A gweilo's take inside ChungKing Mansions

Chungking Mansions on the Kowloon side (exit D1 from Tsim Tsa Tsui station) is one of those places that evoke in you only the strongest feelings.  Either you love it or you hate it at the first sight. For the longest time in my nearly two year stay here so far, that place gave me the creepy crawlies.

(One caveat: I am a guy with normally a very high tolerance threshold and I have stayed in my fair share of shady places.)

If you are a foreigner (or a gweilo as you would be otherwise known in a slightly more disdainful way) who have been exposed to the LKF- Central- shiny mall-Peak culture of Hong Kong, CK is one of those places that shakes you up. 

Gritty, grimy and what in art director lingo would be called  as having "a certain character”. With shifty eyed South Asian merchants hawking everything from calling cards to the latest gizmos (ripped off/stolen/rarely original) to touts for various services sizing you up with shifty eyes from the very moment you step inside its cavernous interiors lined to garishly lit currency changing shops and to shops selling pirated copies of the latest Hindi film release, the experience has only begun.

From the Indian family who craves for that particular variety of vegetables/masalas to the African middleman looking to strike a deal for mobiles, electronics, etc to asylum seekers to the extreme budget minded tourists and a businessman seeking a toehold in the gateway to China, this place has something to offer for everybody. For a really lovely video montage of CK mansions as it is known, check out Wong Kar Wai’s 1994 classic Chungking Express. 

An event two weeks back proved to be a game changer for me. Accompanying a couple of colleagues on a story researching mission, we had the fortune of meeting some very interesting people at the place. Folks whom you otherwise would just pass by without scarcely giving a second look. Suffice to say, the sheer culture that goes beneath the surprise took my breath away. It was the real life equivalent of turning over a rock and discovering a country underneath. From South Asians who fled a wretched existence back home to eke out a living here to potential business deals being struck over plates of tandoori chicken and parathas in a crummy restaurant tucked away in a corner. 

In our nearly two hours of rambling aroud the place helped by Gordon Mathews, the author of the Ghetto at the Center of the world who terms this place as an example of “low end globalization”  a place where sex workers to phone dealers to families co exist together to scrape together a few monies for a better life back home.

As a long time inhabitant of this place told us,” this place was home to me when nothing else in the world was.”  For authorities who want to tear down this place from complaints on fire hazards to a so-called blot on the Hong Kong landscape , they would take away a 50-year old Hong Kong institution and replace it with “ a faceless mall” as Mathews puts it. For a related article, read this.

A pity as one reviewer of the book on the website calls it a “a labyrinth of exotica, adventure , and otherness.”