After spending part of my Sunday afternoon two weeks ago exploring Tin Hau and Fortress Hill, I set out to another area that was kind of a black hole to me on Hong Kong Island: the enclave of Tai Hang (大坑) near Victoria Park.

Previously, I only knew Tai Hang, as the name for Tai Hang Road, leading up to the mountain which forks into the “Tai Hang” drive (now with an opulent new development called The Legend). However, this does not represent Tai Hang proper, as the “real” Tai Hang is in fact a valley accessible by road only through Tung Lo Wan Road from the north side.

If you know the Hong Kong Central Library, then you can locate Tai Hang as being towards the mountain, a tad to the east. It’s out of everyone’s way, a 10-minute walk from Tin Hau MTR.

Tai Hang is perhaps also a remarkable spot because it is very slightly built-up, with relatively narrow streets and little traffic. From what I gather, listening to relatives who lived there, or people of my age living in nearby areas, many of the new businesses opened shop only in the past few years, with the neighborhood’s increasing gentrification. To the north of Tai Hang, closer to Tung Lo Wan Road, trendy bars go elbow-to-elbow with fashionable clothing stores and cute dessert houses.

As you walk further to the south, inside the valley, not only does it get darker (because of the taller nearby buildings on Tai Hang Road), but also the “interesting” businesses aforementioned tend to diminish, replaced with motor shops that service taxis and expensive vintage vehicles alike.

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Two weeks ago, I set out to Tin Hau MTR for a walk in a new random neighborhood that I did not know. When I came to Hong Kong in 2008, I stayed in North Point, with Causeway Bay as one my frequent hangouts, as it is for a lot of returning overseas Chinese. You can either take the tram or the MTR from North Point towards the more popular/international neighborhood to the west. In between North Point and Victoria Park are two MTR stations which eventually lent their names to the neighborhoods they serve: Tin Hau and Fortress Hill.

One is named after a temple to the Chinese deity Tin Hau, and the other took its name from, well, a hill with a fortress on it (although I’ve never seen it). On the mountain side of TH and FH is a relatively well-off high-rise residential area.

Closer to the sea, around the MTR station and the main arteries of King’s Rd and Electric Rd, lie some more popular apartments. The neighborhood is clearly gentrifying because of the proximity to Causeway Bay and relatively new office skyscrapers around Fortress Hill MTR like the AIA Tower (1999) and the Manulife Tower. While walking on Electric Rd, close to Tin Hau, you would recognize a strip of mid-scale, clean-looking Southeast Asian restaurants.

Maybe one-third on my way from Tin Hau to Fortress Hill, along Electric Rd, I stumbled upon a bakery, which was by no means fancy, but had a lineup in front of it, while the staff scurried to provide with freshly baked egg tarts, pineapple cakes — I had one of those and it was very good, especially warm, fresh out of the oven. I also bought a loaf of bread, eight slices for cheaper than Garden bread, and also straight out of the oven.

As I progressed north, half-way there to Fortress Hill MTR, I passed by a street of motor shops, at the ground floor of old manufactures, probably transformed into office space today.

Congestion sur Old Bailey Street 奧卑利街

IFC mall

2 International Finance Centre 國際金融中心二期 et Hong Kong Station

Entrée du quai des traversiers pour l’île de Lamma

Photos prises du sky garden de Queen’s Garden, Mid-Levels, durant le party de Québec Contact, le club social québécois de Hong Kong.

This is an unfamiliar sight on a Sunday morning in Exchange Square, in Central, Hong Kong. Normally, these are prime spots for Filipina maids to take on the only day off of the week for many of them.

In Hong Kong, Central (and Victoria Park too) is known as the hang-out places for domestic helpers, who otherwise live with their employers. You can picture it as Hong Kong’s financial heart being transformed into a sort of outdoor bazaar.

The note to make is that it was barely 8AM when I took this picture this morning, which explains everything. However, you could already see a few people preparing their spots, or at least reserving theirs.

Lining up for free stuff is definitely one of those “strange things” taken from a North American perspective. Free stuff here is never taken for granted, and a line usually naturally forms without much external force.

People are very eager to get their free stuff, and this line (for shake-in flavoured chips from Japan?) stretched for a good 30-40 metre, under the rain…

Golden Lake brothel at night…

…and during the day.

One of my most popular posts ever on Comme les Chinois, was when in March 2008, I re-posted on a friend’s article on a friend’s impression (as a passerby) of Shanghai Street in Kowloon.

Why was it so popular? Because Shanghai Street, along with Portland and Reclamation Streets in their Mong Kok and Yau Ma Tei portions (between Shantung and Dundas) are often synonymous with the sex trade and is home to one of Hong Kong’s most well-known red-light districts. Day or night, as seen in the previous pictures, brothels operate as if prostitution was legal in Hong Kong. You walk around these streets at any time, and you will notice lit-up signs in flashy pink, or the red/pink neons hanging outside on the street or inside the staircase leading up to the establishment.

