Mahjong in the Rain

The raucous clatter of tiles was unmistakable as I approached the corner of Zhijiang Lu (芷江路) and Xizhang Bei Lu (西藏北路) in Shanghai’s Zhabei district.

In a public playground, groups of middle-aged to old people were lazily gathered for an afternoon of mass mahjong and card games. A large group of spectators followed like moths to a flame.

It was a typical way for the community to pass the Saturday afternoon and enjoy the fickle spells of cool summer sprinkles. It hardly bothered the patrons who sheltered themselves under makeshift tarpaulin tents.

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Outdoor Billiards in Shenzhen

In Baishizhou, five yuan will get you an hour of pool and a big bottle of strong beer. This is one of Shenzhen’s largest and liveliest urban villages. Pool is one of its favourite pasttimes.

The village is hard to navigate, with aimless roads and dark, foreboding alleyways, but I’ve come across a few outdoor pool halls in my wanderings there. My favourite is one that exists where an alley widens ever so slightly as it meets a larger street, a tributary joining its parent. It’s a simple operation, with a half-dozen tables and a beer cooler. The last time I went, with a few friends, the hours slipped by unexpectedly, and it was nearly 1am when we left, wandering back into streets that were only marginally quieter than when we arrived. Compared to Hong Kong, Shenzhen sleeps early, but this is not true of the villages — they stay awake all night.

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The City Gets Pixelated

True, Patrick Jean’s 8-bit 80s arcade game-inspired New York invasion video, “PIXELS”, will soon be featured on nearly every blog on the internet. But it struck me as so in keeping to some of the other work featured here — from Jan Vormann’s Lego brick street art to this Berlin housing block game of Tetris (repeated on an art deco skyscraper above) — that it would be a shame not to put it in context with these — not to mention some earlier antecedents (the appearance of a frog hopping across the street — a clear reference to the old game Frogger — brings to mind the meta-heroics of Seinfeld‘s George Costanza, attempting to push an old Frogger machine across a busy New York street in a fashion similar to the game itself).

Combined with tilt-shift videography, which has made actual cities appear toylike, these projects all seem to share the same underlying theme: a certain deconstruction of the barrier between the imaginary world (particularly of play) and the actual — a desegregation of virtual and reality. In the video, this is literally (and dramatically) illustrated by the explosion of pixels from the TV screen in which they’d been confined. Such works seem to presage in art the emerging world of augmented reality, which recently began to filter into the consumer mainstream with the release of Google’s Goggles application, in which a smartphone photo can be translated into a digital data stream, integrating networked data into the public sphere.

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The Lying Down Game

Photos by Neath at Walking Turcot Yards

It’s easy to read a lot into the Lying Down Game (otherwise known as planking), in which people lie face down in odd places. You could see it as relational art that challenges our preconceptions of how to behave in public space. You could see it as a comment on internet-based cultural globalization. Or you could see it as a silly web trend. Whatever the case, it’s strangely fun to look at.

In Hong Kong, Mahjong Endures

No matter where you stand in Hong Kong, there’s a game of mahjong being played nearby, in someone’s living room, in a mahjong parlour or in the back room of a shop. (Every weekend, without fail, the owners of a flower shop around the corner from me invite some friends over to play mahjong in the adjacent lane.) So when my friend Zoe Li and I were assigned to do a TV news feature for one of our classes at the University of Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre, mahjong was one of the first topics that came to mind. Our angle? Whether mahjong is adapting to generational and technological change.

Like our audio slideshow on cage homes, this was a first-time effort: neither of us had made a television news story before. It’s a fairly restrictive process—you have to adhere to conventions and formula—and one that I’m not particularly fond of. But I do love the medium of film and video, so you can expect more from me, especially as I work on my camera skills. By this time next month you should be able to watch my 15-minute documentary about the Jamia Mosque and the people who live and worship there.

City of Open Secrets

Mah-jong followed me wherever I went in Hong Kong. Walking down a quiet alley in the neighbourhood of Wan Chai, the distinct sound of tiles being shuffled tumbled down from a second-floor window. Passing by a row of shops in Shek Kip Mei, I spotted a group of middle-aged men and women sitting at the back of a variety store, surrounded by stacks of toilet paper and cleaning supplies. Again, the unmistakable clatter of mah-jong tiles. In mainland Chinese cities, mah-jong is played like a casual spectator sport in public parks and streets, but in Hong Kong, the bright, colourful tiles show up more often in stockrooms or an auntie’s salon. Perhaps this is the case because the island city is so crowded, and privacy is often illusory—or perhaps because of the pre-eminence of people’s working lives. But however hard Hong Kongers work, there is always time for another marathon session of mah-jong.

