Tai Po Market Cooked Food Centre. Photo by Tommy Ga-Ken Wan
The decor consists of handwritten menus and beer posters taped to the wall, the lighting is a harsh fluorescent glare and there’s a constant din from the kitchen. No matter: it’s Saturday night and the Bowrington Road Cooked Food Centre is packed.
At one table, a family shares a steamed fish and a bottle of wine. At another, a group of middle-aged men down large bottles of beer while playing a noisy game of dice. When one of the players notices some other diners observing the game, he holds up his beer and offers them a toast.
Tucked inside the top floors of neighbourhood wet markets, invisible from the street, Hong Kong’s cooked food centres are an odd cross between a shopping mall food court and a streetside dai pai dong. And despite their clinical-sounding names, many of them have become destinations for hearty, boisterous and affordable meals.
“Going to a cooked food centre is about the whole experience,” says Jason BonVivant, a food critic who writes for several local publications, as well as the food website OpenRice. (He insisted on being keeping his identity concealed to preserve his anonymity as a critic.) Though it’s “loud, not particularly clean and a bit uncomfortable,” the attraction is the combination of good food and a lively, informal atmosphere, he says.
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.
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.
The wet market on Haiphong Road comes as a bit of a surprise, tucked as it is beneath a busy flyover that shudders with the weight of passing trucks. The crowds streaming along the road towards the shops on Canton Road pass it by without much thought. If a passerby were to wander in, though, he or she would be in for another surprise. Instead of the usual row of fishmongers and butchers selling every cut of pork cut imaginable, there is a small collection of halal butchers.
I’ve been to the market on a number of occasions, and each time, the butchers seem vaguely surprised to see me. They ask me where I am from. “Canada,” I reply, to which they usually tell me about a relative in Toronto or offer some platitude about the beautiful scenery. On my last visit, I asked one of the butchers, Asif, how long he had been working there. “More than twenty years,” he said. Born in Pakistan, he came to Hong Kong as a child and started working in the market when his father opened a shop there in the 1980s. “We don’t come from a family of butchers, so we had to watch others and learn from them,” he said.
I had always assumed that the market’s customers were mainly Pakistani from the surrounding neighbourhood, but it draws a more diverse crowd than that. “Indians will come and buy goat — they don’t eat beef — and cook it for breakfast,” Asif told me. “Chinese people come here too. They say our meat tastes better.” He gestured towards cuts of beef hanging from hooks above his stall. “In our country, beef is tough and goat is softer, but here, beef is very tender and goat is tough.” I asked why, but he shrugged.
You can’t touch the sculpture in front of Langham Place. It’s a nice bronze piece by Larry Bell, and it looks great from a distance, but if people touched it, their oily hands would ruin the metal. So there’s a security guard stationed out front, all day, every day, to make sure nobody crawls onto the sculpture’s tree-like limbs, which, most cruel of all, seem to invite you to climb them, or at least lean on them.
Since it opened five years ago, Langham Place has become one of the most recognizable landmarks in Mongkok. Its 700-foot office tower, capped by a glowing dome, can be seen from throughout the city, including my kitchen and bedroom windows, where I take strange comfort in its constant presence. The mall underneath is home to an independent radio station and a huge, unforgettable atrium ringed by outdoor café terraces. The last adjective I would use to describe Langham Place is “bland,” which can’t be said for most malls.
The way Langham Place treats the streets around it is another story. The entire complex occupies two narrow city blocks, connected by large enclosed footbridges above street level. One block is home to the office tower and shopping mall; the other contains a luxury hotel, minibus terminus and community centre. As you’d expect from such large buildings sandwiched onto such small blocks, the effect is that of a tunnel — you’re walking down the street past buildings of varying height and suddenly the sun disappears, the wind blows harder and you’re surrounded by huge, featureless walls. Whereas the interior of the mall is memorable and engaging, its exterior is a triumph of commercial gigantism.
Martin Turner has a way of getting to work that is faster than the MTR and much cheaper than a taxi: he rides a bike. For most of his ten years working at a marketing firm in Wan Chai, Turner has commuted from his North Point home by bicycle. “It takes about 15 minutes door to door,” he said. “That’s about half the time it would take by public transport.”
Across the harbour, Charlie Wong Liang-yih works as a graphic designer from his home in Mongkok. When he leaves his flat to visit friends in other parts of Kowloon, he often takes his bike. “Before, people thought it was ridiculous to ride a bicycle around Hong Kong, but more and more people use them to get around,” he said.
People in dozens of neighbourhoods across Hong Kong use bicycles to commute to train stations, work and to run daily errands, but the government officially recognizes cycling only as a form of recreation, not as transport — something cycling activists are fighting to change.
Every day, according to a 2004 Transport Department study on cycling, more than 65,000 bicycle trips are made, mainly by people biking from their homes to train stations, schools, workplaces and shops.
Other studies suggest the number of daily bike trips is actually much higher. Last year, the Shatin District Council commissioned a study on cycling in the district, which is home to more than 600,000 people, and found that 33.5 percent of the population cycles more than once a week. The study also reported that 65 percent of residents perceive cycling as “an important mode of transport” and that each Shatin family owns, on average, about two bicycles.