Perhaps most shockingly comes the “price list“, where the Chinese girl goes for HKD250 (CAD35) and the Malay or Filipina girl will make your wallet lighter by HKD200 (CAD28).

Langham Place

The Mong Kok red-light district is in fact just one or two blocks away from flashy Langham Place, a commercial complex that opened in 2004 and whose unavowed goal was to “sanitize” the neighborhood west of Nathan in Mong Kok. In terms of urban renewal, Hong Kong has used this stratagem before, in the early 90s with Times Square (時代廣場) in Causeway Bay and more recently with the apm shopping mall in Kwun Tong, which opened in 2005. While Times Square was a huge success, developing a largely residential area into the location to be for brand-name shopping in Hong Kong, it is still to early to tell if this would have the same effect on Langham Place’s surroundings.

A walk in the neighborhood (during the day) is quite uneventful. The area mostly has home renovation, and construction material, and metal shops, with a brothel at about every 50-100 meters. Ah-suks (uncles) working in the businesses look at you funny, but what seemed to be pimps, left you alone as you took a quick picture of their premises (without them in there, of course).

As it provides an “essential service” in a city of about 7 million souls, the Hong Kong government should leave this part of the city alone, as long as the triads don’t start shooting each other in broad daylight.

Home renovation and green light

Chinese BBQ

And now, on a cultural note… In Chinese, “ordering chicken” (叫雞), like in getting chicken from a Chinese BBQ shop, is slang for patronage of female prostitutes. So, “ordering goose/duck” (叫鵝) is the patronage of male prostitutes…

L’intersection du SOGO – du nom du grand magasin dominant ce coin de rue – est probablement l’un ou le lieu le plus cher à Hong Kong en termes d’affichage publicitaire. La confluence d’au moins cinq rues différentes, celui-ci rivalise en achalandage avec l’intersection de Shibuya à Tokyo ou Times Square à Manhattan.

The SOGO intersection, named after the department store dominating it, is probably Hong Kong’s most expensive spot for billboards. At the confluence of at least five different streets, it rivals in traffic with Tokyo’s Shibuya crossing or Manhattan’s Times Square.

I am going to Hong Kong next Wednesday, September 30th and will be staying there for at least two months. Primarily, I will be looking for something to do, but I will also be keeping this blog as I did last year and will be also calling in to our Radio Centre-Ville Cantonese show, almost every Wednesday at 11:20PM (Montreal time). If you want to contact me, e-mail is still the way to go: cedric@commeleschinois.ca.

Comme les chinois s’en va à Hong Kong ! Je pars mercredi prochain, 30 septembre, et y restera pour au moins les deux prochains mois. J’irai principalement pour me chercher quelque chose à faire, mais garderai une présence sur les Internets grâce à ce blogue (comme l’année dernière) et sur les ondes de Radio Centre-Ville, alors que j’appelerai mes collègues de l’émission en cantonais, tous les mercredis vers 23h20 (heure de Montréal). Si vous voulez me contacter, par courriel reste la meilleure façon: cedric@commeleschinois.ca.

My friend Derrick Chang, aka maskofchina, lives in Hong Kong and was present at the yearly 6/4 (Tiananmen events) memorial at Victoria Park:

150,000 people attended the candlelight Vigil to mark the 20th anniversary the victims of the June 4th, 1989 Massacre in Beijing. Hong Kong is the only place in the People’s Republic of China that is allowed to hold remembrance services for this sad occasion.

See the Flickr set (with more photos to come later).

6/4, aka the Tiananmen Events, here in the West, is certainly no laughing matter. When Donald Tsang, Chief Executive of Hong Kong, said that he represented the views of the Hong Kong people by saying during question-and-answer period that the incidents happened years ago and that the territory’s a lot more prosperous today, well, it caused a wave of reactions. (see YouTube, in Cantonese)

After question period, after 23 pan-democrats walked out of LegCo, Tsang disappeared and reappeared after 30 minutes to offer an apology and recognize that what he said was wrong.

A day later (it was May 14), My Little Airport releases “Donald Tsang, Please Die” and rhymes “Die” with “Kai”, as in “Ngo Tei Sat Seung Kai” (We’re taking the streets for sure). “Tung Chee Hwa might’ve been bad, but at least he’s got a good conscience.”

Download the MP3 here:
Donald Tsang, Please Die

That’s after writing this other song last month to demand that the salary of Stephen Lam (Secretary for Mainland and Constitutional Affairs), namely a monthly 300,000 HKD (43,000 CAD), be split. Who said that the Chinese didn’t have a sense of humour?

I’ve known Chris DeWolf mostly for his pictures and written press pieces in Montreal, but now here’s what’s his first video documentary that he made as a HKU student.

