My French cousin Olivier was in Hong Kong, so we decided to go up together to our ancestral village of Ge’an (葛岸村/Got’ngon in Cantonese), up in the Pearl River Delta, just kilometers south of Guangzhou (Canton). Ge’an is now completely gobbled up by the city of Foshan (佛山市/Fotsan), a satellite of the provincial capital. It is in Lecong Town (樂從鎮) of Shunde District (順德區/Shundak) in Foshan City.

I visited our village for the first time in 2005, and more recently talked about it on this blog back in 2008. The town changed a lot in 6 years, and so did I. I didn’t live in South China and my Cantonese was not up to today’s level. I couldn’t properly communicate with Uncle Chi Tong (my dad’s cousin). For instance, I only fully understood this time around that this uncle, who was slightly younger than my dad was actually born here. He immigrated to Madagascar before turning 2, and grew up in Hong Kong afterwards.

My grandpa was apparently the more adventurous one, of the two brothers who lived under this house. Uncle Chi Tong’s father stayed in China until the mid-1950s, before joining his brother in Tananarive (now Antananarivo), Madagascar, to operate in the grocery store business.

Our family later left Madagascar entirely. The younger brother (my paternal grandfather) joined my dad in Canada. The older brother went to Hong Kong. Unwittingly, my mom’s family also comes from the agglomeration of Foshan, but after passing through Vietnam…

My cousin initiated the trip, because he had never travelled to China before, let alone visit his ancestral village. My impressions was that the house will one day crumble, but that it was very well preserved despite not having anyone live there for about half a century (maybe squatters?). The home even had some wiring for electricity, so it may have been less than half a century.

So, we went inside the house, and unlike last time, even ventured on the top floor. We must say that the house is in pretty bad shape, and that the walls are cracking all over the place. Non-renovated wood floors in subtropical climate equals accelerated decay. There were pots stored, chairs and other simple furniture like stools and some chairs and drawers. I thought we should’ve taken something, because we wouldn’t have a chance to go back soon. But we didn’t, perhaps too busy taking photos.

The house could’ve been anymore, since there were no indication that it was ours, except that we knew the address. But we picked up some pieces of paper from my uncle’s parents’ drawers clearly identifying our family. There were letters to Tananarive that were never sent (the address on the envelope was in French! Which is probably pretty neat for South Chinese peasants of the time), my grand-aunt’s talc powder and some of my uncle’s official papers (he was surprised to find them too) with passport-size photos of his family members.

Also, we found dog shit all over the place, and there were some small paper cups left near a bottle of moonshine. There were also construction materials left near the house’s entrance, perhaps by workers who thought the house abandoned (as it was so).

Surely now with the improved state of public transportation in the region, we could find our way back there pretty easily. A metro line was just built between Guangzhou and Foshan, and the travel time between Central in Hong Kong to Foshan a tiny two hours, if you don’t count the time at the border and waiting between trains. Yep.

Aside from being the proud owner of CommeLesChinois.ca, I am also a computer/media/data specialist. Recently, I launched an updated version of my election maps with Cyberpresse. The map was designed using results by polling division from previous elections, the smallest available division for electoral results. Each of these polls has about 200-500 people living in them, and you can basically know what your block (if you live in the city) tends to vote for.

The consequence is voyeurism for political junkies. And I also like to go play with the maps, and decided to assemble a bunch of interesting ridings with relatively a strong proportion of Canadians of Chinese origin living in them. For that, I used Pundits’ Guide‘s fantastic tool for finding census data divided by riding.

I found that the Richmond riding, south of Vancouver was in fact the most “Chinese” (based on the 2006 census), with 50.2% of the population declared to be Chinese. The 2008 map is not in fact interesting, but juxtaposed with the 2006, shows the dramatic shift from Liberals (rep. by former cabinet minister Raymond Chan) to the Conservatives (Alice Wong). 2006 was when the Liberals lost power to Stephen Harper’s Conservatives.

Richmond in 2006…

…and in 2008

Some ridings were won or lost by a hair. In the Vancouver area, the closest race happened in Vancouver South, the third most Chinese riding of the country (43.7%), where the MP is a Liberal, former health minister Ujjal Dosanjh. He won the last election by 20 votes.

The map by polls succeeds in showing that the vote was in fact hugely clustered among neighbourhoods. I don’t know the geography of Vancouver very well, but I’m almost certain that the strong groupings of red and blue (deeper the color, larger the margin of victory in a polling division) represent opposed socio-economical groups.

