Stepping out of arguably the world’s most acclaimed airport, my dad leads me to his car: a most non-descript entity, white and rounded like a vehicular coolie on a Hollywood stage set. He, however, seems unconcerned: “You will like it here. Count the number of Lexus, the number of Mercedes on this floor.”
As we drive the forty minutes it takes to hop within this Special Administrative Region (SAR) from the reclaimed Chek Lap Kok Island to Lantau Island, through the New Territories and Kowloon peninsula, to Hong Kong Island, he tells me a few stories of these roads and these lands.
We drive on the left side of a new roadway constructed specifically for the airport. It was necessary because of a flooding incident that happened a couple years ago that for a few hours took Hong Kong off the global map – the airport was unreachable. It was also about time, considering the voluminous relief donations the pro-Chinese administration sends over to its mainland masters – while ignoring infrastructural necessities of a world city that can no longer afford to make any incompetencies. One does not remain the financial, logistical, and managerial hub of the Rising Dragon by standing aside and sending donations; Hong Kong has nearly no primary or secondary industries: it has been in a most envied, value-added position.
We enter into a tunnel; he asks me if I remember it, and he tells me it is privately owned. I remember neither of these specifics, only the meditative light sitting in the back of his space-lined Nissan Bluebird, or the Porche before that. Like the meditative lights of a console car game I played; I was two and the dreams of machines, the little metallic toy cars lining my bed, the BMWs I would yell out to my mom on the dense streets – at the time there was no difference between the space of flows inside or out. I knew nothing of pollution; the traffic was simply there: the double-decker buses the revolutions of underground transit, and everything had a place.
He bought this car, he tells me, because the company needed a car and it was on sale. It was one of the darkest years. The one thing that was so important to him, to provide for us, was for a while uncertain. The first years after Hong Kong’s handover was a time of black humour – where you were supposed to wear a helmet on the streets in case a family man came verticalling down a tower. The real estate was so forlorn that families would suddenly have negative assets. This is keeping in mind the exorbitant cost of Hong Kong mortgages, taking up on average half of a household’s annual income.
But I recognize the scene once out of the tunnel. :The dense static of signs :the smooth streetcar rails :the lights turning yellow before they turn green. And, at the same time – the dense static of Cantonese humans; ageing concrete towers; the protrusion of stands and awnings and air conditioning exhaust.
June 30, 2008
My brother must have hopped over me because I hear him in the living room. The men are about to go get breakfast.
The lift patiently takes us down nineteen floors and we ambulate leisurely down the familiar neighbourhood crescent. At the bottom of the hill are a series of cheap eateries. We enter into a cha chaan teng, or “teahouse”.
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It is a small place, and the woman at the front flapping a menu has eagerly welcomed us in. We are seated at a little round table that does not keep our knees or faces very far apart. In addition to my father, my brother and I, a breakfasting corporate body leans back with a newspaper at the fourth side of our circle. The seats are low, mock-IKEA black stools and neither the floor nor the white walls are much to write home about.
The cha chaan teng became popular in the 1960s, replacing and synthesizing the streetside dai pai dong[2]. These predecessing, open-air eateries would serve local labourers with either a Chinese or Western-derived set of cheap meals and snacks. Pushed inside by urban development and health inspection, the outdoor stands are now a rarer treat. But the more recent “teahouses” provide a great fusion of foods. While I order a multifarious noodle soup with black mushrooms and goose tongue, my father and brother opt for some eggs and french toast.
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My brother and I are carrying some morning pastries to take home for mother and grandma. But suddenly it is raining quite hard. We pad down a flight of stairs into what opens up as an underground shopping area. It has the feeling of a flea market, with shoes overflowing from mesh bins and explicit price tags over a few flatscreen TVs. The corridors are busy with housewives and domestic workers buying the day’s necessities in the produce, fish, and meat markets.
We did not expect to find this bustling hive of exchange right below our feet. But it only makes sense. How else to serve the thirty-or-so thirty-story towers of three developments, one above the other, of this short stretch of the hill? Though each development has its community grounds, including small grocery stores, the market down the hill has a much more complete selection. It is located on our side of Kornhill Road, but it is also able to serve the hundreds of households from the opposite, alluvial side as well. In a way the relationship between the grocery stores and the wider market recalls the hierarchical neighbourhoods and districts that in China have been developments upon American urbanist Clarence Stein’s more horizontal conception of the neighbourhood unit[4].
