This article was downloaded by: [University of North Dakota]On: 20 December 2014, At: 18:17Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Urban GeographyPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rurb20

Hong Kong: Migrant Lives, Landscapes,and Journeys. Caroline Knowles andDouglas HarperRoman Cybriwsky aa Temple UniversityPublished online: 16 May 2013.

To cite this article: Roman Cybriwsky (2011) Hong Kong: Migrant Lives, Landscapes, andJourneys. Caroline Knowles and Douglas Harper, Urban Geography, 32:2, 303-304, DOI:10.2747/0272-3638.32.2.303

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.2747/0272-3638.32.2.303

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Urban Geography, 2011, 32, 2, pp. 303–304. DOI: 10.2747/0272-3638.32.2.303Copyright © 2011 by Bellwether Publishing, Ltd. All rights reserved.

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Hong Kong: Migrant Lives, Landscapes, and Journeys. Caroline Knowles and Douglas Harper. University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 2009. 270 pp., notes, bibliography, index, photographs. $19.00 paperback (ISBN: 978-0-226-44857-2).

Reviewed by Roman Cybriwsky, Temple University.

Here is an interesting, exciting, informative, highly creative, and exceptionally readable book about migrants in Hong Kong and the changing city in which they live. The book stands out also because its insights into the lives of Hong Kong residents and their respective spaces in the city are original, intimate, and privileged. I want to not only congratulate the authors for their accomplishment, but also feel like thanking the individual subjects of the book who so openly shared their lives and daily relationships with their urban environment with the authors and took them, and in turn us, on close-up excursions through home neighborhoods and the districts where they work, go to shop, and visit with friends or business associates for recreation. At first I was surprised that that the book is about non-Chinese migrants only, focusing on a dwindling minority of the population instead of the large majority, but I soon came to understand that important subtexts in the book are the interactions of these people with the post-colonial nature of Hong Kong, its increasing “Chinesization” (a new word for me from this book), and the marginal position in Chinese Hong Kong of the old colonials and other foreigners who comprise new lineaments of globalization in the city.

The variety of people we meet and places we go ranges from long-term residents from Britain with high-paying jobs and plush apartments on a high hill or on a quiet island; hard-working teachers, also from the UK, in an English Schools Foundation (ESKF) international school; shopkeepers and traders from India, Bangladesh, and elsewhere in South Asia in the famous, now-old (opened 1964), 17-story labyrinth of commerce in Kowloon known as Chungking Mansions; worshipers from South Asia and North and West Africa in the Kowloon Mosque nearly directly across the street; “serving-class” migrants, such as maids from the Philippines, who are described brilliantly as living by definition inside the lives of the people who employ them; Thai women who work in the girlie bars of the Wanchai district and the British and American businessmen who patronize these establishments on “boys’ nights out” after work. I have known Hong Kong for nearly 30 years as a many-times visitor to the city, but my understanding of the place is now elevated to a new level as a result of reading this book. I was especially interested to read about things that I had seen in Hong Kong but did not fully understand, such as the thousands-strong gatherings on Sundays of Filipina domestic workers in the central district of Hong Kong Island, and new scenes such as a “ladies’ lunch” at the Aberdeen Yacht Club, “tea” at Helena May—a turn-of-the-century institution nestled among the high-rise towers of Central that has long played an important role in the feminization of the British Empire in China—and lunch with Indian and African traders behind the “unpromising-looking grimy door of the Khyber Pass Mess Club” located on the eighth floor of a nondescript Kowloon building near the Chungking Mansions. The writing by Caroline Knowles, a sociology professor at Goldsmith’s, University of London, is crisp, fresh, fun, and thought-provoking throughout, while the accompanying black-and-white photographs (there are many) by co-author Douglas Harper, a sociology professor at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, are sharp, stunning, and personal. They are much more than simply illustrations for a book, and amplify the text to a level where they carry more or less equal weight in the book with the writing.

There are other pluses to this book as well. For one, it provides readers with a fresh framework for conceptualizing urban space in their own cities, specifically as the sum of the personal urban cartographies of individual residents and the intersecting cartographies of the various other people in those cities with whom their lives connect. Second, the book accurately envisions a city as a place of constant motion and change. Neither the human subjects, in this case non-Chinese migrants to Hong Kong, nor the city itself, stay still for study, but are constantly moving targets. The book is, therefore, a two-fabric collection of stories of “people-in-motion” and their relationship with a “city-in-process.” As the authors express it, the first fabric is “people and bodies and feet

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kinesthetically engaged in the material social world,” and the second is the city’s “shifting materiality in its architecture, street patterns, and modes of circulation.” Accordingly, the individual chapters in this book are short biographies or ethnographic profiles of different people with different interests, and center on the interconnections between those people’s routines in Hong Kong, their intersections with one another, and the city’s changing urban landscape and socio-political terrain. It’s brilliant and I highly recommend it!

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