About Me

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

Saturday, March 26, 2011

Ersatz Venice

The Venetian casino - 'Disney' Venice
My parents recently visited us on their way back from Australia to the UK. It seemed like a good way to ease them back into winter from summer, although from what I've heard, it doesn't seem to have been a very warm summer anyway, back in Melbourne.
Dad has a fascination with islands and other isolated outposts of humanity, so he was very keen to visit Macau, the other Special Administrative Region of China apart from Hong Kong. Keen observers will know that Macau is no island, but a peninsula attached to China, some 60 kilometres from HK. Interestingly, it was once an island, but a sandbar that connected to the mainland gradually built up until it became a peninsula, and now humans have helped this along with a land reclamation project.
I was curious about Macau too, but mostly because I'd heard it was an intriguing blend of Europe and Asia, with many remnants of Portuguese occupation amid what is an Asian city. The pace of development in Hong Kong is so fast and furious that very little survives for very long - at times it seems that only the temples in this city have survived the developers.
I'll get onto the real Macau soon, but I couldn't resist the temptation to drag everyone to what I'd heard was one of the Seven Kitsch Wonders of the World - the replication of Piazza San Marco and the Grand Canal, in the Venetian casino. I'd read about it and heard about it, but like any good skeptic, I couldn't quite believe it until I had seen it with my own eyes, and having finally realised my dream of visiting the real Venice a couple of years ago, I had something to compare it to.
So we joined the crowd of Mainland tourists and made our way to the Casino, grabbing a handy taxi to cross one of the three amazing bridges that connect the main part of Macau to the island of Taipa, three kilometres to the south (now if only they installed some coloured lighting on these, like they would in Hong Kong, the effect would be perfect). As we walked in, via the West entrance, I couldn't see anything to distinguish this from any other bland but gaudy casino building. Not that I've been in a lot of casinos, but between movies and other media images of casino life, I have a sense of what passes for normal in these places. There were signs to the Grand Canal, so putting my disappointment aside, we followed these. Dad, as a retired water engineer, was somewhat disturbed, when he realised that the whole fake Venice complex was situated upstairs, above the main Casino level! Were there really canals, he was thinking, and why on earth would you attempt to engineer them in such an unlikely location? Nonetheless, they were indeed upstairs, and as we emerged into 'St Mark's Square' we were greeted by the sound of Italian opera, as sung by a small troupe of opera singers. Though the singers were Cantonese, they had clearly been trained in Western, rather than Cantonese opera forms. This was quite magnificent, if a little bizarre. The acoustics could have been better, but then this was essentially a very glamorous shopping mall, not an opera house.
Fake Venice was, I have to admit, all my kitsch heart had hoped for. There were gondoliers (a few whitefellas, but mostly Cantonese men and women, and interestingly, more female gondoliers than in the whole of Venice, Italy), three canals, and plenty of fake Italian architecture, as you can see in the picture above. Sadly, the photo does not do justice to the sky, because in Ersatz Venice, it is always sunset, with the evening light putting the first touches of colour on a few clouds studding an otherwise blue sky (complete with not-entirely-subtle ventilation system). Though none of the canals are really long enough to make it worth getting a gondola from anywhere to anywhere else, the price is certainly much more reasonable than in Venice itself, where you practically have to remortgage your house to afford the fare.
A more striking contrast with Venice itself is the absurd cleanliness of the place, which lent it a very Disney feel. The water itself was the pristine chlorinated blue of all the best swimming pools, unlike the canals of Venice, which can look like a hazard to marine life. It was perversely reassuring to see one piece of litter floating in one of the canals, perhaps an artistic homage to its namesake?!? I have to admit that I wouldn't actually recommend anyone visit the Venetian. Despite my love of kitsch, I had to admit is was essentially a shopping mall with a funky theme. I think they missed a great opportunity by not including the actual hotel rooms in the place as part of the faux Italian facades. It would have been much more alive, and a little less Disney, with some actual people inhabiting some of the hundreds of windows and balconies above street level. Did the designers think that nobody lives in any of the houses in the real Venice?
