A migrant ethnography of two cities (Hong Kong and Sydney)

tasks of negotiating careers, finances, homes, meeting family obligations etc. Touristic impulses are a pleasurable way of extending the range of places beyond functional pathways, of finding new places, and ‘opening up’ new territory. Many Hong Kong people of ordinary means never had the chance to travel very far to explore an extensive space. Even if they had travelled overseas, they may have only experienced urban tourism or short package tours. Driving in Australia provides a more auto-nomous means of spatial exploration. Ringo waxed lyrical about the spatial pleasures of long distance driving (an impossibility in Hong Kong). R: I been to Gold Coast twice. P: You drove up there? R: Yeah, driving. Ten hours driving from Sydney, straight through to Brisbane. It is good for me, I like it. You can’t just drive like that in Hong Kong. Oh, yeah I love it, I love it. Another goal for me at the present, if I can, a little bit retire earlier, maybe say, around fifty, I will spend a lot of time in Australia, to just travel around, to visit town by town, and you know, I think it’s very very exciting, you know, Australia’s very large. My colleague told me, I asked him [if he wanted to travel to other countries] and he told me, ‘No.’ I say, ‘why?’ ‘Australia is large. I spend nearly forty years, but I still can’t travel the whole country.’ The open road seemed to excite informants from Hong Kong (especially men). Adrian described the gradual development of a capacity to explore new places. He remembered his first time driving between the suburb of Eastwood to Ryde (about 4 kilometres), and how it seemed such a long journey. His spatial reach gradually extended to other suburbs in Sydney. After that he visited (in order) the Blue Accommodating Places Chapter 7 202 Mountains, Newcastle, Nelson Bay, Canberra and the Western Plains Zoo. 12 ‘You have to know the place bit by bit.’ He rhapsodised about seeing a vast country, sometimes he would see a rainbow, and recalled the saying that if you go to the foot of the rainbow you find gold. The sense of vastness was new to him: In Australia, you are closer to God. You can open yourself, and feel the existence of God. This is because you can see the sky, and the large landscape, you can feel the power of nature, and of the creation. You realise the power of humans is limited. However in Hong Kong, there are more pressing problems facing you – there is not much time to consider things, you can’t just sit back and think of ‘ideological problems’. Driving and the Australian countryside had clearly enhanced Adrian’s spiritual life. Enjoying the horizontality of Australian vistas was an ecstatic experience for someone accustomed to the dense vertical space of Hong Kong. As with many Hong Kong immigrants, Adrian’s religiosity is very place-specific. Although he had exposure to Christianity in his family background, he didn’t really consider himself as a Christian when he later returned to Hong Kong, ‘I am not faithful’. Hong Kong is not a place for things of the spirit, in Adrian’s interpretation. 13 Creation is too far away. Hong Kong’s denatured environment seems too obviously a human construction. Churches in Sydney supply contacts, support networks and a place of familiarity. Adrian no longer had the same social needs upon return to Hong Kong. Celia once rang me to tell me she had converted to Christianity. She had gone to a church because a friend from Hong Kong who had previously been a Muslim had converted to Christianity. Then she went on some kind of retreat camp with her friend. At first she ‘didn’t have much confidence in God’. But when Celia unexpectedly got a job at a university, she decided that it was not a coincidence, but part of God’s plan. At the church there was a practice of relating peoples’ experience to show the work of God. Celia mentioned another testimony of a 12 These are all places within driving distance of Sydney. The Blue Mountains are close to Sydney while the Zoo in Dubbo is about six hours drive. 13 About half of my informants were Christians prior to migration amongst my respondents. This was partly as a result of networks I had tapped in to. Some 36% of Hong Kong born people professed to be Christian in the 1996 census (DIMA 2000: 32-3), while the proportion of Christians in Hong Kong is probably about 8 per cent (Hong Kong Government 1997: 340-1). It would seem that Christians have a greater propensity to emigrate. Accommodating Places Chapter 7 203 university student who fell asleep on the night before an essay was due. A salesman happened to call, waking her up, so she was able to complete the essay. Rather prosaic ‘miracles’, we might think: they were nevertheless moments of release from tensions and anxieties familiar to migrants. When Celia began to consider returning to Hong Kong, her Christian fellows advised her not to go back because there were too many distractions from God’s ways in Hong Kong, and people often did not return to the church. This was because ‘the life here is more quiet and routine’. Even God’s power has it’s place. 7f. Class-ifying suburban Sydney: the example of western Sydney I have detailed some accounts of practical engagements with suburban space in Sydney in which subjects attempted to locate themselves in an unfamiliar physical and social topography and to negotiate new spatial opportunities (even to experience God). Relatively affluent suburbs seem the most benign of environments, but they could present considerable challenges for settlers. Hong Kong has few spatial environments that could be considered as ‘suburban’. The building of new-towns in Hong Kong have created a network of ‘multi-centred’ urban sites (Lo 1992: 157), although the New towns have not attained the symbolic or social status of the older centres on Hong Kong island or Kowloon. New town areas may be considered to be sub-urban in the sense of bearing a somewhat peripheral relationship to core urban areas, but they scarcely resemble Australian suburbs as lived