Ghetto at the Center of the World: Chungking Mansions, Hong Kong

Somewhat intimidating but insanely fascinating, Chungking Mansions seems dropped from the Third World onto Hong Kong’s "Golden Mile," a luxe shopping strip in Kowloon. It's a place filled with cheap guesthouses, cell phone shops, money changers, Pakistani restaurants, and a swirl of people you're not likely to see together anyplace else.

In Ghetto at the Center of the World: Chungking Mansions, Hong Kong, Gordon Mathews explores what's going on inside the gritty complex, including following traders to their home countries, describing the different types of goods that come through the building, and profiling the overlapping populations: Africans taking goods (often knock-off or low-end cell phones made in China but also watches, cheap clothing, and other items) back home to sell, tourists staying in the guesthouses (mostly adventurous Westerners and bargain-hunting Mainland Chinese), property owners from the Mainland, South Asians who own businesses or work for the various businesses in the building, Nepalese heroin addicts out back (descendents of Nepalese brought over by the British), and asylums-seekers with more or less legitimate claims. According to a rough estimate by the author, about 20 percent of the mobile phones recently in use in sub-Saharan Africa passed through Chungking Mansions. In part, the building and the ecosystem it fosters is owed Hong Kong’s lax visa policy and customs inspections—the region’s business-above-all-else ethos.

The writer is an anthropology professor, so there’s a lot of “in this chapter, we’ll discuss” and “as discussed in chapter X"—and there’s a lot of relying on extended quotes. There’s little of the colorful detail you’d expect in a non-scholarly work. Still, having only spent a little time in Chungking Mansions (and nearby Mirador Mansions), I was interested to read more about the building, and this is by far the most comprehensive work I've found.

If I might take a trick from Mathews's own book, I'll deploy an extended quote to explain low-end globalization, the phenomenon that creates Chungking Mansions' unique environment.

This book is about Chungking Mansions and the people within it, but it is also about “low-end globalization,” a form of globalization for which Chungking Mansions is a central node, linking to an array of nodes around the world, from Bangkok to Dubai to Kolkata, Kathmandu, Kampala, Lagos, and Nairobi. Low-end globalization is...traders carrying their goods by suitcase, container, or truck across continents and borders with minimal interference from legalities and copyrights, a world run by cash. It is also individuals seeking a better life by fleeing their home countries for opportunities elsewhere, whether as temporary workers, asylum seekers, or sex workers. This is the dominant form of globalization experienced in much of the developing world today.

Although the academic tone of the book keeps it from being a very entertaining read, the interesting subject matter mostly makes it worth it. And Mathews has obvious affection for the building and its denizens. While that sometimes leads him to brush aside the seedier aspects, it does make the place come to life. It's beyond the scope of Ghetto at the Center of the World, but, as the book points out, Chungking Mansions has cleaned up a lot in recent years. I'd love to read more recollections from the even more freewheeling old days.