Public Space

Hong Kong Journal

2008-09-02T16:40:00.041-04:00

June 29, 2008

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.

[1]

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”.

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.

[3]

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.

[5]

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.

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.

[6]

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.

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.

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.

[10]

[11]

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.

[12]

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.

[1] Map coutesy of http://evicka.nomadlife.org/uploaded_images/hong-kong-map-small-713353.gif.

[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.

[4] Lu, D. (2006). Remaking Chinese Urban Form: Modernity, Scarcity and Space. Routledge: London.

[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.

Shanghai Journal

2008-08-03T14:30:00.051-04:00

July 1, 2008

My father and I land in Pudong International Airport. It is one of two Shanghai international airports and its interior is reminiscent of Toronto’s Pearson. High ceilings and extensive metallic lines parallel the crisp, official-accented voice through the speakerphones.

We board the magnetic levitation train. It was built by a German firm looking to showcase its technology. It is impressive, world-class, and a world first. But the ridership is only at 20 percent capacity, and as we reach the top speed of 435 km/h, the car is not so steady. It does not bother me so much, but I do begin to draw my first links in this city. In the grand halls of the airport we passed through customs without a flinch; the man at the machine was alone and he barely cared to inspect. At the maglev luggage scan I was stopped. They told me to sip my liquid in front of them. The link is not so clear, but something is up. We float to a stop. We must descend somewhere in the suburbs of Shanghai.

The taxi is mid-afternoon-hot despite the air conditioning. The cabby takes us from Longyang Road station in Pudong to our hotel in the central city. The ride is long because of the traffic; we drive west, over the Huangpu river and connect to a highway that cuts callously through the city heart. My father has often critiqued the slowness of democratic urban construction in Montreal and in Hong Kong; it is evident that here such democracy is not an issue. On both sides of this wide, elevated freeway are high-rises that do not differ architecturally or functionally. The commercial towers are just as alluring in their design and just as dispersed in their siting. This last point is of additional interest. It was to be quite difficult to conceptualize Shanghai in only several days as a similarly undulating landscape would characterize long stretches of the central city.

[1]

The hotel is called New World Mayfair Hotel, though in Chinese it transliterates as Paris Spring Hotel. Perhaps it did not wish to be judged by Western visitors for not living up to its stated identity. Whatever the case, this five-star hotel has covered itself with Western idioms and images. A reproduction of Van Gogh’s Terrase de Café la Nuit framed into the big glass revolving entrance greets the visitor. The second-floor restaurant is called Chez Lili. But the French metaphors end there as the latter serves a medley Chinese cuisine including the very popular Cantonese dim sum. Reproductions of European canonical paintings irrespective of country are fitted in every room and the bar vivifies with live American and British soft rock at night – performed by an alluring Chinese songbird.

The sun is still in mid-sky so, after dropping our bags, we make our way to the purpose of this trip: a printing and design trade show involving my father’s business. We board the air conditioned subway train and make our way across the city, back east to Longyang Road station. In the metro car, a young girl near me is intense in cell phone conversation. I find it curious that she speaks the Shanghai dialect – how does this linguistic island survive in a sea of Mandarin (and English) schooling, media, and business communication? My father tells me that it will pass away, that only the older generations stick to it. But listening to the adolescent enunciate, I do not think so – not for a while at least. Though it would be later that I would be able to articulate why.

The Shanghai New International Exhibition Center is located in Pudong, one of several districts fringing the central city that have seen rapid development in the reform era partly as a result of absorbing inner city relocation[2]. Since urban form in prereform China bore no heed to land value, the gap between existing and potential rent in the market transition has resulted in extensive property redevelopment and gentrification in the inner city[3]. The inner and outer suburbs have thus increased in residential developments, factories, and work units. But Pudong specifically has also been the site of high-profile commercial, financial, and technological investment, owing in part to it being a New Open Economic Development Zone since 1990. Pudong’s geography is also salient as it stretches between the Huangpu river and the East China Sea. In addition to port access, being across the Huangpu means that it flanks the riverside city heart in the same way that a boomed Kowloon has flanked the skyscraping bank of Hong Kong Island.

When I speak of the central city or the inner city I am referring to Puxi, the traditional Shanghai west of the Huangpu. A vernacular region, Puxi remains Shanghai’s political, commercial, and cultural center despite Pudong’s recent ascendancy. It is also referred to as the city core in scholarly works that deal with the dynamics of Shanghai’s sociospatial restructuring in the market transition[4]. Below is a map that illustrates the entire metropolitan area of Shanghai including Puxi’s nine adminsitrative districts. For interest sake, I have also included a table of various Shanghai statistics in comparison with Beijing. One notes, for instance, the intense population density of Puxi.

[5]

	Shanghai	Beijing
Area (km²)	6 340	16 800
Central city	289	1 370
Suburb	6 051	15 430
Population	16 400 000	13 600 000
Central city	6 900 000	8 500 000
Suburb	9 500 000	5 100 000
Density (ppl per km²)	2 588	807
Central city	23 944	6 200
Suburb	1 566	330
Per capita income (yuan)
Urban	16 683	15 640
Rural	7 066	6 170

[6]

By the time we emerge from setting up the trade exhibit, the sun has set. My father, Rita – a Hong Kong communications associate – and I take a taxi back to the hotel where all three of us are staying. One of the Shanghainese employees had beckoned this taxi whose engine purred smooth like the air conditioning. We spot a red ferrari and the driver comments that these are common sightings now in Shanghai. The two Hongkongers disagree and suggest that perhaps the red car is counterfeit. No no no, the driver insists. Rita tells me that Shanghai is exciting but it is very much a spectacle. The buildings gleam with neon patterns and swirl like spaceships, but inside things do not live up to standard. The materials may be faulty; the facilities may lack bathroom paper; the staff may disregard your requests; you may be mistakenly charged to a wrong account. I wondered about that. Were these select Hong Kong frustrations, or was this Shanghai?

