Ghetto at the Center of the World: Chungking Mansions, Hong Kong

"My fifth book selection is about Chungking Mansions, which, as you mentioned, is infamous as a microcosm not just of Hong Kong but of the world. If you go, you will be surprised by how many African, Indian and Pakistani traders there are, buying cheap smart phones and clothes to resell in their home countries. Chungking Mansions gets a lot of bad press because it’s such a self-governing area, just like the Walled City of Kowloon that preceded it. There aren’t many police around, and there are a lot of hash sellers. It’s known for cheap backpackers’ hotels, when tourists don’t want to spend an arm and a leg at the Four Seasons or the Ritz. Chungking Mansions is also known for its authentic Indian curry. That’s right, and there are a lot of colourful characters in there. It’s not for the faint of heart, and a lot of women are discouraged from going. But that didn’t stop Professor Gordon Mathews from bringing a team of university students into the building to do research. He himself spent decades befriending traders inside the building. The book is quite academic, but the main message is that Chungking Mansions is what he calls “low-end globalisation.” It’s a cheap marketplace, a global crossroads and a salvation for the emerging markets in Africa and South Asia. Yes, and a symbol of Hong Kong’s diversity – not just culturally and ethnically, but in terms of its ways of life. Tsim Sha Tsui is one of the most expensive shopping areas in the world, with high rents and glitzy malls. Chungking Mansions is right in the middle those malls – a self-enclosed, weird, seedy building that sticks out like a sore thumb. There are rumours that it is slated for redevelopment, which was the fate that befell the old Walled City of Kowloon. One of Mathews’s purposes in writing the book is to bring to our attention that Chungking Mansions is an important cultural heritage of Hong Kong that ought to be preserved. At the most superficial level, Hong Kong is the classic contradiction of East meets West. But that almost seems stereotypical. If you scratch deeper, I think at its core Hong Kong is the embodiment of survival and can-do spirit. If someone has an idea that works, it will happen because we don’t have any ideological baggage that prevents us from pursuing it. It’s that ‘Why not?’ attitude that I love about Hong Kong. Hong Kong just wants to be left alone. The post-handover government doesn’t understand that, and it has made every attempt to control Hong Kong, for instance, by promoting it as the art hub of Asia or the Silicon Valley of the East. But every good thing that happened to Hong Kong happened organically, because of its bottom-up spirit instead of a top-down government directive. We don’t function that way. Maybe it works well for China or Singapore, but that’s not how we work. Like I said, we just want to be left alone. No, we aren’t, and so we will continue to see a battle – on the legislative floor, on the streets, on university campuses and on the international stage. Next year, 2017, is the year we were supposed to be able to democratically elect our leader, the Chief Executive, but the electoral reform to achieve that has failed. So we will have another election by committee that will no doubt reopen old wounds as we once again witness an undemocratic process in action. And there is another date that nobody wants to mention: 2047. That’s when the fifty years of ‘One Country, Two Systems’ [established after the handover in 1997] expires. The best case scenario is that Beijing keeps things the way they are, seeing no reason to change what has worked in the past. The worst case scenario is that they completely merge Hong Kong and Beijing in political terms, which will mean the end of Hong Kong. We will see which way it goes."