grotesque cityscape, ever present and popping up whereever redevelopment or gentrifiction are brewing. That’s my first impression from the exterior of Hysan Place in Causeway Bay, yet another shopping mall in the overbuilt district with most often worst roadside air quality in one of the most overbuilt islands on earth.
Sky Garden 空中花園 @ Hysan Place, Causeway Bay, Hong Kong
I was curious about the Taiwanese book-and-lifestyle heavyweight 誠品 Eslite. J’ai aucune idée si c’est un jeu de mot sur ‘élite’. Too many people, too many media personnels as well. I did skim at two books that caught my attention though. Firstly, Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment – an anthology or famous or not-so-famous penning essays from aesthetics to environment to earth, rightly described from the backcover as a good read at the intersection of literature and climate change.
Le deuxième livre, titré French Global: A New Approach to Literary History Ouais! Un bouquin en anglais sur le français ou plutôt la francophonie partout.
I dunno if the booksellers these days have artificial intelligence-driven databases pre-selecting books for them, but the two books that are not available at the local libraries picked up a few brownie points in my marking scheme by offsetting the tsunami of people going up and down the four floors that Eslite occupies as well as the I-follow-where-you-go flickering digital cameras. With the freeflow of people to come, the reading atmosphere the bookstore chain would like to replicate from Formosa might take a while to settle in.
Perhaps it would take longer to steer the reading culture of local Hongkongers than to demolish the now cornered thirty or twenty-something tenament buildings in the proximity of Lee Garden Road and Pak Sha Road.
high and low rises, grotesque cityscape
un asiatique et son charabia 某亞裔噏得就噏 an Asian Guy's rigmarole 