However, if you are in the neighbourhood, the outside of the Venetian is certainly worth going past, where there is a replica of the Campanile, the buildings look a little less 'plastic', and the water not quite so 'swimming-pool blue'.
You'd be much better to spend your time exploring Macau itself, which despite the overwhelming number of casinos (thirty or more, I believe), is a flourishing little city. Here you will see all sorts of marvellous sights, from a lion dance that we tracked down, after hearing the drumming at a distance, or a shop that seemed to sell only coconuts, though admittedly some were marked with lucky characters, allowing them to be sold, presumably at a considerable mark-up, to wedding organisers. I imagine we will be seeing a lot more lion/dragon/unicorn dances in our time here in Hong Kong, though I have to say I still haven't got the differences between them sorted out. I think this is a lion dance, because it only has two performers in the costume, rather than many, which would make it a dragon. And though the unicorn looks nothing like a 'Western' unicorn, I think that is recognisable by the forward curving horn on its head. This particular lion, as you can see, had a problem with a snake, and eventually danced the story through to where it was worrying at the snake like any self-respecting cat might worry at a lizard or mouse.
The Portuguese heritage of the place was still very much in evidence, with most of the signs being bilingual Portuguese/Cantonese. Given many of the similarities between written Portuguese and Spanish, it was an unexpected lesson in Spanish vocabulary, as the similar Portuguese word would usually trigger my memory of the word in Spanish. The narrow cobbled streets and curious back alleys were also very reminiscent of a visit we made to Spain back in 2009. Wandering around this area was an odd sensation, blending memories of that holiday with overlays of classic older Chinese housing that we know from the few parts of Hong Kong where these survive. We definitely plan to return, and explore a bit further.
You could also make time to see the incredible A-ma temple, reputedly built in 1488, and perched on the side of a very rocky hill. Apparently it was one of the first places ever photographed in China, presumably sometime back in the nineteenth century. This is dedicated to the goddess Matsu, who is apparently the same goddess of the sea who is called Tin Hau in Hong Kong, and has many temples dedicated to her here. This is hardly surprising, given the dominance of fishing as a trade in the history of both places.
The photo does not do it justice, with its many paths winding up the hill, past various shrines and temple buildings, to the summit where there are enormous characters carved into the rock. One of which I remember was 天 (sky or heaven) which may mean that the other character was 后, which would mean 'Heavenly Queen' (Tin Hau). However my memory for Cantonese characters is notoriously poor - they seem to slide out of my memory almost as fast as I learn them.
If you look between the bamboo in the picture you can just make out two tall thin yellowish columns. They were two of the largest sticks of incense I have ever seen, each of them about 25-30 cm in diameter. They could have been used as columns to hold up a ceiling, but instead they were slowly smouldering away - I can only imagine how long they burn for. Days? Weeks?
I am still trying to get a sense of how to be respectful around the many temples that I see or visit during my time here. In some ways they are very laid back, with various people sitting around smoking and shooting the breeze, or people coming in to quickly light some incense, before getting on with the rest of their day. Then of course there are tourists like myself, having a look around, but not really sure what the rules might be in a place like this. Cantonese locals suggest to me that I shouldn't light incense at a temple myself, unlike lighting a candle in a Catholic cathedral. To do so is to acknowledge a relationship with that particular goddess or god, and perhaps even that particular temple, and creates an obligation on a person to return to that same temple before the end of the year, as some sort of act of closure or thanksgiving. It is all a reminder of how ignorant I am beyond the basic facts of the major world religions.
Perhaps I can remedy some of that ignorance, at least in terms of Taoism and Buddhism as I get to know Hong Kong better.

