Life in a Cage

Click on the image above to watch an audio slideshow

I didn’t even notice the smell until my friend Will McCallum pointed it out — I was too busy contemplating what it would be like to spend my nights in a cage set inside a one-room apartment with ten other men (not to mention the occasional cockroach). But the smell, when I finally paid attention, was pretty terrible. The apartment had two grimy bathrooms, one with a squat toilet and one with a sit toilet, and the smell of shit and stale sweat wafted through the whole place. We were in Tai Kok Tsui, a gritty neighbourhood just a few minutes away from one of Mongkok’s glossier shopping malls, covering a press conference by the Society for Community Organization, a non-government group that is working to eliminate substandard housing in Hong Kong.

Cage homes have been around for a long time. They first emerged after World War II when hundreds of thousands of refugees from mainland China arrived in Hong Kong. Today, there are still 53,200 people living in cage and cubicle homes. (Cubicle homes are apartments that are subdivided into tiny rooms separated only by flimsy plywood walls.) Some of these are licenced and regulated by the government, but housing activists say that thousands more people, including single-parent families, refugees and recent immigrants, live in illegal cage and cubicle homes where conditions are particularly dire. At a housing-rights protest we attended last October, we met women who lived with their children in vermin-infested cubicles less than 100 square feet in size.

Some people live in cages and cubicles because they are the waiting list for public housing; others choose to live there because they are often centrally-located. Some are refugees or undocumented immigrants who cannot afford a proper apartment and who are not eligible for government housing. I get the sense that inertia had something to do with it, too: when you live in a cage home, the toll on your health and mental well-being is such that it becomes hard to save up enough to leave. Most of the men in the apartment we visited did not work, and they spent most of their meagre welfare allowances on rent, which can be more than HK$1,000 per cage. The apartment we visited in Tai Kok Tsui had eleven cages. In that neighbourhood, a one-room apartment like that would rent for no more than $4,000 or $5,000 per month. You do the math — that’s a lot of profit for the landlord.

Along with another friend, Zoe Li, Will and I made a brief audio slideshow about cage homes. It was our first attempt at creating something like this, and the audio mixing is a bit rough, but I hope it gives you more of an idea about the underbelly of Hong Kong’s housing situation.

Smoke Break

Audi carpark, Avenue Road, Toronto

Laundry Day in Shek Kip Mei

In the Shek Kip Mei Estate, Kowloon, Hong Kong

Tram Line to the Past

One of my favourite Hong Kong experiences is the tram ride along the north shore of Hong Kong Island. Although I’ve only done the full trip once — it’s a long way from Kennedy Town to Shau Kei Wan — I often take the tram for shorter journeys. There’s something about the wind in my face, the rattling of the old wooden interior and the slow parade through crowded streets that makes it much more rewarding than the bus or MTR.

It’s also a good way to get in touch with one of the few things about Hong Kong that has remained mostly unchanged in 100 years. These photos, taken in the 1950s and collected by the guys at Batgung, show a Hong Kong that is virtually unrecognizable: ornate and low-rise, with elegantly arcaded sidewalks. What links this vanished city to the present are the slow, rumbling trams, most of which are still in service today (albeit covered with advertisements instead of the classic green paint).

The Mohawk Skyline

For reasons that don’t quite take a doctorate in sociology to fathom, employment and ethnicity are often interrelated, especially when it comes to certain service-sector trades. Haitians dominate the taxi industry in Montreal; Greeks are well-represented in the ranks of Western Canadian pizzeria owners; and the Hui have a lock on the sale of barbecued brochettes in the streets of Beijing. Another interesting example? Mohawk high-steel workers.

In High Steel, a 1965 documentary short by Don Owen, we are introduced to the men who travelled between Kahnawake, a Mohawk town in the Montreal suburbs, and New York, where they arduously pieced together the city’s iconic skyscrapers. By then, high steel construction was a Mohawk speciality, dating back to 1886, when the Dominion Bridge Company built a railroad bridge over the St. Lawrence River. In order to pass through Kahnawake, the bridge company agreed to hire local Mohawks for the project, and a generation of men was trained in the delicate act of lifting heavy steel on high and narrow structures.

That experience was passed down through the generations. Beginning in the mid-1920s, so many Mohawks moved to New York, they formed their own small neighbourhood in Gowanus, a working-class part of Brooklyn, recreating the community life they had known in Kahnawake.

Mohawks lived in other cities, too, working wherever their skills were in demand. In 1924 or ’25, however, the United States tightened restrictions on immigration, and native people were often lumped into the same undesirable category as Asians, making it harder for them to cross from Canada into the United States. In 1926, one Kahnawake man, Paul Diabo, was working on the Ben Franklin Bridge in Philadelphia, where he lived with his wife Louise. Police arrested them for working without papers and they were ordered deported to Canada. In response, Diabo filed an injunction. His lawyer argued that, as a Mohawk, he was entitled to free movement between Canada and the United States. He was deported anyway, but Diabo persisted, returning to the United States to contest his deportation. This time he won, establishing an important precedent for First Nations people.

All of this has been very well-documented but, somehow, the Mohawk contribution to cities like Montreal and New York remains an historical footnote. In Montreal, Kahnawake sits on the fringes of the city’s imagination, seen mainly as a place to buy cheap booze and cigarettes. The same is probably true in the United States. How often, I wonder, does this Mohawk history come to mind when people gaze at the bridges and skyscrapers of Montreal, Philadelphia and New York?

Zzzzzs in the Moonlight