Chungking Mansions

Chunking Mansions. Photo by Sebastian Lewis

One of the first things I noticed upon arriving in Hong Kong was a post-SARS drive to clean up the city’s image. The city seems cleaner than on my last visit. Trash cans are everywhere. Infrared-activated hand-cleaning machines shoot out antiseptic spray every hundred feet. Posters warn of HK$1,200 fines for spitting and littering.

In a way this is unfortunate. One of the things I like about Hong Kong is that it’s not Singapore. There’s something reassuring about a city with a bit of grit and disorder.

Luckily, one place still exists that symbolizes this grit: the Chungking Mansions. This leprous rat-infested slum is an institution. It was raised to legendary status as the scene of shady drug deals in the movie Chungking Express. Anyone who spends time there walks off with a certain filthy stigma.

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The Outdoor Staircase

Nobody really knows why outdoor staircases became so ubiquitous in Montreal. Various explanations have been put forth by various people, but the best one seems to be that the staircases gained popularity when expediency met architectural tradition: they’re cheap and they work particularly well with the plex. Perhaps one of our readers can venture a more elaborate theory.

“I’m a Nigga Forever”

“I’m a nigga forever,” said Yasser, introducing himself. He looked more like a buff Arab in a homeboy costume: big jeans, Nike trainers, and a revolver in his back pocket. Yasser was incongruous with the provincial city of Rada, Yemen. Most people around him were scrawny men in the traditional chequered keffiyah, proudly wearing dangling jambiyaa knives as a crotch-level accessory.

Getting to this town had been a hassle. The last police checkpoint involved a 20-minute interrogation in Arabic, to which I replied with baffled shrugs. I don’t think they were supposed to let me through, but they didn’t really know how to send me back. Yemen is not used to independent travelers. When I arrived in town, I had nothing but a two-line description in my guidebook to go from, but heaved a sigh of relief when I found a local hotel. I was far from the relative comforts of the capital, Sana’a. My 20-word vocabulary in Arabic, consisting mostly of words like “hummus” and “kebab”, wasn’t getting me very far with the locals. It was nice to come across a local English-speaker at a local juice bar.

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Montréal Architecture (No.5)

La Maison de l’arbre

During those brilliantly sunny but freezing cold Montréal winter days, there is still a way to appreciate the sun’s rays. When I was a student at McGill, I would sit in the south-west facing window in the entrance hallway of the Blackader-Lauterman Library. The sun would stream in and I would bask in the light of this otherwise uninteresting passage. I’d sit on the window’s sill and feel my back absorb the orange-yellow solar heat. Climbing out of my hole into these moments of mid-winter warmth was the closest I would come to a holiday in the south.

I always find myself scouting out cafés that have sunny windows for those needed vitamin D breaks. I order café au lait and break a sweat under the combined heat of the coffee and sun whilst dreaming about the stifling humidity of Montréal summers and the joy of walking in T-shirt, shorts and sandals at midnight.

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A Landmark Leaves the Main

Browing $1 books during the Main Madness street fair

Yesterday, a St. Laurent Blvd. institution began a new life on St. Viateur St. The bookstore S.W. Welch, which for 15 years has been a treasure trove of used English books on the Main, has moved to Mile End, pushed north, its owner says, by incessant construction and rising rents.

Work crews began digging up St. Laurent last year for an ambitious renovation project. The century-old water pipes underneath the street are now being replaced and, later this year, sidewalks will be widened, allowing for more trees, bicycle parking and street furniture. In the meantime, however, St. Laurent is a hassle to navigate, pushing customers away.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, S.W. Welch’s landlord announced earlier this year that he would raise the store’s rent from $2,500 to $3,000 per month. “We decided it wasn’t worth the hassle,” said Stephen Welch, the store’s owner. He closed shop earlier this month.

Last weekend, though, Welch and his family opened their old store for one last hurrah: three days of $1 books. As usual, Welch was found sitting behind the counter in the front corner of the store on Friday, greeting customers. He was accompanied by his son Patrick, 17, and their cat, Khan.

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Keefer Rooms

Victoria Regina vs. Technicolor Hippies

“My grandfather was a barber to the British,” says this umpteenth-generation barber in Dalhousie, India

In India, Victorian England is alive and well with all its stuffy floweriness and chastity belts. Picture yourself in a café painted in sombre greens. A Brahmin gentleman at the table next to yours takes Queen & Lion brand snuff out of an ancient-looking tin cylinder. A hand-painted sign on the wall reads “TIFFIN - 3:00.” Dusty black and white portraits of all the shop owners and their extended family clog the walls, hung at 45 degree angles. Underpaid Dickensian kids scurry about on all fours cleaning the floor with rags. Other higher-caste kids hurtle around refilling your glass with dysenteric water. If they’re not quick enough, their fat employers yell and slap them around.

The Brahmin gentleman remains indifferent to the bustle around him. He sits there, head raised, prattling on about the degeneracy of the irreligious and the filthiness of the lower-class plebes (who, ironically, do all the washing up around him). Because of his Christian education at private Anglo-Indian institutions in the Himalayas, he can recite Wordsworth couplets effortlessly and peppers his speech with distorted anachronistic clichés: “Actually, my darling sir, to perform such an action would be as inauspicious as carrying coal to Newcastle.”

