Laura Ruggeri

The Fiction of Non-fiction. Reflections on writing a book about Hong Kong

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Unlike what happens in an introduction, where the writer maps out a given territory (the book), so that the reader can embark on a safe journey across the pages,  I invite the reader to join in the exploration, experience all the obstacles, dead ends, false leads, u-turns, setbacks that any real exploration entails. These notes are, more than anything else, a quest for the raison d’être of a book that has  been aborted several times, for which I sifted through archives, took notes and photographs, made drafts, collected newspaper clippings, interviewed dozens of people, and amassed hundreds of quotations.

I first started by dividing the collected materials into dossiers, each one dedicated to a topic. As the number of dossiers increased beyond my expectations, I realized that something was wrong. Soon my enterprise would resemble that of the Borges’ cartographer who ended up drawing a scale 1:1 map.

Walter Benjamin had faced a similar problem in his Arcades Project (Das Passagen-Werk): he transcribed thousands of index cards full of quotations and notations into dossiers he called Konvolute. Each  Konvolute comprised a vast array of interlinked scraps. His ingenious system of cross-referencing prefigured the possibilities of hypertexts, but was clearly unmanageable on paper. As we know, his life was cut short before he could find a way out of this predicament: imposing order on material that resisted classification and constantly spilled over the borders of the taxonomic space he had created.

I too resisted any monological closure that would fixate meaning and contradict the palpable fluidity of my heterogeneous collection, which had begun without clear guidelines and was inherently dialogical, with the potential to resonate in unpredictable ways.

The series editor wanted ‘a city monograph to capture and represent Hong Kong, and its putative identity.’ But is there such a thing as a ‘city’? Is it possible to make it an object of inquiry, given that urban sites have neither single identities nor clear edges or boundaries? The city seems inseparable from its representations, yet it is neither identical with, nor reducible to them, and so it poses complex questions about how representations traffic between physical and mental space. The city is a slippery notion, sliding back and forth between an abstract idea and concrete material.

James Donald argues that the city constitutes an imagined environment, ‘The city is at the same time abstractly conceptual and intensely personal. It is an imaginary space created and animated as much by the urban representations to be found in novels, films and images as by any actual urban places.’[i]  

It follows that one cannot represent ‘the city’ as such but only some aspects of it, some processes and flows that help to constitute it. Representing Hong Kong raises some additional, epistemological questions. On the one hand, it poses the question of  the translatability of cultural difference, on the other hand, it raises the ethical question of  the morality of speaking for others. For not only would any representation of the city which I might produce, inevitably be stamped with my own particular set of interests, views, standards and so on; these representations would also speak my cultural provenance, that though cannot be located in the continuity of any particular culture or tradition,  is by and large European.

            Then, which processes and flows would I be able, allowed, willing to represent? As Wittgenstein said:  ‘the limits of my language mean the limits of my world’. [ii] My sensations and understandings are inextricable from the systems of signs through which I articulate them to myself and others. My understanding of Hong Kong is limited by the languages I speak. These languages not only structure my social and cultural identity, they also overcode and undercode my experience, composing it in terms of their own grammar, and vocabulary.

            Perhaps the urban experience and its representations cannot be dissociated from a certain linguistic confusion. After all, if we are to believe the Scriptures, the confusion of languages began in the city of Babel, probably the first metropolis recorded in history.

Benjamin was writing in German,  the material he collected for his Arcades Project was mostly in French. Translating it would have increased  its accessibility, but eliminated the dialogical tension created by the presence of these two languages in the original Konvoluten. To say that linguistic confusion characterized my experience of Hong Kong is an understatement: an Italian-born nomad, married to a Hong Kong-born South Korean citizen, I couldn’t read Cantonese. One year later, I was jotting down notes in English for a book that would be published in Italian. Though English is not my mother tongue, this language was chosen because it afforded me a greater level of concision than my own: as a medium it seemed more concrete, substantial - it offered more resistance. Writing in English allowed me to feel the tautness of the rope underfoot. The fact is, that the use of a foreign language also provided an architecture for experience: as a grid it ordered my world, and translated a similarly foreign world.

Nevertheless, I was often caught in this double-bind: translation was impossible - traduir is always trahir[iii] - and yet necessary. Imperfection was inevitable but could lead to new realms of exploration. Travelling between semantic fields is a practice of bold omission and minute depiction, a practice that allows one to become shamelessly hybridized as one shuttles back and forth between blindness and insight. I also became aware that as a translator I transformed while being transformed.                                                                                                               

Between the visible and the invisible

Since I had been asked to focus on the built space of Hong Kong - as if architecture could give evidence of a city’s identity - it was assumed that I would confine my investigation to the visible. This demand soon turned into a matter of contention between series editor and publisher, who clearly had two completely different books in mind.

