Although Canada has a monarch, Britain’s queen retains very little presence in Canadian culture. The kind of curiosity and adulation that inspired thousands of Montrealers to flood the streets when King George VI visited in 1939 has long since vanished. It’s a bit of a shock, then, to visit Bangkok and realize the exent to which the King of Thailand appears to be adored, with utmost earnesty, by the city’s inhabitants. Shrines to the king are found throughout the city, on streets and in shopping malls. Each Monday, many people in Bangkok—a significant minority, at least—wear yellow shirts in honour of the king.
Of course, it’s easy to forget that, as well-loved as Thailand’s king appears, he is protected by lèse majesté laws that are used to prosecute anyone who dares criticize any of Thailand’s royalty. This despite the fact that the king himself, an American-born, Swiss-educated man named Bhumibol Adulyadej, has admitted that “the king can do wrong,” and that “I must also be criticized.” Nonetheless, accusations of lèse majesté levied against Thailand’s former prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, were among the motives behind the 2006 military coup against the country’s democratically-elected government.
Earlier this year, the king’s only sister died; shrines to her have been erected in the city’s metro stations. In one station, the shrine is accompanied by a book in which passersby can write their condolences. If only I could read Thai — what have people written?
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.
Hong Kong is full of interesting doorways. They aren’t quaint or pretty, but they’re loaded with ephemera that reveal small bits of Hong Kong’s everyday life and culture. Take this one for example, which leads to the upper floors of a cheap hotel on a Mongkok sidestreet near Prince Edward Road. The metal door is typical, and so are the banners wishing good fortune upon the hotel and its occupants, but the stern notice taped to the door is not. “These premises are no longer used for the purposes of prostitution,” it reads, suggesting that a police raid and perhaps new ownership have transformed the place from one of Mongkok’s many hourly hotels into a somewhat more legitimate one.
The central part of Bujumbura was laid out during colonial days, and features a classic City Beautiful rond-point, around which vehicle
traffic is channeled. The Chaussée Prince Louis Rwagazore and the Chausée Peuple Murundi come together here.
Bujumbura is the capital of Burundi, Rwanda’s non-identical twin in the Great Lake Region of Central Africa. Like Rwanda, Burundi’s population is divided between Hutu and Tutsi ethnic groups, with Hutus forming the vast majority, about 80 percent. (Both countries also include a small proportion—less than three percent—of Twa, a people related to the pygmies.) Inter-ethnic violence has been endemic for more than 40 years, and although Burundi has not seen bloodshed on a scale of the Rwandan genocide of 1994, a civil war that began in 1993 has claimed thousands upon thousands of victims. Whereas in Rwanda, Tutsi were the target of Hutu violence, the situation is reversed in Burundi.
A long, slow process toward peace and reconciliation was just beginning when I visited Bujumbura to research a novel, The Violets of Usambara. That was in October 2001, a most interesting time to travel in Africa, I can assure you. Both the US and Canadian governments had travel warnings in effect, and before I left I was told not to venture outside the city alone. What I found in Bujumbura was a city which still showed its colonial roots in the design of the central section. Wide, City Beautiful-inspired boulevards took off from a rond-point or climbed toward the hills. Both the airport and the cathedral boasted classic modernist design from the 1950s and early 1960s. But the city was surrounded by acres of informally-built housing. These neighborhoods are said to have grown as people have come to take refuge in the city from violence in the hills.
Cattle are extremely important still to Tutsis who are the traditional herders in both Rwanda and Burundi. When I was there the peace process between the two ethnics groups was underway, but tensions were still acute. Several well-off herders had brought their cattle down from the hills for safe keeping in corrals in the city right at the edge of Lake Tanganyika.
The driver of the S62 bus let me on even though there was no value left on my borrowed Metrocard.
“Just don’t let it happen again,” he said, waving me back.
Twenty minutes later, after a bumpy ride down Victory Boulevard, a narrow commercial street that winds its way across the northern half of Staten Island, New York’s fifth and forgotten borough, we arrive at the best way to get to Manhattan: the Staten Island Ferry. I say it’s the best because, unlike the US$5 express bus, which takes you across the Verrazano-Narrow Bridge and up the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, the Staten Island Ferry is free and it runs around the clock. It’s also relaxing and picturesque: you can stand on the outside deck, leaning against the railing as the bells on the harbour’s buoys clang and the Statue of Liberty passes by in the distance.