Vancouver South in 2008

Brossard–La Prairie in 2008

The Montreal region’s most Chinese riding comes at a lowly 32nd position, with Westmount–Ville-Marie, a largely downtown riding. Brossard–La Prairie on the South Shore is in fact what people in Montreal recognize as the “Asian suburb”. With 7.5% Chinese, it is still a far cry from Toronto or Vancouver’s suburbs.

The contrast in the map is striking, but expected. The northern portion of the riding is Brossard, where a large Asian population lives and where the Liberal vote is concentrated. La Prairie to the south tends to be typical “450″, middle-class French Canadian, seems to be voting Bloc. The race for this suburban riding was won by as little as 69 votes.

Oak Ridges–Markham in 2008

Markham–Unionville in 2008

In some other cases, the municipalities are split over different ridings. Markham, with one of the largest Chinese populations in the Toronto area, is comprised within the ridings of Oak Ridges–Markham (Conservative) and Markham–Unionville (Liberal).

(Fellow Montrealer living in Hong Kong Christopher DeWolf also wrote a post on his website Urbanphoto.net about the use of this map for street by street vote analysis.)

More on Cyberpresse…

If you are familiar with Muji, you will understand what aesthetics Emoi is referring to. I was travelling to Shenzhen this weekend and stayed a night at the city’s YHA Youth Hostel located in an art and culture district called OCT-LOFT (if you know 798, it’s kinda Shenzhen’s equivalent of it).

In short, I was walking down one of alleys during the evening and saw this brightly lit shop with large windows and very minimalistic counters reminiscent of a Apple and Ikea. It was called emoi, which translates in French as “ruckus”. As many of my friends know, I’ve been looking for a new bag for months, and it seems like emoi had the answer to my quest. I liked the style and I liked the design. I particularly stuck on the wool felt bags, because I never saw bags made with such a material and that were not necessarily a women’s bags/handbag.

It was the first time I encountered this brand, but at least two of my (designer) classmates had bought products from emoi. One of them had a wool felt wallet, which ages very nicely, like a fleece sweater would. I guess that even if not unique, one of the nice thing to see is that it is a domestic store, from mainland China. We will perhaps see more and more of these original stores made in China, and before long, Chinese companies will help drive design and innovation internationally.

新興食家 San Hing Sek Ka, Kennedy Town, Hong Kong

Tong Por, Ville Saint-Laurent, Montréal

Swatow Plaza opened about five months ago on Boulevard St-Laurent in Montreal’s Chinatown. It took three years to build, but its biggest would-be tenants have yet to move in, such as the Japanese restaurant on the ground floor, and a Chinese restaurant at its very top.

In the meanwhile, small boutiques are occupying the first floor. The alleys are wide and shops are arranged in alcoves. My impression upon visiting on a Thursday night before Christmas was that the boutique area on the first floor had too many people behind the counter than people shopping. Being on a first floor when the second and ground floor didn’t have shops open added to the awkwardness.

The day before the very cold two days in Hong Kong (13℃ during the day and 7℃ at night in urban areas), there was an episode of fog for most of the day of Tuesday…

Hong Kong Tourism Association Official Guidebook (circa 1977)

Before leaving for Hong Kong, I brought with me this copy of an “official guidebook” distributed by the Hong Kong Tourist Association (香港旅遊協會), the precursor of the Hong Kong Tourism Board (香港旅遊發展局). My dad had given it to me some time ago when he was digging up his junk, and presumably picked it up when he and my mom got married in 1977, at the Lee Gardens Hotel, where the Manulife Plaza now stands (see map).

Flipping through it, I saw that the exchange rate was HK$4.70 for each US$1, compared with the HK$7.77 pegged rate today. It was during a short period of nine years when the Hong Kong dollar floated.

Lee Gardens Hotel, Causeway Bay, Hong Kong (circa 1973)

View of the Harbour in late 1973

“Because only Pan Am fly the new Boeing 747SP”

Visit places like Tiger Balm Gardens in Tai Hang

And now the racier parts

Hong Kong Night Life

54 D’Aguilar Street, that’s at the middle of today’s Lan Kwai Fong

Do I need to say that this is an official guidebook produced for and endorsed by a government-funded organisation?

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The Nikkormat EL was Nikon’s first electronic camera…

…but my dad was actually a fan of Minolta and had one similar to the one in this advert. On the right, Braun also made video cameras with sound…

Wearing real fur in the 1970s was still very politically correct. I mean, look at this, it’s imported from Scandinavia!

The Dark Side

View of Kowloon in the 1970s

“Public transport in the 80s.” The Cross-Harbour tunnel and the MTR were still just a project… Wikipedia has a clearer map of the first MTR line that would open in 1979 between Central (Chater) and Kwun Tong. Other retro station names: Waterloo (Yau Ma Tei) and Argyle (Mong Kok).