Friday, March 11, 2011

Into the unknown, again...

I have no pictures for this one, I'm afraid, being a little too overwhelmed to take any photos at all. So our visit to Shenzhen will be plain old text - Gutenberg would be proud.
For those who don't already know this, Shenzhen is the area in China that immediately abuts Hong Kong, and has been designated a special economic zone (SEZ) by the People's Republic of China. For us, it is just a few stations up the line on the MTR from Tai Po, through a border crossing, and voilà, or in this case 这里 (if my French to Putonghua translator has any skill at all).
We were taken there by a friend who has been to Shenzhen many times, so at least we had a guide to help us negotiate the similarities and dissimilarities of the other China. The first stop in our day was to go to a spa to have a massage, one of my favourite things, and the reason I had come at all. This was to be a whole experience in itself - I'll try and keep it brief. First of all, the place was like an opulent hotel design of the 1980s; all marble, and froufrou, and lots of highly polished gold. We walked in and were handed wristbands and went to our respective change rooms where we changed into our colour-coded 'lounge-ware' for hanging out in the spa. These reminded me of those things that are sold as 'tropical pyjamas' in Australia, a kind-of open-necked short-sleeve shirt and shorts. All this with much help from multiple attendants in the change-room, some of whom  spoke a little English, though at this stage I was far too mesmerized to say much at all. From there we took a lift up to the fifth floor (yes, the place was enormous) surrounded by other patrons (all Chinese), in their lounge-wear. Did I mention that for men this was a brown and gold pattern, whereas for women it was pink and gold?
As you know, I feel most comfortable in black, preferably from head to toe, so to be skimpily clad in what felt like pyjamas, amongst strangers, was not to be at my best. We reached the 5th floor, and were directed, mostly with sign language, to our various massage-rooms. I'm pretty familiar with a massage table - after all, I did live in Daylesford - but there are always different ways that people do things, so a little bit of communication is needed. In a way it was very touching, because my masseur, a young Chinese woman, assumed that I could speak Putonghua(aka Mandarin). Nobody in Hong Kong up to this point seems to have assumed I will be able to speak any Cantonese, due to my whitefella complexion. This is clearly their own experience of white folks in Hong Kong, and probably proves their cosmopolitanism. So it was nice to be treated as if I could speak the language, whatever the reality.
For the first half of the massage we managed to misunderstand each other at every turn, but eventually we started to get the hang of communicating in some strange combination of Mandarin, Cantonese and English. She seemed to know about the same amount of English as I do Cantonese, so it was slow going, but we at least started to feel like human beings to each other. It turned out that her home language is Sichuanese, as she is from Chengdu, so English would actually be her fourth language - not bad at only 21. It was a good massage, using hot stones, which my Hawaiaan masseur from Melbourne had sometimes used. It was also mighty painful, though I'd expected that, as it has been a long time between massages.
Fortunately I was grateful enough for the massage not to mind feeling so stupid, so often, as I continually failed to understand what my masseur, whose name I learnt and promptly forgot, was trying to say. Part of the problem was one I am experiencing a lot at the moment - if people don't expect you to be speaking their language, they don't even try and interpret what you are saying as their language, and so they don't understand. This was a lot of the problem here. When we started each attempt at communication with the language we were trying to use, ie. Putonghua, Guangdonghua, Ying maan, we were much better off, because we had a clue what we were trying to listen out for.
