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  1. Join Date
    Sep 2003
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    25,038
    #1
    Bus Uncle

    Hong Kong's new hero is under pressure these days. And he's also in hospital after three people beat him up at the job he had just started.

    Roger Chan, otherwise known as "Bus Uncle," burrowed his way into the city's psyche a month ago after he ranted for six minutes at a passenger who tapped him on the shoulder asking him to talk more quietly on his phone.

    The late-night tirade became a cult hit when a passenger across the aisle taped it on his phone and the video wound up on YouTube.com, a new and massive Web phenomenon that tells users to "broadcast yourself."

    "I face pressure. You face pressure. Why do you provoke me?" Chan yelled at 23-year-old Elvis Ho that April night. He was seen leaning over the top of his seat on the top level of the double-decker bus, his finger just inches away from the young man's nose.

    Ho, a real estate agent, addressed the man as uncle, a sign of respect for older people in Hong Kong.

    The encounter, which takes some unexpected turns and features some profane language, became the most viewed video on YouTube.com in May, with nearly three million people flocking to see the original and its incarnations, like the Karaoke version, the rap remix and the dance and disco take.

    The Internet propelled the 51-year-old unemployed Chan to an online celebrity status, and local reporters soon caught on, chasing him down and making him front page fodder in a city known for its reserve.

    Now Chan is rarely seen without an entourage. A business sells T-shirts and handbags. "Bus Uncle" Web sites have emerged, while there is an entry on the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. His words on pressure have become an oft-repeated catchphrase in this teeming city.

    Perhaps what is most surprising is how popular "Bus Uncle" has become. Local commentators say the man who lives with five cats and has made a bid to become chief executive of Hong Kong in the past became a hero because of a confluence of events.

    The Internet has created unlimited space for ordinary Hong Kongers to have their say, says pop culture and Internet expert Anthony Fung, giving them the power to generate news that used to focus only on top officials and the elite.

    "People used to be consumers of the media, but when we have the Internet, people don't just consume, they also produce," Fung says.

    "Bus Uncle" is also seen as real, strong and honest, using language close to the heart of Hong Kong people and catching the collective emotional pulse in a city where people live cheek to jowl, and don't generally socialize with strangers or say how they feel, local experts say.

    "He is not pretending to be someone great," says Fung, who says Hong Kong's youth can't find heroes in the textbooks they read. "But he is expressing the true feelings of ordinary people."

    Chan's phrases reflect the pressure that comes from living in a city where 6.9 million people are squeezed into 1,104 square kilometers (426 square miles) of land. In its most densely populated parts -- like the old airport area of Kwun Tong -- as many as 50,820 live in one square kilometer.

    And while the former British colony is widely touted as being the luxury car capital and has some of the world's most expensive real estate, most people work 47 hours a week, earning an average wage of just HK$10,470 (US$1,348) a month.

    "Hong Kong people work very hard to earn a living although the big companies make a lot of money," Fung says.

    Families live in high-rise apartments of between 30-50 square meters (322 to 538 square feet), where there are no backyards. And pressure simmers just below the surface in this commercial center where time is seen as money.

    "The reason I swear, there's something hidden inside, some pressure," Chan told CNN of his encounter on bus 68X heading towards Yuen Long.

    He is not alone. One in every 50 people in major Chinese cities suffer from intermittent explosive disorder, says professor Sing Lee, director of the Hong Kong Mood Disorders Center. The affliction is commonly called "road rage" in the United States.

    Medicine can control such outbursts, Lee says, but people need to seek anger management.

    Before he was admitted to a hospital, Chan told CNN that people should be honest to themselves.

    "If you angry, you angry. If you talk, you talk. If you fight, you fight," says Chan.

    But such words and his rapid rise to infamy may have come to haunt Hong Kong's newest celebrity. He is still recovering in hospital.

  2. Join Date
    Mar 2006
    Posts
    108
    #2
    kung sa pinas nangyari yan nakow, kung saan na pupulutin yang si bus uncle...mabuti kung bubuhayin pa iyan ng mga halang ang kaluluwa..

