LISA NEIGHBOUR

Euan Macdonald's room

Chungking Mansions, 36/44 Nathan Road in Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon, Hong Kong

A Small Room:

Chung King Mansions is one of the cheapest place to stay in Kowloon. Each of its 17 floors is packed with guesthouses, restaurants, hotels and small businesses- they say that over 4,000 people, mostly from south Asia and Africa live there. Each of the five blocks has two tiny elevators able to fit about 4 people depending on the weight of each passenger. If the elevator is too full, or if the weight is not distributed evenly, it stops and a faint buzzer goes off.

Finding the guesthouse in the mansions of isn't too hard - in block B on the 9th floor. Surrounded by four small, old Indian women dressed in saris, the hot elevator halts, the buzzer goes off and each of the women impatiently directs me to the right spot, so the buzzer stops, and the B block elevator rattles and slowly continues up.

The owner of the guesthouse signals to follow him to the room. Ducking down under the narrow door, the owner points to the bed, and then to an air conditioner which he turns on with a remote control. The owner leaves and I lie on the bed - my head touching on wall and my feet touching the other. This humid, fluorescent room is tiled everywhere except the ceiling. It has no window and is no bigger than a closet - about five by six feet. From my bed I can reach all the controls on the air conditioner easily with out using the remote. I lay in the small room for hours, waiting to cool down, listening to a strange combination of muffled languages, scanning all the corners, ceiling and walls- feeling engulfed on all sides by an impossibly dense, complex and noisy maze of corridors, stairways, elevator shafts, and rooms.

I go out for food and decide to take the stairs instead of the elevator. The stairway is far wider than the room - it almost seems grand with deep carpeted steps and wooden hand rails. I go down and around and around taking two steps at a time, losing count of how many floors I pass, noticing how the stairs occasionally branch off in other directions. The staircase leads me down and down until it ends somewhere between the third and sixth floor - at a large open window. The window looks out into a deep open brick shaft. The shaft is filled with garbage.