According to this blog's description for itself, it is modeled after Alistair Cooke's famed radio program, "Letter from America".

        This blogger aims high, but like most of us, he lacks Mr. Cooke's grace and flair for the English language. That being said, it doesn't mean this blog, HONG KONG DIARIES is a blog not worthy of your time --- it only implies Mr. Cooke's shoes are difficult to fill, and he's not easy to emulate.

        Although the blogger, Ali Bullock is no Alistair Cooke, this blog has warmth; unlike other Hong Kong expat blogs Sham-Shui-Po Boy has read, this blog gives its readers a distinctive feel of British middle-class decency and politeness. Ali's entries are often light-hearted and he steers clear of controversial political issues. He is an accomplished photographer, an animal lover, and active in Hong Kong Dog Rescue. Sham-Shui-Po Boy always has a soft-spot for artists of any medium and animal lovers of all persuasions.

        Sham-Shui-Po Boy says, read this blog; Ali comes across as an all around nice chap. What he has to say is interesting and he says it in a friendly, affectionate way, almost as gracefully as Mr. Cooke himself. And Ali has something that Mr. Cooke was not known to have: a sense of humor.

        Of course not all of the blogs that ended up in the bottom of the barrel here are exactly the same --- none of them are completely alike. In some ways, they're quite different from each other. They're on this list because they all have enough similarities to be in the same category.

        There is one barrister(lawyer) and one airlines pilot in this bunch. The barrister often writes needlessly in double-speaking legalese or 19th century English with a pretentious vocabulary; he's unfeeling and complaining constantly --- to him, the natives can't do anything right (this blogger has deleted all his previous entries in his blog prior to this review). And every so often, the pilot throws in some airlines jargon and writes about women, sex and the good old days. Most of these bloggers, for lack of a better word, can be described as carpetbaggers of one sort or another.

        The tones of their blogs are more or less the same, irreverent, sarcastic and arrogant. The contents of these blogs abound with disparaging remarks. Some of them are pornographic and racist. They're generally dismissive about the natives, their culture and language, or pay only lip service to them, or ignore them altogether. Some of these bloggers are consistently talking about cars and driving. In Hong Kong, owning a private vehicle is a status symbol, not a necessity.

        What glues these expats to Hong Kong is money, a lifestyle they cannot afford back home -- England is no longer an economic power house it once was -- and to some, it's sex(Asian women), or both. They have minimal emotional attachment to this place. Socically, politically and culturally, they might as well be living on a different planet, they couldn't care less what the natives really think of them.

        Sham-Shui-Po Boy says, the same attitude and mentality of the old order are still there, only now it's a tad less blatant. These bloggers are relics of our colonial past.


        * There are some more ungrateful guests as those mentioned above, however, they are not listed in this review. Expat bloggers of their ilk and the worse ones deserve to be on the same list, but they do not deserve the world-wide publicity that Hong Kong Blogs Review provides.