When I visited China in the spring of last year, one of my most vibrant memories was of the old town west of Kaiping City named Chikan (赤坎) (Google Maps).

Yes, the Kaiping region is well-known for its diaolou, like Zili village, but the Chikan township, under a typical southern China with a thick summer rain pouring on us while we visited, was perhaps less spectacular, but a lot more “familiar”.

Chikan looks like a movie set — and I think there is a film studio built on the outskirts of the historical town. Buildings are darkened with mold, but the businesses look nonetheless thriving. My friend Tiffany, whose ancestral town is Kaiping, and I were the only “tourists” in that town on that particular day it seemed. Kaiping may be a UNESCO site, but Chikan seemed particularly thin in terms of out-of-towners when we visited.

There was a wet market, where the word “wet” took all its sense. Vendors were literally selling their foodstuffs on the ground, over old pieces of styrofoam/cardboard. The fresh produce looked amazingly fresh. There was also a “meat counter” that was exactly that: a table with pieces of meat that the butcher could chop for you.

Shops on the main street of Chikan (you can walk the whole town in 30 minutes) were pretty diverse, and included shoe shops, cellular phone dealers, rice vendors and coffin makers. There was one convenience shop — kind-of the Wal-Mart of Chikan.

It looks like Old Shanghai in that movie set that they used for Lust, Caution, and reused for a bunch of movies (like that razzie with Rene Liu, Fan Bingbing and Leon Lai), but also a bit like the Melaka old town (perhaps because it was built by Chinese? Or endured the same colonial influence?). It definitely makes me think that one of my ancestors could have lived in this type of house (but no, they were actually peasants).

From Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Ferry, Kaiping is extremely accessible, on speed foil, with a few hundred RMB and a valid passport. You can stay at the Ever Joint Hotel, a five-star hotel, for something like 300 RMB a night. We left the city by bus to Shenzhen, at the bus terminal, just on the island north of the hotel, across the river. For transportation, we hired a taxi that took us to Zili Village, and then Chikan. But taking the city bus back to Kaiping City (a 20-minute ride) is definitely the economical and adventurous way of doing things. I absolutely recommend that. It’s even more adventurous if you go around without a map on you.

Au mois de mai, à ma dernière journée à Hong Kong, j’ai rencontré Ashley Wong pour ce prochain Regarde les Chinois. Torontoise de naissance, autrefois Montréalaise, et à ce point-ci Hongkongaise, elle a travaillé pour une organization artistique en nouveaux médias appelée Videotage jusqu’au début de cet été, et je venais de participer à Folktales From Many Lands, un de leurs projets à ce moment. Nous avons parlé le défi de trouver de l’espace et son propre espace à Hong Kong.

Back in May, on my last day in Hong Kong, I met with Ashley Wong for this next Regarde les Chinois. A Torontonian by birth, she was once a Montrealer and at that point a Hongkonger, she worked at a new media art organization called Videotage, and I had just participated in Folktales From Many Lands, one of their projects at the time. We talked about the challenges of finding space and one’s space in Hong Kong.

***

Comme les Chinois : What do you do?

Ashley Wong: I’m the project manager of Videotage, a media art organization.

CLC: In Hong Kong…

In Hong Kong.

CLC: So where were you from originally?

I’m from Toronto, I grew up there. And then lived in Montreal for three years for studies.

CLC: How did you end up in Hong Kong?

Basically well… My parents are both from Hong Kong. I never spent much time in Hong Kong – I only went once when I was very young and when I finished school, I decided to come here to travel and see what’s going on in China, and kinda (laughs) connect back with my… my background!

CLC: So did you have any expectations; were you looking for a job when you first came here?…

Actually, I came here without a job, so I kinda came just on a whim. And just started looking and found a job within two days! And it’s actually quite easy at first. There’s a lot of opportunities here compared to Canada.

CLC: And do you like it?

Uh. (laughs) It’s kind of a love-hate. It’s definitely different when you live here from when you are just visiting. But ah, I guess if I had some more distance from it, I would like it more.

CLC: Do you like your job?

It’s okay. It’s been very difficult for me, but like…

CLC: How long have you been here?

I’ve been working here almost a year (editor’s note: it was May 2008 when this interview was recorded), but it’s just the situation at the organization – it’s quite strange. But, in general it’s been a very good experience and I would’ve never been able to get the chance to kind of engage in quite a place in Canada. I mean, there’s a lot of opportunities, potential…

CLC: …here in Hong Kong.

Yeah.

CLC: Why is that?

Um… Well in the arts for one, I don’t know for other fields, but there’s a lot of room to grow. They’re still developing, so they need people to help really build the art scene here. In other places, the art community is already well-developed; there’s already lots of people in these positions. But in Hong Kong, you can just come in and pretty much do whatever you want and just give it a try – which is something you can’t do in other places.

CLC: I mean, Hong Kong, economically is as developed as Canada, but why – do you know why – there’s so much space in the arts, I mean.

Well, it’s not that… There is a lot of space because there isn’t much happening here, there’s not a lot of…

CLC: …people are not interested?

Um, there’s not support from the general public. It’s very difficult to… There’s very few venues and there’s very little support from the government to open up to more cultural activities, and it’s very difficult to get permission to do things that are… the usual things that people do.

So it’s a very difficult environment to work with because there’s a lot of restraints. Because of government and policy, the public…

CLC: You have to ask permission to do certain types of things…

Yeah, for sure. Like if you want to get a space within… Like the only space – a lot of them are in malls, and if you ask permission to use a mall, they have to see what kind of art you are going to put in there, how you are going to place it. And like they don’t want to offend anyone, and you’re very limited… it’s such a long kind of bureaucratic process to deal with this kind of people. And the only kind of art that they understand is like very traditionnal paintings, drawings or things like that.

Even here at the Cattle Depot, it’s a government building. It’s a Heritage site, it’s kind of a former _cattle depot_ where they had cows – not sure if they slaughtered them. Basically, we have to gain permission from the government property agency just to use the outside space for events, and we have to submit proposals just explaining what we’re doing, what we’re going to build in the space, how long we’re going to use the space, how many audience… They’re usually very paranoid about bringing strangers here or strange events and stuff.

CLC: I mean, that’s arts, it’s bound to be on the side (fringe?) of society.

Yeah exactly, but they don’t understand that – if you say something that’s a little bit strange to them, they give you a very hard time to do anything. And even when this is the cattle depot artist village, they still have all these, like, restrictions to what you can do here.

CLC: When did the Cattle Depot Village start?

It started about seven or eight years ago.

CLC: And who were the people behind it?

Um… Well, there’s five organizations here. It was basically offered when… a lot of these organizations were located on Oil Street (油街) in North Point (北角), and they had to get kicked out because they were renovating the area and the government decided to offer them this space in To Kwa Wan (土瓜灣) and to rent it out to art organizations for cheap. So there’s five art organizations and a few other art studios here.

CLC: So it’s not easy to find space to do events. Do you think there’s a lack of space in Hong Kong?

There is definitely a lack of space in Hong Kong. It a very compact city, the apartments are very small, but like, it’s also the fact that there is no free space, like no space where people can just… go outside in a park, I dunno, play your guitar (laughs), or like have any sort of cultural activities, because all these parks, or the few parks that there are, are very highly secured and there’s really no space where you can just go and hang out.

When you go into venues for either events or artistic projects, you have to again through this bureaucratic process of getting permission from these corporations or people who own these buildings, property owners.

CLC: So what are your plans? … You are quitting Videotage…

(laughs) Well, initially I only planned on staying in Hong Kong for six months. So I already outstayed my intention by a year! So I think I’ve learned hell of a lot being here.

CLC: Like what?

Learning about China. … Just being here, you absorb things that you don’t really notice or that you didn’t know about. Like, international relations… also geography of where the places in Asia are, and the relationship to different places. Like how Chinese people see Japanese people, or the relationship between Taiwanese and Hong Kong, our relationship to the Philippines, Filipino, … Australia, and Thailand. It kinda makes sense now. A kind of geography, cultural…

CLC: I mean, you grew up in Canada. I also grew up in Canada, and I sort of understand that Canada focuses on North America, Europe, so we know how the relations go between these countries. And Asia is kinda foreign.

Yeah… And you start to understand the trade… just the relationship between countries and the politics as well that affect trade and what we get are kind of the information that we access to. And it’s also the relationship between China and Europe, which is something I didn’t realize was actually closer than America to China obviously. A lot of the information that we get is European.

CLC: Because Hong Kong is a former colony?…

Uh, but in general China has more ties with Europe than with the US. Like the countries are more… benevolent (laughs) with each other.

CLC: Are you going somewhere else?

… Uh, not sure yet. Probably Europe next.

CLC: Thank you Ashley.

Ok!

Dans ce prochain Regarde les Chinois, j’ai fait la rencontre en mai dernier de Paul Zimmerman, un Hongkongais d’origine néérlandaise depuis 1984. M. Zimmerman fait partie de l’organisation à but non lucratif Designing Hong Kong qui fût à l’avant-garde d’un débat sur l’espace ouvert public qui fit rage depuis le printemps dernier. Directeur-général de Jebsen Travel, il se présente comme candidat du Parti Civique pour le siège de représentant au tourisme du conseil législatif de Hong Kong lors des élections du 7 septembre. Dans l’entrevue, M. Zimmerman a beaucoup parlé de politique en développement urbain à Hong Kong, un sujet qui le passionne depuis son implication avec divers groupes, et de l’univers particulier de la Région administrative spéciale.

In this next Regarde les Chinois, I met (in May 2008) with Paul Zimmerman, a Hongkonger who came from the Netherlands in 1984. Mr. Zimmerman is part of Designing Hong Kong, which was at the avant-garde of the debate on open space that raced through Hong Kong since last spring. Executive director of Jebsen Travel, he is running as the Civic Party candidate in the tourism functional constituency of Hong Kong’s LegCo (legislative council) on the September 7th election. In this interview, we talked a lot about the politics of urban development, a topic that he is passionate about since his involvement with various groups, and the unique universe of the Special Administrative Region.

***

Paul Zimmerman: I was born in Holland, and arrived in Hong Kong in 1984, and ran a graphic design company, which I sold in ’98. I worked as a consultant for a while, and one of the projects I worked on as a consultant was Design(ing) Hong Kong Harbour District. It was a research project into why, or what we can do better in the harbour front. Because we realized there were only two places you could eat and drink: it was the York Club, where you could drink a beer if you were a private member, and there was the Fleet Arcade, that’s where the American Navy arrives – there was a McDonald’s there.

Comme les Chinois: Ok.

So these were the only two places on the hundred kilometres of waterfront that we have in Hong Kong that you could eat and drink. And the government had just announced West Kowloon, and we felt that West Kowloon…

CLC: West Kowloon, the landfill… (reclamation project)

Yeah, well, the West Kowloon project is the cultural district project where they were going to build sixteen venues on a forty-hectare piece of land, or at least some twenty hectares of it…

CLC: When was that announced?

The discussion had been on since 2000, around 2000, and we looked at it, and we thought it wasn’t such a good idea to build such a large complex with one goal, and all these cultural venues when we knew that people in Hong Kong don’t have, want the experience to build a nice waterfront, and they don’t have the experience to build lots of new venues or managing venues that they are promising. Because it’s always been a very bureaucratic management.

So we thought that that was going to be a bit of a white elephant. So, we started this research, to kind of like say, what can we do better about our harbour front. At the same time, we kind of look at how we can break open the Kowloon West project, move the things around the harbour, and so on.

CLC: Who’s “we”?

“We”. Well, there was a certain number of people that were very concerned about urban planning at that time, around the waterfront… There were Mr Po Chung (CHUNG Po-Yang 鍾普洋), who was the founder of Creative Initiatives, who used to be the owner of DHL International here – he just sold it. He was concerned. Christine Loh was concerned, Nicholas Brooke was concerned. I mean there were a lot in the property industry that were concerned. We have found as we… the small group kind of grew, people who were concerned and so on.

There were lots more people that came in the project. They started to come to seminars and so on. That group has now grown – we have maybe a mailing list of about 5000 names.

CLC: That group’s Designing Hong Kong…

Designing Hong Kong, yes. People that are concerned with the urban environment in general… maybe coming from different directions, in what they are concerned about, but they are concerned about the shape of the urban environment.

And so, that’s how we started. From that project, I didn’t know anything about urban planning. I had just run my own company. During the project, we became aware of a couple of fundamentals in Hong Kong, one is that the topography is very very difficult, you know, where any other city has a city centre, we have a harbour; every other city has ring roads, we get mountains. There are narrow strips of lands – it means there’s not much land around the core areas, so you have to go outside if you want to grow. People want to be in the core area, so you have a high-density, in very narrow strips. So, how are you going to manage that.

With the agreement to not do any more reclamation, in 1997, there was certainly a finite (amount) of land. Previously, for 150 years, Hong Kong, when it needed something, it just reclaimed land. So, they would always increase the land mass by reclaiming the harbour, for 150 years. From the first piece of land sold, that’s how it operated, because people were building piers, and then warehouse… they always run further into the water.

So soon, it was no longer the case. So, that was a big change in the government, it was very much dependent on premiums. So, land, creation of land created income for the government. 40% of its annual revenues come from land-related incomes, premiums, rates, rentals. So, in terms of planning, the government tends to plan for their financial gain, rather than for the public good.

Of course, you could say that everything they always did was for the public good: they were building warehouses, more housing, and more roads, and so on, but it was never aimed at building a nice living environment, which in a very highly dense area means that you have to make decisions not to build, to build less, or to create more space. And that is where it costs money in their calculation. They could’ve sold it, and built things or built roads so that they could sell all the lands, y’know.

CLC: Is it the same situation in the rest of China?

… In fact, there is a some comparison with the rest of China that you could make. The topography is easier in China, because it is small city surrounded by agricultural lots, and everyone is very happy to sell their agricultural land when you get a lot of money for it. Quite often the ownership of agricultural lots might already be in government’s hands or there might be… there are various ownership forms that makes it easier.

