Introduction

I’ve never had a home and often wonder what it would be like to have one. I packed my first suitcase at six and from that point on, home was in a borrowed room in Manila, a basement in San Francisco, or a corridor of an acquaintance’s house in Buenos Aires.

Home was also sometimes a beautiful apartment in a colonial building, or a house with enough space to play chase in. I have moved forty-two times and lived in Taiwan, Argentina, Chile,...
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Introduction

I’ve never had a home and often wonder what it would be like to have one. I packed my first suitcase at six and from that point on, home was in a borrowed room in Manila, a basement in San Francisco, or a corridor of an acquaintance’s house in Buenos Aires.

Home was also sometimes a beautiful apartment in a colonial building, or a house with enough space to play chase in. I have moved forty-two times and lived in Taiwan, Argentina, Chile, Denmark, USA, Thailand and now in Vietnam.

Because we moved so much, my father didn’t want to buy furniture or appliances. My first desk was an old door propped on empty boxes. My first piano was a box turned upside-down I’d drawn keys on.

For many years, our telephone sat on a display shelf for suntan oil I had dug out of a bin behind the drugstore neighbouring our restaurant. I finally bought some secondhand furniture for my room when I turned nineteen but we continued to do our laundry at the laundromat until I moved out a year later.

I imagine home is a place you know you can return to no matter how far away you go or in what state of mind you return. You know the smells, the stories, and the corners to avoid. It is yours and part of your identity.

My interest in the Chungking Mansions project stems from this curiosity. I wanted to see how people live inside what looks like an inhospitable environment in a country that is not theirs.

For non-residents—for most Hong Kong people—Chungking Mansions is a hotbed of criminality: five blocks of pimps, hookers, thieves, and drug pushers that is best avoided. This dilapidated structure resembling a dirty vent of a giant subterranean machine squats amid the luxury hotels and malls of modern Kowloon.

For residents, it is one of Hong Kong's last bastions of low-rent multiculturalism, where Nepalese guesthouse owners rent out rooms to Thai office cleaners, and Pakistanis sell mobile phones to African traders who hire Indian cargo companies to ship them home.

For me, Chunking Mansions represent what I’ve done so many times: recreating a home, however temporary, again and again.

Nana Chen
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
4 July 2017

"Chungking Mansions: Photographs from Hong Kong's Last Ghetto"
Photo book published by
Blacksmith Books Hong Kong 2018
ISBN 978-988-77928-2-6
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