Every Sunday, when I walk through the covered walkways of Central, I feel as though I’ve stepped into a parallel universe. Past Exchange Square, in the same spots occupied by cigarette-smoking financiers on weekdays, I see middle-aged men lying face down for a cut-price massage.
When I make my way down onto Des Voeux Road, where executives are seen during the week hurtling back from their mid-day workout classes, women are precariously perched on kerbside railings for the most public eyebrow-plucking sessions you’d ever see. From potluck picnics to dance classes, this is an entire subculture and sub-economy at work.
As someone who’s had to explain what goes on in our streets every Sunday to friends and family, it’s a shame that all we can give these women is the gift of a blind eye. But what I also have is an immense amount of respect for the ways in which they find room for joy and community. Whether it’s through roadside karaoke sessions or birthday parties hosted beneath the shade of a highway flyover, on Sundays, they will find a way.
I recently read Christopher DeWolf’s book Borrowed Spaces. A long-time contributor to the Post, DeWolf captures the enduring importance of informal urban spaces – especially in a city like ours where we don’t have much space to begin with.
He observes that it’s those constraints that historically gave rise to the ingenious and resourceful ways people have managed to blur the lines between shop and pavement, official and unofficial, public and private.
The way our helpers spill out onto the streets on their days off is hardly a shining symbol of success for Hong Kong’s street life. Nevertheless, to me, it’s also one of the city’s last remaining acknowledgements of the inevitability of informal urban spaces.
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Hong Kong’s traditional dai pai dong street-food stalls fight to stay open
Hong Kong’s traditional dai pai dong street-food stalls fight to stay open
After all, cities are habitats for life. Much like the strength of a single flower that grows out of the smallest and most barren of cracks, life always finds a way. In fact, it’s in these informal spaces and from these resourceful spirits that Hong Kong draws its unique character.
The disappearance of dai pai dongs, roadside fortune-tellers, birdcage craftsmen and fish ball peddlers are not just losses of intangible culture, but dimming vital signs of a city at risk of becoming another soulless, concrete megalopolis, where our green street stalls and red-white-blue tarp shades will be traded in for more of the same glass windows and steel towers.
Much of Hong Kong’s charm comes from those who stubbornly take up space in these cracks of modernity. Whether one’s intention is to make Hong Kong a more delightful place to visit or to live, the answer could be as simple as letting this city be more of what it is.
It’s the energy of having an open-air wet market where you can buy some of the freshest herbs in the city just blocks away from JP Morgan’s local office, the absurdity of knowing where to find the birdcage seller who is often covered head to toe in pigeons and the familiar sight of chef’s jackets drying on the bamboo scaffolding outside a siu mei (Cantonese roast meats) shop.
The issue is not with modernisation itself but how we choose to modernise. Plush malls and breathtaking skyscrapers have a place in a world city like ours. But when other world cities have evolved their built environment in harmony with those who actually live in it, we ought to question if we’ve managed to do the same.
Without suggesting we turn back the clock to a time when businesses were allowed to operate under ambiguous health and safety codes, we mustn’t allow our informal spaces and intangible culture to fade away even more.
With revitalisation projects like Temple Street night market, we’re on the right track. We need more projects like that, instead of more inflatable wonders of the world and cartoon drone shows.
The resilience and ingenuity our community of helpers must show in finding ways to take up space is a bitter pill to swallow. But in this community of immigrants, I see the spirit of Hong Kong.
To quote DeWolf one last time: “Almost everything remarkable about this city is rooted in its long history of grass roots self-organisation … Hong Kong has a hustler’s spirit, always searching for an advantage, a way over, under or around the obstacle ahead”. And so it is.
Annika Park is a senior strategist at TBWA Hong Kong. The views expressed here are her own