Wandering down narrow lanes, past rows of makeshift houses, I could be standing in a squatter’s village in the New Territories. Potted plants sigh in the heavy heat of summer. Door gods peel from wooden entranceways. It is quiet. But I’m not in a village — I’m ten stories above a narrow street in Tai Kok Tsui, on the roof of a large block of flats built in the 1970s.
About thirty families live on the roof. Most are immigrants from the mainland or South Asia; others are longtime roof-dwellers who’ve decided they’d rather live here than in a faraway public housing estate. People have been living on Hong Kong’s roofs for decades; rooftop villages like this are a remnant of the massive tide of mainland refugees that swept over Hong Kong in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. Rooftop shacks have been bought, rented and sold ever since, in an illegal black market that is tacitly accepted by the government. There are no statistics on how many people live on rooftops, but one community worker told me the number could be in the tens of thousands.
One of the Tai Kok Tsui roof’s residents is a 23-year-old university student named Sam Fong. I was first introduced to him by a social worker who is helping relocate families off of the roof, which will be demolished for a new housing development in the near future. He moved here with his family from Guangzhou a few years ago. Unlike many roof-dwellers, he’s quite philosophical about his surroundings. The rooftop is a village in more ways than its appearance: everyone knows each other and people keep their doors open. Every fall, Fong’s family hosts a Mid-Autumn feast in a small open space in front of their house.
In April, I wrote about the Cheungs, who live in a condemned building in Kwun Tong. Years ago, they built shacks on their roofs and cage homes in their flat to rent to poor tenants. This photo was taken in the flat, which is still home to a few elderly people who live in the cages, which are really just metal bunk beds with mesh gates to protect against theft. The apartment is filthy and filled with decades of accumulated junk. At least the wraparound windows are nice.
On the left, a 1950s building that was demolished earlier this year
From afar, Hong Kong’s postwar buildings look plain and utilitarian, but look closer and you’ll notice their clean lines and vaguely Art Moderne details. I especially like their graceful interaction with the street: curved corners, large balconies (though most have been enclosed), shops on the ground floor and apartments above. Thousands of these buildings were built in the 1950s and 60s, as Hong Kong recovered from the depopulation and destruction of the Second World War. In their own homely way, they are to Hong Kong what Haussmanian apartment blocks are to Paris.
Now they are disappearing even more quickly than they were built. Hong Kong’s economy and system of governance is based largely on property development. In order to maintain its prosperity, land values need to remain extraordinarily high and the city needs to be constantly redeveloped, even though the population is only modestly growing. In other words, under the current regime, Hong Kong must cannibalize itself in order to survive.
Until this year, a property company that wanted to redevelop an old building needed to buy out 90 percent of the units in that building before it could force the others to sell. Now the government has lowered that quota to 80 percent, making it significantly easier for old buildings to be bought out and town down. Property developers have pounced. Since the policy was changed, they have started buying flats in nearly every old walkup building left in my neighbourhood.
Standing at the corner of Ma Tau Wai Road and Bailey Street, less than a block from the spot where a tenement building suddenly collapsed in January, Matauwei Apartments looks much younger than its age would suggest.
That’s because last autumn, with money from the government’s Operation Building Bright programme, the 52-year-old building was repainted and renovated. Its bright blue facade and clean windows stand in contrast to the many decrepit blocks in the surrounding streets.
But Matauwei Apartments could soon be torn down. For the past 18 months property developer Henderson Land has been buying flats in the building, which it intends to redevelop. This has left some residents perplexed: why was a building renovated with public money when it was slated for demolition?
“It’s certainly strange,” said one resident who has lived there for 40 years. “The government is still sending letters to us telling us to renovate this or that.”
Jim Chi-yung normally walks with a steady, deliberate pace, but on the grey afternoon of February 4th, he broke into an uncharacteristic sprint, running from his office at the University of Hong Kong to a friend’s waiting car. He was heading to Maryknoll Convent School in Kowloon Tong, where the future of a tree was at stake.
Last year, Maryknoll had a decided to chop down a 20-metre-tall Norfolk Island Pine that leaned to the north and seeped resin from its trunk, giving the eerie impression that it was crying. The schoolgirls called it the Ghost Pine. Since it was planted in the late 1930s, it had become an emblem of Maryknoll, which is one of Hong Kong’s most prestigious private girls’ schools. The decision to fell the tree was met with a furious response from Maryknoll’s network of well-connected alumni, who called Jim for help. He helped publicize the case and after a flurry of media attention, the school backed off.
But in January, a crew of contractors dug a trench around the pine and severed most of its roots. The school declared that the tree could not be saved. Its felling was scheduled for February 5th. When he arrived on the afternoon of the 4th, he asked to look at the tree, but the school’s administrators refused. He looked worried. “Like a doctor who will use every effort trying to save a patient, immediate stabilization work can be imposed on the trunk instead of cutting the tree immediately,” he told reporters.
