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Whitefella Australian learning how to be gwai lo (鬼佬) in Hong Kong

Saturday, February 19, 2011

Power to the artist



Live snail art!
Last night, we attended the very first night of our first show for the Hong Kong Arts Festival, now in its 39th year. This was Powerplant, a sound and light show being staged in Kowloon Walled City Park, a place with a fascinating history.
With twenty-three installations in the course of the self-guided walk through the park, this is a must-see for anyone in Hong Kong between now and when the show closes on the 13th March. The pieces ranged from the fairly simple, where existing statues were lit up one-by-one, accompanied by varying sounds, to amazing works like nothing I have ever experienced.
The work above takes some explaining. Much of the art was under the direct control of the artists sitting at small tables in the park - this one was a projected digital image, through some sort of kaleidoscopic process, of a small bowl, which contained various natural materials, and live insects, as selected by the artist. In a strange sort of collaboration between the artist and the insect, in this case a snail (though the piece is entitled 'Worm Cam') some fascinating images were thrown up on the huge screen in front of us, which slowly evolved as the insects moved and the artist adjusted the materials, or the kaleidoscopic effect. This work illustrates one guiding theme of the show - being inspired by the park itself - as all the natural materials and insects are sourced from within the park. It does beg the question, 'Will there be new insect 'collaborators' each night, or will the most gifted performers be retained and nurtured throughout the show?'
Bellflowers - Anne Bean
Just as fascinating as the work itself was the audience reactions. Some works invited a quiet awe, whereas others generated a fascinating buzz of conversation and a visible excitement. One of the latter was a small podium exhibit within a tiny gazebo in the garden that periodically (and in that lay the suspense) gave the illusion of bubbling up with a 3D lava effect. People crowded around, straining their eyes in the dark, waiting for they didn't know what, until it happened, and the noise would draw more people in. A personal favourite of mine, though not one of the most visually stunning, had a quiet beauty of its own. Glass bells, for want of a better word, hung from a group of trees at various heights. Various of the bells, in ever-shifting combinations, would light up, literally fading in and then out, and at the same time a metal clapper would shimmer  gently against the edge of the bell, creating a mesmerizing tableau. It is the sort of thing that on a slightly warmer night (there was a chill in the air), I might have wanted to stay and watch for hours.
I'm not sure if this short video will do this work justice (the sound is quite poor) but many of the works could only really be appreciated in movement. This one had dozens of led-lit windmills, spinning in multi-coloured fashion across the far side of a quiet pool of water. Though normally the sort of thing I love - it reminded me of the Monkey lights I bought for my bike back in Australia - there was so much to see in Powerplant that I was almost overloaded with sensation at this point in the walk. The whole show was a reminder of the immense power of light and sound, particularly at night, to evoke mood and sensation, and to return us to a child-like sense of delight.
Old-time gramaphones playing surreal music
Of course for adults this child-like delight sometimes get side-tracked by our desire to pin it all down, and obviously I am no exception. The cameras, from fancy SLRs to smartphones, were out in force, as people tried to hold onto the sense of wonder they were feeling. Very wisely the organisers had banned flash photography - I can only imagine how much of the show would have been undermined by the barrage of camera flashes. This was well-respected by everyone there, a tribute to the civility of the Hong Kong people.
The grand finale of the show, as I think was intended, was a piece called Pyrophones, by artist Mark Anderson, who has a number of works in the show. This took place in one of the largest water features in the garden and contained an array of vertical pipes, protruding from the water, like a vast distributed pipe organ. For this is what it was, though of a dramatic sort. Played by the artist himself (?), these pipes belched tongues of flame, in time with particular sounds that conjured up the fire theme perfectly. The result was a symphony of fire and music that charged the night air with adrenalin, perhaps more usually evoked with bonfires and massed drumming. Though by this point I was overwhelmed by sensation, it was nonetheless hard to tear ourselves away from this work, and was a reminder of how actual fire still has a magic unbeaten by LED technological wizardry. A show to remember...

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Vitality and neighborhoods: Social class and Hong Kong

