momphard.net

They have gathered under the light of an Admiralty street lamp – amateur actors, writers and directors with a passion for filmmaking. If all goes well on this chilly March evening, the dozen wannabe movie makers will forget their day jobs and film a two-page screenplay. A few brace in the cold as Aaron Palermo, one of the organisers, calls for their attention.

“We’re going to shoot everyone saying their lines three times,” says the American, who works as a producer at a local film and television company. “It’s a comedy, people. Have fun with it.”

The loose alliance came together through an internet bulletin board (http://acting.meetup.com/252/) two years ago and coalesced around 30 core members. Although yet to acquire a formal name, they have drawn more than 300 people to their monthly forays into guerilla filmmaking – or community theatre with a camera.

Organisers say the sessions have been an effective way of finding like- minded people keen to produce quality independent film projects.

“We exist to encourage anyone who’s ever dreamed of acting, directing or writing for the screen to step up and give it their best shot,” says co-organiser Steve Kerr, who teaches English and cinema studies at a secondary school.

The Australian has arrived with sound equipment, lights and a high- end digital camcorder, and sets up while the actors are briefed.

Palermo hands out scripts for a short scene Kerr has written for eight nameless characters who discuss the recent removal of wine tax. Their conversation moves from fine vintages to cigarette smoking, then unseemly things floating in wine – all in a David Mamet minute.

“Give me three different line readings,” Palermo tells the group, warning them against melodramatic acting. “It’s on camera, not on stage. No big facial expressions.”

Long-time member Don McPherson tries to play down his acting skills to a couple of newcomers. “Acting is just a hobby for me,” he tells Eric Lau Jian-ming and David Chow, who came to check out the group after reading about it online.

Neither are film novices. Lau produces corporate videos and Chow is a photography teacher and the director of Space of Desire, a documentary screened at the 2005 Hong Kong Lesbian and Gay Film & Video Festival.

Kerr says the group’s greatest asset is its talent but admits that a minority of members seem to do most of the work. All screenplays are posted on the group’s bulletin board for adaptation and filming by fellow members.

He has written many of the group’s practice scripts, including tonight’s. Kerr says he’s happy to write, but wishes more members would try their hand at it, even if they aren’t satisfied with the results.

“We need more in terms of participation,” he says. “The best learning experiences are the stuff that isn’t so brilliant.”

Chow agrees. “Filmmakers are always in development,” he says.

The camera, sound and lights are now ready and Palermo calls “action”. The two pages of script are scheduled to be shot in a couple of hours. All too often, though, here are interruptions. Planes fly overhead, children squeal nearby and a park maintenance worker wheeling a noisy cart past the location are the least of their disturbances.

Harder to ignore are security guards, who once chased them out of Hong Kong Park for not having the required permit. That episode was caught on camera and turned into a “making of” adjunct to their project. Tonight they avoid a similar predicament by meeting in the cul- de-sac of Supreme Court Road.

“We’ve explained [to the guards] that we’re an amateur group,” Kerr says. “But they see a tripod, think we’re professional and want us to pay.”

To try to keep the non-profit group’s activities above board, he contacted the Hong Kong Film Commission for a permit but says their request was ignored.

He didn’t make much progress either when seeking a permit for a separate project that he hoped to shoot on the grounds of the Museum of Coastal Defence.

“It looks like the perfect billionaire supervillain’s lair,” Kerr says. “But to shoot there you need to be an incorporated company with an insurance bond between you and the government reaching into the multimillion-dollar mark. And that doesn’t include the fee for using the facility.”

According to the commission, the same rules apply when filming on public and private property.

“It can be disheartening when so many obstacles are put in front of a new producer,” says Kerr, who has lived in Hong Kong for two years.

But that hasn’t dampened the filmmakers’ enthusiasm. Several have gone on to collaborate in other projects. Former organiser Johnny Guy, who returned to Canada last year, worked with other members to make Kill Park, a short screened at the Fringe Club last year.

Palermo last year co-directed and edited Apartment Lullaby, a15-minute short written by fellow member John D. Lim. Echelon, the group’s first thriller, has developed into a three-part series about government agents working undercover in Hong Kong. The second episode, Echelon – Enforcer, has screened at SoHo arts venue Joyce is Not Here, as has Apartment Lullaby.

