With the industrial revolution, the world began to change. With the changing world, several spaces became ‘business hubs,’ where people began to congregate to promote a shared goal that was often correlated with financial gain. With the development of ‘business’ orientated buildings, some cities have emerged as market centres. Gordon Mathew, an anthropologist, conducted an ethnography study on the ‘Chungking Mansion,’ a building in Hong Kong, which was published by the University of Chicago Press as Ghetto at the Center of the World: Chungking Mansion, Hong Kong in 2011.

Hong Kong is a business city, and Chungking Mansion is a building in Hong Kong. The author has seen how a building in a business city played the function of the world’s centre. The study looked at South Asian merchants, African traders, Indian temporary workers, African and South Asian asylum seekers, and penniless travellers from all over the world, as well as Indonesian sex workers, Nepali opium smugglers, Chinese residents, guest house workers, Indian and Pakistani phone sellers, and their communication languages, as well as anyone who encounters them.

The nature of society has changed throughout changing ‘time and space.’ Multi-non-belonging groups have come together radically and quickly in the globalization period to pursue a common goal. The focus of ethnographic research shifted from a “local” to the “global”. Marcus has argued that “Ethnography has moved conventional single-site location, contextualized by macro constructions of a larger social order, such as capitalist world system, to multiple sites of observation, the participant that crosses cut dichotomies such as the ‘local’, the ‘global’, the ‘life world’ and the ‘system’ (Marcus, 1995). The author has focused on the “intensification of global interconnectedness’ on human to human scale” with a focus on the “low end of globalization” in this building. Michel Burawoy pointed out that “…. global cities cannot be understood in isolation but only in their multiple connectedness”(Burawoy, 2000). The ethnographic study of the author must be seen in two ways. One is a study on buildings and their associations with other things and, the second is the relationship of buildings with other distant locations like Kolkata, Dubai, etc. Chungking Mansion was linked to these cities stretching across countries. The single site of the building is connected to multiple sites.

The author has divided his research into five chapters – Place, People, Goods and Laws, and Future in Chungking Mansion. He tried to get an opinion from a Hong Kong native on Chungking Mansion before entering the study – What did they think? According to the locals, something is not right in Chungking Mansion, and they have restricted their children from going in there.

After entering the building, the author encountered a native and a non-native community who had contrary views. The author and his assistant spent a significant amount of time in the building, interacting with businesspeople, staff, asylum seekers, restaurant owners, sex workers, women, and tourists. It is one of the easiest, cheapest, and safest places to make money, survive in life, enjoy, stay, and do many other things. The first chapter, looking at the building analyses the reason for its creation, its historical and contemporary global era meaning, architecture, and organization. In this chapter, the author does not use the term “ghetto” to refer to a specific neighbourhood in a city where a specific population or minority lives. Chungking Mansion is located within the city and the building itself is a ghetto of the world.

This book explores how a building can become a global ghetto. He found three major reasons for the building’s existence. – 1) the building’s cheapness, 2) the ease of entry into Hong Kong, and 3) the emergence of South China as a manufacturing powerhouse. Chungking Mansion is more than a building; it houses 920 owners, 549 residents, and 371 businessmen, the majority of whom are Chinese and some of whom are Hong Kong natives. Cantonese is the dominant language, but English, Hindi, Urdu, French, and Bengali are also spoken. Although there was no centralized group function, the entire company was moving in the same direction. Indians and Pakistanis do not fight because they have the same financial interests. The author has provided insight into how two different nationalities compete with one another, and how a shared business purpose brings them together. Authors enquired about ‘People’ in the second chapter: who are they? To begin, traders who come to Hong Kong to trade obtain a tourist visa for fourteen, sixteen, or nineteen days. They carry goods from mainland China or Hong Kong during that time, depending on what is available. They sell cellophane, clothing, electronic devices, watches, and other products. Some take from there and sell to their respective countries, while others conduct business in the same place. Many of these traders are from different countries, and the author has visited some of their trading locations in other countries along with his assistant researcher. Managers and owners in the second category, some from mainland China had acquired property in the building and others from Hong Kong in the 1970s and 1980s. Most managers belong to South Asian countries. Cleaning, waiters, and dishwashers are among the third category of temporary workers who serve as the backbone of Chungking Mansion. Some come from Nepal, Pakistan, and South India, but many from a single location in Kolkata, Kidderpore, due to the lower cost of travel. The author went to Kidderpore to learn about the relationship between the two locations. It is extremely difficult for them, according to the author. Some of the newly arrived asylum seekers perform the same tasks.

