Planet Porn: Reflections On/In a Hong Kong Hotel Room
by dominic pettman

The entire bar was watching intently by now. Two young lads seemed to be breaking some kind of local record by constructing a table-tower that was the Jenga equivalent of the Shanghai Bank building. Bad feng-shui or not, the room was getting pretty excited. One player was pretty jumpy; hopping triumphantly about the room whenever he successfully extracted a wooden brick, placing it delicately on the top of the wobbling structure. The other guy was more collected, sucking on a cigarette and keeping a poker face throughout the tense contest. For at least fifteen minutes it was impossible to get a drink, since the two bar-girls, tiny women in giant shoes and spiky haircuts, were entranced by this latest challenge to Hong Kong's besieged gravity. I was the only gwailo in the place, and the two players would periodically glance in my direction and nod, to which I would mime some kind of Esperanto encouragement, or roll my eyes in exaggerated anticipation of catastrophe. It was uncanny to me how similar this Jenga-spire looked to the ubiquitous high-rises which cram Hong Kong's harbour. Then, inevitably - breaking the Canto-pop-infused tension with a crash - the tower came tumbling down . . .

Since returning from a week in Hong Kong I've been having a recurrent dream. I'm walking around the crowded streets, hopping onto escalators, getting into lifts, hanging on to cable-cars and marching along twisting flyovers. I don't know where I'm trying to get to, but I definitely have to keep moving. Otherwise I'll end up like that old man I saw, stuffed into a tiny wooden booth and buried in broken shoes. Maybe sleeping, maybe suffocated. The heat is truly astonishing, broiling me like those black tea eggs in giant baskets on the sidewalk. Periodically, I pass a major building which blasts frozen, reconstituted air out of its orifices, only serving to warp the body's internal thermostat. I seem to be going in circles, looking for the giant mall which will eventually lead me back to the hotel. Perhaps Frederic Jameson had a point after all, and wasn't just a toasted academic staggering around the Boneventura Hotel trying to find his room. It seems, however, that I took a wrong turn somewhere, and am now on the longest escalator in the world, heading up toward Victoria Peak. Maybe this is less a dream than a memory. A night memory.

I ponder the geo-political ephemerality of Hong Kong while lying in my room in the Marco Polo hotel. (I must have found my way back.) I've managed to find the hotel's three porn channels (16, 17 and 18) although they only give you five-minute previews before the signal cuts out, replaced by a demand for payment. I've worked out that if you turn the TV off and on again, you get another five minutes. The first channel is American, and is cheap, tacky and unimaginative. The second channel is Cantonese, and it is also cheap, tacky and unimaginative. The third channel is Japanese, and it is cheap, disturbing, and relatively imaginative. In one dubious feature, Violating Illegal Tits, a corporate-type guy fondles a woman in-between two cameras which face each other in order to create an "infinity effect" on a large TV screen. This odious figure barks in Japanese at the woman, while she is effectively split and multiplied into a sexual kaleidoscope: caught in a digital (in both senses) sadisto-narcissistic fractal feedback-loop. To someone like me, weaned on a steady diet of dusty postmodern theory, the whole thing is perfectly meta, and seems to capture the Russiaon-doll effect of Hong Kong without having to step out of my room. I suddenly realize that the background music is a Casio version of Pachelbel's Canon for Strings, but then the five minutes are up, and the TV goes dead.

Sex is everywhere and nowhere in Hong Kong. While walking around the Island, I had to stop dead in my tracks when I saw a gigantic billboard on the main street, overseeing the maddening crowd. It was part of Terry Richardon's Sisley campaign, and depicted a young woman in a bikini, spraying some white foam over her taut mid-riff, and moving effortlessly beyond innuendo in the process. I had already seen this image in fashion magazines, where it seemed playfully pornographic, but on the streets of Hong Kong it seemed simply obscene. "So this is the New China?!" I thought to myself. But then wondered if it is merely the transitory goddess of the in-formational city. The Venus de Globalism, who will soon be plastered over with a new 2D silent siren. Either way, at that moment she seemed iconic, and somehow sublime. If money is the new religion in Hong Kong, then this Sisley girl was ethereal. Or part of an ether-reality, which has replaced opium as the port's biggest trade.

