somewhere. However, what I have come to realize through the years is that after all is said and done, the best part is really the ground pork mixture that we have come to know as bola-bola. (it's called that probably because it is, essentially, a meat ball). Emerald's has a distinct flavor that I could identify even with my eyes closed. I couldn't say the same for the other ingredients of the Emerald siopao like the asado and the chicken strips, which, if I may say so, are fairly ordinary; so for the past few years I've come to prefer the bola-bola siopao. It allows me to focus on the best part. 😃

 

Race Day

On the previously mentioned visit to Hong Kong I also checked out the Shatin Racecourse. More than anything else, I remember how my late father would always say that on race day, Hong Kong people turned absolutely "crazy", so I thought I'd see for myself. I had wanted to do so in the past but never really found the opportunity as on short trips it seemed like such a waste of an afternoon. Even though I suspected that the fervor my dad witnessed was borne out of an era where Hong Kong had precious few alternative sources of entertainment, and that this fervor had most likely waned; one look at the MTR system map still provided ample proof that horse racing in Hong Kong is still huge:

On race days, every third train on the light blue East Rail Line veers around the Fo Tan Station and instead stops at a non-regular station called "Racecourse". This tells me that on race days, the traffic on the East Rail line increases by around 50% with people headed to the horse races.

The East Rail line, I believe, was an outdoor train line that was eventually integrated into the Hong Kong MTR system. It was previously called the KCR I think, as I vaguely remember taking it decades ago to Shatin to eat squabs/pigeons. So once you're on the East Rail line, there's a decidedly different vibe - whether it's the red doors or the presence of sunlight I'm not sure -

Inside the train on race day, it feels almost exactly like your run-of-the-mill MTR train, except that at first glance it feels like an inordinate amount of its riders like to keep well-informed of current events -

Of course, a closer look reveals that those aren't regular newspapers, but racing forms.. 😁

The Shatin Racecourse is one of two tracks in Hong Kong, the other one being at Happy Valley on Hong Kong Island. Night racing is held mostly at the Happy Valley Track. The Shatin Course, located as it is in the New Territories on the Kowloon Peninsula, where land is more abundant, is supposedly more scenic, better provisioned, and just more modern all-in-all. I found a reasonable package on viator.com that included access to a slightly more exclusive viewing deck (away from the cigarette smoke I assumed would envelope the grandstand), a guide to answer any questions you might have, a bottled juice drink, and most importantly, a hotdog.

It was my first time to be at a racetrack anywhere in the world. And I was immediately struck by the fact that unlike other sporting events I've been to, you actually see less in person than you do on television. On TV the cameras follow the race around the track, from the starting gates to the finish line. At the track you more or less have to pick which part of the race you want to see, the beginning, the middle, or the end. In fact, I suspect racing aficionados go to the track more for the social experience than anything else. To be one with the crowd, to hear the roars, and of course, to discuss bets and exchange betting information:

 

Horse-racing is such an integral part of Hong Kong society because it is driven not only by the commercial aspects of it. There is tremendous prestige attached to owning a horse because not anyone with money can do so. The Hong Kong Jockey Club gives out a limited number of permits to own horses (numbering only in the low hundreds) and so having one says a lot about a horse owner's place in Hong Kong Society. This explains the desire to own horses and race them. But what drives the demand to witness the races? Well, that is probably driven by the gambling side of it. From a purely academic point of view, the barriers to success are prohibitive. Betting is done on a pari-mutuel system, which basically means that every dollar bet goes into a prize pool, the Hong Kong Jockey Club then takes it's share, a fixed percentage of around 15%, right off the top, and what remains is then shared by the winners. This necessarily means that only 85% of the total money bet can be won, so a bettor has to be incredibly good to make money in the long run. i.e. imagine that you and I each put up an amount of money and bet on the results of a coin toss. As the chances of correctly predicting the results of a coin toss are 50/50, in the long run, the two of us would encounter the same level of success and we would be passing the pot of money back and forth and we would both break even. The situation in Hong Kong racing is such that for every round the coin is tossed, the pot of money we are passing back and forth is being depleted by 15%. So just imagine how much better one of us has to be compared to the other to make money off of this exercise.

Furthermore, the way the HKJC runs its pari-mutuel betting pool also means that one has to wait until all bets are in before knowing how much his bet will pay out. (Remember that the winners divvy up 85% of the total money bet, so one has to wait until all betting has been completed to even know what the total pool is).   I remember the guide calling out to me, "Hey, Philippines, no interest in trying a bet or two?" I shook my head and told him that it takes a lot of faith to make a bet where you don't even know how much you will win until the race is over. He smiled knowingly but sagely pointed towards a whole room of punters seriously at work: "Well, it's the only game in town..."

Race Number 4 of the "only game in town"

 

 

Kowloon Walled City

I first learned about the Kowloon Walled City from a book I read in the early 90s, The Triads: The Chinese Criminal Fraternity by one Martin Booth. In it, Booth wrote of a Walled City in Kowloon approximately the size of an average city block, about a quarter of a square kilometer, which "over the years...has grown into an almost solid mass of buildings. The buildings are twelve storeys high but there is virtually no space between them. What space there is can only be inches wide and is certain to be filled with garbage up to a height of thirty feet from ground level. New storeys balance precariously on old; sanitation is non-existent. Water and electricity are tapped illegally from the mains. There is no lighting in the narrow fetid alleys, which remain pitch dark even at noon."
I was immediately fascinated. Even at that time I had come to think of Hong Kong as a territory far more advanced and prosperous than the Philippines, the country where I grew up and still reside to this day. Thus, I found the idea that such a place could exist there unfathomable. But before its demolition sometime in 1994, it really did:

NOTE: All the photos of the actual Kowloon Walled City found in this post are from the work of Ian Lambot, who together with Greg Girard published a collection of photographs about life in the Kowloon Walled City in a book entitled City of Darkness: Life in Kowloon Walled City.