To an outsider living in the 21st century, this aspect of India seems like some exotic Bollywood parody of Victorian England. To the actors it is not a joke. It is quite real. But then there are all the hippies…

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Making Space in Earth’s Most Crowded Place

Like a feverish dream, Mongkok comes alive at night. Thick crowds grow thicker with the onset of dusk, as the glow of giant billboards consumes its neighbourhoods. Flickering neon bathes the narrow streets in shades of scarlet and ochre. It’s like the Hong Kong you’ve always imagined.

Mongkok is located in Kowloon, the earthier cousin to the more famous Hong Kong Island. Mongkok’s name—Wong Gok in Cantonese—means “busy place” and really, there couldn’t be a more apt description. This is Hong Kong boiled down to its most energetic, narcissistic and astounding self. Unsurprisingly, given the crowds on the streets, this is often said to be the most densely-populated area on earth. The Yau Tsim Mong District, of which Mongkok is a part, hosts 300,000 residents in an area of just 2.5 square miles.

Just sixty years ago, though, Mongkok was a low-rise district on the outskirts of Kowloon. It was the massive influx of refugees from mainland China after 1949 that transformed Mongkok into a crossroads of commerce, regional transportation and everyday neighbourhood life. Now, tens of thousands of people flock to the area’s markets, shops and offices every day. More than 20,000 people spill out of the Mongkok subway station daily—and tens of thousands more come by bus, taxi and foot. In evenings and on weekends, 16,000 people stroll down the pedestrian-only Sai Yeung Choi Street every hour.

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Montreal Pulls an All-Nighter

It has started to fade from memory, but I swear my sleep schedule is still screwed up. Two weeks ago, Montreal hosted its fourth annual Nuit Blanche, an all-night festival dedicated to arts and culture. Inspired by the original Nuit Blanche in Paris, Montreal has added its own wintry twist, combining it with the Montreal High Lights Festival, a week-long celebration of food, light and dance that seems like nothing more than an excuse to go out and party in the middle of winter.

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Quebec City Tour #5: Saint Sauveur

Saint Sauveur, like neighbouring Saint Roch, has a tangible working class past, but this is where similarities end. Saint-Roch is in the throes of gentrification and is rapidly becoming a new downtown. Saint-Sauveur has retained its modest rundown feel, but is one of the few places attracting a noticeable immigrant presence in lilywhite Quebec City. This is the neighbourhood to hit for asian markets, african shops, and latino grocers. They’re right there in between the old-school Roi de la patate, Au Royaume de la Tarte, and Tabagie de l’ouvrier.

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Toronto 1995

These photos are from my first, and so far last, trip to Canada. I actually don’t know much about what they are depicting—so I leave the commenting to you. It’s fascinating though how a crappy scanner, black and white film and the way people are dressed make 1995 feel like ancient history.

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Polaroid Signage

Small Press

How Vancouver Deals With Postering

Some people find them unsightly, but regular readers know that I consider posters to be a vital part of a city’s cultural and community life. Without posters, musicians, community groups and political activists would have no effective way of getting their word out. To put it simply, this is about freedom of speech: there is no reason why large companies should have the right to dominate the public realm with advertising when individuals and small, local organizations cannot use the same venue to make themselves heard.

Many cities try to repress posters, but there are others that have chosen a more reasonable path. In Vancouver, lampposts across the city are covered in a special cast to which anyone can legally staple a poster. The posters are cleared by a city employee every week. In many parts of town, even larger poster kiosks serve as neighbourhood hubs where people gather to look at ads for apartments, furniture, events and shows. One of these, on Bute Street in the West End, is a favourite medium of communication for the neighbourhood’s young Korean and Japanese students.

This is Where You Lived in 2006

New condo tower in fast-growing downtown Vancouver

The first round of data from Canada’s 2006 census was released yesterday morning; we now have an accurate update of city population trends across the country. (We’ll still have to wait for the juicier data on income, education, language, race, and immigration, however. They will be released at regular intervals over the next year.) Are there any surprises? No, not really. The cities we already knew were growing are indeed growing; the cities we already knew were stagnating or declining are doing just that, too. But, as always, the real story is in the details.

First, the broad sweep of things: Canada as a whole grew by 5.4 percent between 2001 and 2006, making it the fastest-growing G8 country. (By comparison, the United States grew by 5 percent, Japan grew by just 0.4 percent and Germany didn’t grow at all.) What makes this even more interesting is that two-thirds of Canada’s population growth comes from immigration; in the more fertile United States, most of it comes from natural increase.

Within the country, Toronto’s suburbs and exurbs are growing like crazy, as is almost every town and city in Alberta. Brampton, a suburb of Toronto, grew by a remarkable 33.3 percent as its population rose from 325,428 to 433,806. (Future data releases will probably reveal that most of this growth comes from international migration—from South Asia in particular.) That’s nothing compared to Okotoks, however: the town just south of Calgary posted a growth rate of 46.7 percent. Greater Calgary as a whole, meanwhile, grew by 13.4 percent, its population rocketing to nearly 1,100,000. Ottawa, watch out!

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