I’m on the ferry from Macau to HK, which takes about an hour. I said goodbye to Craig and Isobel. Isobel has been helping me to plan my route across Mainland China. I don’t want to see all the typical tourist sights, I want nature, small ancient villages and witness skilled crafts people. I’ve also seen (on YouTube) a beautiful lake where you can get on a raft. Saying goodbye to them for now feels scary. They’ve been my stabilisers and now I feel like they are being removed and I’m riding off shakily but independently. On the ferry I can hear sounds and recognise expressions but I don’t understand anything. Everyone uses the WeChat app here, they send a lot of voice messages. Nobody uses Whatsapp. You can also transfer money on WeChat. They write the characters on their phone.
I’m going to live in Craig’s art studio in HK. All I know is that it only has cold water, no kitchen and it’s near the beach. I have a set of directions and hopefully it will be pretty easy to get to. Taxis are really cheap here, which helps a lot. I have to point at the address and get driven there. I will work out how to get a bus tomorrow. I’m also going to the laundrette. I’ve always been so depressed sitting in a launderette back in the UK. I wonder what it will be like here? Chinese men seem to pick their noses a lot in public. That’s what I’m seeing anyway.
It’s been hard to get internet and phone access here as I have to get a new sim every time I cross a border. So that’s one for Macau, another for HK and another for mainland China. It’s a pain because EE in the UK haven’t unlocked my phone yet! Boring but essential stuff. I hope my new sim is easy to set up when I get to HK. I see a lot of people with two phones on the ferry. Money changes from place to place too, so I have a varied amount of bank notes, which is a bit confusing.
I’m meeting a friend from the UK later. R is friends with my friends from a music festival I work at. I’ve not really spoken to him that much before. He’s in HK for ten days. I know he has a possible fight coming up in Thailand soon so he’s training and travelling. It’s good to know he hasn’t had a drink for months, as I don’t drink, it’s been over a year now.
Somebody on the market pointed at me, looked surprised and raised his hand up in the air to his friend. I think he was saying how tall I was. I do feel much taller than the average woman here. All the advertisements have mostly white male and female models, if Asian, they are usually very pale and thin.
The ferry attendants wear pollution masks and they are serving a version of pot noodles to paying customers. I think this is rush hour. Some businessmen take this ferry every day. I miss home but my home is in a storage container, so where is the home that I miss? What actually makes a home a home? Georges Perec talks about this a lot in his book ‘Species of Spaces and Other Pieces’. When is a space ours? When we put our stuff in it? When we own it financially? When we’ve had sex, arguments and made food in it? I don’t know what I miss but I think it’s how things used to be, missing the past but needing something different. Isn’t all this cliched traveller stuff? Brilliant. While most women my age are having children and getting mortgages, I am nowhere near that life, just travelling solo and trying to figure out things.
I’m very aware of the different vibrations under my feet on different modes of transport. I imagine the depths of the sea. What kind of creatures can feel the vibration of the ferry? How deep is it? Have battleships have crossed this exact part of the sea? How many people on this boat are aware of their defects of character? What are their daily routines and addictions? Where will this blog be in 50 years time?
I’m actually alone in China. That thought keeps hitting me and causing rushes of panic (or excitement). There are people that I am going to meet along the way. I don’t know who they are yet. Everyone tells me to be safe. How do you ever know if you are really safe? Real danger can confront you at home, anywhere. I can be aware and alert.
I hailed two taxis and both told me that they didn’t recognise the addresses written down and told me to get out. I think it’s because they didn’t want to drive there. I had no way of contacting anyone. This was the first time I felt tears coming and a sense of being very lost and I wasn’t even in mainland China yet. A local business man helped me, wrote the address down in Chinese and spoke to a taxi driver for me. He said he travels for business and people often help him, so he knew what I was feeling. He said ‘Welcome to Hong Kong!’
