Last week, I posted a video by Thomas Lee in which he asked passers-by on Sai Yeung Choi Street where they would go if they could open a door to anywhere. Now he’s back with another great video, this time a (well-subtitled) Cantonese-language rap by MC Yan, whom you might remember as the founder of Radio Dada and one of the first Chinese rappers.
I helped produce this video (though I can’t claim much credit — after introducing him to MC Yan and participating in a brainstorming session, nearly all of the work was done by Thomas). What struck me from the beginning was how passionate MC Yan is about Hong Kong, despite the cynicism that defines his lyrics. He’s genuinely fascinated by this place, rooted to it not only by birth but by a desire to improve it, and the way he expresses that is through unrelenting criticism of Hong Kong’s government and leaders.
In the video, he takes us on a tour of three important parts of Hong Kong — Causeway Bay, Central and West Kowloon — drawing inspiration from the social, political and cultural geography of each.
There aren’t a lot of Jews in Hong Kong, but that hasn’t stopped the city from becoming the centre of Jewish life in Asia, with one of the continent’s oldest synagogues, an active community centre and the only Jewish film festival on this side of the world.
Hong Kong’s first Jews arrived with the British in 1842 — many had been trading in nearby Canton, now known as Guangzhou — and by the turn of the twentieth century, some of the territory’s most prominent families were Jewish, including the Kadoories and Sassoons, whose names have been enshrined in streets, hills and institutions across the city. (Andy Lau, arguably Hong Kong’s biggest pop star, lives in a mansion on Kadoorie Avenue.) One of Hong Kong’s early governors, Sir Matthew Nathan, was Jewish, and though he wasn’t local — Hong Kong was just one of his many stops in the imperial service — he did provide the community with a certain amount of official attention.
Despite a small influx of Jews from Shanghai, Harbin and Tianjin after the Japanese invasion of China, Hong Kong’s Jewish community remained tiny until quite recently; it numbered 200 in 1968 and 2,500 in 1998. Recently, though, more and more Jewish expatriates have been moving to Hong Kong, and the community numbers somewhere between 6,000 to 10,000 — about the same size as the Jewish communities in Calgary, Frankfurt and pre-Katrina New Orleans.
Earlier this week, I interviewed Howard Elias, the Toronto-born founder of the Hong Kong Jewish Film Festival, for CNNGo. Below is a slightly expanded transcript of our conversation.
Infernal Affairs, “I want my identity back”
Enamel paint on canvas, 100cm(H) x 150cm(W), 2007
Hong Kong’s story is one best told on screen, through dihn ying, electric shadows. For decades, it was one of the world’s film capitals, and it was through film that Hong Kong projected itself onto the world with action films and comedies that, beyond their mass appeal, explored the deeper corners of Hong Kong’s psyche.
Since 2006, Chow Chun Fai, one of Hong Kong’s most interesting artists, has reproduced stills from more than 100 movies, complete with English and Chinese subtitles. Each painting captures a small truth about Hong Kong’s culture and identity; together, they form a sweeping and surprisingly nuanced narrative of the city’s history from the 1970s to the present day.
Earlier this summer, I paid a visit to Chow’s airy studio in Fotan, an industrial district in the New Territories. As I sat beneath his fastidiously-organized collection of books, Chow made me coffee and we talked about art, Hong Kong and a show in which he reproduced Vermeer’s “The Art of Painting.” What really interested me, though, was his film series. Below is a short and lightly edited excerpt from our hour-long conversation.
Ever since my first visit last year, the Jamia Mosque, located near the top of the Central-Mid Levels escalator, has had a special pull on me. Hidden behind its stone walls is a verdant respite from the noise and stress of Central. A stately wrought iron gate acts as a portal between a frenzied city and a quiet place of contemplation and spiritual release.
