words yvonne teh

A Hong Kong landmark is not the den of iniquity its reputation makes it out to be.

When Gordon Mathews visited Hong Kong in 1983, he stayed for several nights at Chungking Mansions. Back then, the Alaskan-born anthropologist told bc with a chuckle, the travellers who ventured into the now 46-year-old building after budget accommodation “were real backpackers – hippies, basically. Today, it’s not that way. There really aren’t any hippies left – people don’t go around smoking dope all the time! So it’s a rather different world!” Now, thanks to movies like Wong Kar Wai’s Chungking Express, the forbidding-looking building on 36-44 Nathan Road has become a tourist attraction with a distinct notoriety that makes many Hong Kongers reluctant to go near it.

Eleven years after that initial visit and with a PhD from Cornell University, the Ivy League university alumnus moved to Asia’s World City to live and work. A professor at the Chinese University of HK since 1994, a lot of Mathews’ research has been on, first, the Japanese and, more recently, Hong Kong Chinese: his latest book, Hong Kong, China: Learning to Belong to a Nation, co-written with Eric Ma and Tai-lok Lui, came out earlier this year. A while back though, he became interested in studying Hong Kong’s non-Chinese population and, figuring Chungking Mansions would be a good place at least to start, headed back to that notoriously low-end Tsim Sha Tsui locale where he had spent a few nights all those years ago.

Mathews began his research at Chungking Mansions in the spring of 2006. He calls the building “the prime centre of globalization”, as over 120 different nationalities pass through its doors in a single year. As is customary in his discipline, his research methods include participating in as well as observing the goings on at his chosen field site; and he has been regularly spending at least two nights a week at different guesthouses in the teeming building, as well as teaching English to asylum seekers there on Saturdays.

Some one and a half years on, the bespectacled, bearded professor estimates that “I’ve probably stayed in most of the guesthouses in Chungking Mansions.” No mean feat when you consider that 90 to 100 guesthouses operate in that veritable warren’s five 17-storey blocks. Mathews says he has been everywhere in the building, including certain parts he wouldn’t think to venture without some of the friends he has made from among Chungking Mansions’ cosmopolitan resident population. He notes that such parts of the complex would seem at the very least “dodgy” to some people but he generally found the people there surprisingly friendly.

Still, he points out, it’s not as though he is out to paint a sanitized portrait of a place he clearly loves but which many native Hong Kongers look on with dread. After all, we laughingly agree, if he were to do that, people would no doubt think he has not really done his research! And so he concedes that the Chungking Mansions’ population does include quite a number of illegal workers and that “there are drugs around too”.

Still, he maintains that the most vice he has seen in the building which caters for so many needs, and where “you could literally spend your whole life”, involves nothing more untoward than piracy. “It’s true enough that a significant proportion of the phones sold on the first floor are fakes”, he says, “but that applies all over Hong Kong. It’s not particular to Chungking Mansions.” By a similar token, “There are sex workers outside of Chungking Mansions but there are sex workers outside of Holiday Inn and the Peninsula too.” So why single out Chungking Mansions as far as he is concerned?

All in all, Mathews’ personal experience of Chungking Mansions is that it is generally home to “a very law-abiding population and the degree of general safety is extraordinary”. Also, now that more than 200 closed-circuit televisions have been installed, “in elevators and over stairways too, the chances of getting hit over the head by somebody who wants to take your money is almost non-existent. I won’t say that it never happens but it is extremely unlikely!”

I mention that I had come across descriptions of the place as the contemporary plus international equivalent of the Kowloon Walled City. That he dismisses with an emphatic “That’s nonsense! Chungking Mansions is the one place in Kowloon where the Triads are afraid to go into.” Not because of the vice, but because overwhelmingly English is the spoken language there. “Triads can’t speak English!” Mathews claims, “ And furthermore, Triads are afraid to go in because they stick out like a sore thumb!”

The most visible people in the mansions are Indians according to the professor, many tending stores on the ground and first floors of the building, and others on the street, urging passers-by to invest in a tailored suit or buy a ‘copy watch’ from the shops of people who hire them to tout on their behalf. Additionally, “There are a lot of Africans around,” he says. “Maybe half the people in Chungking Mansions are African traders, businesspeople and so on.” Add Caucasians and Japanese (many of them tourists), South Americans, Central Americans and others to the equation, and you’ve got the kind of ethnic mix you won’t find even in other parts of Asia’s World City that pride themselves on their cosmopolitan nature.

In Chungking Mansions, Hong Kong’s ethnic majority is a minority. And so, says Mathews, “The Hong Kong Chinese stand out. The guards at the front are specifically there to talk to Hong Kong Chinese who enter because so many people are lost when they go in! So the guards ask people in Cantonese, ‘Do you know where you’re going?’”

Of course, what many of Chungking Mansions’ non-Chinese visitors and inhabitants view as “the gateway into China” does house Chinese people. For instance, many of the owners of the numerous guesthouses inside the building are from this ethnic category. It is just that “very few are Hong Kong Chinese in terms of having been born in Hong Kong,” says Mathews.

He goes on to explain that: “In the 1960s and 1970s, many Shanghainese and Fukienese moved into Chungking Mansions simply because the property was cheaper there than anywhere else in Hong Kong.” Along the way, he also debunks the myth that, in the beginning, the place served as luxury apartments. Furthermore, he notes,
“There was a South Asian presence even then.”

Additionally, while the children of those non-Cantonese folks, many of whom continue to live in apartments in the building, can be considered Hong Kong Chinese, a good percentage have fulfilled the Hong Kong dream of doing better than the previous generation. Consequently, Mathews says, “They don’t want to be in Chungking Mansions any more.” Which is why these days many of those ethnic Chinese guesthouse owners have hired Indian managers to work for them.

At the same time, an increasing number of the estimated 2,000 lodgers at the building’s guesthouses at any one time are now people from Mainland China. More so than the building’s other visitors, this group “often come to Chungking Mansions just because the price is low”: $180-$280 per night per room at the top end and as low as $80-$100 per room at the lower end. Somewhat surprisingly, Mathews shares, the Mainland Chinese also appear to have the least genuine knowledge of the place, even though, as he declares, “All through sub-Saharan Africa, all through India and Pakistan, mention Hong Kong and the first
word that comes to mind for most people is Chungking Mansions!”

He goes so far as to suggest that many Mainlanders have a total misunderstanding of the place and laughingly tells of a Mainland Chinese woman who turned to him and said, “This is part of China. Why aren’t there any Chinese restaurants in Chungking Mansions?” Even more incredibly, “I remember one Mainland Chinese woman I was talking to saying she came to Chungking Mansions because she had read in some Mainland guidebook that rats fell out of the ceiling and she wanted to see it! I have never seen a rat in all my time at Chungking Mansions. I’ve never seen such a thing. It just doesn’t exist!”

That is not to say the place is likely to win any cleanliness awards any time soon. Still, Mathews says, “I would say that in terms of being luxurious, Chungking Mansions is probably at a peak now compared to the past. I was talking to somebody on Saturday who had been [there] 10 years ago and he was really impressed by how much better all the guesthouses were!” He notes that the complex has gone through a significant clean up. “So the remark that I mostly hear when I bring people over to Chungking Mansions is ‘It’s not nearly as bad/dangerous/dirty as I thought!’ You wouldn’t mistake it for the Peninsula but, still, it’s not that bad!” glows the professor, happy he has been given a grant to continue his chronicles of the adventures in Chungking Mansions for the next three years.