Social Club

I will be doing my final project on G.O.D.’s new Hong Kong Street Culture Gallery in Shek Kip Mei. I have already visited the gallery on a couple of occasions and will be returning to take photos and record voxpop interviews next week.

Last week, I contacted Cherry Ma, G.O.D.’s marketing manager, asking for an interview about the new gallery. She replied that she will try to arrange an interview with Douglas Young, co-founder of G.O.D. If this approach fails I will try to contact Mr. Young directly; I know someone who worked closely with him during the design and construction of G.O.D.’s Delay No Mall department store.

Beyond G.O.D., I will also be contacting an independent observer who is involved in Hong Kong art and heritage to see what he or she thinks of G.O.D.’s use of Hong Kong heritage as a marketing tool. The person I have in mind is Karden Chan, an artist who has gained renown since her participation in the protests against the demolition of the old Central Star Ferry terminal in 2006. I will be looking around for more potential interviewees this week in case that doesn’t work out.

G.O.D., or Goods of Desire, is a Hong Kong lifestyle brand known for integrating elements of Hong Kong heritage and popular culture into its designs. Some of its products, such as the notebooks, cushions and clothes printed with images of old-fashioned tin mailboxes, are a straightforward celebration of nostalgia, while others are far cheekier and more risqué. Last year, police raided G.O.D. stores after they began selling t-shirts emblazoned with a reference to 14K, a local triad group. The brand’s irreverent approach to Hong Kong culture is perhaps best symbolized by its slogan, “Delay No More,” a pun that sounds like the Cantonese expression diu lei lo mouh (屌你老母) — “fuck your mother.”

Earlier this month, G.O.D. opened the Hong Kong Street Culture Gallery at the new Jockey Club Creative Arts Centre, a collection of art galleries, performance spaces and studios housed in a renovated factory building in Shek Kip Mei. A kind of hybrid gallery-boutique, the Street Culture Gallery is dedicated entirely to Hong Kong heritage, past and present, with books and CDs, clothing items and accessories printed with symbols of traditional Hong Kong life, and an expansive collection of cultural artifacts and kitschy bits of nostalgia.

I would like to do my final project on G.O.D. and the new Street Culture Gallery. I would like to focus on how G.O.D. is appealing to a sense of nostalgia and a desire to embrace Hong Kong’s heritage in order to sell its products. I would especially like to explore the tension between G.O.D.’s celebration of Hong Kong culture and heritage and its desire to brand and profit from it.

I have already visited the Street Culture Gallery on a couple of occasions and I plan to return to take photos and record voxpop interviews with visitors/customers. I will also contact G.O.D.’s marketing manager, Cherry Ma, to arrange an interview. For a more independent perspective, I would also like to talk to an artist or observer involved with some of the questions surrounding Hong Kong’s culture heritage to find out what they think of G.O.D. and the new gallery. One particular artist I have in mind is Karden Chan, who achieved notoriety with her linocut prints of the old Star Ferry clock tower in Central.

We saw the cage homes. You can too.

Hong Kong, September 28 — China’s tainted milk scandal continues to grow. According to the Washington Post, 54,000 babies have been sickened by milk products contaminated with melamine. Four have died.

Here in Hong Kong, mainland milk products have been taken off supermarket shelves, but local consumers are still worried. This weekend, on a busy evening in Causeway Bay, we stopped three people to find out what is on their minds.

Mr. Li says he no longer trusts mainland milk products. The entire scandal, he says, “is not surprising at all,” given his experience of working in China. Listen here.

Stella doesn’t normally consume milk from China, but she used to eat a lot of milk-based Chinese candies, including White Rabbit, batches of which were recently found to contain melamine. Listen here.

“I drink a lot of milk tea and I love cereal, I have cereal every day, so milk’s very important to me,” says Mike, who lives in Zhuhai, across the border from Macau. He says that he normally buys milk from the Hong Kong-based Kowloon Dairy. Listen here.

Will, Zoe and I have chosen to look at Hong Kong’s cage homes for our multimedia slide show project. It’s a tricky project that will require a fair bit of planning so we sat down this weekend to talk about what we will do.

Our first step will be to find people who can help us gain perspective on cage homes. Even more importantly, we will need to find at least one cage-dweller who would be willing to talk to us about his or her life. To this end, I’ve already asked for help from a photojournalist acquaintance who has spent a lot of time capturing the margins of Hong Kong society, and I have sent an email to a contact in the Hong Kong government who will be able to find us official information on the number and living conditions of cage-dwellers. Zoe has sent an email to SOCO, a community organization that works with Sham Shui Po residents, including some who live in cage homes. Will has gotten in touch with the Asian Human Rights Commission, another group similar to SOCO.

All three of us will be responsible for researching cage homes and the history of marginal living conditions in Hong Kong. I plan to do this by speaking with community organizers and social workers who have had first-hand experience in dealing with cage-dwellers; I will also look to newspaper archives and academic research to find out more about this phenomenon. Will and I will both focus on photographing our subjects using the JMSC’s SLR cameras. Zoe, being the only Cantonese speaker in our group, will be in charge of conducting interviews and dealing with unilingual sources and subjects. To make sure our interviews sound as good as possible, we’ll borrow a microphone from the JMSC to use with our voice recorder. You can read more about our division of labour on the wiki page we have set up.

We’re faced with some big challenges in focusing on cage homes. We’ll need to find someone who lives in a cage home and is willing to talk to us; we’ll need to gain his or her trust; and we’ll need to deal with translation between Cantonese and English. That said, I’m sure we can do it, and I’m excited by the opportunity to learn about an often-overlooked aspect of Hong Kong life.