spaces. Despite the dissimilarity or urban spaces in Hong Kong and Sydney suburbs, some of my informants drew parallels between places in the two cities. I used to live in Sha Tin because it’s quiet. Quieter than the city. Now I live in Hornsby, where there’s lots of trees and not too much aeroplane noise. The resemblance between the new town of Sha tin and leafy Hornsby in Sydney’s north-western suburbs may seem slight. But Angie, talking of her liking for quiet and spacious areas was locating herself dispositionally by creating a personal analogy out of her perceptions of spatial distinctions in the two cities. Accommodating Places Chapter 7 204 Garden city planning ideals had a small impact on Hong Kong.14 A development with detached houses and gardens called Fairview Park was built near the Chinese border by a Canadian development company in the 1970s. I am using this exception to illustrate the rule – Fairview Park is an anomalous space in Hong Kong. It seemed a very strange environment when I visited it after having become attuned to tower block life. A friend from Hong Kong who had studied in Sydney bought a property in Fairview Park because it reminded him of Australia, and he didn’t want to return to high-rise living. He had once considered migrating to Australia: in a way he took the place back with him. Or rather he found a piece of Sydney in Hong Kong. Suburban living may provide a means for migrant home-building, of creating a viable mode of inhabiting their new life, as well as being a terrain of social distinction. These two aspects are linked. Suburban homes may offer greater latitude for Hong Kong people to cultivate ‘private life’, to enhance family engagement, or to invest in the space of home through the cultivation of personal tastes. Suburban living may give increased latitude to strategies of investment in the home itself and also to the cultivation of distinctions based on location. Immigrants in attempting to make a viable home typically seek the most advantageous and viable locations within the city given their resources and social connections. This entails a more complex and dynamic process than a political economy approach to spatial location in Sydney could provide. This is because the sense of social/spatial position of newcomers is always filtered through dispositions acquired elsewhere. I want to discuss ways in which Sydney’s urban space is divided and categorised. Representations of urban space have both syntagmatic and paradigmatic dimensions. While there is an ongoing attempt to construct a representative and typified ‘Sydney’, the city is at the same time always internally defined by difference. Like any substantial city, Sydney is territorialized and hierarchised in terms of status and class, desirable and less desirable parts. There is a long history of social distinction about suburban locations. The 1895 publication How to know Sydney was already fixing a social geography: 14 Parts of Kowloon Tong were designed along garden suburb principles in the 1920s, with detached two storey residences set in their own gardens (Bristow 1989: 8-9). Accommodating Places Chapter 7 205 Alexandria, Annandale, Arncliffe and Auburn are recognised as working men’s suburbs, the housing being small...Botany is devoted to factories, and Burwood and Bondi to gentlemen’s residences...Darling Point and Double Bay, which are near the harbour are ...regarded as the fashionable part of Sydney. The other fashionable suburbs are Elizabeth Bay, Pott’s Point, Rushcutters Bay, Gladesville (on the Parramatta River), Point Piper, Rose Bay and Strathfield. At all the above places the houses are mostly large, and are surrounded by beautifully laid out grounds...Mosman’s Bay is a charming place on the north side of the harbour,...having lovely views...Parramatta is a large business town, and the centre of a fruit growing district...(in Spearitt 1978:192-3) Markers of suburban value such as large houses and gardens, distance from the sites of labour, proximity to water and views, have remained much the same, although suburbs themselves have risen or fallen in status and desirability. The association of places with class and status is neither wholly expressive of ‘objective’ social characteristics, nor are they entirely empty ‘myths’ about places. At the same time that places are ‘class-ified’ according to valued social characteristics, social class is ‘spatialised’, attached to spatial moorings. As Rob Shields puts it: ‘spatialisation unifies the discursive (the use of metaphors) and empirical (myths rendered as practice), and indicates their modes of inter-relation (normative codes of spatiality)’ (Shields 1991: 64). Historically, ‘good’ areas of Sydney have been associated with lack of industry and the size of residential properties. In the 1920s, the suburbs of Ryde and Drummoyne were regarded as the Western Suburbs, home of the ‘Great Middle Class’ (Spearitt 1978: 200). Now the west has sprawled further west. Gentrification made over trendy inner city suburbs like Surry Hills and Paddington once thought of as slums that were once targeted for ‘clearance’. Australian newspapers regularly carry features on ‘how your suburb rates’, so people can keep up with the constant flux in the suburban hierarchy, as defined by real estate valuations. Nevertheless, accompanying this complexity of shifting representations of place is a tendency towards simplifying schemes which contrive to project into space the structures of oppositions we might call spatialisations of class. In analysing migrant practices, I want to invoke an active and heterogeneous conception of class. As an active process of class-ifying, class hierarchies emerge not just from relations of the Accommodating Places Chapter 7 206 productive economy, but from many divisions of the social world. One element is the continual production of spatial representations and associations of different groups with specific places. Classifying places and their inhabitants is always a complicated symbolic struggle. There is necessarily some empirical