North Americans and Europeans have an almost natural aversion to Modernist housing projects. They’re very much maligned in our popular culture, often for good reason: generations of official neglect and social marginalization have left many of them in a desperate state. In Hong Kong, though, a large chunk of the population lives in housing estates, either upscale and privately-built or more modest and publicly-funded, and in most cases they are well-appointed, busy and perfectly pleasant.
Tung Tau Estate is one such example. Walking from Kowloon City to San Ko Kong, about 10 minutes away by foot, I passed through Tung Tau, a large public housing project built in the 1970s. I made my entrance through a flight of stairs into a sunken garden, where I came across a large group of poh poh — old women — sitting around a playground, chatting. As we passed through the rest estate, I noticed that everything was well-maintained, all of the public spaces were well-used and there was no shortage of amenities, including supermarkets and restaurants.
For years, the failure of many housing projects in the United States, Great Britain and France has been blamed on design. Their Corbusier-inspired towers-in-the-park, large open spaces and disruption of the surrounding urban fabric have all been blamed for encouraging social dysfunction. While Hong Kong is not immune to those problems — one particularly massive and isolated housing estate, Tin Shui Wai, has been dubbled the “city of sadness” for its high rates of unemployment, social isolation and suicide — most of its housing estates seem to work just as they should.
For some reason, I’d never really considered how and where Hong Kong’s taxicabs are plastered with advertising, so I was somewhat amused to wander into a group of guys doing just that in an out-of-the-way part of the North Point waterfront.
High Street isn’t much of a high street. It’s actually a narrow sidestreet in the Hong Kong neighbourhood of Sai Ying Pun, which was first established in the mid-nineteenth century, shortly after the British took control of Hong Kong Island. Despite the steep hillside location, streets here were laid out in a tight grid, with First, Second, Third and High streets climbing up from Queen’s Road. They were intersected by Western, Centre and Eastern streets.
In this case, Centre Street was the true high street of the neighbourhood; High Street itself was so named simply because it was the highest road in the development. Not coincidentally, it also marked the dividing line between Chinese and European settlement, with members of the latter group allowed to enjoy, quite exclusively, the cooler air and more spacious confines higher up the hill.
Today’s High Street remains a dividing line between the working- and lower-middle-class streets down the hill and the much pricier Mid-Levels further up. It’s an unpretentious strip with a comfortable diversity of businesses (including, as Wikipedia notes, 15 car mechanics, a bakery, a greengrocer, four cafés, a sign maker and an art gallery, among many other things). It’s also a bit of a student ghetto, home to many people who study at the nearby University of Hong Kong.
Double-decker trams have crossed Hong Kong Island for more than a century. In Cantonese, people playfully refer to them as ding-ding, which is of course the sound they make as they rattle down the middle of congested streets.
Whenever I’m walking down the street in Hong Kong I think about all of the information I’m missing because I can’t read Chinese: menus, advertisements, election signs, protest banners. (I’m particularly regretful I can’t read the menus.) Sometimes, though, I wonder if I’m actually being given a break, considering how many thousands of words compete for your attention in the average Hong Kong street. Just look at all of the words written around this single doorway: to me, they’re incomprehensible, but to any literate person they must be the visual equivalent of a screaming match.
One of the things I love about Hong Kong is the city’s captivation with light. There’s the neon for which Hong Kong is famous, of course, but in recent years it has really taken to dressing up its buildings in LED displays. Here are two examples I came across while wandering around town. Below, a McDonald’s sign backlit by neon, is really nothing exceptional, but it captures how even the most banal of businesses have invested in lighting displays. Above is the new LED-lit façade of the W Hotel in Wan Chai, which fades from one colour to the next between dusk and midnight.
Just off Stone Nullah Lane, in an old and quiet part of Wan Chai above the Queen’s Road, I came across this old advertisement on the side of an apartment building. Duk hau wai cheung tong yue, it reads — “Special Stomach Pills.”
