There’s Something in the Air

Researching Hong Kong Air

Studies of Hong Kong air generate reams of material on air quality and the impact of air pollution on Hong Kong’s citizens. An interesting aspect of these findings is to consider where the dirty air comes from—is it ours (i.e., made in Hong Kong), or does it in fact, as many have argued, come from the dense industrial belt that occupies much of southern Guangdong province on the Mainland and is inconveniently located right across the border from Hong Kong? It is true that some of the pollution generated by factories in Guangdong blows into Hong Kong. However, the roadside pollution levels in Hong Kong remain high due to the pollution emanating from their own trucks and buses, especially those that are diesel run, which are the biggest offenders. China’s expanding manufacturing-driven economy and Hong Kong’s fading significance as an economic powerhouse, coupled with Hong Kong’s unique relationship with China in the posthandover period, gives the issue of Hong Kong air an interesting postcolonial bent. In this article we suggest that researching air differently, by moving away from more traditional notions of data, allows us to think in new ways about postcolonial Hong Kong.

In his book After Method: Mess in social science research, John Law (2004) critiques method in social science for being blinkered and thereby misunderstanding and misrepresenting itself. He argues instead that method is not “a set of procedures for reporting on a given reality. Rather it is performative” (Law, 2004, p. 143). This idea of performativity is related to Karen Barad’s (2003) posthuman notion of performativity—“one that incorporates important material and discursive, social and scientific, human and non human, and natural and cultural factors” (p. 808). Law (2004) also critiques the ineffectuality of standard methods in studying “the ephemeral, the indefinite and the irregular.” (p. 4). The subject of this exploration, namely, Hong Kong air, is often studied as a given reality which is codified, collected, measured, and indexed for its quality and then reported to the public. This article suggests an alternative approach of “materializing” air and recognizing its performativity and agency. In doing so, traditional notions of data are rethought by first thinking differently about air and its role in a small experiential study. It may be argued that something ephemeral and irregular like air cannot be materialized but only measured and indexed.

However, data is approached differently by considering the air’s agency, or the agency of data, and the ways in which it inter- and intra-acts with human researching bodies. In doing so, the human researcher is not privileged over the nonhuman air and as the human researchers in this small experiential study, we did not set out to find, collect, or handle data. In fact we relinquish the control that the traditional researcher has over her data and open ourselves up to new and unknown possibilities. We are intrigued with what happens when the human and nonhuman inter- and intra-act. These becoming-with (Haraway, 2008) practices involve both inter- and intra-acting with the sensations, memories, and cominglings of air. Through these becoming-with practices, new and seemingly unrelated questions about air are raised that shed light on the role that data play in the making of human and nonhuman relations. It is here where we begin to see the usefulness of a posthuman performative perspective, to understand and rethink postcoloniality in Hong Kong.

A “Walking-to-Think-With” Research Approach

We adopt a “walking-to-think-with” research approach inspired by Lesley Instone’s (2012) seminar, “Method/ologies for Common Worlds” in which we performed an experiential research exercise without set rules or fixed outcomes. There is a fair amount of literature on walking as an alternative means of knowledge production, something that provides a new perspective, another way of seeing and feeling (Phillips 2005; Wylie, 2005). It is a performative act that determines the kind of knowledge produced. As Instone (2011) points out, how a person moves through a landscape and among the people living in those spaces, constitutes how they relate to that place and how and what they learn about it. Similarly, it also shapes the walker’s mind and body as she or he moves in and through the landscape. Instone writes, “This performative understanding of space and knowledge highlights the complex processes through which worlds are always relational achievements and perpetually ‘in-the-making,’ never fixed or pre-given” (2011).

A walking-to-think-with research approach is provoked by twin considerations—first, how are “matters of fact” altered into “matters of concern” when one takes into account the larger landscape in which they operate, and second, how the intra-actions between people and things constitute and reconstitute the specific time–space configurations of places. In our particular exercise, the approach included embodying and enacting an assortment of practices that attend to the materiality of air. As part of the research exercise, we were asked to consider a range of practices while physically moving through research sites located in Hong Kong. We were encouraged to

Becoming-With Research Practices

We began our study without a research question or focus. We did not set out to research air, rather Hong Kong air found us. By employing a walking-to-think-with approach to data, we developed and enacted three becoming-with research practices. Donna Haraway (2008) uses the notion of “becoming-with” to explore human and nonhuman relationality. Becoming-with practices allowed us to embody different kinds of research relationships by moving away from questions of air pollution, health risks, and the origins of this air, to broader wonderings about Hong Kong’s historicity, its colonial past along with the legacies of that past, and its postcolonial present. Becoming-with practices challenge traditional understandings of data by rethinking humanist assumptions about the role of the researcher and data. For example, it was not the role of our human researcher bodies to collect, find, and categorize air. Rather, we gave our researching bodies over to the air in several more-than-human-encounters. Keeping our researching bodies still, while observing and sensing air, allowed for human and nonhuman inter- and intra-actions to occur.