Cultural theorist Ackbar Abbas believes that Hong Kong has a powerful erotic dimension, since "the city has a diversity that makes it potentially a space of pleasure and encounter." Indeed, if you want to save money on the airfare but experience the horizontal vertigo of Hong Kong, then I suggest you rent Wong Kar-Wai's film Fallen Angels, which is a nocturnal joyride through the neon afterburn of absent lovers and present strangers. People seem to float through the landscape like organic replicants, constantly brushing up against each other but never actually connecting on any emotional level. Sex dwells everywhere other than the sex act itself, which is replaced by unexpected violence, lonely onanism or stoic celibacy. (I was given a sense of this urban evaporation after dancing with an attractive Cathay Pacific groundstaff girl at a club, only to have her vanish moments later. A clear case of Hong Kong's "aesthetics of disappearance" . . . or simply my lame dance technique.)

I finally get sick of the monotony of porn and switch channels to MTV Asia. The promo shoes a teenage girl seductively licking her lips, and then slowly opening her mouth in order to swallow the camera.

I seem to be on the street again. I take another wrong turn, and find myself in Chungking Mansions, a festering warren that I vaguely know through Wong Kar-Wai's movie, Chungking Express. It seems to be the most literal incarnation of a tourist trap I've ever encountered, with lots of labyrinthine twists and turns promising escape, but only beckoning you further into the steamy centre of the beast. Dead rats, used tampons, and rotting fruit are crammed into corners and onto stairwells, while the fire-escape doors are nailed shut. It is surely only a matter of time before this architectural delirium is razed like the infamous Walled City - also in Kowloon - which boasted a population density equivalent to 3 million people per square mile. I duck between two stalls and emerge into a dark alley-way. Some young punks are sitting around patiently, like fishermen, and when they see me they spring into action, running toward me and shouting. They're probably just pimps or hawkers, but I hightail it out of there anyway. Just in case.

Modern urban life is increasingly experienced within the non-spaces of (to use a cringe-inducing term) "supermodernism." Examples include not only elevators, airports, corridors, subway stations and hotel rooms, but also the invisible architectures of the information economy: the digital realms which lie on the other side of the modem. Hong Kong is a perfect example of a metropolitan node comprised of many layers, folding back onto itself like a moebius strip. Bricks and mortar provide the skeleton, fibre-optical cables the nerves, and people the bits of data moving around the system. Which explains my recurrent dream in which I become a figure of "incessant circulation" (to use a favourite phrase of Jean Baudrillard's). A figure who hasn't actually been anywhere at all. Not in a tangible sense, anyway. Hong Kong's amnesiacal momentum is less a case of an imaginary community than an imaged community: a technotopian megalopolis which understands the pornographic logic of advanced capitalism. While Australia passes laws to ban pornography on the Internet (making itself the "village idiot of the global village" in the process), and Giuliani's Brave New York cleans up Times Square, Hong Kong thrives in the ambiguous spaces obscured behind digital pixelation.

A week after I left Hong Kong, physically at least, a massive typhoon hit the harbour. Boats were tossed across piers, cranes were thrown off buildings, and bamboo scaffolding was launched into the air like a thousand javelins. Many of its famous skyscrapers had their windows blown out by the pressure, and a China Airlines jet flipped onto its back as it tried to land on the tarmac. Seeing these images on the news prompted me to remember - or dream - the laughter in the pub as the Jenga tower crashed to the table. The girls said something cheeky and then returned to work. The guys took a long swig of beer and compared shaky hands. Then they scooped the scattered tiles into a pile and started again.