This is the third in a three-part series of posts arising from a graduate course on global environmental history co-taught by Tina Loo (University of British Columbia) and Tina Adcock (Simon Fraser University) in Vancouver in the fall of 2024. It features responses to an assignment about “The Place Where You Live,” described in the series’ introduction.
Mount Lu, Jiujiang, Jiangxi, China
by Anthony Hu
Although I was born and raised in the urban area of Jiujiang, a city literally named as “nine rivers,” my heritage lies in small villages at the foot of Lu Shan (Mount Lu), in which prior generations of my family lived.
When I was a child, urbanization had not yet reached those places. I often had the chance to go to our old house with my family. My grandpa was always worried that its yard would be covered with fallen leaves, so he wanted to clean that up. My grandma often thought about the abandoned vegetable bed where she had worked, so she’d always like to take a look. The roads in the countryside were muddy. As a city kid, I hated it there because the mud would dirty my shoes. But I still enjoyed running in the fields with my cousins, playing hide and seek, and setting off fireworks at night. There was a kind of freedom here, compared to the city’s many rules.
Guling Town on the mountainside is one of the noteworthy places in this area. It has been developed into a tourist attraction. I like it – at least it is not that muddy. The scenery is magnificent, and there is a famous waterfall. Thousands of years ago, when the famous poet Li Bai visited, he wrote, “Water flies straight down three thousand feet – Has the silver stream of our galaxy plunged from highest heaven?” There are also a large number of Taoist and Buddhist temples, as well as many landmarks of Confucian culture. It is a cooler summer destination, so it naturally became the “summer capital” during the Republic of China period (1912–1949). The leaders of the Communist Party of China were no exception: three conferences that shaped the trajectory of modern China were also held here. Many stories have their origin here, yet life remains tranquil and slow-paced for the people living in Guling and at the foot of Mount Lu. Like the mountain itself, and the ancient forest upon it, communities have existed here quietly for thousands of years.
Fifteen years ago, urbanization finally took hold. The village’s houses were replaced by new high-rise buildings. Villagers were happy since they had finally become urbanites. Their lives are now graced by modern conveniences; new shopping malls, supermarkets, schools, and hospitals have been built here. My family also moved back to this place from the city of Jiujiang. I don’t deny the modern beauty of this new urban area at the foot of Mount Lu. The narrow road by the village’s entrance is now a boulevard; street lamps make the nights here no longer dark. But the childhood I miss, the holidays spent in the village – these are gone forever, along with the old villages.
Anthony Hu is an MA student, teaching assistant and research assistant in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. His research is about Chinese immigrant labor in North American history, with a particular focus on British Columbia, Canada. Besides learning how to be a historian, he is enthusiastic about music and outdoor activities.
Sahyadri Mountains, India
by Sushant Pathak
Having lived in Pune, in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, for the last 24 years of my life, I have been connected to the Sahyadri Mountains for a long time. They run north-south on the western edge of the Deccan Plateau, mirroring the Malabar Coast of the Arabian Sea not far away. For plateau dwellers, including me, these mountains are much more than just the gateway to the coastal region. Since my childhood, they have been a home away from home. I have never thought of them as the Sahyadri mountain range. Rather, they have always been sites of cohabitation for me, of multiple ghats (mountain passes), forts, hill stations, and forests that I have hiked in and around, wandered and driven through. They are familiar to me, and yet still quite unknown.
One place in the Sahyadri Mountains that lives on in me is Savlya Ghat. Offering spectacular views of western India’s Konkan region from the edge of the plateau, Savlya Ghat is more than just a picturesque place. It makes plateau dwellers like me aware of our position on this raised mass of land. I visited Savlya Ghat last year during monsoon; hiking up it is a unique experience. The path winds through dense forests, muddy desire paths, and small puddles. It’s a journey that unsettles urban dwellers in all possible ways, like a cautionary tale married to a welcoming face.
Sahyadri ghats have made me not only appreciate, but also realise the significance of the color green. My recent journey around Savlya Ghat immersed me in a green fever. Surrounded by multitudes of waterfalls and clouds, my body was suffused by the atmosphere. Drenched in rainwater and covered with mud, I felt that I had a physical connection to the air as well as the land. The atmosphere embraced me, making me feel like I had finally come home.
Like many other biodiversity hotspots in the world, the Sahyadri Mountains are being affected by climate change.1 Spots like Savlya Ghat face a more immediate, localized problem: overtourism. As they gain more and more attention through different social media platforms, these so-called “hidden gems” are becoming threatened. A lack of local administrative guardrails may lead to visitors polluting such places heavily. I hope that in decades to come, the Sahyadri Mountains are still able to flaunt their green beauty.
