What You Hold May You Always Hold

What you hold, may you always hold.
What you do, may you do and never abandon.
But with swift pace, light step,
unswerving feet,
so that even your steps stir no dust,
go forward
securely, joyfully, and swiftly,
on the path of prudent happiness,
believing nothing
agreeing with nothing
which would dissuade you from this resolution
or which would place a stumbling block for you on the way,
so that you may offer your vows to the Most High
in the pursuit of that perfection
to which the Spirit of the Lord has called you.

Staring at a wall

Call it what you will

Island isolation

Sewing zafu’s for a thrill

Placing coffins in the soil

Replacing membranes with the toil

Memories, haze and shrinking corpses

Gross realm mayhem

Metaphoric divorces

Socks left on at night

Nothing left inside to fight

A double bed and two spare pillows

Shadows of oaks, elms, and willows

A farmer stands there

On a kitsch painting tilling the land

Lovers intertwined and hand in hand

Dust gathering on a Tzog offering shelf

Hamsters on treadmills generating wealth

False teeth stewing in a cloudy glass

And one day

All this goodness will come to pass

:)

*

Pedro and Sinter were from Birkenhead, a strange brown coloured town that used to smell of booze and the exhalations of a million cigarettes, of ash-trays of industry and later on in time, the material of cheap clothes wafting in the air as it hung-up for sale in the towns large market. Brown booze, fags, cheap material, boiling hot-dogs and onions and the merged smell of catering canister sauce and red plastic sauce dispensers. It was a town with an inferiority complex, which in many respects stemmed from its proximity to the popular once busy port of Liverpool which was a stone’s throw away on the other side of the Mersey. Although they were only separated by a mere strip of water, the girls on the Liverpool side would always be dressed like fairy cakes, all ribbons and bows, and suntans and cigarettes. The scruffy looking girls from Birkenhead would look at them with envy, and exaggerate the strength of their diluted Merseyside accents to make up for the misfortune of being born on the wrong side of all of the action.

           Everyone seemed to start smoking in this part of the country around the average and collective age of 9. It was a place where age defied convention. Grandmothers with hands covered in the glimmering sunset colours of eighteen carat gold would blow smoke rings into the sky like teenagers on acid. Ponytails perched on the tops of weary heads, navigating there Giro-pensions around shopping precincts, in their days punctuated with bus stops, and waiting and smoking and waiting and bus stops.

            With the assistance of the mystery cash flow that is the European Fund, Liverpool began to smarten up its image and its act. Weird looking attempts at postmodern architecture growing from the ground at weird angles. 'Oh to defy convention, a little bit more to the right and yes, that will do, now that’s postmodern isn’t it, oh the postmodern, oh it doesn’t look quite right, oh great, it must be right then, oh but there’s no such thing as right, alright, what, you want a fight?' This ‘is’ Liverpool. Don’t you just love the anti-ossifying flow of postmodernity, posteternity, I wonder what would happen to Liverpool if there was such a thing as postmaternity? But the truth was, it always had a lot going for it because it had a population of people that were unpretentious and talkative, talkative and argumentative. Families battled it out but often stayed together, and didn’t care if you were watching them as they slapped there cheeky teenager, or spouse, or boyfriend or girlfriend or neighbour or stranger, or baby in public. It was by all accounts what seemed to be a population that was in dialogue with each other, a populace that interacted. They didn’t just commute around all day in Liverpool; they weren’t just a population of individuals carving there way through the hustle in search of individual pursuits. It was a city that was united.  It was a place that if you glanced through the window of an Indian restaurant on Aigburth Road for example, you might see Alexis Sayle tucking into a vindaloo with his ageing mother.

            And so it was Liverpool that had a big heart, in a world that has lost its way and in many ways, lost its heart, which is why year after year new people visited – Japanese kids – mutton dressed as lamb in 60’s Beatles clothing. There were graduates refusing to return to their snotty places of birth after university, and professionals crawling out of the woodwork en masse to move into the renovated dockland apartments in their attempt to rejuvenate the word ‘trendy.’  

            The brown town on the other side of the Mersey was a different story. Pedro’s Birkenhead was a place of railways and corner pubs, and poverty, and women chatting while sitting on old three piece suites on street corners, chin-wagging their way threw different horizons. It was a more casual kind of place, a downgraded, less glitzy version of Liverpool. It was a place of boxing clubs and fitness centres and of tapping-off inside nightclubs called 'The Pleasure Drome' and 'Atmosphere.' It was a place with an ageing population of bikers and punks and had-beens and head-bangers. It was a place of taxi-cues and pissed people chewing clumsily on burgers and donna kebabs. It was a place at weekends that smelt of the type of freedom that accompanies lack of parental guidance. It was a place where women went to the shops in their slippers and called their dressing gowns ‘house-coats.’

            It was an evolving town with a sense of respectability that was most profoundly witnessed in the Georgian houses that made up Hamilton square, in the pseudo Greek façade of its town hall, places where posh people might have once lived that were now offices for solicitors or other colourless professionals that could afford the high rents. If you closed your eyes and stood at Woodside Ferry Pier and breathed in, you could smell the significance of the place, of its history.  It was the kind of smell that was accompanied by a feeling in the pit of ones stomach. On the surface it would be of salt and sea and seaweed and other estuary delights, but underneath that, if your eyes were closed tight enough, you could see the past, see the story of the place before your eyes, hear the voices of the dead, hear the laughter pour out of the doors of pubs that no longer existed. It was a town of ghosts. It was a big brown ghost town.