July 2, 2008

As in Tokyo, my premier day-time mission is the search for a library. It is for the reasons I have written about previously, but it is also a simple, arbitrary destination. I know not who or what I shall encounter.

The place that I decide to visit – Shanghai Jiaotong University – is nearby in Xuhui district, which touches the southeast border of Changning district where the hotel is located. I step into the subway station for lunch. I pass through a dense network of little shops mainly selling women’s clothing, shoes, and accessories. There is then a dense network of busy underground eateries. A roomy McDonald’s catches my curiosity. Dozens of bright and healthy-looking young workers maneuver behind the counter; the eating area is accordingly full. Walking further in, I pick a large oval table and take a seat beside my new friends. This collective sitting reminds me of the library in Tokyo. It was impossible to find a table to work until I stumbled upon the study room. There we all worked, side by side.

There is no rail stop at Jiaotong University. Walking out of the nearest station, I ask a young lady for directions. Like so many other women in the city she holds a sunbrella, despite the day’s cloudiness. To be fair-skinned is to be urban, civilized, and – according to my mother – it is just plain prettier.

I must have missed the scale of my map because I am walking many blocks that are invisible on paper. I turn onto a smaller street – a gentleman explicates clearly that I only need to follow this road to its end. I notice the many commoners, bikes, and motorcycles and think of a quaint university service pocket similar to the cheap eateries around Concordia University in Montreal. The road curves often, and the buildings are low, old, and often placed at interesting angles to the road. A cultural intimacy is felt through the street life. I glimpse openings and alleys with low-tabled eateries and poorly-lit spaces shops I think or fixing spaces or perhaps just places to gather. I make out a “Chongqing Hot-and-Numb Soup” shop, a hardware shop, a window-fitting shop, and a tailor shop.

This place, in fact, is not so different from the area around New World Mayfair Hotel. True, the roads are more grid-like and the buildings line up to face the street in that Changning area. And true, the buildings are slightly higher and the sidewalks are wide, but there is still a distinctive, intimate local street life. The dress code is very lax, especially for the way men wear (or do not wear) shirts, make-shift barbecue and hot-pot stands flank street merchants with a blanket full of wares, and late soup sippers in humble restaurants deck the sidewalk sides. This is what I love about central Shanghai – you may not find these props at certain sanitized tourist havens but if you turn a corner and walk a couple blocks, the informal economy will be there to welcome you again.

Both Changning and Xuhui are older districts. In Shanghai’s old city, you find street and housing patterns of diverse urbanist lineages, from the wide avenues and geometric corners of the 19^th century International Settlement – re-asserted in utilitarian and formalistic Soviet “superblocks” – to autonomous “neighbourhood units” and “microdistricts” of Anglo-American community planning descent laid out in flexible accomodation to site topographies[7]. Within the areas I described, the buildings specifically reflect a Maoist austerity prioritizing production and capital accumulation. In the dual nationalist narrative of postcolonial, socialist victory over formerly imperialist, advanced capitalist societies, it was imperative that present consumption be sacrificed for future, modern glory[8]. Now, however, these dilapidating matchbox walk-ups are a shame to be demolished. In the early-to-mid nineties urban renewal in Shanghai involved mostly small-scale housing renovation projects. Then in the late nineties city policies reflected an impatience for larger-scale redevelopment[9]. Due to a cool real estate market and the subordination of property firms by city governance, such redevelopment at first benefitted former residents. For instance, New Fukangli in Jiang’an district was financed in large part by local residents, who were in turn extensively consulted as to the form of their new home[10]. But by the new millenium, the city was in need of additional capital in order for the reconstruction to continue apace; property firms were thus privatized and a concurrent market rebound incited a trend of luxury commodity developments in the inner city.

In the bid to modernize, old Shanghai is not only being torn down but forgotten as well, along with the displaced residents who can no longer afford to live in the new complexes. The old lilong – low-rise lane houses typical of pre-revolutionary Shanghai – are razed and replaced by scientific, gated showcases. Though this may have concerned civic-minded planners, it has unmistakably supported Shanghai’s aspiration to be a cosmopolitan, world city. A young and educated generation of street officers in inner city areas compete, in coordination with real estate developers and like-minded municipal planners, to demonstrate ”model communities”. Like the infamous urban renewal of postwar America, marginal spaces – in this case often neighbourhoods impoverished by state enterprise restructuring – are simply rebuilt. But unlike the 50s and 60s of American suburbanization, the rich move in and perpetuate a sociospatial stratification reinforced by poorly serviced, distant suburbs[11]. Finally, in the process of forgetting, a new history is propagated. Shanghai’s cosmopolitan, colonial era is evoked as the city’s authentic identity[12]. Maoist history – a history that had given inner city dwellers work and security and honour – is for many an inconvenient blip in the city’s internationalist becoming.

[13]

The 1935 campus I finally reach, a fine-lined garden, though perhaps soon to be shadowed by high-rises. For now, tall buildings stand side by side smaller ones, and a bank will be neighbour to an improvised eatery. A skinny man sleeps on the sidewalk under a tree; his wife tends the cart they pull. A bike heaves by: are the piled sacks the person’s entire possessions? You see elderly women in standard dress methodically clean the refuse bins. For now, even as they pick up after a society that worships the young the handsome and the educated, they may still call this place their own.

Tonight is company party night. After work, the employees taxi to meet us at a finer restaurant. Our taxi – containing my father, Rita, and I – is a little lost. My father notes that this is not uncommon: Shanghai taxi drivers do not know where restaurants are. I am told that in Hong Kong they will even comment on the venue and menu. But watching the taxi meter here tick at an impossibly economical rate, the dissimilarity is unsurprising.

We gather round the white circular table. Apart from us three, there is Howard, the Shanghai office manager for my father’s firm, and seven office workers. The seating is unintentionally compartmentalized, with the female employees in one group, the males in a second group, and the directors in a third. One exception is Wei, who sits between Howard and I.