  3. Join Date
    Jun 2005
    Posts
    345
    #3
    yung subtitles rin nakakatawa!

    Settled.
    Not yet.
    Settled.
    Not yet!
    Settled.
    NOT YET!!!!!!

    the profanities also...
    diu nei ma!

  4. Join Date
    Oct 2002
    Posts
    22,658
    #4
    Anyone have a link to the video? Thanks

    http://docotep.multiply.com/
    Need an Ambulance? We sell Zic Brand Oils and Lubricants. Please PM me.

  5. Join Date
    Nov 2004
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    78
    #5
    Quote Originally Posted by OTEP
    Anyone have a link to the video? Thanks
    Search in Google Video. Just saw it a while ago.

  6. Join Date
    Sep 2003
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    25,038
    #6

  7. Join Date
    May 2005
    Posts
    4,819
    #7
    .
    nagpasindak kasi yung isa! If dito sa 'pinas, yung pagmumura nya, may kalalagyan sya! kahit matanda pa sya...Umabuso na. Di na karespe-respeto.
    .

  8. Join Date
    May 2005
    Posts
    6,090
    #8
    A Six-Minute Tirade On a Hong Kong Bus Rides Into Vernacular

    Mr. Chan's Pressured Rant Turns Into Web Sensation; Ringtones and Remixes
    By GEOFFREY A. FOWLER - The Wall Street Asia
    June 7, 2006; Page A1

    HONG KONG -- While riding public bus 68X on the night of April 29, Elvis Ho tapped the shoulder of a passenger sitting in front of him who was talking on a cellphone. The 23-year-old Mr. Ho asked the man to lower his voice. Mr. Ho called him "uncle," a familiar way of addressing an elder male in Cantonese.

    Instead of complying, the man turned around and berated Mr. Ho for nearly six minutes, peppering his outburst with obscenities.

    "I've got pressure, you've got pressure!" the older man exploded. "Why did you have to provoke me?" A nearby passenger who found the encounter interesting captured most of it on video with his own cellphone, and it was posted on the Web.

    "Bus Uncle," as the older man is now known, has since become a Hong Kong sensation. The video, including subtitled versions, has been downloaded nearly five million times from YouTube.com, a popular Web site for video clips.

    Teenagers and adults here sprinkle their conversations with phrases borrowed from Bus Uncle's rant, such as "I've got pressure!" and "It's not over!" (shouted when the young man tried to end the conversation several times by saying, "It's over"). Also, there are several insults involving mothers. Web sites peddle T-shirts with a cartoon of Bus Uncle and the famous phrases. They are also available as mobile-phone ringtones.

    Fans have edited the footage into music-video versions of disco, rap and pop songs that have themselves become popular online. One video projects a slowed-down version of Bus Uncle's voice over an image of Darth Vader. Another sets Bus Uncle audio clips to Samuel Barber's "Adagio for Strings," beginning with a title that says, "All he wanted to do...was to talk on his phone and relax from his stress...but someone HAD to tap him on the back."

    Jon Fong, the 21-year-old accountant and night-school psychology student who captured the bus incident on his Sony Ericsson cellphone, has become famous, too. Mr. Fong has told reporters that he often takes videos as a hobby, and had just planned to share this one with friends. "Next time, I'll put myself in the frame," he told Hong Kong's Cable TV news.

    The Internet has allowed the Bus Uncle video to join a slew of other instant amateur films in attracting a global audience. Here in Hong Kong, it has a special resonance. For many, Bus Uncle personifies the stresses of life in their city.

    At a recent dinner with friends, Hillman Lam asked one to pass a drink. His friend jokingly declined, and Mr. Lam, a 24-year-old ad salesman at a newspaper, said, "Hey, I've got pressure." That got a laugh from his companions, he recalls.

    "When I say it, everybody knows what I am referring to," says Mr. Lam. "The video focused on what Hong Kong people are always thinking: that we have lots of pressure. It's a fast-paced society."

    For 42-year-old Sherry Lee, tending a small stationery shop next door to where Mr. Ho has his own real-estate agency, Bus Uncle struck a similar chord. The fast pace of Hong Kong is so ingrained in her, she says, that "any time I visit someplace else, like Japan or Korea, I notice people are slow. I just want to kick them."

    The government plans to use Bus Uncle as a "teaching example" for a Web site on moral and civic education where the incident can be discussed "from multiple perspectives," says Cheung Wing-hung, the chief curriculum-development officer for the city's Education and Manpower Bureau.

    While the event was entirely nonviolent, many agree Bus Uncle wasn't exactly a model of public etiquette. Tang Ming-wah, a security guard who lives alone in a 70-square-foot room, says Bus Uncle didn't behave according to the accepted social rules of Hong Kong. "Hong Kong people are usually quite polite and won't shout on the phone," says the 48-year-old Mr. Tang, while riding recently on the same 68X bus route used by Bus Uncle. "But unlike the kid, I would have used peer pressure" by asking other passengers to help quiet him down, he says.

    In fact, Mr. Ho has drawn no small amount of flak for how he handled himself on that fateful day, particularly for not defending himself -- and his mother -- more aggressively.

    "My friends wonder how I could have the patience to take his abuse," Mr. Ho says. "Some of them would have fought back." Mr. Ho says he takes inspiration from tai chi, the Chinese martial art that emphasizes slow motion and meditation.

    He adds: "I am under pressure now -- from reporters. I have seen over 40 so far."

    Hong Kong boasts some of the densest urban residential areas on the planet and an intensity that many people find exhausting. On some of the small buses nicknamed "flying cars of death" that many people use as public transportation, there are giant speedometers that let passengers berate the driver when he goes too fast. In interviews with the Hong Kong press, one psychologist helped popularize the term "intermittent explosive disorder," in describing a kind of road rage among people taking public transportation.

    Bus Uncle's identity remained a mystery for well over a month, even as the impact of his video spread. Local reporters staked out the neighborhood at the end of the 68X bus line in search of the man. A week and a half ago, reporters from Next magazine found him: Roger Chan, 51, who lives in a 350-square-foot apartment nearby with five cats. Mr. Chan said yesterday, "Somebody knocked on my door [and said] 'Hey, are you Mr. Chan? You know that you are very popular right now? We want to have an interview with you!' "

    Mr. Chan tells some lively stories. He says he once won about $2.5 million in a lottery, and then lost it all to gambling. He says he was imprisoned three times in Europe, and ended up carving fruit for Belgian royalty.

    Only one part of his story was immediately verifiable. A government spokesman confirms that Mr. Chan unsuccessfully sought office as Hong Kong's chief executive in 2005.

    While subject to China's sovereignty, Hong Kong, a former British colony, enjoys a separate political system, but one that many people complain is only nominally democratic.

    When newspaper columnist Chip Tsao watches the Bus Uncle video, he sees a commentary on Hong Kong's struggle for democracy. "Let's not forget what this uncle said: This crisis is not resolved," Mr. Tsao said on a public-radio talk show recently. "This Bus Uncle is a good social spokesman."

    Mr. Chan says all his recent success has made him interested again in being a chief executive, but of a different sort. "I don't want to be a clown of politics," he says. "Now I want to be the chief executive of Steak Expert," he says, referring to his two-day-old job as a public-relations representative for a chain of about 40 Hong Kong steakhouses. Last night, Mr. Chan held court at a branch in Hong Kong's Wan Chai neighborhood, sitting before a half-dozen flashing cameras for an interview with the Miss Hong Kong runner-up turned TV personality Queenie Chu. At the end of their interview, he sang for her in French the song "Ça Va Pas Changer Le Monde" -- "That Will Not Change the World."

    Bus Uncle's final wisdom: "I feel that this is a wave I am riding. I caught the chance to ride on it and look forward to my future....This had a kind of negative beginning. Hopefully it will have a positive ending."

    Write to Geoffrey A. Fowler at geoffrey.fowler*wsj.com

  9. Join Date
    Oct 2002
    Posts
    9,894
    #9
    pati mga may sayad ang utak may 15 minutes of fame na rin...

Irate HK man unlikely Web hero