The market can also be compared to a North American suburban supermarket – while the smaller grocers act as neighbourhood convenience stores. This district, called Quarry Bay, originally accomodated both industrial and residential functions, but industry has now largely been replaced by local commercial functions. Still, there are a number of fundamental dissimilarities between grocery shopping here and, for instance, in suburban Montreal. The space here is too compact for cars, and the kitchens are too compact for what we consider a standard size fridge. So before she passed away, my father’s mother would make this walk everyday, down and up the hill again with a couple plastic bags of produce and meat.
The towering density of this vertical space makes regular driving both impossible and unnecessary, but it also means that the road home is one you don’t walk alone. Though the dizzying crowds admidst this city’s glossier spaces can inflict upon one a sense of urban anomie, this is not the sense I get walking back to our tower in Nam Fun Sun Chuen, the name of our development. At many times of the day, there is an ample but not overwhelming stream of residents, young and old, male and female, as well as the more and less wealthy, who share with you the walk to and from their homes: along the curving sidewalk, through the plaza, up the stairs, along the recreational courts. You may not know one another, but you both know this place well. An elderly woman chats on a bench; the sounds of a card game on a serendipitous flat surface; the engagement of a meat vendor – together you speak to this place. It is a public familiarity unlike the weekend car-ride to the food wholesaler, or the daily highway commute.
In addition to the reason of sky-high land prices, the necessity of walking means that markets trade in size for numbers. It is perhaps too simple to think of the market at the bottom of Nam Fung Sun Chuen as a node; it is more accurate to conceive of Kornhill road itself as an artery of exchange. For not too far from the aforementioned market is a chain supermarket; additional wet markets serve developments at diagonals across the street; one perpendicular road nearby fills with day-time flea stands; and by the metro station is a department store and a grand, million-square-feet-strong mall complete with exhibitions, seasonal themes, a movie theatre, and a skating rink in its two phases. In thick Quarry Bay, the big compete with the many.
July 11, 2008
It is a few days back from Shanghai. But my brother and I have not yet ventured off Hong Kong Island.
The term “the Island side” is sometimes used to refer to the historical north coast of this island along the deep waters of Victoria Harbor. It is the political and economic center of the metropolis.
Like Manhattan, it is not too difficult of a place to conceptualize. It forms a linear strip from historical Sheung Wan in the west to an extended forest of hundreds of high-rise residential towers to the east. To the immediate east of Sheung Wan is Central, where the political and financial high-rollers play. East of that are Wan Chai and Causeway Bay: the latter a daytime Shibuya, the former a nightime Shibuya. To the east again and one will eventually reach our subway station: Tai Koo. Below is a map of the subway system; the station names often reflect the areas of which I will write.
Naturally this is an oversimplification, the same as it is naïve to call Quarry Bay a residential (inner) suburb. But the linearity is strong: going west Kornhill Road becomes King’s Road and then the main, Henessey Road of Causeway Bay. On a tram, on a double-decker bus, or on a metro car underneath, my father goes by this road west in the morning and back east in the afternoon.
Tonight, in towering Causeway Bay, admidst an ocean of shoppers, late-night diners, and street-crossers, the island feels small. Heads and suits and trendy boots block my way, but I cannot help but feel as if on a wealthy, noisy ship in the middle of the dark sea.
July 12, 2008
This evening I get off the ferry onto Kowloon. I am with the daughter of a family friend. She studies logistics and I joke that her time-prediction of my bus ride was right on. It is not about being in logistics, she says, after living on the island you get to know the rhythm of the buses.
Flora and I get off at Tsim Sha Tsui – the port, the subway station, and the name of this once sandy harbour mouth now a space of postmodern consumption. We walk quickly to the Hong Kong Cultural Center to retrieve our tickets for tonight’s show.
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In an ever more familiar tone, the man at the counter scolds us for being late and then hands us the tickets. A few days later a woman at a dai pai dong scolds me when I make an order that directly contradicts her introduction: “Do you hear what I’m saying, handsome?” And a few nights after that, I rush down the bus stairs, realizing I had just missed my stop. The driver opens the door again: “Where were you, dragging your feet, the whole village just left!”