The group is now casting for the third instalment, Echelon – Lines of Fracture, which will begin shooting in a few weeks under Palermo and Kerr’s direction.

Kerr, who is also preparing to make a zombie feature, admires fellow members’ enthusiasm.

“I thought Perth and Melbourne were creative but the collection of people in Hong Kong is amazing,” he says. “I have to weigh up very hard as to whether I would move back to Australia. The only reason would be if I wanted to get more heavily involved in producing. That’s difficult in Hong Kong.”

Kerr realises that over the next few months he will be torn between his two independent projects and his job, but he’s thinking ahead as he films under the street lamp.

“How do you feel about being a turncoat agent who gets kicked in the head?” he asks McPherson.

McPherson smiles broadly. For all his modesty, the ju-jitsu instructor is eager to show Kerr his martial arts skills.

“Kicked in the head sounds great,” he says.

This article first appeared May 13, 2008 in the South China Morning Post.

Andrew Sze Wai-chun reckons he caught a kindred spirit red-handed – or pink-pawed – in his kitchen the other night. The 35-year-old teacher switched on the light, and there was a rat, as big as a cat, on his countertop.

Some Hong Kong folk might have been startled by the visitor’s whiskers, beady eyes and its cheek in trying to unscrew the lid of a peanut butter jar. But not Sze. Born in the Year of the Rat, he knows rodents have creativity, ambition, generosity and the ability to get along well with others.

“We looked at each other for a moment,” Sze recalls. “I thought, ‘Well, he’s a rat. I’m a Rat. He likes peanut butter. I like peanut butter. I’ll leave him until morning’.” Sze’s midnight pal may have concluded from his experience that it’s safer in a Hong Kong kitchen than out on the streets. And he may well be right.

Rodent experts don’t know how many rats and mice there are in Hong Kong, but the government’s out to get them. The start of the Year of the Rat also marks a tailing off of the first phase of the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department’s Anti-Rodent Campaign 2008 in 79 markets before it gets going again in July.

The initiative includes public notices displayed by market stalls, posters tacked up in problem areas such as Kwun Tong and Western, and a contest asking participants to
find all the things on a cartoon drawing of a fruit stand that a rat could exploit.

Then there’s the rat and mouse traps and poison. The extermination rate in Hong Kong is not tallied, experts say, but the department tries to determine Hong Kong’s rodent infestation rate by calculating the amount of bait the animals consume in a given period. The infestation rate rose to 4.8 per cent last year from 2.9 per cent in 2006 and officials want to see whether it continued to rise, the department says. It was 16 per cent in 2000, it adds.

“The rodent problem is not serious in the territory on the whole,” says Yuen Ming-chi, the department’s head of pest control. “However, there should be no slackening in rodent prevention.”

A greater concern is the “rat-flea index”, as the insects on the rodents have historically caused people more harm with diseases such as bubonic plague. Although Hong Kong has not been infested with the plague since the mid-1920s, the department still uses the index to regulate infestation control efforts and reduce the risks of other rodent- borne diseases such as hantavirus, spotted fever, leptospirosis and various forms of typhus.

Yet even the most stringent campaigns were not going to eliminate a rat population, say rodent-control experts such as Jackson Chan Chak-shum, president of the Hong Kong Pest Management Association.

Without control measures, the animals would take over Hong Kong – and soon, he says. Females are pregnant for three weeks and have up to 12 pups, and about three months later, grand-pups. In a year, one rat couple can produce 15,000 descendants, keeping professionals such as Chan in business.

“You will never get rid of the problem,” he says, “but you can take it out of sight. That’s why it’s called rat ‘control’ and not ‘elimination’.”

And thanks to pre-holiday custom of house cleaning, Lunar New Year is the busiest time of the year for his firm, ISS, one of a co-operative of about 80 specialist contractors for the department.

Chan says the problem is not that there are too many rats (they have long outnumbered humans) but that they are too agile to be caught or killed easily and too rapacious to stay away from things they want.

Catchers know that a rat is a formidable quarry that can fit through any opening the size of its skull, jump five times its body length, tread water for up to three days and hold its breath for up to three minutes. They can also gnaw through wires, water pipes and concrete – otherwise their teeth grow about a half an inch in a month. Studies dating from the 70s in the US say that rats are responsible for 20 per cent of all electrical fires.

