Chungking Mansions, Hong Kong
"You'll never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy" (Star Wars) than the Chungking Mansions in Hong Kong. I'd seen the film “Chungking Express” years prior and thought maybe the Chungking Mansions had an allure of charm, a sense of the city, a multicultural Mecca utopia perhaps? The first floor is all cell phone charging stands and ethnic food I couldn't place. We’d first arrived at the “mansion” after a long flight past maybe 2am, all we wanted was to sleep. Finding our “hotel” or “hostel” took what I remember feeling like hours. The mansion is basically a rubex cube of a building; eventually we ran into other backpackers and followed their lead. I remember going through steam rooms, being stopped by locked, fenced dead ends, closed hallways, and small claustrophobic rooms until finding our way to our part of the hive. Finally we found our floor. I remember thinking “I could never find my way back here, and in I fire I could never find my way out, I’m going to die in here”. The mansion is mostly interior the rooms and different business operate internally, meaning that most of the space in the building have no access to the outside, no windows, no exit doors. You’re in a box, in a box, in a box.
