Hong Kong Chronicles: About Age and Jobs

Question: In Hong Kong, which of the following three persons is most likely to have the best command of the English language?

A. Well-dressed, beautifully made-up sales lady in her twenties working at a popular fashion clothing boutique

B. Tidily-uniformed waiter in his late teens or early twenties, working at a Pizza Hut (not a take-out, but a full-blown sit-down restaurant)

C. Scruffy old man in a worn-out shirt, driving a rickety mini-bus

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If you had guessed A or B, you had deduced logically, but you would be wrong. Over and over again, I have found that the workers with the best command of the English language, or Mandarin, for that matter, are the bus drivers, who, for reasons unknown to me, are invariably people nearing or well past retirement age. (Once, I sat behind a driver looking so bent and shriveled that I spent the entire wild ride imagining scenarios where he could have lost control of the bus and sent us all careening to an early grave. Of course, it turned out he was as keen and mean around traffic circles as any driver younger than he, if not keener and meaner. There was no sign of slowing down, mentally or driving-wise, with this guy.)

You'll notice, of course, that by describing their clothing and their working milieu, I am leading you to believe that perhaps the first two jobs are more desirable than the third, but I can be completely wrong about this. It's entirely possible that the bus driver makes more money than the sales lady or the waiter. However, my point is this: the older people in Hong Kong, doing jobs that require mostly mechanical skills, are in possession of more verbal skills than those who work in public service sectors, where verbal skills are of utmost importance. Nevertheless, over and over again, I find only young people working in the service sector and retails. In Hong Kong, you will not find a single sales person older than thirty working in a clothing or department store. The only jobs that are taken up by older folks seem to be bus drivers, supermarket checkout clerks (who also happen to be amazingly talented polyglots), and janitors.

The other day I was in a clothing chain store called Bossini looking for a swim trunk for my son. For all my creative ability at communication, both in English and in Mandarin (and in some improvised Cantonese), I could not make the pretty young sales woman understand "swim trunk" or "swim" or "water", or anything to that effect. I even pantomimed at one point without success. Similarly, I had trouble getting young waiters in Pizza Hut to differentiate between "thick crust," "thin crust," or "stuffed crust" in English. On the other hand, the bus driver I had yesterday promptly pointed out, in English, to a non-Chinese passenger that she was short by fifty cents. "You're supposed to pay fifty cents more--in cash," she said, "did you get that?" I almost begged that elderly woman driver: "Can you please go interview for a sales job in Bossini?"

Is there serious age discrimination in the Hong Kong job market? Why are older people never seen in the shopping malls, restaurants, banks, hotels, or travel agencies? It certainly cannot be from their lack of verbal communication skills. If anything, their language abilities are far superior to those a generation or two younger. Yet, we see that the faces of Hong Kong, the ones that pop up behind counters (except for those at supermarkets), are bright-eyed twenty-something faces. They look energetic and fashionable (complete with the latest up-swept hairdos); they stand at the ready and are eager to please. But they can't tell you if they sell swim trunks or not.

I guess there are still many things in Hong Kong I cannot understand.

The modernity of Hong Kong seems to identify itself exclusively with the young,
leaving the old somewhere around the fringe, if not entirely in the dust.