The City of New York eliminated the ferry’s 50-cent fare in 1997. More recently, it has invested millions of dollars in building two pleasant, airy new terminals. These improvements have attracted new riders and made the ferry one of the most democratic forms of transportation in New York: few other kinds of transport—perhaps not even the subway—bring together so many different people into a single space.
After a few days of going to and from Manhattan by ferry, I left New York for Hong Kong, where I re-encountered my favourite ferry service in the world: the Star Ferry, whose weatherworn green boats have crossed Victoria Harbour for more than a century. It’s not a stretch to say that the ferry’s ten-minute journey across the harbour is one of the more awe-inspiring experiences in the world, especially at night, when the choppy water seems to glow in the ambient light of Hong Kong’s skyline.
Whether it’s Sham Shui Po, Jordan, Sai Ying Pun or Kowloon City, most of Hong Kong’s older neighbourhoods have a similar aesthetic, with the same stained concrete buildings, steel doors, sidewalk altars and worn awnings. It gives the city a remarkably cohesive character despite having such a large population and such varied geography.
The same is true for Hong Kong’s many markets: whether in the street or in a market hall, fish, meat and produce is almost invariably sold under the glow of distinctive red lamps. Like a visual catchphrase, they are an instant and unconscious sign to passersby that fresh food is available.
I’ve seen these red lamps in Macau, too, and as far as I can tell they’re also used in Guangzhou and other Cantonese cities. But I’ll bet that only in Hong Kong have they been used ironically: in the past few days, walking through the trendy streets of Central, I’ve noticed the lamps in a café, an art gallery and in the window display of a high-end shoe store on Wellington Street.
Shanghai Street is one of those long, straight Kowloon roads that seem to change character every few blocks. In the south, near Jordan Road, are grocery stores and restaurants, along with a handful of shops catering to Nepalese, Indian and Pakistani immigrants. In the north, past Argyle Street, home furnishing stores predominate. The red light district falls somewhere in between.
For the most part, brothels in Yau Ma Tei and Mongkok are coyly disguised as “karaoke bars,” their real vocation indicated by the pretty, busty girls on their signs, often accompanied by a price. On Shanghai Street, though, the sex trade is as blatant as it gets in Hong Kong, with hookers waiting on the sidewalk and brothels that do away with all pretense of offering karaoke and instead unabashedly advertise their real wares. Here, racism and sexism come together in cardboard signs posted at the entrances to old walkup apartment buildings: “China Girl 250; Hong Kong Girl 250; Malay Girl 200; Russian Girl 550; Free Preview.”
It’s a bit of a shock to see these signs displayed so openly, especially since most aspects of prostitution, including the operation of a brothel, are illegal in Hong Kong. It is hard not to read into them a mirror of the more unsavoury side of Hong Kong society, one that is often shameless in its contempt for the 300,000 Filipina and Indonesian domestic helpers that live and work in the territory.
Yesterday, on the bus, my girlfriend overhead a couple ranting about the gall their helper had in asking for time off to visit her sick mother in the Philippines. “What, does she think that she’ll get better if she goes to visit?” one of them said, before complaining about her eating habits. “Some of those damn Filipinas eat so much.” With attitudes like that, is it any surprise that such a low value is placed on women, and in particular Southeast Asian women, on Shanghai Street?
But the red light district on lasts for only a few blocks; it’s easy to walk past and, if you want, easy to forget.
Hong Kong often seems like a safety-obsessed city. Public service posters and announcements are ubiquitous: they warn people to hold onto the handrail when riding the escalator, to mind the closing doors on the subway, to make regular visits to the doctor. Sidewalks on busy streets are lined by fences to prevent people from tripping into the path of an oncoming bus. Restaurant patrons often wash their bowls and chopsticks in hot tea to ensure their cleanliness. Nobody drinks water straight from the tap, even though it is treated and, in theory, perfectly safe to consume. Instead they filter it, boil it—and only then do they drink it.
But then you see something like this and nobody seems fazed in the least. I was apparently the only person on the entire street who found it odd that a man was fixing a neon sign by leaning precariously out from a third-floor ledge, on a windy day no less, without so much as someone to spot him. As a Hong Konger might say, yau mo gau cho ah, which translates roughly as “WTF?”