Not having an idea of where air would take us or what we might discover, we used active engagement, constant questioning, and a willingness to follow and to be taken on an uncertain research journey. In being found by Hong Kong air, a different encounter is produced, one in which the human matters less. Air found Mindy while she was sitting in an air-conditioned classroom, listening to Lesley’s research seminar. Cool air was blowing on Mindy’s neck and her body responded by attempting to warm itself up. Her arms crossed in front of her chest. Then her hands rubbed both her arms in a quick up-and-down-motion, and her whole body shivered. Mindy’s body was cold from the air-conditioning, and she could not get warm.

This initial encounter with Hong Kong air is an important moment of instruction. Instead of ignoring the air, or focusing exclusively on either the air or Mindy’s body, attention is paid to the inter- and intra-actions (Barad, 2003) between the human (Mindy’s researching body) and nonhuman (air) and what is produced through this encounter. This encounter, or becoming-with air, produces a curiosity about air. It lingers with Mindy. The following three becoming-with practices—sensing air, tracing childhood memories, and cominglings—show how acknowledging the agency of data and allowing it to take us in unforeseen directions, transformed our understandings of postcoloniality in Hong Kong.

The Making of Relations

Law (2004) writes about “methods assemblages” as “enactments of relations that make some things (representations, objects, apprehensions) present ‘in-here,’ whilst making others absent ‘out-there’” (p. 14). He further defines it as “a combination of reality detector and reality amplifier” (p. 14). This is suggestive for our encounters with data and how this is related to the making of relations. On one hand it is the making of relations of the human and more-than-human. On the other, consider how the air in the classed environments of the buses and Star Ferry is producing human difference. We wonder how air might be keeping certain groups of people apart and how this relates to Hong Kong’s colonial past when society was more segregated racially than it is today.

Hong Kong has a unique postcolonial history in that it did not achieve independence like other colonized countries. Instead it was “returned” (回歸) or “handed over” to the Chinese by the British on the expiration in 1997 of a ninety-nine-year lease that the British had on the territory. Terms like “lease” and “handover” are often used to refer to property or material possessions rather than to cities or nation states. The entire process of Hong Kong’s independence also suggests a certain infantalization, where Hong Kong was ruled by one powerful country for a long period of time and then handed over to yet another powerful nation. Hong Kong’s unique relationship with China since 1997, enshrined in the term HKSAR (Hong Kong Special Administrative Region), has given it an identity as part of China, yet in many ways separate and distinct. Some scholars have suggested that there is evidence in Hong Kong of a process of “self-ethnicization” where it is imperative for Hong Kong to construct its identity in a two-pronged way—“of being both a part of Chinese territory and also a globalized/westernized space that is distinct from mainland China” (Lo, 2007; p. 436).

The British colonizers in Hong Kong are often credited with the startling transformation of Hong Kong from the fishing village the first colonials came upon in 1840, to the bustling world-city it is today. However, along with the development of Hong Kong’s infrastructure and urban spaces, came segregation and discrimination. Racial segregation was enforced both legally and informally with separate schools, clubs, and residential districts. Little of this remains anymore; however this social segregation is still evident, as we noted, in the Star Ferry (a ferry service started in 1870 by Grant Smith, an Englishman, to transport people across the harbor). The ferries had a first-class section, which included an enclosed air-conditioned area. Although the spaces are not labeled first- and second-class, like in the past, it still costs more to ride on the upper deck. Recalling her memories of taking the Star ferry while living in Hong Kong from the 1920s to the 1950s, Barbara Anslow (2012) writes,

About the Star Ferries, all the time I used them, the enclosed area on the top deck was in the middle, and the seats on the open deck both fore and aft. I remember so many very hot evenings, boarding the ferry and just reveling in the lovely breeze on the (adjustable either way) seats on the open deck.

The public bus companies in Hong Kong used to run a small number of non-air-conditioned and less expensive buses to ride than the air-conditioned buses until quite recently in Hong Kong. Here again we see air being used to incorporate a class or social difference. The phasing out of these remaining non-air-conditioned buses—which only happened in May 2012—could be read as Hong Kong moving from its colonial past to its globalized and modernized future.

