philip tinari

Coastal City Mall, 2008, Shenzhen.

Yesterday was one of those magical Pearl River Delta days where the exigencies Koolhaas started proselytizing about a decade ago seemed to resonate even truer than I always imagine they must have at, say, the GSAPP or Documenta X. That old maxim about Shenzhen skyscrapers designed in three days? Sure seemed unchanged as I walked with a designer friend from his studio to a diner down a kilometer-long elevated walkway lined with every sort of retail operation and offering views on myriad foundation-pouring works in progress. This was Nanshan, the new CBD. The walkway and surrounding mixed-use had opened back in December. “They’re imitating Hong Kong,” he told me, which would have seemed less funny if we hadn’t been just a few kilometers over the “border.” We spent a long afternoon proofreading and then ate at the standby Hakka beef hotpot place in Xiasha, a VIC that emerged to service the truckies coming over through the Huanggang crossing, before they amped it up and opened it 24/7 to individual travelers in preparation for a coming subway and rail link.

If you’ve never crossed at Huanggang, you should, but only once. Where Lo Wu propagates this PRD urban fiction of a pleasantly connected stream of city centers, with the KCR light-rail running alongside the through-train to Guangzhou, Huanggang is all fuck-you elbow throws and spitting and plastic burlap sacks. You scale this baroque pedestrian overpass, negotiating poorly designed signage (all in Chinese of course) into the exit hall. After getting your stamp, you are dumped into a giant port-authority-style bus terminal where you must buy a ticket for one or another destination in Hong Kong. Wanchai is as close as it gets to Central, but fortunately I was staying on the Kowloon side, so Mongkok sufficed. Here’s the catch: If you have a suitcase, they’ll make you put it in the lower compartment, but absolutely do not slip into the Airport Express mentality of In-town check-in. After the bus has driven the five minutes through the no-man’s land between border terminals and deposits you in Hong Kong entry land, DO NOT NEGLECT (as I did) to take your suitcase from below and carry it with you through the second crossing. The irony was that the last time I crossed at Huanggang, which should have been the last time I crossed at Huanggang, the hassle of having to reclaim one’s bags multiple times was enough to drive a certain megacurator to cancel a talk and hitch a cab directly from the in side of the border to HKG, just in time to hop AF185 back to CDG.

So there I was, waiting behind ten other “visitors” (i.e. mainland Chinese, to whom Hong Kong belongs, but who are still extremely restricted in terms of entering it) as a very deliberate inspector actually read every line on every entry form (strangest question: place of passport issue), wondering why the e-channel barcodes that work so flawlessly for enrolled foreign-passport holders at the airport had not yet been installed here at Lok Ma Chau. It was at this point that I realized that there was no way I would be boarding the same bus I had been on before; all the Hong Kongers, who made up 80% of the bus population, had swiped their ID cards and cleared customs in seconds flat. Finally through, I could only attempt extreme politeness and precipitate a brief walkie-talkie exchange among the bus operators searching for my bag (I was fortunate to have remembered the exact departure time of the original bus) and then rode the 30 minutes into Kowloon trying not to think about exactly how one would go about trying to reclaim an item that had last been seen in the space between two borders. Miraculously, the bag was there on the curb in Mongkok. Some days, you just get lucky.