Rats also smell in stereo, studies say, and so adeptly that scientists have even trained some to detect the scent of explosives in landmines. Unlike dogs trained for the same task, a rat lacks the weight to detonate the mine, which allows the ordnance to be safely defused and the rat to find more than one. Rats have also been trained to detect tuberculosis in human saliva. Scientists can test for the disease in about 20 samples a day, but a rat can test 300. And rats can also detect most of the poisons created to kill them.

A University of Georgia study in March last year found that rats possess metacognition – the awareness of one’s own cognitive processes, says a National Geographic documentary Rat Genius, which on Thursday and Saturday also discusses rattus norvegicus’capabilities.

But viewers in Hong Kong will miss a cut scene in which a woman is bitten in the nether regions by a rat that allegedly crawled and swam through her lavatory pipes.

Such an incident might change the opinion of rat lovers such as Coco Yu Cheuk-ling,a Hong Kong spokeswoman for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta). The symbiosis in humans’ relationship with rats is one of the reasons they were made the first animal of the Chinese zodiac, she says.

Peta also calls for more respect for rodents in the Year of the Rat. “Rats are social animals who become attached to each other, love their families and enjoy playing, wrestling and sleeping curled up together,” it says.
Rats “feel things just like we humans do”, Yu says. “We [at Peta] don’t think it’s the right of humans to kill these animals just because they’re perceived to be invading our homes.”

Instead, Peta advocates catching rats and relocating them to the wild.

Sze thought the same thing when he met his midnight visitor. If not to the wild, at least to the nearby Gage Street Market, where the unexpected peanut-butter fan would find friends, Sze says. So he set a trap assembled from an upturned plastic bucket, a brick and a jar of peanut butter that would be triggered by the movement of a spoon.

Well, in theory; the bucket and brick came down, toppled off the counter and broke a tile on the floor, he says. The smart rat had taken the bait, but run away with the peanut butter and the spoon.

“I know next time I click on the light [that] I’m going to see him at the table with a bowl of ice cream,” Sze says. “Now I understand the desire to build a better mousetrap.”

This article first appeared Feb. 11, 2008 in the South China Morning Post.

Two baize-topped tables have been set up in a Causeway Bay hotel for the Saturday night regulars of the Hong Kong Poker Group. At one table, stony-faced players assess their new hands in a silence that’s broken only by an occasional wisecrack. The other table is increasingly noisy as excited players toss in HK$10, HK$20 and then HK$100 chips. Soon the pot amounts to a week’s salary and the night has only just begun.

The gamblers are playing Texas Hold’em, the most popular variation of poker in North American casinos, which has also developed a loyal following in Hong Kong. According to the portal Meetup.com, it has grown from one online group linking 100 local enthusiasts a year ago to 400 players gathered under four groups.

Texas Hold’em is also played on poker nights at clubs such as Philia, Cixi and Drop. At a tournament at M1nt, players are bidding for the top prize of a seat at this year’s Asia Pacific Poker Tour (APPT) in Australia, with a return airline ticket and hotel accommodation, worth US$6,000.

Players attribute the popularity of poker to online gaming and tournaments such as the APPT and the televised World Series of Poker that have made wealthy stars of the best players since 2003.

The portal PokerSchool.com.hk also provides information about local and international tournaments and teaches people how to play the game.

“You have tournaments with massive payouts and fame for the players,” says Kenneth Leung Yuen- kiong, founder of the Hong Kong Poker Group, whose 160 members pay up to HK$2,000 for a seat at games. “Asians love to gamble, so everyone wants a piece of the action.”

Poker playing exists in a legal grey area in Hong Kong, and this has checked the expansion of organised games. Although gaming is generally outlawed under the Gambling Ordinance, games can be legal if played on private premises and are not run as a business or for the gain of any person beyond his or her winnings as a player.

Even so, poker playing has kept growing, says “Mike”, a founder of the Hong Kong Rounders group. Ten years ago there were “literally three or four people who had signed up for the only poker group listed for Hong Kong”, says the American who prefers not to give his full name. Through word of mouth and a small online presence, the group has developed a network of nearly 100 members who are involved in “home games”, mostly held in public mahjong parlours, at HK$1,000 per seat and with minimum bets of HK$10 and HK$20.

But the local poker community could improve its organisation, Mike says. “It’s kind of scrappy in the sense that you’ve got several games here and there, when there’s huge potential for a successful consolidation of all the games in Hong Kong,” he says.