So, people can go outwards quite easy. The comparable really is the fact that government quite often makes money out of land sale. Often the village or the town make the money when the lands are sold. Therefore, there is a planning gain in terms of financial income that’s there. But in terms of the topography: probably not. Because they are pancakes, when we are squeezed onto small pieces of land.

We can’t go outside. Shanghai keeps growing, Pudong, you know, it’s farmland…

CLC: Yeah, Beijing…

Everything just keeps growing on the outside.

CLC: So Hong Kong is pretty unique.

In essence it’s pretty unique. And it’s confined by its topography, more than anything else, because if we had a flat piece of land, then maybe we would’ve just grown out into the New Territories much more. But because there are mountains in between and so on, and there was historical aspect in that the New Territories came in later.

CLC: I was told that transportation routes are very important. Every time they built a new subway line in Hong Kong, they develop a whole new area.

Well, that’s how they did that. New town development and rails was combined. There was a decision to build a new town, and at the same time you provided the rails. So, it was always a joint decision. And it was good, because the rails was financed by building a new town, and you had people to use the rails because of the new town. It all worked together.

There a problem there now. It means that rails decisions have always been made on the basis of: What’s the patronage? How many people do I have live near the station? If I get enough people living at the station, then I build the station. It was never based on, like, I build rail because I can avoid people from using their car. And I subsidize it because even if there are even ten people, I don’t want them to use their car. Therefore, I subsidize it because there is public benefit, not only a financial benefit – they pay for their trip – but also a public benefit – less pollution, less road use, I can use other space in the city for other uses. That calculation is not really there.

So, one of the problems that we have now is in urban areas, we tend to build roads before we build rails. That’s another issue.

And now, in the built-up areas, to say, well, can you put more rails. And they say, well, how are we going to finance it? Because normally you finance it by building on top of the station, but if you put stations under existing buildings, then who pays for those stations, and who finances those rail? Because there are certainly still no more development to finance the stations, so the public will have to subsidize it – that’s not an easy decision.

The history, legacy of rail, town building, is somewhat of a problem right now. I’m sure we can get over it.

*** Mr. Zimmerman’s assistant brings us some oranges at this point.

CLC: So what has your organization done so far?

Well, we’ve done the… various things. We did a research in Designing Hong Kong Harbour District, we’ve organized seminars and conferences, we participated in the Harbour-front Enhancement Committee, which is a government organization. We’ve made submissions to the town planning board. We’ve made submissions to Legislative Council (LegCo), submissions to the District Councils.

CLC: Did it have any tangible effect?

Um, yeah. We’ve moved people’s mindset. But, you know, with this type of stuff, if we can move the outside by a metre, we may be moving the inside by a millimetre. So, the tangible effect… and also, the impact of those tangible benefits are not immediately measurable or see-able. Most of these infrastructure and development projects will take ten years, fifteen years before people can see them. So, in that sense, it’s not all that easy.

But there are tangible impacts. There is now a little dock park on the waterfront in Wan Chai. There’s a temporary park in West Kowloon… I mean, there are things, things are improving. And the government has focused on it. The way they talk about it – now they talk about the waterfront as an asset, previously it was not – it was like development potential.

So, I think things have changed in that sense. But it’s not as tangible yet, because it won’t be until fifteen years that we can walk around the harbour-front, and areas that we can go. We talked about twenty years ago, that’s why it’s now this way, you know! (laughs) These things take time, and it’s hard for people to see.

Maybe by that time, people will have forgotten what would have been if we hadn’t. So, in that sense, it’s hard to add one and one.

CLC: Are there precedents of these sorts of activities in Hong Kong?

Well, I guess so. More immediate ones, in Hong Kong. Of course, in Designing Hong Kong, we’ve done other things, not only the harbour-front, also we worked with Heritage… the Heritage Watch, so, trying to save Queen’s Pier and the Star Ferry. Now, both have been removed but Queen’s Pier will be rebuilt, it’s been saved.

We’re trying to save the street markets in Graham Street. Now, we have a commitment that it will happen. How will it happen, and will it happen on time, are issues. We’ve set up a Save the Street Market -dot- com (savethestreetmarket.com). We got a whole group running, people who are fighting to save the street market. There are all sorts of activities that these people are organizing, from fashion shows in a street market, to an artist live impression show, all kinds of things to try to get attention for the market.

Again, we made lots of submissions. Now we have the activity on open space, two seminars that really sparked a debate in public…

CLC: Was it your organization that initiated the whole debate (currently taking place in Hong Kong on public space)? What happened – I didn’t really follow the beginning of it.

Well, in the beginning, we organized a conference on this, one in January, and one in March. And there was lots of different groups of people involved in those two conferences. And it’s kind of stimulated debate among some people, to the point that one of the radio stations set up a program in the morning and they talked about open space – because there was some people that knew about Times Square, the Times Square piazza. But there were already lots of other open space, individual issues pending like, or simmering in the background. Like, I knew that IFC had an open space, and that somebody had been fighting IFC and had been already () the government for one and half year.

We knew of some of them out there, that there were discussions. So, when we came up with the topics for the seminars, we were aware of those. By having the seminars, it sort of galvanized the idea in some people’s mind, and then, Commercial Radio Two do their program, and bang-bang-bang, it was this fire that went on, race very very quickly. We put in our submission in LegCo, which sort of formalized the debate.

So, did we start it? It was something that was ripe. It was just a little match that we put in there.

CLC: Basically (to recapitulate), it was that the government gives tax benefits to companies to develop a land, and in exchange they build open spaces, public spaces…

Well, for the government, again, they’d rather sell the land available for sale that they have to developers. But on the other hand, the government has an obligation to create public open space – it’s for the health and benefit of the public. There is a standard of about 2m² per person that you need to provide in every district. So, for the government to provide that by having to develop or create or reserve some space within their development and designate it as public open space. And in that way, the government can try to meet that requirement.

Basically, there’s a shortfall of public open space in almost every urban district. So, because of this shortfall, the government is under pressure, they gotta find solutions… and the developers are pretty happy with that because, one, if the government were to put a park in front of their building, then they (the developers) would have no control of the park.

But if they can put the park, say, inside their building, they can design it to what they like, they can put the security into what they like, they can basically manage and control that space to their benefit and their style. So the developers are happy.

And then in some cases, if they provide the public space, they get compensation for that, an additional gross floor area. They like that too.

So, it’s a great one for the developers, although they can complain about it, because of course, there are lots of controls, and the government wants all kinds of things and wants them to do it. So it kind of force them into accepting some of these deals. So the developers are not always necessarily happy with it.

But, you know, they have a benefit, and the government has a benefit – but the public loses out dramatically. What we need is public open space at street level, proper parks, space for people to breathe. We need wider sidewalks!

We need street widening. Every time you build a building, you should widen the street because, y’know, there was an old building that was only two stories, and now you put a fifty-story building there! You should widen the street around the building. You are going to have a hundred times as many people coming in and out of that building! The street should be wider, but the government doesn’t do that. They consider that a loss when you do that.

Also, basically, it’s the final plot ratio, so this is the side, and times… it means you can build as many in that block. If you say, you gotta setback, is it still plot ratio 10? Well, it means a smaller building. And the developers are not happy with that, and the owners of the building are not happy with that… the government doesn’t like it because they get less premiums.

So those two on that side are against it, but as a result the city is dying because we don’t have enough circulation space in the streets. It’s getting too crowded. And we don’t have proper open space that is healthy, accessible, open, good amenities, and is free. It means it’s truly open, truly public, not that there is a security guard that tells you that you can’t eat here. “‘xcuse me, it’s public open space, I want to eat, I eat!” It’s the street, it’s public!

CLC: Well, I notice in the newspapers that these property owners, they changed the signs from “You can’t sit here” to “Be careful of the flowers”…

Well, they did, because now they have more pressure. The fact that they have more pressure doesn’t mean that the situation has really improved. It’s still, there’s this obvious problem: we are not dedicating enough of our lands for public open space. And there is a collusion of interests, not necessarily “collusion”, as in illegal working-together, but a collusion of interests – government has an interest to sell the land, rather have it (the public space) inside the buildings. Property owners are just happy to take the inside of building (open space). Both of them win, public loses and they have no voice in the game.

CLC: Do you think they mind? Maybe they like living in a place that’s super-dense…

Well, there are things that the public of course finds nice and interesting about Hong Kong, you know. Just take this the other way around: if I am going to buy a flat in a building, I want that building to have playgrounds for the kids, have a park and a sit-out area for me as a resident. But that’s a different things. In the old days, there were buildings put up here in Hong Kong that didn’t have enough of a lobby space. They didn’t have enough space for the lift lobby, y’know. Buildings were just built to maximize the sellable area, or the rentable area.

So then they had to develop a building code. Basically you had to do a minimum standards. Sure! Maybe that in these very large complexes, the minimum standard should be that there is a park inside the building. If there is 10,000 people living in a complex, then maybe there should be a park inside a complex rather than have 10,000 people looking for a park outside the complex. So, you know, that kind of makes sense.

The question is, whether that park is a residential open space or whether the park is an public open space. I you say that the park is a residential open space for the people who live there, fine. You know, the piazza at Times Square, if you say it’s for circulation space, because I’ve got this building, 200,000 people walking through here, fine, yeah you need that. But that doesn’t make it a public open space where people can have passive recreation. It’s circulation space. Residential open space, circulation space, they are not counted as public open space. I still need my 2m² of public open space outside! But if I start counting all these things as public open space and not build any park, then I have a city that does not have enough space.

So, you have to be quite clear about that, the distinction…

CLC: How do you see the future of…

Well, I mean, this debate is fantastic of course! Times Square this morning are going into the newspapers advertising about their deed, saying that it’s private lands. They say, its allocation as public land occupied by a private (inaudible) is misleading! You know. It says clearly that it is private property! So they are making it clear!

So, that’s a good start. Because that means that if the government then says that public open space under private control… Well excuse me, if you have public open space, on private land, that ain’t very good! Can we have public open space on public land. Because obviously when we put public open space and private land, we’ve got serious problems! Because there’s all these controls and management issues.

For us, it’s great. But then all these developers get upset about, and the government finds out… Then the public says it’s inferior open space, and then the government will have to provide superior open space, which is public lands used for public open space!

That’s all we need! And it takes time and effort, and the government says that we have limited land, and that I dispute entirely, because the government has many properties throughout Hong Kong that they are demolishing: the Central Market, all the reclaimed areas, cargo bay working areas that they are no longer using. There are lots of government properties all over Hong Kong that are taken away, and that they are trying to sell. They don’t have to sell it: make it public open space!

Every time that there is a redevelopment, there should be a good setback rule, so the street is widened. But they don’t do anything, still aren’t doing anything. We’re fighting, we’re fighting…

CLC: How did you personally get interested in urban development?

I decided to stay here. I had sold my business, and I decided to stay here in Hong Kong because I thought about leaving, just because I’ve been here for a long time and I come from Holland, originally.

CLC: When was that?

2000. After I sold my business, done my earn-out. So, sold it in ’98, earn-out 2000, finished. I had a chance to leave and I look around, and thought, do I go to Holland, do I go to Australia, do I go to China, do something different? In the end, I came to a conclusion and I want to stay here. Because I think it’s a great city.

Hong Kong has the potential – as for me, Hong Kong is the most beautiful city in the world, except for the urban environment. Because we got our mountains, our reservoirs, our seas, our islands, our coastlines, natural coastlines… I mean also, look at our biodiversity here, in terms of wildlife, birds, marine life, whatever, it’s there. We got more different types of corals than anywhere else in the entire area. There’s not much of a life right now, because we destroyed a lot. But if we let it come back, it will all come back. There are more insect species, more bird species…

I mean, really, Hong Kong is a very unique… Topography-wise is unique, but also the location is unique. The climate, where we are… so Hong Kong has lots of it going for it. So if we can fix our urban environment… For me, fixing the urban environment is like, you know, I bought a house, I fix it, I make it nice. I make my balcony nice, then I want my building and my neighbours to have a nice building. So, we fix up the building. Then I want my street nice. Here it’s like, then I want my street nice. Here I like the place where I live, I like it to be a nice place! I don’t like it to be ugly.

So that was my pure motivation and it was also, somebody has said to me, after I sold my business, what do I do next with my life? And then he had this very simple rule. He said: the first part of your life you learn, the second part of your life you earn, and the third part of your life you serve! I serve… Hey, (so) you do something for the community! You know, you do something different. You make some money and now you do something different!

So I never was involved with NGOs or anything like that. So now I got involved in Creative Initiatives and started to do some NGO work, and this project comes out out, didn’t make me any money. (laughs) But, you know, I thought it was a very nice project about how to make a nicer harbour-front! So, that’s how I got involved.

But as I got involved… then, you know, I am a passionate person, but I’m also, I run my own business. So, in business, it’s very simple, if you see something that is good, you get it done! You get everybody to do the things right. But when you work with this harbour-front issue, then I found everybody to know exactly what needed to be done. But we still can’t get it right!

And then you find that the government is working against you, you know… for land premiums reasons, for the fact that they’ll have to change internal procedures, which is really tough, it’s hard work for them – for the fact that they’re not be concentrated on it, they’ll have other things to do, they don’t think it’s important. Or just because _you_ came up with the idea and they didn’t come up with the idea… So it’s not invented here. So it’s your idea, not their idea, why touch it, we’re not going to support you because then we look like weak government.

You know, there’s all kinds of psychological things, all kinds of reasons why the government certainly is not doing it. But then I am a tough bastard! (laughs) You know, if people start pushing back at things that I know are right, everybody tells me it’s right, and everybody keeps telling me, everybody I meet! Doesn’t matter, if we’re working with government, their own property (?), the general public, all these people agree with you, that these are the kinds of things that we need to do. But we can’t get them done because we got this push-back from government, then I push harder, so you get more determined, you do another thing, you keep going.

CLC: Well, thank you Paul.

Cheers!

Ceci est une traduction d’un texte que j’ai écrit pour le blogue de Bande à part, publié le 8 août 2008.

—

Last April, I was in East Asia to attend a rock music festival in Kenting, Taiwan, and then made a stop in Hong Kong, where I discovered small record stores.