            And big things once happened in Birkenhead, and that was the building of big ships. Camel Lairds Shipping Company, the landing strip of work contracts that would put high carbohydrate food on the tables of most of the houses in its shadow closed, and the town seemed to loose its pride, it lowered its chin and its bar prices, and its young dreamed up ways of escaping to places and destinations that they passed each day on the polished windows of Lunn Poly or if they dared Thomas Cook, now that’s evolution for you. Its skyline looked like it had been mined. All that remained were different shades of grey and brown and memories and pockets of postmodern subjugation. It had new ugly architecture, which would have had the architects of the past turning in their graves. And so it was from this brown town that lacked its neighbour’s decadent skyline where the two creators of the paradise of dysfunction met and grew up. Pedro was pleased that he came from the brown side; at least he could look out and see something great when he stood at the perimeter of his existence at Woodside’s Pier. He might have had to live in Birkenhead, but at least he didn’t have to look at its ramshackle skyline and crush his dreams of a better tomorrow.

Chapter One

________________________________________________________________________

“It is no longer possible to distinguish what is local and what is not. 

 In Hong Kong… the transnational is the local”

                        (Watson 1997: 80, cited in Mathews & Lui, eds. 2001: 300)

Introduction

Of late, there has been a renewed urgency in the social sciences to make sense out of the complexity of globalisation, particularly in relation to movements of people, place and what it now means to be a local. Not only has this prompted theorists to “delineate the processes through which transmigrants, living lives stretched across borders, reterritorialise their practices as well as their identities” (Basch et al 1993: 34), but in a broader sense has lead to “a transnational anthropology” (Appadurai 1991). Although “populations have long been mobile, interconnected and interdependent; their histories interwoven” (Caplan 1997), the intensity of today’s interactions merit renewed scholarly attention. There must be a reason why a British woman waking up this morning on a small Island in the South China Sea for example feels more at home than when she’s in the English town she was born in; why a French man painted grey is sitting unclothed during morning Puja at his Ashram in the Kolli foothills of Tamil Nadu (see www.aumnamahshivaya.org), or conversely why an asylum seeker stuck on the 13^th floor of a block of flats in Great Britain is sewing-up his eyelids in protest against deportation back to his country of origin.

            We live in an age were patronising euphemisms such as the first and third world are no longer sufficient distinctions of poverty or underdevelopment. Today’s rich and poor are now found in the same apartment blocks, the same streets, or the same neighbourhoods, albeit under vastly contrasting circumstances. Thus, despite illustrating the different guises mobility comes under today, what we increasingly fail to problematise are the transformative qualities that mobile populations bring to their new places of permanent or temporary relocation. A Colonial administration might indeed pack up and go, and their alien architecture bulldozed into a million fragments of memory, but what cannot be erased so easily are the socio-cultural transformations that are etched onto the landscape.

            These radical transformations of place are happening at unprecedented levels in the world all around us, and it is by delving back into the micro field-site which characterised much of early classical anthropology where these changes are best exposed. Thus, by revisiting the village we allow ourselves a chance to momentarily pull back the contentious layers of globalisation and transnationalism that tend to dwarf the day-to-day experiences of people, whom regardless of racial, national, political, religious or economic differentiation, all universally share the common desire to construct lives that are rich in meaning. The types of villages that classical anthropologists were typically found in may have had conceptual perimeters determined by a particular way of life, but even in the days of explorations into all things tribal or indigenous, outside influences, interactions and the ways of life of those under the anthropologists gaze were stretched in one way or another far beyond there own territorial propinquity. 

