Et tu? And what does it mean to you?
Part of the reason my initial few months of university were so difficult was because I was a stickler for labels. I hope that isn’t too odd of a way to open this piece. While I myself found the notion of strict identities nauseating and ever so confusing, I was truly and deeply invested in giving myself a title and then sticking to it. When it all falls apart, as things do, you start to feel yourself come undone too. And that was what happened. It’s dramatic, but what young adult isn’t?
I. Central Market
The first day of my first-ever internship was the day I first saw the Central Market revamp in all its real life glory.
I was very excited to be interning, which shocked me. It would be my first time, in an organisation of my choice, working, for fun. I had always expected interning to be a gruesome task required only to graduate. Fluorescent bulbs and cubicles and name tags and starched collared shirts generally disgusted me. Believe my shock when my office had the ambiance of a cozy bookstore and would blast lo-fi music. Everyday I discover the world is larger than what’s in my head and it’s lovely. I’m still mildly offended by the idea of having to work once I graduate, but I’ve at least somewhat warmed up to it.
‘下一站，中環街市。Next stop, Central Market. *Mindlessly presses bell*’ Why did the chicken cross the road? To test out its new human feet.
I had heard lots of buzz with regards to the market online before I saw it that day. Be it articles from recent news or the occasional friend of a friend online who had gone to see it and subsequently posted pictures of it. I was aware that Mammy Pancake had their own store there now. I lived along Haven Street, so I was very excited to see something I knew and regularly came across in the opening that was the flavour of the season. But as it stood then, all that I knew was that something or some market in Central had been revamped to be more popular with the kids. That isn’t all too odd of an occurrence by itself. I just didn’t know it was that market, the market I so frequently passed as I got off the bus to head to Queen’s Road Central, a popular enough spot on its own.
Now that I literally work in the area and use that same bus to get to work, 3 mornings a week I exit the bus to be greeted by the market and I was still none the wiser. I had just assumed it was some regular building. Up until a while ago. Boo-hoo.
Some Sunday a while after my first day of work, my friends and I met at Queen’s Road Central to plan out the gifts we had to send to our best friend (¼ of our posse) who was currently in the UK and expecting her first child. One thing led to another and we decided that we needed to get to the IFC, and to do so, as I was informed by my friend (¼ of our posse again, not the same one as previously mentioned) who had long lived in the Central-Western district, we could use a bridge to get there and that bridge had us pass through the new and improved Central Market. This would be the first time I looked inside the building.
The picture on the right are pigeons on the bridge I used to head to the market. There are so many pigeons on the island. I like pigeons. I always see them dead. Hit by cars. I thought pigeons were smart? Why do they keep getting hit?
What were the first things I noticed? Mammy Pancake. And is it awful to say that I didn’t notice anything else because I didn’t yet know this wasn’t just some other tourists’ fantasy spot in Central? Which, then again, it sort of is now at its current state?
If you couldn’t already tell, this is a very inaccurate portrayal of my posse. I am the one in pink.
There were a lot of people. It was a Sunday. The aesthetics were peculiar. Plants and minimalist styling you would expect to see, not from an iconic and historic market, but from the many commentary channels run by women that I follow on YouTube. Beige and green overgrowth. I could sort of tell that they were trying to mimic that ‘market-feel’ by having stalls for each vendor, and I could sort of tell they were trying to acknowledge that the place had a lot of history by putting up little descriptions and having a little exhibit inside. But it’s one thing to do that, and another thing when your vendors sell milk (sorry, coconut milk specifically) pudding at prices not suited for a market, and that I had to find out later when I got back home from very angry articles that the building means a lot more than I had learnt or expected historically.
My plants will always die after a week. I wonder if these plants will die. My mom would probably complain about them being indoors at night and my AC on. ‘Won’t you suffocate?! Take them out of your room!!’ Are these plants even real??
I didn’t really think about it much after that. It was suffocating for all of us to be around so many people, so as swiftly as we got in, we swiftly got out. We headed to the IFC and got our gifts, then got back home. My living in Causeway Bay and melancholic mood (note: we were sending a gift to a close friend who was now far away), induced me to use the tram and the trams can be very romantic when they aren’t full of people.
The next time I was aware of the markets I was walking around the ground floors, heading back home from work. The lighting from inside was warm. The automated sliding doors opened as people breezed through. People were perched on top of barstools talking, drink in hand, and they looked important.
II. Johnston Road
I got on the tram at the stop close to Bank Street. When I got on, it had very few people, a rarity on a Sunday. I sat and put on sad music (as one should during moments of melancholy) and looked out the window to the changing scenery.
I remembered as a kid, my teachers in primary school told me that the Tramways were once right next to the sea. We would often marvel at that fact and it would be mentioned any time any of us got on a tram together. Today I still bring it up to people. None of us had yet learnt of the concept of reclamation, so I guess we had just assumed Hong Kong grew larger over time. Like we were.