During the same trip, I also spent two weeks in Beijing. My musical adventures started off quite ironically, as my hosts, an American-Chinese and a Briton, took me to see a concert fronted by You Say Party! We Say Die!, a party punk band from Vancouver, that happened to be touring China at the time!

The venue was called the D-22 and is located in the area close to Beijing University, where its founder, a Newyorker, also teaches finance. We were probably a crowd of a hundred-something people, half of which were foreigners, and the other half, presumably locals, on that Friday night, to fill the D-22, a bar just slightly larger than a closet (at most 10m of width).

Steven O’Shea of YSP!WSD!

YSPWSD, who played on the previous evening at the Mao Live, a venue located at the heart of Beijing, told me their amazement in front of this overcrowded, ever-changing megalopolis, and the fun they had performing in it. “Crowds are very receptive here! We didn’t have to prompt them to mosh: they took care of it for us!”, said Stephen O’Shea of YSP!WSD! before the show.

The opening show only started after 10:30PM, and the main act only came to stage after midnight. The local bands opening for YSP!WSD! were Candy Monster, Guai Li (see top photo), and Ourselves Beside Me (sic). Judging from the exodus of Chinese spectators from the front of the stage, after Ourselves Beside Me’s performance, we quickly took note that they were probably more well-known to locals.

After some research, I realized that one of its members, bassist Yangfan (see photo), was once a member of Hang On The Box, an all-girl punk band, and one of the most well-known to ever come out of China. Separated since their last album, in Fall 2007, which Yangfan already wasn’t part of, HotB was one of the bands followed in the documentary Beijing Bubbles. The German production also introduced us to other well-known bands of Beijing founded between 1996 and 2001, such as Joyside, New Pants, Sha Zi and T9.

Poster of Beijinger Zuoxiao Zuzhou / 左小祖咒‘s 2001 album (左小祖咒在地安门), Overseas version. Seen at the Sugar Jar, for 100RMB.

The scene’s history cannot be told without mentioning Cui Jian, the one dubbed the godfather of Beijing rock. Cui, whose songs were once chanted by the students of Tian’anmen Square in 1989, fled to the mountains of Yunnan, in the country’s Southwest, slightly after the events of June 4th, like many other rockers at the time. Since then, he has been rehabilitated, and now gives concerts in sold-out stadiums around the world, like in San Jose, California, in early May. Tang Dynasty and Black Panther are other well-known names from this period of the 1990s. Other bands in the meanwhile, like Brain Failure, regularly toured Europe and the USA.

Local bands touring around the world: not too rare (when will they decide to make a stop in Montreal?). Lee Clow, an American expatriate, who lived in Beijing for 8 years, explains that the rule is that if they are popular in the West, generally, they would be in only one country! “Joyside, it’s in Germany, and Brain Failure, good for them, it’s in the US!” Clow has himself been part of a band called End of the World, practically the only ska band in Beijing, because of longevity.

In the last days of my stay in Beijing, we talked about the most important music festival in the country, the Midi Music Festival, named after Beijing’s contemporary music school being reported. Usually held around the May 1st public holiday since 1997, in Haidian park, in the universities district, “Midi” gets between 40,000 and 80,000 spectators each year. But this year, as it was the case in 2003 (because of SARS) and in 2004, police asked the organizers to delay their event until the October 1st national day.

Rockland 摇篮 music store and its owner, Xiao Zhan, in Houhai since 2004.

Before leaving Beijing, I went wild at local music shops. More accessible from the city’s centre, there’s the Rockland, established in 2004 in Houhai, a lake around which were built bars and restaurants for tourists and young rich people.

I bought a number of safe bets, like Joyside’s latest, and also the current new hot property Carsick Cars‘ (they were in Time Magazine’s July 17th, 2008 edition) only album. Both were published by the Maybe Mars label. I also picked up an electro compilation, and an album from a folk rock signer named Wan Xiaoli of independant Modern Sky. You might also this type of good self-made albums circulating at 100 copies.

One of the best-known independent record stores in town is the Sugar Jar, located in the 798 art zone, old military warehouses recycled as an art and design zone.

Jewel case wall at the Sugar Jar.

Aside from selling CDs, tiny Sugar Jar may also be fitted as a performance room. That’s where Joshua Frank, a McGill student who spends the rest of his year in Beijing, and the experimental rock band Hot & Cold that he completes with his brother, occasionally plays. His brother also happens to be in a band with Carsick Cars’ Shouwang, frequently lauded as China’s new guitar icon.

On the electronic music scene, the name that circulated in conversations and promotional posters was Sulumi (real name Sun Dawei), a chiptune musician. Shanshui, the label that he started, just organized an Asian tour with other Chinese and Japanese artists. Among recommendations in this genre, there was an interesting electronic mix of Yi ethnic minority music.

Pleasant to the ear / Lies!

After throwing all these names at you, what can you do to discover more Chinese indie music? The first thing to do is to look at a Chinese site called Neocha (in English: New-Tea), or listen to its Next web radio.

Random graffiti at 798 – the only place in Beijing you will see graffitis!

An English version of this article was published on Spacing Montreal and Spacing Toronto.

—

Au cours de ma première semaine à Beijing en avril dernier, mon hôte, une Américaine d’origine chinoise vivant à Beijing, n’a cessé de m’encourager à aller faire un tour à Nanluogu Xiang (Chemin Nanluogu or 南锣鼓巷 en caractères chinois), une ruelle étroite (aussi appelées des « hutongs ») typique de Beijing, au coeur de la ville, maintenant bordée des magasins branchés et cafés style occidental. Ça rappelle le Vieux-Montréal…

Nanluogu Xiang est situé sur l’axe central de Beijing. Faisant l’objet d’un article sur le site officiel des Jeux Olympiques de Beijing, ce hutong est parmi les plus célèbres de la ville et s’est vu attribuer un statut spécial depuis 2006.

Ça n’a été qu’à la fin de ma deuxième semaine à Beijing que j’aie finalement pu m’y promener, et ce, un peu par accident. Après mon repas de jiaozi (dumplings/raviolis chinois), l’ami né en Ontario, d’origine chinoise avec qui j’étais allait me faire faire le tour du quartier où il vivait, qui se trouvait juste un peu plus loin après le Nanluogu Xiang! Étudiant en médecine chinoise, il a commencé à louer une chambre (c’est un 3 1/2, en termes montréalais) dans une maison traditionnelle pourvue d’une cour, non loin de là, pour à peu près l’équivalent de 275 de nos huards.

Quand il a initialement déménagé dans le quartier, il se rappelle que Nanluogu Xiang ne ressemblait en rien à ce que c’est aujourd’hui (comme me le confirme d’autres amis qui ont vécu à Beijing à l’époque). Sur la ruelle qui s’étend sur un kilomètre entre Gulou Dajie (avenue de Gulou) et la rue Di’anmen, où donne aussi la face ouest de l’École d’art dramatique centrale, (où Zhang Ziyi et d’autres noms du cinéma chinois ont étudié), il n’y avait en fait que deux cafés.

En 2008, on y trouve maintenant toutes sortes de commerces, comme le Nine-Thirty, un café Hongkongais avec wifi et projection quotidienne de film, ou un bar-salon de thé avec des spectacles de musique (voir photo ci-bas), comme le Sandglass Café, appartenant à ses deux amis dans la fin vingtaine d’origine ethnique mongolienne, ou encore, un magasin de t-shirts concept comme Plastered qui joue sur des points de repère de Beijing (j’en ai acheté un avec un ancien billet de métro dessus).

La chance a frappé à nouveau, le lendemain, quand je suis retourné à Nanluogu Xiang en suivant ma propre route. Alors que je marchais d’un bout à l’autre du hutong, des t-shirts au design particulier suspendus à la vitrine d’un des magasins ont attiré mon attention. Après le mot de bienvenue standard débutant par « Ni hao », le propriétaire du magasin change à l’anglais pour me dire qu’il était en fait né à Montréal!

Avec ses deux amis chinois d’outre-mer, Raymond Walintukan (lisez l’entrevue réalisée avec eux) a fondé NLGX (l’acronyme de Nanluogu Xiang), un café/magasin de design et de style de vie. Parlant de leur terrasse sur le toit qui surplombe Nanluogu Xiang, il m’explique que la zone entière a été reconstruite et est protégée par le gouvernement municipal, et que le quartier ne changera pas pour des décennies à venir.

Parmi les boutiques branchées, des gens vivent encore dans des maisons traditionnelles d’une ou deux étages. Lors de ma troisième visite, j’ai pris une photo, sans me gêner, d’un homme qui était en train de se faire à souper. Il faut dire, quand même, que sa porte donnait directement sur la ruelle!

Un panneau interdisant la circulation automobile pouvait être aperçu à l’un des bouts de Nanluogu Xiang, sauf que, comme celui sur la photo ci-dessus, personne n’avait l’air de s’en préoccuper…

On April 13th, when I was in Hong Kong, I had the chance to participate in Folktales from Many Lands, a story-telling experience spanning four different sites on the SAR’s territory. Two minibuses picked up participants at the Hung Hom railway station in TST and took them between the old HK airport (Kai Tak), Lok Fu park in Wong Tai Sin, Mount Davis on Hong Kong Island, and finally, the South Bay Beach on Hong Kong Island South.

This weekend, July 26-27, was held the event’s exhibition at KLUUBB, a tiny art space in Wan Chai where FfML is also headquartered. During the tour, the organizers handed out disposable cameras, and asked participants to photograph whatever they wanted along the tour of Hong Kong (in a sense, reappropriating it), record and tell their stories as discoveries are made.

>> Flickr set of FfML on April 13th, 2008

This is the guitar belonging to Damon, aka kokdamon, the performer at the Mount Davis stop.

Adam, from Brown Note Collective, who accompanied the group, providing a low-key soundtrack to the event.

Smile!

Kim-Wa Tsang, performing at South Bay Beach.

I enjoyed FfML mostly because it allowed me to hang out at places I wouldn’t be going as a regular tourist. I am venturing the guess that the sites visited may be new even to the long-time Hong Kong residents in the group.

Another avowed goal of the event: promote the importance of open public spaces, as no special permission was asked at all to hold the activities at the different sites. In a city that lacks quality space for its citizens to thrive, open public space had become a issue (see Wikipedia) that dominated the media in the past few weeks in a row sparked when guards at Times Square (a popular commercial centre in Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay area) attempted to stop people from lingering in the plaza outside it. Eventually, they changed the “do not linger” signs by “love the plants” ones.

Hong Kong is much more than the jungle-like landscape of the spires dominating its city centres: it is the green summit of Mount Davis, the beaches with somewhat-fine sand of South Bay, the deserted runways of the old Kai Tak airport.

The Regarde les Chinois series made a stop in Hong Kong in early May to meet Roland Soong. Shanghainese by birth, but a resident of New York for thirty years (until his return to Hong Kong in 2003), he is the blogger behind EastSouthWestNorth (ZonaEuropa.com), a site that welcomes tens of thousands of visitors on a daily basis, and which you have probably read if you are interested in China. Every day, aside from his regular job as CTO for the world’s second-largest media research company, Soong translates articles from Chinese-speaking newspapers and blogosphere for the benefit of English-only readers. We obviously spoke about media, but also of Lust, Caution, whose author of the short story it was inspired by, Eileen Chang, was a personal friend of his parents, and of other topics, like prostitution in Hong Kong, the coverage of the then-recent Tibet riots, the origins of ESWN and foot racing. This interview was conducted on the Thursday before the Sichuan Earthquake, which is why we didn’t talk about it (it made the site fall, but it still wasn’t the year’s most popular item, as explained later by Mr. Soong).

La série Regarde les Chinois s’est arrêtée à Hong Kong pour rencontrer Roland Soong au début du mois de mai dernier. Shanghainais de naissance, mais résident de New-York pendant 30 ans (jusqu’à son retour à Hong Kong en 2003), il est le blogueur derrière EastSouthWestNorth (ZonaEuropa.com), un site qui accueille des dizaines de milliers de visiteurs par jour et que vous avez sans doute déjà visité si la Chine vous intéresse. En marge de son travail habituel comme directeur technique de la deuxième plus grande compagnie en étude des médias au monde, Soong traduit quotidiennement des extraits choisis de journaux et de la blogosphère sinophone. Nous avons bien sûr parlé de médias, mais également de Désir, danger, dont Eileen Chang, l’auteure de la nouvelle sur laquelle s’est basé le film, était une amie personnelle des parents de Soong, et de d’autres sujets, comme la prostitution à Hong Kong, de la couverture des émeutes d’alors au Tibet, des origines de ESWN et de la course à pied. Nous nous sommes rencontrés au Pacific Coffee du IFC – je n’ai même pas eu le temps de partir mon enregistreuse que l’entrevue démarrait. Cette entrevue a été réalisée le jeudi précédant le séisme du Sichuan, ce qui explique pourquoi on n’en a pas parlé (qui fit tomber le site, mais qui n’est pourtant pas l’item le plus populaire de l’année, comme M. Soong l’expliquera).

[Fait intéressant: bien que cette entrevue ait été réalisée en anglais, l'un des premiers articles jamais écrits sur Soong et ESWN fût publié en 2005 dans Alternatives, un journal en français publié de Montréal! (voir article)]

***

Roland Soong: I was interviewed as well in English. That’s not too unusual, but usually, ordinarily, if you say that someone speaks only English, the Chinese press would not interview that person, because he is probably not of interest to their readers. But somehow, I do get (coverage from) both. And the other bits happen to be with Mainland Chinese media, as well as foreign media. So like, there is for example Reuters media. So again, it’s a little unusual.

Comme les Chinois: And on BBC, there’s your interview…

Yeah, there is a BBC radio interview. These kinds of things really tend to, how shall I say, cross-pollinate? Cross-pollinate, in that, maybe my first interview was with the BBC – and I don’t know how they found me, but they did it! It’s a little unusual, because here I am in Hong Kong, and the interviewer was in London. Because it is radio, you just do it by telephone. So, but to ensure the quality of the voice, I had to go to the Radio Hong Kong, where they put these studios and then, you know, you make the connection and it becomes kind of noise-free…

Yeah, so it was like BBC Four or something. Like, (the Chinese-language media) would be, so what, who cares! (laughs) Like, they think BBC, OK, it’s a bunch of listeners in the UK – what do they really care about what a Hong Kong blogger has to say. But oddly enough, that program is actually broadcast on RTHK 4 or something like that, like every Thursday night. They don’t broadcast everything, but they take parts of it.

