Local Action
Posted by dm at 6/18/2007 10:16 PM 
Categories: Brooklyn,protest demonstrations,Hong Kong Politics,star ferry,Atlantic Yards
Categories: Brooklyn,protest demonstrations,Hong Kong Politics,star ferry,Atlantic Yards
Saturday morning finds me in front of my apartment building in Park Slope, Brooklyn holding a clipboard and collecting signatures on a petition. Am I turning into the American Long Hair? I do a quick wardrobe self-check--nope, no images of dead bearded revolutionaries anywhere in sight. But I do get the chance to speak a bit of Cantonese, when I meet, for the first time, my neighbors three doors down. Chi Ping and Chi Ling are lawyers who own a magnificent old Victorian house with a turret; they are the only Cantonese left on the block.
The rental building next door used to be filled with about 15 Cantonese-speaking families, from the opposite bump on the M-shaped economic pattern that now prevails in both New York and Hong Kong (where, yesterday, the stock market hit a record volume, while a new report showed a record number of HK people living on less than $500 USD a month).
My old leun geui were recent arrivals from Guangdong. They lived in tiny single rooms, and did manual labor and piecework to get by--when I'd walk home late at night, the curtain-less windows of the front apartment revealed a scene out of Jacob Riis: the greenish glow of a bare flourescent tube, a pale, middle-aged Chinese woman hunched over a sewing machine, surrounded by bits of zippers and strips of cloth.
One of the things I'd dreamed about when I first started to tackle Cantonese was that someday I'd be able to go next door and get to know my neighbors. Now my language skills are up to the task, but all the Chinese people next door are gone. Three years ago, their landlord--a Cantonese businessman named Mak--kicked them all out and renovated the building into condos, which he then sold to mainly Caucasian yuppies at 800,000 US a pop. (To give you some context, these flats are roughly twice the size of mine, purchased 8 years earlier for less than $50,000).
I mention the tale of the vanished Cantonese because in a way it explains why I am standing out on the street with a clipboard on a Saturday morning, doing what Long Hair and his buddies would call a chim meng wuht dung 簽名活動, a signature campaign. Ostensibly, I'm collecting signatures of support to present to the New York City Department of Transportation to try to get some speed bumps installed on our little block, which is located right off a busy thoroughfare and has become a drag strip for speeding SUV's.
But that issue is just an excuse. What we really want is to make contact with our neighbors, collect email addresses and get them motivated to join and work with our Block Association. So that we can join the larger movement that's afoot here in the neighborhoods of New York-- working to shut down the Unchecked Reign of the Property Developers.
I used to think it was one of the great ironies of my life that I happened to choose to live in two neighborhoods--Park Slope, Brooklyn, and Soho, Hong Kong--that are being rolled over by rapacious and short-sighted property developers, in collusion with a greedy, corrupt government. I'd arrive from Hong Kong indignant about the Star Ferry clock tower being demolished in the middle of the night, only to discover that a bunch of politicians in a back room in New York had made a sweetheart deal with a fat cat developer to turn a big parcel of state owned land near my Brooklyn apartment into a condo tower project planned to have a higher population density than Mongkok.
But soon I understood that these things are neither ironic nor coincidental. Both New York and Hong Kong are part of the same worldwide phenomenon. Real estate nowadays is like tin or diamonds or oil: a scare and coveted trans-global commodity.
Back in the 18th and 19th century, entire nations practiced rapacious and exploitative development. Back then this was called colonialism. But colonial rulers, albiet in self interest, did build public roads, sanitation systems, parks, municipal buildings and schools (and, sometimes, they created whole modern cities, like Hong Kong, Singapore and Calcutta).
Similarly, major Western cities, from the late 19th until around the mid-20th century, put civic amenities and public space high on the agenda. Again, there was a self-interest motive--the bourgoisie and power elites feared that if poor urban immigrants didn't have access to light, air, sunshine and space, there'd be rampant disease, crime, or even widespread revolts. So vast public sums were spent constructing grand avenues and gracious parks, monuments and statues, fountains, pools and promenades for the enjoyment of all classes. My neighborhood in Brooklyn is highly desirable today because it's surrounded by the fruits of this 19th century beautification zeal. The value of my property is soaring because of public-sector investments more than 100 years old.
