Moving
Posted by dm at 5/11/2009 9:09 AM 
Categories: uncategorized
Tags: Kowloon Bay Lower Ngau Tau Kok Estate hong kong culture
Categories: uncategorized
Tags: Kowloon Bay Lower Ngau Tau Kok Estate hong kong culture
Everybody I know is bun nguk. Moving. Anh thu to Happy Valley, driven away from Elgin Street by the creeping Lan Kwai Fong-ization of Central (despite the recession, the drunken expat bar scene has been spreading across my neighborhood like an extra-terrestrial mold, swallowing up the Persian carpet stores on Wyndham Street, the antique dealers on Hollywood Road. Now, Saturday nights are a parade of women encased in lycra minidresses and strapped into spike heels teetering woozily down Shelley Street's 70 percent grade.)
In English, "moving" is a verb--the language emphasizes the action, implies the uncertainty of transition. But in Cantonese, the stress falls squarely and practically on the noun of place: bun nguk means, literally, "change house". Maybe this is why I feel so unsettled and anxiety ridden by moves, even when (or maybe especially when) I am not the one moving.
But my Hong Kong friends David and Ah Lan have no such emotional baggage. Next month they will say goodbye to their 6th floor Caine Road walkup in the tong lau with its magical tin toi and decamp to a new flat in Kowloon Bay.
David got the keys on Friday, and Saturday morning we all went up to Gaau Lung Wan to inspect the premises.
Kowloon Bay is not a neighborhood you'd ever think to visit if you didn't live there yourself (or know someone who did). Decades ago, in the time when the proud label "Made in the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong" dangled from toys, plastic flowers and transistor radio sets, the area was an industrial center, home to small factories. But in the mid-60s, Hong Kong's colonial government faced a housing crisis, with more than a half million squatters, refugees from Mao's economic "reforms", living in slum conditions. The bureaucrats embarked on a public housing program, kind of a low-rent version of Britain's own council housing estates. The relatively unpopulated Kowloon Bay became the early staging ground for this grand social experiment, which continues to the present day.
We emerged from the MTR station at Kowloon Bay to a archeology of public housing estate architecture, old and new.
The building in the foreground, marked with the number "10" is part of Lower Ngau Tau Kok estate, and it is one of the reasons I was extra-eager to accompany David to check out his new digs (which are in a private housing estate about 10 minutes walk away). Built in 1967, "Lower Cow Head Corners" estate is a vintage example of early Hong Kong public housing architecture. It's going under the wrecking ball in a month or so, and lately it's been the subject of lots of newspaper and magazine articles and even an artists' exhibit.
"Let's cut through the estate," David suggested. "Then you can see the old grassroots shops and food stalls."
We entered the estate courtyard from the bright sunlight street, and headed down a narrow alleylike passageway covered with plastic tarps and the occasional corrugated iron roof. The place teemed with commerce--here there was a cha chaan teng, over there was a vendor selling cooked dishes over a steam table. A sign overhead marked the palace of "Ah Jing" the "Big King of Lo Seui Goose".
entry to block 9F, Lower Ngau Tau Kok estate
I felt relieved for the people who were getting out of here. The estate had outlived its usefulness, and seemed ripe for one of those disastrous events--fire, contagion, monstrous family murders-- that spread across the front page of Apple Daily illustrated by hand with helpful cartoon strip re-creations of the gory scene. Indeed, during the 2003 SARS epidemic, Lower Ngau Tau Kok was one of the hardest hit areas. (Central Hong Kong, on the other hand, was almost untouched).
And yet, I completely understood the nostalgia that Hong Kongers have been expressing for the Lower Cow Head Estate as its last moments tick away. If you believe, as I do, that the real grassroots spirit of Hong Kong is the spirit of the Chinese village modulated by the constraints of cramped urban living conditions, then Lower Cow is a brilliant, Jane Jacobs-ean creation. Here, down these narrow lanes filled with crazy quilt, makeshift businesses, is the living genius of Hong Kong people who can transform a cheerless, bureaucrat-designed public housing block into a thriving, teeming urban village. One where the poverty of private cubicle space is overwhelmed by the glorious cacophony of living in public.