substance in representations of place, along with oversimplifying and stereotypical images. Such stereotypes are potentially enabling as well as limiting, providing a basis for subjects including migrants to negotiate a position in relation to others and other places. Class divisions are mapped onto the city as if they were discrete symbolic territories.15 The social delineation of American cities is commonly aligned around cardinal points – Westside, East End, north Side, South end – which have a social meaning only in the context of a particular city and its historical geography of class and ethnicity (Allen 1993: 228-9). Sydney is often conventionally described in terms of broadly ‘tectonic’ regions of the North Shore, Eastern Suburbs, and the Western Suburbs (sometimes distinguished from the gentrifying Inner West).16 Diane Powell (1993: 63) has written of the shift in stigma from inner city terrace house ‘slums’ characterised by crowdedness and unsanitary conditions to the supposed featureless and barren sprawl of the western suburbs, constructed primarily in the post WW 2 period. The western suburbs of Sydney now bear the stigma of low status, unemployment, and criminality. As Powell puts it: ‘The compass points have become social indexes with differentiating auras of status and prestige’ (Powell 1993: 1). These ‘cardinal’ imaginings are only approximations in a much more finely graduated status ‘map’ of the city. Such geographically vague categories, such as ‘the west’, in which geographical space, administrative zones and typifications of 15 Raymond Williams (1973: 259-76) wrote of the bifurcation of nineteenth century London in terms of visibility: London was imagined as a city of light and city of darkness. The glittering gaslit metropolitan ‘West End’ was opposed to the ‘nether world’ of the East End, a threatening ‘unexplored’ world for the literate who lived outside of it. The vertical classifications Uptown and Downtown seem to derive from early nineteenth century Manhattan – the residential Uptown was associated with class and style, opposed to the downtown, the busy commercial and entertainment areas and the nearby poor neighbourhoods (Allen 1993: 229). 16 The ‘south’ of Sydney is not so clearly demarcated and typified and does have such a clear-cut identity as the north, east and west. Areas such as Bankstown, Fairfield and Cabramatta are sometimes described as south-west, or sometimes included in western Sydney. Accommodating Places Chapter 7 207 social status are intertwined, create a sense of discontinuity of social conditions in discrete places, rather than contiguity and interdependence between places (Zerubavel 1991: 6-9). The directionality of social identifications such as ‘the west’ are relational and give the interlocutor a sense of ‘where we are’ within a panoramic sense of the city that fades off into the distance of familiar representations and routine movements within the city. Powell shows how a typical newspaper description of the western suburbs placed the reader in a particular way in a ‘discourse space’ that also depends on that reader’s position in the context of a hierarchised urban space. In her example, the reader is presented by the writer (‘I’) with an account of ‘the dumped population syndrome’ which has resulted in a whole litany of ‘problems’. The reader (‘you’) if, from the western suburbs, is positioned as part of the problem. In Benveniste’s words, “the third person is the one who is absent, not really a person at all, but ‘the verbal form whose function is to express the non-person’” (Benveniste in Powell 1993: 13-14). A reader who lives elsewhere in Sydney is able to adopt a complicit ‘you’, reinforced in their difference and distance from the discursive site of such problems. Michael Symonds (1993:66-7) points to western Sydney being the other which is lacking in exoticization. Unlike the paradigm exotic other of Said’s Orientalism (1978) there is no secret desire for the other – the west is simply a space of lack without compensatory attractions. Adopting a more ‘culturalist’ explanation, Symonds sees the west as urban space constituted as without culture. He sees the myth of the west as a projected ‘colony’ resulting from the bifurcation of Sydney – culturally and materially – from the 60s to the 80s – Australia’s ‘age of enlightenment’, when urban elites gradually acquired a sense of being in an international city with a distinctive culture located in the city’s inner suburbs. This was accompanied by the peripheralisation of the west and the ‘westie’ as the cultural leftovers, ‘what has been left behind’ in the civilising process (Symonds 1997: 90). But Symonds does not consider the multiple representations attached to places identified with migrant settlement. How have specific cultural and ethnic differences been represented in the context of this concentration of cultural capital in the inner city? ‘Multiculturalist’ distinctions have been mapped onto the structures of Sydney space to produce zones of taste and Accommodating Places Chapter 7 208 distinction. This is brought out in Hage’s study of restaurant practices in Sydney. If the west is the place characterised by lack of culture (or of cultural ‘appreciation’), it can also be conceived as a ‘wild’ zone, where exotic game can be had. Cabramatta, a western suburb with a major concentration of immigrants, particularly Vietnamese, is associated (in media reports and ‘urban myth’) with the drug trade and criminality. Its concentration of Asian restaurants is imagined as a wild but fertile territory by inner-city gourmands looking for new and fresh fields. Cabramatta is a place which potentially ‘enriches’ the urban tourists’ experience of authenticity/ethnicity, hence their cultural capital as a whole. The local council actively encourages this internal urban tourism, promoting Cabramatta as ‘A Day Trip to Asia.’ But this enrichment relies on the maintenance of the distinctions between places and populations identified with them: multicultural consumption is envisaged as being provided by one group for another – ‘cosmo-multiculturalists’ – presumed to live in the east. These distinctions are projected onto representations of the urban space of Sydney as a whole (Hage 1997: 118-23). We should not take this scheme too literally. The point is that there are competing imaginaries of place operating within discourses of taste. The lived space of the ‘subjects’ of ethnic difference who build of homely environments including the provision of food, is juxtaposed with the ethnicised space of consumption which draws on representations of commodified difference. Different subject positions generate multiple spatial images in relation to dominant representations of the city and suburban structure. 17 Cities are complex and always shifting constellations of real-and-imagined locations, structured by multiple practices and view-points. Real estate markets, zoning and planning regimes, cultural perceptions, discourses and representations, the collective desire and abjection projected on certain places are all constituents of the received 17 The rebellious son of Greek migrants in Christos Tsiolkas’s novel Loaded describes Melbourne in cardinal terms: I detest the East. The whole fucking mass of it: the highways, the suburbs, the hills, the rich cunts, the smacked-out bored cunts. The whitest part of my city, where you’ll see the authentic white Australian, is in the eastern suburbs . . . East are the brick-veneer fortresses of the wogs with money. On the edge, however, bordering the true Anglo affluence, never part of it ……… The West is a dumping ground; a sewer of refugees, the migrants, the poor, the insane, the unskilled and the uneducated. There is a point in my city, underneath the Swanston Street Bridge where you can sit by the Yarra River and contemplate the chasm that separates this town. Look down the river towards the East and there are green parks rolling down to the river, beautiful Victorian bridges sparkle against the blue Accommodating Places Chapter 7 209 (and contested) knowledge of city dwellers. The next section traces how my informants from Hong Kong mapped and (re)interpreted their own social geography of Sydney’s suburbs. 7g. Hong Kong mappings of Sydney Recent migrants from Hong Kong have not shown a great tendency to marked settlement concentrations. While they may initially stay in areas near relatives or friends, this has not prevented a quite wide spread. There are relative concentrations in areas such as the north shore, Hurstville and Parramatta areas. My emphasis here is not really on the empirical ‘patterns’ of the social geography of urban location. I am more interested in the way in which migrant subjects form an image of Sydney as a whole, in finding their place within a symbolic geography of Sydney through ordinary migrant practices. When I met Tony, he had only been in Sydney for a couple of months. He was living in the inner suburb of Ultimo, and still gravitated mainly to places where he could meet other Chinese. Since he had a lot of leisure time, not having yet found work, he would often wander to the Haymarket Chinatown, Chatswood, Hurstville, and the local library, which has Chinese books and newspapers, a contemporary Chinatown circuit. He didn’t go to the Chinatown locations principally to shop, saying he preferred the supermarkets at Leichhardt ‘where you can get everything’18, but to be amongst Chinese/Hong Kong people. This ‘stage’ of wanting to be enveloped in Chinese space is usually short-lived.19 I interviewed Angie five years after she had settled in Sydney. Initially she wanted to live in proximity to Hong Kong people, but expressed a typical desire to disperse: sky. Face West and there is the smoke scarred embankment leading towards the wharfs. The beauty and the beast. . .All cities depend on this chasm. (Tsiolkas: 41, 143-4) 18 Larger retailers have begun to realise the potential for marketing to the diverse cultural groups found in many parts of Sydney. Supermarkets like ‘Big Fresh’ which first opened in Leichhardt and later other locations embody a multicultural ethic in selling a wide variety of national produce, with subsequent market success. In the process they have taken ‘shopping as spectacle’ to greater lengths, with singing and dancing animals and vegetables, strolling clowns and musicians, etc. 19 Older people typically have less capacity to acquire language skills and new social connections and thus are less likely to change. Community agencies working with Chinese such as Australian Chinese Community Association (ACCA) devote by far the largest part of their programs to older immigrants. As a community worker told me, “the younger (Hong Kong-born) people are too busy working or studying, or if they are not working, looking for jobs to be involved.” Accommodating Places Chapter 7 210 At the beginning ... if I meet people from Hong Kong where I come from, then I can get more social gatherings... and I can get more consultation advice. I won’t find it so strange in a new environment...But now after five years, I can live anywhere. I am accustomed to Australian way of life, and so it’s just the same anywhere, it’s the same. Angie was past the stage of needing to live in proximity to other Hong Kong people. This is not the kind of perspective which we would associate with the formation of ‘enclaves’ or any strong immersion in concentrated ethic community. Hong Kong Chinese have nevertheless made a contribution to the appearance of Chinese concentrations, the creation of a number of putative ‘Chinatowns’. New areas have emerged where there is a visibly Asian presence in the form of stores and restaurants beyond the established Chinatown in Haymarket – such as Chatswood, Hurstville, Parramatta, Eastwood.20 These are principally retail and eating sites that provide visible signs of Chinese-ness. ‘Chinatown’ in Australia has shifted from being a single enclosing ethnic ‘enclave’ which supplied a wide range of specific community functions, to more dispersed zones of consumption –culinary and shopping areas (See