The Most Dangerous Animal in Asia – The Canto Granny

In the cold, hard light of day Hong Kong is not an easy city. Oh yes at night the lights are bright, the city awash in odours, your senses constantly stressed. But in the day the place can be grey. Grey buildings, grey roads, grey clouds, grey air. It is in this grey realm that that most dangerous of Asian animals roams - a myriad of filled plastic bags in hand, ready to be used as rams, the head at an angle, the shoulders hunched, pressing her territorial claim to be able rest her weary limbs - the ‘Canto Granny’. On the helter-skelter streets of HK ready she constantly is to go to war on the city’s other unsuspecting under-classes for that one thing most cherished by all HK domiciles – a seat

Yes a seat. HK is not a city blessed with wide open spaces, or public parks, or places of calm. It is a city constantly on the move. At once shaping and being re-shaped, its people constantly psychologically burdening themselves as being ‘underachievers’, pressing each other forward professionally en masse and at speed towards an early grave, while having one of the highest incomes per capita and living standards in all of Asia. The HK government, progressive and educated and sincere, trying to satisfy the people - despite being under the constant yoke of Gnijieb - provides a world-class infrastructure and social environment in which a compressed city of 7 million can live in relative harmony and mostly happiness. And yet, with all this constant pressing towards greater success, greater monetary returns, and greater social status amongst the worlds’ preeminent cities, there is one thing that HK just doesn’t have enough of – seats

From the underground MTR train network where there is little encouragement to linger, to the sidewalks and streets where people abound and are fused together on the move due to their sheer weight of numbers, to the harbour’s edges where new expressways and tunnels and thoroughfares are being constantly planned, or added, or upgraded. These rivers of people, these arteries and veins pumping with human life, these constantly pulsating homo-sapien pressure points of yin and yang and chi. But HK’s people do need rest. At night the streets are mostly empty, more like Tombstone than the Ginza, as the old colony’s residents return to their tiny apartments at an early hour to take in canto pop music, or mahjong, or bird whispering before retiring responsibly to ensure another early rise on the morrow in their fight for personal success. Exhaustion is dominant, glazed tired blinking eyes a constant, slumbering bodies in public a given. With no place to lay their weary heads, the fight for that seat can be biblical

And what of that most deadly HK denizen – the ‘Canto Granny’. At 4 feet 11 a reminder of Mao’s wholly misguided national nutrition policies, the Granny roams the streets of HK like a miniature silver-haired sledge hammer ready to slam The Nav in the back – targeting his kidneys – to move him bodily away from tram or bus or train entrance to ensure the Granny has a flying attempt at winning one of those cherished empty abodes. The Nav moved bodily aside, a tide of Canto, Pinoy, and Indo humanity next, arms and legs and torsos ripped asunder on tram track or under bus wheel or against truck bumper – the Granny will not be denied from achieving her most important mission today. To lay luxuriously together with her packages of worldly possessions on a HK public transport ‘seat of heaven’, regally reviewing those commuting mere mortals surrounding her - standing

Being HKs ‘Schwarzenegger of seating’ the Granny is never stopped, nor frisked, nor questioned – neither by tram attendant, nor bus driver, nor Chief of Police - for fear of a retribution so severe a grown male lion would himself cower in the corner like an adolescent feline were he to be assailed. The secret of the Granny’s intimidation is her height. Think about it. If a sledgehammer - with a very low centre of gravity - were to wind up, swinging its physical weight around and then upwards like an Olympic hammer thrower, opposing ribs and teeth and tibia would become directly at risk. And given the cost of HKs emergency healthcare for the assaillee, the immediate result would invariably be one of three things, a) a wheelchair b) a life support system or c) bankruptcy

Additionally there is the added risk of loss of hearing as the Canto Granny then assaults the poor assaillee with some of the strongest South China swearing heard this side of the solar system. Altogether the numbers bear witness to the dangers of going ‘toe to toe’ with this the most feared animal in Asia. It has been statistically shown that the most dangerous job in our hemisphere is that of the HK tram driver – the SARs hospitals and sanitoriums full to the gunwales with men and women in green uniforms, wrapped in white jackets and rocking on their toes at their windows, staring, screaming out like a Tourette’s sufferer every-time a grey-headed Granny passes by their window. The Granny gently smiling in triumph

This is The Nav hopping off. Kidneys newly covered in Kevlar