The main advantage of this set of digital maps is that it can simultaneously mark different landform material using more than eighty signs. In addition, users can make selective searches; for example, an automatic search for a facility or specific type of land or outstanding topographical and geological features. Users can also select different scales and sizes, adjusting at will the complexity of the material to suit different needs. Each different category of materials on the map is delineated in different colors, so that when it is set at full-screen display, the digital map becomes crisscrossed by neon lights in all shades and hues. Compared with traditional drawings on paper or printed plates, digital maps are beyond doubt the crystallization of an unrivaled assembly of information at a superlative height of efficiency, but along with their profound subtlety in categorization, digital maps, because of the complexity of their information and the extreme simplification of their signs, also give the impression of lacking differentiation and tending toward abstraction in terms of their visual appearance. In traditional maps we see the world in microcosm, but what we see in digital maps are colors and lines. The imaginative connection between the semantic complement of signs and their intention has been utterly destroyed.
Digital maps, compared with the great quantity of maps produced as material objects, demolish the mythology of maps to an even more advanced extent. From ancient times up to the “Comprehensive Atlas of Imperial Territory” drawn up on the orders of the Kangxi emperor of the Qing dynasty, maps were even kept hidden from view in the Palace Treasury, completely inaccessible to the public. On the one hand, maps were a tool of political control at the exclusive disposal of the emperor, while on the other hand as unique material objects in themselves they were symbols of power. Maps seem to bear a mysterious strength: to possess a map is to possess a kind of embodiment of the world. Digital maps, lacking materiality, have dissolved this sense of mystery; they hint at the world but they cannot possess it or pass it on, because our control over the world is no more than dots and lines and colors made up of computing bits without substance, and these dots and lines and colors can develop into different forms and shapes at the users’ needs and whims. The user in manipulating the program continues by other means the ancient illusory desire to be in charge of the world.
The businessman who had bought the digital map created and confirmed his own kingdom every day on his computer. Shortly before his death, he invited a famous geomancer to find him an auspicious site for his grave in the land he owned. After consulting the businessman’s digital map, the geomancer expressed himself as follows:
Sir, I cannot find any difference between one place and another on this surface. The five hues and six colors of these lines are completely foreign to the principles by which yin, yang, and the five elements engender and conquer one another. Be assured, nonetheless, that there is nothing that can place a restraint on your destiny. Since there is no place on the map that does not belong to you, I can arrange the most auspicious site on the map for you in accordance with your wishes. What you, sir, possess is the full color spectrum of the bits; what I design for you is the eternal vault of the signs.
The businessman possessed all there was on the digital map; he also lost all there was.
51
THE ORBIT OF TIME
Map archaeologists discovered in a book entitled The 1997 Hong Kong Street Directory & Guide a map that traces the orbit of time. This discovery delivered a ground-shaking tremor in regard to the firmly established concept of maps as spatial representations. Behind all map production is an assumption of frozen time, and on the assumption of “an eternal present tense” the state and appearance of the earth’s surface are depicted “at a certain moment of time.” This assumption simultaneously repudiates time and expels it from maps. Even if a time-related notation were to be made on a map (for example, data on the year when an area was developed), it counts only as a written “reference” to time and does not view time in the same way as space by expressing it symbolically as a system of map signs.
According to the above commonly accepted knowledge, when you first read “The Hong Kong MTR and KCR Railway Map and Timetable,” it is difficult to avoid overlooking the possibility that this map is a representation of time keys. In fact, as far as the majority of map readers are concerned, who are accustomed to the concept of irreversible time, this possibility is utterly fantastic. These maps show us the four main lines in the rail transport system: the KCR line (in black), running south to Kowloon from Lo Wu at the northern border; the MTR Tsuen Wan line (in red), from Tsuen Wan in the west through Kowloon to Hong Kong Island; the MTR Island line (in blue), along the northern shore of Hong Kong Island; and the Kwun Tong line (in green), from Yao Ma Tei in Kowloon through the eastern part of Kowloon to the eastern part of Hong Kong Island. The red, green, and blue lines connect at Mong Kok, Admiralty, and Quarry Bay stations to form a circle, and the KCR intersects with the MTR at Kowloon Tong station. Thanks to the existence of a spatial concept of maps, we are ready to believe that the abstract colored lines that wind along on paper represent the actual city’s transportation network.
