Already working on a Sunday, a cleaner at Tsim Sha Tsui MTR could be excused for being a mite snappy yesterday afternoon, after a man allowed an 8-year-old boy to poop on the floor in the station’s concourse.
“You got problems with your brain?” the cleaner asked the child, in a video of the post-steamer standoff, which occurred at about 1:30pm.
The boy was part of what appeared to be a mainland tour group. Led by a man, they wore blue T-shirts with the logo “vChina,” an education development center in the mainland.
Peeved, the witness who recorded the scene, surnamed Cheung, began her own enquiries.
“Are you from mainland China?” she asked the apparent tour group leader, who initially did not respond. Cheung, using Mandarin, continued:
“The children may not know the manners, but you are an adult, why would you allow him to poop in the public space?” she asked.
The man claimed that the child felt sick and couldn’t help himself. Cheung then asked the children if it was inappropriate to poop there. One of them nodded.
A staff member showed up and settled down the situation eventually.
Unfortunately, the incident is far from the first case of its kind in Hong Kong or, in fact, within the TST MTR station.
A Chinese woman shocked commuters in 2016 by squatting near exit C of the busy terminus and taking a big ol’ dump.
In 2014, meanwhile, an argument between a mainland mother and a Hong Kong man — which erupted after the former allowed her son to poop on the sidewalk — spiraled into protests and even calls by mainland netizens for their compatriots to take their kids to Hong Kong specifically to urinate on the streets in a sort of pee protest.
Hong Kong’s Public Cleansing and Prevention of Nuisances Regulation prohibits those in charge of a child under 12 from permitting the child, without reasonable excuse, “to obey the call of nature in any public street”.
Violators face a HK$2,000 fine (about US$260).
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