Subway Vigilante

It feels a bit weird to admit this, but I actually prefer taking the bus over the MTR — Hong Kong’s clean, efficient metro system — because it keeps me sane. The bus might take twice as long, but at least I’m not shoved aside by people rushing into the trains at stops, or squished into a corner by the rush hour masses.

Every time I ride the MTR, I witness some kind of egregious behaviour that I wish I could punish with a slap across the face or a kick to the groin. I’m obviously not alone, because Mark Tjhung, an editor at the local edition of Time Out magazine, has fulfilled my daily dream: he became a subway vigilante. In a video that accompanies a column about rude behaviour on the MTR, Tjhung poses as an officer of the “MTR Police” and gives out tickets for infractions he sees while riding the trains (along with a yellow card, soccer-style, just for kicks).

Unfortunately, Tjhung is mistaken for a real MTR employee, and his first order of business is to deal with a pile of vomit somebody has left on the platform. The video is also somewhat disappointing — we get to vicariously chastise a kid who sits blithely in front of the hobbled old lady standing in front of him, and smirk as Tjhung gives a ticket to a teenager drinking bubble tea on the train, but we don’t have the satisfaction of seeing justice brought to the absolute worst human beings on the MTR: the door-rushers.

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Shek O in the Off Season

Shek O is a seaside village on the southeast corner of Hong Kong Island. It’s home to one of Hong Kong’s most popular beaches, which gives it a holiday atmosphere in the summer, when thousands of people flock there from across the city to sunbathe, swim, barbecue and drink. In the cooler months, though, it’s a lot quieter, and it returns to its wintertime existence as a picturesque hamlet of commuters and beach bums.

I don’t know much about the history of Shek O, but photos from the 1950s and 70s show that it was even smaller then that it is today, so there might not be a lot of history to know about. In some ways, it’s a typical Hong Kong village, with narrow lanes and small houses clustered around a temple dedicated to Tin Hau, the goddess of the sea. But the beachside location has given it an atmosphere that evokes coastal California: there’s a surf shop, a pizzeria that wouldn’t be out of place in Venice Beach and a laid-back beach bar that plays reggae music.

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A Day Around the Yamanote Line

Tokyo doesn’t really have a single discernible center. Most of the metropolis’ characteristic clusters of lighted advertisements and overloaded sidewalks — Akihabara, Ikebukuro, Shinagawa, Shinjuku, Shibuya, Ueno, and (at Tokyo Station) Ginza — are strung together along the circular Yamanote Line, a Japan Railways loop that calls at the city’s busiest nodes. This necklace of light and activity effectively constitutes Tokyo’s peculiarly polycentric core.

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(Subsidized) Cheap Eats in Hong Kong

Tai Po Market Cooked Food Centre. Photo by Tommy Ga-Ken Wan

The decor consists of handwritten menus and beer posters taped to the wall, the lighting is a harsh fluorescent glare and there’s a constant din from the kitchen. No matter: it’s Saturday night and the Bowrington Road Cooked Food Centre is packed.

At one table, a family shares a steamed fish and a bottle of wine. At another, a group of middle-aged men down large bottles of beer while playing a noisy game of dice. When one of the players notices some other diners observing the game, he holds up his beer and offers them a toast.

Tucked inside the top floors of neighbourhood wet markets, invisible from the street, Hong Kong’s cooked food centres are an odd cross between a shopping mall food court and a streetside dai pai dong. And despite their clinical-sounding names, many of them have become destinations for hearty, boisterous and affordable meals.

“Going to a cooked food centre is about the whole experience,” says Jason BonVivant, a food critic who writes for several local publications, as well as the food website OpenRice. (He insisted on being keeping his identity concealed to preserve his anonymity as a critic.) Though it’s “loud, not particularly clean and a bit uncomfortable,” the attraction is the combination of good food and a lively, informal atmosphere, he says.

