Saturday, June 28, 2008

THE TOWERS OF HONG KONG


The first thing you see in Hong Kong are the tower blocks. They are what you see most, too. They are the walls of the city, and most of the time they are the sky as well. Repeated over and over, between ten and twenty storeys, all slightly different but the same shape. All together, they look like a crowd of tall, old ghosts. They look like rows and rows of teeth in some old animal. They look like rock formations made millions of years ago by God and left to weather since then.

From the outside, they look bleak. Streaks of rust and water and damp fall down from beneath the windows. They’re built out of some grey render, rough, crude, unadorned. A few are, were, painted in pink stripes, and a handful are still bright colours, green, orange up to red, like ice pops. But most are just left in the material they were thrown up in.

All the windows are different. Each one a different make, brand, material, replaced piece by piece, adhoc. But all of them have the same air conditioning thrusting out of them, bolted on, sticking out like warts.

The blocks have holes cut into them, canyons dropping down all the way to the ground. These holes are like arseholes, fetid, hot, filled with rotten food and tissues and air con units, all shielded with a piece of corrugated iron from the litter dropped above. All these cold machines screaming away to suck heat out of their own flat and spit it into someone else's, like another kind of litter. The windows that open onto these holes are pointless. If you’re more than three floors down, no light reaches you. You can’t tell whether it’s day or night.

Doesn’t this sound dreadful? Doesn’t it sound like hell on Earth, hot, stinking, cramped hell? But the surprising thing is: it isn’t. The corridors and stairwells inside the towers are scruffy; mosaic tiles missing, dust, naked wires and bright lights. But they aren’t scary. There are no broken televisions, no drugs, no alcoholics, no shit, no tabloid hell, nothing like the fear at home. Instead, it’s like a terrace, a series of different coloured doors, each with a different grill on the outside. Decorated with Chinese exhortations: Double Happiness! or Best Wishes To Those Who Enter! or something else jarringly, unexpectedly upbeat. And during the day, the doors behind these grills are opened. You can hear the swish of fans, and the too-loud din of soap operas. You can hear the click of Mahjong tiles being shuffled, or the song of a choir in a church located on the fourth floor, or the hoot of a Chinese instrument you don’t know, echoing down the well as you walk past.

There are pieces of people everywhere. A pair of kitten heeled flip flops left on someone’s mat. A blue plastic trike outside your neighbours door. Umbrellas hanging off a pipe to dry. A red lantern, some socks, some washing. A pot plant, a wooden stool. People have set up karaoke systems in the flats, offices, work rooms, stores. Humanity has grown here, made it home.

It’s wrong to call these tower blocks: that makes you think of ours, standing on their own, isolated. They aren’t just apartment blocks either: there are shops at the bottom and on the first floor, offices, cafes, karaoke bars up until the fourth floor. These are just buildings: the fabric of the city, what it’s made of. What it is.

AN INTRODUCTION


This is a blog about being in China right now. About watching this country go boom.

It's not about statistics or the amount of concrete being used. It's just about how people are living here, what people are building here, and how it feels. Wikipedia this ain't.

I'm starting off in Hong Kong, then heading up to Beijing for as long as they'll have me.

Oh, and the name of the blog comes from a brilliant American saying of the 19th century; when young people were urged to go out to the wild west, a land of opportunity, where anything was possible. The saying goes:

Go West, young man, and grow up with the country.

Today, it seems to me that the West is done: fat and tired and out of ideas.

Today, I think that quote should be:

Go East, young man, and grow up with the world.

I AM LOST IN HONG KONG


I got off the plane and waited for a bus. The rain was pouring. I got on the bus and pressed my face against the window. As we drove into the city, I saw concrete buildings pop up. Ten. Twenty. A hundred. A thousand. A million. Concrete apartment buildings, two flats wide, forty, fifty, sixty stories high. Unfinished buildings cocooned in bamboo scaffolding and green sheets. Office blocks in the sky. Covered in neon. Blinking.

