Most of us have at sometime had exposure to or have heard the word “mortgage” but do we actually know what it means or where it originates from?

The word “mortgage” comes from two words, firstly the Latin word “mort” meaning death, secondly the French word “gage” meaning pledge.

In legal terms a mortgage is ‘a lien upon land or other property as security for the performance of some obligation to become void on such performance’.

Translated into modern thinking this means a mortgage is a death pledge or a noose around your neck until the day you die! In the old days you quite literally had a mortgage for life and it was unusual for people to shop around or move their mortgages between banks until recent times.

With so much choice available now it is important that when taking on such a commitment that one thoroughly examines the various types of mortgage, the intricacies and flexibility required meeting the modern lifestyle. Easier said than done in certain parts of the world where lack of innovation and creativity still mean rigidity in the mortgage marketplace.

Here in Hong Kong there is only one type of domestic mortgage available through all local banks. This is known in Asia as a Principal and Interest mortgage and is one whereby your payments are dictated by three criteria,

• 1- the size of your loan

• 2- the term of the loan

• 3- the current interest rate

Interest rates in Asia are based around HIBOR, which stands for HK Inter Bank Rate, or the Prime Rate. HIBOR is the underlying rate and Prime is typically the ceiling rate. Dependent on your status and economic conditions banks will either offer you Prime Rate minus a percentage (typically between 2-3%) or HIBOR plus a margin (typically between 0.5-1%).

Currently the cheapest form of borrowing in Hong Kong is HIBOR plus a margin which can easily be affected by a global rise in interest rates, something that we are currently experiencing.

All mortgages in Hong Kong are offered on ‘floating rates’; know internationally as the ‘variable rate,’ so as interest rates rise so do your payments, most Hong Kong property owners reading this will certainly know what we are talking about as they experienced 16 consecutive interest rates hikes between 2003 and 2006! Thankfully in an attempt to maintain market confidence rates have been relaxed over the last 6 months. Even in today’s competitive mortgage market it is unusual for banks to come back to their clients and offer them a better rate even though rates have reduced, it is therefore up to the client to either regularly renegotiate their rate with their lender or go through the expense of refinancing and moving the loan to another lender offering a more competitive rate.

Another thing to be mindful of with Hong Kong banks are attractive cash backs and incentives at outset, which will most certainly mean that the loan will be subject to early redemption penalties. These penalties make it difficult and expensive for clients to redeem their loans within a 1-3 year period.

The contributor’s opinion is this; if it looks to good to be true it almost always is and therefore be prepared to pay back these incentives or more if another “on paper” better deal comes along.

Thankfully in the global mortgage market things are not quite the same as there is much more choice, flexibility and even different types of payment option available. As well as the traditional Principal and Interest mortgage you now have the option of borrowing on an Interest Only basis.

This is generally recognized as a much cheaper way of borrowing money as you are only servicing the debt rather than repaying it. Borrowers can look outside to other asset classes and ways of repaying the loan if they wish to do so but banks no longer insist upon this.

Within these two types of loan options you can also move away from the ‘floating rate’ to other options. Dependent upon personal circumstances, attitude to risk and anticipated interest rates you can choose from a fixed rate, this type of mortgage fixes the interest rate for a certain period of time, generally between 1-5 years. Clients can take comfort from the fact that if they can afford their repayments today then they can continue to do so over the fix period. The downside of a fixed rate mortgage is that if interest rates drop significantly below the fixed rate then the clients will effectively be overpaying the market rate. The discounted rate is another type of mortgage whereby the lender will ‘entice’ the borrower through their doors by offering a discount off the standard variable rate, this discount is generally for a period of 1-2 years after which the client goes onto the standard variable rate. Another offering from the bank will be a ‘Tracker’ rate whereby the interest that you pay track a particular indices so that as interest rates move up or down so does you pay rate, an example of this would be in UK where over the last 10 years the UK base rate has gone from a high of 7% in 1997 steadily down to 3.5% in 2003 only for a tightening of policy to the present day where the rate is 5.5%. The difference that these swings make to a borrower with a GBP 150,000 is as much as GBP 437 per month.