Anderson 1990, 1993). I am more interested in places in Sydney in terms of processes of orientation, and how subjects have practically made sense of the city through its divisions, its places of desire, fear, indifference. These understandings may not be entirely incongruent with the ‘Aussie’ social imaginary of Sydney. Dana, who had spent a couple of years living in Blacktown in Sydney’s western suburbs while studying prior to emigration, put it this way: When you divide the city, east-west and south-north, the best place to stay is east or north. You know about it. In the western area, there is a lot of, you know, people, but the quality of people is not as well as the other part. This sounds something like the general structure of Aussie accounts of Sydney’s social spatiality. These impressions of the class topography of Sydney could come Accommodating Places Chapter 7 211 from any number of sources – through friends and colleagues accounts of places, media stories, or personal experience. But Hong Kong people have not simply reproduced the social map of Sydney in the same form as the natives’. Migrant accounts of suburban differentiation typically encompass their own experience of finding their place in the city relative to a sense of their social position. Decisions about settlement in Sydney involve diverse and often protracted strategies of testing out the best place to be. Settlement strategies are understood in relation to past trajectories, and indexed to specific places. Adrian bought a block of land in southern Sydney. Because land and property is worth far more in Hong Kong due to the extremely short supply he was able to buy a much more capacious dwelling in southern Sydney. Yeah, Australia is so spacious, fresh open air, wide and completed roads. So I purchase a block of land in Beverley Hills and built a new house there. The living condition is very comfortable, compared with Hong Kong it’s much better. You couldn’t buy this much land for no matter how many millions. Only very rich people in Hong Kong own a house and a garden, so spacious, very luxurious for ordinary people in Hong Kong. Adrian’s sense of upward mobility is certainly enhanced by the unprecedented access to land in Sydney, and the status this seems to imply. Adrian implicitly references Hong Kong space in evaluating his own trajectory in Sydney. P: When you first came to Sydney, where did you live? A: In the south, in Beverley Hills. P: Why did you choose that place to live? A: In the first place because my sister lives in Beverley Hills, and it’s logical that I live in a place near to my sibling, so they can render me consultation advice. I know nothing about Australia when I first arrived, so I logically found a place adjacent to my sister. P: Did you like living in Beverley Hills, did you feel at home there? A: After all, is quite good, but after all I found more Hong Kong people live in the north than in the south. But I may consider moving to the north later but not now. 20 None of these exclusively cater to Hong Kong immigrants. Other ‘Asian’ shopping areas with less Hong Kong presence include Cabramatta, Ashfield, and Bankstown. Accommodating Places Chapter 7 212 We can see how Adrian referenced Sydney’s urban space in terms of the location of other Hong Kong immigrants. A distinction between location in ‘north’ and ‘south’ emerged in these accounts of relations between migrant subjects, perceptions about lifestyles and styles of housing. One interviewee commented: The wealthy people settle in the north shore and the people with less money further south, such as in places like Hurstville. Most people we know live in the north, but they do not have much time for us. (…) Yes, I think it makes a difference to Hong Kong people where you live and what kind of house you have. Again status is measured in relation to the location of other people from Hong Kong. Being less habituated to the internal spaces of Sydney, migrants construct their own maps of Sydney’s hierarchies of places and associated meanings. I want to present two cases of gravitation to the suburb of Carlingford, as a way of comparing different trajectories and readings of class and place. Stephen described his family’s movements in Sydney over several years. For some nine months he and his family rented a house in Lindfield in the north shore, which they had heard was a good area to settle and invest in property. They were still deciding whether to stay permanently at this stage, but wanted to buy property if they were going to stay in Australia. When they had made a decision to remain in Australia for good, they tried out several residential locations including Eastwood, before deciding on Carlingford, because it was close to a good school, where the children go. Stephen differentiated Carlingford spatially and socially from the ‘north shore’: They are different, they are different. The people living in Carlingford, they are the workers, they are in the blue collars, they’re working types there. The one in the north shore, normally they are rich, they own business, or they just want to come to retire. But here we see a subtly different reading of the class grading of the city, viewed from a specific migrant viewpoint. The search for the best place to live, given one’s Accommodating Places Chapter 7 213 social and economic resources, entails forging a particular social map of the city filtered through a ‘Hong Kong’ sense of positionality. But this social map must also mesh to some extent with dominant local representations of the city’s structure. Carlingford occupies an ambiguous position in the changing cognitive map of Sydney. Does it belong to the north shore or western suburbs? Physically Carlingford lies in between Parramatta and the western edges of the ‘north shore’. Carlingford could be positioned either at the far end of the north shore, or the beginning of the west, depending on viewpoint. This is a question of imputing its class representation, given that the north shore is locally associated with wealth, usually ‘old money’, while the west is associated with working classes, and relative deprivation. North shore residents may consider Carlingford as part of the West, since it is close to Parramatta, definitely ‘westie’ heartland. Another informant living nearby thought of Carlingford as part of the north, because of its proximity to Eastwood, a middle class suburb with a sizeable Asian migrant population. But Stephen distinguishes Carlingford from the north shore, which he understands to be the abode of wealthy Hong Kong Chinese, especially those living around the Chatswood area. The characterisation of Carlingford as ‘blue collar’ is relative to the north shore as the most prestigious zone of Hong Kong settlement – ‘they are rich, they own business, or they just want to come to retire.’ Rather than deriving the social position of Carlingford from the ‘dominant’ perception of Sydney’s status geography, migrants may map the city partially through their readings of the migrant group and its social divisions. Few locally born Sydney-siders would think of Carlingford as ‘blue collar.’ 21 Stephen was making a synthesis of impressions of general class divisions in Sydney, as well as of the Hong Kong migrant field. We might compare Wanda’s move to Carlingford from Wentworthville, a western suburb near Parramatta. When she found a job in Parramatta, she bought a unit in 21 This example of a particularly ambiguous suburban location was suggested by a discussion at a seminar in 1999 called “Writing the West”. It was about western Sydney and the way it is represented relative to other parts of Sydney. There was some discussion of this contested social spatialisation of Carlingford. To many of the discussants, this boiled down to whether Carlingford is a nouveau riche area, or a ‘genuine’ part of the west. For instance, one man who grew up there said it was becoming part of the north, because it is now a gentrified area, unlike the time of his childhood. Most people at this event regarded themselves as ‘authentic’ western suburbs intellectuals confronting a class bias directed against the region. Curiously, they succumbed to the same class-ifying logic that they were trying to criticise, in adopting a ‘proletaroid’ position in relation to the ‘marginalisation’ of the western suburbs. Carlingford no longer fitted the category of west, because it no longer contained the authentic battlers. Accommodating Places Chapter 7 214 nearby Wentworthville because of its proximity to work. Wanda came to live in Carlingford via the ‘west’ not via the ‘north’, so her experience and sense of distinction between places is partly based on living in the west. She experienced the different evaluation of the western suburbs more directly, and came to the realisation that the area was not so ‘suitable’ to Hong Kong people of her background. P: What did you think of living there (in Wentworthville)? W: Well, it’s not too bad. I guess where I lived in Wentworthville the street is quite high population, it’s all units, and it’s got a few blocks of Housing Commission units as well. So after a while, I feel, like, in terms of value, it wasn’t that great. P: Was it affected by the Housing Commission places? W: Well, it’s just, I think the kind of stigma with the western suburbs. Although we didn’t have any problems where we were, but we think the house, I mean the price of the unit, hasn’t really raised in a few years. And I’ve got a lot of friends living in Eastwood, Carlingford area as well, and a lot of Chinese sort of live around this area, (...) and because our office moved to Telopea, and I sort of beginning to, like this area. ….The western suburbs, I think, is not as good as where we’re living now, and it’s sort of mainly working class people. But we didn’t really have any trouble, but I guess I feel in the long run, it’s probably better to be in a place where we can live long term. This association of ‘trouble’ with proximity to working class people did not arise from any negative experiences with neighbours. Rather Wanda became aware of the difference in value ascribed to the area – both in terms of the sense of stigma attached to it and its inhabitants and to the real estate values that were not appreciating like most of Sydney. She has incorporated the association of ‘units’ and public housing with lower status, even though she can attribute this lower status to ‘stigma’. The social maps that Hong Kong people form of Sydney (and these are certainly not static) often include ethnicizing certain places in relation to the presence of other Chinese communities. For instance, it is common for Ashfield, where there is a concentration of PRC immigrants, in particular Shanghainese, to be referred to as ‘Shanghai’, and Hurstville ‘little Shanghai’. I have heard Hurstville referred to as ‘Singapore in Sydney’, not because there is a Singaporean concentration there, but Accommodating Places Chapter 7 215 ‘because it’s very tidy, and the police do a good job of cleaning up crime.’ I was told there were signs in the streets saying ‘No loitering’ and threatening a $500 fine. These regulations would have had nothing to do with the presence of Singaporeans in the locality. However, these readings of place seem to reflect a Hong Kong regional template projected onto the topography of Sydney. Particular places can be associated, either positively or negatively with other Asian groups. Dana was drawn to other (East) Asians, Koreans, Japanese and Taiwanese, living around Chatswood and St. Leonards near her north shore apartment block: ‘because they look similar to you, you feel more comfy with them.’ On the other hand, the presence of other Asians can often be problematic for Hong Kong Chinese. .Wai Man, who had been looking for places to live in Ashfield mentioned that he didn’t want to live near mainland Chinese in Ashfield, as he didn’t feel safe around them. The transposing of this distrust is not so surprising, given the common stigmatisation in Hong Kong of ‘mainlanders’, typically identified as ‘illegals’ and blamed for crime and other problems. This distinction is really about established versus recent immigrants in a city of immigrants. Helen Siu noted negative terms for recent immigrants from the PRC such as ‘mainland boy’, ‘green stamp alien’, ‘Ah Chan’ which seem to date from the 1980s (Siu 1988:1). An emergent sense of identity in Hong Kong, distinct from one based on Chinese origin, would seem to be partly constituted by an ethos of material progress, threatened by ‘less developed’ immigrants. Mainlanders are perceived to be the cause of a multiplicity of problems in Hong Kong, including competition for jobs, impeding the supply and access to government housing, and most emotively, of crime. Also, mainlanders are thought to be characterized by lack – of style and of cosmopolitan savvy, even though they often share the same place of origin as their detractors. They must work hard to acquire the look, speech and style of the Hong Kong urban ‘natives’. Fay was quite blunt about Hong Kong people not wanting to mix with other Asians in Australia, singling out Vietnamese and mainland Chinese. When I asked her why she said: ‘those PRC Chinese elbow you in the crowd and spit in the street, climb on a wall to get their photo taken. They will even divorce their spouses to get the single parent’s benefit.’ Fay was herself an immigrant from Shanghai. I ask her why she thought mainland Chinese were like this. Accommodating Places Chapter 7 216 The Chinese people are different from Chinese many years ago. They don’t have that tradition, the sense of value is different. They are too practical. I saw couples coming to Hong Kong, recently migrated to Hong Kong, and the husband got ill, and the wife just dump him like garbage. No good, always wanting to climb up, saying ‘we don’t suffer enough, don’t want to suffer any more. I want my share, it’s my time now to enjoy.’ They forgot how hard Hong Kong people work. . . In this narrative, the Chinese from China have lost certain Chinese virtues, which have somehow been maintained in Hong Kong. These cultural tensions acquired in Hong Kong are projected onto certain spaces of danger in multicultural Sydney. 22 Wai Man initially lived in Marrickville, an area in the ‘inner west’ of Sydney characterised by a diverse population including people of Vietnamese, Lebanese, Greek, and Pacific Islander origin. He had been disturbed and anxious about his safety, particularly because of the visible presence of public drug dealing near the Marrickville railway station. Wai Man was worried that they were mostly Vietnamese, an often stigmatised group in Hong Kong. 23 Vietnamese in Hong Kong are negatively associated with ‘boat people’ who were effectively incarcerated there for long periods by the Hong Kong government. Wai Man felt he was being ‘harassed’ about money by mainly young men who would ask for small change. Once he said no to one of them and he thought the youth was following him. In Hong Kong, he had never felt threatened by beggars, since they were mainly old people, or ‘those disabled people who just hold out a bowl’ and didn’t present a threat to him. A sense of danger cohered around negative images of class and ethnicity, probably derived more from Hong Kong than from local sources. Wai Man later moved to Hurstville, where he felt much safer: I feel much safer than in Marrickville. The crime rate is lower. There was always drug dealers and drug users, you could tell which ones they were. And also, no one comes 22 There has been little attention given to racism in Hong Kong, either in popular discourse or in academic studies. For a discussion of the invisible forms of racism and national distinctions from the standpoint of the teaching of anthropology in Hong Kong institutions, see Lilley 2001. 23 This was in 1998 when there were newspaper reports of the street trade in heroin having spread to Marrickville. From my observations in 2000 visible trade had vanished from the vicinity of the station. Accommodating Places Chapter 7 217 up and asks you for money here. People are nicer here, they say hello to you in the supermarket. Not like in Marrickville, the people in the shops, they are so rude. ….. They call it [Hurstville] Sydney’s second Chinatown. It is a big metropolitan town. Now Hurstville is the second largest suburb, apart from Chatswood, for the gathering of the Chinese. There are many people there. We can see how the specific localisations of fear of crime and violence are transferred from a specific Hong Kong Chinese disposition towards other ethnic groups. These localisations may well run parallel to local Aussie ethnic typifications of crime and danger, but they are not identical in origin. In Dana’s social topography, negative perceptions of the western suburbs were linked to crime and people perceived to be lower class. She spoke of her fear of violent crime and robbery when travelling at night from Blacktown. At the same time she speculated that crime might not be objectively worse in western Sydney than in parts of Hong Kong where she had lived, but rather: D: …the impression when I got here is I’m like (an) outsider here, so I couldn’t ventilate so much. In Hong Kong, you know the places because you are born there and you know about the peoples around you, and the different areas. In case of emergency, you got some help from the other people. You can ventilate better. P: Ventilate? D: Yeah. P: What do you mean by ‘ventilate’? D: Like you know, there’s a lot of things you can’t talk with the other people too personally.... In Hong Kong, even I stay in the area which is not very good, you know, for accommodation or whatever, but you still find the place, you know, is more comfy. I was puzzled by this use of ‘ventilation’, meaning something like an intimacy and sense of security in a place. Perhaps a mistranslation of a Cantonese usage, it struck me as an apt Hong Kong English invention, revealing in its affective specificity. ‘Ventilation’ seems to imply a capacity to ‘breathe easily’ in an atmosphere one knows in a more ‘comfy’ and personal way. A lack of ventilation – not having a Accommodating Places Chapter 7 218 sense of the familiarity of spaces and people around her – allows Dana to succumb to insecurity and a fear of criminality. Anxiety about crime in empty spaces is not an uncommon feeling among Hong Kong people in Sydney. I recall accompanying a friend from Hong Kong to the bus terminal at Central Railway to wait for a bus to an eastern suburb where he was staying. I waited a while talking with him before he suggested that he would be all right, I could go, although I sensed some unease. When I said I would wait with him, he was immensely relieved, admitting he was quite scared when no one was around. 