Ricky Cheung Wai-ki is trying to change that. He organised M1nt’s poker tournaments and has run similar events at Veto (formerly Club Mod) and Club Cixi. Last year he founded the Hong Kong Game Club, now renamed the Hong Kong Poker League.

“Playing online is limited compared with playing at a real table,” says Cheung, who learned to play Texas Hold’em in 10-hour online sessions while he was a university student in England. “At a real table you meet people and can make friends,” he says.

Leung says Texas Hold’em has caught on because it offers a more communal style of poker and perhaps more acting skill than other variations. “You’re playing the other players, not the cards,” says Leung, who placed second at an APPT event in Manila last year. “It’s about 90 per cent skill and 10 per cent luck.”

Corporate sponsors have been eager to make poker nights even more social, Cheung says. He found his first major sponsor outside another venue as he was handing out publicity leaflets for his Club Mod event. “This guy took a flier and asked if I was organising the game inside,” Cheung says. “I said I wasn’t and he said ‘Great. I need you’.”

The man turned out to be the distributor for Patron, the Las Vegas- based spirits company. Within weeks, Cheung and his partner, PokerSchool.com.hk, set up the free- entry, no-cash tournament at M1nt.

Cheung organised a poker tournament at another local club last year, but it was cancelled after police confiscated security camera videotapes following a separate incident. The weekly events were legal, but the club management stopped his tournament because they were applying for the renewal of the venue’s liquor licence and “didn’t want to invite trouble”, Cheung says.

The sticking point in playing poker at clubs and parlours often involves fees. The Gambling Ordinance says if a fee is charged for admission, the game is illegal. But local venues skirt this by charging for something other than admission.

Mike Rickman points to two bowls of nuts on a table at The Best Club in Causeway Bay, where his Geo Hold’Em group plays. “We have to eat those nuts; we have no choice,” says the American chef. The club charges HK$828 for mandatory nuts and other dishes, tea and filtered water, plus a 10 per cent service charge.

Rickman’s 140-strong group offers the city’s most popular low- stakes game, with minimum bets set at HK$1and HK$2. The play is faster and louder than in higher-stakes games as participants rarely hesitate to meet a HK$1bet or raise it twice that amount over a beer. Last Friday’s meeting attracted more than 30 players – a mix of Chinese and westerners, and a lone woman.

“For us, it’s not about making money or winning tournaments – although we have people who are into that,” Rickman says. “We play because we love the game.”

Mike agrees. “Give us a table, some chips, and a deck of cards and the guys at the table become old friends,” he says. “Okay, that may be pushing it a bit, but you get the point. The table banter and the emotions that run with the pots create a sense of camaraderie – a twisted kind of camaraderie that could only exist in a place where you joke with a guy who just beat you in a hand for a week’s wage.”

This article first appeared Jan. 10, 2008 in the South China Morning Post.

The HK$300,000 Donald Tsang Yam-kuen paid to have a koi pond built at Government House after taking office as chief executive two years ago raised some eyebrows. But that outlay merely elicits smiles from members of the Hong Kong Koi Club; HK$300,000 is a mere drop in the bucket for serious fish fanciers. Keeping koi can be a costly undertaking. Enthusiasts easily pay tens of thousands of dollars for one fish. And then there’s the cost of maintaining a pond.

Textiles manufacturer Eddie Law She-guan started out with a simple fish tank in his flat, but eventually built a seven-ton pond on the roof. As his interest grew, the koi fancier learned of a group of enthusiasts who were maintaining their own ponds in the New Territories. “I was told the Koi Club is like a secret organization,” says Law, who joined 11 years ago and is now a co-director. “Not many people know about it.”

The club lists some prominent members, including City Chain owner C.K. Wong and legislator Frederick Fung Kin-kee. Tsang has also attended some club events, although he isn’t a member.

All koi – short for nishikigoi, or ornamental carp – are the same species of carp, but fanciers group them into distinct varieties, the most popular being the kohaku, taisho and showa. A popular saying among koi keepers is that the hobby begins and ends with kohaku, a white- scaled variety with a deep red pattern running from head to tail. They can live up to 100 years if kept in natural ponds and grow to a meter long.

