Atlas

by Kai-cheung Dung

  However, there is an alternative explanation (assuming that the English name is the original one), since it is by no means certain exactly what kind of tree the sycamore is. In Europe it is a large kind of maple, but in America it is a plane tree, and in the eastern Mediterranean region it refers to a fig tree. There is no obvious reason why sycamore has to be translated as mou-fa-gwo. Perhaps it is just that the official translators at the time had no way of selecting which meaning of sycamore to translate so chose instead to transcribe the word phonetically.

  Another account (not terribly convincing but one that people preferred to believe) circulated widely among local people. Leung Kwan Yat recorded the story in his A Study of the Oral History of the Kowloon Area. As far back as the eighteenth century, the stretch of land that became Poetry, Song, and Dance Street was already a center of artistic, educational, and cultural activities for the whole district thanks to its proximity to Mong Kok, one of the largest villages in Kowloon. Ancestral temples, schools, and opera troupes served the community’s religious, educational, and leisure needs. In time a scholar from Mong Kok bestowed on it the name Poetry, Song, and Dance, after a well-known passage in the preface to the ancient Book of Poetry:

  Poetry is where intention goes. In one’s heart, it is intention; in words it becomes poetry. When feelings stir within, they are formed into words. When words are not enough, so there are sighs; when sighs are not enough, so they take form in song; and when song is not enough, so, without thought, hands and feet dance.

  Poetry, Song, and Dance had declined by the beginning of the twentieth century, along with Mong Kok’s decline and disappearance as a village. Instead it degenerated into a zone of brothels and whores with noisy entertainment night after night. When the British developed Tai Kok Tsui, they named the street Sycamore after the pronunciation of the old name of the area, Si-go-mo, an act that showed disrespect for Chinese tradition and indifference to local culture and custom.

  Some people have uncovered evidence to suggest that this stretch of land had been planted with fig trees, uprooted when the street was under construction. It was subsequently named Sycamore Street in English, while its Chinese name was adopted for the sake of its secondary association with peace and prosperity. Later the government replanted the street with bauhinia, the city’s emblematic flower, in order to enhance the street’s scenic attractions. A large number of schools were established along the street during the second half of the twentieth century, reviving the tradition of poetry, song, and dance.

  Although the fig tree has no flowers, it bears fruit; the bauhinia has flowers but it is barren.

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  TUNG CHOI STREET AND SAI YEUNG CHOI STREET

  Tung Choi Street (literally, “water spinach street”) and Sai Yeung Choi Street (watercress street) were a pair of streets of roughly equal length running side by side north to south in Mong Kok. This state of affairs, however, was a relatively late development. Tung Choi Street and Sai Yeung Choi Street actually underwent three separate stages of development, but the first two stages have almost been forgotten. The unusual relationship between the two streets allows us a glimpse of how the intrinsic quality of a place can stubbornly persist, overriding superficial changes. It also gives us an understanding of what is called the spirit of a place in Chinese culture, a variant of naturist mysticism.

  According to Leung To’s The Origins of Kowloon Street Names, the middle section of what became Tung Choi Street and Sai Yeung Choi Street used to be a stretch of paddy fields in Mong Kok Village. As it happens, water spinach (tung-choi) has low resistance to the cold and is therefore grown in the summer, while watercress (sai-yeung-choi) is just the opposite, so that the farmers in Mong Kok at the time practiced a form of crop rotation, growing water spinach in the paddies in summer and planting watercress at the end of autumn. Afterward, when the Mong Kok paddy fields were filled in and leveled in the course of the area’s redevelopment, two new roads that were built there were named Tung Choi Street and Sai Yeung Choi Street.

  However, before Tung Choi Street and Sai Yeung Choi Street became two separate streets, they had in fact been one. This was the first stage in the relationship between the two streets. In the initial stage of the street’s construction, it was no more than a muddy path, lined with new low-roofed huts built to house Mong Kok’s original inhabitants. Following their long-established custom of rotating between water spinach and watercress, the inhabitants called the street Tung Choi Street in the summertime and changed it to Sai Yeung Choi Street on the arrival of winter. In consequence, if you look up early administrative and post office records, you will find that the address of this street is sometimes given as Tung Choi Street and sometimes as Sai Yeung Choi Street, depending on the season when the forms were filled in. If you sent a letter to Tung Choi Street in the summertime but wrote the name Sai Yeung Choi Street by mistake, it might be winter before it got delivered. This, of course, was something of a nuisance to the inhabitants, but they still maintained their simple, uncomplaining nature characteristic of village people, content and happy in their accustomed ways.