24 He didn’t like to be out after dark in Sydney, although he told me he felt quite secure in Hong Kong at any hour. He felt more secure in familiar spaces – ‘It’s your place, you know it’. A feeling of security is not just based on objective chances of crime or violence occurring, but on a certain sense of belonging or ‘ownership’ of a place. 7h. Chapter conclusion In this chapter I have presented some ‘spatial stories’ of practical encounters with suburban space Sydney. They detail moments in individual strategies of dwelling, fragments of ongoing projects of establishing and augmenting a sense of being in a new place. These accounts do not give a whole picture of Hong Kong migrant adaptation to Sydney’s environment. They tell more about affective states and how subjects become attuned, develop a ‘feel’ for suburban milieux. Settlement practices encompass both repose and movement, and take place at different social and spatial scales: from the cultivation of the proximate spaces of house and garden; the expansion of routine movements and the exploration of new parts of the city; to the gradual formation of more complex representations of the city as an aggregation of regions and a structure of differences. Subjects typically confront a sense of ‘too much space’, the initial perception of intervening space as a barrier to the intimacy and at-hand availability of Hong Kong 24 It struck me that expressions of fear seems to be more easily and commonly expressed by Hong Kong men than by Australian men. Accommodating Places Chapter 7 219 life. These spatialised feelings are projections of a sense of ‘social density’ relative to the degree of integration of the subject, their sense of centrality in relation to the newly adopted place. Ordinary activities such as gardening may confront people from Hong Kong with a sense of uncontained and sometimes threatening irruptions of ‘nature’. Phobic responses to spiders, birds or soil in part derive from the de-naturalised environment of Hong Kong. Living in suburban houses or neighbourhoods has to be learned: suburbia is by no means the natural state Aussies imagine it to be. Learning to dwell in suburban settings is assisted by the acquisition of new ‘spatial pleasures’ – enjoying the spatiality which was initially a barrier to feeling at home. Migrant dwelling goes beyond necessity, often expanding to encompass new possibilities and tastes for the unfamiliar. Establishing practices of suburban dwelling often entails shifting the primary site of social interface towards the house, creating a different sense of relation between work and domestic life, the public and the private in the two cities. The suburbanising of social experience in Sydney is often the basis for sharp comparisons with Hong Kong. A ‘deeper’ sociality, friendship and family life based on leisure and space is equated with Sydney, and compared with the speedy density and functionality of Hong Kong. It is as if economic relations did not exist in Australia or a private and intimate sphere was not possible in Hong Kong. While these dualistic comparisons apparently misrecognise many aspects of social relations in Hong Kong and Sydney, at the same time they are also ways of actively orienting subjects in negotiating social tendencies and differences between places brought together by migrant trajectories. Dwelling in a city as a whole entails the construction of an ‘image’ of the city and its divisions. Although in some ways mirroring locally hegemonic spatialised hierarchies of class, status and ethnicity in Sydney, migrant subjects overlaid their own templates as a basis for distinctions between places, based on hierarchies and power differentials derived from Hong Kong life. These spatialisations of urban space actively affected settlement strategies and the lived sense of place in Sydney. I pointed to some broad ‘native’ spatial/social distinctions about Sydney’s urban Accommodating Places Chapter 7 220 space, in particular the stigmatisation of the west. Broadly speaking, western Sydney was viewed negatively as a place of lesser dwelling potential by Hong Kong migrants. However, the strongest cardinal distinction within the settler horizon was between north and south with the north shore representing the ideal place for successful migrant settlement. Subjects generally did not attempt to ‘recreate’ Hong Kong in Sydney by building homely milieux or enclaves. Rather, migrant subjects adopted a form of dwelling in Sydney that complemented their still active connections to Hong Kong. Sydney presented ‘another side’ to the mode of urban experience in Hong Kong. Inhabitance in Sydney was often conditioned by the prospect of return or frequent shuttling to Hong Kong. A further dimension of cross-national migrant accommodation – between places – needs to be considered. This will be examined in chapter 9 using accounts of subjects returning to Hong Kong and the way they have incorporated their experience of Sydney into their sense of place. The next chapter examines a cinematic account of the ‘globalisation’ of a single family from Hong Kong, traced in their movements and interconnections between Hong Kong, Australia and Germany. Migrant struggles with settlement in Sydney outlined in the last two chapters are amplified in the more elaborated narrative structures of a film that emphasises the contrasting lived spaces of migrant experience in several locations.