The mosque is a welcome diversion whenever I find myself riding up the escalator. I enjoy the well-worn appearance of its grounds, the songs of the birds in its trees and the particular coziness created by the wall of skyscrapers that surround it. It’s also a place I like to show visitors to Hong Kong, and on a pleasant evening last winter, I found myself sitting on a stone ledge next to the mosque with a couple of my friends from Montreal. As the sounds of the evening prayer drifted through the air, an old man with a beard and more than a few missing teeth came up to us and started talking about everything he could think of: politics, the weather, Islam, his childhood. He mentioned that he had grown up at the mosque and had witnessed the complete transformation of the neighbourhood around it from an airy collection of walk-up tenements to a dense, dizzying cluster of highrises. He said that there were many families that lived around the mosque, in haphazardly-built houses and an elegant, now-decrepit building once used to house travelling Muslims and Islamic scholars.
Unfortuantely, the old man dashed away before I could ask him for his name. The next time I saw him, he brushed me off, muttering under his breath. “Don’t bother him, he’s crazy,” said someone standing nearby. But my interest was piqued. I decided to make a documentary, with three of my classmates at the University of Hong Kong, about the mosque and the diverse community of people that worship and live there. People started moving in during the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong during World War II. They never left, and now 20 families call the mosque home.
Through the Gate is my first documentary. It offers a glimpse of life at the Jamia Mosque through the experiences of three people. Andy Putranto is an Indonesian grad student who sees the mosque as a home away from home. Leila Karchoud is a Tunisian woman who was drawn back to Islam when she moved to Hong Kong. Mustafa Mohammed was born and raised at the mosque. I’ve tried to use their stories to convey the atmosphere of the mosque and its significance as a place both sacred and secular.
One of the last remains of Tsang Tsou Choi’s work, now protected by a special coating and latex screen
During his lifetime, the King of Kowloon was seen by the Hong Kong government as little more than a nuisance. But that was before the Star Ferry incident raised public awareness about identity, culture and heritage issues. So in 2007, after the King—also known as Tsang Tsou Choi, the oldest graffiti writer in the world—passed away, the government promised to do everything it could to preserve what was left of his distinctive graffiti.
Turns out the government isn’t capable of doing much. Although it was quick to spray a protective coating on a prominent piece of Tsang’s work at the Tsim Sha Tsui Star Ferry pier, the South China Morning Post reveals that many other pieces, especially those near Tsang’s home in Kwun Tong, remain unprotected and vulnerable to decay and vandalism. (The SCMP article is locked behind a paywall, but you can see a short slideshow they produced about the remains of Tsang’s work, which I’ve embedded below.) Lau Kin Wai, an artist and friend of Tsang, hopes to draw attention to the matter by holding a protest this weekend at the Star Ferry pier.
In the Legislative Council, opposition lawmaker Alan Leong has made a fuss about the preservation of Tsang’s graffiti, which prompted a sheepish response from the Home Affairs Bureau yesterday. Maybe, it said, the government would simply take some photos of Tsang’s graffiti, rather than preserve its actual physical remains. If you ignore the fact that the government is trying to sidestep the fact that it broke its own promise—the remaining works should have been protected right after Tsang died—its position almost makes sense. Graffiti is, after all, a inherently ephemeral form of art. It isn’t meant to last. In most cases, I’d hesitate before throwing my support behind a government effort to preserve a piece of graffiti.
But this is a special case. Tsang was unique: he was making political statements, not artistic ones, and his graffiti stands alone for its distinctive form of Chinese calligraphy. Preserving his work will keep his spirit in the streets. Besides, Hong Kong doesn’t have a rich tradition of graffiti. Just a few neighbourhoods have street art of any note and none of it is particularly inventive or cutting-edge. By making a deliberate effort to include Tsang’s graffiti in the canon of Hong Kong heritage, the government will demonstrate that street art and public political statements remain a vital part of the city’s identity.
Mayor Gérald Tremblay’s attempt to rename Park Avenue two years ago was a turning point in the street’s history. When that controversy emerged, a number of the street’s Greek merchants were already asking the city to create a Hellenic Quarter similar to Little Italy or Chinatown. The city spent $15,000 on a feasibility study that suggests emphasizing Park Ave.’s Greek-yet-multicultural character could be a boon to business. This spring, the city invested $50,000 in new banners, benches, garbage cans and bike racks there. The city says it will announce the next phase of the quarter’s development in two weeks. Chris Karidogiannis, executive secretary of the Park Ave. Merchants’ Association, is one of the project’s main proponents.
What is the Hellenic Quarter concept?