The Hong Kong attitude used to turn me off, but it has worn on me. A collective history of hardship is rarely without its associated rough humour. It was not long ago that Hong Kong man and woman lived and laboured in infamous densities. They were recent refugees in a tiny colonial land – yet a benevolent one that allowed ingenuity and dogged ambition to thrive. The locals laugh now – it is not the dark humour of a frustrated place – but it is not without edge. It is almost always competitive: a playful rudeness that sometimes makes the most sense.
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The play ends by nine and we walk outside, along a celebrity boulevard by the harbour. The night is warm and the island skyline flickers on the black water. She is being quite sociable – and, partly because of this, I ask her why she studies logistics. Her reply is simple: there are many logistics firms in Hong Kong, and it is interesting too.
She is not alone in either the content or spirit of her response. Finance and management and communications is what our mothers and fathers do; finance and management and communications is what we do. Certainly, it may be network technologies; it may be industrial design; it may be civil service. If you are very good, it may be law or medicine. For what else could it be. How else do you pay the 3.4 million HKD – the value of my dad’s little 700 square-foot apartment in Quarry Bay – for a home. Hong Kong may be a developed city that competes on the global cultural stage, but it is not the West. It, and its people who constitute it, cannot relax: there simply is no land to do so. Climbing on top of Asia is what has gotten it here, and it must keep climbing if it wishes to sustain itself. Besides this, there is very little social security, and plenty of oligopolizing inequities[7].
My father, the wiley Red Guard diplomat turned inventor and street-smart international entrepreneur extraordinaire, fights to turn a profit in Hong Kong. Mainland Chinese firms are impossibly difficult to compete against – they simply do not play by the same rules. His brother, a civil engineer at a municipal power plant, wakes up before six each morning only to come home at eight in the evening. He gets two days off a month. His civil servant son – my cousin – is not much better off. Another well-educated cousin works the night shift for a global telecom company. The sales-ladies at LensCrafters begin their shift at 11 am and work until 9 pm. I recall coming home and my father announcing that he had cleaned the whole apartment just for us. That he had washed the curtains and wiped the wine glasses. I walk into his tiny room – and see counters covered with photos of me and my brother. It becomes quite clear.
July 14, 2008
I am excited – tonight I will be an expat. I am meeting my old friend Judith and we will hit Lan Kwai Fong.
With my Mount Allison salsa society T-shirt we enter into a latino bar. With her curly blonde hair, nothing can go wrong.
Lan Kwai Fong, in Central, was once an area dedicated to hawkers but it is now a bumpin high-class bar and club district frequented by expatriates.
Westerners in a way make the bar scene – they liven it up. The young locals, be it in Tsim Sha Tsui or Causeway Bay, will still be hang gai – pretending to shop – at this hour.
Or, they may be sipping nai cha – iced tea with condensed milk – at a cha chan teng. But come weekend, they may well reserve a table here at a supper club.
July 19, 2008
Two tables and three generations. On my mother’s father’s side. Tonight a second-floor restaurant in Mong Kok, a staggeringly dense commercial hive in Kowloon – 130 000 people per square kilometer in 2005. A world record, but in Hong Kong, nothing new[8].
To my left sits a young couple. Brayden is a Hong Kong local, but he met Addie while working in Singapore. Addie grew up in Malaysia but is, like Brayden and I, of Hakka descent. Incidentally, they both completed their undergrad in Japan.
I bring up the topic of international development work. Indeed I have been feeling a disconnect between Hong Kong’s wealth and its populace’s seeming unconcern of international affairs unrelated to business. But Brayden is not indifferent to the issue of political rights. He defends the Chinese policy with regards to Tibet: there is no need for talk about freedoms of the press or of demonstration – the Tibetans are no different from us – nothing comes before eating. The point is what people need and seek, not ideals of the Enlightenment.
I could have retorted by highlighting the cultural assumptions of market capitalism and illustrating the cultural relativity of needs, but – although I think this is aside from the Tibet debate – at a certain point I find it difficult to disagree. Not too long ago, my mother emigrated with her parents and two younger siblings here in Kowloon, not too far from where we are sitting. The entire family shared one room and a balcony – and the kitchen and bathroom were shared by two other families. My grandmother worked on an electronics assembly line and my grandfather – previously a university professor – worked as a security guard. A few years later, my mother would take her classes at night and work as a Mandarin voice-over during the day. She would also do the groceries and cook for her siblings before class.
