NYLON - January 2009 - (Page 144) invisible city The first thing I notice upon arriving in Hong Kong is the air conditioners. They cling to the sides of apartment towers like barnacles, even though this is during the winter and the temperature outside is no warmer than 60 degrees. The white boxes protrude from nearly every window. Since most apartment buildings here are between 50 and 70 stories, tens of thousands of air conditioners are visible at any given time. Most of them are old models—bulky, with exposed fans, sitting on flimsy shelves screwed into the walls. During typhoon season, falling air conditioners are one of the main causes of death. But I am told that residents of the city consider them a necessary possession. With four people, on average, living in every room, it helps to have air circulating at all times. Air conditioners aren’t the only things sticking out from the windows of apartment towers. Electrical wires hang between them and snake down the walls. The buildings wear their infrastructure on their exterior—there is nowhere left inside to stuff it. Wet laundry hangs from long metal and bamboo racks that sti http://geology.com/world/hong-kongmap.gif ck out the windows. The people who live in these apartments are not, for the most part, working class. There just isn’t any space for a dryer. FOR ALL ITS BLUSTER, THE BEST THINGS ABOUT HONG KONG TAKE A LITTLE SEEKING OUT. BY NATHANIEL RICH Hong Kong is governed by a single principle: maximization. Maximization of space, maximization of profit, maximization of maximization. This preoccupation derives from a question of simple math. How is it possible to fit seven million people, and 22 million annual tourists, into an area of roughly four hundred square miles (much of which is taken up by mountains nearly as steep as cliffs)? The answer: skyscrapers, a dense forest of them. They are thin and ridged, so as to increase the number of rooms with windows. They rise in clusters of as many as twenty identical buildings; to an American eye, they resemble supersized, attenuated housing projects. Each window represents a different room, and each room is an apartment. There are two million apartments in Hong Kong that are between four- and six-hundred square feet. It is not unusual for three generations of a family to share a single home of this size, together with a live-in servant. Each resident of Hong Kong is allotted, on average, seventy square feet. Yet Hong Kong is one of the world’s major financial centers, and whether shopping, dining, or walking around downtown, a visitor gets the impression of stratospheric wealth. A woman at my hotel explains that Hong Kong caters to two types of tourists: businessmen and shoppers. Both conduct their affairs in the skyscrapers downtown. The upper floors hold the offices, while the subterranean levels are given over to shopping concourses. The malls themselves, with their endless parade of Western brands, are virtually interchangeable from their counterparts in Houston, Chicago, or Miami. What is remarkable is that each building, and thus each mall, is connected to its neighbors by underground tunnels, and by glassed-in walkways that cross over the streets. It is therefore possible to walk for blocks without ever going outside or, for that matter, without ever leaving a mall. But to do this is to miss the chaotic fervor of the city’s street life. In Hong Kong every thoroughfare is Times Square at 7 p.m. on a Friday night. The density of the crowds causes an informal highway-ization of pedestrian traffic, with dawdlers keeping to the right, and the impatient passing on the left. Any change of lane, or abrupt redirection, results in jostling or head-on collision. This makes for dangerous passage, for as you proceed, there are plenty of reasons to stop and gawk. Neon lights and advertisements are not only mounted on the fronts of buildings, but often extend outward on poles, so that they crowd the sky over the street. Women call from bars. Men shout from tailor shops. the 411 LOCATION: China’s south coast, at the Pearl River Delta POPULATION: 6,985,000 OFFICIAL LANGUAGES: Chinese, English CURRENCY: Hong Kong Dollar (approx. 0.13 U.S. dollar) 144 en route hong kong and macao photographed by nathaniel rich http://geology.com/world/hong-kong-map.gif http://geology.com/world/hong-kong-map.gif
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