ITZY – Checkmate Live in Hong Kong

South Korean girl group ITZY played two sell-out concerts at Asia Expo on 11 and 12 March, as live music continued to return to Hong Kong.

Click on any image for the full concert image gallery.

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ITZY – Checkmate Live in Hong Kong – Set List

S#1. INTRO + 마.피.아. In the morning
S#2. Sorry Not Sorry
S#3. SHOOT!
S#4. WHAT I WANT
S#5. 365
S#6. [留真] Boss B*tch
S#7. CHERRY
S#8. ICY
S#9. Free Fall
S#10. #Twenty
S#11. [有娜] Maniac
S#12. [LIA] Red
S#13. INTRO + WANNABE
S#14. DALLADALLA
S#15. SNEAKERS
S#16. [彩領] bloodline
S#17. [禮志] Hotter Than Hell
S#18. CHESHIRE
S#19. LOCO
S#20. Not Shy
S#21. DOMINO
S#22. 믿지 (MIDZY)
S#23. Boys like you
S#24. Nobody like you

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ITZY – Checkmate – Live in Hong Kong
Date: 6pm, 11-12 March, 2023
Venue: AsiaWorld-Expo, Hall 5&7
Tickets: $1,799, $1,099, $699 from Cityline

Women’s 10s Debuts in Rugby Week 2023

It’s taken thirty-five years but the inaugural HKFC Women’s 10s Competition kicks off as part of 2023 Hong Kong 10s and will see five teams compete in a round-robin format. The top four teams will progress to the knock-out phase of the competition, with the winners of two semi-finals progressing to the Cup final and the losers to a Plate final.

The competing teams are Samurai Warriors, Ashbury Tropics, Tokyo Sankyu Phoenix, FindRugbyNow as well as hosts and Hong Kong Premier League champions, HKFC Ice

Samurai Warriors will be coached by two titans of England Rugby (a.k.a. the Red Roses) in Rochelle ‘Rocky’ Clark, who with 137 national appearances is one the most capped English players of all time, and 115-cap team-mate, Tamara Taylor.

Going head-to-head with the pair is fellow World Cup winner and legendary open-side flanker, Heather Fisher, who joins as part of the coaching team for Ashbury Tropics. Fisher is a veteran of both the Sevens and 15s having represented England and Great Britain in the 2014 World Cup and the Rio Olympic Games respectively.

Rocky Clark, who is also the Official Tournament Ambassador, said “I am massively grateful to Samurai for inviting me to coach the team. After the opportunities they gave me as a player back in the day when I started my playing journey, to now be coaching the team, it is a massive honour and where better to do it than the world’s best tens.”

The Red Roses’ involvement in the tournament reflects the calibre of the new Women’s Competition and HKFC Chairman, Neil Jensen, said “As a club, we are delighted to see that Hong Kong Football Club can still attract the biggest names in sport. We are really looking forward to seeing the return of the HKFC 10s to the Club and to once again present this exciting precursor to the Sevens which started over three decades ago.

We’re particularly pleased to see the introduction of a Women’s Competition which is an important milestone for the tournament and something we have been working towards for a number of years. Thank you to the teams that are making the journey to Hong Kong and we look forward to seeing a new dimension to the World’s Best 10s out on pitch.”

The 2023 HKFC 10s marks the 35th edition of Hong Kong Football Club’s flagship rugby event. It takes place at Hong Kong Football Club from 29-30 March. Matches are 10 minutes each way, gates open at 8.30am. Tickets cost $120 per day.

Hong Kong Tens
When: 29-30 March, 2023
Where: Hong Kong Football Club
How much: $120
More info: www.hkfc10s.com

Additional reporting and images: HK10s

Clockenflap 2023 Part Deux

After a sold-out weekend, Clockenflap have announced a second festival in 2023 on 1-3 December. No bands have been confirmed.

clockenflap march 2023

Clockenflap
Date: 1-3 December, 2023
Venue: Central Harbourfront
Tickets: tbc

image: clockenflap

Hong Kong Raised Nancy McGillivray Selected for England’s Red Roses

Congratulations to Nancy McGillivray who becomes the first player raised in Hong Kong to be selected for the England Rugby senior women’s squad.

McGillivray grew up in Hong Kong playing mini and youth rugby for DB Pirates and age grade for the HK teams. She had two seasons with Kowloon rugby and then headed off to university in the United Kingdom.

Nancy McGillivray England squad March 2023

Eric Yip’s Fricatives Wins UK National Poetry Competition

Hong Kong’s Eric Yip has won the UK’s National Poetry Competition with his poem Fricatives which talks about language, race, migration, belonging and the guilt of leaving one’s home behind.

Fricatives’ is a poem that makes its way ‘through the murky and treacherous waters of language, race, migration, and of being heard when “Nobody wants to listen/ to a spectacled boy with a Hong Kong accent.”

Speaking of his win the 19-year-old Yip said “It’s possibly the most surprising thing to ever happen to me. I’ve never had anything published before in a journal, let alone win any competition. I’m also honoured to contribute a small part to the growing literary space of Hong Kong poetry, which was carved out piece by piece through the wondrous efforts of many Hong Kong poets I admire.”

