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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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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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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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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Need a Plumber?

In Hong Kong, like in many Asian cities, it’s common for contractors to advertise their services through graffiti. Forget Google — to find an electrician, a plumber or a cement specialist, just walk down the street and look at the phone numbers scrawled on utility boxes with magic marker or stencilled on walls with spray paint.

One plumber rises above the rest. Throughout Hong Kong, often in very unexpected places, you will encounter the same telephone number and neatly-written inscription: Tong Kui Jo Hau — “Unclogs drains, repairs pipes” — followed by a signature, Kui Wong, that translates roughly as “The King of Plumbing.”

Who is this king plumber who paints on walls with such care and patience? Does he carry a can of paint when he gets called out for a job, just in case he stumbles across a particularly enticing wall? I’m not sure I want to find out — it would spoil the romance of drainage royalty decorating the city under cover of night.

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The Altars at the End of the Street

Like the mosaic depictions of Catholic saints that adorn the front entrances of many Portuguese houses, the small altars found in every corner of Hong Kong are an everyday expression of faith, more humble than that of a temple or church, but in some ways more authentic.

I came across these small altars in a lane in Sai Ying Pun, a hilly neighbourhood in Hong Kong Island’s Western District. The main altar is Buddhist, but there is also a jiu choi mau — a lucky cat meant to bring in great fortune — and an even smaller altar of the type used to pay homage to various gods or ancestors.

I’m not sure if the altars were installed by the lane’s dried seafood vendors, its residents or both. I’d be curious to find out how altars like these are enshrined in Hong Kong law — are they subject to the same restrictions and regulations as outdoor seating, for example? And when the altars are in public space like these, who maintains them?

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Van Brunt Street

For all the questionable writing that’s abused or insensitively applied the term “urban frontier”, Brooklyn’s sleepy, sometimes desolate Red Hook neighborhood actually feels like one — and nowhere is this more apparent than on somnambulant Van Brunt Street.

The neighborhood’s main commercial thoroughfare sets the pace for Red Hook’s streetlife with its lack thereof: as much a testament to the street’s sedateness as to the pioneering urban horticulturalists who tend them, giant sunflowers sprout from the sidewalk cracks, leaping to human height. The still life composition of Van Brunt’s Hopperesque facades brings to mind country hamlets closed up on Sunday. And on a streetscape that conjures the Great Plains, a prominent restaurant bears a coincidentally appropriate name — Fort Defiance.

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End of the Road

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History Hiding in Chengdu’s Backstreets

Dive off the main street near Wenshu Temple in Chengdu and you’ll find yourself in a backstreet that’s bustling with a very different kind of character.

One side of XiZhuShi lane is devoted to small mahjong rooms, their crowded tables spilling out onto the street through open fronts. Here many are engrossed in clamorous games of mahjong. Others spread out big newspapers or lean back to sleep.

Opposite these shops an even older building stretches crookedly along the street, its low roof overhanging worn plaster walls. It has been broken up into different rooms and small doorways offer glimpses of gloomy secrets inside.

Peer in through one of these doors and you’ll see people being manicured beneath the halo of an angle poise. Through the door of another there’s rows of men sat on church-like benches, staring forwards at a television which flickers brightly from the back wall.

“This building is about 90 years old,” says the old man with amputated arm who is sprawled on a wicker chair outside. “It hasn’t changed much in that time.”

Streets with this kind of traditional atmosphere are becoming harder to find in a China that has indiscriminately redeveloped large parts of many cities. Even in Chengdu, where the population are known to value a more traditional and laid back lifestyle, much of the central city has been rebuilt.

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The Other Side of Macau

Away from the casinos and the tourist hordes of the Largo do Senado, Macau is a city of narrow streets lined by walkup apartment buildings and shops that haven’t been renovated in decades. These photos were taken on the quiet streets just outside the buzzing Three Lamps shopping district.

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Blue Buildings

The Blue House, Wan Chai

Tin Hau Temple, Sham Shui Po

Street View in South Africa

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Hillbrow, Johannesburg

With the world’s attention trained to the World Cup in South Africa, it’s a logical time for Google to debut its Street View coverage of the country. People unfamiliar with South Africa now have a chance to peer beyond the stereotypes and get a look at the country as it actually is. While there’s only so much you can tell by looking at something on a computer, even a virtual walk gives you a better sense of what a place is like than reading a sensational account of it in the media.

One of the first neighbourhoods I checked out was Hillbrow, the central Johannesburg neighbourhood that was a popular with white yuppies and students during the final decades of Apartheid but suffered terribly from crime and poverty after 1994. As I dragged Google’s little yellow man onto a random corner, I expected to see derelict buildings and empty streets — evidence of the abandonment and lawlessness I’ve seen described so often. Instead I found a neighbourhood with few vacant shops and plenty of new investment. There must still be problems, but a new narrative has obviously emerged — one that hasn’t yet been told in much detail.

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