Acronym for
Failed
In
London,
Try
Hong Kong.
Until Hong Kong's retrocession to China in 1997, young Brits could enter their colony and legally work without needing a visa. This was very handy, especially when Britain's economy and employment rates in the early ninties were in the doldrums, while Hong Kong and other Asian mini dragon economies were enjoying spectacular growth. And Brits of all sorts, ranging from merchant bankers, sandwich makers, teachers, policemen, lawyers, actors and chairmen of the British Conservative Party made the great leap over.
This epithet implies that the less talented or employable, or those who blew their reputation away back in ole England, could start over again as a cleanskin in the east. Their inherent incompetence or dishonesty could be hidden from the Chinese under a veneer of cross-cultural differences (although you can bet that wouldn't have fooled or pleased DMan). With other expats it was considerably harder takes one to know one, and so an informal but rigorous hierarchy emerged, with Chunking Mansions and the Royal Hong Kong Jockey Club at opposite ends of a continuum.
Eventually the party finished. Even before the handover, businesses and the Hong Kong public service quickened the process of localisation, often by requiring Mandarin fluency as a job requirement the Brits had enough problems with French. Hong Kong's economic woes, starting with the Asian Economic Crisis, government mismanagement, chicken flu and SARS, not to mention the hollowing out of Hong Kong's service industry, made the place simply less attractive to Britain's entrepreneurial flotsam.
Following the flow of capital, trends and free parties, those who failed in Hong Kong now try Shanghai.