Finally, we found that the publishers of the booklet, Kwun Tong based A-O-A Offset Press Limited is in business!

We have no idea what this is for, but in about two weeks, they built this giant red box on top of the Lamma pier (#4) in Central, Hong Kong. We theorized half-jokingly that it was perhaps a deluxe stripper’s club, because the flashiness just points to that.

We finally had our answer this Friday night when what looked like an exclusive party was in the process of being hosted on top of the pier to the least anti-glamour outlying island of Lamma.

In general, this blog approves of urban development, but this is just wrong and a total eyesore — I was told that they were going to add such 2/F levels to all the other piers who don’t already have one. We wonder if they are going to take it down any time, or it’s going to stay there to forever block our ever-receding harbour’s view.

October 1st is the day of the founding of the People’s Republic of China (in 1949) and otherwise National Day, and most importantly, a well-deserved public holiday in China and Hong Kong. It’s also what I consider the day of my arrival in Hong Kong last year.

***

Le 1er octobre est jour de Fête nationale en Chine et à Hong Kong, et aussi le jour de mon arrivée à Hong Kong en 2009. Je me souviendrai de ce spectacle de feux d’artifice l’année dernière qui se terminait alors que mon autobus en provenance de l’aéroport longea le port de Hong Kong. Cette année, j’étais sur un bateau avec des amis… un bateau qui nous a donné bien des frissons, tant la mer était houleuse avec les dizaines d’autres embarcations civiles dans le port en même temps.

Par hasard je suis tombé sur cette nouvelle publicité virale réalisée pour nul autre que l’Hôpital du Sacré-Cœur de Montréal, un hôpital du CHUM ! En haut à droite, le nom de la » station de télé «, c’est 也不上哪, qui veut dire (je pense) que ça ne sortira nulle part. Façon originale de spoofer les médias chinois au Québec !

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This is an advertisement for recruitment at the Sacré-Cœur Montreal hospital that I found by chance while surfing on a local Montreal news portal. Featuring a former baseball commentator and two professional hockey players, you would probably pick up pretty quickly that this is not real news. The Chinese characters on the top right corner 也不上哪 (ye bu shang na) mean that “it won’t be broadcast anywhere”. Interesting and original way to spoof mainland Chinese media in Quebec!

Quebec: Les parlementeries

Les parlementeries is a mid-late-90s comedy show that marked my youth growing up in Quebec. Two dozens of stand-up comedians would play the roles of fictional politicians in a parliament context, often based on their own trademark character.

The “Parlementeries” title is itself a play on word, being a portmanteau of “parliament” and “lying” in French.

One of the YouTube videos I found featured an insult match between both “black” and “white” parties and their representatives, all pretty much household fictional characters impersonated by the best comedians of the time, many of which are still active today.

After a ten-year hiatus since 1997-98, Les parlementeries came back to the theatre in 2008, although received a bit of lukewarm welcome from reviewers. You can find many clips over on YouTube.

Hong Kong: 東宮西宮 East Wing West Wing

A little by chance, I saw this bus stop advertisement at Central Piers on 東宮西宮. After figuring out the characters and googling, I realized that this was in fact their ninth edition already!

This is a trailer made for their next show coming in late September. The advert is a spoof of Inception, but I don’t know what the show will contain. The title for this edition is 十大九官. Literally it means the ten big nine officials. But apparently the two last characters 九官 (nine officials) is the name for mockingbird in Chinese!

The big difference between 東宮西宮 East Wing West Wing and Les parlementeries is that the former involves real-life politicians from the executive council. Hong Kong might not have universal suffrage, but it can poke fun at its top politicians! Perhaps because of that, the focus is perhaps a little more political and focused on real-issues (rather than being of death matches between comedians on general-interest topics).

You will find lots of videos of this comedy show on the Internet. The ubiquitous figure with the bow-tie is Donald Tsang.

In previous years, real-life progressive legislative council member Tanya Chan even participated in the play. You can think of her as the darling of social liberals. She played a leading role in the play in September 2009.

東宮西宮 East Wing West Wing also has a Facebook page.

Lamma Island has a new ferry ship! HKKF, the company that runs the ferry service between Central and Lamma Island has a new ship on this route. I don’t know when it first sailed (it could have been off rush hour), but I took it on both Thursday and Friday mornings at 8:20AM from Yung Shue Wan pier.

According to the ship’s manufacturer Cheoy Lee Shipwards, the Sea Superb (or 海永 / Hoi Yong / “Sea Forever” in Chinese) is different from other catamarans operated by HKKF on the Central-Yung Shue Wan route and also built by Cheoy Lee. It is 32m long instead of the 28m basic models, like I think the Sea Superior and Sea Smooth are. The rear deck of the Superb is indeed noticeably longer.