Another type of mortgage that has become very popular over the last 5 years is the currency mortgage; certain large international banks now allow clients the freedom and flexibility of borrowing in other currencies which allows the borrower to seek out lower interest rates that of their base currency. The necessity to constantly move from bank to bank to seek out better deals is now removed as there is a basket of currencies to choose from with varying interest rates. These banks allow clients to switch between currencies on a quarterly basis without charge and seek out lower interest rate opportunities; this can also reduce the size of the mortgage if exchange rates have worked in your favor. It is important when entering into this type of mortgage that correct attention is also paid to the relationship between the currencies both at inception and on an ongoing basis, like any other investment it needs to be monitored on a regular basis.

Written by Mark Kirkham, MD & CEO of Premier Brokers Limited with contributions by Ross Bendix, Executive Director of Fuel Investments Hong Kong.

About the author:

Mark Kirkham originates from the UK where he qualified as a Financial Planner and mortgage Broker 17 years ago. Mark left the UK 10 years ago to concentrate on a career within offshore financial services and spent his first 6 years working in Brussels, Belgium within the high net worth expatriate community. He arrived in Hong Kong in 2003 and now heads up Premier Brokers Limited, a specialist mortgage and property broker and Platinum Financial Services Limited a Hong Kong authorized Insurance Brokerage.

The good news is that next year’s or the following year’s Man Hong Kong International Literary Festival is likely to have at least one session looking at gay writers and writing in Hong Kong and the East. This is likely to include both writing in English and works translated from another language. The format isn’t clear yet, but in preparation I was asked recently to investigate the gay literary scene in Hong Kong and Singapore to find themes to discuss and participants who might be invited. It was thought that a comparison between the two cities might lead to as lively a discussion as would sessions on politics, commerce or sport. Which is where we get to the rather bad news, as, starting from a position of admitted ignorance in these matters, I have found in Hong Kong something of a dearth of gay literary activity, a lack which seems set to make this a rather one sided contest. So I am hoping, in writing this article that I may flush out all those gay novelists, dramatists and poets active in Hong Kong to prove my ignorance and to set the score straight!

For something really quite staggering is taking place in the arts in Singapore, something of which most Hong Kongers, like this reviewer, are only dimly, if at all, aware. A few weeks ago, I was in Singapore to see Alfian Sa’at’s new play, Happy Endings: Asian Boys Vol. 3, at the Drama Centre, Singapore’s amazing new theatre in the Durian. I’d missed his earlier Landmarks: Asian Boys Vol. 2, and knew little of his work (s short film, Katong Fugue, based on one of his earlier plays, has been showing here this month in the Indpanda International Short Film Festival in the Broadway Cinematique). Used to little else on the gay stage here than the fuzzy inanities of most of the offerings in our LGBT film festivals, confess I was not expecting much, but, wow, was I quickly shown the depth of my misapprehension. The play was dynamite.

Its first half is based very closely on Singaporean Johann S. Lee’s epoch-making novel, Peculiar Chris, a book which isn’t much known outside of Singapore (I read the copy I bought at the play on the flight home - it deserves to be read all over Asia and beyond; it’s as relevant and fresh today as when it first came out). This book did for Singapore in 1992 what Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story had done for the States only nine years before and Hollinghurst’s The Swimming Pool Library did for England only in 1988. It came out, in all ways an apposite phrase for both Lee, his book and Singapore, in that city’s repressed days of 1992 and was distributed at first often in brown-paper covered copies passed from hand to hand. That was a time when there was hardly any of the tolerance that, patchily, marks the modern Singapore.  The book is the story of a young gay Singaporean discovering his sexuality at college and taking the shattering step of declaring it to the medical board examining him for his national military service. Lee claims this was not an autobiographical account, but he wrote it during his own national service, and, like his protagonist Chris, he escaped to London soon thereafter.