Craig sent me a photo of the beach near the studio. I can’t believe I’m staying in an art studio, I thought those days were over. I remember drunken nights making art and listening to music, missing the last train home and sleeping in the studio. If you’re an artist, you’ll grimace at the thought of staying in your studio, it’s the thing we generally don’t like doing as it’s usually some sort of industrial lock up space. These are usually cold, uncomfortable, un-homely, back-to-basics and almost always quite scary spaces. The kind you can image some serial killer tying people to chairs and interrogating them under intense spotlights. Mind you, at ACME Studios in Deptford, the latest James Bond was filmed there, Daniel Craig drove Bond’s car out of the ground floor of the studios. I always thought the back streets of Deptford were scenic, having snapped many an instagram photo around there. They closed off the whole road for it. I went to the shop to buy two cheap bottles of red wine with a cheese roll (classy) and they wouldn’t let me back down the street to the studio! It was an old airplane propellor factory on one side and council flats/houses on the other side. So needless to say, I was kind of dreading staying at the studio, despite Craig telling me it was habitable.
I managed to find my way in finally. It was ok, just needed a few small touches. It was dark outside and I was in a huge industrial building in HK pretty much on my own, as most people use it for businesses, a bit scary but I appreciate it. I was hungry but fearful about heading out on my own in case I got lost or killed. Topless men on the floors below are boxing fish and shoes for the market. I walked to a main road and then to what looked like a motorway, this wasn’t feeling good. Apparently I was heading to town and not to the beach, which was a good start. I had no internet connection, no phone line and I was walking along to somewhere hopefully busier and less bleak. The buildings are huge and towering into the clouds. I’m not sure what a jungle really looks like but I think I’m surrounded by one.
I remember seeing photos of the Teletubbies set a few years ago. It was run down and wildly overgrown. Apparently now it’s a lake. This place is called Aberdeen, it’s about 3 miles from HK town centre. If people abandoned the Blade Runner set and left it for a while, I’d imagine it to look like this place. I watched Blade Runner for the first time last month in a cinema in London, it was packed. Everyone was there for nostalgic reasons but somehow I missed watching it when I was younger. At Goldsmiths Blade Runner was constantly referenced and I kind of rebelled against seeing it due to that. Here we are, in that future and we have flat screens, touch screens, not box screens that you talk at, as you see in the film. All that technology they imagined to be the ‘future’ and I was most impressed by the LED umbrella handles. Now that really IS the future. I expected to see that here. It would be a goldmine for muggers to see what they wanted to rob though. You can buy these illuminated umbrellas on ThinkGeek now.
As I was passing a motorbike shop, I saw and heard an English guy trying to get oil for his bike, or something else. I stopped to talk to him and asked him where the shops were and where I could sort out my internet issues. We walked to the local town and went shopping for food, cosmetics and I got my phone activated. We went for food and he told me about his experiences in HK and China. He is a trainee lawyer from Wimbledon, London. He moved out here, something to do with his boss wanting business here so he could have an affair with a young Chinese girl behind his wifes back. He was basically living in HK so his boss could get his end away. He shrugged at this and said he much preferred Shanghai. We talked about my research and I asked about laws concerning brits and heroin here, some are executed, others face huge fines and lengthy sentences. I am going to find out more.
We ate some Japanese food and talked about both of our strong Jewish upbringings. His cousin is visiting next week and we are going to ride around the countryside. I haven’t managed to meet up with R yet but hopefully we are going to the beach on Sat. I walked back to the studio and slept really well. In the morning I woke to this and now I’m making it more homely.
I walked up the stairs to the top of the building. There’s a nice little cafe and little allotment plots on the roof.
Craig is coming to the studio to spend the night and to show me how to get around on the busses. Tonight we are going to an art opening, I have no idea what the show is. We got the MTR.
On the way to the gallery, we passed some women who were sat under a flyover near the station (Causeway Bay). They were burning things and fanning the flames in some sort of ritual to paying customers. They are called Villain Hitters. Sorry about the distant photo but I didn’t want to get too close in case they cursed me. It’s basically witchcraft. I also can’t take photos of Buddha shrines as it’s meant to be really bad luck and disrespectful.
This is from Wikipedia:
Villain hitting, da siu yan , demon exorcising, or petty person beating,is a folk sorcery popular in the Guangdong area of China and Hong Kong. Its purpose is to curse one’s enemies using magic. Villain hitting is often considered a humble career, and the ceremony is often performed by older ladies, though some shops sell “DIY” kits.
