Meandering the Mean Streets of Mong Kok

Two decades after its handover to China in 1997, and three years removed from the Umbrella Protests of 2014, Hong Kong finds itself in a unique cultural place, one offering a counter-narrative to the global marketplace and fast-finance for which it was until recently renowned. I borrow my title from Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (1997), where Ackbar Abbas references Scorsese’s Mean Streets to describe the location of Hong Kong-filmmaker Wong Kar Wai’s early work, which is set in and around Mong Kok, the heart of Kowloon. Kowloon is still referred to by the local elite as Hong Kong’s “dark-side” because of its historical underworld connections, like organized crime, prostitution, poverty, and overcrowding. Complicating this extant actuality is the fact that Mong Kok’s streets are also home to a signature tourist attraction: the night markets by Temple Street, where tourists unwittingly mingle mere meters away from gang activities. This article is backgrounded by spatial, urban, and geography theories by Yi-Fu Tuan, Henri Lefebvre, and Michel de Certeau, and foregrounded by very recent interventions in the emerging glocal field of Hong Kong Studies. My main impetus, however, is self-reflexive and culturally interrogative. As a decade-long resident of Hong Kong, as an inextricably entwined Hong Kong-subject who does not speak the local language of Cantonese, I navigate an interstitial space between official and unofficial. This creative nonfiction piece concerns traversing Kowloon on foot and constructs a new critical Hong Kong reality, one concerned with intersections, one that actively resists any facile local-outsider dichotomy.