Now I wonder what they will do when the second boat arrives too. Is HKKF going to reassign the other boats to different routes from Central, or are we going to see the reappearance of a night ferry…

Trying to predict weather in the summertime, especially in a tropical region, sounds like a daunting task. It was perfectly sunny in the morning of Wednesday, and at lunchtime when I went out on my lunch hour, and just slightly cloudy when I got off work.

Thus my tweet that day: “Good thing I left my umbrella at work; good thing I decided to take it home. Thunderstorms in the Harbour now.”

Once I boarded the ship, thunder started lighting up the skies, and rain was hitting hard on the hull. Once we were on Lamma, many people obviously forgot their umbrella somewhere, and were stranded at the Yung Shue Wan ferry pier while the storm was raging. As I finally decided to brave the ten minutes between the pier and my home, a man came rushing by with a large orange parasol, which could have been more suited planted on a sunny beach or on a terrasse than between someone’s arms.

I walked through the village. I came home early that day — it was just 7PM when I arrived on Lamma. Many shops were still open, but their owners were busy looking at the rain, chatting with each other from across the street.

It rained and thundered for the rest of the evening, but I was happy to stay home, coding away on my computer. It turned out that it was not one of those dreaded black rain storm alerts, although it made it to TVB’s late evening report as a red rain storm alert, the level just below.

Last week, I was walking on the path behind the famous dessert tofu place in Lamma (where you need to pass to get to the Power Plant Beach), and saw an eggplant field, alongside other vegetable. It turns out that the farmer sometimes go down to Yung Shue Wan’s main street with his load of fresh produce on a metal cart.

On the second day of our mini-trip to Qingyuan (see part one), we took a taxi to the natural park of Niuyuzui, a scenic location 30 minutes from Qingyuan City to attend the 2010 Niuyuzui music festival on July 18th, 2010.

2010 Niuyuzui Music Festival in Guangdong 牛鱼嘴音乐节

WangWen 惘闻 (Dalian)

It was a hot day in South China…

Zhaoze 沼澤 (Guangzhou)

Ourself Beside Me (Beijing) (This is Yangfan, lead singer of OBM)

People attending the Niuyuzui festival

The previous night, we stayed in the city because of the heavy rain, and did not see many of the bands scheduled to play. The good thing is that all the bigger acts of Saturday, which included WangWen, Hedgehog, and American band Caspian, were all squeezed in on Sunday night! At RMB80 (CAD12) for the day pass, we had at least 6-7 major bands on the Chinese indie scene!

It rained the night before, so it was just a slightly fresher summer day in South China. People didn’t really start showing up until the late afternoon, after two post-rock bands, along girl-fronted Ourself Beside Me played. Go Chic from Taiwan literally lit up the place, but that was already after I stood up previously for two entire sets, especially for Ourself Beside Me, who I saw in Beijing in 2008. They were missing a band member, and had a new one (a guy) on keyboards.

Toddler drinking Pepsi

Go Chic (Taipei)

Night falling on festival-goers

Caspian (USA)

Caspian fan club girl flashing her iPad

Caspian had their local fan club at the festival. They wore red t-shirts emblazoned with the band’s name, and even carried an iPad with an app that displays banner announcements… And now I wonder when the day will come when we get digital displays malleable enough to be built in your clothing, say.

Hedgehog (Beijing)

I had to catch a bus, so left Niuyuzui at around 9:30PM. It was a Sunday night, and I had to work early the next morning, and about 4 hours (which turned into 5 because of traffic in GZ) separated us from Hong Kong.

The last band was Hedgehog, a indie rock “noisepop” trio that I had been listening to a lot in the past few months. They played right after Caspian (post-rock), and was another band that definitely woke the crowd up, as you could see in the pictures here above (and there was a mosh pit too). Their tiny drummer girl was hitting away, while her two band mates stood coolly while the crowd did most of the moving.

We left, and our friends stayed behind for the bands that they wanted to see, Pet Conspiracy. Unfortunately, I was told that they played about three songs and had to leave (the organizers had to squeeze in all of Saturday’s bands). There was Brain Failure and the Subs too, but one of them cancelled, and I forgot which it was.

The last part of the evening was Carsick Cars, perhaps the biggest name in Chinese rock right now. But they played at 1:30AM, two hours and a half after they were normally scheduled for… My friend said that they were a bit underwhelming, as the crowd was then dead tired at this point. But they did sing their hit Zhongnanhai…