The fourth category is the asylum category; in 2006, Chungking Mansion housed 6,000 asylums. They are mostly from South Asian and African countries. Domestic workers, the fifth category, are mainly from Indonesia and the Philippines. The sixth category comprises sex workers, who make up 80 to 90 per cent of the population and come from various nationalities such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Mongolia, Tanzania, and Kenya. In this category, heroin addicts are mostly associated with Nepal. Tourists constitute the seventh category. They come from all over the world but choose this location because of the low cost of lodging. Despite having various nationalities, cultures, and ethnic affiliations, the author attempted to discover how they communicate with one another.

In the fourth chapter, the author discusses the complexities of Hong Kong’s asylum laws. Most asylum seekers arrive in Hong Kong from South Africa and South Asia in search of a new home. The Chungking Mansion played the most important part in the asylum process. They have various reasons for seeking asylum in Hong Kong, including stealing with them in their home country, being unable to repay debts, and being threatened by others. Although these are legitimate concerns, most applicants fabricate stories to obtain asylum in Hong Kong and work at Chungking Mansion. It takes longer for them to apply for asylum. Due to the high number of asylum seekers in Hong Kong, they come into direct contact with the government and the asylum office. They are also detained for various crimes, and others are taken into custody by the police. At one point, this had erupted in a protest for fair asylum treatment.

In the third chapter, the author has focused on ‘goods’. The author observed that “globalization” here “takes place not through the dealings of large corporations, but rather through individuals dealing with one another largely based on trust and working with a high degree of risk, often carrying their goods themselves across the globe”. In this chapter, the author found shops in Chungking Mansion have relationships with worldwide trade centres. Eighty per cent of shops belong to mobile phones. They sell at a cheap price; they occasionally sell counterfeit products. The author studied how a seller interacts with customers and whether they are cheated. They use religion in a moral sense at times, but the author has discovered that they are ‘morally lax’ when it comes to consumer situations. Many who came from the Muslim faith spoke of high values, but when it came to business, they were content to be “morally lax.” When it comes to stealing, they use two methods: one is “misrepresenting price,” and the other is “quality of products.” Under the guise of “quality of goods,” they market counterfeit goods and sell under the brand name. When a customer buys something, they don’t care whether it’s original or a copy; what they care about is having a good deal compared to the competition. He studied how they interact with one another, how they determine prices through negotiations, how middlemen operate, how they resolve communication issues, and how the offered price changes through negotiations. These are all questions that the author has attempted to answer through communication with them and observations. African and South Asian traders have come for several reasons, including poverty, but the bulk of them are from their own countries’ middle classes. They, too, have a generational split. The author wanted to know how they were able to avoid paying taxes on products.

Despite many changes in businesses, globalization, and rules, people still look forward to the future of Chungking Mansion. When the author asked an American tourist, what had changed in Chungking? He replied “Chungking Mansion has changed. Many things changed in Chungking Mansion with the rise of China. Chungking Mansion is still standing as a structure with a bright future. They adore their homeland, but they understand the significance of Chungking Mansion to them. Time and space have always changed modes, and Chungking Mansion is no exception. Many protests occurred in Hong Kong after the publication of this book; it was a period when people were seeking asylum in Hong Kong for various reasons, but today, following the post-protest China by natives, natives are seeking asylum in various parts of the world (specifically those who were involved in the protest against China law).

References

Burawoy, Michael, Joseph A. Blum, Sheba George, Zsuzsa Gille, Millie Thayer, Teresa Gowan, Lynne Haney, Maren Klawiter, Steve Lopez and Sean O’Riain. 2000. Global Ethnography: Forces, Connections, and Imaginations in a Postmodern World. University of California Press.

Marcus, G. E. 1995. Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology. 95-117.

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Mayur Narendra Kudupale is a Research Assistant at the Centre des Sciences Humaines, New Delhi.