Even in Arcadia Am I @miriam@octodon.social

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.

2/ One of the things I find so fascinating is the way stories change and evolve and circle back in on themselves to be retold better, in more complex ways, as a relationship deepens.

1/ I spent a while this summer doing fieldwork, formally, for the first time. I don't come from a discipline that typically engages in fieldwork, or research that doesn't take place in a library or archives, and so it's been a DIY crash course in WTF am I doing, occasionally with the very generous help of my so-called subjects, who've largely become my friends.

I'll tell some stories that have been racketing around my mind lately, as a "what is this Mastadon thing, anyway" experiment.

4) New manuscript which is consuming my writing life and is very, very Southern, and at this point 80% things titled "Of ______" which are clustered around the low end of the alphabet, so if anyone has suggestions for "Of _______" in the upper alphabetic atmosphere, please say

1) The lyric essay on the illegal agarwood trade I'm currently writing; 2) the essay on creative practices in the humanities I assigned to my students without having finished reading myself [not-infrequent pseudo-prof fail]; 3) the litany of fieldwork-derived poems by Tarfia Faizullah also assigned to my students (& which I have read, many times) in this infernal documentary poetics class which my students might be tearing out their hair over, ionno?

Hello new social network I would fall in love with if this were 2001. Let me make a list of things that ought to be consuming my time in lieu of the this and the eight-decatrillion paperclips I recently made.