In his methods assemblages, Law (2004) advocates for a dismantling of binaries—such as between the human and the nonhuman, between “knowing subjects on the one hand, and objects of knowledge on the other” (Law, p. 132) or between the social and the natural. By recognizing the agency of data, we are able to consider how air plays a part in the production of difference, by keeping people apart. So in this case, air acts not in unpredictable ways but in ways that rearrange human priorities. Just as the open passageway from an air-conditioned space to the outdoors spurred Mindy’s childhood memories of “wasting the air,” by letting it out through an open door, so also the different classes (first and second) on the buses and ferries are the remaining traces of a colonial Hong Kong. We argue that the ways we have approached data, by recognizing its agency, is about producing knowledge in a radically different way. If we had been working within more common disciplinary boundaries, we might have begun with clear research questions that would then guide our investigation as well as the collection and codification of our data. However, the posthuman performative approach to data led us to think about the cominglings of Hong Kong’s colonial past and postcolonial present, which might not be easily traceable, using established positivist research methods. It requires a different approach to data, including the kinds of becoming-with practices we explore here.

The debates about the ever-decreasing air quality in Hong Kong, with the claim that Hong Kong imports much of its pollution from across the border, has an interesting analogy with Hong Kong’s postcolonial relationship with China. The border between Hong Kong and the Mainland, located in the Lo Wu district in Hong Kong’s New Territories, is the most heavily used and monitored immigration control point between the two regions. While the mingling of human (students, migrant workers, pregnant women, illegal immigrants) and nonhuman (mass-produced fake designer goods, smuggled contraband, vehicles, food, etc.) from the Mainland to Hong Kong is strictly monitored, the comingling of heavily polluted Mainland air with Hong Kong air cannot be restricted. This leads to the often hotly debated issue of the source of Hong Kong’s pollution woes. While traditional research methods analyze the air quality data to arrive at generalizable conclusions, our becoming-with practices lead us to see in this phenomenon a reflection of Hong Kong’s turbulent relationship with the Mainland. It unsettles Hong Kong’s attempts at self-ethnicization and its desire to remain “separate but equal.” Just as the polluted air from China’s Pearl River Delta comingles with the relatively clean air of Hong Kong’s rural New Territories, so also must Hong Kong shape its future postcolonial identity in a spirit of comingling with its motherland. Our becoming-with practices allow us to make these connections, not based on a linear trajectory of cause and effect supported by predictable, controllable, and replicable data, but rather an approach that acknowledges the limitations of human agency in the research process. Instead of the human researcher who sets out to find data, the data are allowed to find and direct us to make new and nonlinear connections.

Pastpresents

The terms “presence,” “manifest absence,” and “Otherness” are particularly important to Law’s (2004) methodology. He defines presence as that which is made present or “condensed in-here” (p. 84) while manifest absence is one of the correlates of presence. Air, as we (fail to) perceive it in our daily lives, is an absence. Our becoming-with practices allow us to make air “present” in Law’s sense and become acutely aware of it, to “see” it and feel it. Even the original air-conditioned air that Lesley asked us to consider may be described as a manifest presence since it is not natural air but mechanically produced. Our approach enables us to take our curiosities in new directions and trace Hong Kong’s colonial pastpresents (King cited in Haraway 2008, p. 390, n. 15). Contrary to this, traditional methods of studying air by codifying, measuring, and documenting, only produce Otherness, or what Law would call “absence that is not made manifest” (p. 85). In codifying air and studying its properties, air itself disappears. Law argues that “there will always be Othering” and “What is brought to presence—or manifest absence—is always limited, always potentially contestable,” (Law, 2004, p. 85). This makes room for the inter- and intra-actions between humans (us) and nonhumans (air), leading to unexpected moments of instruction and insightfulness. It is these becoming-with practices that we have found productive for rethinking postcoloniality in Hong Kong. We are able to trace past colonial presences in the way that air operates in Hong Kong as well as find analogies for Hong Kong’s current and possibly future postcolonial identity. These are practices that make room for materiality—through the inter- and intra-actions we generate new understandings about difference and relationality. Tracing air and allowing it to guide us in the ways that we did, enables us to make broader historical connections between Hong Kong’s colonial past, strangely postcolonial present, and globalized future. These becoming-with practices open up new ways for rethinking Hong Kong’s future postcolonial identity as it struggles with issues of autonomous identity and national belonging.