In which the writer muses on the diverging urban experiences of Berlin, Hong Kong and Beijing, while also thinking about how our perspectives  on 'here and there' shape such experiences for us.

​It still surprises me, the difference having such great stretches of uninterrupted sky in view makes and the calmness it brings. If I look closer at it, for long enough, at the point in which it meets the nearest building opposite us, with its turquoise, yellow and grey tiles that bring a surprising prettiness to an otherwise highly-functional and serious structure, I have a nice perspective on the shades of white meeting the mid-noon azure blue. Swallows fly in and out quickly and chaotically, occasionally in pairs, mostly alone. I’ve tried, but I can’t quite trace patterns of movement. It seems like they don’t really have much of a traffic system up there. But what do I know?
It’s only in the absence of having to face crowds regularly that I realise how much I hate them, the state of hypervigilant arousal they put my body through; how you have to position your elbows outwards a little bit as their sharpness gives you a little bit more leverage in maintaining something of a space bubble as you plough ahead, finding openings and sliding through them using a fighter’s footwork as and where you can, gulping down little breathes of rage as you remind yourself that everyone is in exactly the same position as you, just trying to get from A to B, probably facing all the same time pressures, too. No one means harm by all the pushing and shoving.
We’re told that dense cities are the way of the future. I see all the arguments for this. But on a personal level, I don’t think I’m built for them, for that narrow vertiginous-ness that swallows you up and leaves you dizzy. Although those sprawling cities have their discombobulating strangeness, too. There’s a place and moment I keep returning to in my mind, a point at an interchange between an especially large mall and a series of vast concrete residential structures in an intersection towards the west of Beijing along which I’d walk to see friends most evenings the year I lived there, which coincided with the year in which Xi Jinping rose to power.
On an especially dusty, smog-filled and breathless night you might stare out at that smoky, eerie space between those monumental edifices and suddenly feel incredibly small and fragile, like you’re an ant about to be squished by something vast and impalpable. Is this image a cliché? Possibly. But it’s how I felt.
There’s a similar place in Berlin, on a much smaller scale: The view from over Waschauer Strasse, especially on a snowless winter night where the evening rush of traffic allows for enough space in which you don’t have to play Tetris with the street, but where you might easily find yourself having cigarette ash blown in your face, walking through a puddle of either beer or urine, as someone on a saxophone is drowned out by a drunk person wailing in time to the screeches of a halting train. Everyone is cold and rude, and the tracks and wires seem to stretch into Nothingsville, Nowheretown.
It reminds me of that famous Wim Wenders 1987 film, Himmel Ueber Berlin, in which two angels observe the city in all its dislocations. Again, to bring up this film in the context of the Berlin urban experience is probably a cliché. But it’s what I think about when I’m there.

Journalists are told time and again to avoid using clichés, not resort to the lazy ones, and I agree to an extent (especially given Colonial legacies). I know how I annoyed I get reading flattened depictions of women turned around by men intent on cutting them up into a size they can cope with; so I try very hard not do a similar thing with the places I cover. But, I think, in the pursuit of what I am trying to do, and what many writers like me are trying to do; that is, marking up the contours of these in between worlds, and unknown and ever-shifting places and identities we occupy; I think they might help us map things a little bit, if we’re careful with them. Learn to look behind them to see if there’s anything that’s actually there at all.
 
            There’s a fun and very clever multimedia art piece produced by Malaysian artist Wong Hoy Cheong, a fictional documentary charting the 250-year history of Austria as if it were a postcolonial- once occupied territory of Malaysia. It is a brilliant and very witty work, that casts white Austrians as ‘other’ and disorients our perspective of and associations with global hegemonies. One of my favourite bits is the map it provides of Europe, which is riddled with inaccuracies and misspellings. We see a world mapped by another culture’s blindspots, and it is deeply uncomfortable.
 
I’ve overstepped my self-imposed deadline. The takeaway? Turn a cliché in and out, watch it wobble into incoherence, cling to it anyway, because very little makes sense otherwise. Look at maps, turned them around, tear them up into bits of paper. Call this art. Go outside, feel the sun’s rays on your shoulders, stare at the shadow between your feet, the blue dome above your head that calls itself the sky. Muse about the smallness of insects. Feel confused about the world and your place in it.
Thank God no one is paying me for these.