But gradually, for reasons too complex to get into now, cities stopped earmarking their resources for public space and amenities. Corporations took over from nation-states in the property exploitation game, and now everything is on the chopping block. It's more extreme in Hong Kong (again, see Alice Poon's key book about power and property in HK), than in New York (here in NY, unlike HK, there are landmarked buildings and districts, and a fairly powerful architectural preservation lobby).
And somewhere along the way, people living in cities like New York and Hong Kong stopped viewing public amenities as their right, as something that civilized modern cities are supposed to provide. Our expectations have downsized. The propaganda of privatization is so strong that nearly everyone, rich, middle class and poor, is fantasizing about how they'll make a fast profit flipping a flat, or a house or a skyscraper, instead of planning neighborhoods with space and amenities that add value to property for generations to come. For most of us, this jackpot will never be anything but a property bubble fantasy.
Others, and I count myself in here, may get a tiny benefit out of the bubble, but their rights as small property owners--and as citizens-- are always going to be (sorry about the pun here) Trumped by the interests of the big players, the Bruce Ratners and Sun Hung Kais of the global real estate grab. The big guys get preferential treatment and tax breaks galore. I get to pay for those tax breaks, and then live with their construction traffic and noise for five or ten years. Not to mention the heartbreak of watching a rich, lively mixed neighborhood like the one I moved into years ago on Staunton Street in HK turn into an expat food court.
This morning I got another email newsletter from Local Action, the Hong Kong activist group that sprang up in the wake of the struggle over the Star Ferry terminal. They've been sending out weekly Internet missives since December of 2006, long, thoughtful essays about the politics of property, historical preservation, and identity and cultural memory in Hong Kong. My Chinese isn't good enough to read the quantity of info they send--it would take me hours to translate it all--but I skim the headlines and occasionally peek into their Chinese-language blog, so I can keep up with their news. (Today it's not good: on Friday, the Legislative Council defeated the motion that would have stopped funding the removal of Queen's Pier and gummed up the project to carve a highway along the waterfront. They may try a judicial review next.)
Still, it makes me happy that Local Action has gotten even this far. Like the Brooklyn-based blogs and groups that have been fighting the Atlantic Yards mega-development, Local Action uses the Internet to move popular opinion and to organize the public to come out and attend all the little, obscure town planning meetings where these projects get rubber stamped. Publicity, and opposition groups of outspoken, informed people may not be able to completely stop the deals and the giveaways, but it will force the big guys to work harder to get away with it. And that will slow things down, hopefully until the bubble finally bursts. I want to believe that the future can be changed by ten million e-mails.
Local Action's Cantonese name is Bun Tou Wuht Dung, which literally translates as "Action from home turf." The lovely Chinese character, tou 土 , is one of my favorites: it means "earth". Like a lot of the basic characters, tou looks a lot like what it symbolizes: the long lower horizontal line is the base, elemental and solid, from which all things reach upwards.
The fight for the human right to a healthy living environment--for sunshine, a stable climate, clean air and open public space, for cultural ways and our memories of place--is shaping up as the great global battle of our time. It is a struggle as big as the earth, and it reaches from Hong Kong to New York, to everywhere. Ignore bun tou wuht dung and you risk losing the ground beneath your feet.
The rental building next door used to be filled with about 15 Cantonese-speaking families, from the opposite bump on the M-shaped economic pattern that now prevails in both New York and Hong Kong (where, yesterday, the stock market hit a record volume, while a new report showed a record number of HK people living on less than $500 USD a month).
My old leun geui were recent arrivals from Guangdong. They lived in tiny single rooms, and did manual labor and piecework to get by--when I'd walk home late at night, the curtain-less windows of the front apartment revealed a scene out of Jacob Riis: the greenish glow of a bare flourescent tube, a pale, middle-aged Chinese woman hunched over a sewing machine, surrounded by bits of zippers and strips of cloth.
One of the things I'd dreamed about when I first started to tackle Cantonese was that someday I'd be able to go next door and get to know my neighbors. Now my language skills are up to the task, but all the Chinese people next door are gone. Three years ago, their landlord--a Cantonese businessman named Mak--kicked them all out and renovated the building into condos, which he then sold to mainly Caucasian yuppies at 800,000 US a pop. (To give you some context, these flats are roughly twice the size of mine, purchased 8 years earlier for less than $50,000).
