A couple of years ago, I visited a beautiful park where the Kowloon Walled City used to stand. It was my first time hearing about it. This article breaks down its history. There is also some great information in this infographic. Here was what the Kowloon Walled City looked like before the government tore it down in 1993:

Wikimedia, via Greg Girard’s City of Darkness

People use words like, “Dismantled Chinese fortress,” “overcrowded slum,” and “City of Darkness,” to describe the Kowloon Walled City. It’s an inspiration for a lot of dystopic, cyberpunk, visuals—including The Narrows in Batman Begins. 

This memory popped back up as I recently came across this post, in which Matthew Hung writes:

It is said that there is a distinct lack of any sense of national identity in Hong Kong and this is partially due to colonial tactics where political expression is purposefully subdued and hence providing no outlet for political idealism. In the case of Hong Kong, this resulted in the attention being directed towards the economic realm. Engaging in the free market gave a freedom to those blocked from democracy by allowing them an alternative context from which to improve their own situation, albeit at the individual level rather than the collective level of citizenship. The focus on the individual fragmented the need for the imagined community of the nation. This lack of a collective identity is also due to Hong Kong’s primary role as a facilitator. Existing as a far eastern entrepôt, it facilitated the meeting between the east and west which made a floating identity desirable.

…

He believes that the reason why Hong Kong seems to lack a culture was due to the import mentality under colonialism. This gaze saw culture along with everything else as coming from elsewhere, whether it is the modernist architectural styles from the West or Chinese traditions from the mainland. This was not because Hong Kong did not have any culture as the popular term of Hong Kong as “a cultural desert” may suggest, but rather that Hong Kong did not recognize it as being their own culture. This “reverse hallucination” of not seeing what is actually there was what existed prior to the Sino-British Joint Declaration. After which the sudden intense awareness of culture produced a special form of culture, what Abbas calls the “Culture of Disappearance.”

My parents were born in Hong Kong, and I was born and raised in Canada so I’ve been thinking a lot about this passage.