By reading according to this “common sense,” we can follow the running times and frequencies of the trains at that time. Taking the KCR as an example, the time at which the last train sets out from Lo Wu for the terminus in Kowloon is 00:08, the time at each station along the way is 00:12 at Sheung Shui; 00:14 at Fanling; 00:19 at Tai Wo; 00:22 at Tai Po Market; 00:28 at University; 00:32 at Fo Tan; 00:34 at Sha Tin; 00:37 at Tai Wai; 00:41 at Kowloon Tong; 00:44 at Mong Kok; and 00:47 at Kowloon. However, some map archaeologists believe that this map can actually be read in a different way. The 00:08 underneath the phrase “To Kowloon” at Lo Wu station actually means “To Kowloon at 00:08.” That is to say, when the time at Kowloon station reaches 00:47, if you enter Lo Wu station and board the train at exactly that time, then you can make a leap in time and return to 00:08 at Kowloon station. Using the same logic, it follows that if you board the train at Sheung Shui at the same time you can return to 00:12 at Kowloon station, and if you board the train at Fanling you can return to 00:14 at Kowloon station. The nearer the station where you board the time-train is to your destination, the smaller the time gap as you go back. That year, the maximum conceptualization of return time was thirty-nine minutes, and this railway map is a graphic illusion of the return time. It attempts to endow time with a visible group of symbols in a situation where it is displayed on a flat space, namely uneven, random, twisted lines, a group of orbits going backward and forward. In reading maps we take our seats on a train to the past; with the prospect of a future threatened with inundation before us, we face backward in competition with time, striving to delay the arrival of the present.
Clever map readers have pointed out that in the circular route where red, green, and blue meet, the time traveler can continually delay the time of return because there is no limit created by a terminus as he urges forward the perpetual last train, moving in repeated cycles in a self-enclosed orbit of illusory time, going for thirty-nine minutes followed by another thirty-nine minutes.
Acknowledgments
The following chapters of Atlas have been previously published in English translation:
“Aldrich Street,” “The Centaur of the East,” “Ice House Street,” “Possession Street,” “Scandal Point and the Military Cantonment,” “Sugar Street,” “Sycamore Street,” “Tsat Tsz Mui Road,” “The View from Government House” [“A Government House with a View”], translated by Dung Kai-cheung [credited as Dung Kai Cheung] in Hong Kong Collage: Contemporary Stories and Writing, edited by Martha Cheung (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1998).
“Spring Garden Lane” (erroneously classified as an essay), translated by Bonnie S. McDougall with Wong Nim Yan [Wong Nim-yan], Renditions 66 (autumn 2006): 111–13.
“Ice House Street” and “Sugar Street,” translated by Bonnie S. McDougall, Edinburgh Review 124 (August 2008): 28–31.
; “Ice House Street,” “Spring Garden Lane,” “Sugar Street,” translated by Bonnie S. McDougall, published on the Web site of the International Writing Program of the University of Iowa, September 2009, http://iwp.uiowa.edu/writers/archive/2009works/Dung_KC_sample_.pdf.
The author and translators are grateful to the publishers for permission to republish these translations in revised versions.
Author & Translators
Dung Kai-cheung was born in Hong Kong in 1967 and received his BA and MPhil in comparative literature at the University of Hong Kong. He now teaches part-time in several Hong Kong universities and writes novels and short stories in Chinese. His major fictional works include Androgyny: Evolution of a Nonexistent Species (1996), Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City (1997), The Double Body (1997), Visible Cities (1998), The Catalog (1999), A Brief History of the Silverfish (2002), P.E. Period (2003), Works and Creations (2005), Histories of Time (2007), and The Age of Learning (2010). His book reviews and literary criticism are collected in Contemporaries (1998), Writing in the World and for the World (2011). He has won several literary awards in Taiwan and Hong Kong, including the Unitas Fiction Writing Award for New Writers (1994), the United Daily News Literary Award for the Novel (1995), and the Hong Kong Arts Development Council Literary Award for New Writers (1997). Works and Creations received wide critical acclaim and was ranked among the best ten in the Annual Book Awards (2005) of the two major literary supplements in Taiwan (Unitas Daily and China Times Daily). It also won the Adjudicators’ Award of The Dream of Red Chamber Award: The World’s Distinguished Novel in Chinese in 2006. Histories of Time won the same prize in 2008. He received the Award for Best Artist 2007/2008 (literary arts) by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council. He joined the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa in 2009.
Anders Hansson studied Chinese at the University of Stockholm and later in Hong Kong; he holds an MA from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and a PhD in history and East Asian languages from Harvard University. He worked in Peking as translator and cultural attaché at the Swedish Embassy in 1971–1973 and as a “foreign expert” in the early 1980s. He taught Chinese studies at the University of Edinburgh between 1993 and 2006. On moving to Hong Kong he was appointed editor of the translation journal Renditions at the Chinese University of Hong Kong 2007–2009. His publications include Chinese Outcasts: Discrimination and Emancipation in Late Imperial China (1996). He is at present chief editor of publications at the Macau Ricci Institute.
Bonnie S. McDougall is visiting professor of Chinese at the University of Sydney and professor emerita at the University of Edinburgh. She has also taught at Harvard University, the University of Oslo, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and the City University of Hong Kong and has spent long periods teaching, translating, and conducting research in China. She has written extensively on modern Chinese literature and translated works by Bei Dao, Ah Cheng, Chen Kaige, Mao Zedong, and Leung Ping-kwan, among many others. Recent books include Love-Letters and Privacy in Modern China: The Intimate Lives of Lu Xun and Xu Guangping (2002), Fictional Authors, Imaginary Audiences: Modern Chinese Literature in the Twentieth Century (2003), and Translation Zones in Modern China: Authoritarian Command Versus Gift Exchange (2011). Her home page can be found at http://ihome.cuhk.edu.hk/~z105771/.
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