Eventually I reached the opening of Johnston Road. I am deeply fond of this place. I had quite literally grown up with it. As a kid, one of our favourite hangout meetup locations was Southorn Playground, which was and still is en route. Back then, on the weekends, it was a haven for ethnic minority kids. It was so very iconic in primary school, where the student body was majority minority. ‘Meet at Southorn? (pronounced Southern [收-th(soft th sound)-earn] because we didn’t know better)’ ‘Yeah, ok.’ I don’t know if it’s still very popular amongst the minority kids today, but I had many of my childhood memories there. The first time I hung out with the popular girls. The first time I got on a skateboard. My failed attempts at showing up looking cute in hopes that my crush was there playing basketball that day. Times I fell. Times we had old people shout at us for being loud or messy. I remembered bringing sushi I bought in 7-11 I bought for $3 each. That was a thing once. That was fun.
Thank you taxi driver for showing up right on time for this picture.
I remember an era before Lee Tung Avenue. Back when it was still blocked up and showed construction signs. There was a hawker; the ones you see in cooler weather. I bought chestnuts. My friends bought quail eggs. They let me try some. That was the first time I tried ‘street’ quail eggs. I liked it. They said they liked to eat it with salt. I think I remember there being a bird store in the area somewhere. One where I spent nearly an hour with some of the girls. They weren’t afraid of birds so they were very excited to be trying to get it to talk. I stood by passively because anything with a living body tended to scare me. I don’t think they ever noticed my fear.
I’ve always found the lanterns along Lee Tung Avenue kinda tacky. Why are they always there? So the tourists can take pictures in ‘Asia; exoticised’? Who knows?
One of my group tasks for a subject in primary school required me to study the Woo Cheong Pawn Shop, which you would pass while on the tram, even today, and is along Johnston Road. If people have no idea what I mean when I tell them of the place, I normally say ‘it’s the pawn shop that’s sh*t gentrified in Wan Chai’ and they tend to get what I mean. So there you go.
Ah yes, bamboo scaffolding and Five Guys. Minibuses and Trams. *starts playing Hannah Montana’s The Best of Both Worlds* Welcome to Hong Kong baby!
My group and I had to head up to the restaurant (I later discovered it was called The Pawn; it was a Western restaurant) and ask people some questions about the building. Any kind of task that required us to go out to the streets to ask people questions always gave the lot of us a lot of anxiety. Sparking a conversation with a stranger on the street is one thing; but doing that is infinitely more difficult when we were all fully aware that we could not speak Cantonese and could be bothering anyone at any moment the moment we walked up to them and started in English. We were small and many of us were brown or tan. We knew to not make ourselves seen. Homework that forced attention onto us was especially daunting.
At one point, we approached a foreigner sitting around the balcony of the building. One of the boys in our group, who was known for being a problem child to the teachers, took the fall for us and asked the first question. Was it because he was 2 years older than most of us and thus braver after living more life? I remembered him looking pretty nervous too. But he got things rolling and we were all very thankful that he asked the first question. The man answered adequately for us, and in English, and we left the building with a worksheet filled in and no longer anxious.
I’ll always somewhat remember what the inside of the building was like and what it ended up meaning to me. It was sort of dark and had barstools and glassware hanging from the ceiling and was basically a place that felt forbidden to me. (Older now, I’m aware it just looks like an expensive restaurant, which it was) Everyone there felt important and most, if not everyone, were speaking in English. I have always had a hard time tuning out conversations that happen in English around me, seeing that it happens so infrequently. This was a treat for me, because my head then was sort of just spinning with all this information that I had the ability, for once in my life, to process altogether in real time. It’s an odd foreign experience to have. I still get disoriented when I hear a lot of English around me when I’m least expecting it. To many of us then, with parents who worked in catering or service or late jobs, this was the aspiration. To be sitting in a location important enough for kids to study for school, to be the ones buying the drinks with wacky names, and to proceed to answer anything they asked in crisp English.
When we were younger, a lot of us had big aspirations for the future. It always hurt me when I hear people say that minority kids are just inherently dumb and want nothing more in life than what they currently have. I think back to that classroom of 30 people, all small and still unaware of what life had to give, and I know all of us had a dream. Some of us wanted to be vets, some wanted to be singers, some wanted to teach. Were we good at what we wanted to do? Maybe we weren’t, but by god we were trying.
Amongst the sea of dreams was an obvious trope. We wanted to be successful to prove a point, and we were going to prove that point without needing Cantonese, without needing Hong Kong, like so many people could, it seemed. Estranged as we were from the city who seemed to use every opportunity to reject us, we were going to be the successful foreignerTM and Hong Kong’s complicated relationship with how it understands foreigners will bother us no more! Whoop whoop! … Not that easy.
I had gone through a phase in secondary school wherein I actively rejected using Cantonese because ‘I knew people who didn’t have to use it ever who are also very rich; why are teachers being so mean to me then?’. I now know I’ve had no proper conceptualisation of privilege then and never really fully understood the gravity of what I had thought.