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When the Streets Were Swept by Hand

In most cities of the developed world, mechanical street sweepers are a fact of life. Even New York’s carless commuters are fluent in strategies to use on “alternate-side parking days,” when the scheduled passing of a street sweeper forces all of a block’s parked cars to one side of the street. It’s easy to forget that, before these behemoth, motorized sponges began scrubbing the streets en masse, even the widest boulevards were cleaned by hand. This street sweeper in 1910 New York would have his work cut out for him after his beat — Fifth Avenue — was considerably widened that year. Although the mechanical sweeper had debuted in 1840s Manchester, it took nearly a century to catch on almost everywhere else.

Of course, street cleaners — some wielding handmade brooms — are a common sight in the poorer countries of the so-called Global South. But old photos of individual sweepers toiling to keep dry the rain-soaked streets of currently presently, hypermodern Tokyo come as a bit of a shock. The photo above, from the collection of the Dutch Naational Archief, is dated “circa 1930,” though some commenters think it might have been taken even later, perhaps in the immediate postwar era. Almost nothing here is recognizable as contemporary Tokyo — except maybe the electronics store in the background. Many of the street sweepers are wearing conical hats typical of agricultural field laborers, and some are even sporting a mino, a traditional form of raincoat made from straw.

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Small-Town Shanghai: Who’s Left?

You don’t have to wander too far from Shanghai to find interesting small towns, that is, ones that have not converted into tourist villages of Disneyland proportions.

An hour-long bus ride from Longyang metro stop on Line 2, deep into Pudong, we found ourselves in the town of Dayuan in Nanhui.

Towns in China have developed with a banal similarity common in suburban America. The same fading welcome signboards, the same layout of buildings, shops and houses populate next to the highway – all of it, engulfed in swirling road dust. There is nothing particularly outstanding about Dayuan town but there was plenty to explore once you push into the interior.

The dynamic of urban and suburban sprawl applies aptly when you compare metropolitan Shanghai and suburban towns like Dayuan. In the town’s older neighborhoods, you see a mix of elderly and children with a conspicuous absence of the robust working age group of 18 to 25 year olds. The young and mobile have migrated to the cities in search of more interesting work and that bit of excitement.

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Writing on the Streets

It was late on a chilly March afternoon as I wandered through a small plaza near Houhai Lake in Beijing. The air was struggling to stay above freezing and I shivered in my spring jacket. Looking down, I noticed some Chinese characters drawn in water on the plaza’s grey paving stones. Whoever drew them was long gone; the cool air had kept them from evaporating.

I’d heard about water calligraphy before, but this was the first time I had seen it for myself. It’s a form of art that draws beauty from the ephemeral: like spoken words, these characters vanish into the air, their meaning lost to time and memory. It also says something about the futility of control. No matter how much you master your technique, no matter how well you squeeze these words into the form you want them to take, you are left with the same empty patch of stone you started with.

I’ve never heard of anyone doing water calligraphy in Hong Kong. For some reason, people here are much more inhibited in the way they use public space. Go to an open space in any given Chinese city and you’ll see a far greater range of activities than in a comparable place in Hong Kong. Go to Shenzhen’s Civic Square on a nice Sunday afternoon, for instance, and you’ll find people driving electric race cars, playing instruments, flying kites, riding bikes, doing water calligraphy, singing and dancing. There’s irony in the fact that people behave far more exuberantly in an authoritarian state than in an ostensibly free city.

That said, I did come across something in Hong Kong that reminded me of water calligraphy. In Man Ming Lane, just behind Exit C of the Yau Ma Tei MTR station, someone used white chalk to write a lengthy screed on the redbrick sidewalk. I saw it late one night and, since I live only 15 minutes away by foot, I returned the next day to photograph it. But most of the chalk had already been worn off and it was impossible to read most of what had been written.

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Macau Art Space: Ox Warehouse

Tucked away next to the slopes of the Colina de Mong-Há, halfway between the dog-racing track and the Red Market, the Ox Warehouse doesn’t call much attention to itself. But inside the slightly ramshackle quarters of this former cattle depot is one of the avant-garde spaces that are nurturing the arts in Macau.