It was a relief to get out of my spa gear, and back into my street clothes, but this was only the start of a day of more culture shock. One of the most obvious things to notice about being across the border is how many people smoke, and in how many places. As M. said, it was like being back in our childhood, where people walked around with cigarettes in their mouth routinely. To give you an idea how all-pervasive this was, there was a fancy dispenser on the table in the lobby of the health spa, with free cigarettes, and a handy lighter. It was like being in a looking-glass world. Hong Kong has not banned cigarettes in quite as many places as Australia, but it is not far behind. In Shenzhen you wouldn't even know such a thing was on the horizon.
From the spa we headed to a gigantic vertical shopping mall, which our friend described as being a mall 'entirely of fakes'. From what we saw for the rest of the day, this may well have been true, but we have no context of what is normal, or not, in China, to know how to judge it. We did get warned by a number of shopkeepers that the police were on patrol hunting for fakes, and there seemed to be a lot of surreptitious moving or concealing of various goods. I still do not know what to think about all this. There are very bizarre things going on across that border, with wealthy Chinese coming into Hong Kong to buy high-status branded goods, while on the China-side, wealthy Hong Konger and a numbers of gwai lo/gwai po, are buying up very cheap fake versions of those same goods. I know that China is fairly untroubled by the knock-off branded goods, except as far as the pressure they get from other countries and the WTO goes. For myself I think the 'genuine' branded goods with their artificially high prices are just bizarre, particularly given that most of them are made in factories in China as well, with only possible better-quality materials. It all seems deeply meaningless, particularly given that none of this 'stuff' is any better or less damaging for the future of the eco-systems on the planet.
Perhaps the best time in the day was buying teas, and tea canisters, because these are things that are from China, and do not need to be copied or faked at all. This felt like something worth buying in China, and at least had some meaning in that context. The rest of the time we were almost endlessly solicited by a string of shop-owners, 'Missee, come look, cheap [insert product here], very cheap'. It was relentless and after a while took on a surreal quality, like accidentally wandering into one of those cheap electronics stores with too many toys that talk, or laugh, or croak or whatever. More interesting was a section of the mall with perhaps fifty tailors, all one after the other, located near a section with so many fabric stalls that they seemed to stretch into infinity.
At a certain point we were too exhausted to continue, and headed back to the customs hall, and back onto the MTR. The most fascinating part of the day was probably how much it felt like 'home' to be back on Hong Kong territory - back to a world that seemed instantly more understandable and more manageable.
The experience of being in a Putonghua environment reminded me that I am not totally helpless in Cantonese, just as trying to learn Cantonese has made me realise just how much easier it is for me to communicate in Spanish. I remember being in Spain and being pained by not being able to come up with grammatically correct sentences fast enough. Pah! What a luxury! I should have appreciated having enough vocabulary to be able to carry on at least a semblance of a regular conversation, even if I sounded like a stupid foreigner.
It is all a great reminder that you can never know what you have right now, until you lose it, if only temporarily. At this point I can appreciate that I know a little Cantonese, even if it may take me years to become remotely fluent. I can also appreciate all the prolific language skills of the people around me, who so generously and so often make up that deficit.