The idea started in the early ’90s, but it didn’t really develop until the past couple of years. We were trying to find a way to re-imagine Park Ave. commercially. We were looking for a way to bypass certain negative things the city has done that have really damaged the viability of our businesses – like the bus lanes, high property taxes and, most recently, exorbitant parking meter rates. Like it or not, this past generation of Park Ave. has been very Greek. It hasn’t always been Greek, but for the past 30 years it’s been known as the Greek area, and we thought that we should officialize it and create something a little more touristy, like Petite Italie or Chinatown.
What would this entail?
We’ve been working closely on developing a concept that’s similar to Little Italy. Fortunately for the merchants there, they had a mayor that was really into the concept, Pierre Bourque, and who invested $9 million into it. Now you cannot even rent a spot there and business has gone up 50 per cent over the last eight years.
What do you think of the city’s efforts for Park Ave.?
The city spent $20,000 on 32 new banners. They’re visible but discreet at the same time. I know the city wants the project to happen but they don’t want to ruffle any feathers at all. As you can see, on the banners there’s an Asian child with a Greek flag right under her. They’re trying to show the multiculturalism of the area, the roots of which are Greek. That’s what I think they’re trying to accomplish, anyway.
Park Ave. is Greek, but it’s also very multicultural. Why should one of its communities be privileged over others?
Little Italy is as Italian as Park Ave. is Greek – not a lot of Italians still live in that area but a majority of businesses and properties are still owned by them. We’ve been working on this for four years and we haven’t had anyone who has come up with another idea or who has said that they don’t want it because it’s Greek. We want this to be a gift to the Hellenic community in general, but hopefully it will benefit the businesses, as well. We were worried about the scale of the project at first, since it goes from Van Horne down to Mount Royal, but then we visited the Danforth in Toronto (that city’s Greektown centres around Danforth Ave.) and it’s just as wide and just as long and it’s 10 times as busy. There’s unlimited potential.
The first banner was incongruous enough: “Avenue du Parc,” it read in a vaguely Hellenic font, set to a pale blue background. Underneath was the logo of the City of Montreal. Then, a couple of days later, I noticed other banners, these ones much more inscrutable: each featured a portrait of someone that was pulled up in the lower left corner, like a page being turned, to reveal part of a Greek flag. The city still seemed to be in the process of installing of them, and as far as I could see, there were only two kinds of portraits, one of a thirtyish man of Southern European appearance and another of a little Asian girl — not usually the kind of person you imagine when you think of someone Greek.
Earlier this year, the city announced that it would spend $50,000 to polish Park Avenue and emphasize its Greek heritage. Flowers would be planted, more benches installed and banners erected. I guess this is the fruit of those efforts (and dollars). Unfortunately, they reek of compromise — the worst kind of compromise that is unsatisfying and underwhelming to everyone involved. For years, Park Avenue’s Greek merchants have pushed to have the street declared a Greektown or “Quartier hellenique” that would have the same symbolic value for Montreal’s many Greeks as Little Italy does for its Italians and Chinatown for its Chinese. More importantly, the merchants reason, it would be an opportunity to consolidate their resources, promote the street and draw more outside shoppers.
After a brief spate of investment in what might be called “ethnic infrastructure” — former mayor Pierre Bourque’s administration invested heavily in sprucing up Chinatown and Little Italy, and it built new community-themed parks like Portugal Park on the Plateau and Athena Square in Park Ex — the city has shied away from recognizing the city’s ethnic and cultural communities in any significant manner. The idea for a Quartier hellenique on Park Avenue is just one of several ethnic theme districts that have been proposed by shopowners in recent years. In the area around Jean Talon and St. Denis, where dozens of Vietnamese-owned businesses are located, one merchant has advocated the creation of a “Vietnamville.” North African businesspeople on Jean Talon east of St. Michel are now pressing for the creation of a “Petit Maghreb.” Each of these movements has been met with the same indifference from city officials.
In 2006 and 2007, though, mayor Gérald Tremblay’s attempt to rename Park Avenue angered so many people that his administration is still cleaning the muck off its face. City Hall must have felt that it had political capital to regain among those who had protested loudly against the name change, so it committed itself to investing more heavily in Park Avenue. Many took that to mean than it would finally support the creation of the Quartier hellenique but, as the $50,000 it has decided to invest in flowers and benches indicates, it is simply not willing to go that far.