Public housing in Tai Po
This post has to come with some huge disclaimers, acknowledging that I am a newcomer, both to living in Hong Kong, and to the study of social class. However reading, possibly voraciously, for a research-based thesis on the issue, makes it hard not to reflect on my daily life here. Not being a Hong Kong local, nor having grown-up within the classed systems in Hong Kong, I may well be misunderstanding what is going on.
That said, my comments here are indebted to work by Mary Pattillo whose insights into the process of neighborhood formation provoked my thoughts here.
Having migrated to Hong Kong, I am surprised at how positive my reactions to the place have been. As someone who loved my 'home-town' of Melbourne, there could be many reasons for me to be slow to warm up to Hong Kong. Yet it is hard for me not to love. Everywhere I look there is something going on. The streets are always alive with people. The built environment is an amazing mixture of traditional Chinese, and modern global city. As I have commented in an earlier post, the public transport is fantastic. The food here, whether in supermarkets or in restaurants, seems truly global, drawn firstly from the region (China/Japan/Korea/Thailand/Vietnam) and then beyond (Europe, South and North America, and as major food-producers, Australia & South Africa). What's not to like?
Reading about the ways in which social classes are maintained and constrained by urban planning, caused me to reflect on some basic facts of Hong Kong life that may contribute to why this is such a vibrant city. One of the ironies of urban planning is that the most vibrant places in cities around the world are often that way because of the diversity of people (in both class and ethnicity) that rub shoulders, often literally, in those areas. It is ironic, because as places get recognised for their vibrancy, a process of gentrification sets in whereby the affluent move in, property prices go up, and the vibrancy of a place starts to be compromised, because it becomes inaccessible to most of the people who once made it so. In many places, when gentrification happens, there is often a loss of both social housing, and also of public transportation options.
These two things caught my eye. If there are two things that Hong Kong has in spades, they are public transportation and social housing. According to most the recent census here, in 2006, 48.8% of people in Hong Kong live in some form of public housing (for further info see this delightful article in wikipedia). This is a huge percentage of the population, and probably says something about the very high costs of private housing in Hong Kong. As far as public transport, there seems to be no place on the island that cannot be reached by public transport, whether it is the ultra-efficient MTR, the ferries, the double-decker buses, or the ever-enthralling minibuses. What is more, this transport is very reasonably priced and very frequent. Even if this were not true, there always seem to be taxis close-by, and these are a surprisingly cheap alternative, particularly late at night when public transport may have stopped. These two pieces of information mean that as a Hong Kong citizen, whatever your income, it should be possible to live in a variety of places across the city, and to be able to access most other places with relative simplicity.
These two factors must help to promote the vibrancy and excitement of this city. On a more descriptive, rather than analytical level, this can be illustrated by the Graham Street wet-market. This is the city's most famous wet-market, which happens on a narrow and very steep street in Central in Hong Kong. In Melbourne, it would be my perception that a market such as this would have been driven out perhaps thirty or forty years ago, by high prices, local government opposition, or perhaps a lack of customers (though perhaps the Queen Victoria market proves me wrong). Despite the almost comically high real-estate prices in Central, it still seems to be hanging on (though apparently there is some danger of it being redeveloped).
In thinking about the sustainability of cities (I will post on this shortly), and climate change-dominated futures, making cities places that people love to live is going to be particularly vital. Hong Kong, with it's mix of good public transport AND public housing, seems to offer a good model for how to do so. It is interesting that many of those who argue for gentrification talk about the increased buying power of those moving into the area, which is good for local businesses. While this may be true in some very limited sense, it seems to assume a guaranteed (low) density of housing. The Hong Kong solution seems to say that if you put ten (or twenty, or thirty) people in the space that might in most cities be occupied by just one or two, then no matter how low their spending power in a relative sense, they will still spend more in an absolute sense, thus promoting a vibrant city. Or at least that's the way it seems to me.

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Language lapses

Writing practice, in my cheap school notebook.
While I know intellectually that there will be times learning any language when it seems overwhelmingly hard, it doesn't seem to make it any easier when it happens.
Last Tuesday was one of those moments for me, when it felt like nobody could understand me, and I couldn't understand them, and I'd forgotten everything I thought I already knew up to this point. This wasn't true, of course, but at the time I just felt like crying. Fortunately there was no-one around to be sympathetic, so I was able to keep it all nicely bottled up inside!
The solution, as with all language-learning, is simply not to give up, so I made some time to hit the books, in between working on my thesis. As I read and write and listen, some of the little that I have learnt comes back to me, and I start to feel a little less overwhelmed. It is particularly nice when I come across a word or a phrase that I know I really need, such as the ever-useful, 'This one, please' (呢個該), for all those inarticulate shopping moments.
The other good moments come, when I am reading signs out and about, and a new word jumps out at me, that I realise I actually know, such as the other day, when I saw the word for bus, which is a simple transliteration of the sound, into Cantonese (baa1 si6), 巴. Two lovely easy characters that don't mess with my head too much.
I guess one of the reasons learning a language is so hard, just like trying to learn a craft, is that no-one can tell you when, if ever, you will be any good at it. It would be so much easier if you could just think, 'well, in five years time I will have this all sorted!'
If I can get a bit geeky here for a moment, perhaps I should remember a question the character Data, an android, was asked (on 'Star Trek: The Next Generation') about why he tried to appear more human. His answer, and I will be paraphrasing wildly here, was that it wasn't whether he could succeed that was important, because he knew he would never be human, but that it was the fact of trying that mattered. A nice early childhood lesson that, about process and not product. So here's to the journey...

