I’m back in Xiamen and found my laptop sitting there by the door in its bag, just where I left it when exiting in haste. Having neither the laptop nor my camera was in some ways good as I had less to filter my impressions of Hong Kong through, just a few notes scribbled into a small book, rather than through the habitual frame of technology. Seeing how the taking of photographs and videos is so much a part of the visitor experience it is good to take a distance from this and see it as a very contemporary habit.
I feel it is often the case that we remember things through the records we take, whether these be the images from cameras or the stories we repeat and expand upon after the event. While these are very powerful tools, they can, at least for me, skew my memories in particular directions if I am not careful. Space, smell and rhythm can become less important, relatively speaking. My memory of Hong Kong island has much to do with the physical effort of walking up and down steep inclines and the pleasant surprise of finding an extensive system of public escalators wafting pedestrians up one side of the hill. While this could, with effort, be made into a story, it does not lend itself to a good narrative and so could easily find itself omitted in a retelling of the experience, even though it was important at the time.
I am also quite aware that making a performance here in China and then presenting it elsewhere it will be difficult to not partake in this mythologising process of memory, however the memories are filtered and then represented in abstracted ways. Even with work that is in a state of continual creation and which has the best intentions to stress the moment of its performance, I expect it will still be somehow or another about a distant there and then.
In Hong Kong Museum of Art I saw an exhibition on the tourism industry in Canton in the mid-19th Century. Whilst the paintings and items were quite conventional in character the narrative they wove of colonial trade, expansion and exoticism taking place within the context of the two Opium wars, was downright odd. There was a selection of phrases in Chinese Pidgin English printed. These ranged from ‘Justee now what time?’ to ‘Long me catchee ten piecee coolie’. The expressions construct an identity for the visitor which I was familiar with from my Chinese lessons which are also designed for Western visitors to China. Fortunately my classes no longer include such things as how to order a ten man work team and instead cover such useful topics as how to say I really don’t need something when being pressed by vigorous salesmen.
I picked up Julia in Hong Kong airport and saw her have her first jet lagged impressions of visiting Asia. The entrance was a gentle one with Hong Kong being familiar in many ways as it is quite Western and has a distinctly British flavour. Shenzhen just across the border was another thing however. Luo Hu shopping centre is just plain crazy. Built over five or six levels it has hundreds of small stalls on each level, all selling more or less the same things. The sales staff zealously try their best to drag you inside their stalls at every opportunity but we were in need neither of fake Rolexes nor of mobile phones so I had the opportunity to practice my disinterested consumer Chinese vocabulary.
Later, we met a theatre director and anthropologist who live in Shenzhen and we learnt a lot about this city of 15 million people that has erupted from a small fishing port in the space of only 30 years. The night bus back was a horror, nothing more need be said about it. Back in Xiamen once again, I will start taking pictures, making stories and taking in the Spring Festival/Chinese New Year which gets started in earnest very soon now.