Significance of Research

            With the recent trend to accentuate the fluidity and dislocation of today’s mobilised populations, I believe we run the risk of forgetting two crucial things. Firstly is our intrinsic relationship to place, which instead of dissolving or becoming meaningless as we become increasingly mobile, takes on a renewed level of significance. Secondly, is the role that landscape plays, as mobile populations renegotiate their ethnicities and recreate their own petit histories that serve as building blocks for the generation of new socio-cultural contexts. Although our current theoretical musings point towards the complexity of the deteritorialised world “In which money, commodities, and persons unendingly chase each other around” (Appadurai 1991: 94), it is by returning to the transformed arena of what once seemed a relatively uncomplicated coherent locale; the traditional small-scale field site for example, that I believe we can shed new light in the direction of transnational moorings. Thus, this research focuses on a village called Yung Shue Wan – a village on Lamma Island, the third largest of Hong Kong’s outlaying Islands that make up the territories Island District and is an analysis of the way in which the inhabitants – Westerners (sai yahn), diasporic Filipinos, and local Chinese – practice a localisation of their world, generating a structure of existence (Friedman 1997) and a “space of experience” (Mannheim 1982). This research explores how the Island village has become home to a diverse overlapping community of communities, and questions the role that the Island landscape has played in the reconstruction of transnational and local ethnicities. Since this research sets out to understand both the colonial past and the post-colonial present of Hong Kong in its attempt to explore the multiple identities of Yung Shue Wan, I rely on data taken from detailed life histories of those living in the village today, as well as data gathered through structured and semi-structured interviews. The purpose of this is to bring a greater understanding of the forces that have been influencing socio-cultural change in the village since the late 1970s when the first Westerners came to live on the Island.  It is my contention that detailed life histories enable us to draw parallels between the lived experiences of individuals and the larger multiple and intertwined processes that fuel international mobility and the subsequent emergence of transnational communities. Not only does this rejuvenate a method that has throughout the last few decades waned in popularity among anthropologists, but it also offers us new opportunities to keep up with the individual, who is submerged in the often faceless processes that we pack tightly under the umbrella term of globalisation. I maintain, like scholars past (Benedict 1948) and more importantly present (Mintz 2004), that the life histories of the people we study parallel complex macro phenomena and as such provide us with a richer way of understanding our contemporary anthropological investigations. As Ruth Benedict writes, “The unique value of life histories lies in that fraction of the material which shows what repercussions the experiences of a man’s life – either shared or idiosyncratic – have upon him as a human being moulded in that environment” (Benedict 1948:592, cited in Mintz 2004). By listening to the life histories of individuals featuring in this study I have been able to map the connections between the desire among Westerners living in Hong Kong to move away from the colonial pomp that characterised their identity in the city during the 70s; to the rave scene and backpacking subcultures popular with Westerners throughout Asia in the 90s, and at the same time witness how the subsequent socio-cultural transformations have brought new opportunities to local landowners, who over the same time span were granted permission to build on previously farmed land.

            This research presents us with an “alternative” view of Hong Kong in two ways, first and foremost, it allows us to situate the identity of Westerners (particularly the British) outside of the framework of colonialism, which has because of its historical importance in the formation of Hong Kong, dominated the imagination when it comes to the way Westerners have experienced their ethnicity in the city. Not only does this shed more light and present us with an alternative view of ethnicity among Westerners (again particularly British) living in Hong Kong, but it allows us to analyse how the historical juxtaposition between locals and Westerners currently informs the multiple imaginaries of Yung Shue Wan.

Background

            Leased to the British in 1898 for 99 years, the fate of the territory was set in motion with the historical signing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration by the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1984, resulting in the 1997 handover back to China. Thus, as one of the last vestiges of the British Empire, it’s not surprising that the scholarly interrogations of Hong Kong have been enmeshed in its colonial history. It is from these historical trappings that today’s urban cityscape has emerged, characterising what has become a unique Asian metropolis. The skyline, dominated by its high-rise postmodern subjugation is a testament not only of its economic success, but also of its apparent socio-cultural hybridity and connectedness with the rest of the world. However, in the shadow of the metropolis, twenty five minutes ferry ride way from the high density hustle that for some typifies this “virtual nation” (Tapp 2000) lays an “alternative” Hong Kong. Attention was first drawn to Yung Shue Wan in the 1930’s, when the archaeologist Fr Daniel J. Finn accidentally stood on a large fragment of prehistoric pottery in a construction workers sand heap in Aberdeen (see Meacham 1980: 11). Tracing the source back to Tai Wan, a beach site a mere stroll away from the village of this study, Finn was able to salvage numerous bronze and Neolithic artefacts, enabling him to shed considerable light on the distant human history of the area. However, it wasn’t until the excavations further south of the Island at Sham Wan were “Found to contain in stratified sequence all the prehistoric, and some historic, cultural levels found at other sites” (Bard 1978: 1) that the significance of Lamma’s archaeological contribution was realised. Moreover, it is because of the subsequent development of the archaeological record in Hong Kong that “One can justifiably speak of pre-Sham Wan and post Sham-Wan phases” (ibid.: 1). Over forty years later in 1978, Finn’s Tai Wan site would become the stop of point for a group of Westerners on one of their typical weekend Junk boat trips. After swimming ashore and soaking up the scenery, John an Australian photographer now in his 60’s, one of the first Westerners to move to Yung Shue Wan, recalled his first memories of the Island. He said, “The water was pristine back then, and the place was underdeveloped. My friend and I jumped off the boat and climbed up a small hill opposite of what we now call Powerstation Beach[1]. My friend stood on the hill next to a small Chinese house and shouted out how he was going to come and live here, but as the guy had only just arrived in Hong Kong, us oldies just said ‘yeah right.’” However, just a couple of weeks later, both men had moved to Yung Shue Wan and a matter of months after that the number of Westerners living in Yung Shue Wan had risen to 12 people. John said, “I guess the twelve of us were a rogue bunch of people in those days [laughing]. Living here was a stigma. We are looking at a time in the days of the 70s and 80s when people [Westerners] living on The Peak would not even go down and eat in Chinese restaurants. Mainly because of the British contingent I am sorry to say.” Further to this he said, “We ignored all that, we were breaking the boundaries I suppose in a way.” However, “roguish” John claims that he and the few other Westerners living on Lamma were they differed from today’s transient population by the fact that they bought property on the Island. He said, “Once you bought property, they’d [locals] come to you,” signifying a feeling of acceptance and interaction with the locals of Lamma, which is perhaps somewhat absent today. This desire to move away from the colonial pomp that had been associated with the lifestyle of Caucasians living in Hong Kong, is mirrored in the emergence of Lan Kwai Fong and its first club Disco Disco as an “Alternative venue, an alternative to going to a hotel restaurant, or a hotel bar” (Cheng 2001: 239).  As John indicates, it was not so much a desire to live among the locals that fuelled the move of foreigners to the shores of Yung Shue Wan, but rather the desire to break the boundaries that situated Westerners vis-à-vis locals in a position dominance (see for example, J. Morris 1993, Epilogue to an Empire, London, Penguin, pp. 194-5).