CLC: It’s syndicated…

Yes, syndicated. And so, on that particular Thursday night, the publisher of, what, Next Magazine (website) in Hong Kong, somehow listening to it, and then in the morning, went back to the office, got one of the reporters and said, OK, now you are gonna get me an interview with this guy! (laughs) So that was how I got into the, like, Hong Kong media!

CLC: Oh, so that’s how it started. But you only wrote in English… You translate articles from Chinese. You write comments as well, right?

Yeah… Well, not a lot, because it’s problematic for me to start saying things, because my objective is really… I have lots of time, so I read a lot, and say, well that’s interesting and I haven’t seen it in English before, so let me translate it. OK. But somehow when I say something that something is of interest, it doesn’t mean that I agree with it. It’s of interest in the sense that, um, “ah, this is interesting right here, it’s unusual”, or it’s of interest because “woaw, everybody is talking about it” and you don’t hear (anything) about it in English. So I think, you know, that the people who can only read English are entitled to see what the Chinese are talking about. So, I go do that translation…

CLC: How do you choose your articles?… You choose them based on how popular a topic is?

Yeah… And the substance, it’s not as if I… There are some things that I just intensely dislike, like stock markets! (laughs) Stuff like that. And also what you call high politics.

CLC: Hype politics?

High politics, … high-level. Because I really truly do not understand it, in the sense that, um, you can say, OK, the Chinese government is meeting with the special envoy of the Dalai Lama, and then a whole bunch of people start speculating as to what the strategy, tactics and possible outcomes are? … I don’t. I don’t have a clue, I mean, and I don’t think they have a clue, so I don’t think I want to waste my time on this? And all this stuff is, you know, it’s a senior government official, so whatever, talking behind closed doors – who knows what they are thinking, you know, why do I wanna start guessing? It’s not useful. So, I kinda avoid that? You know, like, if you ask me what do you think of these talks: I don’t know? I really don’t know! (laughs)

Uhh, you can force me to give an opinion, but I will probably follow it by saying: “that’s a waste of time?” (laughs)

CLC: You’re not a reporter, you’re not…

Yeah, just that I think, you know, that I am not a reporter, even though… my job is related to media. It really has more to do with media planning? With respect to allocation of advertising money and all that, budget…

CLC: That’s your regular job?

Yes. Like optimizing, um, you know, like… I have a million dollars to spend on Coca-Cola, which I spend on websites, CD, radio, newspapers, magazines, um, whatever. So, my company really goes about collecting data that helps, people, let’s say advertising agencies, that make this kind of decisions. That, in turn, I do have a tremendous appreciation of the differences among media, what is more effective in one media as opposed to another? And also, what makes a successful newspaper, as opposed to one that is failing? There are issues of how a smart newspaper has to actually make a clear statement that it has some kind of position.

I mean, in Hong Kong, you can brand yourself as a pro-democracy or a pro-China. Or you can even brand yourself as a newspaper that is absolutely neutral, fair and balanced. That’s OK, but you gotta do it. Then you ought to pick up the issues that are emotional, makes people angry, or feel something about. It could be like, “oh my God, they are taking away our freedoms”, or “oh my God, they’re insulting China”. (laughs) You gotta do that, you know!

CLC: To get different markets… you define yourself as a pro-China or pro-democracy…

Or pro-nobody and just pro-people. (laughs) Yes, I am pro the general interest of the population, and I can swing this way or that way on specific issues, blablabla. And that’s OK. It just means that my sole part of it is really helping the newspapers or television stations to position themselves, um, based on the information I have.

So, a lot of it… So, I’ve done a lot of so-called “tracking” studies. You do that every week, and every time you do something, I can sort of track what the changes are. So, in a television station, it is fairly straightforward. Let’s say the stuff that relates to public opinion are the talk shows for example. And it is largely driven by personality: who is effective and who is not?

And sometimes it is effective because he’s persuasive, or he’s effective precisely because he is irritating, and their viewers are actually happy because they are irritating the other side. Every time that you say something totally outrageous, you say, “great, the other side will be really really upset”.

So, the tracking studies actually track many changes. So, (let’s say) we just had a personnel change: so you basically look at favourable ratings – you know, is it going up or down, that kind of thing… What does the competition look like as a result?

CLC: And sell that information to … (inaudible)

So part of it helps, because when I want to do stuff for my website, I pick up a newspaper and I kind of guess what the tricks are? Like, why are you saying this, it looks wrong! (laughs) There is a reason…

CLC: What’s your scope though? I mean, you look at newspapers in Asia, in Chinese language… or anything? Because I’ve seen in the top (of your website), links from American newspapers?

It depends. Part of it… You have to say what’s going on right now… So I do look at a whole bunch of things, but (for) some of them, if there is nothing going on, I would say “forget about it, OK”. Then will only pick up on some minor issues. So, if you look at this year, then I would say this year there were really long-term, extensive series of events, and they are completely different.

[Important editor's note: this interview was done in early May, actually just four days before the Sichuan earthquake - which intermittently overwhelmed ESWN because of pictures directly hosted on Mr. Soong's website.]

The first series of events, which is the stuff like the Edison Chen photos… I look at that particular case when it first started up, and I started covering it, and people start writing in, saying “Are you crazy? This is nothing – why are you wasting your time on this?” There are more important stuff going on, like the…

CLC: Snowstorms in China?

Snowstorms in China. Like, “why ain’t you talking about?” Because I don’t think you have anything to say. Everything that has to be said about it is basically in the newspapers… But then, I look at the Edison Chen case, and I said “Oh my God, this is it”. It’s not the sort of lurid part of the scandal, but it’s actually about something that, you would say, I was trying to work on, but could never get an effect on. It has to do with the censorship, or the classification system in Hong Kong.

Namely, you can publish something, and you could get into trouble depending on how a certain obscene articles tribunal, consisting of a couple of people, or adjudicators, decide to classify it. Is it indecent, is it obscene or is it neither? And you could get fined for basically publishing indecent or obscene material. Um, it’s weird, it’s a weird system, because it is totally a function of two people randomly selected, and you have inconsistent outcomes.

CLC: It’s an arbitrary…

Yes. But I could never get, regardless of how I pushed it in previous cases, I could never get out the contradictions and the absurdities out, in a manner that is sufficient to arouse public outrage? Along comes this thing, I say, well, it’s movie stars! (laughs) And you got the tabloid magazines. This is very different from, let’s say, a previous case, with the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) student newspaper. And they had no pictures, but an article describing something, and it was just considered indecent… You can talk about it, look, nobody’s ever read that newspaper! (laughs) It’s so abstract! It can talk about it and say “it doesn’t bother me!”

But except once it starts showing in like…

CLC: Mainstream newspapers, with photos, and it’s concerning stars… it becomes a big thing.

(laughs) And it’s not one photo, but whoever was doing it was releasing it in bits, and doing the entire process, all the contradictions and the absurdities start coming out. Like, what were the police doing? It was like, how could you put the entire commercial crime division to work on this case? And if you were an ordinary citizen, you would not have cared less! Tell them: go away, we don’t deal with this!

But because it is a movie star, it’s a public affair, the police put all this stuff together. It’s a question of…

CLC: Do you remember a story that you covered, I think it was last year or before, when they publicized … (it was) a website for hookers, prostitutes. I don’t quite remember it. Can you tell me more about this case? You did a Google search and how it was possible for you to do it… (Note: woaw, I was clearly mixing many cases together…)

(Here is the piece I was talking about – here is the website that we are talking about)

This is another piece of what I consider as absurdity in Hong Kong. Let’s say, what is the law with respect to prostitution… under very restricted circumstances it was perfectly OK. And namely, they would not want to interfere the fact that two adults decide to go to bed and afterwards the man wants to give money to the woman. There are perfectly legit reasons and you really can’t distinguish between the two situations, so they started saying that it was alright.

What is criminalized is in fact… you cannot run a brothel, like, hire ten prostitutes and put them in a stable, so to speak, let your clients come in and make their selection. The specific crime is not so much prostitution as profiteering out of immoral conduct on the part of other people. So, that’s possible. Or you can arrest a prostitute, maybe because she is a tourist from the Mainland and doesn’t have a working visa… You know.

But there is a perfect way to run, for an individual entrepreneurial woman to run, to conduct a business as a prostitute. And the way you do it is, you rent a single room, somewhere, and you start advertising. And your advertising could be, let’s say, you stick little posters down on lampposts and stuff like that. You know, “#700, on Main Street, Apartment 12F” or something, you know. And you have a deep description of your skills. So it would be in, uh, some other obscure language, like “expert flute player”. (laughs)

CLC: I see!

Stuff like that! (laughs) Once you know it, you’re like, let’s get on with the show, hum! (laughs)

CLC: And if I come from Overseas, I think, you know… First time I came here (in Hong Kong), I was like, to my aunt, oh hey, we should go sing some karaoke there! And she’d be like, “no, no, that’s not what you think!”

Another way is downstairs of your building, you have red neon lights.

CLC: Yeah. Or like I’ve seen on the Mainland (Note: near a posh residential area of Shenzhen, actually), they have this purple light in stores (that serve as brothel).

Yeah, you can’t do that here. Because that becomes simply… if it’s a store, and there’s more than one person, then it becomes basically, what we would call… If it’s actually a different person that is renting the store, then even the landlord can get into trouble, because it’s against the law to profiteer through the immoral behaviour of others.

Um, so, the thing is that once you start doing them, the neon signs, the police comes around to remove them, on the basis that they are too big. (laughs) Not because it’s advertising prostitution services, but because sign is too big, or it’s not authorized, you have no license to put up the sign. They come and remove it, but then there are… the problem is that signs are not very expensive. There are in fact services that you would call, and they will say that “we will replace a sign within six hours”… (laughs) No problem, it’s just a couple of hundred dollars. Like, six hours – it’s like those computer repair, the warranty, you know, “this is Dell Computer, if you want, if you pay X hundred dollars, for the next three years, we guarantee that a service person will appear on your premises within half a day”. (laughs)

CLC: Do you think it says something about Chinese society? Hiding, you know, all those contradictions? Kinda say that there’s no prostitution…

(long pause) I think what is interesting to me is that this is really more about the… an obstinacy for adhering to the concept of the rule of law in Hong Kong. Everything goes by the book? So…

CLC: Do you (Hongkongers) do that by contrast to the Mainland?

Actually, to the Mainland, there’s a lot of discretion, say, “OK, you’re a prostitute”, you know… “But I am just sitting in a coffee shop, why do you think I am soliciting?” … “It doesn’t matter, I think you are”

But in Hong Kong, it’s like, uh, you see the police basically reading the code of law and then you have this slow evolution of every process, whereby… because it’s a matter of always test and trial. Someone tries, pulls a new trick, you get arrested, you get prosecuted… You go through the court system, and someone just says, “but that’s ridiculous, police can’t do that”, and this is how it works out to be… It’s possible for individual female entrepreneurs to rent a single room to start actually a one-person-per-room. As soon as there are two persons in two rooms in a single apartment, it’s no good. So, what you have to do is rent an apartment, partition it into separate rooms, to make sure that they are not joined, and then all of a sudden, it’s OK.

So, I mean, that process has obviously evolved over time, because they, the police probably kept busting brothels with multiple rooms, and someone came up with the idea, why don’t we partition these apartments into different rooms? And then the police came in and arrested everyone all over again. You go through the court system, and the judge says, “but, they’re in disconnected rooms, there is not a single premise! you can’t say they’re running a business”. (laughs)

Then, when you treat this problem as one of advertising reach, and effectiveness, then you realize, OK, for me to put up little slips of paper on lampposts, or neon signs to the entrance of buildings, the reach is low, and it’s only seen by people who walk by, and the effectiveness is also not really good, because when you actually look at those buildings, there are about eighty signs! Why this one, as opposed to that one?

CLC: So, people came up with the website, with reviews from customers. And then they got into trouble.

Right. And they would not have gotten into trouble, because all you have to do is host that website server outside of Hong Kong and there isn’t a thing they could do about it. But people who did get into trouble… because you have to put the contents, so there are salespeople who visit the prostitutes and say “you want to advertise? and it’s only a dozen dollars (HKD – about $1.75 CAD or USD) a month and you make more than that in a single day. You do that, and you can increase your reach. You can add your photos, and your specialization on it, so that people can at least see what they are getting, and so on.”

So, ok, one, there is the salesperson, and after the woman says yeah, then they will go down and send a photographer. So the people who got busted in that case are the photographers and the salespeople, and the owner is actually still free! Because all you can say is that you are running a website, but the website is not in Hong Kong, sorry.

CLC: I know that you’ve lived in New York, before coming (back) to Hong Kong. Can a situation like this happen in America or somewhere in the world? Or is it specific to Hong Kong and its idiosyncrasies?

(pause) In New York… I mean, don’t be ridiculous – I don’t know about websites, but in the pre-Internet days, you can buy a copy of the so-called alternative weekly, known as Village Voice. It’s a pretty famous weekly magazine, because it does actually contain some interesting contents? Like, about the arts, Greenwich Village, or East Village, or stuff like that. It’s a pretty thick newspaper, so if you say that at each week it comes out at 80 pages, maybe the last 40 pages are classified ads, because that’s where they make their money. There are perfectly legitimate classified ads, such as apartments to rent, and stuff like that, and then you have pages and pages of escort services, or massage services, and there are photos… so what’s the difference?

CLC: Yeah, and they can’t get busted…

No. It’s a massage service, it’s an escort service…

CLC: So, you lived in New York – for how long? Were you born in Hong Kong?

Yes.

CLC: And you moved to New York or somewhere else?

No. I grew up here and I lived for about seventeen or eighteen years, and then I went to study in Australia, Sydney, for about three or four years, and after that I moved to New York, where I lived for more than thirty years. I came back to Hong Kong in 2003, because my mother who was living here had a stroke, and I was taking care of her.