Sunday, February 13, 2011

A little bit local

Wong Tai Sin temple, amid the urban bustle
Yesterday M & myself caught up with a friend from Australia, T, who was born and raised in Hong Kong. This was a great opportunity to ask lots of questions about those Hong Kong phenomena that we have been puzzled about. Of course we didn't get all our questions answered, because that would take about a week, and would probably be a bit tiring for T.
Instead we spent a very Hong Kong day with her. We went out for yum cha, at a restaurant local to her, in a mall in Wong Tai Sin (黃大仙). We tried to get the minibus from Kowloon Tong to get there, but it turned out that we were at the wrong one of two bus stations adjacent to Kowloon Tong MTR. Perhaps it is possible to have too much public transportation!?! This was not a great inconvenience - we just hopped back onto the Kwun Tong line and got the train along two stops. Getting off at Wong Tai Sin station had the added bonus of taking us past, and at one point through, the enormous Wong Tai Sin temple. This Daoist shrine is apparently one of the most famous in Hong Kong. This was not difficult to tell, even through gwai-lo eyes, with a bustling crowd and amazing-looking buildings, as well as apparently important people walking around in fancy robes - I guess these were Daoist priests. One of the questions we asked T was about this temple and whether some big ceremony was happening on the day. 'No', she said, 'that's just normal. It's always like that. You should see it on Chinese New Year - you can't even move!'
Everyday busy in Hong Kong
Lunch was a relaxed affair, eating at a restaurant where T's Mum works, so we were well-looked after. T searched out the few vegetarian items on the menu for us (I will have to try and memorise those characters for future restaurant occasions). Typically for Hong Kong, one of these turned out to have a little meat in, but then surely no-one would want to eat something completely meatless, would they? The most interesting discovery for me, that I may have to try and recreate at home, was a type of steamed bun I've never had before, with the evocative name of Quicksand bun, because the grainy yellow  and sweet filling resembles quicksand. Very nice. We got to refine our understandings of Chinese table etiquette, for which there are many different unwritten rules. Some that I think I now know are...  always take your own small bowl to the platter of food, rather than bringing the platter to you; Lay your chopsticks on your side-plate or chopstick-rest, not on your bowl; Turn your chopsticks the other way around, if you wish to serve a friend, unless you know them very well indeed; Finish everything that is in your bowl before taking some more food. Apparently there is also a ritual involving washing your bowls and chopsticks before you start eating, but T and her Mum had apparently done this while waiting for us to arrive. One of the interesting things we learnt is that many children, when they are school, including T herself, leave school at lunchtime to come to restaurants like this, where they meet their parent(s), have a lovely cooked lunch, and then go back to school. Finally I understood why I had been seeing so many high school children streaming out of their schools at lunchtime, and being met by parents. I know that schools aren't only half-day here, so it had made no sense. I think this experience would be unimaginable to most of those children back in Australia, munching on a sandwich or two for lunch, but it made sense when we got the bill for the meal, which was almost absurdly cheap. For four of us, ordering more food than we could eat, sitting down in comfortable surroundings, the bill was HK$127 (feel free to convert this into your currency of choice).
After lunch we took a quick minibus ride to one of the fancier malls close by, Festival Walk in Kowloon Tong. This is enormous, with seven or eight levels, including a cinema and an ice-skating rink, which was pretty busy, this being a Saturday. Interestingly, it was not very crowded, unlike the mall we go to most often in Sha Tin. This made it a relaxing afternoon of window-shopping, chatting idly to T about her life as it is now, and how it was growing up in these neighbourhoods. Along the way the conversation ranged from the finer points of Cantonese grammer, to typing chinese characters in using a keyboard (a useful skill, but one that T had resisted learning, preferring instead to bribe her younger brother to type things for her!), to T's mother's complicated rules about what not to eat or drink, and when (all based soundly on Chinese medicine practice), to the finer points of toasters, rugs, jewellery, and computer technology. I admired a very nice coffee tamper made by the Royal Selangor Pewter company, whose factory I remember vividly from a tour we did in Malaysia when I was twelve. I decided ultimately that it was a little too fancy for me, and perhaps too big a leap from my decidedly un-classy plastic coffee tamper, which does a good-enough job, though delivers very little aesthetic pleasure in the process.
After what was apparently a very typical local Hong Kong day,  we contemplated having dinner together, but decided that we still too full from lunch, so hopped back on the train and headed for home, slightly better informed that when we had left that morning.

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

So much for the new media...

