Even in Arcadia Am I @miriam@octodon.social

13/ One night I was wandering through the Chungking Mansions. It was probably a Saturday night, and I didn't have any plans but to have a few conversations if they surfaced. I walked past one of the African bars far in the back, and a tableful of young women hollered after me and one put her arms around my waist and told me to join her. So naturally I did, and it turned out they were wonderful.

Wait last night I'd started to tell a story about the way storytelling itself deepens and folds back as the stories being told demand more context, demand the layers that had been omitted in the first brief retelling. Then I got distracted on a tangent about agarwood traders (which in turn I didn't finish because it was 2AM in Singapore, bedtime). Back to the first story.

#introductions I'm Miriam, a poet with a documentary practice, lives most of the year in Berkeley but currently in Singapore. Slothful these days, but sometimes cycle tourer (planning a Silk Route trip in a few years, & coastal Vietnam in Dec), longtime/long ago hitchhiker & freight hopper from rural Texas currently with one foot in academia & another longing for the porches of a southern junebug night.

@pollyguo Oh--a bunch of folks from a website I'm on migrated to mastodon today, so I figured you were someone whose username I knew but not their given name/face!

@pollyguo are you a Mefite?

[In the meanwhile, it's almost 2AM on my side of the world--I'll try to continue this story tomorrow.]

12/ That wasn't strictly true, actually; at the point *he* was buying it, it seemed legal.

11/ I asked his friend what he did in HK, and he said he traded in sandalwood and agarwood. I must've been a little drunk because instead of asking a less direct question, I told him the only thing I knew about agarwood, which was that it was endangered because of heavy poaching of wild agarwood from the jungles. Did he encounter any of that? Of course, he said to me immediately; it's all illegal.

11/ All of which, very roundaboutly, brings me to the story I'd been thinking of telling, of an agarwood dealer I met one night a few days before I left last summer. I was drinking a beer with a friend, an older Indian man who I'd gotten to know a little bit over the past few days. We were sitting in an out of the way office listening to "sentimental music" (Lou Reed's "Perfect Day" came on his little radio) when his friend dropped by.

10/ Though in general, I've tended to find that perceived risk is so relative. Young Indian guys washing dishes in a restaurant illegally on a tourist visa very rarely admit what they're up to, whereas a friendly drug dealer once explained to me exactly how his supply chain worked. We were friends, yes, and he was from a Western, white country, and used the privilege that conferred on him in HK quite adroitly.

9/ ...mostly because he seemed like the kind of guy you didn't want to end up alone with for all the reasons women often prefer not to end up alone with certain men. He was a sketchy young dude, and much more open about his hustles than many of the other young men there who I got closer to over time.

8/ One day in an elevator I met a cocky young Kazakh guy who was hustling exchange rates; I think this is arbitrage, on micro-scale. He'd take a few hundred dollars to one exchange counter, change them for something, then for something else at an exchange counter twenty feet away. He went on like this, claimed he was making $20USD/hr while he waited for his ship to come in. I wanted to interview him, but knew it'd be dangerous,

7/ So for a few years now I've been interested in hearing stories of people who come through the Chungking Mansions before it's gone. It's especially interesting to me because it's a place where the hustle thrives, where people aren't necessarily breaking the law so much as making a living on the edges of the economy.

6/ ...as a way of funding your vacation. Before visa restrictions shifted, if you couldn't get into China easily--say, because you were from India, or Pakistan, or just about anywhere in Africa--Hong Kong was where you'd go to arrange manufacturing via a fixer, and you'd find that person at the Chungking Mansions. Or perhaps you'd just hang out there for a few days eating halal food and speaking Urdu or Swahili w/ others from the same place while you waited for your Chinese visa to come through.

5/ Years ago it was an epicenter of trade; around 2010 more than 20% of all mobile phones sold in Sub-Saharan Africa could be traced through CkM (and very likely many more had, too). If you were a trader you might go there to arrange purchase of five thousand mobile phones, to be resold in the markets of Tanzania. If you were middle class in your home country, but not in the context of the global economy, you might go to HK on vacation, then buy a suitcase of phones...

4/ It's an "intercultural nexus of the low end global economy," a place where traders, tourists, entrepreneurs, asylum seekers, hustlers of all minor sorts, and in general the 'othered' of Hong Kong society go--largely in search of their fortune.

3/ The best example I can think of is this one. One night I was wandering through the Chungking Mansions. It was probably a Saturday night, and I didn't have any plans but to have a few conversations if they surfaced. The Chungking Mansions, for those of you who don't know (or haven't caught glimpses of it in the Wong Kar Wai film Chungking Express and perhaps picked up some misapprehensions that way) is a dense intercultural thicket in the Tsim Sha Tsui neighborhood of Kowloon, in HK.