Saturday, March 5, 2011

Green Metropolis - review

While others will do a better job of reviewing this book (here and here) I want to share my thoughts too. David Owen, a writer for the New Yorker magazine, has written a book about how and why dense cities may be the answer to some of our environmental problems. Having just moved to Hong Kong, which has some of the highest urban densities of any city in the world, this subject is very much in my thoughts.
While it has been distressing to feel like I can no longer compost, or recycle many things that I could in Australia, in actual fact my carbon footprint is almost certainly much lower in my life here. Having made the decision to give up driving a car (no regrets there) and living in an apartment block, as most Hong Kong people do, we are almost certainly consuming less of the planet's resources than we would otherwise be doing in Australia. Being a New Yorker, David Owen naturally focuses on New York city, though Hong Kong does get a brief mention. Depending on which statistic you are measuring, whether water consumption, gas/petrol consumption, or electricity consumption, New Yorkers use somewhere between one third and a quarter of the national average. It is this not-so-well-known information that inspired his book.
Owen is at his best when pointing out the absurdities of many environmentalist's opinions. It is common among environmentalists to look at the pollution and energy use of cities and see them as part of the world's problem. He points out that this is akin to 'trying to fight obesity by putting skinny people on diets' [p.17]. The problem that most environmentalists have, as he carefully points out, is that they cannot distinguish between total amounts of energy use, and per capita energy use.
Perhaps his most compelling point in writing the book, though, is to point out that dense cities represent a real world answer to many of our environmental problems, and, most tellingly, that this answer does not rely on people going without. All across developed countries huge amounts of money are being devoted to trying to persuade their citizens to use less energy and live a less carbon-consuming life. By and large these efforts have been useless, or at least have only had a very small impact. While I am much more an optimist than a cynic, I do know that most people find it very hard to change their behaviour even a little, especially when they perceive those changes to mean a less enjoyable life. I have read too many individuals on blogs daring environmentalists to 'pry my [insert high-energy-use technology] from my cold, dead hands' to think that such changes are going to be made willingly or without suitable tax incentives.
What Owen points out is that no-one in these dense cities is feeling deprived, or deliberately going without things that they want. This is incredibly significant. What he makes clear is that the nature of dense cities is that it is easy to access what you need close-by, and even if it can't be found close by, it is usually far easier to get there by walking or by catching public transportation than it is to drive a car. Add to this the fact that apartments use less land, less energy for heating and cooling, and tend to be smaller than comparable free-standing dwellings, and you realise that city-living tends to reduce or eliminate two of the major elements of most citizens' carbon footprints.
This is not to say that it is any easier to move everyone into dense city living than it is to get them using less resources. Far from it! However it is a reminder to all of us, whether self-professed greenies or not, to stop equating the good environmental life with getting back to the earth. While that might feel good to you personally, with almost seven billion people on the planet, it is not going to solve the world's problems.
It is also a direct challenge to the pervasive NIMBYism that prevents any sort of high(er) rise development in my former home city of Melbourne. This sort of attitude, whether cloaked in the language of building preservation, neighbourhood character, or whatever, is simply people protecting their own privileges at the expense of the planet. In fact we should be saying, 'bring it on', because more buildings means more people, which means more chance of local shops being viable (less travelling), more chance of public transport frequencies improving, less car journeys (as parking and congestion discourage all that induced traffic) and less chance of urban sprawl on the city fringes consuming valuable agricultural land (thus indirectly forcing our food to be farmed even further away). Perhaps what we need to do is have rules like they do in Japanese cities, that aim to preserve each person's access to sunlight, while not necessarily preventing building upwards.
Owen is not trying to be holier-than-thou about this. He freely admits that he moved out of Manhattan to a more rural life about twenty years ago, and in many ways regrets this decision in the light of what he now knows. As he points out quite clearly though, simply selling his house to someone else so that he can live in the city again does not necessarily help the problem at all. As long as all the existing dwellings keep being occupied, this is largely a zero-sum game, with the world's total carbon emissions remaining much the same. It would be a brave, and a rich person, who knocked down their house to move to the city, which while it would certainly solve part of the above problem, is not necessarily a wise use of resources either.
I also liked the way he honed in on some more counter-intuitive aspects of this larger environmental crisis that we have on our hands. One of a number of examples he points to is of the tech-whizzes from Massachusetts Institute of Technology trying to invent radical new examples of private cars for city dwellers. As he rightly points out, ANY invention that encourages people who currently choose not to drive or own a car to take it up again, is achieving the opposite of what they intended. It gets us back to the proverbial skinny person on a diet. City dwellers already have access to low-carbon forms of transportation, and don't need less efficient ones, even if they seem 'green'.
I could go on and on, but why don't you instead read this book for yourself. By all means borrow it from a friend, or from a library, but have a read. It is not heavy-going, and you may find yourself surprised by some of the things that come in for scrutiny in the book. In that sense it puts me in mind of another similarly counter-intuitive book that I read on this subject, called 'Time to Eat the Dog'.
So all you big city dwellers, give yourselves a pat on the back, and remember, you may be doing more for than planet than you thought.

Tuesday, March 1, 2011

The Venice of the SAR?

