Tau Yat Piu! Throw a Vote!

It’s election time in Hong Kong. Today, hundreds of thousands of people headed to the polls to determine the makeup of the Legislative Council, a territorial legislature that meets in an old court building marked by a statue of Themis, the Greek goddess of justice. Half of the council’s 60 members represent geographical constituencies and are elected directly by the public, while the rest are elected by members of “functional constituencies” such as law, social welfare and the arts.

A cynical interpretation of Hong Kong’s electoral system would be to dismiss it as an ersatz democracy designed to shore up the power of Hong Kong’s establishment and maintain the territory’s status quo, while giving people the illusion of having a say. But, for all its flaws, I’m willing to subscribe to a most optimistic view, which is that this is a very much a nascent democracy, which I think is pretty remarkable when you consider the context in which it exists. For all the efforts Beijing and its supporters have made to influence the way that Hong Kongers think and vote, 60 percent of the popularly-elected seats in the 2004 Legislative Council election were won by pro-democrats.

Here, perhaps more than in many more established democracies, election time is messy, emotional and pervasive. I love elections because they bring a process that is normally aloof and unseen right down into the streets. In Montreal, there seems to be an election or by-election every year, be it of the federal, provincial or municipal variety. Posters and advertisements are ubiquitous but, as passionate as people there are about politics, you never quite get the feeling that there is anything particularly gritty or grassroots going on.

There’s no shortage of that here, where vast slates of candidates compete intensely for the few seats available. Vans with loudspeakers mounted on the roof drive around town blasting warbly messages in support of one party or another. Candidates and other well-known politicians stand on neighbourhood streetcorners, pageant-style sashes strung across their torsos, where they attempt to glad-hand onto anyone who walks by. Election posters festoon shops, buildings and minibus windows.

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Stumbling Blocks

Pierres d’achoppement de Max et Meta Seta Strauss, morts à Auschwitz en 1942

« Pierre d’achoppement » en français, Stolperstein en allemand, stumbling blocks en anglais, tel est le nom d’un projet européen qui vise à placer un « pavé de la mémoire » devant l’entrée du dernier lieu de résidence des victimes du nazisme. Initié par l’artiste allemand Gunter Demnig en 1993, ce projet a pour but de ne pas faire tomber dans l’oubli les personnes mortes en déportation au cours de la Seconde guerre mondiale. Comme le dit Miriam Gillis-Carlebach, la fille du dernier rabbin de Hambourg, ”The stumbling blocks become reminders and voice; they call out, ‘Every human being has a name‘”.

La première pierre a été posée de manière illégale en 1997 à Berlin. Aujourd’hui, plus de 13 000 pierres d’achoppement ont été posées légalement dans plus de 300 lieux, en Allemagne, en Autriche, en Hongrie et aux Pays-Bas. La plaque en laiton comporte toujours les mêmes indications : tout d’abord « Ici habitait » (« Hier wohnte » en allemand, ou plus rarement « Hier arbeitete », c’est-à-dire « Ici travaillait »), suivi du nom, la date de naissance et la date et du lieu de décès de la personne déportée. D’un coût unitaire de 95€, ces pavés sont posés à la demande d’un membre de la famille du déporté, d’associations, … Ces pierres sont installées par Gunter Demnig lui-même qui a conscience de ne pas pouvoir créer six millions de pierres d’achoppement mais qui refuse de fabriquer ces pierres de façon industrielle puisqu’il souhaite avant tout amorcer une réflexion.

Ce projet, qui a suscité la controverse, pose en effet un certain nombre de questions. Tout d’abord, on peut être étonné de la simplicité du projet : un pavé est posé au même niveau que le trottoir, seule la couleur différencie les pierres d’achoppement. Si les riverains des pierres d’achoppement sont invités à les nettoyer régulièrement, ce n’est pas toujours le cas. Les pavés de mémoire passent donc le plus souvent inaperçus : les personnes que j’ai rencontrés ne les avaient pas remarqués, n’arrivaient pas à lire en raison de la trop petite taille (il s’agit d’un carré de 10 cm sur 10 cm).

Plus préoccupant encore, et, à mon avis, l’endroit où ces pavés sont disposés : le sol. Les passants semblent marcher sur ces pavés dans l’indifférence générale. Le fait que les noms soient foulés toute la journée a d’ailleurs constitué une des plus vives critiques émanant de la communauté juive de Krefeld (Allemagne) – un compromis a par la suite été trouvé entre les familles des victimes, la municipalité et les propriétaires des maisons qui ne souhaitaient pas se souvenir chaque jour des atrocités commises par les nazis au cours de la Seconde guerre mondiale.

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Windows

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Eleven Storeys

Nathan Road, Yau Ma Tei, Kowloon

Earth to Mouth

For all the times I went to buy groceries at Montreal’s Chinese supermarkets, it never once occurred to me that much of the food I was buying was in fact locally-produced. Then I saw Yung Chang’s short documentary, Earth to Mouth, which my friend Cedric screened last year in a fifth-floor room in Chinatown. In his disarmingly quiet way, Chang introduces us to Wing Fong Farm, just outside Toronto, which grows the produce sold and consumed in the city’s big Chinese malls and supermarkets. In a particularly inspired scene near the beginning of the film, the farm’s 73-year-old matriarch, Lau King Fai, introduces us to some of the produce she grows, like gai lan (best prepared with smashed ginger and stir-fried with wine and salt) and go lai choi (stir-fry with vinegar and serve with oyster sauce).

As you would expect from someone who made Up the Yangtze, which put a defiantly human face on a massive technological achievement, Yung Chang has made a film that is more about the people who run Wing Fong Farm than it is about the food they produce. We learn about Lau’s path from Changsha to Guangzhou, and then, late in life, to rural Ontario, where she slipped quietly into the role of a farmer after a lifetime spent in cities. She rises at dawn each day, putting in long hours overseeing the farm’s operations, but it is the six Mexican workers she and her son employ who do the real grunt work. Watching the interaction between the farm’s Chinese owners and their Mexican employees is one of the things that makes Earth to Mouth so fascinating: this is the ordinary, everyday face of globalization.

“Where We Can Find Our Family”

“Huwag Manigarilyo” is not what you would expect to find written on an official banner in Hong Kong, but that’s exactly the message that greets visitors to Victoria Park in Causeway Bay, where Indonesian and Tagalog join Chinese and English on the park’s official signage, such as the banners meant to remind park-goers that smoking is prohibited.

The quadrilingual signs are an indication of the thousands of Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers who descend on the park each Sunday, when they meet with friends and compatriots in what might be best described as a giant communal picnic. Every open space in the park is thronged with women eager to make the most of their only day off. The same is true in nearly every major public space in Hong Kong: in Central, where an especially large number of Filipina women gather in the streets and plazas around Statue Square; in Tsim Sha Tsui, where Malay, Indonesian and South Asian women flock to Kowloon Park; and in many smaller parks throughout the city.

Domestic workers from Southeast Asia first arrived in Hong Kong in the 1970s, at a time when its middle class was growing and countries such as the Philippines faced particularly tough economic times. Since then, the population has swelled from several thousands workers to nearly 250,000, the vast majority of them women. For most of the week, they remain relatively unseen, living and working with their employers, who play them a minimum wage of $3,580 per month. On Sunday, however, the true bulk of Hong Kong’s domestic worker population becomes evident.

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