"fix-it" shop, Lower Cow Head Estate
The modern housing estates, unlike Lower Ngau Tau Kok, were designed with the control of public space in mind. After the early 1960s experiments in estate housing, the Hong Kong government decided that outdoor markets and shops were "un-hygienic", and they set in place new policies to prevent the shopkeepers and food vendors (dai pai dongs) from setting up outside, makeshift stalls, and to force them to move into proper premises. Of course, when you force business into buildings, you create new income streams for property developers, too. 大家樂 ---Everybody happy!
Except the on-a-shoestring, spontaneous small businesspeople like the ones who created the messy, marvelous urban village in Lower Ngau Tau Kok.
I've read the economic theory, so I know that choking off the ways that people from the grassroots can independently make a living is one of the strategies of late-stage capitalism. The big boys want Mr. Wong slaving away for them. They don't want Ah Wong out there selling his cuttlefish sticks from a cart in the lane when they can make big rent money by having a branch of the Daai Ga Lok chain in the estate's lower retail area.
不大家樂!
As we walk through the ordered, undistinguished shops underneath David's new building, I suddenly understand the source of my anxiety. All around me, Hong Kong is bun nguk, changing houses. Trading up from damp, grimy tong lau walkups and ancient housing estates one step up from the squatters hut to better, cleaner, healthier flats in the property developer's towers.
But what kind of lives are we moving towards? The nicer private spaces bear a steep price tag that's greater than any mortgage can cover. We--and I say this about Hong Kongers, as well as New Yorkers--have been forced into a Faustian bargain, paying for better private spaces with the richness of our public lives, and our control over them.
The longer I stay in Hong Kong the more I grasp at beloved moments. I try to freeze all my friends, and our memorable dinners enjoyed on tin tois, holding onto them like a parent does a child, filled with fear these things will vanish if I loosen my grip or glance away. Before the handover, I am told, the city's sensibility was ruled by anxiety and uncertainty about the future. But now Hong Kong seems to be about fear of loss. All these precious intangible things--the texture of daily life, neighborly connections, the patch of view from your window, the vendor who sells you cuttlefish on sticks--are being stripped away, erased from existence, by the relentless machinery of Hong Kong's government, in cahoots with crony capitalists.
This fear manifests as nostalgia for the passing of the old Lower Cow estate. But lately it also has surged in the anger over the redevelopment of Wedding Card Street, and the destruction of the Star Ferry. It is, I believe, the most potent and untapped political force in Hong Kong. If I were doing branding for the pan-democrats, I'd be making spots filled with dai pai dongs and cuttlefish vendors cross cut with leering execs from Sun Hung Kai and with ex-Housing Authority turned New World Development honcho Leung Chi Man. I would use propaganda to make the point that democracy is all that stands between a rich, satisfying community life, and the people who want to re-design public lives to suit their profit margins.
But I don't see the pan-Democrats doing that. Half of them because they belong, or aspire to, the profiteering class, and the other half because they are so focussed on street-fighting that they've forgotten the essence of what they're fighting for:
Excellent post. The issue of government collusion with developers to transfer public space into private hands is a serious one. You can see the same process at work in the plan to resume the Central street markets: suddenly, 200 people who were previously self-employed will have the 'choice' of working at either Wellcome or Park'n'Shop -- depending on which developer gets the contract. Thankfully a large portion of HK people have woken up to this in recent years.
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This is really wonderful and spot on. Thanks.
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Hi Daisann --
Before you yourself *bun ngok*, you're going to have to come and explore some more my neck of the Hong Kong woods. Only thing is: be prepared to eat a lot of Hong Kong-style "junk" food. Frankly, that and the convenient transportation links are two of my favorite things about where I live... ;)
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Daisann,
Thanks for this wonder site and your other wonderful articles for the IHT. Your writing has brought my wife and I hours of amusements, discussion and introspection.
