In contrast to the bland apartment buildings on its south side, the northern side of Mosque Street is lined by a crumbling stone wall and vegetation spilling over from the lush grounds of the Jamia Mosque. If you peek over the wall, there’s a nice view of the mosque, which is the oldest in Hong Kong. It’s a surprisingly rustic scene in the Central Mid-Levels, a neighbourhood that has obliterated most traces of its 170-year history.
Another throwback is Mosque Street’s name. Though perfectly straightforward in English, it’s a lot more complicated in Chinese. While the proper standard Chinese name for mosque is 清真寺 (ching tsam tsi), or回教廟 (wui gaau miu) in Cantonese, Mosque Street’s Chinese name uses the expression 摩羅廟 (mo lo miu), which derives from mo lo cha, an old and derogatory term for South Asians.
These days, the sweet ballads of Cantopop might seem like they are smothering whatever creative spark Hong Kong’s music scene might have, but that wasn’t always the case. In the 1970s, Cantonese pop was populist, exciting and avant-garde. Until then, most of the popular music recorded in Hong Kong was in Mandarin. It was the rise of the local TV and film industry to make Cantonese music for the masses, often in the form of theme songs that ran during the opening credits (a tradition that still exists on television today).
Ask anyone who defined the sound and ethos of 1970s Cantopop and Sam Hui‘s name will invariably crop up. Raised in So Uk, a public housing estate, Hui sang humourously about everyday Hong Kong life in a vernacular language that people could easily identify with. (His song about the 1960s water shortage is a classic.) He was also an actor, appearing two dozen movies between 1973 and 2000.
The opening sequence of the 1976 comedy The Private Eyes is a great montage of Hong Kong street scenes, accompanied by a song by Hui with the usual topical references to Hong Kong life and culture. There’s a funny English version, but it’s meaningless — all of the local commentary has been removed.
The following essay appears in the April 2010 issue of Muse, a Hong Kong arts and culture magazine. The same issue also contains my feature-length profile on Hong Kong’s “tree professor,” Jim Chi-yung. The magazine can be found at major bookstores throughout the city.
In my neighbourhood, I know exactly what language to speak. At Jean-Coutu (the drugstore), Nouveau Palais (the corner diner) and Première Moisson (the upscale bakery), it’s French. At Zoubris (the copy shop), Cheskie (the Jewish bakery) and Club Social (the Italian café), it’s English.
But in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, on the other side of town, I’m lost. I know the neighbourhood is mostly English-speaking, but I don’t want to offend anyone. So before walking into the clothing store, I decide to take the safe route and speak French. Turns out it was the right decision. The owner was francophone.
Nothing is simple when it comes to language in Montreal. The city’s history has made it one of the most linguistically contested places in the world, but far from being a hindrance, it gives it the kind of powerful creative charge that can only come from cultural friction.
By day, the Western District Public Cargo Working Area is a sun-bleached strip of forklifts, barges and rusty containers. By night, it’s another world. People from across Hong Kong’s Western District sneak into the cargo area to ride their bikes, fish, barbecue, sit by the water and chat with friends. Security guards watch the activity benignly until the end of their shifts, when they head home and leave the gates ajar so that people can wander in.
The cargo area stretches all the way from Kennedy Town to the wholesale food market in Shek Tong Tsui, where a long pier extends out into Victoria Harbour. If you wander to the end of the pier, you’ll be immersed in the sound of Hokkien being spoken: this is where the neighborhood’s large community of Fujianese immigrants likes to hang out. “When it gets really hot in the summer, we come here because there’s always a breeze,” says one woman, Mrs Lin, who moved to Hong Kong 15 years ago. “We just sit around and speak our own language. It’s a good place.”
I’ve passed through the cargo working area a few times, always surprised by the amount of activity in such an unlikely place. Not all Public Cargo Working Areas in Hong Kong are like this — I’ve passed by the one nearest to me and it’s a ghost town at night — so I think the popularity of the one in Western must be a factor of its proximity to lots of apartments as well as the lax security. Last fall, I returned to the cargo area with a camera and audio recorder for CNNGo. Above is what I got.
Franco-Algonquin hip hop is the last thing I expected to encounter in Hong Kong, but that’s exactly what I heard this past weekend at the former Central Married Police Quarters, which has suddenly become the most interesting cultural space in town. Over the past month, the Heritage X Art X Design festival and the Indie Ones series of concerts have used the space to great effect, transforming its concrete courtyard into a fake lawn (in contrast to the beach created by November’s Detour festival) set in front of a bamboo stage illuminated by red market lamps.