Wei is Shanghainese, though she lies and says that she is from Anhui province – an impoverished region from which many migrants come, staffing Shanghai’s spaces of consumption. My father laughs. I met her yesterday – I asked if she lived with her colleagues, in a work unit dormitory. Yes, she replies. I laugh.

She comments on the dour attitude of our waitresses. She explains that it is because they are migrants and – Howard jumps in: “To put it simply, this dish here, it will take them a night of work to afford.” I understand this, but then I do not agree with customers complaining about the service. Wei tries to help me to understand: “It is like there is something wrong with their psychology.” I cannot disagree with that: one sign of pathology is the denial of reality. I push the absurdity further and compare them to black people who do not appreciate their situation. “Exactly! That is a perfect analogy,” says Howard.

Wei tells me that it is no longer acceptable to see a black man on the street and call out, “Hey, Black!”

We go for a walk. She was born the year of the rat, so we are juxtaposed in age. I tell her I am not sure why we in North America do not usually sing karaoke. She tells me it is because people in America like to play their own guitars and sing. I find out that sometimes marriages are facilitated by elders – there simply are not the same opportunities to meet new people in a casual setting. Yes, she is a native Shanghainese and works in an office, but still she must live at an hour’s commute. I do not know her history, why her mother and father must live there. I do not know why she dresses so plainly, unlike the other employees. And I wonder at when she told us not to waste the nation’s food. The Shanghainese may have appropriated a new teleology now, but the former historicism remains in movements, utterances, thoughts. After all, it was the Maoist control of urban migration that elevated Shanghai privilege. Though their parents were almost all immigrants, the new generation in Communist Shanghai would identify themselves with this prized place[14]. Their dialect was perfect.

July 3, 2008

After a morning of writing, I clue back into the actual hotel that is my environment. When the air conditioner is on and the towels are clean, one can leave the physical plane. But the world of imagination soon ends; I am back on a steaming street in Shanghai, and I cannot see the sky.

I arrive at the International Arena of the new exhibition center. The floor space here is four times as expensive as the other sections. My dad informs me of last night’s robbery. It only adds to all the negative experiences he has had doing business on the mainland. The officials do not let him see the security footage because they fear that it might be their own personnel; in such a case all would have to be fired. This is what they tell him.

The staff is exhausted from last night’s extended shift that finale-ed at the karaoke club. They live the furthest away and they were not singing as much as their bosses, but it was still important as it was a rare social occasion. Howard sings his heart to the familiar Cantonese refrains; because of my father he rarely sees his wife and two teenage children in Hong Kong. My father shouts out too but is laughing; he is used to living away from us and telephoning in the business hours of others.

It is time to go. The convention center tells us this by turning off the air conditioning a half-hour beforehand. At the exit are two very long lines of people awaiting taxis and coaches (the metro is at an inconvenient distance). The sun is still pounding through the smog. We get onto an unlicenced van. I am connecting the dots. I begin to understand what Rita was getting at in the car that first night.

We take the metro in the opposite direction so as to get a seat (the exhibition station is only one stop away from the end of the line). On the Shanghai metro, there is a clear prioritizing of sitting. You see people bunch up close to the screen doors in preparation for a sprint in.

I stand beside Alyssa – as the accounts person she must return to the office after each exhibition day. She is sitting. She tells me that she does not like to stand because some men will press their bodies up close. She speaks quickly but precisely; it is a person listening and responding to a time full of permutation and opportunity. China is on its way, she tells me – though it is not there yet it still needs time. Then she asks herself why she tells me this, as if speaking to a foreigner. Her children – after she marries – will study abroad like me, even though children nowadays begin to learn English by primary school. But first she will move out with a friend: presently she is staying with her uncle as a temporary arrangement. Her dress is trendy and dialoguing with me she recollects and re-asserts the path of her thoughts; it is a personal, fleeting ground.

[15]

Her negotiation of the post-reform world has taken her to Shanghai from her home city in Hubei province. Though Wuhan is a capital city and the most populous in central China, she is nonetheless a migrant, with all the formal and informal meanings attached to such a status. Beijing is too harsh for migrants, she tells me. I have indeed heard from others of a Beijing attitude, a pretension towards outsiders worse than in Shanghai. I ask Alyssa how it is better in Shanghai. She admits that it is probably not much better, but at least at the (Hong Kong based) office it is not an issue. Still, it is not certain that she will stay here.

The group of us squeeze up a tiny elevator to the office.

July 4, 2008

Groggy-eyed, I pull on the closet door. The handle breaks off.

At breakfast, a busgirl drops a knife. She is lectured on how to do things right. She learns that she must not rush, that there is time.

I recall the evening before. A waitress leaves a bit of beer in the bottle. This is a faux-pas, according to the two businessmen with whom I am dining. I suggest that she was probably not brought up dining in nice places. Perhaps to her, it all seems like an arbitrary set of gestures.

The waitresses stand at their spots and watch – as they have been instructed to do.

Returning to my room, a young woman is scrubbing the wall. She bids me well. She is my age. Why is it me walking to the hotel room and her scrubbing the wall and smiling politely?

A taxi driver takes me to the Huangpu last night. It is past midnight; he is in the second half of his twenty-four hour shift. I say I wish to think near the river; I wonder what he must think of me.

The promenade by the river is beautiful, cool enough to sleep; a relaxed wind. Vendors sit and chat, the lights of Pudong dance across from us. This is the famous Bund waterfront, part of the old International Settlement. During the day, one hears the sounds of construction. Highways are being diverted and the grand banks and trading houses are being restored. A city must have history and Shanghai’s history, it seems, is here.

This city is a spectacle, and yet it is not a spectacle. Some may try to make a show, but others just don't care.

[16]

My mother, brother, grandmother, and a family friend have arrived from Hong Kong. This morning, we all bundle over to an old friend of my father’s. The residence is about a half-hour away by subway.

We walk on a commercial street, but it is clear that this is a residential district. We turn right, into what must be a socialist housing complex. Two long and colourless apartment blocks face one another; the mediating way is a broad pedestrian lane. This neighbourhood was not meant for private automobiles, and it is likely that for most inhabitants this fact of life has not changed.