I had travelled more than 15,000 kilometres only to stand, once again, at the corner of Peel and Wellington. Of course, it wasn’t the same Peel and Wellington as back home — with a shared colonial past, it shouldn’t be surprising to find some similar street names in both Montreal and Hong Kong.
In Montreal, Peel and Wellington finds itself in the heart of Griffintown, a neighbourhood that was once a centre of industry and working-class Irish life. In Hong Kong, it sits in the middle of a busy market district in Central, an area that was once part of Victoria City, Britain’s nineteenth-century foothold in South China. It seems somehow appropriate that, even halfway across the world from one another, Peel Street and Wellington Street intersect. Peel was named after Robert Peel, a Tory who first elected to Parliament in a “rotten borough” home to just 24 easily-bribed voters, and who served twice as Prime Minister, from 1834-35 and 1841-46. Wellington Street was named after Peel’s longtime ally, the Duke of Wellington, another two-time Prime Minister who served one of his terms immediately after Peel.
There are plenty of other names that will ring familiar to anyone who has spent time in a former outpost of the British Empire: Elgin, Dalhousie, Drake, Drummond, Granville, Argyle. Like shadows left behind by a passing giant, they testify to a kind of globalization that began before the term even existed.
Sitting in front of his makeshift green stall on a particularly steep block of Peel Street, Ho Hung Hee could be mistaken for one of the many fruit vendors and junk dealers that work in the narrow back streets of Central, uphill from the offices and department stores of Hong Kong’s financial district and in the midst of a rapidly-gentrifying enclave of restaurants, bars and art galleries. Like the other vendors, Ho is old and withered, but his bright, expressive face, more youthful than you would expect for an 82-year-old, hints at the energy it takes to work long hours in the street. But the service he provides is unusual: he makes and repairs umbrellas.
Ho’s career began in an umbrella factory just after the Second World War. In 1948, he set out to start his own umbrella business, riding his bike around the city, offering his services. That’s when he met a grocery store owner who let him open a stall in front of his Peel Street store in exchange for helping him write receipts. While the grocery store is long gone, Ho and his umbrella stall remain, and he continues to receive free water and electricity from the adjacent business owners. Ho’s decades spent working with umbrellas have even led to a certain notoriety: in 1994, he won a Guiness World Record for making the world’s most expensive umbrella, crafted from American ox-hide and a century-old German umbrella frame Ho found at a construction site in 1982. He used the material to make two umbrellas, one of which he sold for $2,000. Ho donated the other one to the Hong Kong Museum of History — even after he was offered $5,000 for it.
Surrounded by a colourful mess of umbrellas, bags and old cookie tins full of tools, Ho works carefully, pulling at an umbrella’s wires with a pair of pliers. Behind him are newspaper articles and a laminated certificate of his Guiness World Record. Craftsmen like Ho are increasingly rare in Hong Kong, and especially in Central, where soaring rents are displacing decades-old businesses. More than rent, though, it’s age that threatens the neighbourhood’s traditional shops and businesses. Ho is about the same age as many of the other people who work in the tiny stalls on Peel and other nearby streets. Several years from now, when they die, there will be no one to take their place. A centuries-old tradition of street vending will disappear.
Hong Kong is a noisy city. Part of it comes from the usual bustle of a large metropolis—roaring buses, roadwork, shops blasting music to attract customers—but part of it comes from a higher tolerance for noise than you would encounter in most of Europe or North America.
For instance, every crosswalk in Hong Kong makes a beeping sound to let blind pedestrians know whether it is safe to cross or not. With streetlights on nearly every corner, this means that the beeping is constant and ubiquitous. (Audible crosswalks in other cities don’t seem to be nearly as loud.) Video screens are another example: while they are common throughout the world, they are usually muted, but not in Asia, which means that newscasts, commercials and music videos are always being blasted at full volume on busy commercial streets.
I recorded these videos as part of a somewhat haphazard attempt to capture a bit of this soundscape. The first one was taken at a crosswalk next to Statue Square in Central; the second is a block-long walk down Sai Yeung Choi Street in Mongkok on a relatively quiet Monday night.
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