This is part of Hong Kong’s collective history and memory. So is the story of me sitting in a Porsche as an infant. What is necessary and unnecessary is clear. Politics pushed both my mother and father out of the mainland – from which they did not fare much better – but the absence of politics – or more specifically the neoliberal politics of British laissez-faire paternalism – has essentially been the success story of this society.
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Our aunt, who incidentally is younger than either of us, shows my brother and I around Mong Kok. At eleven pm, the human traffic along these reserved streets has diminished somewhat. Still, pumpin, narrow outlets of brand-name apparel remain open alongside the open-air stands packed through “Woman’s Lane”.
Mong Kok is a concentration of shopping and entertainment – including a number of massage parlours – but it is not of the same aesthetic as Causeway Bay. The buildings are lower, older, and the shopping is less glossy, corporate. To be sure, Causeway Bay is no Ginza: streets run diagonal and the underside wiring of perpendicular shop signs are very much in evidence. Still, here in Kowloon one loses that stifling feel of island-side linearity – where any potential uncertainty of the city seems to have been accounted for. The lines of double-decker buses run so predictably on the main, island-side avenue in part due to the organization of pathways of every other mode of transportation. Most evident are the railings that line the avenue so that pedestrians cross only at the designated corners (or through the many overpasses and underpasses). In Nam Fung Sun Chuen, where we live, I can see the serene forested mountains beyond the hill. But I cannot simply walk up; there are cliffs – and a designated path.
Such regimentation is understandably necessary in a densely populated, two-dimensional space. But Kowloon has a polygonal base; accordingly its residences fan out in differential heights and styles. Indeed, the cookie-cutter towers of Hong Kong Island appear in clusters here too, but they are unable to dominate the peninsula’s length and width. The result is more surprising, less objective like a sheet of paper. A third dimension invalidates the single perspective.
It also lowers land prices. While harbour-front condos mean that one can no longer associate “Kowloon” with “the poor side”, Hong Kong Island is still the side the poor cannot afford. Here on the peninsula I remember the Indonesians and Indians, the old friends of my grandmother whose factories have fled and whose coolie days are over, the t-shirt waiters of the multi-floor restaurant, and the bargaining in Mong Kok. I remember initially coming here and finding a Hong Kong attitute in a space that did not seem like Hong Kong. I heard an accent that to me always meant money and modernity, but I find myself not among slick glass towers but small shops along a hot street. I then saw a completely curious sight in harbour-side Hung Hom: lanes and lanes and lanes of individual, open garages. They were all small businesses: small car repair shops.
We see here another side to the story of Hong Kong. While the island may evince, on the outside at least, idioms of a perfection achieved, the peninsula houses spaces where luxury cars can come to rest awhile, and put up their competitive faces once they return. In Hung Hom I remember sitting in a brick-laid park, seeing and hearing the badminton rackets, shouts and giggles, and various soft balls. The air around me seemed to be at rest, a red-sun afternoon before heading home at the end of a regular day.
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My aunt’s tongue is itching for some ice cream and so we descend a flight of stairs into a McDonald’s. It is packed on this Saturday midnight: congregations of happy friends, but also a number of young suits who have brought numbers to crunch. Soon after, we descend into another bunker, an arcade. But in addition to the regular crowd of racing and fighting and musical rhythm machines, there is a whole floor, or over half the venue, dedicated to imitation gambling games. It is impossible to actually redeem one’s tokens, as the players are not of age, but the games are all there, including a big-screen horse-racing simulation.
Watching this, I get the eerie thought that these coin games are a form of practice, an acculturating preparation for the particular adulthood of this society. Some older players are in truth able to sell their tokens at a reduced rate, but I do not see the appeal of chasing after money after long hours of work. It reminds me of the suits lined up along the playful-colored coin machines in the evenings of Akasaka district. I remember the soft-focus romantic posters outside these venues, and the movie on the plane about a bus-driver’s emotional escape. Kowloon may demonstrate another side of the Hong Kong story, but it seems to nonetheless be the same story. Is there an alternative culture here, or are the poorer folk simply the ones who did not make the corporate bandwagon, but who maintain the same dreams?