            Thus, it is by travelling from the rich archaeology of the past to the anthropology of the present were the continued significance of Lamma Island can be reassembled, allowing us to explore some of the more recent transformations in the region. There are two major factors that have led to the types of transformations that are the focus of this study and these are the diversification of the population, which one can trace back to the late 1970’s, and a change in law which permitted local land owners to build three storey apartments on land that had previously been used for farming. The rapid construction of apartment blocks brought about a complete change in the local economy, a change that was ultimately facilitated by the introduction of a faster and more frequent ferry service to and from Central District, effectively opening the floodgates of Lamma. This offered two-way opportunities for the local population to monopolise on its newly found appeal to Westerners keen to live outside of, but with close approximation to urban Hong Kong, and to the steady stream of tourists who biblically flock to any destination that travel writers see fit as worthy of featuring on the crammed pages of their guide books, or websites.

“Returning” from the Field: Reflection and Methodology

          The beginning of a new academic semester signalling the official end of a four-month period of fieldwork was indeed met with a sigh of relief. As any theory-loving anthropologist will tell you, or quite possibly won’t tell you, returning to the prospect of burying ones head in other peoples work again, and the fresh attempt at theoretically musing over newly formed data is the perfect antidote to the puzzlement of being a human vessel for the further development of disciplinary knowledge. Unlike non-human vessels for experimentation such as test-tubes and other types of laboratory paraphernalia that one might systematically place poisonous chemicals into, before burning with a Bunsen burner and discarding, the anthropologist will suffer no such comfort and ease in the attempt to shed the aftermath of their fieldwork experience. However, as the months pass by, the anthropologist, tucked back into the comfort of their office can relive and reflect on this entire experience, and sieve out all the bits that have caused them discomfort, select whether or not to include any of these potential forays into solipsism and conjure up what at times seems to be no less than a miracle; a tidy piece of scholarly prowess that shows not only ones ability to enter a “real-lived” experience into the context of popular academic debate, but also the ability to quantify oneself in the process of qualifying the other, which of course everyone claims doesn’t exist. Upon this return to “normality” the other, a classic conceptual definition which we have spent over half a century building a discourse around is thrown into interplay again.

Last night as I sat on one of the rocks that outline the harbour of Yung Shue Wan, the village of my fieldwork, I pondered, in situ this time old equation. Although the official end of my fieldwork had been marked by the start of a new term, a new set of requirements to be met in order to graduate and the beginning of the special journey that is writing-up; the conversion of voices-into-data-into-product – the ethnography, the fact that I am still living in the village of my study has made this process (that usually has a more defined beginning and ending) more fluid and infinite. Having lived in the village in question for a year before I began anthropological fieldwork and remaining post-field, it must have been slightly odd at first for locals and foreigners living on Lamma to suddenly have somebody who they might have walked past a million times in Yung Shue Wan Main Street suddenly thrust upon them, enquiring about their lives. Like anybody else with a full-time schedule to navigate ones general life around, before the official beginning of fieldwork, I was bound by time and personal interests that inevitably meant that I would get to know certain people on Lamma more fully than others. Therefore the beginning of fieldwork for me really meant stretching my own perimeters, putting voices to the many faces that had become familiar to me from all sectors of the North Lamma community. From the outset I placed myself in all of the places that I never usually went to, and consciously set out to speak at length to people that I had a type of non-verbal rapport with, such as shop keepers, landlords, and local neighbours etc, who may have felt like they knew me to a certain extent despite having never had conversations in Cantonese that extended beyond the daily pleasantries. It was this existing rapport that often enabled me to go straight into lengthy discussions in an open and trustworthy manner via an interpreter, and for every conversation I had of this nature, a gap was bridged and questions flowed in both directions, which made for an immensely stimulating environment. Although it’s not what one first expects when one is interviewing, I found this process enjoyable and revealing, and I was explicit in my answers as I hoped those I interviewed would likewise be with their own. My requests to talk with people that I didn’t know at all within the Chinese community were met with such openness, that on occasion tears would even be shed as the person revelled in their memories and thoughts about issues I raised that were close to their hearts. Interestingly enough for me, the same woman who openly cried during my interviews would several months later completely ignore me in the street, so much for the closeness and trust our conversations are said to often lead us to. In fact, almost a year on its as if these moments of inner sharing on their behalf never happened at all, especially with regards to the local population I interviewed. I have since concluded that people don’t expect to have an “anonymous” researcher still roaming the streets of their village a year after opening up to them in the intense context of an interview situation.  In the interviews themselves it was often the case that asking one thing would lead to a whole new direction, and I did my best to facilitate this process of conversation, often spending hours on end listening to various aspects of a person’s life. However, I found out quickly that people preferred some sort of structure to talk against, and these semi-structured interviews tended to fizzle out after two hours, but at times stretched for longer – depending on how much the person doing most of the talking was enjoying themselves, or at least happy to keep talking. Conversely, on occasion I would find that after one hour of a completely formal interview, both I and the interviewee would be physically drained. At times, after interviewing a variety of people in different contexts, anywhere from inside of a bar to outside of the temple, I would literally feel like vanishing off the face of the earth, as if speaking to one more person would literally make me keel-over. Learning to strike a balance is just that. Moments like such I would use as perfect opportunities to escape into literature, to “top myself up” so to speak.