Hong Kong’s urban landscape changes at such a vertiginous speed, that the question of ‘spatial identity’ becomes particularly problematic. Hong Kong space has been likened to a magnetic tape that can be erased and reused, leaving no traces of previous uses. [iv] The life expectancy of  buildings in Hong Kong has nothing to do with either materials or construction  techniques. Rather, it is determined by market forces. Buildings in Hong Kong suffer the fate of any other commodity, an insight that Walter Benjamin arrived at more than half a century ago, when he wrote: ‘In the convulsion of the commodity economy we begin to recognise the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled’[v]. Property speculation means that every building in Hong Kong, however new or monumental, faces imminent ruin, on the premise of ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ - a logic that, by contracting time, dispenses even with the pathos of decay. However, those buildings and places that have been effaced from the urban palimpsest without leaving any visible trace, are still vivid in people’s memory, as I have often realized when asking someone for directions, and was told ‘Turn left where such and such building used to be’.

 How could I account for this vanished or latent city that despite being invisible still played such an important role in everyday spatial practices? I also started to fear that the publisher’s insistence on ‘built space’ would turn me into an architectural voyeur. Architecture has the dangerous potential of turning all of us, locals and visitors alike, into tourists, gazing at a stable and monumental image of the city. The fact is that such stability is deceptive and illusory, although Hong Kong seems only too keen to lend itself to this kind of visual consumption.

The highly impressive skyline, with its growing number of signature buildings by international architects constitutes a monument in its own right. Yet such a skyline not only underlines the domination of the marketplace, with the architect’s signature functioning as a brand name; it also takes to an extreme Sharon Zukin’s argument that ‘market’ erodes ‘place’[vi]. The combination of rising land prices, property speculation, and the presence of large corporations vying for prime space results in a constant rebuilding.

Given these premises, could Hong Kong architecture ‘represent’ the city? As Diana Agrest has pointed out, it is one thing to look at the city from the point of view of architecture and quite something else to look at architecture from the point of view of the city. [vii] The city from the point of view of architecture may be associated with painterly modes of looking, derived from classical tradition, but architecture from the point of view of the city can only be associated with film, the visual art that developed alongside the modern city; that is to say, the art that problematizes the visual as stable because it is film that gives us, in Jean-Luc Godard’s words, truth twenty-four times a second.

 In the case of Hong Kong, there is indeed an important relation between architecture and cinema that goes beyond including shots of impressive buildings on film. Not only are they the two most developed cultural forms in Hong Kong, but they are also the most dependent on the market and the most predominantly visual. Nevertheless, there is a crucial difference, and it concerns their relation to Hong Kong’s urban space, to visuality and to the local. Hong Kong films, in a few outstanding examples, have managed to capture changes and contradictions in the spatial experience of the city and by extension, the historical and political implications of such changes and contradictions.

The case of Hong Kong architecture, at least up to the present moment, is somewhat less sanguine. It constructs a visual space that to a large extent resists critical dismantling. It does not concern itself as yet with the question of cultural self-definition and presents to itself only the false image of power. There are now enough examples of outstanding buildings to make a coffee-table book, but it remains true that architecture still seems reluctant to address the paradoxes of urban space.

Up until now, it has been cinema that has been posing the important spatial questions, which should be questions for architecture as well. When I look at Hong Kong architecture, what I see is a variety of spatial practices. There is for example a vernacular mode that can be very ingenious and inventive in maximising a limited space. But these spatial practices are mostly imposed by poverty or necessity, and one should perhaps not romanticise them to much.

What happens alternatively, when there is relative freedom to build? At this point variety disappears. What I see is architecture very much concerned with doing the right thing; whether it is acquiring the services of renowed architects who can provide a ‘brand name’ building, or more modestly by simply following trends, quotationism without the wit, where the model or genre is not transformed, only repeated. The result is the spread of the generic everywhere, whether it is the ‘high’ genre of corporate towers or the ‘low’ genre of housing estates.

 The case of Hong Kong cinema is different, its most interesting practitioners address the issue of spatial aporias, link history, space and affectivity, use the visual to problematize visuality itself and in this way contribute to a critical discourse on colonial space. To describe is to observe mutations, and this is precisely what Hong Kong directors such as Wong Kar-wai, Fruit Chan, Allen Fong, Stanley Kwan, Ann Hui, Patrick Tam, Tsui Hark and others do. They show that what looks very permanent is in fact very temporary, and by the same logic, the temporary can also have a relative permanence. Their cinematic representations of Hong Kong somehow succeed in conveying the elusiveness of Hong Kong urban space. There are no ultimate depths, as the search for revelations is shown to be endless. What remains are surfaces, mirrors, doubles: ‘that which is merely seen (and merely visible) is hard to see’[viii], as Henri Lefebvre notes about the ‘abstract space’ of capitalism.

 The point holds true for Hong Kong space, where the visual is both ineluctable (right in your face) and elusive at the same time. What is even harder to see, is the dematerialized space created by the technological speed of information and communication. Information technology is changing the nature of place: ‘space’ and ‘place’ cannot be opposed in any simple way, nor can they be considered separately. The limits or boundaries of the city have come into question, largely because of technologies that introduce a novel idea of space: space as nonphysical and dematerialized.  In a word, ‘invisible’.

