June 2006 Archives

Oh yeah, about that Videopower screening. There were two sessions: a set of shorts about the anti-WTO actions in December 2005, and their fabulous documentary about the Lee Tung St residents’ action campaign against their eviction by the Urban Renewal Authority, which was shot by the residents themselves.

The most amazing thing about both sessions was their palpable sense of a capacity to mourn, an ability to express dignified, collective sadness that is usually absent in activist culture, especially in its more Anglocentric instances. One of the WTO shorts was about a young Hong Kong man who was disturbed and eventually emotionally overcome by the Korean Peasants League’s tactic of getting down on their knees and touching their foreheads to the ground every three steps of the slow march from Victoria Park to the Convention Centre where the WTO ministerial meeting was taking place.

At first, this Chinese onlooker was disappointed; was this gesture not a sign of submission, of weakness? But after a while, in tears, he decided to join them. Because he’d realised that this performance couldn’t be reduced to a communication by the Korean farmers of their own (extremely unlikely) supplication, but was instead something else — a “wildcard” invocation of sadness that cracked open the world. It also created an atmosphere of generalised respect — of collective, almost “environmental” dignity, rather than its opposite. (Interestingly, for the actual shots of this mass kow-towing, the camera appears to find it impossible to focus on the farmers themselves, who always appear at the edge of frame, and instead centres on the onlookers. It’s as if this radical sadness is unable to be directly represented.)

Thinking back, I later realised that this was prophetically framed by the first short film, about a tiny group of local radicals who visited the Convention Centre the day before the WTO meeting took place, in order to ritualistically open a period of mourning for the carnage of capital’s global consolidation. Carrying a black banner that read “The WTO Kills — Mourn the Death” and carrying burning sticks of incense and an insistently tolling bell, this group slowly backed away from the Convention Centre, bowing every three steps. No, not a submissive gesture at all. Also, against the grain, I wouldn’t dismiss the slightly “Chinglish” grammar — mourning “the (systemic) death” can mean mourning without limits, rather than just for a particular, quantifiable “dead”.

The Lee Tung St documentary was also incredibly touching. I mentioned the huge, seamless photomural of the street previously, but the film makes its role in the affective process of recollection much more clear. At its exhibition, and aware that they were probably about to be evicted, residents could walk the length of the photomural, using it as a spatialising touchstone for memorialisation. With tears in her eyes, one woman touched various points of the reproduced streetfront. “This is where I got my wedding invitations printed,” she said. “And this is where I bought the jewellery.” Whatever one’s preconceptions about the tendencies of Not-In-My-Backyard petit-bourgeois local action groups, this film was a tribute to small moments of everyday life on one hand, and the indefatigability of these people’s collective engagement with space on the other. In response to the Urban Renewal Authority’s plans, they created their own amazingly extensive, fuck-off redevelopment proposal — one that actually included them. It was rejected. But in the pre-credits “where are they now?” sequence, we learn that their proposal later won an independent prize for town planning. Sigh.

[ tags: activism, affect, hong-kong, lee-tung-street, mourning, protest, urban-renewal-authority, videopower, wan-chai, wto ]

There’s a sense of intimacy and immense debt when someone translates for you — especially if they do it well. Even if they’re acting as your interpreter for a discussion in a political/intellectual forum (no, perhaps especially if that’s the case), you feel like they have temporarily become your world, because they’ve shielded you from the terror of a language you’re supposed to know, but don’t.

Here in Hong Kong, we’ve met some awesome strangers who’ve spontaneously volunteered to do translate the thorny particulars of urban development politics, or critiques of the public sphere, or repressive psychiatry. For instance, we randomly met Kannie at a forum where the only word we understood was “Foucault”, and she deftly steered us through some treacherous waters, and this fortuitously opened the door to more important exchanges with her. Last night we met Steph, a Canadian Chinese activist, at a film screening by the Videopower radical media collective, and she offered to translate the post-screening discussion for us. What’s cool is that Steph has only been here a year, and wasn’t a Cantonese speaker when she arrived — and throughout discussion, she only asked others for help with obscure urban planning jargon! This might seem reasonable to some people, but it amazes me. After the discussion, we discussed the whole phenomenon of second-generation migrant linguistic cringe, which Steph still experiences. Except for her, it’s getting Cantonese tones right, while I’m trying to get the whole language to even approach being “right”.

Last week I had a similar conversation with an artist, Becky — another young Canadian Chinese woman — at a gallery opening. The show was all about utopian spaces, and she’d recreated a teenage suburban rec-room to signify the everyday, mundane spaces that can afford young people some daydreamy autonomy. As we nestled in her installation’s couch, in front of Super Nintendo controllers and a TV playing Clueless, I told her that for me, speaking Chinese terrified me so much that coming to Hong Kong was a dare. “Oh, totally,” she said. “I thought to myself, what’s the scariest thing I could do? Move to Hong Kong. So I did.” She considers her Cantonese to now be “pretty good”.

