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Nicolette Wong (editor),ย Making Space: A Collection of Writing and Art,ย Cart Noodles Press, 2023. 163 pgs.
A presence and an absence define Making Space: A Collection of Writing and Art, an anthology of poetry and prose edited by Nicolette Wong. The presence is a specific representation of Hong Kong as a busy, crowded, noisy, ever-changing place. It draws upon a distinct vocabulary made of the images (tall buildings, relentless crowds, soiled urban landscape, lights) that render what life in the city is like. As much as this is an accurate commentary, the same imagery has been used many times to describe many other cities. After all, every metropolis would characterise itself in a similar way and claim to be busy and crowded and fastโmodern, in other wordsโwhile their residents would subscribe to such a narrative almost as a mark of distinction.
In parallel and in contrast, an absence runs through the anthology. This is an alternative vision of what Hong Kong could be: more compassionate; easier on its inhabitants; less materialistic; more tolerantโand less efficient even. The city described in Making Space is nothing like thisโnot yet at leastโso this vision is absent first of all because it represents what Hong Kong should be (but is not right now) in opposition to what it is (but should not be). And also because it is alluded to, rather than being directly spelled out. Unlike the presence discussed above, it cannot be narrated through well-known stock images: it is an aspiration whose contours can be traced only in contrast to what living in the city is like right now. An absent proposition thenโbut one that leaves an indelible mark on all the writings in the form of a persistent longing for a different Hong Kong. So strong is this desire that it becomes a sort of hauntology, to borrow a concept from Jacques Derrida and Mark Fisher: something that does not exist but still influences (haunts) the present. It is the awareness of unfulfilled possibilities and the uncomfortable realisation that the alternatives that were conceivable once most likely will never come to beโto quote a poem in the anthology, it is like catching a glimpse of what the city could be. ย
By exposing a broken equilibrium and a desire for a new balance, this haunting absence is the very reason why different spaces need to be made. But it also characterises the entire process as painfully impossible: the longing it causes never truly goes away and yet, as we will see, nothing can fully alleviate it. Even leaving Hong Kong would not assuage the craving for what is absent: after all, as one writer puts it, the body could depart but not the spiritโwhich is why making space is always about staying in the city, not withdrawing from it. With all this, the contributions are pervaded by a wistfulness for a different Hong Kong that is out of reach for its residents. Communicated through the anthologyโs many striking images and original turns of phrase, this melancholy becomes the real vocabulary of the absence, imparting a deeper resonance to the conventional representations of skyscrapers and crowds and lights.
SPACES OF ALTERNATIVES
The hauntology develops in two opposite directions. A few writers elaborate it outwardly, focusing on issues beyond their own personal circumstances. Coming to think about it, this can be a distinctly socially-conscious concept: it is not by accident that many NGOs in Europe and the USA are named โmaking spaceโ. It exposes real friction within society when individuals and groups use it as a rallying cry to demand that a certain situation is acknowledged and rectifiedโan insistence on alternatives and potentials that is very much in line with how Mark Fisher defines hauntology.
In the collection, apart from a few brief and incidental allusions, only three contributions are centred around this interpretation: A Painless Body, The Glasshouse and the Footbridge and A Tale of Space and The City, all of which openly talk about the protests. Aiming to claim a new equilibrium and not satisfied with just learning to cope with the present, they identify places of alternatives and possibilitiesโand agency tooโwhich contrast the usual urban landscape, where residents often move in confines made for them without their involvement. But what they chronicle is fragile, always at risk of being lost in the mainstream storytelling of the city: preserving its memory becomes an inevitable responsibility, at a time when recording and documenting is ever more urgent.
However, despite the inclusion of these three pieces, the anthology presents a rather limited account of the diversity of making space. Only Shahilla Shariffโs poem โThe Rest Is Silenceโ, unique because it directly confronts a social issue (homelessness), describes places made by those who live at the margins of society. It is an accomplished piece but on its own it cannot change the overall balance of the collection, which does not give a voice to many of those who try to make their own spaces in the city (migrant or foreign workers, the poor, the excluded).
SPACES FOR OURSELVES
For context, other artists have addressed these social dynamics in Hong Kong. For example, How to Make Space, a 2016 exhibition with an almost identical title, displayed the places lived in and made by migrant domestic workers. More recently, the poems of Eric Yip and Nicholas Wong narrate difference.
Instead, most of Making Space (including its two prefaces) steers towards a reflective and personal tone. The contributors remain firmly focused on their own attempts to cope with a constraining city and time: they explore how the existing situation can be endured, not if it can be fundamentally changed. Also, they do not look too deeply into the reasons (social or otherwise) why different spaces need to be made (for example, mental health does not feature in any great depth despite the anxiety caused by the inescapable longing).
So, consisting of a (literal or not) search for places that provide respite, followed by reflections on the emotions that they evoke, this making space remains predominantly a private act, completed by and for the author/narrator and therefore reflecting the experiences of a specific subject (the writing subject, so to speakโeducated and often English-speaking).
A DIFFERENT CITY
For all these limitations, this inward focus is the source of the anthologyโs most perceptive intuitions, as the contributors make use of it to say something important about coping with the absence.