[17]

Turning left we enter. Three generations live here with their spouses and children, sharing the bathroom and the kitchen. My mother recalls growing up in Beijing: it was more crowded – there was sharing with other families – but the buildings were new then. The walls here are covered with numbers and short phrases stamped in black and red: permanent advertisements. Beneath, the walls are a white mortar scraped on a concrete frame. The touch of steel pipes and lilting ceramic at my feet – here is little division between outside and inside, between the public and the private. Here I cannot escape from the physical plane; the discomfort is real but somehow I am more alive.

We are led to the living room. A compact fluorescent lightbulb sweeps away the darkness. Things have changed. The folding futon has enabled this interior social space during the daytime. Guests are treated to an air-conditioning unit, as well as to the sight of a shiny black upright piano. Above the piano is a photo- and certificate-taped wall dedicated to the center of this household: the still shy boy of thirteen. It is not long before we are treated to his piano practice. I turn the TV off so that we can pay proper heed.

Although the hosts have been generous in their watermelon and plastic-wrapped ice cream offering we are subsequently led to a nearby restaurant. But before I go, I visit the grandmother, the reason for my father’s repeated return after so many years. Having suffered a stroke, she lies in bed. For some reason, she does not wish to let go of my hand.

I do not know why it is so easy to drop roots here. It may be the language – even though Mandarin is in a sense an artificial language it is more particular to me than English. It may also be that there are roots here. Shanghai may be a relatively young city – a city wall was built around the seaport only in the 16^th century – and its dialect a young dialect – Shanghainese has been considered China’s youngest dialect as well as an amalgam of surrounding dialects[18], but that there is a local linguistic culture, for me, gives the city place. It is not exchangeable or, like the savourous multicultural havens of North America, best defined in relation to other places and histories. I have written about feeling at home in Ryogoku, but I think China affects me at a personal level as well. Like the Chinese-American writer Fred Wah expresses, I do not know what it means to “feel Chinese”, but I do know how it feels to speak Mandarin, to speak Cantonese, to be taken as Chinese, to eat rice with vegetables every day, or to wake up frosty-eyed and hear Chinese voices soft in the kitchen. I remember leaving Tokyo and the enthusiasm I had the first night in Hong Kong – the enthusiam with which I ordered foods that were hot-colored, hot-tasting; my body must have been chilled by wet and salty noodles and raw fish and seaweed.

As I relate to this place, I am constantly exchanging my life with those of others. It is still strange to see Wei at work, knowing that this is a very large part of her life. After work, she commutes home. She tells me about the importance of working, of improving ourselves. I know that my life will be very different from hers, that I will have more time for other pursuits, and that even my work will be a privilege – in addition to being renumerative and a fulfillment of my family and societal responsibilities. It is strange to see her because I question if it is fair to value what I value, to seek what I seek. Is it fair to have First World dreams if others cannot share them? In Wei’s case, it may have been her choice, but even the choice to not study at university must be taken in the context of her familial and financial environment. But who is to say that all young and especially intelligent people should pursue higher education? Well, Chinese parents especially, actually.

I think it is becoming evident to us why China studies have become so popular in recent years. There is simply no theoretical paradigm with which to capture its bustling diversity in form, in ideology – and this is reflected through the valuing of money, family, nation, and self all at once, one at a time, and even in contradiction. Confucian and nationalist, socialist ethical idioms are heard alongside the celebration of individual, transnational consumerism. Yet of course, this is nothing new. In the first centuries of the common era, Buddhism slowly became accepted in China – but in the guise of Taoism, forming a hybridity that persists to this day. In the nineteenth century, as European powers were carving up China’s territory and bleeding it of its national treasures, Confucian scholar-officials debated modernization strategies under the philosophy of “Western technique, Chinese foundation”. More familiar to us, a Maoism based explicitly “on contradiction” has evolved into a “socialist market economy”. On the streets, in the parks, Tai Chi practitioners circulate to the rhythm of boombox rollerbladers; a woman writes in virtual space of her sexcapades; a good-looking young man waits to gather enough of an income before beginning to date. A sick person consults a doctor trained in both Western and Chinese philosophies of the body; then again, perhaps a few mirrors in the window will do the trick. What is Chinese is whatever works! And all this one finds right here in Shanghai, where a young woman picks me off the street to converse in English – she orders but does not eat and pressures me to pay; she then pays herself and stomps off.

[19]

July 5, 2008

Today I decide to visit the finer side of life, the space in Shanghai that is already what it envisions itself to become. I take the subway east to People’s Square, deeper into the heart of Puxi. Here the roads are smooth, wide pedestrian sidewalks are neatly laid with stone and lined with trees, and one takes in the view of majestic, free-thinking architecture. It is a landscape meant to do away with the escape from the physical, for one’s imagination becomes conveniently real.

A concentration of governmental and cultural edifices, including Shanghai City Hall, Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Hall, Shanghai Grand Theatre, and Shanghai Art Museum, monumentalize this central location. As its name suggests, this is also the space to hold city-wide festival activities. To top it off, one will also find a fine array of shops, hotels, and café experiences within a moment’s walk, or simply at the underground level.

I look for MOCA Shanghai: the city’s museum of contemporary art. A wide river of people are exiting the Grand Theatre’s afternoon performance; a mother with a child points me in the right direction. The museum is in People’s Park. Before I get to it, I pass a restaurant floating in the middle of a large pond. I borrow a cell phone from a man leisurely speaking with his wife. This is something my father warned me never to do myself for the phone will be stolen. But this man is unsuspecting and even berates me for trying to pay him.