Cumulatively, I felt that there were two things going on in my interviews, which could be broadly labelled as a general openness and avoidance. In the case of the former, what was clearly illustrated was the level of intimacy an anthropologist can foster with the people involved in their research. Unfortunately there didn’t seem to be a happy medium in this process, people were either burning with enthusiasm and the spirit of participation or not wanting to talk to me either informally or formally at all.  Fortunately, having had a more than a year to build up a multitude of genuine relationships with people of Lamma from all walks of life and of all racial and national backgrounds, I believe I did my best to get acquainted with Lamma’s diversity. However, the length of time one has had to develop a relationship is not always the decisive factor in how conducive it will be to research. Having a very sociable daughter also proved to be seriously beneficial to this process, as did living in a variety of places in Yung Shue Wan, namely Ko Long Village, Tai Yuen New Village and Ka Nam Village, all unique micro-neighbourhoods  offering a chance to live in accommodation of all descriptions – a 450 sq ft 2 bed-roomed ground floor apartment, a 700 sq ft 3 bed-roomed 2^nd floor apartment, and a small Chinese house in the middle of a bamboo forest area, twenty minutes walk from the main village, which I got rewired and painted in exchange for cheap rent. All of these experiences have undoubtedly helped in the getting to know people and place process, and have also helped me understand first-hand why Westerners at least on Lamma choose to move so frequently. Living in a place that one research’s prior to fieldwork makes one feel like part of the furniture, seeing the same faces day-in-day-out, eventually getting smiles from all directions, and finally at times changing direction in order to avoid the hundredth conversation of the day with all and sundry as one tries to walk the length of Yung Shue Wan Main Street. However it is this characteristic that has made living in Hong Kong much more pleasant, and an antidote to the pace of life and lack of connectedness to people one feels as one is emerged in the hustle that characterises the rest of Hong Kong. Indeed, having had to commute from Lamma Island to Central District in order to continue via three trains to the Chinese University of Hong Kong which is on the KCR line and only several stops from Lo Wu the Chinese boarder, I have suffered the self-imposed inconveniences that many people in my interviews have talked about from living on Lamma. Missing ferries and being stranded in Central for the evening, leaving oneself with the only option of a death-trap ride home on a rickety sampan from Aberdeen fish market, is for some a frequent occurrence. I quickly found out that the longer one stays on Lamma, the deeper the psychological effort becomes of travelling in and out of the city for a night out or for anything at all. For the official four months of fieldwork, I only left Lamma Island four times, and each time was only for a couple of hours. This self-imposed quarantine from urban Hong Kong really accentuated the level of physical stress and discomfort I felt on my return to the city, a type of stress that seemed to dissolve once I stepped back on to the lovely breeziness of Lamma. It gave me a first hand opportunity to experience how easily one can become ‘romantic’ about ones locality and how this informs and impacts ethnicity. Again, this helped me to understand more fully the physical benefits of living on Lamma which people continuously talked about in the interviews, which despite being aware of, had personally not been experienced so acutely until I more or less stopped going into the city completely. It is by no accident that one of the first restaurants one encounters on the main street of Yung Shue Wan is called “The Holiday Mood Grill,” although saying that, it doesn’t seem like much of a holiday for the Chinese owner who can be seen battling daily in his attempt to persuade the reluctant stream of tourists through his doors.

            Being stationed on Lamma without distraction from the rest of Hong Kong also allowed me to experience some of the limitations that people living on Lamma often talked about in the interviews – the boredom and predictability, the insular nature of the long-term foreign residents who seem to coexist in what often seems to be non-permeable cliques, and the frustration of not being able to converse properly with local Chinese, who by contrast don’t seem too phased by this fact of life. I have also been able to witness first hand the pressure, stress and animosity felt between many of the Chinese business owners who often have exactly the same Western foodstuff gracing their shelves, and on occasion between shop owners and customers, especially if one happens to be walking into one shop with bagged goods from another. The fact that this anxiety is openly displayed by some shop owners signals that there is a real undercurrent of tension running through the village of Yung Shue Wan, that stems from the competitiveness that a diverse outside population bring to a small Island Village. The strongest advantages of living in a community prior to research, has to be the forging of relationships, or sense of familiarity at least with a broad spectrum of people. It is this rapport, especially were the local Chinese were concerned that I felt made-up for, to a limited extent, my inability to fully master Cantonese in the space of time allocated to this research. Surprisingly, the most problematic people to interview were those who I might have categorised as friends.