Frank Lei Loi-fan has run the space since it opened in 2003. “At the time there wasn’t much going on,” he says. Few organizations existed to support Macau artists and not many artists were working full-time, especially not in the realm of contemporary art. So the Ox Warehouse began organizing exchanges between Macau and overseas artists. “Before, the Portuguese just had official galleries in the centre of town that showed artists who weren’t local,” he says. “Now we see that young people want to organize their own activities, ones that are closer to our local culture in Macau. Macau has a lot of people who like to take photos or to draw, but they needed to branch out and learn to absorb knowledge and experience from others.”

Macau’s art scene has always been fluid, with many artists coming from Portugal and other European countries, while local Chinese artists leave Macau to study overseas or on the mainland. After studying journalism, Lei moved to France, where he studied film and photography. When he returned, he first resisted joining an arts organization. “There’s too many cultural associations in Macau and they exist only to ask for money,” he says. But he realized that, without something to support local talent, Macau’s art scene would never develop.

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Two Cities’ Scale Models

Set in the seclusion of Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, well inside the largest of New York’s outer boroughs, the Queens Museum of Art doesn’t attract the same blockbuster number of international visitors as the megamuseums and power galleries of Manhattan. That hardly means it fails to draw from cosmopolitan sources — in a borough as diverse as Queens, appealing to the local population means displaying art that speaks to many points of origin. But the museum is best known for a work of very local significance: the Panorama of the City of New York, a vast scale model of the five boroughs built on Robert Moses’ orders for the 1964 World’s Fair.

Despite an occasional lack of updates — including one twenty-some year gap — the Panorama has been kept fairly timely. Though the last comprehensive upgrade took place in 1992, sponsors can now adopt buildings and ensure the accuracy of a given plot on the map. There are some exceptions where updates are off limits; the museum preferred the World Trade Center towers remain standing rather than represent Ground Zero (they will be replaced when the new site’s new towers are completed). But by and large, the model is a decent representation of the city — precise enough to use for mapping geodata.

Last year, urban planner and artist Damon Rich did just that, taking advantage of the Panorama to detail the extent of home foreclosures in New York. Reasoning that, for many New Yorkers, the foreclosure crisis appeared to be something taking place in far-flung Sunbelt suburbs, his aim was to bring the extent of the national real estate debacle home to a city that didn’t yet seem to realize the problem had reached its front stoop.

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Mosque Street’s Other Name

In contrast to the bland apartment buildings on its south side, the northern side of Mosque Street is lined by a crumbling stone wall and vegetation spilling over from the lush grounds of the Jamia Mosque. If you peek over the wall, there’s a nice view of the mosque, which is the oldest in Hong Kong. It’s a surprisingly rustic scene in the Central Mid-Levels, a neighbourhood that has obliterated most traces of its 170-year history.

Another throwback is Mosque Street’s name. Though perfectly straightforward in English, it’s a lot more complicated in Chinese. While the proper standard Chinese name for mosque is 清真寺 (ching tsam tsi), or回教廟 (wui gaau miu) in Cantonese, Mosque Street’s Chinese name uses the expression 摩羅廟 (mo lo miu), which derives from mo lo cha, an old and derogatory term for South Asians.

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Dusk in Dongzhimen

Three subway lines, two major expressways, and countless buses converge on Dongzhimen, at the northeastern corner of Beijing’s historic core. At the end of the workday, that makes this transfer point one of the busiest in the city, a whirlwind of streaming throngs.

Beijingers usually point their tastebuds toward Dongzhimen to visit Guijie, one of the Chinese capital’s most popular dining destinations, which is not far away. On sweaty summer days, though, the crowds rushing through Dongzhimen aren’t usually in the mood for that street’s famous Mongolian hot pot. Nor do the marble-clad, air-conditioned malls nearby seem to attract many seeking temporarily relief from the heat. The refreshment of choice is, instead, fresh fruit, and street carts converge on the area toward dusk to provide, dishing out heaps of the city’s famously excellent watermelon and other juicy snacks to homebound commuters.

