Interviews in Hong Kong
These interviews were conducted in March 2018 in a city that was so very new to me in so many ways. Yet as the final site in my field trips, it was strangely familiar as well --- drawing from the cha chaan teng (tea restaurants) I spent time in Vancouver’s Chinatown to the coastal construction sites of Singapore.
As I visited the freshly laid reclaimed land in West Kowloon, with its brand new trees, public parks, and ongoing construction, I heard the voices of Leung Chi Wo, Angela Su, Tse Pakchai, Cally Yu, Dung Kai Cheung, and Chloe Lai. They guided me through Hong Kong’s contested past, its growing awareness of the cost of development, and the great unease surrounding growing Chinese authoritarianism.
There was so much wealth and yet so much inequality in the city --- existing as if two distinct cities had been superimposed, one over the other, the two seldomly interacting.
Whose land was this? How did the colonial lead so directly to the threat of the totalitarian? Whither Hong Kong after 2047?