Apologies for the length of time since my last post. I had trouble getting photos onto this computer which was making me cranky and unable to write!
View down to one of Lamma's many beaches

While many words have been written about Lamma Island, far more eloquent than these will be, I was very excited to visit there on Saturday. Having heard so much about it, and read even more, it was great to be able to form my own impressions of the place.
My own interest was largely about its status as a car-free zone, amongst a small handful of such places in the world. Being a public transport advocate, I have had a fascination with such places ever since I read J.H.Crawford's inspiring book Carfree Cities. This book describes a wonderfully idealistic model of a possible carfree city, which to me seemed like paradise; so much so that all actual cities can never quite match up to this ideal. Hong Kong, with its supremely well-organised public transport, both affordable and ubiquitous, comes close to fulfilling some of this vision. I visited Venice back in 2009 as a result of reading this book, and thrilled at a city organised solely around pedestrians. I think I drove M a little mad pointing out all the ways that Venetians got around the need for motorized vehicles, such as the specialised handcarts designed to be able to go up and down steps while still transporting awkward and heavy items, or the barges that collected garbage from various locations around the city. Having been born in 1969, during the height of the car-centric developments of last century, it is hard for me to imagine life without cars. So places like Venice can be an inspiration, as well as a challenge to reimagine a life beyond the motor vehicle.
Which is all a round-about introduction to my visit to Lamma Island, Hong Kong's third largest island, and a long-established haven for hippy ex-pats and alternative-minded HongKongers. Appropriately enough, archeological digs on the island have found pottery stretching back around 5000 years, so perhaps Lamma can match Venice as an ancient centre of habitation, as well as a car-free zone.
The first observation is that the place is a good size. Walking from one end of the island to the other might take at most three hours, and the walk between the two main villages, which we did, takes only an hour. This more-human scale perhaps made cars unnecessary, though I have been unable to discover how and why it evolved without cars. It is not as if human beings are particularly smart or strategic about these things normally - the usual thinking seems to me no more complicated than a Homer Simpson, 'Mmmmm, cars'.
Without cars, people find other ways to do things. Though bicycles (my favourite form of transportation) were not big in Venice, there were certainly plenty of them on Lamma. Though given the alarming gradient of some of the paths(quite normal in Hong Kong), it does not exactly scream 'bicycle-friendly'. The good thing about a bike, I suppose, is that even if you have to push it up the odd hill, it still makes good sense for all the rest of the journey, particularly if you can load it up with other things you might want to transport, such as a child. I have been loving the sustainable materials that some of the bicycle child seats are made from here, and I finally got a close-up of an unoccupied one, while at Lamma.
Rattan child bike seat
 If you add up the lack of cars and ability to have a garden - we walked past a number of flourishing vegetable gardens, and more banana and papaya trees than you could poke a stick at - then this place could really start to seem like heaven. Certainly it got immediately added to our mental list of 'great places to retire to'. The probable two and a half hour commute to work for M. would make this not a practical option right now, I'm sad to say.
In terms of liveability for us it certainly seemed to have everything we needed. The long time 'hippy' population has meant that it is very well supplied with vegetarian and organic foods, which was good news for us. We ate at a cute place at lunch called 'The Bookworm' which is a vegetarian cafe, with a large library of secondhand books that can be browsed or even borrowed, apparently. The food was okay, though not exceptional, but we are not going to complain about actually having choices on a menu. It is certainly popular as we had to give our name and wait for a table to become available, which took about twenty minutes.
Lamma's fire engine (compact size)
I was very happy to catch a glimpse of Lamma's fire department, which consists of this one small red minivan, as far as I understand it. This is the scale of all the very few vehicles on the island, the majority of which are like glorified open go-karts, mostly used for carting building materials on the island.
The size of the vehicles matches the size of most of the shops and other facilities, with the result that it reminded me very much of some of the Cornish fishing villages I used to visit as a child. The same reliance on fishing as an industry in both places, of course, but mostly the similarities in narrow lanes, odd-shaped houses, steep hills, and shops that are a mix of the practical (a tiny hardware store), the touristy, and the beach-oriented (plastic bucket and spade, anyone?). One of the guidebooks described the main street (actually a fairly narrow alleyway) as 'endearingly ramshackle' and that I think conjures up the whole Lamma experience. We'll certainly be coming back, probably for a weekend away from the hustle and bustle of Hong Kong proper.