There are some meaningful works in the museum. One series, by Liu Dahong, depicts four temples: the temples of Tao, Confucius, Buddha, and Science. Each tableau depicts a view of the altar, but the scenes humorously differ in the architectural styles, the characters and idols, their activities and arrangement, and even the color tone. The Buddha temple for example is fitted with Tibetan horn-blowers, praying commoners, and what seems like a band of bandits pulling a rope around the gold head of the Buddha statue. In the center appears to be a bronze statue of a topless woman chiselled in classical Greek style. Likewise, the Confucian temple is lined with ultra-studious students, calligraphical debris, uniformed soldier-nationalists, and heavenly sunlight breaking through the earthly walls. So that Dahong is not merely depicting the presence of multiple Chinese cosmologies but rather, if only as a starting point, the way these traditions permeate the whole structure of Chinese society’s customs, aspirations, and political economy.

A second series shows two photos. One is a black-and-white shot of a farmer pulling a plow with his hands. Multiple strings extend from his hands as he tugs on the earth; a sparse line of trees of varying forms forms his background. The second is of a man in contemporary dress – the loose fit suggests either a hip-hop style or a janitorial occupation – in an interior, underground concrete space. Lines of white rope extend from his hands as he pulls a mass of boxes plastic-wrapped in indigo-blue.

The role of the artist in these cases is very evident to me. In making some sense of the cacaphony, in asking where we are headed and if it is desirable. In drawing links to the past. The exhibition is titled “The World of Others” and its curatory abstract communicates the classic theme of wandering at the crossroads of contemporary culture. It is not about the marginal “Other” of cultural studies but rather simply of you and I and who we are and what we are doing. It is about Shanghai and China too of course, as it relates to others elsewhere and here. So a third piece that I wish to feature is constructed of consolidated oil fibres. The mass of mesh piles up, intertwining and rising, but droops from the weight. A human walks very carefully with feet and hands at the tip; he is far from the base, both vertically and horizontally. For the tip has leaned so far it is now a thin thread reaching horizontally out above nothing.

That night, I return to MOCA Shanghai for a penthouse party. My dad comes with me, and since I do not know whether or not the party is private, he urges me to speak in a foreign tongue. We pass the guard of People’s Park without too much difficulty. But we wonder why he must ask us where we are going. The park at least should be public. A number of “public places” have so far been closed to me, such as Jiaotong University’s library, and the Grand Theatre when all the people were exiting. In any case, it turns out that this party is open to the public, but there is no need for me to switch out of French or English.

It seems that I have perforated through to the world of expats and returnees. The house music scintillates in the room where drinks are served from an improvised counter. I meet fellow voyagers in quick succession – it is as easy as at any private party. To speak the right language is like two men nodding in mutual validation.

Many here are young professionals working in multinational firms or perhaps in an embassy. A few have grown up in Shanghai, and a few others have come to further their career. I speak at some length with two musicians. They are in their mid-to-late-twenties and from Vancouver. They are a young man and a young woman, though they do not seem to be a couple, musically or otherwise. Both work in electronica; they are here for their DJ friend – every Saturday there is a party at a different venue. The young man tells me he used to work in a bank, after doing a degree in financial engineering. It is the Asian American parent’s dream, as we both know, but he would rather spend his energies on making music, even if he’d have to live more simply. We also both know this story well.

The young lady, also Chinese and a former Vancouver resident, studied film sound production as a compromise after failing economics courses. But after a menial stint in foley production, she took off for Shanghai, where the opportunity lay. Both musicians wrote off Vancouver as a desolate market for electronica while at the same time being artistically saturated. Fly west and find the greenfield that is Shanghai. Anything can happen, money is everywhere, rich people are everywhere to support you. And there is a huge and growing market of listeners open to innovation. For now, the young woman supports herself with the help of DJ gigs once a week at a nearby lounge and it pays 10 000 yuan a month.

I spend the rest of the evening with a large and friendly group of expatriots, most of whom are from France. While still at the penthouse party, a young woman named Anastasie sits to my right. Cheerful and full of questions, she tells me about her life here in Shanghai. She provides legal counsel for a chemicals firm based in France. It has been about six months since she was first transferred here.

Having grown up in a small town, Shanghai still seems fast-paced. We agree that the air here is too dense and it is difficult to find a place to breathe, and be away from the continuous activity. Nonetheless, she is happy here, and slowly taking lessons in Chinese, even though she has so far interacted little with the locals.

Her friend is less optimistic. While we taxi to Burger King, he bikes: perhaps he has seen more. His impression of Shanghai is of a general superficiality. While one can certainly discern the progression of commodification and consumerism here, I find his statement to be too simplistic. Because behind the spectacle are labourers, nurses, accounts people, even the waiters bringing him his drinks at the party – for many of these people, a trendy image is not so high on their list of priorities. It would certainly fall below their aspiration that their parents retire in dignity, that their children be able to find fair and decent work, or that China be autonomous in her cultural appropriation. Wei may be picking the right colours for a marketing firm (my father’s company supplies colour communication tools), but for her the meaning of this work is much more dense than a simple participation in visual culture. I cannot know this place without speaking to its people and learning about their values and friendships. To describe Shanghai as superficial is akin to depicting China as Confucian, Maoist, or Taoist – it is insufficient. It is only to see the surface of a tapestry that I find as chaotic and awful as it is beautiful and coherent.

[20]

A young Shanghainese with whom I was dancing has asked me to go to Mao. I would like to remain on this elevated plane, this superstratum of Shanghai a little blind to the underside, but I am too tired to go clubbing tonight.

[21]

[1] Photo courtesy of www.flickr.com/photos/2_dogs/205021735.

[2] He, S., Wu, F. (2007). Neighborhood changes and residential differentiation in Shanghai. In F. Wu (Ed.), China’s Emerging Cities: The Making of New Urbanism (pp. 185-209). Routledege: New York.

[3] Tian, Y. Y., Wong, C. (2007). Large urban redevelopment projects and socio-spatial stratification in Shanghai. In F. Wu (Ed.), China’s Emerging Cities: The Making of New Urbanism (pp.210-232). Routledege: New York.

[4] E.g.: He & Wu 2007; Tian & Wong 2007.

[5] Map coutesy of www.likealocal.cn/shanghai-districts-explained.