I know that this does not respect the heterogeneous subtlety of reality, but at times I get an essentialist vision of Hong Kong as this abstract capitalist space. This vision becomes especially strong near island-side corporate and commercial centers, where Hong Kong brands de-center the cultural implicities of capitalist movement. As the ubiquitous sights of local food courts and beauty product ads pass through my senses, I hear a stripped-down story of capitalism without Cocacolonization.
Or, a capitalism with not-so abstract, Hong Kong characteristics.
July 23, 2008
My brother and I take advantage of these last days in Asia to visit Shenzhen by train with our grandfather. If Hong Kong capitalist culture is one of survival and rationality, overlaid by a consumerist culture of fashion, food, and the body[9], a few essential items are nonetheless very missing from the city picture. Prominent among these would likely be the mores, choices and activities that come out of the valuation of the family.
I am thinking of the generous excursion that Brayden and Addie took my brother and I on last Sunday, after just having met the night before. I am also thinking of a dinner at my cousins' house. There, in what I was feeling to be the Hong Kong spirit of informality, I asked my typically cheeky aunt where her husband was. That was enough to warrant a severe reprimand by my mother. By not saying dai bak – the title of an uncle who is the older brother of my father – I was made to see the fine line between the reverence and the play of tradition.
We ate with dai bak's family at another time at a Shanghai-style restaurant (which however had a very Japanese interior). Our family sat on one side of the rectangular table while dai bak's sat across from us. Mother sat across mother and father sat across father at the extremities. Cuddled in between were older brother sitting across from older brother and younger brother sitting across from younger brother. Despite my awkwardness with this formality, I eventually learned a few important points about my two cousins: Tommy and Gary. Even though Tommy is 26 and Gary is 28, both live at home. In Hong Kong this is the rule for unmarried children in part due to the sheer expense of acquiring a mortgage and in part due to the unimportance of physical independence in a young person's maturity rituals. While I do hear of staking it out in the outside world as a coming-of-age trope – within family friends and for instance in the histories of Chinese migrant workers – it is rather irresponsible to move out in the same town. It is childish to forsake one's family duties, to not learn what it means to be an older member of a household. Independence is implied as Tommy and Gary bring back to the household a part of their paycheck. It is a contribution that will not end once they move out: it is a humane counterbalance to a society with little distributive mechanisms, but it also means that in Hong Kong you sometimes see the agonizing sight of an old woman and her begging bowl.
Family may also help to keep the younger generation from moving away from Hong Kong. A number of people I spoke with who studied abroad had decided to return to their home SAR. Gary, for instance, commented on the tedium of the Australian nightlife. He commented on the early closing hours of stores and the absurdity of going to a pub every night. Tommy seemed unable to express what exactly other places lacked; in Hong Kong he does not exactly do anything special except for visiting or eating out with friends. But I think that may be it: an ineffable cultural and interpersonal intimacy here that a native may well find hard to do without. And, in combination with their hectic responsibilities, the ability of the city to meet its people's many needs may contribute to many a Hong Kong person's nonchalance towards other places.
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The train chugs along the New Territories landscape as we head towards Shenzhen. The development stretches far, but the eye is finally privy to a fair amount of tropical green, especially on the many slopes. What I find funny though is the continued presence of cookie-cutter apartment towers alongside much lower old village homes. I imagine it has something to do with suburban concentration at nodes of transit.
Travel to the mainland is much more frequent these days – all you need to do is show your Hong Kong residency card and away you go. Both business people and consumers take advantage of the wage and price differentials across the border. Shenzhen has developed so close to the border that if Hong Kong were not an SAR, the local rail systems could simply link up, creating a fantastical megalopolis.
The increasingly un-urban landscape reminds me that it is important not to brush aside the multiple realities that make up Hong Kong. I remember when Brayden and Addie drove us near to where they live: the town of Sai Kung at the east of the New Territories. We drove past an old theatre that was putting on a Cantonese opera; we watched locals hanging over the port rails to bargain with the fishermen below; and later in the night we sipped tong sui, or Cantonese desert, at a quiet roadside stall. We also saw, earlier on, a lane blocked off by organized volleyball games played by Philipina migrant workers on their collective day off.