I mention the tale of the vanished Cantonese because in a way it explains why I am standing out on the street with a clipboard on a Saturday morning, doing what Long Hair and his buddies would call a chim meng wuht dung 簽名活動, a signature campaign. Ostensibly, I'm collecting signatures of support to present to the New York City Department of Transportation to try to get some speed bumps installed on our little block, which is located right off a busy thoroughfare and has become a drag strip for speeding SUV's.
But that issue is just an excuse. What we really want is to make contact with our neighbors, collect email addresses and get them motivated to join and work with our Block Association. So that we can join the larger movement that's afoot here in the neighborhoods of New York-- working to shut down the Unchecked Reign of the Property Developers.
I used to think it was one of the great ironies of my life that I happened to choose to live in two neighborhoods--Park Slope, Brooklyn, and Soho, Hong Kong--that are being rolled over by rapacious and short-sighted property developers, in collusion with a greedy, corrupt government. I'd arrive from Hong Kong indignant about the Star Ferry clock tower being demolished in the middle of the night, only to discover that a bunch of politicians in a back room in New York had made a sweetheart deal with a fat cat developer to turn a big parcel of state owned land near my Brooklyn apartment into a condo tower project planned to have a higher population density than Mongkok.
But soon I understood that these things are neither ironic nor coincidental. Both New York and Hong Kong are part of the same worldwide phenomenon. Real estate nowadays is like tin or diamonds or oil: a scare and coveted trans-global commodity.
Back in the 18th and 19th century, entire nations practiced rapacious and exploitative development. Back then this was called colonialism. But colonial rulers, albiet in self interest, did build public roads, sanitation systems, parks, municipal buildings and schools (and, sometimes, they created whole modern cities, like Hong Kong, Singapore and Calcutta).
Similarly, major Western cities, from the late 19th until around the mid-20th century, put civic amenities and public space high on the agenda. Again, there was a self-interest motive--the bourgoisie and power elites feared that if poor urban immigrants didn't have access to light, air, sunshine and space, there'd be rampant disease, crime, or even widespread revolts. So vast public sums were spent constructing grand avenues and gracious parks, monuments and statues, fountains, pools and promenades for the enjoyment of all classes. My neighborhood in Brooklyn is highly desirable today because it's surrounded by the fruits of this 19th century beautification zeal. The value of my property is soaring because of public-sector investments more than 100 years old.
But gradually, for reasons too complex to get into now, cities stopped earmarking their resources for public space and amenities. Corporations took over from nation-states in the property exploitation game, and now everything is on the chopping block. It's more extreme in Hong Kong (again, see Alice Poon's key book about power and property in HK), than in New York (here in NY, unlike HK, there are landmarked buildings and districts, and a fairly powerful architectural preservation lobby).
And somewhere along the way, people living in cities like New York and Hong Kong stopped viewing public amenities as their right, as something that civilized modern cities are supposed to provide. Our expectations have downsized. The propaganda of privatization is so strong that nearly everyone, rich, middle class and poor, is fantasizing about how they'll make a fast profit flipping a flat, or a house or a skyscraper, instead of planning neighborhoods with space and amenities that add value to property for generations to come. For most of us, this jackpot will never be anything but a property bubble fantasy.
Others, and I count myself in here, may get a tiny benefit out of the bubble, but their rights as small property owners--and as citizens-- are always going to be (sorry about the pun here) Trumped by the interests of the big players, the Bruce Ratners and Sun Hung Kais of the global real estate grab. The big guys get preferential treatment and tax breaks galore. I get to pay for those tax breaks, and then live with their construction traffic and noise for five or ten years. Not to mention the heartbreak of watching a rich, lively mixed neighborhood like the one I moved into years ago on Staunton Street in HK turn into an expat food court.
This morning I got another email newsletter from Local Action, the Hong Kong activist group that sprang up in the wake of the struggle over the Star Ferry terminal. They've been sending out weekly Internet missives since December of 2006, long, thoughtful essays about the politics of property, historical preservation, and identity and cultural memory in Hong Kong. My Chinese isn't good enough to read the quantity of info they send--it would take me hours to translate it all--but I skim the headlines and occasionally peek into their Chinese-language blog, so I can keep up with their news. (Today it's not good: on Friday, the Legislative Council defeated the motion that would have stopped funding the removal of Queen's Pier and gummed up the project to carve a highway along the waterfront. They may try a judicial review next.)