It’s about the Jamia Mosque in Mid-Levels, Hong Kong. If you take the Mid-Levels escalator, one of the more peculiar “touristic” attractions of Hong Kong Island, the Mosque can’t possibly be missed. In fact, on my first visit to Hong Kong, I had a pic of this said Mosque, taken on my “tour” of the Escalator-To-Almost-Nowhere:

Hong Kong is in fact a more “diverse” society than any other in East Asia, as could be seen in movies like Chungking Express (that also contains a few memorable scenes off the said-escalator).

Read the review published with the video on Urbanphoto.

La nouvelle d’aujourd’hui sur le tourisme obstétrique dévoilée par la télévision de Radio-Canada risque de faire couler pas mal d’encre dans les jours qui viennent.

Ça me rappelle énormément une histoire semblable qui avait enflammé le territoire de Hong Kong à la fin 2006. Les journaux de Hong Kong avaient alors montré que de plus en plus de mères résidant en Chine continentale venaient dans la zone administrative spéciale dans le but de bénéficier d’un accouchement à prix abordable et de la résidence permanente (right of abode) à Hong Kong donnée à leur bébé.

Le site de l’école de journalisme de Hong Kong University a quelques articles là-dessus en anglais:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Ajmsc.hku.hk+mainland+mothers

ainsi que le China Daily:
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2006-12/22/content_765079.htm

et le International Herald Tribune:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/01/17/news/hong.php

(Dans l’article du IHT, on souligne aussi le cas des mères mexicaines aux États-Unis…)

Bon, on va dire que je vous pose une question ouverte. Que pensez-vous des conséquences au Québec d’un tel reportage? Que pensez-vous de la réaction à Hong Kong?

À Hong Kong, la controverse s’est éteinte lorsque le gouvernement a annoncé en début 2007 que les mères étrangères enceintes de plus de sept mois (on visait les mères de Chine continentale dans les articles que j’ai lu) devront prépayer $USD5000 avant d’entrer à Hong Kong pour leurs soins médicaux anticipés ou seraient refoulées à la frontière.

Following my experience in a dessert place in Markham (dessert houses in Montreal are rare to inexistent), I became obsessed with the idea of making one day my own ginger milk curd, or “keung zap zong nai” in Cantonese (薑汁撞奶). If the number of YouTube videos of people is a clue, then ginger curd is something that is definitely fun and intriguing to make.

Why that? Perhaps because it defies everyday conceptions. The principle of ginger curd is to take ginger juice, a mixture full of enzymes, and mix it to some warm sweetened milk. It’s supposed to react and make the milk curd, just like for tofu or cheese.

In 2006, a bunch of Hong Kong high school students’ science fair project won a prize and their presentation (PDF) became a hit on Google searches.

Ginger milk curd is a speciality of Guangdong, said to actually be from the locale of Panyu, nearby the provincial capital city of Guangdong and maybe where one of my grandmothers came from. It’s a staple dessert in Cantonese style (so, Hong Kong style) dessert houses all over the world. It is not known whether Montreal has a place that serves ginger milk curd, as not even the place I went to in Toronto made their own properly (they cheated by adding eggs, and it had the consistency of flan).

The recipe is rather simple, but just like any chemical experience, can be a little fussy. Here is the Flickr set of my two attempts at making ginger milk curd, the second time being successful:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/smurfmatic/sets/72157613733786306/

You can certainly find many recipes in English on the Internet. I notably used this forum page and this page, as well as watching some of those videos. I ignore why my first attempt was a failure (it was ginger-flavoured milk in the end). On the next day, I went to the shop to get fresh ginger (the one I had was sitting in the fridge in a plastic bag for over three weeks and its flesh was getting brownish…). I removed the skin with much precaution in order to keep as much flesh as I could. Then I chopped it and extracted the juice. I heated some milk, and took it off the stove as soon as some steam was coming out.

I added two spoonfuls of sugar. Then I cooled down the milk a little, before pouring it in the ginger juice.

I left it there for twenty minutes on the counter and the mixture had coagulated! Then, I remembered that the taste of something extremely smooth (“waat” in Cantonese) is still somewhat unusual for a Western-trained palate such as mine.

I think it was pretty well done anyhow as it was very smooth, the milk protein having separated from its serum and with the consistency of egg whites (it was way softer than jello, say). Apparently, some people say that it improves your skin! But how can a glass of milk, sugar and some ginger juice do that?

The My Little Airport of Hong Kong have two new songs. Get the mp3s from their website.

The first one is called 北歐是我們的死亡終站 , or “Northern Europe is our last stop (death terminal)”, and is about young people discussing suicide and concluding that going to Finland to freeze themselves to death is the most romantic. (The lyricist is not Nicole, but 阿雪?)

The second is a self-ad. MLA does gigs for money and this is an advert! “Despite the world economic crisis [...], we are cheap, well-worth your money”, say the lyrics. (Edit 2008-12-03: It actually means “poor people selling their asses”.)

Music videos below the cut.

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