CLC: So you came back. And you are working for a company in Hong Kong?

In New York, but it’s sort of a globalized world – you don’t have to be anywhere.

CLC: Uh, what made you start the blog?

(Pause) It’s actually fairly easy for me, because I had a website… a couple of websites, since 1995 or something like that.

CLC: Zona Latina?

Yes, and a track-club website.

CLC: A what?

Track-club website… running website?

CLC: Oh ok.

That’s a New York City running club. And that’s actually closer to the blog than Zona Latina. Because it’s all random, like gossip news, like so and so run such a race, and whatever whatever. You know, and it’s a little bit funny, because it’s not totally true. It’s more like so or so run a race in Wisconsin.

CLC: Run races? You mean, just like (upon) hearing rumours of races…

No, no, no, it’s like I had a team, and it’s like a couple of hundred people. I write gossip about them.

CLC: About the track community?

No, it’s just my club – I don’t care about anyone else. It was just a little bit weird, it just had a very strong personality because it was a little bit what you call quirky. You know, it’s like, a lot of stuff tends to be really really funny. For some reason, the stories that I want to focus are the really weird ones? So, I have one teammate, who was in the business of collecting lost gloves. You know, it’s winter, and once in a while we lose gloves, don’t know where it went.

CLC: Heh.

And it’s lost somewhere, and she just collects them. Then, periodically, she would make an announcement, and say, I am bringing all my gloves down to the playground to the corner of 72nd Street and Broadway. I welcome anyone – you can come down and if it’s one of your gloves, take it, even if it isn’t, take it anyways. So, she got featured in the New York Times, who wrote this follow-up… Like, why are you doing that? (laughs)

And, this stuff about people running races? You have tons of people running races. These people are runners, and runner do run races. It’s one thing for you to… They are mostly New York City residents, so you can run local races – on Thanksgiving, you go race somewhere.

CLC: You ran also?

Yeah yeah.

CLC: You still run?

No. Knee problems – very bad knee problems.

CLC: If you were able to, would you run in Hong Kong? Do you know good places to run?

It’s actually very good, because there is so much. Ordinarily, you would advise people to… Running tends to be longer distance. There are certainly plenty of tracks around, but that’s kinda, you can’t run. Unless you want to run like 50 laps. (laughs) It’s not good, because you keep … that’s not good, because you keep running… That’s the reason for my knee problems, because you keep turning that bend. I used to run indoors, which is even worse, because the tracks are bent. So, that could really… (laughs)

CLC: In my city, you can’t run in the winter.

Yeah, but like I have the indoor tracks in New York.

CLC: Yeah, you have to stay indoor… But you can run outdoors in the winter in New York… It’s not too cold, it’s not like in Canada.

It snows in New York but it’s pretty much…

CLC: Clear most of time?

No, I mean they’re very quick and efficient about cleaning. Like, it doesn’t snow that much – it’s not like 3 feet of snow and then (laughs) you can’t do anything about it. So, they may have, let’s say, very typically six inches, then the plows come out, you know, the salt spreaders, the plows, whatever. And you basically have the roads cleaned out.

We also run… It’s actually best to run in the snow, actually, but sometimes… because the snow isn’t really that deep. You know, so we’re really talking about…

CLC: It’s squishy, (but) it’s (also) kinda like irregular, might hurt your knees sometimes (I was thinking about hardened snow, which NYC may not see much of, perhaps). I’m not a professional runner, unfortunately… Um, did you see Lust, Caution?

Yeah, of course, I had to!

CLC: Did you like it? Did you see the rendition of it?

I actually saw it here (at Palace IFC – since we were at IFC’s Pacific Coffee). Because they had the premiere, so I guess that they felt they had to give me a ticket. (laughs) Actually, when the publisher first told me that Ang Lee was going to make a movie, and I hadn’t read the so-called short story carefully before, so, I went back and looked at it… So how are you going to make a movie out of this? (laughs)

So, Ang Lee has actually significantly expanded it, but in a way that, I take, he necessarily had to. Because otherwise, it was way too subtle in an audio-visual media. You can’t really communicate… Because you can’t really have the kinds of monologues that, you know, a first-person observation, that you could have in the novel. So, you can’t express these, can’t expect the actors or the actresses to communicate through facial expressions or hand gestures.

Um, so usually people would say, oh, there are those three bedroom scenes that were not in the book. That’s somehow, I felt, they just had to be there, because it’s not the identical bedroom scenes, because it clearly shows the shift in the so-called power relation, power, politics if you will, as it starts off with the man being dominant, and then by the end, it’s really the woman taking charge? But without that, you couldn’t really tell what exactly had really changed.

And, you know, it has been asked enough that, how do I feel about that – how do I think Eileen Chang would’ve thought – I felt sorry? (Editor’s note: lost with the recording…) Or let’s say even my father would have thought about it. I think the answer is, um, they wouldn’t have minded, because both of them were actually script writer. My father was a film producer.

CLC: In Hong Kong.

Yeah. Some of Eileen Chang’s scripts were actually adapted. Because at one point, she needed to be as prolific and productive as possible, so how many stories, sketches you have to mind, that’s easy. Just go to the classical English-language novels, such as… You actually read some of the film scripts and you can detect a really Pride and Prejudice and stuff like that (inaudible).

But, clearly, doing (during?) the process, she appreciates that she is writing for an audio-visual media, in that, how do you capture the essence of Jane Austen, and that you have to do something, because it’s audio-visual.

CLC: They (in Mainland China) censored the movie, but they censored it after it came out. They let it show for a bit, and then decided to… I mean, Tang Wei cannot (perform in China anymore).

Yeah, there are several things going on. I believe, one, Ang Lee probably, before it ever came to Hong Kong, probably did something, some form of censorship, because some of the photos – there are photos out there that did not show up in the Hong Kong version.

CLC: Photos?

Photos from the film, scenes. And, specifically, and I don’t know how well you remember. It’s somewhere at the start of the movie, when Tony Leung first showed up. He was so-called “at work” and he’s coming out of some kind of dungeon, and his aide is right behind him. And so what was censored was what happened inside the dungeon, where there were some torture scenes and some people being beaten, woman getting stripped naked, blablabla.

Now, you would say, was it necessary? Would that have been necessary? See, he filmed that originally on the assumption that … without that, what Tony Leung does in his day job is quite abstract. You need to be someone familiar with Chinese history – not so much official history, but so-called popular folk history, about what happened during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai, you know, these sort of legends about people, number 76, … you know, that particular building, later on, you can see him come out it.

The place is well-known. People would say that they hear people screaming all day and all night, that kind of stuff. Since that was removed, it’s kind of actually hard for an American to appreciate, like, what is he doing – he is not such a horrible person!

CLC: By the end of the movie, you see the people get shot in the quarry…

But that’s not him. He might have signed the order, but it’s a little bit fairly different from basically (being) in the torture scenes.

CLC: In the dialogues, I think I remember one part where he was describing (the torturing)…

Where he said to her, “what do think I was doing”, you know… Like, I think, the dialogue, she says “you’re late”, and he explains “what do you think I was doing? I just arrested, bla-bla-bla, and made him talk, bla-bla-bla”. Hmm, but I think he took it out, I am guessing, because he didn’t want to be accused of gratuitous sex and violence. (laughs)

CLC: (laughs) (since) sex is already there.

Like, the three bedroom scenes, you could say that it’s not gratuitous, because he needs to indicate a shift in the power relationship, so on and so forth. If you just show people being tortured, beaten and raped or whatever, then…

CLC: Yeah, I thought that the sex scenes were not gratuitously there, and they were there for a reason. I didn’t know the reason, but it just felt natural in the flow of the movie as well! Hmm, I have a bunch of questions about media in China and the Western world. Since things are so censored in China (!), I found through the articles that you translate that a lot of news are being transmitted through BBS (bulletin board systems), through unofficial channels. Is there a sort of “free press” in China, but not officially?

(long pause) … no, it depends on what you mean on the specific item. There is a lot of software… OK, I mean, at issue is, they have a, what, 220 million Internet users. I don’t know. And they start talking at the same time, I don’t know how you are going to control it. So, about all you can do, … y’know, people talk about, oh, there is this legendary or mythical Friday morning meetings, where all the managers of the major web portals or forums are summoned to talk to the, whatever, the guys, the officials in charge of the Internet. You’re summoned there and handed off a list: OK, this is what must be avoided.

Fine, OK, (and) these guys go back and put in the filters or tell their workers that whenever someone writes about this, delete it. OK, that’s fine. Let’s say it’s true – I don’t know whether it’s true, but people keep talking about it. And on suddenly breaking events, incidents, they will just pickup the phone and call and say – you know, you can’t wait until Friday – so you could call, call and say that this subject is off.

So an example would be… But your problem is this: I’m going to come in on Friday, and you are going to hand me a list. How long is that list going to be? It’s not going to be 650 pages. Let’s say five pages, and it covers 150 items. That means that the web portals guys say, fine, then it means that everything else not on the 150 is free game, until someone calls on the phone.

So, a lot of stuff just goes right through. What won’t they allow you talk about, there would be things like, oh, this is the 17th Congress of the Communist Party. No discussion – doesn’t matter whether it’s good or bad, just no discussion, just in case. Alright, fine, that’s off the table, you can’t talk about it. But then, all sorts of other things are on the table! So, if some guy wants to say, well, you know, I really don’t like what the French did with the Olympic Relay, so I am going to start a boycott of Louis Vuitton, and then someone else – you know, the discussion starts, and someone else says, “how are we are going to boycott that? I can’t afford it – I can’t buy it anyways!” (laughs) “Oh yeah, maybe you are right. So then let’s see what else is related to LV.” So they say, “Oh, LVMH, the holding company, has bought some stocks in Carrefour – we can boycott a supermarket, can’t we?!” (laughs)

That’s off their attention, until it got so big. Then, you know, someone picks up the phone and say, “wipe it out”. But then that’s only going to be (-inaudible- “tentle?”), because it’s absurd. It’s absurb, because if you get on Google China, google.cn, or the local Baidu search engine, and you look for Carrefour and you can’t find it, it just also wipes out their business. You have a real website, but suddenly you can’t get to it! Nothing on Carrefour, sorry!

CLC: It’s very dangerous to mess with China!

No, it’s… I think some things are not allowed, but there are all sorts of other things that are going through. So, you would say, are they allowed to talk about Tibet? I don’t see any problems.

Um, sometimes someone gets nervous unilaterally and they would just stick in a filter, nothing on Tibet, which is in Chinese, 西藏 (Xīzàng). So, it’s like, ok, you won’t let me type in 西藏 / Xīzàng.

CLC: So, you’re going to write something that sounds…

Right. Just initials, Z.D. (?) or, since 西/Xī is west, there’s a lot of talk of 东藏 “Dōngzàng”.

CLC: Is there a danger that … Because, that slight little small little things that bother these Chinese netizens can snowball into a really really big thing. The story of Grace Wang, that little girl on CCTV.

Very yellow, very vulgar? Um, you think it’s a lot of people, but actually it isn’t. The issue is the base – the base is 220 million. 0.000001% (!) is 20,000 people knocking on your door! (laughs)

CLC: Oh, that’s nothing, eh! (laughs) Everything is so big in China. It’s hard to control all that mass of people. How do you see the future of Chinese media?

(long pause) I think that eventually, all the controls will be gone. It’s gotta be so ridiculous, in the sense that it’s only humanly possible for, let’s say, the guys to say, “that’s the list of the week and everything else is ok”. At some point, it’s just ridiculous.

So, if I want to think about how it would happen, I might want to think… I look at what people are talking (about) today, what they were allowed to talk about on the Internet, five years ago, ten years ago, something like that. You can’t… I mean, just go to any BBS, and say, if I take this stuff, copy it, and post it on a similar BBS ten years ago… (laughs) You know, just take 100 posts, and put it there: well, I think 99 of the people would be arrested! (laughs)

CLC: Things change a lot… And what do you think of the perception of China in Western media? I’ve been “fed” with Western media, and coming to China made me a little bit paranoid about everything that I did in China. Now, I’ve stayed in Asia for my fifth week, and I think that everything is “normal”, and that you have to cause a lot of trouble to be in trouble. What’s my question… What do you think of the perception (of China in) Western media?

(long pause) That’s a very difficult question to ask, because it assumes Western media refers to some kind of, sort of like homogeneous entity? It would be equivalent to thinking, to asking what does the TV media in the US think about the Democratic Party candidates? … Well, what do you mean, Fox News? (laughs)

Uh, you know, it’s not the same. If I was to say, what about the Western media, you can say that some of them are, just by screening the contents, you would say, this is clearly driven by certain political positions, because absolutely nothing good comes out of it. So, I would list, ah, that whole Radio Free Asia. OK, it’s just human rights violations all the time. OK, nothing else ever happens.

Then, you have some other things, which you would say… well, you guys are kind of… Like, I understand, but always find it, you know, rather bizarre. You could take the big American media, like the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the Wall Street Journal. It’s actually fairly difficult to read, in the sense that you need to understand that they are divided into the news department and the editorial department. And the guys who write the editorial, a lot of times, I must say, you must not read the news in your own newspaper. Because your assertion is totally contradictory to what the reporters are saying! Like, it’s just sometimes, for whatever reason, the guys who are the senior editors just want, have certain positions, and it’s the mission of the newspaper to advance those positions. And ground reality has nothing to do with it.

So, maybe the Chinese people have a lot of difficulty understanding that? You know, they would look at the editorial and say it’s totally wrong. And the Americans would say, why? it’s an editorial, it’s an opinion. Who says there are no rights or wrongs about opinions? It’s not reporting, and the Chinese can’t really distinguish between that?

You also have a… there’s a difference in emphasis. So you see really the contradictions being brought out, especially now, with the Olympic Torch relays. ‘Cause you have been, during this period, travelling…

CLC: I’ve been following it with Hong Kong press. I’ve been reading, you know, the South China Morning Post. It’s one newspaper, I guess – one newspaper in Hong Kong. A place where you have people who are pro-Beijing, and people who are pro – the other camp.

Yeah, they tend to be way too careful.

CLC: Oh yeah, in Hong Kong they are too careful?