Specific Villain
Specific villains are individuals cursed by the villain hitter due to the hatred of their enemies who employ the hitter. A villain could be a famous person hated by the public such as a politician or could be personally known to their enemy, such as when the request is to curse a love rival.
General Villain
Villain hitters may help their clients curse a general villain: a group of people potentially harmful to the clients.
Receiving orders from clients, villain hitters require human-shaped papers with or without some information of specific people. As part of the ceremony, they beat the papers with shoes or other implements. The whole ceremony of villain hitting is divided into 8 parts:
Sacrifice to divinities (奉神)：Worship of deities by Incense and Candle.
Report (稟告)：Writing down the name and the date of birth of the client on the Fulu (符籙). If the client requests to hit a specific villain, then write down or put the name, date of birth, photo or clothings of the specific villain on the villain paper.
Villain hitting (打小人)：Make use of a varieties of symbolic object such as the shoe of clients or the villain hitter or other religious symbolic weapons like incense sticks to hit or hurt the villain paper. Villain paper can also be replaced by other derivatives such as man paper, woman paper, five ghost paper etc.
Sacrifice to Bái Hǔ (祭白虎)：The hitters have to make sacrifice to Bái Hǔ if they want to hit the villain on Jingzhe. Use a yellow paper tiger to represent Bái Hǔ, there are black stripes on the paper tiger and a pair of tooth shapes in its mouth. During the sacrifice a small piece of pork is soaked with pig blood and then put inside the mouth of the paper tiger (to feed Bái Hǔ). Bái Hǔ won’t hurt others after being fed. Sometimes they will also smear a greasy pork on Bái Hǔ’s mouth to make its mouth full of oil and unable to open its mouth to hurt people. In some regional sacrifice the villain hitter would burn the paper tiger or cut off its head after making sacrifice to it.
Reconciliation (化解)
Pray for blessings (祈福)：Use a red Gui Ren paper to pray for blessings and help from Gui Ren.
Treasure Burning (進寶)：Burn the paper-made-treasure to worship the spirits.
Zhi Jiao (擲筊) (or so-called “cup hitting” [打杯])：Zhi Jiao, to cast two crescent-shaped wooden pieces to undergo the Zhi Jiao ceremony.
We then went to Connecting Space HK, which is owed by a German Foundation. I met Ricky there too and he had some friends with him, Steph and Jesse. I met Freya Chou and Qinyi Lim, who are both curators at Para Site gallery (this gallery has a great reputation) in HK. It’s the oldest not for profit in HK. Then I went for a Korean meal with Ricky, Steph and Jesse.
I met Craig in Wan Chai. There are a lot working girls hanging out in bars and a lot of male expats looking for a good time. There’s a film about this area called ‘The world of Suzy Wong’, which is about an american artist who comes to HK and falls in love with a prostitute after her being his muse. Wan Chai was like the Wild West back in those days, with swinging doors and bar brawls.
Craig spotted some expensive cars with the number plates ‘FAST TOY’ (Ferrari) and ‘BATT MOBL’ (top range Tasler, 1.1m HKD, 762 HP, 0-100 in 2.8 seconds, apparently). Lots of people were taking pictures. I decided to speak to the owners and interview them on camera. One guy was a Senior Captain Pilot for Cathay Pacific (also ex military) and the other was an Insurance broker who lives in Clear Water bay.
They were happy to show me videos and photos of their other cars. The insurance broker spoke about HK being a tax haven, 15 percent top taxes. They loved the fast pace and referred to their cars as ‘street art’. The insurance broker showed us videos of him driving racing cars on track, he described the vehicle to as ‘top of the range, expensive and eye catching’. Tasler’s are quite big in HK with a showroom in Repulse Bay. It’s rumoured that Tasler give some kind of breaks for people using electric vehicles. The end of December there were 4,1898 electric cars in HK, mostly Taslers. The problem with these vehicles in the future is how hackable they could be.
We then went to some bars and watched some great live cover bands. I especially liked ‘Repunzel’, who played Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains and other great grunge classics. Oddly, there was a girl in the middle of the stage just sat on her mobile phone. Stunning working girls were hanging off grey sleazy men, mostly British.