In the writings, the city soils and pollutes: even a majestic animal like a wild boar (fearsome in its natural environment) is reduced to a pathetic figure scampering in the rubbish bins; and the famed lights, far from their consumeristic grandeur, expose detritus discarded in the streets. In contrast to this squalor, there are places in Hong Kong that perform a cathartic function: a pier, a seafood joint, a park, a beach, hills and islands. And mind spaces, created through meditation or coping mechanisms such as negative ease.
They all facilitate a different (rebalanced) relation with the city: while they do not resolve the haunting absence, at least they allow a temporary escape from the harsh urban life, a respite from all the longing that it causes. They promise a different equilibrium and fleeting moments of light-heartedness so that, amid all the changes and challenges, one can just be. Just like the 5am light, full of promise after a long day in the office and a longer night of karaoke; or the unexpected courage experienced during a hike, and the sense of direction sensed from the summit of a hill.
Out of this search, a different aesthetic emerges: intimate, it claims the right to everyday normality by celebrating small acts and seemingly mundane scenes. Localised too, because it moves away from the cityโs most famous areas, to places like Sok Kwun Wan, Tai O or Oscar by the Sea. In other words, a mythology of the micro, an aesthetic that celebrates what is often erased from the mainstream representations of Hong Kongโsomething that this anthology shares with other recent examples of Hong Kong literature, such as Karen Cheungโs The Impossible City or the collection Where Else: An International Hong Kong Poetry Anthology.
FRAGILE MAKE-BELIEVE
The problem is that these places can only ever provide temporary and incomplete reassurance, a tenuous equilibrium that might disappear without notice. They are not stableโone never feels definitively in control in themโor safeโon the contrary, at times they are dangerous, to the point that it is better to not look at them too closely to avoid uncovering the ghosts hidden behind. And the process of reaching them is fragile and unreliable, undertaken with hesitation (always open to reconsideration, weighed down by insecurity) and even (self-) deception.
Perhaps all this uncertainty is because sooner or later one realises that, like life in a fish tank, this search often requires giving up agency (no matter how knowingly or reluctantly) for shelter (no matter how illusory). And because, more fundamentally, making spaces is exposed as an artifice, an act of fiction in its etymological meaning of both creation and make-believe. To function, it demands commitment and, more than anything else, a determination to (pretend to) believe in its durability: in the words of a poem, we need to want it to last. Come to that, the goldfish memory (or some sort of selective amnesia) would help, to block out the doubts and insecurity implicit in the search. Memory, which as we have seen has to be defended to create alternatives, can be a hindrance when trying to cope with the haunting longing.
On its own, such a feeble process, marked by an unavoidable sense of impermanence, cannot really provide a lasting counterbalance to the city. The act of making space has to be supported (or even substituted) by something that masks its inherent weaknessโjust to temporarily silence the many questions that go with it and just so that it may appear more credible. Hence the necessity of resorting to myths and fantasy (Lo Ting or the Little Mermaid); or spirituality (by seeking protection in the statuettes of Guฤnyฤซn ่ง้ณ); or practices like divination. Their function is a variation of what cultural anthropologists would call reification, in that they try to solidify something that is really quite unstable. This works in more than one way. If our attempts to make spaces for ourselves are never entirely convincing, then undertaking them equipped with long-established conventions and well-known shared rituals can lend a semblance of objectivity. And in the face of constant change and disruption (within us as well as in the physical city around us), tradition and spirituality might just be the anchors that provide some reassurance.
AN INDISPENSIBLE ACT
In the end, the anthology successfully articulates the complexity and ambivalence of creating spaces for ourselves. It alerts us that there are always compromises to be negotiated, only to reach a solution that will never be completely satisfactory. The process it describes is fragile, never entirely safe but, just as important, always necessary. And with that, it offers a little bit of hope: we will never be fully liberated from our longing but at least we will learn how to take the edge off its most painful symptoms.
If at times Making Space comes across as a little too self-centred, incomplete against the complexity of city life, its solipsistic perspective reveals an important insight about how we cope with the absence that haunts us. It is contained in the title, which, as a progressive tense (or a noun, as a gerund), tells us that creating a space for ourselves is an activity and is always in progress. The act itself (with all that it demands of us) matters more than the end result because, once we accept that we cannot ever conclusively actualise what is absent (the only eventuality that would provide real stability), all that we can do is to continue our search and keep up the pretence.
So, this is what stays with us after we put the book down: the confirmation that if we stopped trying, if we did not believe in it anymore, the whole fiction of making spaces for ourselves would collapse. And then we would be left with nothing but danger, decay and distress.
How to cite:ย Griseri, Luca. โThe Absence that Haunts the CityโA Review of Making Space: A Collection of Writing and Art.โย Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 24 Nov. 2023,ย chajournal.blog/2023/11/24/making-space.
Luca Griseriย (he/him) studied history and postmodern philosophy in his native Italy. After obtaining an MBA from the University of Warwick (UK), he embarked on a career in marketing and over 18 years lived in London, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore. He is currently based in Penang, where he indulges in his passions: running, hiking in the forests and eating street food. [All contributions by Luca Griseri.]