Top 5 Reasons Hong Kong needs a Roller Derby League

So, I spent Christmas and New Years in Hong Kong, where I got to meet up with Colonel Slanders (and we had yum cha! Nom nom). Before I went, I looked up places to skate around there or leagues to skate with. THERE AREN'T ANY. WAT. I'd love to see a Honkers team at some future Blood and Thunder World Cup, but that doesn't look like it is going to happen. There seems to be some demand for derby though: check out the most recent posts in the Hong Kong Pro Roller-Skating Team Facebook page. Anyway, after being there, here are some reasons why Honkers needs to have a derby league, if it wasn't already obvious that anywhere without a derby league ought to have one:

5. The market exists for it already

LOLWUT

Hong Kong makes roller skates. Yep. Granted, some of the skates they make are pretty hilariously terrible but they have the resources to make good quality derby skates. So why don't they? I guess it's not that hard to get cheap materials and stuff, and while they're at it they could also make safety gear. They need safety gear for other forms of skate-related sports, so obviously there is a market for that sort of thing.

They also have a LOT of people who skate, but on ice or speed skate or artistic roller skating, which I gather is like figure skating but on quads. But they're pretty good at it. Because there aren't a lot of sports fields and stuff, people tend to do indoor sports like ice skating and this kind of thing, and then add to that the whole Chinese stereotype about overachievement and you have an army of skaters with mad skills. Seriously, check out this kid. I don't even know how old she is but HOLY CRAP:

What was that?! I mean, backwards crossovers, backwards shoot the duck, jumping transitions?!?! I really hate her skates, but mad props to her for being able to do all that on crazy crappy skates. I learned how to shoot the duck (forwards) when I was like 8, but then I forgot and didn't relearn it until last year or something. But imagine pulling those moves in a jam. Jesus. The best I would be able to do if I was jamming against this kid is maybe hipcheck her in the ribcage before she pirouetted away from me and did 10 million transitions while jumping the apex or something. I should just retire now.

4. Lots of flat spots

So much surface area.

Don't get me wrong. Hong Kong Island is pretty much a giant rock with some houses and stuff along the shoreline. That would make a freaking awesome hill skate, but I'm not talking about that. What I'm talking about is the large number of flat (and usually very nicely paved) surfaces that are around: basketball courts, subway tunnels, and, most of all, shopping malls. Yes. Given the stupid number of shopping malls there are (and how they all have nice atriums and escalators) it's amazing that people still walk to get places, when they could skate between the shops.

I walked around in a lot of malls while I was there, and a lot of the time I was looking at the ground and thinking "this would be a really nice surface to skate on". They're mostly tiled (and very well polished) so you'd probably need to use grippier wheels, but there is SO much flat space, all packed one floor on top of another. You could do like a race or something and start at the top of a building and do a lap of each floor, going down the escalator in between (or if you are game, running down the stairs on your toe stops). Now THAT would be a fun game. But seriously, there are so many atrium-type things and stuff that I'm surprised nobody's actually done that yet.

Also, Hong Kong airport is a HUGE expanse of flat. I almost wish I packed my skates just to go there. It's fricking huge and wide enough that you could skate around all the check in counters and people and luggage with room to spare. There's also the old Honkers airport in Kai Tak, which apparently still has all the runways and everything there (and which used to be one of three places in the world where pilots had to manually land the plane because the flight path was in between people's apartment buildings...!!) which might have been interesting to explore on outdoor wheels. But failing that, the new airport is also pretty awesomesauce.

So flat. So shiny.

3. Passive-Aggressiveness
One thing I found about people in Honkers was that they were SO polite. But, as my mother will tell you, behind all that politeness is some pent-up bitchiness waiting to explode in the right situation. I was at a street food stand once and one girl spazzed out and yelled at the vendor lady because she had to wait for TWO WHOLE MINUTES to get her cheese weiners on a stick. So she was like "hurry up, I'll miss my bus" and the vendor lady said "I have to cook these properly" and then the girl was all like "YOU'RE TAKING AGES TO COOK THEM BECAUSE YOU KEEP PUTTING RAW THINGS INTO THE BOILER!" and then the vendor lady was like "I THINK I KNOW WHAT I'M DOING" and then they were yelling at each other in the street about food poisoning and child abuse and everyone was staring and I was confused and wanted my egg waffles.

So normally it doesn't boil over and people are good at keeping their tempers in check, but when it gets to be too much, look out. Where better to let that out all that aggression in a safe environment than in derby? Oh, and I guess making a smashed cucumber salad comes a close second. It's not as fun as derby, but it tastes a hell of a lot better.

2. The Squat Toilet
Oh yes, it's hard to go on a trip to Honkers without coming across one of these bad boys:

Those foot ridges are not helpful for keeping your balance if the toilet is wet.

I never figured out whether you face forwards or backwards on these things. Basically you do a squat to when you pee or take a dump. Protip: for the love of Derby Jesus roll up the bottoms of your pants BEFORE you go into the bathroom stall. Anyway, basically you bend your knees to below a 90-degree angle, drop your butt (not so it touches the toilet, ew) and then do your business.

Sound familiar? Hello, derby stance!

There was a LOT of practice of this. Also, even the normal sit-down toilets were usually grody, so it was good practice to hover-squat over those. End result: beefy calf and lower back muscles and an ability to hold a stupidly low derby stance for a very long time. (Actually this is kind of important when you are being thrown in front of other skaters as a cannonball, or to just be low enough to not to get hit in scrimmage.)

Random sidenote: Apparently flat-footed squatting is something that comes more naturally to Asians or something. I'm not sure why, but I heard something about how the leg bones or ankle bones or something in Asians made the more able to do the flat-footed squat. I tried to find some scientific evidence of this online but this was as good as I got:

So we did a test – 100% of the Asians could squat with feet on the ground (P<0.000063) while only 13.5% of North Americans could (p<0.0000043). And of the 13.5%, 9% had part ASIAN ancestry in them. The remaining one was a Yoga Freak.

I'm not sure what the sample size was, but this sounds about right from my experience with people in derby. It still sounds weird (and possibly racist?) to say that Asians are the only people capable of the flat-footed squat. In my opinon, I think it has something to do with having longer calf muscles or something, but I'm not a scientist. But I'm sure Dr. Chang-Goldstein (in the video on the right) is!



1. Ridiculous number of people on the street = one giant pack
Seriously. The population density in Honkers is something like 6,500 people per square km, which makes it the 4th most packed place on Earth. Compare that to Australia's population density, which is closer to 3 whole people/square km. No wonder there are like bazillions of people everywhere you look. And they're slow too. They tend to mosey around, stop and look at random things in shops or not really look where they're going (usually because they are on a cellphone or PSP or some other device) and all up get in your way.

Spot the lead jammer.

Also, then there are the CHILDREN. For some reason that escapes me, people in Honkers like to have their children in tow and use them like small, moveable barriers to hold up people trying to get around them. The annoying thing is that, in a crowd 5+ people deep, you can't see the kids. So it looks like there's an opening and you go for it, and then suddenly you are plowing into a group of children and their families, all of whom are walking at like 1km/hour. There is usually a line of them holding hands or something, and some of them are so small I can jump over them. Heh.

I found it a really fun challenge to make it through a crowd without touching any of them (not like that, you perverts). Like, weaving my way around people, finding gaps that I could squeeze through while throngs of people milled around me, and making it faster to some self-determined spot than some other random person (which happened to be easy, because most people seem to wander). This was fun, but not so much I guess for other people who were walking with me when I would suddenly take off. But this was definitely good jammer training. If Honkers had a derby team, they would EASILY have the most skilled jammers on the planet.