No, no, careful in the sense that it’s right. It is… you don’t know say anything that you don’t know. I don’t mean the opinion part, but the journalism part. And so, in that sense, you would say, well, I read the whole thing, and I have no idea what happened, because you simply completely refuse to speculate or even say “rumour has it that” because you couldn’t do anything.

CLC: I think I would say that the way that Tibet was handled was that, you know, by not allowing journalists, you don’t know what’s happening, in the West, and you can speculate in the West that something bad must be happening, since we are not talking about it. Like, nobody knows what’s really going on.

Well, I don’t know if you buy that. OK, so why can’t you tell me that you don’t know what’s happening, instead of making stuff up? (laughs) So, what Chinese are lashing are that we have all these instances where people are making stuff up! And therefore, we will refuse to believe in the Western media anymore. You know, this is treating the term, the concept of Western media as it was a homogeneous entity. “Just because some Western media are making stuff up, then all must be…”

So, I don’t think everyone’s making stuff up, but clearly you can’t write a piece of reportage that in fact says, “we have no idea what’s going on, because we’re not allowed in there”. So, you end up… So what does it mean for you to be fair and balanced when it gets to something (-inaudible-). Two sets of press releases: one from the Chinese government, one from the Tibet government in exile. You look at it, and then you say, you know, even superficially, this is two packs of lies! (laughs) It defies physics!

CLC: It would be interesting if one (a non-Chinese reader, we assume) could read news simultaneously in China, if Google Translate was a bit more faithful to what the original article was. I would like to read editorial from respected Chinese newspapers, and make an opinion from what I read from local media. I hope that someday we have the technological means…

It’s far away!

CLC: You think it’s just a communication problem? People don’t want to dialogue? …

Well, the whole thing is fairly complicated. Part of it is people are… what was it, the thing I was just telling you about: the term is chickens talking to ducks. You know, I have a… maybe the Chinese have this issue about Western media should not just be making stuff up? Because some of this stuff is very straightforward, elementary, basically journalist ethics or something. I mean, the behaviour is simply inexcusable. I think, you know, the answer is not… is just acknowledge it. Because you can’t defend it. You know, like just lifting a photo from Nepal and say, you know, Chinese police beating Tibetan monks. It’s that simple.

So, when the Chinese say this is what’s in Western media, you just say “it’s wrong, whoever picked the photo was either… stupid or getting out of line. Let’s move on with it.” But no, instead, the answer is “this is happening because Western media is not allowed to enter Tibet”. And then, all of a sudden, they are totally stuck, because then the other side says, we allow you into Tibet and produce this kind of stuff?” (laughs) Because you won’t know up to it (-kinda inaudible-), and just move on! If it’s just wrong, just get over it. No big deal, it’s wrong! You can’t say it’s alright, or pretend it’s not there! (laughs)

CLC: I’ll wrap this up. Woaw, it’s been an hour! So, my last question would be, who are you, how do you describe yourself?

Who am I? (laughs) I think, my life experience is I just happen to be someone born in China, grew up for quite some time in Hong Kong. So, I’m someone who has, who knows the Chinese language and understands some of the values. But I have also lived a much longer time Overseas, mostly in the US. So, that relative experience of having lived in two different places meant that I hold a certain amount of relativism? Don’t tell me (that) certain Chinese values or American values is absolutely and universally applicable to everybody – I don’t believe it. Because they are clearly different. I don’t know which is right or wrong: they are just different.

Um, so having said that, I am today, through historical circumstances, family circumstances, living in Hong Kong, with the luxury of plenty of personal time, not having to worry about working hard to earn a living. You know. So I find myself being able to spend a lot of time on my blog. And my hope on the blog is really, a lot of time, by virtue of the fact that I can read Chinese. And what I read in Chinese, what the Chinese are saying, is often not being represented in English. So, my website is there for a way of presenting to English-only readers about what the most hot… the most interesting or popular Chinese news are, and the most significant events of the day, so to speak.

Un article que j’ai composé pour Spacing Montréal a été repris par Spacing Toronto hier, notre publication-mère. Vu l’intérêt suscité, le voici traduit en français.

—

Megan Hall, la correspondante de Spacing Toronto à Beijing cet été vient récemment de signer un article très intéressant sur l’équipement d’activité physique publique dans les parcs et terrains de jeux de Beijing. En avril dernier, je suis resté deux semaines à Beijing, et ai pu moi-même découvrir comment les Pékinois investissaient leurs espaces publiques pour se garder en forme. L’article de Megan m’a d’ailleurs inspiré à parcourir ma collection de photos.

Par exemple, une activité populaire, qui peut être pratiquée simplement sur le coin d’une rue ou un square publique possédant une surface plate assez grande, est de botter des volants (comme on joue au aki ici). Les gens que j’ai croisé dans les diverses instances en train de jouer ressemblaient à des employés de bureau ou de magasin prenant une pause.

Vu que le ping-pong est un sport si populaire en Chine, ce n’est peut-être pas surprenant de retrouver des tables pour jouer à l’extérieur, comme sur cette photo prise dans un espace publique près d’un complexe résidentiel.

Dans cet autre parc, à juste quelques centaines de mètres du site olympique principal, quelques personnes du troisième âge jouent au croquet entre eux. Le terrain de jeu en question a l’air d’avoir été rénové récemment.

Regarde les Chinois complète sa tournée de Beijing avec cette sixième et dernière entrevue. Née à Hong Kong, grandie en Californie méridionale, et définitivement une New-Yorkaise dans son coeur, Fiona réside aujourd’hui à Beijing, où elle travaille et maintient Quirky Beijing dans ses temps libres. C’était mon dernier soir à Beijing, après deux semaines passées dans la ville, et Fiona a bien voulu répondre à mes questions, malgré le rhume récent qui l’a tût pour les deux derniers jours. Nous avons parlé de ses jours comme enseignante d’anglais langue seconde entre 2006-07, de ce qu’elle pense de la vie d’expatrié en Chine, et de Beijing et de son côté inusité.

Regarde les Chinois completes its tour of Beijing with this sixth and last interview. Born in Hong Kong, grown up in Southern California, and definitely a New Yorker at heart, Fiona now lives in Beijing, where she works and runs Quirky Beijing on her free time. It was my last night in Beijing, after two weeks spent in the city, and Fiona answered my questions despite nursing a recent cold that totally silenced her for the past two days. We talked about her days as an English second-language teacher in 2006-07, what she thinks about expat life in China, and Beijing and its quirkier side.

***

Comme les Chinois: So, you’ve been living in Beijing for two years? How do you like the city?

Fiona: Um, actually, I’ve only been living here for nine months. I’ve lived in China over two years now.

CLC: Um, right. So, you started off as an English teacher in Changchun?

Yeah, and then we came to Beijing. But I can’t say I particularly like Beijing. (laughs)

CLC: How come?

Too big, too smoggy. Um… I like smaller places! (laughs) Inconvenient too…

CLC: But you come from New York, I mean, lived in New York before coming to China. It’s funny for you to say this.

是 (shi, or just “Yes/Correct/Sure” – as Fiona occasionally inserts simple Chinese words in her speech… or did she mean “Sure”?), but it was more convenient to get around, and shockingly the traffic was better in New York, because you can always the subway. You also take the subway here too, but it’s really crowded, it’s not a pleasant experience, and as you pointed out too, the interchanges don’t make any sense. (laughs)

CLC: Hey, so you are the founder of this blog called Quirky Beijing. Tell me about the blog.

Well, the tagline for Quirky Beijing is “finding the …”. What’s the tagline again? (laughs) “finding the gently offbeat in a decidedly uncute city”. It came about because I was really looking for a few things. You know, a more, kind of, indie, twee sensibility, which I wasn’t really finding here in Beijing or in English-language blogs in general. Most of the English-language blogs about China tend to be about politics, or the kind of English teacher adventures in China, so I was kind of beyond both of them… And I also wanted something that would make me, that would enable me to look for things that I liked about Beijing.

CLC: And did you find that? … What did you find?

Um, well, some of the things that I found were mostly – most of them were things that I see every day. Like street food, kinda like funny things that I see on the street. Um, I think a lot about the subway, because I spend most of my time on the subway. So, it’s a big part of my life. And some of the things that I’ve… I also did a lot of posts which are the most popular ones. So, about funny-looking pastries or cute pastries in Beijing, this is the most popular part of my blog. I’m not really sure why, but I guess that there’s more people who like funny-looking pastries than I thought.

CLC: Um, tell me about your work.

Well, I work for Immersion Guides, which is… I do marketing for them. and they’re an English-language guidebook publishing company here. Um, and we do the Insider’s Guide to Beijing, which is this big kinda tome to everything in Beijing. And also, the Taxi Guide, this little Taxi Guide that you tuck in into your pocket, and some more unusual one, like the excursion guide, for day trips around, and also the Mandarin Phrasebook, which has a lot of funny Chinese phrases that you don’t really learn in class. Things like how to say “Dude, that’s a great song”, or how to pick up at an art gallery, like, by impressing them with your knowledge of post-impressionism, but saying all of this in Chinese! (laughs)

CLC: Hey, do you mind if we talk about how original your way of teaching was? B/c I used to read your Livejournal blog, and where you always posted about how you find original ways to teach English to your students…

Yeah, it was mostly because I had to. We were given very little in the way of materials, and the materials that we were given were very repetitive. They were created by a British company, but they still managed to suck. And, um, they were very, extremely repetitive in my opinion. Students got really bored and once I got to know them more, then I just thought of other things that would make them more engaging and that I was more excited about. If the teacher’s not excited about teaching the lesson, then it really comes out.

CLC: Like what? Like what did you do?

Like grammar is a good example of a thing that I was miserable at. I was miserable at grammar, and I was never good at teaching it, I wanna just say it right now. (laughs) And so, if I could get across the grammar point without actually going into the real fine technical details, like (by) making it more fun, so that my students would still get it, and not involve me having to, you know, describe what a gerund did, whatever, then that was much better. Then, actually, breaking it down, explaining it what it meant technically… So, because most native English speakers wouldn’t know what the difference between a gerund or like a past participle, things like that…

CLC: Well, how did you make it fun?

We do a lot of exercises. Once, we did personals, um, they had to write personals described who they were looking for. I actually did a lot of dating-related exercises, just because I liked them. Because I am more romantic, so I want to do that too. Also because, actually, my students too. It was a subject that really engaged them, so we did…

CLC: Well, they were teenagers…

Yeah, they were mentally teenagers. So, we did personals, which was like, you wrote down who, what kind of person you were looking for to date, and this would be given to somebody else in the classroom, and that person had to help you find somebody else in the class, find like the perfect match for this person. Um, and we did speed dating. That was really fun too. Just similar, but you had to interview people. (coughs)

CLC: Did it create any real-life quid pro quo?

Um, yeah actually! There were a lot of couples that ended up in my classes, but I don’t think I had anything to do with it! The thing is that these kids spend their entire days, like, with each other. They lived together, they had classes together, and so it’s kinda natural. There was one student, sort of the big story that came out of my last year there. There were these two students, Bob and Chloe. Bob was like this really sweet, kind of short, chubby kid. Chloe was like this really pretty (girl) – her English was great too. And there was a big joke for most of the, like, entire year and a half that I was there, that Bob really fancied Chloe! But Chloe wouldn’t have anything to do with him… So, it was just this big joke!

And well it became a true story, toward the end of the year, toward the end of my last couple of months there. I was like, “woaw, really?”, texted all my students, and it’s like, “did you hear about this? is this true?” and they all said yes. (laughs) So it’s a big 八卦 (bat-gwa), which is news gossip! (Editor: a term that means a lot of other things too)

CLC: It’s kinda like expat life… They’re always together, the expats, it’s kind of incestuous… In my two weeks experience here in Beijing, this word always comes up (laughs), “incestuous”, tell me about it!

Um, well, judging from both my experience in both Changchun and Beijing, yes, probably expat life is very incestuous. In Changchun, it was literally… there were just like a couple of hundred foreigners out there, maybe a thousand at most. That was segregated between German engineers and their families, and this sort of teaching crowd? So, you could imagine it was a very small circle – you see the same people all the time, hung out with the same people all the time.

CLC: Yet Beijing is a much bigger city.

Yeah, Beijing is a much bigger city, but the same thing happens. I mean, there are sometimes… this is something that is true for almost anybody, all the sort of English-speaking expats. I can’t say for, let’s say the Korean or the Japanese ones, because these are the actually bigger groups here. But the circles don’t really cross. We’re all here for different reasons and about the English-speaking ones, there are people who’ve come to our events, seen on the street, or go to other events that I am also at. I mean, I’ve seen them before a million times. I’ve no idea who they are, or sometimes I know who they are, because of Facebook!

I mean, Facebook, which is huge in China, amongst expats, is this way we can sort of stalk people in the circles in Beijing. Especially, there are people that I’ve seen on Facebook, before I’ve actually met them, still haven’t met. I’m like, oh I know that is, just because I’ve seen them and they’re also on Facebook.

CLC: Hey, how’s it to be Chinese-looking in China, yet being American?

It’s both good and bad. I mean, I really enjoy passing… I mean, until I open my mouth, of course. Then, also, it really kind of frustrates me sometimes, because, you know, there is definitely a difference… Like, sometimes, you can definitely see where an obvious-looking foreigner gets better treatment, than somebody who isn’t. So, that can be really frustrating. On the other hand, then, I can just console myself the knowledge that just being treated like a Chinese person, which means is to be treated like shit.

Um, so, you know, I think like the biggest incident that happened once… where like, I was really angry and I know that this never would’ve happened if I’ve been White, was when my friend and I, we were on a train, moving some things over on the luggage rack. And this Chinese guy starts screaming at me, actually pulled my sweater from my waist – so he was actually physically confrontational. Unluckily for him, I just start screaming back at him and I know that if I’ve been White, this never would’ve happened. It’s like a really ridiculous thing to say, but it really makes me angry when things like that happen.

I mean, the only two times… You know I’ve lived in all these different cities. I lived in New York, in what was considered a dangerous part of New York, you know, there were shootings just outside of my apartment, but I’ve never been physically threatened. And in China, it happened twice where I’ve almost gotten into a fight.