On a cold, grey day last December, stir-crazy after more than a week of snow, I took a walk down Decarie Boulevard in Montreal. It’s not the most obvious place for a stroll—a six-lane, sunken expressway runs down the middle of it—but it’s a pretty interesting street nonetheless, taking you through a growing Russian neighbourhood and past old landmarks like the Snowdon Theatre and the Snowdon Deli.
Along the way from Van Horne to Queen Mary, I noticed something else, too: the names of the apartment houses along Decarie. Heading south, I passed a series of boxy 1940s-era buildings with strangely terse names—King, York, Michel—each inscribed very plainly above the main entrance. Some of the more modern buildings along the street had more flamboyant names, like the Decarie Towers, which as far as I could tell consisted of just one tower, and a fairly short one at that.
Historically, property developers have used names to distinguish and define their apartment buildings. They’re a marketing gimmick, in other words. Inadvertently, though, apartment building names can reveal a lot about a city’s character.
In Montreal, apartment houses first became fashionable in the late nineteenth century, mostly in the upper-middle-class anglophone neighbourhoods around the Golden Square Mile. That might explain why, in a city that was about half French-speaking, the names of these buildings were strikingly Anglo-Saxon. Some were reliably conservative, like the Waldorf and the Smithsonian. Others traded on imperial glory, like the King Edward and the Majestic. Still others were almost cloyingly quaint, like the Pickwick Arms.
If Chinatown’s Jewish heritage isn’t obvious, it’s probably because it has been erased by time and redevelopment, swept away like Chenneville St. and its quietly imposing synagogue.
Makom: Seeking Sacred Space, an ongoing exhibition at Hampstead’s Dorshei Emet synagogue, examines the historical traces of Montreal’s Jewish community with photos of former synagogues near the Main.
“The exhibition raises some really interesting questions about the way that spaces that are claimed by one group of people or one community are also claimed, in their own way, by other communities,” said Leanore Lieblein, a retired McGill English professor who helped organize the exhibition. Even in a synagogue that has been renovated and used for something else, she added, “you can feel the presence of past lives in that building.”
Chenneville’s synagogue was a case in point. Located on a small street (now shortened and written as Cheneville) between St. Urbain and Jeanne Mance Sts., below Dorchester (now René Lévesque) Blvd. and above Craig (now St. Antoine) St., it was built in 1838 by Montreal’s oldest Jewish congregation, Shearith Israel.
In 1887, when Shearith Israel moved to a much larger home on Stanley St. – following the westward migration of Montreal’s older generations of Canadian-born, anglicized Jews – the synagogue was rented by Beth David, a congregation of Romanian immigrants who arrived in the late 19th century, part of a huge wave of Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe. Over the next three decades, the area around present-day Chinatown – with Bleury St. to the west, Sanguinet St. to the east, Craig to the south and Ontario St. to the north – became the heart of Jewish Montreal, a haven for Yiddish-speaking immigrants who established businesses, synagogues and many of the Jewish institutions that still exist.
Israel Medresh, a journalist for the Kanader Adler, a Yiddish-language daily newspaper, sketched a portrait of the neighbourhood in his 1947 book Montreal Foun Nekhtn, translated into English in 2000 as Montreal of Yesterday.
“The corner of St. Urbain and Dorchester was the very heart of the Jewish neighbourhood,” he wrote. “Nearby was Dufferin Park, then a ‘Jewish park’ where Jewish immigrants went to breathe the fresh air, meet their landslayt (compatriots), hear the latest news, look for work and read the newspapers.”
My hunt for apartment building names has only just begun, but these two photos show exactly why I’m interested in them in the first place. Appartement Nathalie is located on St. Denis near Rachel, right in the middle of the Plateau Mont-Royal. The Denbigh, meanwhile, can be found about five kilometres to the west, at the corner of de Maisonneuve and Elm in Westmount.
Both were built around the same time in the late nineteenth century. Without being too obvious, their names speak a lot to Montreal’s cultural and linguistic divide, between francophones and anglophones, French-Canadians and Anglo-Scots. But they also hint at trends that bridged that divide, like the increasing popularity of apartment buildings among Montreal’s upper middle-class, French and English alike, in the late 1800s.
