Yesterday, at around 5 PM the Hong Kong government sent out a citywide alert. The government has never used the emergency alert system before. A lot of people were expecting bad news. Perhaps the citywide lockdown was starting? Maybe the government was going to send you to the newly made quarantine facility in Tsing Yi? Here’s what the message said.
This really didn’t need to be an emergency alert. When I received the alert I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do with the information it provided. It did however successfully freak out a lot of people. People started posting memes about, here’s one I saw yesterday.
The first line translated to “I scared the shit out of you”. The second line says “You probably though you were going to be taken to Tsing Yi”. Here’s how CantoRead would read it out for you.
We can then check out the flash cards that are generated by this meme. 仆街 is the key term in this meme, and it’s a great word. Interestingly, when Apple’s text to speech software reads out 仆街 it seems to laugh for some reason. Here’s a demo of that interesting behaviour.