            I may have been the first anthropologist to conduct research on Lamma, but I was certainly not the first person living on the Island to make what had become my ordinary place of residence the subject of my work.  Indeed, life on Lamma continues to be subjected to the scrutiny of the photographer’s lens, the novelist’s pen, the journalist’s report and the cartoonist’s caricature, examples of which will be included in this work. Some people I spoke to thought the fact that my research was located on Lamma was hilarious, and didn’t take it seriously at all. An American Journalist who I met two days after his girlfriend had apparently ‘forced’ him to move to Lamma stated quite clearly that he thought my enquiry into various aspects of life on Yung Shue Wan was in his words, ‘really sad.’ On the other hand, a particular group of people I had known from the beginning of my time on Lamma were most of the time nowhere to be seen or curiously silent whenever I was around. This change in attitude towards me was stifling in a social capacity and sometimes the source of great anger and resentment on my behalf. Although I put these reactions to my research down to mild paranoia, the ethical issues they raised were indeed extremely important. I found the pending “standing-on-eggshells” approach to my anthropological research unsatisfactory, and was slightly outraged at the culture of suspicion that the discipline had over the years acquired, not so much by reputation but rather from the general public’s lack of understanding what the discipline is actually all about. What a sad state of affairs it is if the diverse inhabitants of this globe do not even have the slightest understanding of an academic discipline that directly concerns them.

In the early days of my research, upon the mention that I was doing anthropological fieldwork to a group of people in a bar, a well known photographer began doing an apparent impression of me ‘the anthropologist’ in action, which was a very amusing over-the-top impression of a person walking through the jungle discussing dead civilisations, animals and artefacts. In fact, this was probably one of the closest approximations of understanding of the discipline I came across, and in my case was still way-off centre. More down-to-earth understandings generally came from others who described themselves as anthropologists of sorts, which included the editor of Lamma E-Zine (a community website) who described himself as a ‘hobby-anthropologist,’ a magazine editor who described herself as an anthropologist in the sense that she was a social commentator and observer of people, and a writer for the weekend supplement of the Asian Wall Street Journal who was also writing in his spare time about Lamma. The bottom line was, that the roles of the above professions are embedded into the human imagination, into our everyday experience, whereas ‘anthropology’ is not, despite in many respects covering similar territory. A Baker mixes flour, water and whatnot and finally produces a loaf of bread. People may eat their daily bread, thus the Bakers job is experiential, it is internalised. Other frequent difficulties were met in the processes of running around in circles with individuals who by contrast semi-interviewed me every time we met, in order to ‘find-out’ what I wanted to interview them about. Funnily enough, I now firmly believe that this is what we should expect when we dare to attempt to discuss the intimate experiences and thoughts of individuals about their lives. I also imagine that if I was on the receiving end of one of my own interviews, that I would have also wanted to ask a lot of questions. The beauty of the ethnographic endeavour is that its data is by no means a monologue.

            Sitting outside a bar one evening with a friend, a South African called David who has lived on the Island for over ten years walked past me and laughed out, ‘Look at you, your becoming the subject of your own study.’ Did he have a point? Was it possible to live in a village that was also my place of research, was I an ‘honorary’ local? If so, was that a crime? Did my researcher role de-legitimise the authenticity of the relationships I had developed with various individuals? I felt that the ridiculousness of this apparent incongruity had become more profound to me than ever. I remembered a sudden flash of advice I had conjured up somehow as an undergraduate, which was to avoid at all cost the shame, embarrassment and horror of ‘going local.’ Participant observation, the umbrella term for getting involved in the everyday fabric of life in your place of research connotes by its very description that one is ‘pretending’ to be a legitimate part of what one is trying to do. This simplistic dichotomisation of identity, the participant/the person is heightened considerably if ones role changes when their place of temporary, albeit ordinary residence becomes their field site. Thus it seems that this historic yet contemporary conundrum deriving from one of our highly acclaimed methods of data collection is in need of a make-over in order to reflect some of the challenges researchers face in the explorations of life today.

            Why is it that the anthropologist almost feels apologetic for doing research, yet the journalist or researcher in a similar capacity feels no such restraint, either during or after data collection? Journalists are not met with such suspicion for the simple reason being that what they write ends up in print for all to see, available for purchase on the shelves of newsstands, whereas whatever one writes as an anthropologist is largely inaccessible to a wider lay audience, a fact that is further exaggerated by the language that one uses to present ones data. At the same time, whereas the journalist will often be strongly opinionated and publish material that takes ethics with a pinch of salt, the anthropologist on the other hand spends month’s painstakingly gathering intimate material, from which they then carefully and ethically create an argument which sets out to protect those who feature on its pages. Thus, the product of the journalist is something that is highly integrated, for better and for worse into the public imagination, whereas the anthropological endeavour ends up being a more private affair, which is cut off from its place and people of origin. What then can we learn from other types of socio-cultural research? We have become more concerned with the structure of theory as it unfolds at the leisure of a handful of frequently cited theorists than we have at occasionally daring to think and write with a broader audience in mind.