[6] Wang, S., Guo, C. (2007). A tale of two cities: Restructuring of retail capital and production of new consumption spaces in Beijing and Shanghai. In F. Wu (Ed.), China’s Emerging Cities: The Making of New Urbanism (pp. 256-283). Routledege: New York.

[7] Lu, D. (2006). Remaking Chinese Urban Form: Modernity, Scarcity and Space. Routledge: London.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Tian & Wong 2007.

[10] Tian & Wong 2007.

[11] He & Wu 2007.

[12] Pan, T. (2005). Historical memory, community-building and place-making in neighborhood Shanghai. In L. Ma & F. Wu (Eds.), Restructuring the Chinese City: Changing Society, Economy and Space (pp. 123-136).

[13] Photo courtesy of www.flickr.com/photos/ericfirley/532802767.

[14] Rudolph, J., Lu, H. (2008). Mirrored reflections: Place identity formation in Taipei and Shanghai. In J. Logan (Ed.), Urban China in Transition (pp. 161-178). Blackwell Publishing: Malden, MA.

[15] Photo courtesy of www.flickr.com/photos/2_dogs/144839622.

[16] Photo courtesy of www.flickr.com/photos/tannenberg/1578244266.

[17] Photo courtesy of www.flickr.com/photos/wangjue_2005/385144161.

[18] Rudolph & Lu 2008.

[19] Photo courtesy of www.flickr.com/photos/justinbrown/2595243739.

[20] Photo courtesy of www.nationalgeographic.com.

[21] Photo courtesy of www.flickr.com/photos/2_dogs/50292513.

Tokyo Journal

2008-07-12T03:12:00.038-04:00

Wednesday, June 25

We arrive at Narita International Airport in the mid-afternoon. We shuffle over to immigration and place ourselves in the line for foreigners. A short and wide-faced older man walks to and fro reminding us to fill in the back of our entry card. In gestural English, he then animates the aliens into the available slots.

Blazer-less and theatrical, he is a beautiful complement to the clean, straight lines of the airport handrails and staff; my brother and I wonder if he does this all day, and whether this is the impression that the authorities want us to begin the city with.

Soon we get our first glimpses of the city through the glass of our Limousine Taxi – that is, the bus that will drop its passengers at their respective hotels. We see old houses and intermittent rice fields – how sustainable, we think. But we are still a good hour from our destination, and the rice fields soon turn into industries – the most unique of which is a blue-skinned factory with the word “Human” printed en face. We cross several bridges and the leftward landscape fills with crates and cranes of all colors. We are approaching the city proper; the houses become taller and our highway rises and dips as it must evade the thickening web of transit.

But we notice here how disappointingly bland the architecture looks. The apartment buildings differ in height, orientation and at times color, but they are ubiquitously concrete and the windows and balconies and stairwells feel as if belonging to the same family. Functional modernity had apparently filled the vacuum left by the devastating firebombing of World War II. Aside from that, the multiple layers of expressway and railway provide a futuristic vision of urban efficiency, where mass movements need not obstruct the open flow of the street network. But what kinds of aesthetics are implicated by additional levels of structure and also of view?

It is night and my family and I stroll into a set of narrower streets within the Akasaka district where we are staying. The streets are busy with small noodle shops, the happy romantic music coming out of gambling machines, heels clicking, unbuttoned blazers, and now and then we might hear hints of a more familiar language. Pressed by indecision, we settle for an “American-style” menu underground. It is a very tight space and we get the only four-person table. Many men sit alone at the bar and some stay with a newspaper; we notice later that we were never invited to kneel in the back tatami room. In any case the waitress arrives. She appears South Asian and as such her effortless Japanese disorients me. What is she doing here? She is brown she should understand English! How do other Japanese see her?

Thursday, June 26

On our first whole day in Tokyo I decide to spend the morning in search of a library. Places that house unseen spaces – such as those more communicable by words than by physical sight – as in the case of bookstores and universities – appeal to me especially in a foreign sphere. They reassure me that there are others here who cherish an internal space, a space that by definition is hidden amidst the physical public (as far as I am concerned, at least).

I soon realize that it is not easy to find one’s way without the help of a Tokyoite. My internet searches reveal a nearby library and this information is even presented in English. But Google Maps is completely Japanese when one zooms into Japan. Not willing to sequentially compare symbols, I shortly find myself sitting across a thoroughly beautiful and helpful young lady at the Tourist Information desk. It is two subway stations from here, it is not the one I found, and I have a printed map in hand.

I stand near a column so as not to get into the other travelers’ way. But the ticket machines and signs are intuitive enough with a bit of observation. No one notices me; secretly I smile.

One begins to notice that they are in an extended metropolis when they burrow out after a period of rapid transit in a cueless passage. And they see that the buildings are still tall and glassy and the streets are wide with trucks and taxis. But now I notice a few more details. There is scarcely a car parked in sight; this is because the side lanes must move. And roads carry more public and freight transportation than personal vehicles. In other words, it is the realization of the vision implied in Montreal’s 2004 Plan with its policies minimizing certain highway infrastructure while at the same time privileging bus and freight movement.

Curiously, there were rarely any large trucks to be seen on Tokyo roads; this was as peculiar as the survival of smaller-scale industries and grocery shops. Do the particular institutional and cultural factors mediate a ‘cutthroat’ global capitalism, or is it more accurate that these elements take part to create a system of transaction? Land values play a part too; would it be naïve to point out how elegant it is that the ecology of urban density here coincides with the survival of the little[1]?

In the afternoon my mother, my grandmother, my brother and I meet up with a business friend of my father’s[2]. Although he possesses four personal vehicles, he arrives by metro. We follow him to his Tokyo showroom. His main office is in Yokohama, where he lives, but his internet wholesaling was suffering because buyers wanted to see and touch what they were ordering.

The showroom is a small and extremely expensive space located on the second floor of a four-story building. Clustered around are other businesses in the design field. The locational advantage is evident, though I wondered why these low-rise units would persist.