Still, it makes me happy that Local Action has gotten even this far. Like the Brooklyn-based blogs and groups that have been fighting the Atlantic Yards mega-development, Local Action uses the Internet to move popular opinion and to organize the public to come out and attend all the little, obscure town planning meetings where these projects get rubber stamped. Publicity, and opposition groups of outspoken, informed people may not be able to completely stop the deals and the giveaways, but it will force the big guys to work harder to get away with it. And that will slow things down, hopefully until the bubble finally bursts. I want to believe that the future can be changed by ten million e-mails.
Local Action's Cantonese name is Bun Tou Wuht Dung, which literally translates as "Action from home turf." The lovely Chinese character, tou 土 , is one of my favorites: it means "earth". Like a lot of the basic characters, tou looks a lot like what it symbolizes: the long lower horizontal line is the base, elemental and solid, from which all things reach upwards.
The fight for the human right to a healthy living environment--for sunshine, a stable climate, clean air and open public space, for cultural ways and our memories of place--is shaping up as the great global battle of our time. It is a struggle as big as the earth, and it reaches from Hong Kong to New York, to everywhere. Ignore bun tou wuht dung and you risk losing the ground beneath your feet.
well, it's actually sort of ironic that the governments in the 19th century, whom we don't usually think of as environmentally friendly, are the ones who are planning more parks, etc. than the current governments, which spouts a lot of talk about protecting the environment but doesn't do as much.
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How true! A very sharp observation.
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Hi, I came across your article in National Geographic Travelers and am interested in your writing about learning Cantonese and your lives between New York and Hong Kong because I've been teaching Cantonese in NYC and am from Hong Kong.
p.s.My web site is written in Chinese.
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Hello, and welcome! I love the title of your blog in Cantonese--much better than the English!
無書不歡，無食不樂
For the benefit of the non-Chinese readers, that's mouh syu bat fun, mouh sihk bat lohk--No Book Not Liked! No Food Not Enjoyed!
In other words, "I Never Met a Book or a Bowl of Rice I Didn't Want to Devour!"
Where are you teaching Cantonese in New York? There aren't many places for Cantonese teachers here.
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Thanks for stopping by my blog!
I like the Chinese title much more too. Hm...but the English title you suggested is not really what the Chinese means. It actually means "I wouldn't be happy without books. I wouldn't be happy without food." The first two words of each phrase is a conditional clause.
Yes, you're right. It's very difficult to find teachers here. I used to teach at the university for years and now am teaching part-time in the Upper East Side. But, I won't teach there in the coming year because of personal reasons. If you have any questions about Cantonese or Chinese, you're welcome to write to me either via e-mail or my blog.
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p.s.
The literal translation is" If there are no books, I will be unhappy. If there is no food, I will be unhappy."
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Chinese is not a very precise language and is not as suitable as English to be used in the legal profession. However, in literary use, it is a different story. I would like to point out that the meaning of "無書不歡，無食不樂" is context dependent. So dm's understanding cannot be regarded as incorrect from the standpoint that she is just a visitor of readandeat's blog. Actually, readandeat is using "無書不歡，無食不樂"(which isn't idomatic Chinese) as a figure of speech to give his/her blog a catchy title. Here, "不歡" is used as an adjective, i.e. "unhappy" and so is "不樂" that has the same meaning as "不歡". In dm's case, "不歡" and "不樂" were understood as the verbs "be not liked" and "be not enjoyed" respectively. I would like to point out that there are such idiomatic AND unambiguous Chinese expressions as "無書不讀"(There are no books that I don't read; I read all types of books; I am not selective in reading books. ) and "無肉不歡" (I am not pleased with meals without meat.)
Here are some wordplay I learnt when I was in primary school. See any difference in meaning if the following sentences are puntuated differently:
「下雨天留客，天留我不留。」
「下雨天，留客天，留我不？留。」
「無雞鴨也可，無魚肉也可；然家常便飯不可少，薪水分文也不要。」
「無雞，鴨也可；無魚，肉也可；然家常便飯不可，少薪水，分文也不要！」
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Very interesting! Thanks for this. By the way, I don't think that English is as precise a language as people give it credit for. However, it as not as elegant in its imprecision as is Chinese!
