Deaths Tell the Story of Life in Old Hong Kong

This is a great little article about an fascinating book. Having previously lived in Happy Valley for many years I became very familiar with the cemeteries in the area. They do tell a valuable story of Hong Kong.

I can’t help but draw a parallel between this type of documentation of the past and some of the Insights Abbas makes about Hong Kong and the politics of disappearance. There is something intangible and remote about Hong Kong culture and everyday life, analysis of it is often cumbersome, slippery, and unsatisfactory. However, using conceptual anchors of the past, of disapperance, memory, and place can collude to build an engaging account of the territory.

This is of course a real gem for anyone fascinated with graveyards and biographies, but ultimately one of those ‘key’ Hong Kong books.

Interview here

Book here

Last night whilst talking to colleagues and students we debated Hong Kong landscape, history, and photographs. I commented that whenever you go to a bookshop in Hong Kong, despite the vast array of books on Hong Kong, typically 50% of what is on the shelves are photo books of Hong Kong. These books are normally contemporary pictures, or a collection of ‘old’ Hong Kong. What is desperately lacking is a contrasting book of old and new.

Fortunately there is a wonderful Flickr group that fills this void. It houses a remarkable collection of photos in which it is possible to trace change, discontinuity, and permanence in the Hong Kong physical and built landscape. One photo that I do not include here shows Chungking Mansions photographed approximately 25 years apart. There is little change.

For Hong Kong people these photos are valuable in dramatic ways. THe cultural history of the territory changes in such a dramatic pace, that these small fragments of the past hold the key to unlocking memories that have been cemented over, lost in the sea, and constructing upon.

For my further musings on the changes to HK places see here. Also some other collections of Hong Kong photographic history here and here.

Meandering through Monopoly, The Peak, Governor Young, and Crisis Capitalism

This board game provided me with some interesting things to reflect upon. I like how they have adapted the classic game for the Hong Kong setting and I find it very interesting to see how the different areas of Hong Kong are priced and profiled as either cheap or elite and expensive.

Of course Victoria Peak is still the most expensive spot on the board. Buying a deed for The Peak costs $3000 in comparison with the paltry $600 needed to get a spot at Chek Lap Kok. 

However, what many people may not realise is that racial segregation in Hong Kong in the early 1900s resulted in the prohibition of Chinese from living on the Peak. Often this prized location is imagined as unobtainable beacause of its expense. But since the early days of the colony, Hong Kong has always had very wealthy Chinese and Eurasian families. For these people, The Peak was denied. The Peak ordinances of 1904 and 1918 legally enforced this.

During the same era in 1919 part of Cheung Chau island was also reserved for British missionaries. This is  alarming as a deliberate anti-inclusive move by an evangelical group.

Such racial segregation and legislation was deeply unpopular in Hong Kong and was widely regarded as a humiliation.

The Peak ordinances were finally repealed in 1946. After the end of WW2 and the return of British rule to Hong Kong after the Japanese occupation, the Governor Mark Young instigated broad changes.

The ‘1946 spirit’ as John Carroll (2007:132) terms it, was a turning point in Hong Kong history. This was the moment that Hong Kong came closest to self-determination, and full independence. Governor Young felt strongly that Hong Kong could make the transition to a full city-state and perform an intermediary role between the East and the West. It was however never to be. Britain felt that Young was too influenced by the liberation of Hong Kong and softened by his sympathy to the hardships the colony’s people had faced under Japanese rule. Many of the local Chinese elite also felt that the reforms were a step too far. His reforms were only ever partially put into practice, but he did put an end to The Peak Ordinances.

I considered Young’s changes in the light of Naomi Klein’s ‘Shock Doctrine’ argument. In which governments and capitalists take advantage of crisis in order to privatise public amenities. Mark Young’s ‘1946 spirit’ was less to do with ‘crisis capatalism’ and much more to do with an earnest capitulation to independence. Crisis is not simply an opportunity for change, crisis is change. The Japanese Tsunami of 2011 has been a catalyst for the closure of nuclear power programmes in both Japan and Germany. 

So whilst Klein rightly notes that Hurricane Katrina destroyed not only New Orleans, but also the public schools programme, this is not always the case. Crisis and fortune work in more complex ways.

The last couple of days have been fascinating ones in Hong Kong. The hot topic of discussion remains the events of the T10 typhoon. Yesterday morning people awoke to streets littered with fallen trees, crumpled roadsigns, and flooded walkways in low lying areas. The South China Morning Post has numerous photos today of the destruction, one even showing a yacht crumpled against a harbour wall in Deep Water Bay. At the same time Social Media is awash with photos of the carnage, Twitter and Facebook users are sharing scores of photos.

My mind can not help contrasting this with the events of Typhoon York back in 1999. Sure there was plenty of destruction, and sure there were scores of photos in the press. However, there was not the instant reproduction of images via mobile digital cameras like I am seeing these last few days. There certainly wasn’t the online sharing of these details, and the spread of so many images between so many people. 

After the initial reports on York there were photos in the press, but the day after there were none. Now two days on after Vicente’s strike and the amount of available data is piling. We can access huge amounts of information very quickly, and we are no longer dictated by the press. We can search out these images, videos, and stories through our own networks and reproduce them for as long as our own interest remains.

One of the pictures above pushes this even further showing the published report of the September 1906 typhoon in Hong Kong which caused a huge amount of devastation also.

So whilst the discussion circulates about what got destroyed, how many beautiful trees were lost, or even in my opinion the unnecessary criticism of the MTR…I am reflecting on some other issues.

Where some see a typhoon, I see social change. 

Old business cards for Chungking House hotel

Imagined Communities is one of those books that crops up in the references of scores of books that I have read, yet I have never read it myself. Earlier this week I set to remedy that. I can see why it is such a key text but it makes me want to revisit Ernest Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism .

Here is an excerpt from Anderson…

Some of the peoples on the eastern coast of Sumatra are not only physically close, across the narrow Straits of Malacca, to the populations of the Western littoral of the Malay Peninsula, they are ethnically related, understand each other’s speech, have a common religion, and so forth. These same Sumatrans share neither mother-tongue, ethnicity, nor religion with the Ambonese, located on islands thousands of miles away to the east. Yet during this century they have come to understand the Ambonese as fellow-Indonesians, the Malays as foreigners.

Benedict Anderson “Imagined Communities” pp 120-121.