  Nevertheless, the situation described above was quite inconvenient as far as local government departments were concerned, and the authorities decided to redevelop the district, creating two separate roads, Tung Choi Street and Sai Yeung Choi Street, in order to avoid further confusion. But the inhabitants did not give way so easily. Obedient to the timetable of alternating seasons so deeply implanted in their being, the whole populace, without a word being spoken, shifted over to Tung Choi Street and conducted their trade there for the summer, and then in winter they moved their places of residence and work back to Sai Yeung Choi Street, so that each street would be in turn deserted for one half of the year. The post might still be delivered up to six months late, and the local government and administration both found it difficult to impose uniformity.

  Although the problem was a matter of great frustration to the government, Time itself proved to be the best solution. As the next generation grew up and flourished in the two streets and the older generation gradually died out, the mode of existence based on the two rotating seasons eventually decayed as well. In addition, the government set about moving outsiders into the district and encouraging the original inhabitants to move out, effectively destroying what was left of the solidarity and unique sense of identity within the village. The third stage was in fact a poststructural state of the dissolution of spatial-temporal differences, the breakdown of the winter/summer binary opposition, and the obliteration of the distinction between water spinach and watercress. Young career women shopping for vegetables in the street market would mistake watercress for water spinach and vice versa. The problem was that their husbands never noticed that there was anything odd about it as they gulped it down.

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  SAI YEE STREET

  Sai Yee Street (literally, “laundry street”) in Mong Kok used to be a stream in the days before Mong Kok Village became urbanized. From its source in Beacon Hill to the north, its water was used to irrigate the nearby flower nurseries and vegetable gardens. In the 1920s, when the paddy fields of Mong Kok were leveled and the area was developed into a residential district, it was the custom of the inhabitants to wash their clothes and lay them out to dry at the side of the stream. Doing the laundry gradually became a specialized occupation, and many local women made a living out of it. It was at this point that the path along the bank became known as Sai Yee Street. Afterward the stream was covered over, when the city drew up new plans, but the new street that was built over the underground stream kept the old name.

  People engaged in comparative cultural studies have made some research on the role played by Sai Yee Street in local culture. In his Street Names and Indigenous Values, for example, Ma Hak-ming attempted to interpret this kind of district culture with “laundry” as a signifier. Ma’s argument was centered on the explanatory possibility of “water” in activities revolving around “laundry,” in contrast to “f
ire,” another element in everyday cultural practices. His main points are set out below.

  First, the function of water in an activity such as laundry is not nourishment or the sustenance of life but a medium for washing, and the water used in the process of washing necessarily ends up depleted and is drained away. This is the opposite to water being used for drinking and irrigation. In terms of structural function, water used in laundry is totally different from fire used in cooking. That is, cooking transforms a substance so that it becomes capable of being ingested, while laundry brings about a substance’s reversion to its former appearance, but the illusory longing for reversion is destined never to be truly satisfied (even if clothes are washed clean they can never again be the clothes before they were washed). To take laundry as a signifier of a district culture suggests a desire for self-preservation in the collective unconsciousness, and also the impossibility of this self-preservation.

  Two, depletion in washing is unavoidably realized through rubbing, kneading, and beating. It is not the same as the destructiveness of cooking with fire, because washing in water does not induce an acute transformation but only creates a gradual and imperceptible erosion. It could also be said that if the violence of fire is carried out without any sense of shame in public, then water’s violence is protracted and hidden, with the sensual effects of clearing, cooling, and cleansing.

  Three, it is difficult in laundry culture to transcend the contradictions inherent in its nature. The aim of laundering is to achieve purity but its inevitable result is pollution. Clean river water becomes dirty water, and the consciousness ends in confusion. Unlike refining through fire, which produces an internal transformation, laundering must make an external and temporary restoration through the annulment of its own medium (water). Laundry culture, at the same time as it is intent on cleansing itself, also necessarily brings about the soiling of the Other; or, to put it another way, the brightness and cleanliness of what has been washed are achieved at the cost of the filthiness of the means of washing.

  Four, apart from the illusion of reversion in washing, laundry also emphasizes the function of clothes in covering and adorning. We can imagine how the culture of dish washing realistically reflects the way of life of people who earn a living, whereas laundry is aimed at the temporary undressing and repeated cleaning of collective civilization’s outer garments. Although laundry culture is essentially an attribute of lower-class working women, when it ascends to symbolize a district’s specific character, it must at the same time reveal a general and intrinsic meaning that structuralist anthropology cannot ignore.

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  PUBLIC SQUARE STREET

  Yau Ma Tei’s Public Square Street is now called Jung-fong Gai (literally, “people’s quarter street”) in Cantonese, but before the 1970s it was known as Gung-jung Sei-fong Gai (public square street, that is, “square” as in an equal-sided rectangle). Some commentators have said that gung-jung sei-fong was a mistranslation of the English term “public square” and that the correct translation should have been Gung-jung Gwong-cheung (literally, “public plaza”). The name in English referred to an empty space in the street popularly known as Banyan Head. Itinerant performers would gather there at nightfall, casting divinations and telling fortunes, or singing and storytelling. Afterward, when street names were being revised, it was called People’s Quarter Street in Cantonese, taking on the meaning of a space where the populace at large would gather.