And thank you for pointing out that my (mis)translation of 無書不歡，無食不樂 is not necessarily incorrect...
If it is "catchy" that we are aiming for, I really do like my English interpretation: "I never met a book or a plate of food I didn't like."
Very Groucho Marx, don't you think?
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I think so, but I must admit that I knew nothing about Groucho Marx until I got to wikipedia and the Youtube. I think he is such a guy that one can draw comparison with Charlie Chaplin.
As far as the Marx brothers are concerned, we've got the Hui's brothers (許氏兄弟), Michael Hui (許冠文) and Sam Hui (許冠傑) in Hong Kong in the 70’s as Hong Kong people’s favourite comedians,. Go to Youtube and type in 雙星報喜in the search window if you wish to give it a try to understand Hong kong humor in the 70s. It’ll be great fun.
What’s more, Sam Hui’s Cantopop's songs are full of cheery and cheeky stuff and can be used as good teaching materials for anyone who wish to learn Cantonese. Go to Youtube to check for them if you like to. The following songs are very good indeed. (Just do the cut-and-paste into the search window of Youtube)
1. 學生哥 *** 許冠傑 ***
In particular, note the lyrics (e.g. 最幣肥佬咗, 冇陰功囉, 同學亦愛莫能助。The worst thing is that if (you don’t work hard and) got a fail (in the exam) 肥佬咗, it will be a crying shame and your schoolmates will not be able to do anything to help you though they really want to.) In fact, 肥佬means a fat guy, but it actually means the verb “fail” here because it sound like “fail”, sort of an inter-linguistic phenomenon.)
2. 許冠傑 Sam Hui - 财神到
This song will be played invariably in the Chinese New Year period every year. Note the hilarious stuff where the scenes in the clip meet with the relevant parts of the lyrics.
3. 許冠傑 Sam Hui - 制水歌
Water Rationing Song
4. 許冠傑-打雀英雄傳
Who’s going to be the Mah-jong Hero?
Enjoy.
P.S. Please remind any prospective Cantonese learner not to imitate the Cantonese spoken by native Cantonese speakers of the younger generation because it is full of lazy speech and ICQ’s Cantonese intelligible only among themselves. Young Cantonese speaker have problems with differentiating the velar nasal /ŋ/ and nasal /n/ and this problem is particularly marked when the velar nasal occurs in the front of a word as in “I”我. As a result, nine young native Cantonese out of ten will pronounce /ɔ:/ instead of /ŋ ɔ: /when they say “I”我.
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Thanks, dm, for mentioning my book for the second time in your blog. I also wrote supplementary articles for Asia Sentinel under "Special Package - How Hong Kong Really Works".
http://www.asiasentinel.com
I, too, am glad that increasingly people in Hong Kong are taking matters into their own hands in exerting their own civic rights. No doubt it will still be an uphill battle for them.
Your lucid analysis of the Hong Kong and New York situations is certainly a job well done!
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Welcome, Alice, and thanks for the kind words.
Do you have a website or a blog going yet that we can link to?
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DM, thanks for yet another informative, entertaining and perceptive post, most especially that last paragraph.
Re: Alice Poon. I left a message at her blog asking how to buy her book. It would be good to buy a copy! The blog hasn't been updated for a long time, but maybe Ms Poon will read my message there, or here.
http://www.civic-express.com/alice/
Maybe it's also time Ms Poon got her own blog? How about it, Alice?
Thanks and best wishes, Mister Bijou
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Mister Bijou, thanks for your interest in my book. It's available at all Bookazine and Dymocks bookstores.
DM & Mister Bijou: I still don't have a blog going yet although I've been mulling over the idea for quite some time now. It seems to me such a big commitment... plus the fact that I'm a low-tech person and have no clue of how to go about starting one. I would appreciate any advice - what's the simplest way of doing it?
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Hi Dianne, I came across your blog through Roland Soong's EastSouthWestNorth. I used to be a food writer when I was in HK. I don't teach Cantonese but if you have any questions, I'd be happy to help.
I just started a blog http://hongkieintexas.blogspot.com/
請多多指教!
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Welcome, hongkie in texas, and thanks for the offer, and for the link!
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