Because they’re sneaky, smell like shit and they’re favourite pastime is shutting lift doors in people’s faces. There’s also their horrid xenophobia, which is hard to balance with HK’s supposed status as an international city.
Did I mention the food sucks, or that they smell really bad?
HG
You probably feel this way because you did not have to actually live there and face them everyday.
HKG have derived a thin veneer of all of the worst of the Brits and have the heart of a Canto. They are very clubby, loud, glibly false, and arrogant. Everything is members only, (not that it is hard, just requires a small amount of $$ and a ‘friend’). If you want your kid to join the orchestra, don’t bother auditioning; just find a friend. They think they are the bestest Chinese in existence. They at turns sneer, and cower at their brothers over the border. When asked, you must always tell them how wonderful their cuisine and what a wonderful mix of East and West HKG is. They have zero creativity, genuine arts, or culture compared to the Taiwanese.
Initially I was quite happy to be posted to HKG. Civilization I thought! Culture! Food! Variety. No more living in a backwater. Well. If an overpriced, overcrowded strip mall, full of ill mannered people is culture…if vaguely derivative artwork is your ken…if mediocre and overpriced, overdone, western food is your fancy, or bland overpriced Chinese food hits the spot…I mean the national dish is a bland fish ball in clear Crisco soup, or a dry pineapple bread…they’ve got a concrete fetish that is worse than the Taiwanese. The bureaucracy is efficiently, but poorly led, meaning that half-baked ideas get executed brilliantly .
Shanghai is better than HKG. By miles.
overdone western food is your fancy,
Eh, was this this an attempt at verse? Very Burroughesque.
No. Copy paste issues. 
Still, very Burroughs-esque…
I hate it when they hit that close button door repeatedly in the elevator as if the door would close faster.
they smell, they’re arrogant, they think about money too much, and they are small-minded.
The way you guys describe HK and its people is like how a lot of people describe Taiwan and its people! Betel nuts, flip flops, spitting in the streets, etc. 
Can you compare HK and its people to Taiwan and its people so I can better understand why expats (well, so far just the three of you!) dislike it so much?
My spousal unit lived there for a few years but he lurved it and it could be in our future.
I always felt it was like Taibei, except I don’t like the Cantonese dialect and the mainland Chinese people squatting everywhere. Everywhere I went people could speak English (Watson’s, etc.) and most people I met or came in contact with were from Canada or had a friend from there or England. No one blinked an eye when I spoke English, which was fantastic. I also found the people (in my demographic) more metropolitan than Taibeiers. It was at times easier to communicate with them than Taiwanese people, I found.
There were plenty more restaurants that were better than Taibei. Carnegie’s is like the default western eatery in Taibei, but in HK, every other western eatery trumped Carnegie’s. (Not a dis, just keeping it real).
I’d love to hear your input on living there. Hearing about HK from my Honger friends is biased, of course.
it’s always one thing to visit a city as a tourist, another to slog it day after day.
New scooter slogan!
Hear hear. Brilliantly put, as always. And to anyone from HK who is offended, I grin inananely and say “Sollee, ah!”
Here’s a very simply yardstick: Most Taiwanese that come here find the people appallingly rude.
HG
HGC, you need to embrace the suck and move over here to the motherland.
Well, the Chinese food in Taipei is far more diverse, has more vegetables and in general tastes better. Regarding non-Chinese food, Hong Kong has an excellent range of large and small, cozy restaurants, bistro’s, and eateries that serve food from almost any country you can think of.
Hm, but people say that about Taiwanese people, too. Heck, EYE find Taiwanese people rude sometimes.
I’ll chalk it up to differences in experiences. My spouse loved living and working there for four years, so I don’t know what to think. I’ll have to experience living there myself one day then.
Thanks for your loverly description of HK, elegua! That was hilarious. No, you don’t sound bitter one bit! 
I’m betting your spouse stayed only in the expat areas of HK and had minimal contact with locals.
Moi? Bitter? Under normal circumstances no, but HKG nearly sucked the life out of me. Thank God I escaped to somewhere saner like China. :roflmao:
That’s what I disliked most about HK – it really was an “us and them” situation. FAR moreso than I ever experienced here in Taiwan. And yeah, there is an undeniable stink if you find yourself in an elevator that I haven’t ever noticed in Taiwan.
He made me an offer like that, but I couldn’t afford him. 
Just for the record, HKG is NO relation to HGC!
It is an astonishingly segregated place. Very rare to see a mixed group of foreigners and Chinese out socially unless it’s some forced work event. Mixed couples are far less common also, by which I mean Cantos and foreigners. There are plenty of whiteys with Flips and Mainlanders, but an incredibly small number of locals and whitey.
It cuts both ways, of course. The residual HK royalty, by which I mean the leftover white uberlords, have pretty much complete disdain for all things Chinese except what they consider a perceived plucky business zeal.
I’m an equal opportunity hater, in that I hate the white faux aristocracy as much as I hate the screeching and stinking little (and why are they so damned short? If you look at them, you’ll notice that it is a problem with long bone development, same as it is for midgets; thus stumpy arms and legs but normal body size and head) courier that fouls up the air in my lift.
HG
My love for HK has still clearly failed to develop.
Yet another scene of appalling behaviour at HKIA. She’ll probably just go home and toss bottles of acid off her rooftop at complete strangers walking below.
The good news is that a sailor friend mentioned that in discussions with the HK Marine Police last week they had noted a sharp uptick in bodies floating in the waters around the former colony. Now this could be an unfortunate sign of things turning grim in China and more people strapping on leaky bicycle inner tubes for the swim to HK, or, and I’m obviously hoping it’s the latter, more locals topping themselves. I’d dare suggest that charcoal burners are so last year, that alone explains the shift towards drowning.
HG