“I see the poem as a coming-of-age for the speaker, reflected through the transformation of his city.  It’s about different types of oppression and how the speaker navigates them. The poem begins by looking at the legacy of colonialism in influencing how we speak, or how we think we should speak. Then there’s the political dimension, which feels impossible not to write about. There’s also submission in the sexual sense, but even that scene has colonial undertones. And finally, there’s assimilating into an English-speaking country. All this mirrors Hong Kong’s journey from a colony to a battleground, to a site of exodus,” Yip added.

“I think there’s definitely an element of survivor guilt in the poem. Hong Kong is experiencing its largest emigration wave in history, but not everyone has the means to move to another country. For me, being able to write this poem is a form of privilege”

Yip’s work was chosen by judges Fiona Benson, David Constantine and Rachel Long, who read all the entries anonymously.

Benson said: “Fricatives is an immensely ambitious and beautifully achieved poem. It puts its reader into the position of a student of English as a second language, the fricative consonants tangling our mouths as we speak the poem, and intriguing us with the alternate meanings that rest precariously on the pronunciation. ‘Proper’ achievements – the correct pronunciation, the good education abroad, and the proud parents – are countered by an underworld of political prisoners and risky, grim sex.”

She added: “This is an incredibly powerful, vulnerable story of an uneasy assimilation, and of government surveillance… It’s a poem of poise and counterpoise, and is personal, political and acutely musical. What a tensile, high-wire reckoning.”

Fricatives by Eric Yip

To speak English properly, Mrs Lee said, you must learn
the difference between three and free. Three men
escaped from Alcatraz in a rubber raft and drowned
on their way to Angel Island. Hear the difference? Try
this: you fought your way into existence. Better. Look
at this picture. Fresh yellow grains beaten
till their seeds spill. That’s threshing. That’s
submission. You must learn to submit
before you can learn. You must be given
a voice before you can speak. Nobody wants to listen
to a spectacled boy with a Hong Kong accent.
You will have to leave this city, these dark furrows
stuffed full with ancestral bones. Know
that death is thorough. You will speak of bruised bodies
skinnier than yours, force the pen past batons
and blood, call it fresh material for writing. Now
they’re paying attention. You’re lucky enough
to care about how the tongue moves, the seven types
of fricatives, the articulatory function of teeth
sans survival. You will receive a good education
abroad and make your parents proud. You will take
a stranger’s cock in your mouth in the piss-slick stall
of that dingy Cantonese restaurant you love and taste
where you came from, what you were made of all along.
Put some work into it, he growls. C’mon, give me
some bite
. Your mother visits one October, tells you
how everyone speaks differently here, more proper.
You smile, nod, bring her to your favourite restaurant,
order dim sum in English. They’re releasing
the students arrested five years ago. Just a tad more
soy sauce please, thank you
. The television replays
yesterday on repeat. The teapots are refilled. You spoon
served rice into your mouth, this perfect rice.
Steamed, perfect, white.

Image: National Poetry Competition

Restricted Exterior Access Isolation Centre at Lok Ma Chau Loop

Factwire have written a long article about the new isolation centre “First instance of Wuhan Huoshenshan blueprint with restricted exterior access being built in Hong Kong’s Lok Ma Chau Loop

//As the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases gradually fall in Hong Kong, authorities continue construction on a large “container hospital”. As of today, Factwire has observed that the layouts of the “container hospital” and quarantine facilities apparently do not allow direct egress from rooms to the outdoors.

The architecture and layout of the facilities bear a distinct resemblance to Wuhan’s Huoshenshan and Leishenshan hospitals, where patients are quarantined in double rooms with shared toilet facilities, and are attached to, inter alia, a common operating room, ICU department, and computed tomography (CT) rooms. This appears to be the first instance of the Huoshenshan/Leishenshan(火神山/雷神山) blueprint being used to build a structure in Hong Kong.

The Secretary for Food and Health Sophia Chan had expressed earlier, via an online publication, that the Lok Ma Chau Loop facility would be staffed and operated by medical personnel from mainland China.

The government announced in early March that the Lok Ma Chau facility, scheduled to begin operation in April of 2022, would comprise some 1,000 hospital beds and allow an occupancy of 10,000 quarantined individuals.

Wen Wei Po reported yesterday that the construction was slated to be completed on April 5, 2022 and that the finished facility would contain three operating rooms and 100 ICU beds. The Chinese government appointed the China Construction Science and Industry Corporation – the same firm that built the Huoshenshan and Leishenshan facilities in Wuhan – to the project in Lok Ma Chau Loop…..//

Article continues on Factwire www.factwire.org/en/first-instance-of-wuhan-huoshenshan-blueprint-with-restricted-exterior-access-being-built-in-hong-kongs-lok-ma-chau-loop/

Isolation Centre at Lok Ma Chau Loop - factwire

American Lawyer Samuel Bickett Deported

American lawyer Samuel Bickett who was convicted of ‘assaulting’ an undercover policeman who denied he was a cop – has been released from jail and deported.

Cotten Tree Messages of Hope

An old lady in Diamond Hill is using fallen cotton tree flowers to create colourful messages of hope.

Originally from India the Tree Cotton – Scientific Name 學名: Bombax ceiba – is known as “Hero Trees” in Chinese.

You can read more about the plant in the HK Plant Database.

cotton tree flowers message

Image: andthenHK