French culture is dead, Time magazine’s Don Morrison recently proclaimed. Complacently subsisting off plentiful government subsidies, it has failed to keep up and compete with any of the noise issuing forth from the anglophone world. If France’s capital city is any reflection of the country’s cultural decline, one might be inclined to agree with him — superficially, at least.
The museum-like quality of Paris, which remains a sort of improbable continuation of its late 19th century self, has long been lamented. The City of Light is bathing, perhaps, in too much of a stage-set’s glow, and one could be forgiven for feeling like one was traipsing through a theme park when strolling through the Tuileries in the evening – especially since half the park literally serves as a sort of fairground. It’s telling that the two most controversial building projects in central Paris – the reconstruction of Les Halles, a former marketplace turned mall and train station, and the potential rebuilding of the Tuileries palace, are, respectively, an attempt to snuff out one of the few 20th century intrusions into central Paris, and the attempt to restore a building lost to fire in 1871. The recent installation of a bike-rental system has only added further to Paris’ 19th century flair: never since then have there been so many pedal warriors on the city’s boulevards. All in all, Paris is not only ossifying, but taking active steps to turn back the clock.
Place Vendôme: Sepulchral City
Morrison claims that that hope for French culture lies in the twin engine of neoliberalism and the immigrant ghettoes of French cities’ banlieues: the latter providing new twists on what “French” means, the former allowing France to competitively export itself to the rest of the world. It’s true that these two forces have brought considerable change to Paris, though not, perhaps, in the positive ways Morrison expects. The offices of American law firms have quintupled along the Avenue Georges V, and St-Germain has steeply declined from Bohemian Rhapsody to Banana Republic. This sort of sterility, more than the mere preservation of belle époque facades, has paralyzed Paris.
(I first posted about Il fait beau dans l’métro last April. Today, an article was published with a more in-depth look at the advertisement.)
A troupe of exuberant dancers isn’t what most commuters expect when they descend into the métro. But there they were, in Il fait beau dans l’métro, an iconic 1976 television advertisement that was a triumph of public transit geekery, gaudy fashion and vintage Québécois kitsch.
The advertisement opens with the familiar sight of a métro car entering Atwater station. A troupe of lively dancers jumps out, singing, “Il fait beau dans l’métro, tout le monde est gai, tout le monde a le coeur au soleil.” The métro’s distinctive three-tone chime – created by air rushing out of the brakes when trains leave the station – is incorporated into the tune.
You would think that this ad would be long forgotten. In the last year, however, Il fait beau dans l’métro has won a new generation of fans online, part of a burgeoning trend of nostalgia for public transit imagery and pop culture kitsch from the 1960s and ’70s.
The ad has racked up more than 100,000 views on YouTube and it has been featured on most of Montreal’s most widely read blogs. On Facebook, a group devoted to the ad has attracted close to 600 members.
Andrew Martin and Michael Baillargeon, undergraduate students at McGill University, created the Facebook group this year.
“I am a rapid-transit nerd, with interests in advertising, musicals, and costumes, so naturally I became an instant fan of the clip,” said Martin.
“It was Michael who took the initiative to start the Facebook group. Part of the original intention was to get a group of people to go down and reenact the ad. Sadly, to my knowledge, this has yet to take place.”
Stroll up the hill just south of downtown and take a look at the street signs: Frontenac Avenue. Montreal Avenue. Wolfe Street. Cabot Street. Montcalm Crescent. Talon Avenue. Laval Avenue. Dorchester Avenue. Where are we? In Mount Royal, of course, Calgary’s most prestigious neighbourhood.
I’ve always found it odd that the street names found in this hilltop district — hell, even the name of the neighbourhood itself — are meant to so deliberately to evoke Montreal and Quebec. In terms of architecture or design, Mount Royal is typical of pretty much any Garden City-inspired suburb developed in the early twentieth century. So why the references to a city and province so far removed from what was once bald prairie?