Anyone can buy tosai or pond- quality koi at their local fish store. However, fanciers such as Law often make trips to Japan, where koi breeding is a billion-dollar industry, to get the most beautiful varieties. The club plans another visit this autumn to tour koi farms certified by Zen Nippon Airinkai (ZNA), the world authority on koi. With members hoping to visit five farms each day, it’s hardly a leisure outing.

The average Japanese koi fetches at least HK$120,000, but wealthy fanciers often pay much more for an especially captivating specimen or one that they believe will bring luck. Serious koi keepers who compete in shows pay more than HK$1 million for fish from important Japanese bloodlines.

That’s no mean investment, and the only reward for winning at a koi show is a trophy and bragging rights, says Aaron Lit Ying-yeung, one of two Hongkongers certified to be an assistant judge at ZNA shows. Winners of the All Japan Show – the World Cup of koi shows – have been offered enormous sums for their champion fish. A fancier bid as much as US$1million for the kohaku that won last year’s grand prize, although his offer was declined.

“These fish are a man’s fortune. They’re his luck,” says Lit. “You never sell your luck to anyone.” An advertising agency owner who has raised koi for 20 years, Lit recently had a 60cm kohaku place first in ts class at a local competition.

Enthusiasts also spare little expense to construct ponds for their living jewels, as the koi are sometimes called. Koi Club founder Ng Cheung-fat’s ponds in the New Territories include an air conditioned enclosure covering several hundred square feet for his most valuable fish.

Part of the reason koi are so highly prized is that they’re a symbol of prosperity among the Chinese – the word for carp sounds like that for profit , and the word for fish sounds like that for plenty. In Japan, koi are symbols of love and friendship for similar reasons. And koi ponds feature prominently in measures to maintain good fung shui.

However, Koi Club president John Chan Kwok-keung says members’ interest in the fish has little to do with symbols of wealth. “Anyone can raise koi,” he says. “You can buy a young fish for less than HK$100 that could grow to be a grand champion.”

The Japanese word for such a fish is tatekoi, or “a fish with potential”, and finding one is part of the challenge of raising koi.

Chan, who is Hong Kong’s other ZNA-certified assistant judge, says the difference between an average koi and a potential grand champion lies in the size of the fish and the colour and pattern of its scales. A champion kohaku, for instance, will have a balanced crisp red pattern on a snow white background.

The owner of Harbour Koi Farms, Danny Ngai Man-fai, says his customers include long-time enthusiasts and those who are just starting. Beginners usually buy fish that are less than a year old, whereas more experienced koi keepers will buy fish that are about two years old.

The basic patterns on koi will stop changing about the age of three. A female koi may hatch more than 100,000 eggs and the breeder will sort through them four times in the first months to cull those deemed inferior. Those culled from the fry will be fed to other fish, and those culled as tosai may be sold to aquarium shops.

Demand for high-quality koi exceeds what breeders can produce, and Ngai, who raises his own varieties from stock imported from top farms in Japan, says he has constructed another two farms in Guangzhou to meet clients’ needs.

Who has Hong Kong’s most expensive fish? Koi Club members are characteristically close- mouthed but agree that it isn’t the chief executive. Tsang’s fish, estimated to cost between HK$10,000 and HK$50,000 each, are at the low end of what a serious collector would pay.

Tsang says his favourite varieties are the highly valued kohaku, the sanke, which has white skin with a red and black pattern, and the tancho, another white-skinned fish with a red spot on its forehead named after the Japanese crane, which has similar colouring. “I can unclutter my mind and relieve work pressure by simply admiring and feeding them,” the chief executive says of his hobby.

“They always give me a sense of tranquility. And, of course, they never talk back.”

This article first appeared Aug. 7, 2007 in the South China Morning Post.

Be careful how you hold the board when you first begin sawing, or you might cut your thumb, warns Albert Cheng Hung-cheung. It might seem an obvious point, even for the basic carpentry lesson he’s giving, butsome of the participants scribble a note.

Hongkongers typically employ contractors for home improvement projects.But that might be changing as more people show an inclination to do it themselves and a number of retail outlets have sprung up to satisfy the demand for DIY.

B&Q, Britain’s biggest home improvement retailer, recently opened in Kowloon Bay, as has Spotlight, an Australian chain that offers fabrics and home interiors products.