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The Gutting of Gulou

The view from Beijing’s Gulou, or Drum Tower, is dominated by the labyrinth of threadlike lanes — the city’s famous hutongs — spreading in all directions, filling in the superblocks formed by the city’s broad, rectilinear avenues. Gulou, built in the 13th century by the Mongol Yuan dynasty, is one of Beijing’s most popular — if not immediately recognizable — attractions, drawing thousands of visitors each year. The resulting crush of tour buses making their way into the drowsy, low-slung square outside the landmark may seem incongruous with the humble hutongs, but the area profits immensely. The square is lined with bars popular with both Beijingers and the Lonely Planet set, and rickshaw tours of the environs take off in all directions.

As a result, the neighborhood, also known as Gulou, has gentrified just enough to make it a good example of how the hutongs might prosper if preserved. Such slow, organic improvements to city life don’t seem to have impressed local government officials, though. The entire Gulou area is set to be demolished and “restored” with historicist buildings that will, allegedly, evoke the look and feel of Ming-era Beijing. This facelift will be for the supposed benefit of tourists alone; the neighborhood’s businesses will be purged, and its residents moved elsewhere.

The widespread eradication of Beijing’s hutongs has been well-documented for several years, and criticized as vehemently by locals as outsiders. Civil society opposition to the demolitions is now formally organized; in 2003, opponents of this form of destructive form of urban renewal founded the Beijing Cultural Heritage Protection Center. But mere attempts to gain detailed information about the government’s plans for Gulou have proven as fruitless as any to limit or stop the neighborhood’s destruction.

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Rethinking Urban Renewal in Hong Kong

This is a feature story that was originally published in the July 2010 edition of Muse magazine. The photos accompanying this article were taken around the Graham Street Market in Central.

Standing in the soggy heat of a late spring afternoon, Katty Law reflected on the irony that it took a movie a mere two months to do what she has been fighting to achieve for two years. “We’ve been talking about Wing Lee Street for so long,” she said, looking up at a rusted balcony on this sleepy street in Sheung Wan. “But we couldn’t convince the government to save the whole street.”

That was before the makers of Echoes of the Rainbow picked the street — with its single row of tong laus built just before and after World War II — as the perfect backdrop for their weepy drama about a shoemaker’s family in 1960s Hong Kong. After the movie won a prize at the Berlin Film Festival, dozens of photographers, schoolchildren and sightseers started visiting the narrow street, recording the details of an urban scene that has become nearly extinct in Hong Kong. As the crowd of pilgrims grew, heritage advocates raised their voices and a group of architects, engineers and urban planners joined in, urging the URA to preserve all of the buildings on Wing Lee Street.

Government officials were listening. In a surprise announcement, the Secretary for Development, Carrie Lam, announced that Wing Lee Street would be withdrawn from the urban renewal site. For Law, co-founder of the Central and Western District Concern Group, the announcement was only a temporary respite from the overall battle to persuade the government to rethink its entire approach to urban design. Her aim is to get the government to encourage development that is sensitive to the environment, that enhances the city’s streetlife and sense of community and that respects Hong Kong’s history and heritage. “Right now, developers can do whatever they want, and they’re facilitated by the government. We need planning controls,” she said.

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Tai Ping Shan

In Cantonese, Tai Ping Shan — Peace Mountain — refers to Victoria Peak, Hong Kong’s most exclusive address. But it’s also the name of a much less illustrious street in Sheung Wan. At the end of the 19th century, new migrants kept pouring into Hong Kong from mainland China, but the colonial goverment’s policy of segregation forced Chinese residents into the city’s least salubrious quarters.

Tai Ping Shan Street was the most squalid and overcrowded of them all. In the spring of 1894, the bubonic plague spread through the street’s tenements, killing more than 2,500 people by the end of the year. After the outbreak, the colonial government razed the neighbourhood, replacing part of it with Blake Garden, one of Hong Kong’s first public parks.

Today, Tai Ping Shan Street is ringed by the traffic-thronged, high-rise streets of central Hong Kong, but it remains a mostly low-rise area. It’s one of the sleepier parts of the city, too, especially on a Sunday, when most of the small workshops in the area are closed for business. Stroll down the street and the small lanes leading off it and you’ll spot some fine details typical of postwar Hong Kong life and architecture: metal shutters with floral cut-outs, old tin mailboxes, outdoor work and storage areas.

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