The Hong Kong Tourism Board called it a #ShamShuiPo love story; netizens had some other words for it, words like “creepy,” “terrible,” and “abusive.”
The board’s latest promotional video for the neighborhood surrounds the story of man who sends his girlfriend into an understandable panic by stealing and hiding her passport just hours before she prepares to travel abroad for a photography course.
To recover HER passport, she has to follow a series of notes left by her travel-document-swiping boyfriend that lead her through the streets, markets and shops of Sham Shui Po.
After scurrying through Wong Kee Flea Market and Apliu Street, she finally meets, at a camera store, her boyfriend, whom we’ve been informed wasn’t happy at the prospect of her leaving Hong Kong to follow her photographic ambitions.
Girl meets boy. Girl leaves boy. Boy hides girl's passport: A #ShamShuiPo love story. https://t.co/lWuDOApK81 pic.twitter.com/WtvbWuJBrh
— Hong Kong (@discoverhk) October 10, 2018
But what’s this? Oh, he’s bought her a new camera and has accepted her decision to follow her dreams. How, uh, reasonable of him?
Presumably aiming to be cute, the clip, described by Discover Hong Kong as “Girl meets boy. Girl leaves boy. Boy hides girl’s passport,” didn’t go over well with netizens.
“99% sure this is how human trafficking starts,” commented one.
“Stop romanticizing this. This is not romantic this is controlling, manipulative and abusive. This is not love,” said another.
“As a Hongkonger… what kind of abusive backwards shit is this,” remarked one netizen, posing a very good question.
The answer, at least on one level, is it’s part of the tourism board’s HK$12 million (US$1.5 million) campaign to promote “traditional and trendy” Sham Shui Po, one of Hong Kong’s poorest neighborhoods, to tourists.
They might want to try a different approach and, for starters, as pointed out by one commenter: “Stop advertising this kind of behavior as acceptable.”
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