Nearby is a glossy shopping district and we walk through it to the rail station. One stop later, we begin our promenade through Harajuku, the famous “youth district” of Tokyo. This alternate space is reinforced by formal and symbolic differentiations from nearby Shibuya, another highly consumerist and youthful landscape that will be our next destination. In Harajuku, the green and white and yellow flower-arches demarcating Takeshita Street protect a busy otherworldly space in the way that Disneyland gates might mean for children stepping through. The street is narrow and stone-paved; no cars are allowed to come through. The shops vary in their form and are about three stories high – high enough to give the coziness of cover but not so high as to be imposing or independent. Indeed, Takeshita may strike a stroller as an old town – but except for its built form, there is something very un-old and at the same time very un-youthful about it. For I think that to be old or adolescent means to be marginal and, despite fashions that astonish, allude and hybridize, this place is playful without being subversive. For sure, it challenges the dress codes of Japan’s assembly line human capital, but one cannot get around the fact that this is a safe, consumerist space. You dye your hair in fluorescent hues and purchase Victorian-hemmed miniskirts; you highlight the visual exchange of postmodern capitalism[3].

In Shibuya we stop at Tokyu Hands, a perpetually crowded department store with an emphasis on do-it-yourself items such as hobby tools and stationery of the most subtle discriminations. Bewildered, I split with my family and debark into the streets. The streets are refreshingly do-it-yourself; it is still a very commercial landscape but there are no signs holding a linear passage. Paved and narrow cobbled roads wind through a hilly topography; underground venues flank vivacious shortcut descents. I stumble into what appears through the tinted glass to be a cyber spa. I walk past a posh counter and brush through rows of black cubicles. Some of the cubicles are unoccupied, and inside one is a computer, a flatscreen TV, and either an office chair or a tatami mat on an elevated floor. A couple walks past me; they hold a bento box and a bowl; they take off their shoes and shuffle inside. Further, there are “relaxation lounges”, showers, and places to buy food and rent media. I want to stay in a box for a few hours. The tinted glass also silences the noise, the din of too much music and screens and conversations and taxis and pamphlets. Some, I learn later, will stay much longer than that.

Friday, June 27

In the morning we join a half-day tour. The tour guide points out the men in suits outside the bus: they are the salarymen, she says. They are tired, she says, because they must squeeze themselves for an average commuting time of between 60 and 90 minutes[4]. They are tired, I think to myself, because they were out drinking the night before. Because the many dining and beverage spaces in the narrow-laned Akasaka entertainment district were still lively with loose-tied salarymen and their colleagues even after the last midnight metros. It was on such a train too that I lived the sardine shove of the Tokyo subway experience. Of course, these night owls represent a minority – a metropolitan area of 35 million can spare a few hundred thousand partying suits – but maybe these suits express something, some dreariness the body needs to party out.

Soon we are on the observation deck of Tokyo Tower, a TV and radio tower and Japan’s tallest artificial structure. I ask the tour guide why, as one gazes in all directions, there are only clusters of skyscrapers. This is planned; like several largest cities in China it is a preference to create several downtowns rather than one. Perhaps there is a planning graph that will show the parabolic arc of agglomeration benefits? Perhaps this explains why the design district we visited yesterday was highly valued yet only lightly built up. In any case, I should not think of transiting from Shibuya to Shinjuku as taking a train from one borough of Montreal to another; it is better to think of it as riding from downtown Toronto to downtown Vancouver, only that they are a few stops apart. Indeed the tour terminates at Ginza – the “5^th Avenue of Tokyo” – except that I saw Gucci-s and the Prada-s yesterday in Shinagawa, near where the little design companies were.

By this point the consumerism is starting to get to me. In each direction an air-conditioned space solely to sell. High-heeled eyes scanning for the next accessory. You want to shout for it all to come down, to talk, and touch.

It is a few hours later. My brother and I come out of the Edo-Tokyo Museum. We are in a neighborhood called Ryogoku which is a good distance to the northeast of where our travels have taken us thus far. Daniel (my brother) goes back to the hotel, leaving me to ambulate at my leisure. I take many photos because there is something of beauty here. I photograph the museum, an architectural trophy. Nearby is a tall school with open windows – one hears the children making contact in a gym or two inside. Along the sidewalk there are delicate white guardrails on one side and stone edges on the other. Beyond the stonework is meticulous landscaping with trees and bushes that fill and humble the space. Here is a tall office complex and a few workers walk out along the brick path. Here is an old, traditional house – you know with the corrugated black shingles and the sliding paper doors – that now acts as a fish market. A woman picks out the weeds that stick out between the bricks. Circling around I see that some of the school play-sounds have been coming from outside. It is true that this is a special place, but when I cross a main road the atmosphere remains.

I take more pictures.

But I cannot capture the feeling –

Is it the neighborhood shops in the old buildings. Potted plants are left in front. A bike too. Is it how the old is mixed with more recent, taller buildings, some of which echo a brick theme. Is it the rail line that cuts through, the intermittent strollers and bicycles in no rush and peaceful looking. Is it the overhead power lines and tree branches and clotheslines and multiple levels of public space – that provide a canopy reminiscent of a friendly concrete jungle I knew long ago. In Hong Kong – I was very young and the buildings and squares and parks and people and old open windows are what the meadow or the river or the barn must be for someone else. I decide that if I ever move to Tokyo, I would move here. Strange – to feel a sense of home so quickly – to imagine an alternate childhood and commuting back here – to know the feeling I would get living here, returning here after a day of work.

It is slightly past midnight and Shibuya is emptying itself of young people. This is discouraging; is the party someplace else? But Daniel and I spot two foreigners; following them the tide turns. We are led to a club district; a later crowd is streaming here.

My brother taxis home and I walk up and down wide and narrow lanes looking for a specific venue. A metal door opens to my side. It is not it, but I descend.

The venue is ginormous: cells on top of one another looking into a humungous central atrium. This, in combination with the collective dancing oriented towards the video jockeys, is exhilarating. But then I notice a significant number of single Caucasian males. The way they approach the situation is no different than in North America, but I do not like it here. Why is that?