Dried longan and other goods in a Graham Street shop

It’s been a busy week for me, so going to Sham Shui Po to shoot some photos would have been a bit too much of a trek. I decided to opt for a similar but more convenient subject for this week’s photo assignment: the Graham Street Market in Central.

It has always struck me as being a particularly apt symbol of Hong Kong’s eclecticism that one of the city’s most traditional market districts exists within and around its financial heart. But, like Hong Kong, the Graham Street Market is in a state of flux, as many of its vendors and shopkeepers pass away and ever-higher rents drive up the cost of doing business. The Urban Renewal Authority, meanwhile, has unveiled plans to completely reshape the area around Graham Street, leaving the very existence of its street market in doubt.

My photos are meant to capture some typical market scenes: a dry goods vendor looking out from his small shop; cooks in an outdoor dai pai dong preparing affordable meals for the lunch hour crowds (an unlikely mix of office and construction workers); a tailor working in his tiny market stall; and a woman selling fresh fruits and vegetables. I’ve also included a photo of a shoeshiner taken on Theatre Lane, a few blocks away from the market, because I like the way it illustrates the relationship between some of Central’s street merchants and the highly-paid workers who spend their days in its office towers.

I took all of my photos in the street, on public space, which hints at the very fluid boundary between private and public spheres that is so typical of market districts like the one around Graham Street.

Heritage is about more than just buildings and monuments: it’s about the things that make up the essence of a place, the bits of everyday life that shape and define its character. Heritage, in other words, is alive and constantly evolving.

That’s why I chose Sham Shui Po’s working-class heritage as my heritage topic. Sham Shui Po, a poor but energetic neighbourhood in western Kowloon, is one of a dwindling number of places where some of Hong Kong’s traditional urban life can be experienced. Walkup apartment buildings—many built before or immediately after World War II—still outnumber highrises. Street markets, alleyway shops and staircase shops are abundant. So are dai pai dong, “ice houses” and other kinds of classic Hong Kong eateries. In its poverty, another face of Hong Kong is revealed, sometimes not as traditional as it is simply marginal: African refugees who live on monthly allowances of HK$1,000 as they wait for their asylum applications to be processed; homeless men who set up camp in a football pitch each night; cubicle dwellers who pay as much as $900 for a couple of square metres in a makeshift, windowless room.

My base of information, not to mention my inspiration, comes courtesy of the Society for Community Organization, a non-profit social justice group that has spearheaded some fascinating multimedia initiatives to document the lives, culture, homes, businesses and streets of Sham Shui Po. On its website and in several books, SOCO provides architectural studies of tong lau and other typical buildings, profiles of businesses like pawn shops, cha chaan teng and bonesetters, and stories of the people who call Sham Shui Po home.

Beyond SOCO, there are a number of more general sources of information that I find very helpful. Sham Shui Po Kai Fong is a blog that advocates for the documentation and preservation of Sham Shui Po’s cultural heritage through art and grassroots political action. Sham Shui Po Art Action is another blog that covers the same topics in Chinese. Not to Leave, meanwhile, is a community-based art project that created postcards bearing the stories of Sham Shui Po residents.

Finally, I always find it helpful to check out Wikipedia, which has articles many aspects of Hong Kong and Sham Shui Po culture like dai pai dong and tong lau. Although Wikipedia isn’t reliable enough to use as a source, it’s a great starting point for a more in-depth exploration of any given topic.

In the fast-paced word of today’s internet, it is essential to understand the many different types of lolz that web surfers and internet wakeboarders encounter. I’ve compiled a handful of lolz and rolfz in a new must-read website. Read it before it’s too late.

The JMSC and its home, Eliot Hall, is a fascinating and oft-overlooked part of the University of Hong Kong. It’s a great place in which to get a taste of the hot and sour soup that is the life of post-graduate journalism students. To help you get acquainted with this must-see point of interest, we’re happy to offer what we like to call A Brief Audio Tour of Selected Sites of Interest at the JMSC, which we also refer to by the snappy acronym ABATSSIJMSC (pronounced “a-bat-sij-misk”).

On the itinerary:

1) The Stairs to Nowhere
2) The Mysterious Chessboard
3) The Escarpment Under the Trees (aka Death Slope)
4) The Dissolved Essence of Student Spirit

Download, listen and enjoy! (3:09 minutes, 2.89mb)

Will McCallum on his way to interview someone. Photo by Hu Chun

“What is this? Are we supposed to record this interview or just take notes?” I asked Will McCallum, one of my fellow classmates in the JMSC Technical Bootcamp.

“Is that question part of your interview?” he answered. “It could be some sort of meta thing.”

“No, I was — well, okay. Sure. Why not.”

“This interview is for the purpose of getting something down with a photo.”

Will knows about interviewing. While working at the University of Melbourne’s AsiaLink, he often interviewed people about Asian events and happenings on campus. His favourite interview subjects, he said, are those who are passionate about and invested in what they’re doing “but haven’t been given a voice before.” While interviewing, he tries to keep silent, encouraging his subject with nods and other non-verbal gestures. Still, he has some habits that are hard to break.

“Too often I think I have the answer in my head already and I just want to get it out. That’s something I need to change,” he said.

Will enjoys interviewing. He dispels any nervousness he feels before conducting an interview by thinking of how intimidating it is to be in the position of the interviewee. Of course, there are some interviewing challenges that Will might find too difficult to surmount. Although he speaks conversational Mandarin, having studied Chinese in Beijing for six months, he isn’t sure whether his language skills would be up to interview standards.

“I think if I have to conduct an interview in Chinese, that would be really scary.”