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

Mathews, Gordon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226510204 ISBN 13: 9780226510200

Verlag: University of Chicago Press, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

There is nowhere else in the world quite like Chungking Mansions, a dilapidated seventeen-story commercial and residential structure in the heart of Hong Kong’s tourist district. A remarkably motley group of people call the building home; Pakistani phone stall operators, Chinese guesthouse workers, Nepalese heroin addicts, Indonesian sex workers, and traders and asylum seekers from all over Asia and Africa live and work there—even backpacking tourists rent rooms. In short, it is possibly the most globalized spot on the planet.

But as Ghetto at the Center of the World shows us, a trip to Chungking Mansions reveals a far less glamorous side of globalization. A world away from the gleaming headquarters of multinational corporations, Chungking Mansions is emblematic of the way globalization actually works for most of the world’s people. Gordon Mathews’s intimate portrayal of the building’s polyethnic residents lays bare their intricate connections to the international circulation of goods, money, and ideas. We come to understand the day-to-day realities of globalization through the stories of entrepreneurs from Africa carting cell phones in their luggage to sell back home and temporary workers from South Asia struggling to earn money to bring to their families. And we see that this so-called ghetto—which inspires fear in many of Hong Kong’s other residents, despite its low crime rate—is not a place of darkness and desperation but a beacon of hope.

Gordon Mathews’s compendium of riveting stories enthralls and instructs in equal measure, making Ghetto at the Center of the World not just a fascinating tour of a singular place but also a peek into the future of life on our shrinking planet.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Gordon Mathews is professor of anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is the author of Global Culture/ Individual Identity: Searching for Home in the Cultural Supermarket and What Makes Life Worth Living? How Japanese and Americans Make Sense of Their Worlds, coauthor of Hong Kong, China: Learning to Belong to a Nation, and coeditor of several books.

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GHETTO at the Center of the World

Chungking Mansions, Hong KongBy GORDON MATHEWS

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2011 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-51020-0

Contents

Acknowledgments...............................................................ixPrelude: A Note on Hong Kong..................................................1Introducing Chungking Mansions................................................7"Ghetto at the Center of the World"...........................................13Why Chungking Mansions Exists and Why It Matters..............................16The Building..................................................................21History.......................................................................33Owners' Association...........................................................38Business......................................................................41My Own Involvement............................................................50Traders.......................................................................57Owners and Managers...........................................................66Temporary Workers.............................................................74Asylum Seekers................................................................78Domestic Helpers..............................................................83Sex Workers...................................................................85Heroin Addicts................................................................87Tourists......................................................................90How These Different Groups Interact...........................................94The Passage of Goods in Chungking Mansions....................................105Selling Goods.................................................................108Taking Advantage of Buyers....................................................112Copy Goods....................................................................114Manufacturers and Middlemen...................................................118Tricks and Travails of a Phone Stall..........................................120Varieties of Traders..........................................................123The Generation Gap among Traders..............................................128Techniques of Traders.........................................................131The Lure of China.............................................................135The Perils of Customs.........................................................137The Significance of Goods and Traders.........................................147The Omnipresent Shadow of the Law.............................................151Conflicts Within and Beyond the Law...........................................153The Role of Police............................................................157Visas and Residence Rights....................................................165Asylum Seekers and the Law....................................................169"Real" and "Fake" Asylum Seekers..............................................173The Lives of Asylum Seekers...................................................178The Changing Treatment of Asylum Seekers......................................190Changing Imaginations of Chungking Mansions...................................195How Chungking Mansions Transforms People......................................198Cultural Identity.............................................................202Global Significance...........................................................207The Future of Chungking Mansions/ The Future of the World.....................215Notes.........................................................................219References....................................................................225Index.........................................................................231

Chapter One

place

Introducing Chungking Mansions

Chungking Mansions is a dilapidated seventeen-story structure full of cheap guesthouses and cut-rate businesses in the midst of Hong Kong's tourist district. It is perhaps the most globalized building in the world. In Chungking Mansions, entrepreneurs and temporary workers from South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and across the globe come to seek their fortunes, along with asylum seekers looking for refuge and tourists in search of cheap lodging and adventure. People from an extraordinary array of societies sleep in its beds, jostle for seats in its food stalls, bargain at its mobile phone counters, and wander its corridors. Some 4,000 people stay in Chungking Mansions on any given night. I've counted 129 different nationalities in its guesthouse logs and in my own meetings with people, from Argentina to Zimbabwe, by way of Bhutan, Iraq, Jamaica, Luxembourg, Madagascar, and the Maldive Islands.

Chungking Mansions is located on the Golden Mile of Nathan Road, famous, according to the guidebooks, for "its ability to suck money from tourists' pockets." If you approach Chungking Mansions from across Nathan Road, you will see a row of glitzy buildings towering on the other side of the street bearing an array of stores, including a Holiday Inn, many electronics places, several entrances to shopping arcades, a number of fashionable clothing outlets, a couple of steak houses, and several bars. This looks like the Hong Kong of postcards, particularly if you approach in the evening and are bathed in the gaudy sea of neon that Nathan Road is famous for. However, in the midst of these fancy buildings is one that looks plainer, more disheveled and decrepit. Its lower floors, seen from across the street, hardly seem part of the building since they too are fancy shops and malls, physically part of the building but inaccessible except from outside and a world away. But then, in the middle of these stores, you see a nondescript, dark entrance that looks like it belongs somewhere else. As you cross Nathan Road on a butterfly crosswalk and draw closer to this entrance, you will notice that the people standing near the entrance to this building don't look like most other people in Hong Kong, certainly not like the throngs of shoppers elsewhere on Nathan Road. As you enter the building, if you are Chinese, you may feel like a member of a minority group and wonder where in the world you are. If you are white, you might instinctively clutch your wallet while feeling trepidation and perhaps a touch of first-world guilt. If you are a young woman, you may feel, very uncomfortably, a hundred pairs of male eyes gazing at you.

If you approach Chungking Mansions from the same side of Nathan Road walking from the nearest underground MTR railway exit on Mody Road, just around the corner from the building (see map on p. 6), you will get a somewhat fuller introduction to the place. You will first see a 7-Eleven that in the evenings may be full of Africans drinking beer in its aisles and spilling outside its entrance. You may also see a dozen Indian women resplendent in their saris who, if you are male and look at them, will offer you a price and then follow you closely for a few paces to make certain that you truly aren't interested in their sexual services. After passing the 7-Eleven, you may, if you are male, be accosted at the corner of Nathan Road by other young women, from Mongolia, Malaysia, Indonesia, and elsewhere. You will also be accosted by a number of South Asian men offering to make you a suit—"A special deal just for you." They may be joined by...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Chicago Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2011
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0226510204
• ISBN 13: 9780226510200
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 254
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar