Nicole Kidman has become the femme fatale for Hong Kong officials
- Mega-starred series Expats keeps generating controversies, with the latest being allegations of censorship as the city’s viewers can’t watch two premiered episodes
It’s hard to resist the star power of someone like Nicole Kidman. So it was perhaps understandable that Hong Kong officials controversially granted her exemption, along with some of her crew, from tough quarantine rules in August 2021, during the filming of Expats.
The Amazon series has just premiered its first two episodes, and it has already started a new row. No doubt local officials have been regretting her preferential treatment.
The government claimed at the time that the show would carry out “designated professional work” contributing to “the growth of Hong Kong’s economy”. But it’s not even being aired in the city, at least for now. And the story certainly doesn’t put Hong Kong in a very good light.
A tragedy – spoiler alert! – involving an expatriate child being stolen or kidnapped in a busy nighttime street market is not the kind of crime that one of the world’s safest cities is known for.
Critics also have called out the show for glossing over the city’s political upheavals of recent years. Yet, major foreign news platforms have claimed in their reports that the show not being locally available could be due to political censorship. Who’s right?
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There was a forgettable 10-second sequence in the first episode in which a few lonely protesters marched and shouted without much enthusiasm political slogans that vaguely sounded like those from the so-called umbrella mass protests in 2014. If that was what the censors fretted about, they really shouldn’t have.
The Hong Kong government said it had nothing to do with what it called a commercial decision. Amazon has not offered an explanation. It could be a delayed release, which is not an uncommon practice for streaming big-ticket shows outside key regions.
A synopsis describes a later episode featuring some scenes of protests set in the 2014 mass rallies that were the precursor to the ferocious anti-government unrest of 2019. You can easily rewatch those scenes on YouTube, so there is little point censoring them on a pay-TV show.
Shouldn’t those foreign reporters find out exactly what happened before running their stories rather than speculating or insinuating what might have happened? The latter may be standard tabloid practice about the lives of film stars, but sadly, it has become acceptable when it comes to “reporting” political news about Hong Kong.
Dramatically, the series features the typical surface glamour of the city’s affluent emigres with children attending international schools, partying and boozing on luxurious private yachts, and fine-dining at Michelin-starred restaurants.
But it also explores their uneasy, often claustrophobic if egocentric lifestyle. Spousal infidelity, marriage on the rocks, barely disguised animosity between the in-laws, nasty gossiping among friends and relatives – it seems these rich expats do mostly what everyone else does, just in bigger and nicer flats and offices.
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But there are also multiracial foreign workers who are neither wealthy nor privileged, such as Asian live-in helpers who are invisible until they draw attention through their bosses’ casual racism, meanness, rudeness, and occasional kindness.
There are about 300,000 of them who keep local and expat households running but are paid low and legally set wages. Without them, it would be hard to have both parents working full-time and contributing to the workforce; nor could the more affluent enjoy their easy living.
They are at the low end of a not-too-subtle caste system, which also includes local chauffeurs and servers catering to the needs of rich locals and expats.
So far, the show cannot be said to be wholly inaccurate about our expats, but it’s not painting a pretty picture. It also can’t come at a worse time. Since the Covid-19 pandemic and mass riots, there has been a thinning out of the Western expat community. Heightened geopolitical tensions also mean some multinationals have been relocating foreign staff to other Asian cities. The government has been trying to lure more of them back. Expats is hardly an advert for that.
Letting Kidman in scot-free has not paid off for the city.