A report by global market research firm Euromonitor International, published last year, anticipated the arrival of such stores. Despite social factors, “such as congested living space and the lack of a DIY culture”, the fact that the property market was doing well indicated that more people would be taking on home improvement projects to save money and capitalise on their investment.

Cheng, a former carpenter who gives free DIY lessons twice a week at B&Q, says his students want the skills to be able to do exactly that, and more. “I’ve seen tremendous interest in learning how to do all kinds of home improvement projects,” he says. “There are many who seem to be taking this up as a hobby.”

Today’s lesson is teaching how to hang shelves, while introducing participants to the basic tools of the trade. In addition to using a cross-cut saw, Cheng demonstrates proper hammering techniques, explains when to use a screw rather than a nail, and shows how using a spirit level keeps you straight when measuring. An hour later, he’s hung two types of shelves and built a simple wooden box.

Brian Lau has taken detailed notes. He left work early to attend the lesson and has designs for a wardrobe he’d like to build as well as abed that incorporates storage.

“It’s not that I’m hoping to save a lot of money making them myself,” says the 24-year-old retail salesman. “It’s more to do with the fact that I have something specific in mind.”

Lau touches on one point of DIY home improvement that prevents many people from taking it up: the saw, hammer, drill, level and other tools Cheng works with add up to nearly HK$2,000 to buy, which doesn’t include the cost of materials. Lau says he’s kept his costs down through comparison shopping, visiting the many small hardware stores in Mong Kok and on Apliu Street in Sham Shui Po.

The owners of many of these stores say the opening of the large DIY retailers has been a boon for their own businesses. “I’ve been getting more customers in the past month,” says Eva Lau, who sells tools on Apliu Street. “They’re new customers. You can tell from what they’re buying that they haven’t done many home improvement projects before.”

Cheng says he’s had two types of people in his classes: those who come in with designs for a project they want to build from scratch and those who want to finish something a contractor started for them. “We get lots of people who come in the week after the contractor has left, saying they want to add or change something.”

He says that large “one-stop” DIY stores tend to encourage people to try a project themselves because they sell all the tools and materials needed to complete the job, have knowledgeable staff offering help, and hands-on demonstrations.

Peter and Christine Bancroft needed very little help to refit the Sai Kung flat they moved to two years ago; she’s an interior designer and he a civil engineer.

The couple hired a contractor to help with the heavy work, but they did their own electrical wiring, built a wardrobe in their bedroom, refitted parts of the wooded floor in their living room and added a deck to their rooftop. They also did all their own wall coverings and finishing. The couple say they saved a substantial amount. Contractors charge about HK$700 per worker per day. Specialist contractors usually quote prices per square foot, with wallpaper hangers, for instance, charging about HK$8 per sq ft and flooring specialists as much as HK$38 per sq ft. Hiring an English-speaking handyman can cost up to HK$550 an hour.

Though now settled into their renovated home, the Bancrofts say it was difficult to live in the house during the six months of evenings and weekends it took to complete their DIY projects.

“It’s painful to live in such a mess,” says Christine Bancroft. “You just want for it all to be finished so you can enjoy it. If we had it to do over, I’d want to live elsewhere while the work was going on.”

The dust and dirt of an ongoing renovation project wouldn’t bother Chan Chak-nam. He’s done small DIY projects in the past, but the 36- year-old IT specialist says he’s not sure if his wife would stand for it.

“If it were going to take only a couple of weeks, it wouldn’t be a problem,” he says. “But we’re talking about moving a wall to make our bathroom bigger and retiling it.”

He expects the project will take at least a month and jokes that his wife would have to bathe at the kitchen sink during that time.

Besides the number of weeks it will take to finish their bathroom, Chan also worries about making time to do it. He works during the day and would only have evenings and weekends to work on his bathroom. “We have neighbours above us, below us and on both sides,” he says. “Apartment life in Hong Kong makes doing DIY projects very difficult.”

Still, he’s determined to get the job done before taking on a few other comparatively easier DIY projects. Their plan, he says, is to make improvements to the flat, then put it on the market in the hopes of turning a profit.

Chan happened to be in the store during Cheng’s recent carpentry class and stayed for the duration, making note of the date and time of the next lesson – how to lay bathroom tiles.

But becoming too handy around the house could have its downside, he says. “If my wife sees I can do these things, she’ll have me refitting our next flat, too.”

This article first appeared Jul. 24, 2007 in the South China Morning Post.