The Birdcage Archives

Thursday 13 June 2013

Atlas: Archeology of an Imaginary City

Hello Gentle Reader

Many authors have written love letters to their favourite cities. It could be their adopted home; or it could be the landscape of their life: from childhood to adulthood to old age. So many authors come to mind and their beloved cities: Charles Dickens Victorian London; Charles Baudelaire’s decadent Paris; Paul Auster’s metaphysical New York; James Joyce’s modernist playground Dublin; Kafka’s surreal and alienating Prague; the existential wasteland of Dostoevsky’s St. Petersburg; Robert Walser’s sparkling and vibrant turn of the century Berlin; Fernando Pessoa’s mystical Lisbon; all the way to Orhan Pamuk’s home of Istanbul, the bridge that meets east and west. The Austrian (and more importantly Viennese) poet Friederike Mayrocker, can only write in Vienna. Well on a six month residency to Berlin, the poet was unable to write a word. She was forced to go home, for a weekend, in order to write a single word. The have been many songs, stories, poems and novels written and sung about cities. From New York to London; Paris to Berlin; Budapest to Bucharest; Istanbul to Hong Kong; Tokyo to Vancouver. These places of steel and stone; built on the dreams come true and of the broken failures of others. A place were the refuge of the world, can call home, when their own home has abandoned them. There in this world are cities that are so populated they become countries on their own. Singapore is the most significant; a metropolitan, brightly lit world. It is the fourth leading financial sector in the world. Singapore’s port is one of the busiest in the world. It along with Taiwan, South Korea, and Hong Kong is one of the Four Asian Tigers – economic power houses of the Asian world. Hong Kong is a special city. A place that has changed, and whose position in the world is not debated, but exactly who runs Hong Kong is something of a speculative and rather confusing mess. Hong Kong along with Macau is a “Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China,” – as with all political matters/terms/titles/names, it’s a large long winded title, which summarises Hong Kong and mainland China’s, reliance on each other – the same can be said with Macau. The simplest answer in regards to Hong Kong and China is that it’s one country with two systems. Hong Kong has substantially more freedoms; especially financially than its Chinese mainland counterpart. It is one of the most densely populated regions in the world, and its modern architecture of compact space, but also looking good is quite a marvel.

The skyline of the city itself is beautiful. These shimmering golden lights. Bright neon lights, red blinking air traffic lights. A mixture of an indigo, violet, and pink haze always hovering over the city. It must be both a crowded and claustrophobic city as well as a world on its own. A place of constant fluxing change, to meet and match its ever changing needs. It’s hard to imagine Hong Kong without the glass and steel skyscrapers. The constant light filled nights. It’s a high stakes city, full of money – and with this high money come a lot of hustle and bustle. A constant clean image, and a desire to constantly to look towards the future and not dilly dally in the past. This must surely be Hong Kong. A place where, an event or activity is always going on. It surely must be a wonderful place – if only to visit. Yet the concept of Hong Kong as a self-sustaining organism, that works on the most basic of levels as a well-oiled machine is something amazing. Cities here in the developed western parts of North America – are not small contained highly dense population. They have become an urban sprawl. A place of frustrating transportation issues and inconveniences a very similar destination. Commuting in around the city that I live in, via public transportation is something to a hellish bureaucratic nightmare. There is plenty of waiting. Which isn’t so bad; if you have something to do. Nowadays people have their phones and their tables to watch television and pass times or read. But in the dead cold hard Canadian winter when its minus twenty five outside and a wind chill making it feel like minus thirty-five, I don’t want to read or wait in the open space and freeze. Then of course, if you want to drive, you have accidents to deal with, and traffic because the roads have not been kept up, and maintained in order to deal with the continuing increase of traffic. Personal I feel one cannot call themselves a city until they have proper transportation, that can commute on a very intricate schedule larger groups of the population to their destinations – as well as connect via trams surrounding communities and suburbs to the city centre, and continually create profit and fill jobs as needed, rather than outsource or hire temporary ‘international workers.’ That is why I praise the European and Asian cities for their advanced understanding of sophisticated transportation and commuter problems. Allowing the population to thrive within an almost petri dish like existence.

Dung Kai-Cheung has been born and raised in Hong Kong. “Atlas: Archeology of an Imaginary City,” is Dung Kai-Cheung’s love letter to Hong Kong. It’s a strange novel – and not what I had expected. Dung Kai-Cheung has been compared to Borges and Italo Calvino – especially this work compared to Calvino’s “Invisible City.” It is a strange book full of postmodern techniques and sensibilities. It’s a fiction based work; written as if it were a non-fiction account. It’s about the reconstruction by a future archeologist, of a city by the name of Victoria – which is very similar to Hong Kong. Even this though is a boneless or rather abstract concept of the plot and workings of the novel.

There are no real characters. There are a few character studies and vignettes in their place and contribution to the city and to its history. But other than that, there is not a lot in regards to character or really even much of a story. That is why it is wonderful, that it is a short book; because towards the end it had started become bone dry and very difficult to plow through. This is mainly because it was missing the human element. It structured itself off of an academic premise, in a fictional content. But it came across as overtly academic and not fictional enough. Often missing key parts, like the individuals role inside the workings itself. There are a few instances of this; but they are few and far in between. The fictional documentation is very interesting, but the critical assessment of cartography and topography is overly done. Yet there are moments of beauty and often interesting understandings; that do become breaths of fresh air.

“Looking out at night from the front gallery of the Government House, before the moon had risen, I witnessed an effect which was quite strange to me. The sky, though clear of clouds, was somewhat hazy, as that the small-magnitude stars were not visible, though some of the larger ones were plain enough. Beneath however, the air was quite clear, and consequently, though the buildings, in the city were invisible in the darkness, their innumerable lights seemed like another hemisphere of stars even more numerous than the others, and differently only as being more dizzying.”

-- a quote from the book, by Chris Patten, the last governor of Hong Kong before the United Kingdom relinquished it back to mainland China.

It furthers this romantic and often strange world of Hong Kong. A place built on steel, glass and light. A universe so small and compact, yet buzzing and teeming with life, that it almost defies reality with its existence. The only regret with this books besides it’s often overtly dead plan academic feel to it, is that it did not have enough stories. The ones that did pop up were wonderful and very intriguing but, there is a feeling that they were only a small taste of what could have been; what is; and what will be. Constant discussions of maps can become rather wearisome. But legends, folktales, and odd characters, salt and peppered throughout the novel will always give a sense of connection. It’s a great book, and a better understanding of Hong Kong, written by a Hong Kong writer, not an outsider. So it has a more authentic feel to it; but it did not deliver as it had promised, all the time.

Thank-you For Reading Gentle Reader
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read
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M. Mary