If only the bus were a little more red and a little less boxy, I could have sworn I was in South Kensington or Knightsbridge in London rather than in Mumbai. The double decker bus, the Victorian Gothic architecture — a common inheritance of the British empire that is at once familiar and strange. I did not spend long enough in Mumbai to explore further the lingering British influence and how it had been adapted to local circumstances.
I wonder if people on their first visit from Mumbai to London have that same mix of feelings of déjà vu and novelty.
Toulouse is a large, cosmopolitan but relaxed and laid back southern French city. It feels like it has as much in common with nearby Spain as with northern France.
The bilingual street signs here are a tantalising reminder of how the city’s history could have been different. Had Occitanie remained a distinct culture and society from that of Northern France, Toulouse would have been its capital. Perhaps the street signs would have Occitan on top, and might not even be accompanied by a French translation.
In fact, you will not see Occitan on commercial signs, or hear it spoken on the streets (or, at least, I did not) in Toulouse — after French, Arabic and English predominate. And yet, the bilingual street signs serve as a reminder that, although clearly integrated for a long time into the French Republic, there is something distinctively Toulousain. This is an example of the use of language as a common shared heritage, a cultural signifier, if you will, rather than simply as a means of communication.
Chinese and English newspapers at a newsstand in Vancouver
When Sept Days sent Montreal journalist Xian Hu to Afghanistan last December, the weekly Chinese newspaper was not only making a statement to its competitors in the community here, but to mainstream newspapers as well.
“We want Montreal to know that the Chinese community wants to integrate into society,” said the newspaper’s publisher, Ling Yin, and part of that involves giving Chinese immigrants an opportunity to debate national issues like the Afghanistan mission in their own language.
“Our initial goal was to see, from our own eyes, what the NATO and Canadian troops are doing there. We don’t want to hear just from La Presse or The Gazette, we don’t want to know what the so-called mainstream is saying, we want to know ourselves,” she said.
Rather than send Hu to cover Canada’s military operations in Kandahar, Yin decided that it would be more effective to send her to Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, to hear from ordinary Afghans what they thought of international reconstruction efforts and life after the Taliban.
For the 54-year-old Hu, who had no experience in journalism before joining Sept Days, the trip was a revelation.
“I was shocked. I thought it would be more developed, especially after six years of reconstruction,” she said. Her experience was made all the more tangible by the fact that, rather than living in a hotel for the week she spent in the country, she stayed in the houses of “friends of friends of friends” and explored the city to speak with ordinary Afghans about their experiences.
Her journey gave Hu enough material for two feature articles, one that looked at how Afghans perceived reconstruction efforts and another that examined why Afghan women continue to wear the burqa.
Before there were flashmobs… there was Wayne and Shuster. In this segment from the CBC’s Wayne and Shuster show, which aired on September 19, 1971, the two comedians—Johnny Wayne (né Louis Weingarten) and Frank Shuster—play a game of golf in the streets of downtown Toronto. What better way to bring such a quintessentially suburban sport to the urban masses?
I’ve always thought of surface parking lots as dead spaces. They interrupt the streetscape, create a hostile environment for pedestrians and serve only to reinforce the hegemony of the automobile. That’s all true, but I’ve slowly come to realize that, like other urban spaces, parking lots have lives of their own — social and economic lives far more complex than their appearance would indicate.
While the parking lots in many cities are corporately-owned and completely automated—you take a ticket, drive in through an automatic gate, park your car and leave—this isn’t the case in downtown Montreal. Here, most lots are run as independent businesses and staffed full-time by parking attendants who make it their business to cram as many cars into their lot as possible. This adds an unpredictable human element to a space that is often decried for being inhuman; instead of feeding your money to a machine, you hand it to a guy whose job is to make use of his limited patch of asphalt in the most imaginative way possible.
Each of these lots has its own daily rhythm. In the area around Crescent Street, lots that are improbably full during working hours take a brief respite in the evening, followed on the weekends by another rush, this time of luxury cars. Near my apartment, on Park Avenue, the only parking lot on the entire street is similarly filled with BMWs, Mercedes and even the occasional Ferrari as it provides a valet service for the nearby Greek restaurants-cum-nightclubs.
Still, it’s hard to reconcile any of this with the physical impact of parking lots on the urban landscape. For pedestrians, they are inconvenient at best and dangerous at worst. They can almost always be better used for something else and, after three decades of letting them proliferate, the city of Montreal has come to realize this and it has prevented new parking lots from opening in the downtown area. Many have been closed.
Montreal Apartments