At the dawn of the twentieth century, American entrepreneurs, many from property speculators from the Dakotas, flocked to Calgary and settled on the hill just south of town. Very quickly, it came to be known as American Hill, and towards the end of the 1900s many of its residents expressed their desire to name the district’s streets after American presidents such as Washington, Cleveland and Grant.
“This did not go down well with the predominantly British-Canadian culture of Calgary at that time,” write Elise Corbet and Lorne Simpson in their detailed history of Mount Royal. “The majority of the population came from eastern Canada or the British Isles, and they were proud of their connection with the British Empire,” write Corbert and Simpson. “This did not go down well with the predominantly British-Canadian culture of Calgary at that time. The majority of the population came from eastern Canada or the British Isles, and they were proud of their connection with the British Empire. The initial reaction came with the 1907 plan, showing such names as Sydenham, Durham, Colborne, Carleton, Dorchester and Amherst, names resonant of British rule in Canada, which should have been enough to counter the concept of American Hill.”
But it wasn’t enough. In 1910, two Tory members of Calgary’s elite, R.B. Bennett and William Toole — Bennett would later become Prime Minister — convinced the Canadian Pacific Railway, which owned most land around Calgary, to officially rename American Hill after Mount Royal, in honour of the CPR’s president, William Van Horne, who lived in Montreal.
Then, write Corbet and Simpson, “the full force of Canadian patriotism was brought to bear when the street names zeroed in on prominent French Canadians in our history: Frontenac, Montcalm, Talon, Laval, Joliet, Verchères (the only woman in the group), and early explorers such as Cabot and Champlain. Montreal, Quebec and Levis were thrown in for good measure. After this, there was no more talk of American Hill.”
Of course, most of these names, from Amherst to Talon, would be familiar to Montrealers. After all, they grace a number of our own streets. But, removed from local history as they are, the street names of Calgary’s Mount Royal never seem to have become grafted to the landscape. Nearly a century after their imposition, they seem somehow contrived.
(I should add that this isn’t true for the name of Mount Royal itself: it quickly entered Calgary’s collective imagination as a symbol of the city’s elite. In 1910, it was even reflected in the name of Calgary’s first college.)
Today, nearly a third of Mount Royal’s residents are American immigrants or expatriates. In a way, the legacy of American Hill lives on.
One of the King of Kowloon’s last remaining pieces.
Photo by Dustin Shum of the South China Morning Post
Tsang Tsou Choi, the King of Kowloon, died two weeks ago at the age of 86. I wrote about Tsang in March, outlining my first encounter with his graffiti and the strange and sometimes nonsensical messages it contains.
Hong Kongers will remember his denunciations of Queen Elizabeth II and his outlandish claim to be the rightful proprietor of most of Kowloon. But Tsang’s impact was less trivial than it might seem: in a society that for decades stressed material gain and social mobility above all else, the King of Kowloon was an oddball and an outsider. His unique visual style influenced a generation of creative young Hong Kongers and, in 2003, his work was featured in the Venice Biennial.
For most of his life, however, Tsang was not viewed with such high regard by the Hong Kong authorities, who doggedly erased his work as soon as he put it up. Only a few of his murals remain, the most prominent being located on a pillar at the Star Ferry terminal in Tsim Sha Tsui. Now, pressure is mounting on Hong Kong’s leaders to preserve what is left of the King’s legacy. “Friends, exhibitors, members of the Antiquities Advisory Board and a legislator said Tsang’s work, some of which remains on walls in Kowloon, was part of the city’s collective memory and must be preserved,” reports the South China Morning Post.
Ever since its handover to China in 1997 and the economic recession that followed, the question of Hong Kong’s identity has weighed heavily on its citizens. Last year, the decision to destroy the Queen’s Pier and an historic Star Ferry terminal sparked widespread outrage, as did the eviction of hundreds of residents and businesses for “Wedding Card Street” to make way for a new real estate development. Issues of heritage and “collective memory” have become standard fodder for discussion.
For many Hong Kongers, then, the King of Kowloon represented a part of the territory’s local identity, a small part of the unique culture that sets it apart from the overbearing mainland. So far, government officials appear to be listening. The SCMP reports that they promised yesterday not to remove any of the King’s remaining work. “I don’t see any reason why they should be removed,” said Bernard Chan, a member of Hong Kong’s executive council.
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