CLC: Hey, are you exhausted about the Olympics?

Yes, I can’t wait for them to be over! And then we can all get back to our real lives, you know. (laughs – Editor’s note: they’re looking forward to them, actually, like anyone else!)

CLC: Ok, thank you Fiona.

Sure.

Je vous présente cette fois un Regarde les Chinois un peu spécial. L’entrevue devait à l’origine servir pour un article sur la scène musicale locale dans la capitale chinoise, mais n’ayant pas pu écrire ledit article, je vous la présente comme entrevue sur ce blogue. Lee Clow est un Washingtonien d’origine (comme l’état) et résident de Beijing depuis les huits dernières années. Nous étions en train de chiller sur la terrasse sur le toit du NLGX, et avons alors parlé de son band ska, de ses bonnes rencontres avec des personnages de la musique pékinoise, et de ce qu’il entrevoit pour le futur de la scène.

This time, I present you with a rather special Regarde les Chinois. The interview was meant to serve as an article on the local musical scene in the Chinese capital, but since it was never written, I am presenting it as an interview on this blog. Lee Clow is a Washingtonian of origin (as in the state) and a resident of Beijing for the past eight years. We were chilling on the NLGX rooftop patio and spoke about his ska band, his interesting encounters with Beijing music characters, and what he sees in the scene’s future.

***

Comme les Chinois: First, please explain who you are, to situate the context.

Lee Clow: Um, well, I am the lead singer of basically what was, kinda is, the only ska band in Beijing (End of the World, aka 世界终止乐队). I mean, there’s been a few bands who’ve tried it over the years, but we’re certainly the only ones who have been playing for a long time.

CLC: For eight years?

Ah, not eight. I’ve been in Beijing eight years. I think the band… Let’s see, we did form in the late summer 2001. So yeah, it is getting on like seven years now, that the band’s been together.

CLC: What are the bands that you recommend?

Well, my biggest recommendation is Brain Failure. They’ve been around the longest, they have the best sound, and best stage presence, performance overall.

CLC: They’re a punk band.

They’re a punk band, yeah.

CLC: They’re Beijingers?

Ah, no actually, only one of them’s from Beijing. Lead singer is from Beijing, but the rest of them are from Zhengzhou, in Henan province. And they’re all second members to take their respective positions. Brain Failure broke up once, and then reformed in about 2000. They reformed with the current… well, most of the current lineup.

Who else to recommend… Joyside. Those guys are good, fun stuff. Lead singer is sort of a Jim Morrison type. Usually too trashed to play their own songs…

CLC: Yeah, I saw him in that (documentary) movie, Beijing Bubbles. He looked like he was stoned.

He always looks like he’s stoned! Never seen him look not stoned! I’ve known him a lot of years… (laughs)

Um, last night I went and saw Misandao. Well, I was playing with Misandao. They’re local skinheads. They’re the biggest of the skinhead bands in Beijing.

CLC: Oh yeah, skinheads. Like, the aesthetics, but none of the ideology?

Well, more of the sort-of traditional ideology, which is like “free” sort of thing. But like unifed… Like, “we’re a bunch of kinda thugish guys, but stick to our own and we believe that we have the right to believe what we want to believe…” They’re very… I don’t want to say anti-government, because I am going to get them into trouble, but … um (laughs)

SL: Reactionary?

Yeah, they’re rather reactionary. They have songs about cops and stuff like that, you know. Like, half their songs are about they hate cops, about how you shouldn’t be a political tool. The other half of the songs is about how awesome it is to be a skinhead… I like them! They’re good friends of mine. You know, I got their lead singer’s first pair of suspenders, ok! (laughs)

SL: It’s a girl, I hope?

** SL is British.

Not the British meaning of suspenders, but braces. That’s how you call them, right? Suspenders are braces… garters.

CLC: Oh, like jarretières…

Yeah yeah. (Editor’s note: actually, I was totally wrong, they’re just the thing that Larry King wears – but you immediately notice it on their picture on their MySpace). No, he doesn’t wear garters! (laughs) Suspenders is the American meaning. Braces!

CLC: Where is the scene going?

The scene is getting kinda commercial. A lot of the newer bands are sorta looking out for some money, rather than just trying to make art. IThe scene’s been kinda fractuous and volatile since the big new school / old school fight broke out about four years ago.

CLC: What’s that?

Um, basically, there were a lot of pop-punk bands that sort of sounded like Blink 182-ish, and skate punk, that kind of thing. And then there were these old school bands that, you know, all had their mohicans, leather jackets, and stuff. And then, they all started breaking bottles over each other’s faces… A few people ended up in jail, and since then, the punk scene just hasn’t been as united, good as it was in the early days.

It used to be like, everybody not only was going to every other band’s shows, but had members in each other’s bands. These were the old days!

CLC: I guess that as China gets richer, more open, that sort of scene is less underground, becoming more of a mainstream thing.

Yeah, a lot of people are accusing Brain Failure of being sellouts and stuff, but… I mean, they’ve signed with a record label, they toured in the US, but I’ve known them a long time, you know, and they’re… I don’t want to say “rock stars”, because that’s got horrible connotations to it, but, you know, they’ve just wanted to share their music with everybody, and it was a dream of theirs, forever, to tour the US, and they got to do it. So, I don’t hold that against them, and I think it’s prickish to do that. I think that most of the other bands are just jealous, to be honest!

CLC: Hey, well thanks.

No problem.

Regarde les Chinois présente maintenant sa quatrième entrevue à Beijing. Native de Qingdao, Patricia Li vit maintenant à Beijing depuis la dernière année. Elle a vécu à Montréal, alors qu’elle était étudiante en administration à l’Université McGill, et écrit maintenant une chronique d’humeur hebdomadaire décrivant des scènes de vie à Beijing. Malheureusement, ses articles ne sont disponibles que sur la version papier du Luby, mais voici un échantillon (Google Translate) récent de ses écrits, parlant de fumer dans les restaurants en Chine.

Regarde les Chinois is now presenting its fourth interview in Beijing. A native of Qingdao, Patricia Li is now living in Beijing since the last year. She lived in Montreal, as a management student at McGill University, and now writes a weekly column depicting daily life scenes in Beijing for the Luby, a Montreal-based newspaper published in Chinese. Unfortunately, her articles are only available in Luby’s paper version, but here is a recent sample (Google Translate) of her work, telling her story of smoking in restaurants in China.

***

Comme les Chinois: You live in Beijing right now?

Patricia Li: Yep.

CLC: And you lived in Montreal for…

For two years and a half.

CLC: You studied there?

Yeah, I studied at McGill, in management.

CLC: And you worked in Montreal?

Just a part-time job, at the Chinese newspaper, and also Chinese travel agency.

CLC: What were you doing?

As a tour guide, for Wonder Travel, and gathering some news, or doing some marketing jobs for Luby.

CLC: So, now you’re writing for the Luby from Beijing?

Yah. They say, actually, they ask me to do that, is like, our reporter was asked to stay in Beijing for the Olympics. So, the title is really special, and I said “Ok!”, because I’m here, I can write something. I think it’s good for me too, because I want to be a reporter in the future, maybe for a TV station, so I think it’s good for me as well. Since I am doing that, I find it kind of pushed me to be really really… you kind of have to focus on the news all the time, and try to read as many newspapers as you can, in order to get insights from news.

Actually, for the first few weeks that I wrote the column, I find that all my news were from TV and newspapers. I kind of follow their stuff. After a few weeks, I find that the friends near me, the colleagues near me, what’s on their sites is more interesting, much better than what I see on big sites. So, I kind of start to do that(, cover stuff like they do).

Since I am doing a job that is (with) a performance firm, so I start to… I have to go out all the time, go to the five-star hotels, talk to the people working for, like, That’s Beijing English magazines. So, I can find a lot of topics to write from (these experiences).

CLC: Do you find it weird now to be on the other side of the microphone?

Yeah, it’s weird! I have to answer the questions that I discussed before (off mic)! You just ask back the questions, and the answer you actually know it, right!

CLC: Yeah, that was a really cool story, that you told, (happening) in the hotel…

Yeah, yeah… Actually, I think, when I saw it, I didn’t really want to write it as an article. I thought maybe it wasn’t really good… But after, I think maybe it’s a really good topic, because people… some people see (this kind of thing happening) but never write about it. I don’t think it can be published in Chinese newspapers either. So, only someone like me, who is doing articles, but published in Chinese newspapers outside of China (can write this). It’s one way to other people, other Chinese people know what is happening in China, what happens to Chinese people in China, but also what foreigners do in China. It’s not all good parts about foreigners, it’s also other parts of foreigners as well.

*** I am going to try to tell Patricia’s story again, since I cannot find the article on the Luby News website! One day, she, with a male Chinese friend is visiting some five-star hotel in Beijing. In the main lobby, they see a man, Western man, stretching his feet over the table, shoes off, as if he were in his living room. Something ticks off her friend about this behaviour, so he goes to the hotel staff to try to get them to tell the man to stop. They wouldn’t help Patricia’s friend, saying that it isn’t their job to take care of such behaviour. Of course, he thinks it’s because he’s a foreigner that they let him behave like this. So, instead he goes himself to the man, starts staring at him (since he cannot speak English so well). The man looks back at him, defiantly. They stare for a bit, until the man packs, grumbling, and leaves the scene. So, to prove a point, that hotel staff behave differently whether you are a foreigner or not, our friend starts taking position just like the Westerner previously did. Promptly, the hotel staff comes to him, and says that he can’t do that: it’s a five-star hotel lobby. “So, why did you let the Westerner do that, then?”

CLC: Do you like living in China, versus living in Canada?

I think here is… Because, here, I speak Chinese, I don’t feel kind of like an outsider. Like, in Montreal, I don’t speak French that well, so for a lot of stuff, I am kind of blocked from main(stream) society. And here, I mean we have more opportunities, not only for Chinese, but for foreigners as well. As long as you can speak English, you can find a job in Beijing.

You make friends… All people can be your friends, really. I think this is the good side, and also, another good side is that you are living in Beijing right now, and the Olympics are coming. So, you are the center of the world! And people, your friends in other cities in China, they have you back here to, like, “Hey Patricia, can I live at your place during the Olympics?!” (laughs) “Ok, that’s fine!”

CLC: You should rent it to them!

(laughs) No, it’s ok, only a few days, it doesn’t really matter. So, because you are in Beijing, the capital of China, actually a lot of people never come here. My mom, only came here one or two times, but never doing the tours. Also, my other friends, they always want me to present them (the city) when they come here. I can lead them to 天壇 (Tiantan), Heaven Temple. In Beijing, you have different places to go to… But here, winter’s cold, and summer’s hot, and it’s not as clean as Montreal, that’s for sure. Also, in the winter, although Montreal is colder, but as long as you come inside, you don’t feel cold at all, right. Here, outside is cold, and inside, the heater is not good enough, so you still have to wear a lot of stuff!

CLC: Yeah, it’s like that in Hong Kong too. When it’s like 15ºC, you freeze to death, it’s cold.

Yeah!

CLC: But in Montreal, when it’s 15ºC, you see people in shorts outside!

Yeah yeah! I like that. I do miss a lot of stuff in Montreal. I lived in Vancouver, Edmonton and Montreal, three cities, during my school time. So, I liked Montreal the best.

CLC: What do you write about in the Luby?

Um, it’s a column, and we call it 草根 (Cao gen – literally, it means “Grassroots”). Cao gen is not a celebrity. It’s just real people (leading) real lives. So, I just talk as myself, as cao gen, and anywhere I go… maybe, some people think that cao gen is just people who go to cheap restaurants, and find a cheap place to buy clothes. If you stay in Beijing for a long time, you know which restaurant is good and also is cheap, and also where to buy clothes – you can save a lot of money like that. But this is kind of the spirit of people who are living here. You want to save money in order to buy more stuff.

I think… I think that is real life. I don’t think it counts as fact… I think that readers, when they read my articles, they will feel that this is me, as well. And if I am in Beijing, I would feel the same stuff. So, I think it’s really close to the readers.

*** At this point, we exchange on writing styles, as this blog that you are holding in your hands also prefers low-key daily life stuff.

CLC: Do you have a place to recommend to eat?

In Beijing?

CLC: Yeah. This restaurant (where we are sitting at), is it good?

It’s a Shanxi restaurant, it’s pretty good! (Talking to the microphone) Just give me a call when you are here! As long as you come from Montreal, I will be your guide here! (laughs)

CLC: (laughs) omg, are you sure of that?

Yes, I like to meet friends (from) Montreal. It’s a cool place.

CLC: Well, thank you Patricia.

Ça ne va pas très fort pour Mega Brands, compagnie de jouets et papeterie montréalaise fondée en 1967. En mai dernier, j’ai fait un voyage de deux jours du côté de la province du Guangdong en Chine, et en ai profité pour visiter l’usine de Mega Brands, pour laquelle travaille mon cousin.

Je suis arrivé en début de soirée à Shajing, un district (plutôt une ville en elle-même) qui fait partie de la ville de Shenzhen, aussi une zone économique spéciale, qui ne l’est plus tellement dans la Chine d’aujourd’hui. Shajing est dans le nord-ouest de la municipalité de Shenzhen. Comme c’est souvent le cas dans les secteurs industriels, les boulevards sont larges, et le voisinage plutôt inintéressant.

Pour se rendre au travail, mon cousin prend une navette privée le matin, avec les autres expatriés de la compagnie.

Les chaines ne fonctionnent pas toutes 24/7, et en effet, plusieurs d’entre-elles étaient déjà arrêtées pour la journée quand je suis arrivé. J’ai vu les lignes de fabrication de pâte à modeler : saviez-vous que c’était juste de la farine et du colorant ? Bon, et en plus, il y avait des crayons de cire, dont on voit les différentes composantes:

Pour quelqu’un qui n’avait jamais vu une usine opérée par une compagnie d’outre-mer, c’est bien sûr plutôt impressionnant. On allait d’un bâtiment à un autre, passant parfois via des passerelles, voyant en accéléré, parfois à reculons, les différentes étapes de la fabrication d’un produit.