Fifteen years on, Alfian Sa’at, the ‘enfant terrible’ of the Singapore theatre, returned to the theme and, in the second half of his play, brought it up to date in a Singapore where the gay scene has exploded but where the law has not changed and where its administration remains as arbitrarily repressive as it always was; a state, though, which is now at last beginning to debate relaxation of the control of divergent sexualities but which remains one in which the fundamentalist Christian right has battened on ‘conservative’ and ‘Confucian’ forces in a predominantly Chinese culture to block and retard progress.

The play was directed by Ivan Heng, the artistic director of the play group, Wild Rice, which he founded in 2000.  Heng is a prominent figure in the burgeoning Singaporean drama scene.  He was first an actor, with a career on the stage in the United Kingdom and Canada, and made it to Hollywood to appear in The Fifth Element before going home to take up writing and directing. His projects include directing Landmarks – Asian Boys Vol.2, Puccini’s Madam Butterfly for the Singapore Lyric Opera at the Esplanade, and the crazy local female trio, the Dim Sum Dollies, in Singapore’s Most Wanted.

Despite the overt repression of its legal system, Singapore has a flourishing and highly popular liberal theatre that addresses gay themes head on. The theatre is not alone. Two years after Peculiar Chris was published, Andrew Koh brought out the gay novella Glass Cathedral in 1994; this won a commendation in the Singapore Literature Prize competition that year. Currently, in the few days in which I was there to see this play, I browsed the LGBT shelves in Waterstones, Kinokuniya and Borders (nowadays just down Orchard Rd from the amazingly named, and even more amazingly open, House of Condoms, whose great big sign hangs unavoidably over a pavement trod by what must be Singapore’s entire population at some time or other), and in one day’s trawl found more books on gender issues than I have found in Hong Kong in the last year. Given prominent space on all their shelves, and not just in the gender studies section but also prominently in the new arrivals, was Ng Yi-Sheng’s SQ21: Singapore Queers in the 21st Century,which has just hit the shelves. This is a collection of fifteen personal accounts by Singaporean gays and lesbians of many ages, and in some cases by their parents, all out and named with their photographs. Ng himself is a prolific writer, a poet and author of the collection he published in last boy a few years back.  Many of you will be familiar with his occasional columns in Fridae.com. There you may also have come across Cyril Wong, another acclaimed and prolific Singaporean poet (with five published poetry collections to his name), story writer, trained singer and figure on the local literary scene who is not only out and loud but, back in 2004, used the pages of Fridae.com to describe his experiences as a male escort while at university in Singapore.

In Hong Kong, in our city where gay sex became legal at about the time that Joe Lee was writing his book, what can we say that we have produced or are producing that is the equivalent to all of this? Where is the Hong Kong arts scene to compare with what Ivan Heng, Alfian Sa’at and others are doing now in Singapore? The results of my search have been embarrassingly meagre. We started well. IIn 1979, the author who wrote under the pseudonym Samshasha (or Xiaomingxiong in Putonghua), perhaps Hong Kong's first, and in his lifetime the leading, gay activist, published the first gay publication here (in Chinese), the pamphlet Chinese Gay’s Manifesto. He then started writing regularly on gay issues for City Magazine. This was amazing bravery; he handed out his first pamphlet in the Lang Kwai Fong bars on the night that Inspector MacLennan died, and he wrote throughout the gay witch hunt that followed it. In 1984, he brought out his ground breaking, 570 page, History of Homosexuality in China (Zhongguo Tongxingai Shilu), the first work to establish that China has had, since its earliest times, a history of tolerance of same sex love. He remained a prominent gay activist here till his sad death a few months ago. His book has never been translated and his real name is not generally known (this author would be glad to be enlightened by anyone who has information on Samshaha, who deserves to be better remembered than he has been here so far).