I got off the bus and walked out into the heat. The rain was throwing. I put sandals on and waded through the streets. The rain was hurling, dropping, bouncing. I walked beneath flyovers, under underpasses. I walked through heat, heat like a wall you had to climb over, like a hill you had to climb up. I walked through smells stronger than anything I’ve ever smelt, like the whole city had gone off.

I didn’t know what time it was, what day it was, what month it was, what year. There was no way of telling. The sky was always grey. I couldn’t see the tops of the buildings. I couldn’t see anything. The rain was hitting, cracking, firing.

I found a park in the middle of the tower blocks. I found a concrete football pitch, painted green. It was flooded too. I didn’t know where I was, or when, or how I’d got there. So I walked to the middle of the football pitch, and stood on the centre circle, under my umbrellas, wondering what to do next.


Photograph by Gemma Thorpe.

Thursday, June 19, 2008

GO EAST YOUNG MAN


The first time I realised something was happening with China, and with the world, and with me, was the 15th March 2008. It wasn’t in the papers, or on the news. It wasn’t some editorial telling me: China is the fastest growing nation on Earth, China is building 100 power stations a second, China will eat more cows than Belgium by this date, snooze snooze snooze. In fact, it was in a museum. The Victoria and Albert Museum, in London.

It was partly what I saw in the V&A that made me realise. I’ve been to China before, last year, for a month. In that month, I saw more people than I’d ever seen. I saw sprawling cities full of fat skyscrapers, like cheaper versions of the ones we built in the 80s. I saw shops full of mobile phones, streets full of cars, malls full of people.

But the phones all looked like knocks-offs of the phones we buy; the cars looked like crapper versions of the cars we drive; and the shopping centres were full of our shops. It didn’t seem like China was doing it for itself, having its own ideas, creating its own cities. It just looked like a country copying off other people. It seemed quite desperate to me.

In half a day at the V&A, this changed. The exhibition was called CHINA DESIGN NOW. The poster was made out of neon Chinese characters. It was Dead Cool. And suddenly, here was China talking to itself, not to us.

There was graphic design made in a city called Shenzhen, created out of Chinese characters and images, that looked as modern and as good as anything Peter Saville did in Manchester. These posters were designed by kids in a city of 10 million, a city with an average age of 27, that didn’t even exist 30 years ago.

There were films made in Shanghai like ‘In The Mood For Love’. Subtle, pouting, gentle, beautiful films. There was a music video by a band called New Pants, in which the band dressed up like Bruce Lee and dispatched a series of 70s martial arts clichés. There were amazing products, tea-sets, trainers, dresses, corsets. Not just made in China any more, but made by China.
And then there were the buildings in Beijing. Buildings that the rest of the world wouldn’t even dare to think of. Yes, you’ve got your super-modern look-at-me boxes, like the CCTV tower by Rem Koolhaus, or the Beijing Digital Centre by Studio Pei-zhu. And there were some subtle, little buildings as well: the very much uncommunalCommune by the Great Wall, or Fathers House, built for the architects’ Dad, better than every would-be icon thrown up at home. But who gives a shit: Beijing is building the Birds Nest, the most beautiful building on Planet Earth. Just that would be enough for me.

All of these things, these products, these buildings, couldn’t have come from anywhere else. All of them were totally and utterly Chinese. And all of them were amazing. My jaw was dropped. My mind was blown.


But it was something else that really hit me. The best exhibit, the most incredible thing on display, wasn’t anything from China. It was the rest of the people there. It seemed like the entire Western world was at that exhibition. Upper-class global types with no homes and grey Muji clothes. Painfully trendy London boys wearing trenchcoats and their dads’ moustaches. Posh old London ladies with fat painted lips and 80s glasses. Pretty Finnish girls with symmetrical faces. Japanese girls with perfect bobs and perfect English. Fat Americans wearing bum bags. Grey haired academics with grey haired wives.

The whole rich white world. And all of these westerners, these lean, toned, moisturised, well-fed, in-credit westerners, were walking round the museum in silence. They were looking at China, and trying to understand. Trying to come to terms with this massive geographic shift, with this tectonic economic movement.

And they were thinking this: the world is slipping away from Us and towards Them. Everything is going East. Something new is happening now. We are no longer the golden boys. We are no longer the only ones running the show.