La main-d’oeuvre n’est pas chère (même si elle le devient de plus en plus dans le sud de la Chine), alors le bottleneck n’est pas dans les tâches manuelles, comme l’empaquetage des crayons, par exemple, mais plutôt chez les machines, comme celles qui servent à couler la cire de ces crayons. Mon cousin travaille en général six jours / semaine, ce qui est idem aux travailleurs sur le terrain.

From Beijing, back in April, I wrote an article for Spacing Montreal on the Beijing Subway during rush hour, at the Xizhimen interchange. Here are some of the many pictures that I took on the subway, perhaps the only moment of daily rest (the distance between stations is so long in Beijing) that I had during my stay in the Chinese capital.

The first photo shows the ceiling over the platform area of a station on Line 2, part of the original system inaugurated in 1969. The second and third pictures were taken on one of the new trains occasionally running on Line 1. Photo four are the new turnstiles that were finally put for use in early June 2008. The last photo was taken outside of the Tian’anmen East (天安门东) station on Line 1.

***

De Beijing, en avril, j’ai écrit un article pour Spacing Montreal sur le métro de Beijing à l’heure de pointe, à l’échangeur de Xizhimen. Voici quelques photos que j’ai prises sur le métro, sans doute le seul moment quotidien de repos (c’est tellement long entre les stations à Beijing) durant mon séjour dans la capitale chinoise.

La première photo montre le plafond au-dessus des quais d’une station sur la ligne 2, faisant partie du parcours original inauguré en 1969. La deuxième et troisième photo ont été prises sur l’un des nouveaux trains qui roulent sur la ligne 1. Photo numéro quatre sont les nouveaux tourniquets qui ont finalement été activés, début juin 2008. La dernière photo fût prise juste à l’extérieur de la station Tian’anmen Est (天安门东) sur la ligne 1.

Tout à fait dans l’esprit Regarde les Chinois-eque, ce fut par hasard que j’ai rencontré les prochains invités à cette chronique (qui se traîne encore les pattes à Beijing, alors que je suis rentré à Montréal depuis plus d’un mois). Je rentre dans ce magasin quelconque de la Nanluoguxiang, la nouvelle allée « in » parmi les hutongs, au centre historique de Beijing, après avoir aperçu à la fenêtre des t-shirts design-és à mon goût. Voilà tu pas que le gars dans le magasin m’accueille avec « Ni Hao » bien accentué (en anglais). En plus d’être un Chinois d’outre-mer, le type est né et a vécu les premières dix années de sa vie à Montréal! Avec des copains (aussi Chinois d’outre-mer) rencontrés à Beijing, Raymond Walintukan a fondé NLGX, un genre de café se basant sur un groupe de protection des hutongs et qui vend des patentes design. Raymond et Edmond Hung, son comparse californien, se sont échangés la parole, pendant qu’on déménageait le sofa sur lequel j’étais assis…

Going perfectly along the Regarde les Chinois-esque spirit, it was by pure chance that I met the next guests to this column (which is still lagging behind in Beijing, while I am back in Montreal since more than a month). I enter this random store on Nanluoguxiang, the new “in” tourist street at the historical centre of Beijing, after seeing nice designed tees that I liked. And there you have the guy in the store greets me with a thickly accented “Ni Hao”. On top of being an Overseas Chinese, he was born and lived in Montreal for the first ten years of his life! With friends that he met there (also Overseas Chinese), Raymond Walintukan founded NLGX, some sort of cafe based over a hutong protection group that sells designed stuff. Raymond and Edmond Hung, his Californian pal, both spoke to me while they were moving out the couch that I was sitting on…

(Raymond passe à l’émission Ailleurs c’est ici à la Première Chaîne de Radio-Canada, mercredi le 2 juillet 2008.)

***

Comme les Chinois: So you came here, and you met your friends?

Raymond Walintukan: Yeah, on an unfortunate event, on the Great Wall (laughs). Seriously, that’s how I met them, on the Great Wall… We were camping on the Great Wall, and just decided to do something, and we did it, and it was a lot of fun!

CLC: This thing (NLGX) was an association for preserving the hutongs…

RW: Right, and we’re working actually with a culture heritage project… it’s actually on our website. And what they are doing is culture heritage protection and things like that, in Beijing. So, that’s what we’re all about: we want to preserve the hutongs, and the bu chai (不拆). You know the story with the bu chai, right?

CLC: What’s a huchai (sic)?

RW: You see our grey t-shirt over there, maybe you can take a picture later.

CLC: Yeah, I think I’ll buy one of these. (And I did.)

RW: The government puts it on somebody’s house, and two weeks later, they’ll go and demolish the house. So, some guy was really brave, and then he wrote a “bu” (editor’s note: is the character for the negative of something), to kind of show, like, against the destruction. And these are really really old hutongs, but they are demolishing it for whatever reason, for making money or whatever. And so, that’s what we’re all about…

CLC: And this is something you run… You have been here for two and a half years, been doing this for all this time?

RW: Ah, we’ve only been doing this for, since last… Um, the shop’s been only open for a month, since March (2008), but NLGX was open since, maybe, October. And it was only a concept, an idea. We wanted to make a lifestyle brand, you know, wanted to make it all about travel, all about the apparels, stuff like that. We never thought that it would happen, but we had so much success in the last month. This is a great thing, y’know. We’re lucky to be on this street – this is a really nice street, with a seven hundred years old history, and you see old people up and down, walking around, it’s really cool…

CLC: But it’s been very commercialized…

RW: A little. It’s very very different from a year ago, or two years ago.

CLC: That’s what I was discussing yesterday with someone I met. He came to Beijing – he’s Canadian Chinese – three years ago, and lived (around) here. And he said that when he came here, there was like two cafes. And the whole street has been developed.

RW: Yeah, that’s because the government put a law on this street, and protected it. So, we cannot build any buildings. You can change the interior, and a little bit of the exterior, but it’s considered to be a national treasure now, or something like that, so the government put a law saying that you cannot do any major construction. So, nothing is going to change here – maybe the shops will change, but everything else stays the same, which is going to be cool.

CLC: It’s a good thing for you to start the shop, now… So, you’re going to stay in town when the Olympics happen?

RW: Yeah, it’s going to be crazy. I have no idea what is going to happen. It’s totally up in the air, what sort of people are going to show up! (laughs) Yeah, I mean, it’s going to be exciting. It’s only two weeks and we’re for the long run. It seems like there is a lot of people that are building things for this two-week Olympics thing, which I don’t know what the deal is with that.

CLC: What kind of expectation do you have, what sort of dream do you have (with NLGX)?

RW: With this? Well, we just want to promote the hutongs. That’s the most important thing… We love this place. I mean, these guys (patrons) live here, some of these guys live here. I can’t afford to live here (laughs) but I come here all the time! It’s basically like if I live here.

CLC: You live on the fifth ring, right? That’s pretty far…

RW: Yeah, fifth ring. I ride my bicycle here though sometimes. Two times a week, I’ll try for, and it’s an hour and six minutes, and it’s a long ride. But it’s good, because you get to see more of Beijing, and this area, this hutong area, is what Beijing looked like 50-100 years ago. You can imagine what it’s like. It’s the same, you know, whereas cities like Shanghai are so developed that it’s what cities are going to look like in 20 years!

CLC: So, why did you come to Beijing?

*** And, at this point, Raymond knocks down my double shot espresso, at which point we switch focus on Edmond.

CLC: So, you are one of the partner, right?

Edmond Hung: Yeah yeah.

CLC: You were in the States before?

EH: I was in San Francisco, grew up there, went to school at University of St. Louis, went to Hong Kong, worked there for a couple of years.

CLC: Are you Cantonese Chinese?

EH: Yeah. Can you speak?

CLC: 小小 (siu siu / a little)

EH: Yeah, me too, 小小. It improved a lot when I went to (Asia). I graduated from university, and then moved to Hong Kong.

CLC: You lived there…

EH: I lived, worked there for two years.

CLC: What’s your field?

EH: I studied business, went to b-school. The plan was to try and live in Asia, come here working and living. It’s great experience.

CLC: I’ve met quite a few Overseas Chinese… Chinese Canadians who lived all their lives, were born in Canada, and they go back to Asia to find their roots.

EH: It’s cool, yeah. In certain ways, it’s like a… culture shock, you know. But it’s weird being here, and of Asian descent. Most Westerners think you are local.

RW: And most Chinese…

EH: Think you are Korean! (laughs)

CLC: Or Japanese! (laughs)

RW: You get that a lot?

CLC: Ah… It happened yesterday!

RW: “Are you Japanese?” “No-no, I am French! Woaw, no, wait a minute!” (laughs – Editor’s Note: There was, in April, a backclash against the French in China, because of their stance with respect to Tibet, Sarkozy hypothetical boycott of the opening ceremony). You know, I am going to you another cup – you are not going to sleep tonight!

*** At this point, Raymond leaves to get me a new cup of espresso…

EH: Yeah, so it’s kinda weird. I told Chinese people that I was born in the US, and they’re like, but you don’t look American! …

*** We skip a little random talk on California, and Raymond comes back with the coffee…

CLC: Actually, one of my friends in Beijing grew up in California, in Arcadia.

EH: Oh, Arcadia! I am from Irvine!

RW: Oh, I am from the OC (Orange County)!

CLC: So, is Arcadia part of Orange County?

RW: No, Arcadia is part of LA County… It’s pretty close. But we always drive to Arcadia, because it’s the Asian area. To get the 珍珠奶茶 (Zhen zhu nai cha – Bubble tea), the 雲吞 (wonton).

CLC: Well, I am sure you can find your stuff in your city too… I come from Montreal, and you can’t find _anything_ (of course, I vastly exaggerate).

RW: But a lot of Vietnamese, huh?

CLC: Yeah…

RW: Hey, (friends) are having a party tomorrow, just nearby.

EH: A housewarming.

RW: Yeah, so there is a party tomorrow, in the hutong, if you want to crash. In a hutong, real hutong.

CLC: Really? When, what time?

EH: Just around here…

CLC: It’s because I have some Chinese friends who invited me to go to Mao Live (a well-known live house in Beijing, close to Nanluoguxiang, on Guloudajie).

EH: Cool place, Mao Live.

CLC: Went to D-22 last week.

RW: Oh yeah?

EH: Our store manager is actually a Taiwanese girl. Her boyfriend is actually being an instructor for a samba group.It’s actually quite an interesting group, mostly Chinese locals actually. It’s called Sambasia. The chapter in Beijing is one of the newest. They also have a chapter in San Francisco, and New York too, as well. They just had a performance at Mao a few days ago, like a second anniversary.

CLC: I saw some old people dancing outside the subway (the other night).

EH: Yeah, they do that every night. In Houhai, there’s a lot of it.

*** The guys give me their cards, but I tell them that I don’t have one, since I am not someone important. “Everyone has a card in China!”, says Edmond. For a while after this, Raymond, Edmond and the dude at the bar discuss how to organize their party the day after. They have a sanlunche. They use it to transport the big red couch I sat on during the first part of this “interview”.

RW: I can’t believe it – can you imagine, he’s got a big couch on a sanlunche! (wipes tear)

CLC: One last question…

RW: Yeah, go for it.

CLC: Why did you come to Beijing?

RW: Ahh, I’d like to say, I like Beijing food. But it’s more… One part is discovering your roots, you know. I look Chinese, I don’t speak any Chinese, it’s kinda like it’s the birthplace of my culture, in the sense that you have to go back and feel it up. (laughs)

CLC: Found any roots?

RW: Sort of! You change a little bit, you know. I learned a little bit more about how the Chinese think. You know, we think as from a Western perspective. We know how Chinese think, because we look Chinese, and our parents are Chinese, but it’s very different here, very very different here. And, that’s one of the main reasons why I came back.

The other reason is that I wanted to get out of OC. I rather didn’t go to another OC, like Shanghai, and decided to come here, and this is where… I mean Shanghai is very very different from Beijing… Shanghai is very shark oriented, go-get, entrepreneurial-oriented mindset. Whereas Beijing is more of a culture centre, because everything is preserved here. Things have been here for a really long time. People who are here, they know that the pie is large enough, there is enough for everybody. Not everyone is here to do business and be a shark. Everyone is here to learn about the culture, and that’s why you meet so many more interesting people, I think, in Beijing, than in Shanghai.

Well, you meet a lot of business people. Business is your focus, and it’s a great place. But here, you meet a lot of brave, culturally-interested people, and you see a vast majority of foreigners who come here are so interesting to talk with. And this is what I love about it.

But the original reason why I came here? More opportunity than California, I think. In California, you would be stuck in an office every day.

CLC: Were you bored in California?

RW: Born in California? No, I was born in Canada.

CLC: Bored, bored of California…

RW: Oh, was bored of California? Yeah, I think so. Because I am tired of the beautiful sun, driving down the beach in my car with the top down… Girls in bikini all the time. You know, I prefer a city with…

CLC: …with grey skies!

RW: …grey skies! And a lot of culture. But it’s the people that make it interesting. People who come here got to be brave. Gotta be mentally-ill or brave. (laughs)

CLC: Ok, thanks!

RW: Sure, anytime you need it!

陳綺貞 – 一起去巴黎 (4.4 Mb – Cheer Chen’s “Let’s go together to Paris” – Live in Kenting (墾丁) – 2008-04-05)

Voici une chanson que Cheer Chen (陳綺貞) ne chante qu’en concert, et donc non disponible sur aucun disque officiel. Elle s’appelle « Allons ensemble à Paris » (一起去巴黎). Chen chante souvent à propos de Paris, perpetuant l’image romantique de la capitale française. La photo que j’ai prise montre l’interprète-compositrice folk-rock-pop taiwanaise, accordéon à la main (au lieu de sa guitare habituelle) au Spring Wave, un festival de musique extérieur à Kenting.

***

This is a song that Cheer Chen (陳綺貞) only sings in concert, and so not available on any official album. It’s called “Let’s go together to Paris”. Chen often sings about Paris, perpetuating the French capital’s romantic image. The photo that I took shows the folk-rock-pop Taiwanese singer-songwriter, accordion in hand (instead of a guitar) at Spring Wave, an outdoor music festival in Kenting.