Becky is way cool. Underneath all the ’90s-era ephemera scattered around her installation, she had “randomly” hidden a layer of anarchist pamphlets.

[ tags: language, translation ]

I always thought of myself as a canny user, if not actually a “power user”. I’ve set up my PowerBook to always ask for a password once someone opens it. I’ve got a personal firewall set up in stealth mode, and my own home WiFi network has a NAT firewall. I have a utility called “Little Snitch” that informs me about every little piece of network access that any application attempts.

A few weeks ago, somebody changed my computer’s administrator password, and I had to reboot from a system DVD to regain access to my own computer. Today, somebody changed the password to my Gmail account. Luckily, I still happened to be logged in on another computer, and was able to regain access. As a traveller, I’ve been using a lot of WiFi in public, but given that neither password was ever sent in cleartext over the net, how is this possible? Is one of my apparently friendly applications actually a keylogging trojan horse?

This was the first street protest that actually moved me to tears. Migrant workers from the Cordillera region in the Philippines met to mourn and protest the state-sponsored killing of comrades from the Cordillera Peoples’ Alliance. (The Flickr photoset is here.) Yep, I’m an ironic pomo wanker, but when they pulled out the guitars out and sang “We Shall Overcome” (really!), I was… overcome.

Some of these people happened to be “actual comrades” of ours (with old friends on common) from the Asian Students Association, to which my own activist organisation was affiliated back in the 1990s. And despite my many differences with their overwhelmingly Maoist bent, our Filipino comrades were a constant source of inspiration back then, because they understood the joy of performance and the creativity of games. I even tried reinjecting some of the old Philippines-Australia Cultural Interaction Network methodologies into some of our work with Smash Racism a couple of years ago.

Of course, CPA and ASA comrades weren’t the only people on the streets, because every Sunday, on their one day off, thousands of Filipino migrant domestic workers occupy heart of Hong Kong’s financial district. To just hang out. Relax. Gossip. Organise industrially. To Get the Fuck Out of the Live-In Closet That Their Employers Call a Room. To be autonomous. To have an “inappropriate” visibility in the city that runs on their labour. We’ve been here for weeks, but so far hadn’t gotten our shit together to witness this regular occurrence. I didn’t feel comfortable taking photos, but it was breathtaking: Filipino women occupied every square inch of the space in between the towers of the HSBC building and the surrounding streets, playing cards, napping on towels, being raucous. The authorities can do nothing but officially block the streets that have already been blocked.

A woman was handing out leaflets amongst the crowds, and when I enquired what they were about, she gave me the dirtiest look imaginable, her whole body assuming a defensive posture, as if I’d threatened to eat her baby. Fair enough — a Chinese man wanting to know Filipino women’s business on their day off in Hong Kong isn’t really a recipe for dialogue. Until that moment, I don’t think I ever realised quite so starkly the possibility for me to be the enemy, or the oppressor, via a particular constellation of class, race and gender.

After the protest, we got to talk to some domestic worker activists. How the fuck did they have time to organise politically outside the official channels, when they work for — and live with — their employers, around the clock? By using buckets and rope to surreptitiously pass things to other workers upstairs or downstairs in the same apartment block. By whispering into mobile phones while feeding their bosses’ kids. By taking said Chinese kids to political rallies! (A couple of activist nannies had indeed brought their charges to the protest.)

Migrant domestic workers enjoy very few rights in Hong Kong; for example, unlike everybody else, they can’t apply for a resident’s card, even if they’ve lived in Hong Kong for decades — their visas forever remain at the mercy of their employment contracts. Some are immediately deported when their racist potential employers decide, upon their initial meeting, that their skin was darker than the recruitment agency’s profile suggested. (My overriding memory of Hong Kong television is from 1988: I saw a prime-time variety show in which Chinese comedians got made up in blackface and acted like hysterical buffoons to portray Filipino people.) When grievously assaulted by their employers, it is often they, and not their employers, who are taken in for questioning by the police. And in a final (but predictable) irony: now that Hong Kong is part of China, the traditionally “communist”-influenced trade union federation has sided with the state against migrant domestic workers in the familiar name of “patriotism”. In the face of all this, migrant workers’ resistance in Hong Kong is to be celebrated without reserve.

[ tags: activism, affect, hong-kong, immigration, labour, migrants, philippines, protest ]

Just when I’m getting used to Hong Kong being twice as hot as Sydney right now, I present an encore download of Zooey Deschanel and Leon Redbone’s “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” — because here, it’s super-cold inside. (Also: whenever I see Zooey Deschanel in a film, she reminds me of Pippa, so this is for her, too.) I posted this song a couple of years ago, and people seemed to like it — Deschanel’s charming vocal shrug is certainly my one of all-time favourite performances.