As I tried to learn more about the place from various sources, what I found even more tantalizing were the claims that supposedly, even the police were afraid of venturing inside. As Booth put it: "within the Walled City the Hong Kong Police have been virtually powerless and the city has developed into one of the most notorious criminal ghettos in the world..." The Kowloon Walled City, while it existed, was understood to be the birth place of many Triad factions and was widely assumed to be the epicenter of the Hong Kong drug trade, first opium, then heroin. Indeed, I found quite a few references to the Walled City in the Hong Kong gangster movies I love so much. Most recent was the 2017 Donnie Yen film Chasing the Dragon, which portrayed the life and times of Ng Sik-Ho aka "Limpy Ho" and his start in the Kowloon Walled City. The film also focused on Ho's symbiotic relationship with legendary (albeit in a somewhat corrupt sort of way) Hong Kong Police Inspector Lee Rock, although that is an entirely different, if equally interesting facet of Hong Kong society.

Back to the Kowloon Walled City, so apparently, when China ceded the lands which later collectively became known as Hong Kong, to the British in the 18th century, they retained sovereignty over a walled Fort, perhaps to symbolize a nerve center by which to emphasize that the surrounding territory was still Chinese and only ceded to the British. This Fort later came to be known as the Kowloon Walled City. As the years passed and Hong Kong evolved, this walled area technically remained beyond administrative control of the British. Why was this never resolved even as it became somewhat unwieldy and awkward? Well, my personal interpretation is that Beijing liked the idea of retaining sovereignty over a piece of Hong Kong - as this does have its benefits in the same way as say, an embassy might - but had no practical way by which to administer/govern it. The result was an area that was in administrative purgatory - neither here nor there, just out of reach of any meaningful governance. Needless to say, such a place served as a haven for those who desired or wanted to have no governance - including marginalized elements of the population (i.e. those whose immigration status were unclear) or those whose criminal proclivities pushed them towards a preference for stateless domiciles. And as more and more people streamed into this finite piece of land, the result was, well, a sort of madness:

For decades it stood there, what I think of now as a "reverse-oasis", a fountain of squalor in the midst of a desert of prosperity.

As one learns more and more about it though, one also comes to realize that like many unique and iconic places, a convenient mythos has come to envelope it which paints a somewhat inaccurate and exaggerated picture of what life there was like.

Certainly, it was a ghetto. And like many ghettos, real power was held not by nominal authorities but by some force which actually resides there. In this case, yes, it likely was organized crime. But it is not entirely correct that it was beyond the reach of Hong Kong police. The city was regularly patrolled, although I imagine authority had to be shared with the real powers that be within the city in a certain quid-pro-quo arrangement. Still, the area was not entirely lawless.

Again, like many ghettos, the vast majority of residents were not criminals but productive if marginalized members of society. Lots of manufacturing activity went on within the city, which added to the garbage and refuse; but as a whole, the city produced things and contributed to the economy. In fact, if you were a regular visitor to Hong Kong in the 70s and 80s, I would dare surmise that you've probably consumed something - whether it be roasted meats or dim sum - that was produced in the Kowloon Walled City. In short, like many havens of illegal immigrants the place was a source of cheap labor. Regular Hong Kong residents were known to venture into the city to get dental services, and I think this fact says quite a lot about the city's inhabitants. Majority were decent, hardworking folk, many educated and highly skilled; although for one reason or another almost all of them were marginalized and not full assimilated into Hong Kong society.

Last week on a visit to Hong Kong I decided to scratch a minor item off my bucket list and ventured out to the area. On the site now stand two parks - a larger city park, and a smaller memorial park of sorts. I had wanted to take a picture of myself standing by the South Gate but entered the park through the North Gate since the MTR station was north of the site. The walk from North Gate to South Gate took less than five minutes, so that should tell you something about the size of the site. "One city block" is a great way to describe the site, and it is truly astounding how at one time, the city was home to more than 30,000 warm bodies.

I remember just enough of my high school Chinese to recognize the two characters to be "South" and "Gate"

What self-respecting fort wouldn't have a canon, eh?

The "remains" of two signs, the smaller says "South Gate" while the larger says "Kowloon Walled City". Not entirely sure I believe that these signs are as old as they are supposed to be, but I guess that's not really important.

A stone sculpture of the city, the way she was before she was demolished.

To be totally candid the memorial fell quite short of what I had hoped it would be. I had hoped it would provide more of a sense of what the city was like and what daily life there was like. It is impossible to fully understand the story behind the Kowloon Walled City without necessarily learning more about the history of China and its tumultuous tides, so I personally believe that the Kowloon Walled City has such great potential as an impetus for learning, but I feel the memorial failed to encourage such learning. It is often the darkest chapters and saddest footnotes of history that provide the most important lessons regarding human existence. The Kowloon Walled City was one example of how political developments far beyond the decisions of ordinary citizens change the trajectory of their lives permanently; and although the park as it stands today is a testament to human resilience and hope, I do wish it captures more of the contrast - for it is that contrast between despair and renewal that provides hope to the human spirit.