Actually, during this Sunday I took a walk in Victoria Park, a relatively vast central park near Causeway Bay. And suddenly I was immersed in a whole different country. All along the walkways and squares and sport fields were thousands of Indonesian domestic workers congregated in small groups, many of whom were sitting on a picnic blanket and either conversing or simply relaxing. You suddenly become a minority, but it is not threatening. There is an air of intercultural peace here as a Muslim fellowship sitting as a light-blue circle study not too far from the Christians lined up facing and clapping and singing to a guitar. Some young girls are practicing a dance while others talk on their cell phones. A similar tradition happens at Statue Square in Central among Filipina workers.
Hence, in addition to the shaft of capitalism-consumerism and the shaft of family, we find staggered in the landscape stalagmites of religious practice, hobby activity, and artistic pursuit. My teenage aunt has just left for Thailand with her church to teach English; the Olympic-sized pool in Victoria Park thrills with lane-less negotiation; adolescents take figure skating lessons in a glassy mall; the tennis courts are reserved and for a few hours they fill with wheelchair amateurs; the daughter of a family friend has come home from studies abroad and she brings her own bag now to shop. The conspicuous deficience of the artist, however, counterpoints an intense visual culture of unquestioned consumption. You hear a single flute melody on a library terrace in the evening and it touches you like a quiet fire in the deep cold northern night.
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We are almost at the border. Grandpa asks me what exactly it is that my studies focus on. I try to explain that it is something about how an environment will affect the culture and interactions among the people of that place. He tells me it must be challenging to understand people’s sum lei (literally “within the heart” but closer to “psychology”). I remember that he is a geologist – rocks and climbing mountains are his thing. Through the train window we notice long rows of new pipes on a scratched earth. Since he is also a developer, I am curious as to how he sees this landscape. I do not realize what I have done until he replies, “Mm, yes I see, that is interesting what you study.”
We get to the border. I look at the hard faces of the mainland customs officers and feel a sudden animosity. A few weeks ago I asked my civil servant cousin if Hong Kong people feel superior towards the mainland Chinese, while at the same time fearing them. On another walk together I commented on how irritating it must be to constantly hear public messages repeated in Cantonese, Mandarin and English. He expressed exasperation for how Hong Kong must cater to them when they are the guests here. He explained that the pro-Hong Kong democratic party is constantly fragmented while the governing pro-China party never wavers in their brown-nosing routine. At this border, I can feel the fear of China, like a steadily advancing, unshakeable wall. It is fear at the loss of the Hong Kong we know, and with this comes hatred and feelings of righteous superiority.
But, in an endearing defence of the private sphere, my cousin tells me that for all the games we play, for all the contracts and suspicion, at the end of the day when you come home to your partner, you want to have something real. You cannot live constantly in fear and calculation – it is not a life. Later today I will sense the ambiguity in the people of Shenzhen. I will sense the uncertainty of assertive clerks in the overstaffed stores, hear the admiration of Hong Kong by a proud businessman, and hear the story of migration and separation by an optimistic masseuse. Though the negotiation must go on, we forget sometimes who we are railing against. As the border becomes increasingly transparent, we can wait to see - perhaps without too much apprehension - the particularity this city of immigration and survival will become.
[2] Lee, L. O. (2008). City Between Worlds: My Hong Kong. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Mass.
[3] Photo courtesy of http://picasaweb.google.com/candicepoon/HongKongTrip#5145587365394741922.
[5] Map courtesy of www.cucy.org/c2k/img/hong-kong-mtr.jpg.
[6] Photo courtesy of www.flickr.com/photos/87791108@N00/205535469.
[7] Poon, A. Land and the ruling class in Hong Kong. Alice Poon: Richmond, B.C.
[8] Lee 2008.
[9] Lee 2008.
[10] Photo courtesy of www.flickr.com/photos/124330160/50244284.
[11] Photo courtesy of http://hongkongdailyphoto.com/2006/11/05/dai-pai-dong.
[12] Photo courtesy of www.flickr.com/photos/buddhasbreakfast/2493988633/in/set-72157600384358829.