I do have a question though. I am pretty sure that 'bun' in this article literally means 'to move' rather than change. Perhaps a display of the characters will help me to understand?
Regards,
JC
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Wow, I hope that you and your wife are still speaking to each other after discussing this blog!
Thanks so much for the support and comments--and also for spurring me to think harder about what I wrote.
You're absolutely right, the character 搬 is translated as "move". But what I was trying to say up there (and which I rushed over and didn't explain clearly enough) is how the Cantonese "move" in this context has a different nuance and emphasis than the English verb "move".
In English, the overwhelming sense of "move" is of motion, action, moving from place to place. So when we talk about moving, our emphasis is on the action itself, not where we've been or where we are going, or what we carry with us. It can feel really lonely!
But bun (搬) in Chinese conveys a really different feeling. First of all, it is one of those slippery Cantonese "verbs"--like sihk, "to eat"--that isn't happy until it latches onto an object. You don't just "bun", you "bun nguk", or "bun ga" or "bun saang yi". And so the emphasis, the feeling, strikes me as a more rooted one: yes, you are moving, but at the same time you remain connected to familiar objects as you transfer them (and yourself) from one place to another.
That sense of "carrying along" is conveyed by the "sau" or hand radical in the 搬 bun character. (Aside to all you Simplified Chinese fans--this is what you miss by not studying Traditional Chinese!)
So I translated "bun nguk" as "change house" back there in order to emphasize this nuance in a way that non-Chinese speakers could grasp easily. Probably "transfer" would have been a better choice. But yes, "move" is the universally accepted, and correct way to translate it in English.
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Perhap the following line of thinking may help resolve the argument:
1. Think of the word 搬遷 (to move) which consists of two morphemes of similar meaning juxtaposed together(juxtaposition is a very common phenomenon in word formation in Chinese; there are numerous examples such as 光明, 黑暗,美麗,忠誠,潮濕,災害,明朗,晴朗,憎恨,記憶,etc.)
2. Now use 遷居(more formal and can be used in classical Chinese)instead of 搬屋, then the translation of "change house" will be a perfect fit!
3. Note the Chinese idiom 事過境遷(literally: things-passed-situation-changed)which means things are now over.
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Great writing
You have a very underrated blog here my friend
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Thanks for the nice comment.
With readers like yourself, how can I possibly feel underrated?
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This is a very late comment, but I just discovered your blog and I love it. You are a delightfully cogent observer of the urban scene and write beautifully.
I was particularly taken by your comparison of Hong Kong and New York. It seems that every intersection in Manhattan has a Starbucks, a mobile phone store and a bank office with fewer and fewer of the (generally) immigrant-run markets that made living in New York much easier to deal with.
There was something very civilized about picking up fresh pears on one corner and falafel balls with sesame seeds on another for a late dinner while walking from the subway at 11:00 PM.
Cities are great, crowds are great, markets and shops that exist because there is demand from the 5,000 or 10,000 people living in the immediate area are great.
This is quite a blog--if I can actually use it to help pick up some Cantonese it will really be something.
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brilliant - I love your perspectives and love reading your thoughts on my home, our home; hong kong.
btw, here's a good few pics of NTK:
http://www.pbase.com/hltam/ngautaukok
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I just found your blog via a WorldHum article, and am enjoying it very much. I have to say this post really got me. Last year I went back to Hong Kong for a visit and was rather shocked to find that I didn't really recognize anything. I had been to Hong Kong twice before - once in the 80s and once in 1990. I knew that places change, but this was a huge overhaul. All the buildings looked totally different, the streets were sanitized and it just wasn't the same. In contrast, on the same trip I had also been to Penang and that felt so much more real to me than my time in the "new and improved" HK.
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