The harder we try to categorize it, the more the city mocks the available categories and remains, in spite of its overwhelming presence, a peculiar kind of ‘invisible city’. Ackbar Abbas, one of Hong Kong most lucid cultural critics, in addressing some of the idiosyncrasies of Hong Kong’s colonial space, describes the city as a ‘space of disappearance’ and argues that ‘there is a gap, hysteresis , between the city and its representations, the way the city has been made to appear in many representations in fact works to make it disappear’[ix].

Consider the representation of Hong Kong as an East-West city, mixing tradition with modernity like memory and desire. We see this idea enshrined in one of the most durable images of Hong Kong, which shows a Chinese junk in Victoria Harbour against a backdrop of tall modernistic buildings. This image has gone beyond kitsch and stereotype, and is being promoted as an urban archetype, reproduced in countless postcards; a stylized red junk is the chosen logo of the Hong Kong Tourism Board. What disappears behind such a copulation of clichés and facile binarism, is the city I know. Moreover, what this stereotypical juxtaposition of East and West cannot account for is the performative nature of differential identities, and their relation to space.

What is really difficult to represent is the ‘third space’ of which Homi Bhabha[x] speaks, characterised by the non-synchronous temporality of global and national cultures, locus of complex hybridization processes, existing somewhere beyond our perceptual and mappable experience. Hong Kong, as a peculiar type of ‘third space’ existing on borrowed time in a borrowed place, has developed a tendency towards timelessness (achronicity) and placelessness (the inter-national). Hong Kong is a ‘floating city,’ to use a metaphor borrowed from Xi Xi, a Hong Kong writer, but this floatation has little to do with long gone Chinese junks. In one of her short stories, Xi Xi wonders,

What is it that enables this floating city to stay so steadily in the air? Could it be the gravitational pull between ocean and sky? Or could it be a       marionette performance staged by the god of destiny holding numerous invisible strings in his hands?[xi] 

A floating city is a city without roots and ‘you need courage to live without roots’.[xii]  Hong Kong is a city that seems to have been built on contingency, on geographical and historical accidents, shaped by times and circumstances beyond its control and by pragmatic accomodations to events. Without any stable identity, neither British nor Chinese, but a peculiar hybrid that looks like nothing else but itself, Hong Kong is home to more than 200 different ethnic groups. True to its vocation as a port, Hong Kong is a place of transit; half of its population was born elsewhere.

In what can be described as a ‘space of hybridization’ there is no longer anything absolutely foreign. Everything is within reach. Accordingly, there is no longer anything that is exclusively ‘own’ either. Authenticity has become folklore, it is ‘ownness’ simulated for others.

Any representation of the city is, necessarily, always going to be a reductive entity. The problem lies in the fact that representations, by revealing only specific aspects of the city and focussing our attention on these instead of others, have the power to frame problems in such a way that only certain solutions are likely to occur to us. Representations are means by which the city is known, analysed and controlled: ideology and knowledge become barely distinguishable once they are subsumed under the broader notion of representation. The languages in which the city is taken to be known - the languages of economics, sociology, statistics, surveys, case studies, demographics, cartography, photography, empirical documentation, etc. - are languages not only for describing the city, but languages embedded in the techniques and technologies of disciplinarity. These languages are characterized by a high degree of impersonality, and adopt an empirical, formal register. Their claims to ‘objectivity’ are particularly suspect.  What is presented as a logical or scientific ‘truth’ is itself a rhetorical device, an effect of language that seeks to negate its status as language. The author’s own involvement with, or commitment to a particular analytical position and his/her political ties are seldom mentioned, and the city seems regularly to speak, and sometimes to act, for itself.

However, in recent years the methods and languages used to describe and analyze the spaces of the city have become subject to intense scrutiny and debate. The city and its flows are no longer posited as knowable, graspable, harnessable and controllable, as a postmodern orientation distrusts and interrogates all meta-narratives, the mimetic theory of representation and the search for ‘truth’. Rather than setting up a model of some universal, value-neutral researcher, this approach recognizes that interpretation and representation are an interpersonal and intercultural process, a dialogue between one’s data - other places, other people - and the researcher who is embedded within a particular intellectual and institutional context.

Since a representation cannot, of course, literally reproduce the whole of what it seeks to represent, the interpretive process necessarily entails a selection and a movement  - back and forth - from presences to absences, from an area of experience which is felt to be understood, to one that is cognitively less secure. This discursive movement requires the use of various rhetorical strategies including tropes such as metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony, which construct meaning by transferring or deferring it from the realm of familiar experience into the realm of the unfamiliar. Not only do they become the form in which (partial) knowledge of the city is conveyed, but also as cognitive tools, they produce fresh perceptions and insights. Thus the city is not so much a transparently viewed object of representation, as it is a ‘material’ from which something new is fashioned.

Because what we know and how we know is situated, it follows that a practical or situated way of knowing is contextual, and rooted especially in embodiment.

A different, embodied, experience of urban space calls for a different theoretical approach and critical practice. (...)