            To return to the question of reflection when still in the field, a process which I call reflexive objectivity, for the simple reason that one is of course attempting to look at times from an aerial vantage point, whilst at the same time whatever one writes or concludes is grounded in the self, I muse about the partiality of my newly formed data. The experience of incompleteness leads one to ask the question ‘Could I have done anything better?’ Naturally, with hindsight, there are a million-and-one new ideas that spring to mind, but these moments have passed and new sets of time constraints force one to focus on what was achieved, rather than what wasn’t. Impartiality always seems to have negative implications rather than being seen as a natural consequence of research. However, for myself, the realisation that the ethnographic portrait one is about to paint is inevitably going to be incomplete, is also the realisation that there is no such thing as completeness in this process of anthropology. As a British woman researching in a village that’s population comprises of fellow Westerners (sai yahn), Filipino’s and local Chinese, it was inevitable that I would become better acquainted with the two former English speaking groups. Although that said, the intertwined history that Britain has with the population of Hong Kong certainly has to stand for something when it comes to shared cultural phenomena, which is something that I perhaps don’t share with the English speaking Filipino women I interviewed. As I claimed earlier, my ability to get to know various people from the Chinese community before I began researching, helped facilitate smoother and more open interviews via an interpreter, than would have existed had I not being a familiar face prior to the study. Conversely, had a Chinese student attempted to do the same study with no prior experience of living among the community, I strongly believe that they would have faced much greater problems than in my own case. Indeed, although language is a barrier to communication, there are other barriers that have nothing to do with ones linguistic ability which I will resist going into here. It is my contention that the anthropologists personality, her interpersonal skills, her aptitude and ability to make people feel at ease and want to share their knowledge is if anything, the essential ingredient to getting anywhere in the complex process of fieldwork.       

            The two recent graduates of anthropology that I hired as interpreters sporadically throughout this fieldwork were both young and inexperienced, and there is no denying that this set up wasn’t without its frustrations and drawbacks. Indeed, I found that during the interviews I often had to interrogate the interpreter just as much as the person I was supposedly interviewing, as more often than not the interviewee and interpreter would dissolve into conversations were I am positive that they actually forgot the purpose of why we were all actually sitting together in the first place. However, instead of this being completely negative, I used these slides in conversations as opportunities to look into my questions differently, thus interviewing at times both the interpreter and the person she may have been talking to at the same time. This worked particularly well in the case of discussions about local women marrying Westerners and the issue of Western children attending the local school.

            What remains shocking to me post-field are the levels of verbalised racism I encountered during intimate conversations at the bars with fellow Westerners – an issue that will be theorised within this study. Had some of the people I spoken to realised that xenophobia and anthropology are two terms that don’t sit well together, then they might have thought twice about airing their controversial opinions so freely. Given the controversy of some of these conversations when talking about the local Chinese population, I am indebted for the frankness that my questions were met with. It seems that one of the side-effects of having white skin is that fellow Caucasians often feel comfortable discussing negative opinions relating to race, without as much as a second thought that the person being spoken to might be both offended or not share their thoughts. This was a peculiarity that I had encountered before when as a teenager I took a job as a waitress in an Indian restaurant in an attempt to learn more about this small group of Muslims that were living in my completely white neighbourhood. White British customers would frequently breathe an over exaggerated sigh of relief as I approached their tables with trays of food, openly make racist comments about my colleagues and would share their racist jokes with me as if my acceptance of their hilarity was unquestionable. Another shock during my fieldwork was the ‘abandonment’ of elderly Chinese people on the Island, many of whom had been brought here by family members from the urban neighbourhoods that they had lived in all of their lives, because of the relative cheapness of accommodation and quiet environment. Although this wasn’t typical for the majority of elderly people who clearly have a good relaxing quality of life on Lamma Island, the sense of isolation that some of the elderly I spoke to experienced was accentuated by the fact that they were on an Island and felt very removed from the rest of Hong Kong, and secondly because they’d lived the majority of their lives elsewhere and therefore did not feel, in their own words ‘completely local.’ Incidentally, it is not unusual on Lamma to witness weary looking young Filipino girls taking their elderly employees out for a midday stroll, whilst the rest of their fellow compatriots are either shopping for food or pushing around fair-haired babies. It seems that there is an enormous price to pay for what scholars like Nichole Constable lead us to believe is agency.

            In what now seems like a rather sinister twist of fate, this research has been flanked by two suicides. The week I moved to Lamma Island a middle-aged British man built a symbolic wooden structure on Powerstation Beach and committed suicide inside of it. And in the weeks leading up to the submission of this thesis, a British woman in her early thirties committed suicide, after suffering from the prolonged agony of clinical depression. A few weeks after the first suicide, another Westerner living on Lamma died whilst in police custody in South America. A British man who had been an excellent informant and had sat with me on many occasions talking about his life on Lamma Island, returned to England towards the end of my research after suffering from a drug induced nervous breakdown.  Before he left he said to me, ‘There’s a dark side to Lamma you know,’ and although it was this dark side that seemed to be the underlying fuel for the stereotypes that were associated with Westerners living on Lamma, it is a significant fact of life here that could have quite easily been overlooked had one not been a resident for some length of time. If you stay in any place long enough, it slowly reveals itself, which is of course the precise reason why anthropologists spend as long as they can in the field in the first place. (adding :) :) for posterity!)