What did it even mean to be ‘foreign’? As it was very formally understood, most of us as kids were locals. We were born and raised here. Some of us had parents who were locals too. We just happened to be neither ‘ethnic’ local, neither expat, and only ethnic minority, so we were: *foreign(?). We spoke English and Cantonese and our mother tongue as if we weren’t supposed to, catching sneers and stares everywhere we went, and found the people’s reactions enough of a reason to reject that locality. I wanted to be a spunky successful foreigner and then proceed to inhabit these old historic Hong Kong buildings that have repurposed themselves to cater to folks like me. Important people like me. Me sitting on those velvet barstools. What a thought.
III. Gentrification and me
I speak in English at my jobs. All 3 of them. Exclusively. And every day I am reminded of the anxiety in the possibility that one day English-speakers will all of a sudden no longer want me and I’ll have to learn to use Cantonese to get another job, a language I rejected during the most important period of my life and to my detriment, and then fall back into the loop that so many of our parents wanted us to leave. That one day I’ll be back at the bottom.
Wan Chai has gone through one hell of a gentrification process. I live in a building that has plans to get its own revamp in a few years and it constantly looms over my family; we could be kicked out any time. I live opposite a FritesTM(?); I’ve never tried raw oysters. Central has gone through one hell of a gentrification process. Look at the Central Market; look at Tai Kwun. Most people seem to be happy with it. The people most upset, oddly enough, write their articles and opinions in English. Why are they upset again?
There are loads of rats and cockroaches along Haven Street though it seems to remain a popular hangout or ‘foodie’ spot. Or maybe they’re just common to me because I live there. This picture reminds me of the time my best friend pushed me towards rats. Long story.
As a kid, this was valorised. These places and how fancy they looked. Me and my eccentric friends who looked up to them. Gentrification has been weird for me. I had considered it aspirational. You’re altering yourself to fit upper and middle class needs. Wouldn’t that make sense? My going to university is my gentrification process. My knowing what the word gentrification means is my gentrification process. I study English literature; English is neither the mother tongue of the place I live in or the place I’m ethnically from. I don’t fully know what I am doing. I am a gentrified mess. A confused husk trying to make what I am work for the people who have more than enough. While all that I am, and all that isn’t needed, is dumped to the corner because who would want that?
Why is it that when something is revamped, it's to work for the people who already have enough and what does this insinuate? In gentrification, what margins are we trying to cater to? How many of us drink expensive wine on top of velvet barstools? How many of us need an extra location with expensive bite-sized food? Why are my margins less important?
I think about those popular teen rom coms from way back when where the main character becomes prettier after a makeover. Similar questions pop up: at the end of the day, for what?
‘Oh! Did you check the Hang Seng Index today?’
Gentrification. Huh. While I understand that, to an extent, these sites gave me drive for a kind of future I assumed was great, it hasn’t been faithful in presenting the realistic possibility of accomplishing those dreams, especially for someone like me. And it does stand to question why the upper and middle class are the folks we’re spending millions of dollars of very visible revitalisation work on. For the economy, I guess. For the future, I guess. I should know. I’m an unpaid intern in the area. I need to fill my CV somehow. I need a job. What bigger embodiment?
It feels a lot like being a mule who’s walking towards the carrot on a stick. Only the very lucky few mules who managed to get a longer neck as they grow up get to chomp on that carrot eventually. The rest are stuck in their situation. One day, the carrot becomes a shiny golden carrot because the holders of the carrot realised it was getting kinda moldy. Now glimmering and gold, everyone has come to touch the carrot. But the mule. The mule is stuck there in its misery. All of a sudden a beautiful horse comes in from nowhere and chomps a bit of the carrot. The mule is even more miserable. I am god awful at metaphors. But I think you get it.
Yesterday, I went to work. The world still spins and I still move forward and because I learnt that long ago, I don’t know how to hold anger and disdain for long. I leave the bus and still see the Central Market and the wine racks. I use the tram and still pass through Johnston Road and the cafes that use the word ‘pain’ for bread. I no longer aspire to be some tacky caricature from my child mind. I do think the world is still trying to gentrify me. And I see bodies of that success daily. But, alas, what can I do about it but be aware!
~
I think you’re always expecting your life to head towards one trajectory and you so carefully curate an image of that possibility from the things around you. Sometimes things fall apart and unravel in ways you never expect it to. I don’t dream the same dreams 16-year-old me or 13-year-old me dreamt thus. People who’ve fully accomplished their childhood dreams are baffling to me. I’ve always developed new ones before any get accomplished. Yet I find it so important to have at least one at any given moment in life. I am a dreamer in that sense. An accomplisher, less so. I’ve had people say it’s because I was born in February; and other iterations. In my constant swaying but simultaneous incessant need to have a defining trait, I became the way that I am.
Today, I’m happy enough.
This is me. At some age below 10 I think. I still have no idea how to react to cameras. And I totally would still wear a Happy Meal Box on my head. Some things though don’t ever change.
-
I’d like to thank Valerie and Ikra for helping me read the piece before it was sent out and providing some input. Extra thanks to Valerie for lending me her iPad and helping with some of the illustrations. Shout out to my parents for taking great pictures of me as a child. All the other pictures here were taken on my phone. Some details of specific folks were altered for the sake of privacy and/or continuity.