[ tags: zooey-deschanel ]

The other day our minds were completely blown when we saw the Love Street exhibition at the UMA Gallery in Wan Chai. A response to the redevelopment of Lee Tung Street in Wan Chai by Hong Kong’s “Urban Renewal Authority”, the exhibition involved residents’ action groups and artists, celebrating the everyday feelings of the space, and acting as a memorial for the disappearing richness of the area.

One of the artist-activists, Patrick Tse, gave us an impromptu tour of Wan Chai, pointing out points of contention and resistance hidden in the urban landscape around us. He then showed us a crazy canvas photomural of Lee Tung St that he’d worked on, which perfectly mapped both the extensive horizontality and verticality of the street onto its surface — it was stitched together in Photoshop out of over 150 separate photos, taken over several months by photographers mounted on a cherry picker.

The booklet produced by the Community Museum Project was also staggering, reproducing the mural in a huge fold-out format, and also lovingly documenting such ephemera as street signs, graffiti on doors, and the fucking antique light-switches of the area.

Without pretension or over-intellectualisation, Patrick said that their mission was “to amplify daily life”.

Here’s the photoset.

[ tags: everyday-life, hong-kong, psychogeography, urbanism ]

And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost and began to speak in other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.

And there were dwelling at Jerusalem Jews, devout men out of every nation under heaven. Now when this was noised abroad, the multitude came together and were confounded, because every man heard them speaking in his own language. And they were all amazed and marveled, saying one to another, “Behold, are not all these who speak Galileans? And how then do we each hear them speaking in our own tongue wherein we were born? Parthians, Medes, Elamites and the dwellers in Mesopotamia, and in Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, in Egypt and in the parts of Libya about Cyrene, and strangers from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabians — we hear them speak in our own tongues the wonderful works of God.”

(Acts 2:1-11)

Universalism. Translation. Difference. The TARDIS vortex as the Holy Spirit. After Mass yesterday (again, don’t ask) and Prayers of the Faithful that were surprisingly about social justice, the politics of class (!) and the role of the universal Church, we went to see The Da Vinci Code. What a crock! Having had a quixotic interest in vintage christo-heterodox conspiracy theories in a previous life, I’d stayed away from the whole phenomenon for fear of grave disappointment, but I caved in to everyone else’s curiosity. I’m not sure how well the film mirrors the plot of the novel, but Dan Brown reads The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail and we get this? Christ on a bike! I mean, it was good to have such a high profile slagging of Opus Dei (“fascist Opus Dei,” Mr Hanks corrects us) and Christianity’s deeply rooted misogyny, but that’s about it. Why do I keep defending Akiva Goldsman, based solely on Batman Forever? Oh dear.

[ tags: christianity, da-vinci-code, holy-spirit, opus-dei, tardis ]

Today we met Lawrence Grossberg and Meaghan Morris at “Kids, Politics and Our Future”, an event organised by Lingnan University’s Cultural Studies Department. There was a weird collection of people there, from people who were obviously activists, to strangely obedient-looking students, one of whom walked in late, sat next to Lena and then asked her for her notes. There wasn’t a problem with sharing knowledge (although Lena was a bit embarrassed by the idea of handing over her commentary, complete with scathing remarks about “monolithic feminism”); rather, this person made her request as if it were homework. Yikes.

Grossberg basically outlined the argument of his latest book, Caught in the Crossfire — that the “War on Kids” isn’t so much about young people in themselves being a problem to the powers that be, but what they represent: the future. So, an inability to conceive of a future that isn’t rapacious exploitation or suicidal mania leads to the abuse and repression of the young. The contributions of the other panellists, including two from Christian NGOs, were interesting, but as a whole the event was a bit disparate. And while he was amusing, I could have done without Lui Tai-Lok’s nostalgia for shiny happy Maoist recruitment strategies of the 60s and 70s as an example of “a more diverse Left” of which contemporary activists can apparently no longer conceive. Feh. Whatever one thinks of Maoism, there should be an injunction against middle aged Leftists pitying young people for fucking living in the wrong era. Given the context of the panel, a little bit of reflexivity would have been nice. Also: despite Grossberg’s conclusions about the nature of paedocidal culture, there wasn’t one person on this first panel under the age of 25, or even 30, which was rather ironic. But all in all, we were thankful to be at the most politically critical event thus far of our stay here in Hong Kong.

Oh yeah, the event was held at the Hong Kong Scout Centre. Now, we didn’t expect it to be an ordinary Scout hall. Not at all. But we didn’t expect this:

There’s a fucking indoor heated swimming pool on the twelfth floor or something. And lots of cute but bratty Scout kids, trailed by their Filipina nannies.

[ tags: cultural-studies, lawrence-grossberg, maoism, meaghan-morris, young-people ]

Taken at the interactive Chinese opera display, in the Hong Kong Heritage Museum. It’s only now that I realise that my eyes are somewhat uneven.

[ tags: hong-kong, museum, vanity ]