Today is Grave Sweeping Day, so I thought I’d publish something about an historic cemetery–Holy Hill (圣山), which is located in Buji.
Continue reading
Tag Archives: hakka
huidong: impressions of the edge
A week or so ago, we went to Huidong (惠东), one of the poorer counties in Huizhou City (惠州市). Huidong is located within the valleys of the mountain range that runs parallel to the eastern coast of Guangdong. Via mountain paths, it is a four-hour hike from Huidong to Haifeng (海丰县).
Continue reading
SZ8X80103//The_Myriad_Transformations//Cut and Pastiche: Hakka-scapes
There is this sense or perhaps compulsion to make sense of the city through its cultural history, as if history were the whole story and not some narrative, which has been retrofitted to the needs of the moment. This is not to say that the needs of the moment are unimportant, merely to highlight that what counts as history and when history may come to count (so to speak) are themselves effects of other social processes which may or may not have anything to do with what happened, but are (nevertheless) important to understanding what we think happened. All this to say, answering the question “how did Hakka-scapes come to the foreground of Shenzhen’s current embrace of history?” requires double think: we not only need to rummage around to figure out what happened then, but also to posit why then-and-there have been positioned at the origin of here and now. Continue reading
one tradition, two villages
The entrance to Changling Village (长岭村) is located on the southern side of Luosha Road at the foot of Wutong Mountain. Before the construction of the Binhai Expressway (1999) and the opening of the East Coast Highway (2008) made traveling across Shenzhen commonplace, Changling marked the practical eastern edge of the early Special Zone. Today, however, Changling is conveniently located on the J1 bus route which connects Seaworld at the southern tip of the Nantou Peninsula to Dameisha on the eastern edge of the Dapeng Peninsula. The entire trip takes 90 minutes without traffic, but usually takes over two hours. Indeed, the J1 route traverses the entire Shenzhen-Hong Kong border, and its constituent roads—Houhai Road, Binhai Expressway, Binhe Road, Luosha Road, and Huishen Coastal Express—literally name the waterways and migrations that once shaped the area: Backwaters, Oceanside, Riverside, Luohu to Shatoujiao, Huizhou to Shenzhen. Continue reading
The P+V Academy
So these past few months, I have been busy setting up a public arts education program at the P+V Gallery (虔贞女校艺展馆) in Dalang. We’re calling this series of events, the P+V Academy (虔贞女校学堂). This name, of course, is an updated rendering of Pious Virgins Girls’ School and the project to create a space for alternative, minjian (民间) histories.
On Saturday, September 9, 2016 at 3 pm, we’re screening Shefong CHUNG’s “From Border to Border,” a documentary about the Hakka diaspora in India. The title, of course, alludes to the marginalization of the Hakka within both China and India. We are thrilled that the director will be joining us for the screening and discussion. If you’re in the neighborhood, join us.
Located in the middle of an urban village, the P+V Gallery is the only historically restored building in Shenzhen that offers public programing. It is truly worth a visit to experience both the city’s deep history as well as Dalang Street Office’s efforts to shape an alternative public culture. The “Children’s Art Sprouts” projects, which organizes a monthly arts course, including the sock puppets is part of the Academy’s offerings.
finding samuel lowe…in shenzhen
How have our parents’ and grandparents’, and their parents’ and grandparents’ sojourns–some forced, some voluntary, and some taken on a whim–shaped the people we have become? It is a quintessentially American question, and yet it resonates in Shenzhen where almost everyone of the city’s 20 million people have migrated here from somewhere else. It also resonates because before the establishment of the Special Zone, emigration–rather than immigration, departure rather than arrival–informed family trajectories. Continue reading
the “village” thing
This past week, I toured Shangling Old Village (上岭村) in Dalang. Decaying villages like Shangling contextualize the “what came after” success story that is SHENZHEN! And yet. This contextualization depends upon one, standardized (and quite frankly boring) narrative of rags to riches, sudden wealth, boom boom boom, etcetera etcetera and so forth. Continue reading
minjian history
Inquiring minds want to know: what is minjian (民间)?
On Sunday, I became part of the scholarly committee (学术委员会) of the Devout and Chaste Girls’ School (虔贞女校)–a minjian organization. Other members in the group included architects, an archaeologist, an editor at a history journal of Bao’an District, an artist, and the Director of the Dalang Culture Office. The Dalang Vice Secretary of Culture also attended the meeting, but left early. In addition, clerical workers from the Department of Culture served tea and insured that the meeting ran smoothly. So what made us a minjian organization? Continue reading
the violence of rural (re)construction (5): lessons from shenzhen
So what am I learning about Shenzhen through my engagement with Meizhou forced evictions and the young people who are trying to figure out how to articulate new relations to their Hakka past and rural injustice? Continue reading
the violence of rural (re)construction (4): what gets preserved
Monday I joined the Meizhou preservationists in Enning Neighborhood Guangzhou, where we met to talk about how we could intervene in what was happening in Meizhou. There were two issues at stake. The first was straight-forward lay human rights–how do we help people keep their homes or guarrante a replacement home? The second was more abstract–what kind of buildings and spaces “ought” to be preserved for their historic value? Continue reading
Shenzhen Noted 