            If the findings of this study are anything to go by, what will become apparent in what follows is that if the commodification processes that characterise much of the 21^st century have by there globalised nature simultaneously fuelled and restricted the mobilisation of people from all corners of the globe, then it is by default that the significance of nature and landscape has been brought back into the equation of human life. In lives that have seemingly become dominated by routes and space, this study will take us back to the importance of roots and place for it is from this vantage point were we can hope to gain a better and broader understanding of the new contexts that are generated by today’s transnational populations and the impact they make on their local counterparts.

            The emergence of Hong Kong, both past and present is intertwined and firmly embedded in the successes of the British Empire. This is a fact of life that continues to subtlety impact not only the identities of those born in the territory but also Westerners and other Asians who have under the same historical circumstances come to make this most southern tip of China their home. Although several years have passed since the Royal Britannia set sail on her monumental journey out of Victoria Harbour, the imprint of one hundred and fifty years of colonial rule on the other hand, has not been as quick in leaving its mark on the way that Westerners have come to view their status and identity in the city. However, many Westerners, since as early as 1970’s have attempted to separate themselves from the outdated and unrealistic caricature of the colonial Westerner in Asia, examples of which offer an illuminating insight into the early popularity of Yung Shue Wan among Westerners living in Hong Kong in the late 1970’s, as discussed in chapter two.

            It is by exploring landscape, and ethnicity through the memories of Westerners, locals and other Asians who call Lamma Island their home that we can shed some light on how Hong Kong’s cultural diversity is organised in this age of near universal modernity. Indeed, Hong Kong in many respects has been built and mapped out on the conceptual interface between the local and global, however for some, being “A local in a globalised world is a sign of degradation and deprivation” (Bauman 1998: 2). Economic grandeur and development aside, the socio-economic transformations that have made Yung Shue Wan what it is today, show the two extremities of what it means to be local in our increasingly transnational world. Whilst some local villagers own two or more properties and have become wealthy landlords over time, others continue to scrape by for a living, and remain housed in simple homemade constructions that contrast sharply with the three storey apartments that have sprung up in a ghetto like environment that makes up Yung Shue Wan.  The daily view from my apartment window is a perfect example this –  showing a local man building a small (100 square ft or less) structure which he will sit inside both day and night, and which, if past experience is anything to go by, will be pulled down no sooner than it is erected by employees of the local government. The illegal structures this man painstakingly erects have been literally built and pulled down, bimonthly for the last year. Other locals noticeably existing on the periphery of Yung Shue Wan’s current development are a handful of elderly folk – quite literally two married couples, who can still be seen grafting in the fields growing vegetables that they will later sell in Yung Shue Wan Main Street. Unfortunately, the sight of any one of these elderly individuals attempting to sell their small quantities of freshly hand picked vegetables is pitiful when compared to the vast quantities that both shop owners and hawkers import to the Island; an irrefutable sign of the times for Yung Shue Wan.

Unique location

            Essentially, it is the scale and interface between the local population and the population of Westerners living in Yung Shue Wan that sets this site apart from other similar locations in Hong Kong’s Islands District, and elsewhere in Hong Kong.  Architecture and organisation of public space in Hong Kong means that small scale village neighbourhoods are no longer that easy to come by (for further discussion on the development, growth and urbanisation of Hong Kong’s neighbourhoods see Tai-lok Lui 2002: 23). Cheung Chau, the smallest inhabited Island in the Islands District is busy and urbanised with a larger population (see fig.1 below) that is exclusively Chinese.

Fig.1. (see: http://www.info.gov.hk/censtatd/eng/hkstat/fas/01c/dcca-nt_islands_index.html).   

Its developed harbour is brimming with Chinese Junk boats and sampan water taxis, dissimilar to the comparatively sleepy scene found in the harbour of Yung Shue Wan. Similarly, Lamma Island is often compared to Discovery Bay – a village situated on Lantau Island, popular among expatriate Westerners seeking high-end accommodation in a semi-rural setting. Its high-end development attracts a somewhat wealthier crowd and as such lacks the type of class and racial diversity found in Yung Shue Wan. Discovery Bay also has a 24hr ferry service back and forth to Central District, and lesser degree of facilities that we could regard as conducive for producing the type of community found on Lamma – such as bars, restaurants, village stores, and social clubs and so on.  Moreover, commercial property developers have carefully orchestrated the environment of Discovery Bay, creating a uniformed standard of accommodation, unlike Yung Shue Wan were diversity is found in its accommodation, its environment and its population.

            The Hong Kong Tourism Board equally are responsible for constructing the image of the village, as are other independent travel guides such as the Lonely Planet and Rough Guide. Guidebooks revel in their attempt to highlight the “duality” of Yung Shue Wan, describing it as a Chinese fishing village where a significant community of Westerners live, “Where new bars, restaurants and hippy-style shops” attribute to the Islands “Bohemian reputation” (Rough Guide 2002: 171). Together these images produce the village as an exotic, “Different, even foreign space within Hong Kong” (Cheng 2001: 238). These forces when considered together have produced Yung Shue Wan as a distinctive place and provide us with a unique tangible example of Hong Kong’s global “logo” – the city with the dichotomised identity, where “East” apparently meets “West.”