Hong Kong is a uniquely intense experience, a high-rise metropolis clinging to the edge of a continent, a city of open secrets trapped for a century between two empires. Until 1997, when the territory was handed back to the Chinese government, Hong Kong was a colonial oddity, a Chinese society ruled by the British. Some of the smallest and most unexpected aspects of the city’s quotidian life can suddenly reflect that legacy, such as the way street markets are arranged in nearly identical fashion to London markets, or how a Hong Kong breakfast of choice includes both macaroni noodle soup and a beverage called milk tea: black Ceylon tea, strained through silk stock-ings, blended with thick evaporated milk.

Every inch of Hong Kong is seething with life. For lack of space, restaurant kitchens spill out into back alleys and onto sidewalks. It’s not unusual to find someone washing pig’s intestines by the side of the road. Particular specialities tend to cluster near one another, so that singular musky odours come to define entire neighbourhoods. Sheung Wan is a lovely district that smells like dried shrimp. Other neighbourhoods, like To Kwa Wan, reek of motor oil and grease, thanks to the auto body shops that seem to occupy every other storefront. In every part of town, laundry hangs from apartment windows, revealing the colour preferences of the city’s undergarments (conservative white).

Despite its liveliness, the city is often accused—usually by transplanted Westerners—of being a “cultural wasteland.” When he left his post last March, the outgoing British consul-general warned Hong Kong that if the city did not recognize the importance of becoming a cultural, artistic and intellectual hub, it would never measure up to, say, New York or London. But even if its museums are somewhat provincial and its art scene is overlooked, Hong Kong is hardly devoid of culture.

Culture, like mah-jong, is everywhere here. Small things matter: the real story of a place’s identity can be found in everyday life and the stuff it leaves behind. In Montreal, for example, the city’s story is told through the language of street signs, old advertisements and outdoor staircases; in the florid tile mosaics of Christ or a Catholic saint that Portuguese families affix to the entrance of their apartments. (Do secular or Muslim families, moving in, remove the tiles?) Urban layering is what makes a city like Hong Kong (or Montreal) so fascinating. Individually, all of these pieces of cultural detritus can seem inconsequential, but considered as a whole they tell us who we are and how we live. They are our living heritage.

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Chess, Mahjong and Pi

My friends always swore by Café Pi. I never really shared their opinion (its food isn’t great and neither is its coffee) but I could at least appreciate it, since Pi’s customers are an odd mix of students and chess players, all of whom pack into the café’s jarring red-and-black confines until they are kicked out at midnight — closing time. The chess players, nearly all men, are impossible to categorize by appearance or origin, but they all share the same seriousness and the same intensity. This becomes obvious a couple of times a year, during the St. Laurent street fair, when Pi spills out into the street.

City Golf

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?

Politicians, Slippery in More Ways than One

Quebeckers head to the polls today in a provincial election that might produce the first minority government in more than a century. Most of the snow has melted, but for most of February and March, the election provided for more than just news-hour entertainment: it made for great impromptu tobogganing for people who don’t have enough room in their apartments for real sleds. Just like politicians, you see, election signs are very slippery.

My first experience with election sign tobogganing came just over a year ago, on a clear, cold January night. Canadians have gotten used to constant election fever since the Liberals lost their majority in 2004, but last winter was exceptional: in Montreal’s Outremont riding, there were three elections in as many months. First was a municipal election in November, then a provincial by-election in December. By the time we trudged to the polls to vote in January’s federal election, leftover election signs from all three races were in abundance. It only seemed natural to put some of them to good use on the bunny hill at the corner of Park and Mount Royal.

So, armed with scissors, we snipped down a few green Omar Aktoufs, found some NDP-orange Léo-Paul Lauzons, recovered a diamond-shaped Farouk Karim and scored what we considered to be the prize of the night, a giant rectangular Raya Mileva. Bracing against the wind, our skin frosty despite layers of wool sweaters, scarves and mittens, we walked to the edge of Mount Royal and clamoured up the small tobogganing hill.

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