Samian is the son of a French-Canadian father and an Algonquin mother; he grew up on a native reserve in Abitibi-Témiscamingue, about 800 kilometres northwest of Montreal. He started rapping when he was a teenager, first in French, and later — after he met the influential hip hop crew Loco Locass — in Algonquin.
Samian took the stage on Saturday in a performance that was energetic but marred by poor sound, which was mainly because the organizers had to muffle the vocals after the police got a slew of noise complaints from nearby luxury apartment towers. (“At least in Quebec we have until 10pm before we have to keep quiet,” Samian’s DJ said to me after the show.) The crowd responded enthusiastically even though most of the people there didn’t speak French.
There’s several different names in English for small, secondary streets that run between blocks or behind major roads. Alley and lane are the words most often used in North America, but there’s significant variation in the UK, where regional words like vennel, chare, wynd, twitten and jigger are common.
It’s a similar story in China. Just about every city has a lu (路), which is the word mostly commonly used to describe important roads. And even though there is a basic word for lane — xiang (巷) — there are also many regional variations. In Beijing, it’s hutong (衚衕); in Shanghai, it’s longtang (弄堂) and in Chengdu, it’s xiangzi (巷子).
I don’t know anything about the exact origins of these different words for alley, but I imagine they have roots in local languages and geography. In Guangzhou, for example, a common name for alley is tung jeun in Cantonese (衕津), which literally means “alley dock” and refers to a lane near the Pearl River. Nobody uses this word in Hong Kong, where two other words are used to refer to alleys: fong (坊) and lei (里), which is a Cantonese transliteration of the English word “lane.”
Few things are as contentious and politically charged as the names of where we live, so it’s not surprising to see toponymy back in Montreal’s political spotlight, three years after the Park Avenue/Parc Avenue/avenue du Parc debacle. Earlier this week, a variety of nationalist groups began to advocate the renaming of Amherst Street, ostensibly because its namesake, Jeffrey Amherst, an officer of the British Army who helped conquer Quebec in 1760, advocated the genocide of North America’s native peoples.
Fair enough, I guess. There has long been a movement to give Lionel Groulx the boot from the St. Henri metro station that bears his name because of what he thought and said about Jews. Thing is, in the case of both Amherst and Groulx, as much as their beliefs and actions would be unacceptable today, they were in keeping with the general attitudes of their time. Groulx was far from the only anti-Semite in pre-WWII Canada; Amherst was not the only military leader who engaged in despicable tactics to win a war.
Besides, plenty of other unsettling people whose names have been enshrined in the landscape. If we want to get rid of all of the skeletons in our toponymical closet, we have a lot of cleaning to do, starting with Christopher Columbus (genocidal imperialist), René Lévesque (lethal drunk-driver), Maurice Duplessis (corrupt autocrat) and Saint Zotique (he wasn’t even a saint!).
Street markings are ubiquitous in Hong Kong, thanks to its British heritage, and pedestrians are urged to “Look Left” or “Look Right” at every crossing. But I was somewhat astonished to find out that the Chinese character used for this command (望, pronounced mong in Cantonese) does not just mean “look” in a literal sense, it can also mean “hope” or “expect.”
Of course, as is always the case in Chinese, the word’s actual meaning depends entirely on context. But it’s awfully poetic in a figurative sense. What goes through your mind in that microsecond that passes when you turn your head to look at something? Trepidation, fear, longing, expectation, hope? And what happens when that brief moment of anticipation settles into the reality of what we see?
Writers and journalists looking for a quick and easy symbol of Montreal’s political and linguistic divide usually find one in the city’s downtown west end. There, in the shadow of the Montreal Children’s Hospital, René Lévesque Boulevard turns into Dorchester Avenue as it crosses Atwater and passes from Montreal into Westmount, a remnant of the divisive legacy of nationalism in Quebec.
Symbolically, I’ve always thought that this streetcorner did Montreal an injustice. It’s too simple, too obvious. It doesn’t jive with the nuanced reality of the city’s everyday life.
A more representative streetcorner can be found further north, on the border between Montreal and Hampstead. On its west side, in Hampstead, a newish set of street signs marks the corner of Rue Macdonald Road and Rue Fleet Road. Right across the street, in Montreal, two much older signs, dating back to the 1950s, describe the corner simply as Macdonald and Van Horne, their English articles—“Ave.” and “St.”—covered by white tape.