Since then, Hong Kong has not shown much sign of developing much gay literature. We have one or two openly gay writers working on the scene (this author included), but most have hesitated to write publicly of their sexuality or have felt no need to do so. One of our most prolific local writers, Peter Moss, who was a star at last year’s Man Hong Kong Literary Festival, came out recently in print in his autobiographical trilogy, Bye Bye Blackbird, Distant Archipelagos and No BabylonYet, whilst his books are as intertwined as was his life with the relationships he made in Malaysia and Hong Kong, and cast a much needed light on some dark and obscure times in Hong Kong’s history, his books can only be classified as gay writing in the most personal of senses. Local writer Eric Carrera Lowe, author of several decadent books of photographs of European royalty, the most recent of which was 2005’s Royal Images, co-produced an entry in the Hong Kong Lesbian and Gay Film Festival in 2005 examining the history of gay life in Hong Kong since the seventies. Indeed, celluloid seems in Hong Kong to have produced a richer gay culture than the printed page.

The difference, of course, between the two cities lies in the language used by the majority of their citizens.  Hong Kong’s culture is so very much more Chinese in a literary sense, and in the visual arts that predominantly means Cantonese.  There has been a series of Cantonese language dramas in recent years on the Hong Kong stage, which, although aided by minimal subtitles, are largely inaccessible to the illiterate expat community here. In 2004, W Theatre staged Queer Show, a gay comedy written and directed by Wong Chi Lung, and in April this year put on singer-songwriter Chet Lam’s Once in a Lifetime, which had gay themes. The most recent of these shows, this month about to hit the stage in Ngau Chi Wan, where for the first time a gay show is being sponsored by the Hong Kong Government’s Leisure and Cultural Services Department, is the musical Homo Superus. This will also be in Cantonese, though it has a poster, now encouragingly all over the walls of the MTR, designed to pull the most linguistically challenged rice queen. The LCSD actually approached the drama group, 2onstage, to initiate this show. 2onstage was founded in 2004 by Pichead Amornsomboon and Tony Wong Lung-pun. They have produced several plays: Two of Us (2005), about conjoined twins, 2 Come to Pass (2006) and 2 Come to Pass Rerun (2007), all in Cantonese, though with English subtitles. They have teamed up for this show with music writer and director Frankie Ho and lyricist Renson Chan.

There isn’t, as far as I can see, much activity to match this off the stage. I fear that much being done in Chinese must pass beneath the expat gaydar; I am also told, for instance, by Siu Cho Man-kit, of at least two local authors who have published gay novels in Hong Kong, though I regret I have yet to track them down.

Yet, given Hong Kong’s thriving arts scene, it is difficult to understand the apparent imbalance in English language creativity between the two cities. I am hoping to explore this in some depth at the Literary Festival, and I am particularly hoping that this article will elicit a flood of protest to prove me to be the cultural ignoramus I suspect I am. Please write in to Fruit Talk to point out the error of my ways. I am desperately seeking to be proved wrong so that I may invite all you gay literary types to the Man Hong Kong International Literary Festival, so, please, pick up your pens, hit your keyboard and let me know how wrong I am!

About the Author:

Nigel Collett is an English businessman, biographer and writer who has lived in Hong Kong for many years. In London in 2005, he published The Butcher of Amritsar, the life of General Dyer who perpetrated the Amritsar massacre in 1919. He is a member of the author's committee for the Man Hong Kong International Literary Festival and moderates for them annually. He reviews on the net for the Asian Review of Books. He has written for G Magazine and Fridae.com and is a a Board Member of cr4sd. He is currently working on an English language biography of the superstar, Leslie Cheung.

FinS is looking for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender (GLBT) writers or story tellers; men or women who are willing to write about GLBT life in Hong Kong for FruitTalk our new column of informative, involved and insightful happenings in the Asia Pacific and Hong Kong area.

Welcome to the forum, FruitTalk, submitted articles about political, cultural, the arts, current affairs, and daily life in HK, the power and influence of the Gay Pink dollar and what it means and any other topics one chooses to discuss or write about.

When submitting your article please, you should cover stories about life as it reflects the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender community here in Hong Kong and how it is reflected and/ or compared to lifestyles around the world.

The submission is non-fee. Please submit any inquires to Eric at hkfins@yahoo.com Thank you very much. We look forward to your vital contribution.