Saturday, June 28

The next morning we are at the Tsukiji fish market. Once again, I bask in the courtesy all round me. It is strange, but I am beginning to smile – first. I become wanting to be polite, to re-give the gift, to uphold this unique civilization. I have been cleaning slight spills, and I did not appropriate the magazines from the Limousine Taxi that first day. You sense how much attention is put into the environment, and you do not wish to cause these workers pain.

I think back on the night before. Of the young Japanese in the club. Yes, the young women smoked and some had mean eyes; the young men were dressed typically cool, tattered with wild long hair. But when spoken to, the concern for social kindness would return; the security guard even apologized when asked for a hand stamp! Is this why I did not like the brash Americans, notwithstanding the history? Is this why it is so difficult for a foreigner to become accepted as a Tokyoite?

But this social system may also be why the Tokyo girls responded to the Western advances. Think of the beautiful young women standing in department stores, smiling and bowing like status curtains. The courtesy is mutual, but the hierarchy is evident. Often in the movies, the female lead is heroic for her undying love for a wayward lover; the husband neglects or cheats or abuses but may ultimately repent. The noble woman is to suffer silently as the wild man comes to his senses. I do not appreciate this – I do not like it in the hotel in the restaurant in the airport when the male client speaks curtly and the hostess the waitress the attendant must apologize and work efficiently head low. I do not like it that they must smile and say subordinating formalities when the person to whom they speak does not listen or respond with any positive acknowledgment. A Japanese woman may seek a Western partner for his enlightened principles, but women’s rights in the West exist because of strong, free-thinking women. It makes no difference if your man is Canadian if he is looking for a submissive Japanese and you continue to play that part. I do like a society where others are placed first, but such a society will be precarious in the company of nations that do not share that ideal[5].

Sunday, June 29

I am on the plane to Hong Kong. I awoke at five thirty in the morning, a good hour before the wake-up call. Having not been to Shinjuku I hurried down to the subway. There was not much time so I alighted off at the first Shinjuku station. But there were few souls on the streets at six. Far from the downtown I could only savor some old shops and a few taller offices. I would have to come back another time.

On the train back there were a few more people. They were trying to steal a few more minutes of sleep before their Sunday workday.

I select a movie to watch. It is about a young, debt-ridden gambler, a falling J-Pop idol and her fans, a businessman who hits the streets, and a failed comic. The first character evinces the immense pressure to succeed and the perpetuating guilt when one fails. The businessman, in a similar feeling, abandons society. What the film then portrays is the longing for acceptance and intimacy in each of the characters, who are willing to confer this to one another. But this willingness is not communicated; one’s love for another’s flourishing is rather understood as a judgement of who they should be.

The movie is called Flowers in the Mire, or something to that effect. I think of the numerous gardens and public parks in the city of the film, Tokyo. The architecture of this city may be somewhat dull and grey, but it is the unimposing backdrop for much valued greenery. I also think of the contemporary art spaces I visited in Ginza. Like the straight lines of the airport handrails and staff, the orderliness here is exciting in its potential for creative juxtaposition. While I often find (North American) contemporary art to be a nonsensical play of referential wit, here the photos and drawings felt beautiful. The photos illuminated shadow-spaces and with its theme drew together spaces of similar light. The drawings of so many flowers on a white sheet brought out the contemporaneous existence of ignored landscapes of minutiae. Carefully depicted flowers in a studio in Ginza, like a blazer-less customs official dancing about in Narita. The authorities were right; they had given us the right impression.

[1] Perhaps. Further discussion has made me less idealistic about the above points. Part of the reason why few people drive is that traffic can be very congested. Also, the scarcity of large trucks may be due to better planning – where large freight is unloaded at the edge of cities and then distributed in smaller parcels to central parts – rather than a case of a radically different economy. Still, commuters are able to leave their cars at home because of a highly developed public transit system, and little shops and eateries persist.

[2] My father was in Hong Kong during our Tokyo trip.

[3] This is not to write off postmodern culture and for instance the musical recontextualizations that will be heard in Harajuku’s backstreets; it is only that I was finding the visual commodity focus of Takeshita Street to be excessive.

[4] Actually, a recent article in Asahi Shinbun presented the average commuting time for Tokyo workers to be only 67 minutes.

[5] Nations have ideals but it is the individuals that must live or not live them out. Anything I write about a society is true only insofar as its individuals conform to it. There will be many exceptions.

8

2006-05-30T10:51:00.001-04:00

I prepare to leave through the door, then hesitate for I want to tell grandma that I am going out. She is in the washroom, so I yell inside, "I'm going out!"

Where!

-Outer space!

What! You can't go to outer space, you haven't had any training, you don't have the proper equipment.

-Of course I'm ready. All I need is my rocket ship. Besides, I can fly.

Hmmf! Fly! Ya right, you're gonna crash into the ground into a big poopbiscuit.

Laughing at us, I wander into the kitchen to get a glass of water. But I turn on my heels and yell back, "Aren't you making poop-biscuits now?"

Actually, according to Chen tradition, it is "poop-cakes." So I asked her if it was poop cakes or biscuits she was making.

Hmmf! I, for one, am done. But you, si beng (poop biscuit).

7

2006-04-28T23:56:00.002-04:00

holding the ball with the tip of the stick
the car light is white
car car!

6

2006-04-27T02:09:00.002-04:00

they were kicking down the pylons with their legs, and throwing them over fences. In grade three he had asked me in the van, very tenderly, if I could be on his team. when we got to the Laser Dome, I had teamed up with everyone else to blitz him.

5

2006-04-27T02:06:00.001-04:00

my waitress is joking with everyone.

4

2006-04-27T01:47:00.001-04:00

in the tumbling vacuum between Vendome and Villa, grandmother calls the Russian woman a big white pig

3

2006-04-25T16:57:00.001-04:00

it has been raining for four days
the sun is out now

2

2006-04-25T00:28:00.001-04:00

a freckled girl
in a yellow raincoat asks for the time
she leans to my side