About eight different varieties of street signs can be found within Montreal’s old city limits; that doesn’t include the two dozen other kinds of signs seen in former suburbs like Outremont or de-merged municipalities like Hampstead. As innocuous and quotidian as they might seem, these signs capture the real complexity of its social and political landscape.
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.
Having travelled in other parts of Eastern Europe when younger, I was excited about my first trip to Riga, Latvia, a few months ago. I was not sure exactly what to expect but had an idea that it would feel more developed than other parts of Eastern Europe while still bearing quite some traces of its communist past. The prosperity of the city surprised me – it feels like a wealthy Scandinavian city and, indeed, it has many cultural and business ties to Scandinavia. I did not feel during the course of my week there any hint of a communist inheritance.
I was also curious to see how the ethnic Latvians and ethnic Russians co-existed in this Baltic city. Having read up on Riga before my trip, I knew that Riga is about 42% ethnic Latvian and about 42% ethnic Russian, and thus was not surprised to hear quite a lot of Russian spoken in the streets. It did not take me long to find out that there is indeed some antagonism between the two groups.
What I was not prepared for, however, was the complete lack of any signage in Russian. I do not know what the law is there, but it does not appear to consist of having a Latvian sign at least twice as big as a Russian sign. I saw plenty of English signs. Russian was most noticeable for its absence.
I cannot decide if this is a good or a bad thing – the Latvians were unwillingly taken over by the Russian-dominated Soviet Union, and their culture almost destroyed. Independence provided them with a precious chance to protect and restore their culture. On the other hand, Russians are, unless they are willing to Latvianise, clearly treated like second class citizens. I met one Russian who used a Latvianised spelling on his business cards, but used his native Russian spelling to sign his e-mails.
I sympathise with both groups and cannot help but compare and contrast the situation in Riga with that in Montreal, which it seems to resemble more greatly than that in other bilingual cities such as Brussels. Is it the difficulty in reconciling the conflicting demands of justice for a minority within a minority?
Toronto, like many cities across North America, uses its street signs to identify neighbourhoods. Chinatown and Greektown are no exception.
In Greektown, which extends along the Danforth for several blocks, Greek signs are posted above the standard English signs. It’s more a token recognition of the neighbourhood’s historical ethnic character than anything else.
In the downtown Chinatown, however, all street signs are bilingual, and these Chinese/English signs can even be found on streets well outside the neighbourhood, like on the Queen Street West shopping district, across from MuchMusic and a block away from the Paramount entertainment complex.
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.
In September, the owner of Swatow, an import/export business, announced he will replace his St. Laurent Blvd. store with a $20-million shopping centre – the first major real-estate investment in Chinatown since the 1980s – that will include a supermarket, office space, a rooftop banquet hall and small boutiques similar to those found in Toronto or Vancouver’s trendy Asian malls.
Earlier this year, a number of new businesses opened elsewhere in the neighbourhood, including the third Canadian location of Xiao Fei Yang, a Chinese hot pot chain with hundreds of locations across Asia.
These changes in Chinatown’s retail landscape – toward businesses that appeal to a wider segment of the population, like young people and Mandarin-speakers from the mainland – are happening as Montreal’s growing Chinese population is becoming increasingly dispersed throughout the city.
“The demographics of Chinatown are definitely changing,” said Ting Kwan Hung, a community organizer who lived in Hong Kong, Liverpool, New York and Toronto before coming to Montreal in 2004. “There are more and more non-Cantonese speaking people and you also see more Chinese youth who speak French.”
Nodes of Chinese businesses and services have emerged outside of Chinatown, especially in Brossard, home to the largest concentration of Chinese immigrants in the Montreal metropolitan area. Other neighbourhoods, like Ville St. Laurent, Côte des Neiges, Verdun and the west end of downtown, also have large or growing Chinese populations.
Now that Chinese supermarkets, restaurants, dentists and other services are found throughout the city, can Chinatown stay relevant to Chinese Montrealers?
“There’s a lot of new immigrants, but they don’t spend much money,” said Tran Tao Cam, the vice-president of the Montreal Chinese Chamber of Commerce. “There are also lots of students from very rich families, but they don’t come to Chinatown. Look at the area near Concordia, along Ste. Catherine. There used to be only two or three Chinese businesses, now there’s 30 or 40.”
Tran worries the high cost of parking, issues with cleanliness, competition from business in other parts of the city and even the rising dollar will keep people from coming to Chinatown in the future. Still, he said, it remains “a very special area for business,” one that continues to draw a large variety of people.
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