  However, some people believe that gung-jung sei-fong was not a mistranslation but was based on fact. Before the Kowloon Peninsula was ceded to Britain in 1860, there was a square plaza at this spot for the use of the people of the neighborhood as a meeting place and market. Running around the plaza was a street in the shape of a square. This street did not have a beginning nor did it have an end, instead turning back in on itself. In addition, the four sides were of equal length, and the corners were at a uniform angle. The buildings along both sides of any one of these four streets were perfect matches for the buildings on the other three sides, whether in height, design, or order. The faces of the street’s inhabitants were also difficult to distinguish one from another, and strangers passing through could even less count on determining where they were by looking at the clothing hung out to dry from the upper stories. To enter the square street was to enter an absolutely predictable and calculable geometrical world, where there was only a single length and a single angle. However, it was actually the square street’s regular and monotonous construction that made it a labyrinth from which it was difficult to escape. In fact, a square street, wholly self-contained and with a name matching reality, has neither entrance nor exit. Therefore, the plaza enclosed by the square street was a sealed plaza, and the public nature of the street made it at the same time a private one.

  The only way of finding one’s way in the square street seems to have been by determining the direction. The four sides of the square street were fixed according to the four points of the compass, north, south, east, and west, but because there were no door numbers along the street (for no one could say where the street began and where it ended), it was rather difficult to determine if one were proceeding along the east street, the west street, the north street, or the south street. To be sure, this was not a problem for the local inhabitants, because whatever side of the street they lived on made no difference to them. Another special characteristic of the square street was that there was a flight of steps at each corner. It was said that if you kept turning right as you walked, the steps would lead upward, but if you went in the opposite direction, to the left, the steps would lead down. But whether you went up or down, you would still return to your original place by way of the four flights of steps and the four corners. Experts in cartography maintain that such phenomena can occur only on the surface of maps, or in pictures with fanciful optical illusions.

  The conclusion of some map archaeologists was that Public Square Street was previously a walled village in the shape of a square, and what is known as the plaza was in fact an empty space at the center of the village. After 1860, new streets were laid out in Kowloon, and Public Square Street lost its original appearance when the village wall was torn down.

  Adherents of the psychoanalytic school of cartography maintain that the inhabitants of Public Square Street suffered from the combined afflictions of agoraphobia and claustrophobia. There is also a contrary view to the effect that these two diseases could not exist at all in the world of Public Square Street.

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  CEDAR STREET

  It would be a mistake to believe that street names are loquacious by nature. If you open a street directory of any city in the past you will discover that the great majority of streets are silent. Such is the case with Cedar Street, a street that is hardly worth mentioning. On the map it was just a side street located between Sham Shui Po and Mong Kok in Kowloon. There was nothing about it that distinguished it among the streets in the vicinity that are named after trees. It had nothing outstanding of its own, nor did it represent anything that would win the affections of a tourist guide or local poet; it did not have a role to play in the history of this city, leaving a mark behind it. It did not even have an opportunity to appear in a street anecdote or rumor. It was just the kind of street with nothing about it that could attract the interest of map readers.

  The only place where we could find a passage describing Cedar Street is in a book about maps. Its author was a minor writer of the late twentieth century who grew up and began to write in Cedar Street. In this unsystematic and unclassifiable collection of map reading, and with a complete disregard for reality, the author read in between the dotted lines and colored spots strewn freely across the page all sorts of public and private nightmares, memories, longings, and speculations. His account of Cedar Street is as follows:

  I have long contemplated the impossibility of returning to Cedar Street. With only a street map before me, how can I summon up once more the image of Cedar Street from the depths of my
memory simply by fixing my eyes on this tiny, brown, slanting patch with its surroundings and text on the map? How should I find the scent of cedar on the map, or hear the sound of the wind in its branches? And how should my fingers trace the tree trunks’ rough pattern on the map’s smooth surface? Why is there no map to reproduce its sound, its feel, its scent? Why is it not possible for us to seize the surface appearance of things, their most impermanent feature, and in so doing to penetrate their essence? But I can only recall another map, a map of my own home environment that I showed off to my schoolmates when I was a child; sketched by an inexperienced hand, it showed a shady road densely planted with cedars and a few spacious low houses standing widely apart. I even drew a fictional sheepdog into that nonexistent courtyard. Afterward, this sketch gradually disappeared under the superimposition of the street plan based on an actual survey, and in the end all that remained was a short, narrow section surrounded by names like Portland Street, Ki Lung Street, Tai Nan Street, and Yu Chau Street, with their connotations of the most banal and vulgar aspects of life. However, it is precisely in this kind of urban area that I construct the dwelling place of my memory, allowing my words to soar upward, take root downward, and branch out inquiringly and playfully in an image of a cedar.