...or the old media for that matter. Despite it being 2011, and having the world (or much of it) at my fingertips via the intertubes, it can still be surprisingly hard to find some sorts of information that you need.
Yesterday, while working from home, I kept hearing a very noisy helicopter buzzing overhead. Eventually I got curious enough to look, and I realised it must be a fire-fighting helicopter, as I'd seen pictures of these in Australia. I then realised that not only could I see the helicopter, I could see the location of the fire, and I could see flames! Hmmm! While this was on a reasonably distant hillside (perhaps five kilometres away), you learn to be quite sensitive to the issue of bushfires coming from Australia, particularly after the bad bushfires we had almost exactly two years ago today, in Victoria.
I could tell it wasn't a high fire-danger day, at least from what I am used to, because there was very little wind, but I do know how little rain there has been here since we moved almost six weeks ago, and I can see how dry the ground is, so that is not exactly reassuring.
So I got on the web, and found nothing (not even a skerrick of information) about a fire in the New Territories. I could find information about a bad fire they had here fifteen years ago in almost exactly the same spot, and even someone on a blog talking about how most fires here in Hong Kong are started from human carelessness. This is nothing new, though the specific cause is new to me, from people lighting incense and small fires as part of their respect for their ancestors.
I even got desperate enough for information, after exhausting all the English-media news sources I could find, to try and find a twitter feed that might tell me something, and I don't even UNDERSTAND twitter! Still nothing.
So last night we enjoyed an impressive view of quite a significant firefront creeping towards us down the hill, wondering if there was anything we really ought to know, but didn't.
                               ....
It's now morning, and the fire is still there, and the helicopters are back at work. The fire is still quite a distance away, but I still don't know anything more than I did last night.
So I have to ask the question? Is our new media environment all it is cracked up to be? Are we any better off than when gossip was our finest news source? Would I have found something if I spoke and read Cantonese?

I did (later) find this link to another source of fires, appropriate to the season, which is Lunar New Year fireworks.

Monday, February 7, 2011

Green Gourmet Nian Gao?

First ever Nian Gao
This post is in honour of my good friend Johanna, who has been diligently blogging the best of vegetarian and vegan cooking over at her blog since April 2007. Since that time she has blogged many hundreds of recipes, and become a damn good amateur food photographer into the bargain. Rarely a morsel seems to pass her lips (well, okay, perhaps the odd bowl of cereal) without it being blogged for posterity, and for the benefit of readers everywhere.
So this may be the first and last time I post a recipe, but Johanna, this one's for you. This being my first Chinese New Year living in Hong Kong, I wanted to try and embrace some of the traditions of the place, and where better to start than food. I've been seeing lots of Year Cake, aka Nian Gao (年糕) being sold in shops - and often they had samples to taste! Apparently it is traditional to cook this after the evening meal on New Year's Eve (this year 2nd February) with your family.
So even though M was tired and wanted to sleep, after a big day down in Central, I twisted her arm to make her come and at least watch while I made my own version of Nian Gao. There seem to be almost as many versions of this as there are people in China, so I have felt free to give it my own twists, always trying to stick within the New Year theme. My Nian Gao is probably closer to the Guangdong () style, which is appropriate, as I am in a Cantonese-speaking town.
Given the very limited kitchen equipment we brought to this country, the most creativity went into working out exactly how I could make it with what I had. Traditionally it would be cooked in a small cake tin, which is then steamed within a wok. I currently don't have a wok or a cake tin, at least not one that will fit within any of the pans we have. So, I got my metal sieve, lined it with a clean tea towel, which I then lined with some baking paper, wrapped it all up, and steamed it within one of the saucepans, with only a little steam escaping out of the sides! It actually worked beautifully, as you can see, and made for almost a Christmas-pudding shaped creation.
So how did I make it? I took a cup of boiling water, and dissolved about 3/4 cup of sugar in the water (add more or less, depending on your taste. Then add glutinous rice flour ( it needed about 4 cups of flour, but just add until it is a reasonable firm consistency). Then add dried fruit and/or nuts. I used various festive things that are being sold for Chinese New Year, like fresh cumquats (I removed the seeds and pith, and chopped the rind into it), a few cashews, chopped, some dates (these seem to be the most traditional), a few sultanas, and some crystallized sweet potato, coconut, lotus seeds and things that are all being sold as New Year delicacies at the moment. They all worked well, so add what you like. If the dates are too dry, I would advocate soaking them, but why would you be using old dried-up dates anyway, rather than yummy fresher ones? I also added 1/2 teaspoon of cardomon (because I like it), and  1 egg, beaten, because a few of the recipes I looked at seemed to have eggs in, though many didn't. Steam for 50 minutes or until a knife inserted in the centre comes out dry (it may take longer). Some recipes add vegetable oil, or similar, though I don't know what this would add to the recipe. It can be served cold, or heated up, often by slicing it, and gently heating the slices in a frying pan. Perhaps I'll go and have a piece now...