Sushant Pathak is a MA (German literature and cultural studies) student at the University of British Columbia. He completed his first degree in German literature from Pune University (India) in 2020. His research interests are in environmental humanities, specifically in 21st-century German language literature. He is currently working on his Master’s thesis, which focuses on the question of how attachment with a place, concepts of ownership and permanence and practices of exclusion and dispossession are related to one’s environment in contemporary German writer Juli Zeh’s book Unterleuten (Among People).
Hong Kong, China
by Rui Zhao
I see Hong Kong as my personal belonging: I own this place because of my emotions, my thoughts, and my attachments, derived from my personal experiences that other people cannot directly share. They might not understand, honestly, but I am always proud of sharing my feelings for “my” place.
I have been to Hong Kong five times. I like wandering in its “jungle” in the Central, a district of high-rise buildings. The light reflected from their glass exterior walls is dazzling, constantly reminding me of the city’s prosperity. The roads are narrow, but I can move swiftly through the gaps in this urban jungle. The highly developed public transportation system, containing the metro, buses, minibuses, and ferries, acts as its nutrient cycle, circulating people and goods through urban space. Hong Kong is a place of efficiency, a symbol of modernity.
What else is squeezed into these gaps? Some people might say China and the West. Yes, Hong Kong is a capitalist city under a socialist regime “with Chinese characteristics.”2 Acting as a middleman to connect China and the Western world, it is neither fully Chinese nor fully Western. It carries my hope for openness, diversity, freedom, and incorruptibility.
I left mainland China for Hong Kong in February 2022, when I was tired of the Chinese government’s pandemic-control policies. But I was also frustrated by Hong Kong’s response to the Omicron variant of COVID-19. Politicians were arguing over whether to follow China and implement a lockdown of the city, while the voices of experts seemed diminished. I was worried by the proposal to divide Hong Kong into grids in order to control the pandemic. Under this regime, people would be monitored by administrators directly, losing their connections to the community. Hong Kong, in this sense, would no longer be the place I know.
The lockdown plan was canceled because the high density of buildings and people made it meaningless, and people wanted to reconnect to the world. In April 2022, when Hong Kong’s population had almost achieved herd immunity, I traveled to Cheung Chau, an outlying island of Hong Kong. It was around 24°C. The humid and hot air kissed my skin. It felt overwhelmingly real after hiding in my room for two months because of the pandemic.
Unlike the Central, Cheung Chau’s environment was very different. There were no high-rises. The fishing boats rested beside the dock. The Taoist temple gracefully nestled among low houses. People were not squeezed onto the main road but were spread out in every corner of the streets and alleys. They were excitedly talking about celebrating the Da Jiu Festival that had paused for two years: which household would be the host, where to collect local foods, and how to parade local deities.3 The sea breeze did not seem that biting then.
It is still my thriving place. Hong Kong’s people create pessimistic narratives by using different temporal markers now. Pro-China people describe Hong Kong’s past as a national shame since 1842, when China lost its sovereignty over Hong Kong to Great Britain; pro-Western people see its “return” to China in 1997 as the death of its international status. But looking further back in time, local peoples, like the ancestors of the Cheung Chau people, lived there before the arrival of British power. They have rooted their love and their concern for daily life in their sense of place, which constitutes the core of Hong Kong. Politics may change, but people’s attachment to Hong Kong remains. My place, in this sense, will keep moving forward as always.
Rui Zhao is a MA student in History at the University of British Columbia. He is interested in the interaction between the empire and the environment in early modern China.
Conclusion
by Tina Adcock
The places where students (and one of the professors) in our graduate seminar live are diverse: beaches, lakes, mountains, cities, and the prairie. What unites their lived experiences of place? Four things, I think.
Places are bound up with people. They derive much of their meaning from the human relationships that one builds and maintains there. Many of these pieces centre on familial bonds, both intra- and intergenerational ones. Grandparents loom large. For Tina Loo and Rui Zhao, however, the places where they live have connected them with other kinds of people – with fellow mountain enthusiasts (Loo) or city dwellers (Zhao).
Places also derive their meaning from one’s sense of home. In this series, home means different things to different authors. Many authors share their memories of beloved family homes. Some reflect on cherished places of rest and relaxation close to family homes, such as Cultus Lake in Braeden Mandrusiak’s piece. Others, like Zhao and Jurian ter Horst, write about making new homes in new places such as Hong Kong or Vancouver, and how they came to feel at home there. Still others write about returning home. Anthony Hu’s family moved back to the foot of Mount Lu once their ancestral village there was modernized. Loo, meanwhile, speaks of her desire to stay home – to resist the Rocky Mountains’ allure because of her part in changing this place’s lands and waters.
Places change over time, because we change, and the world around us changes. Our perspectives on and relative positions to places shift over time. As Natasha McConnell grew up, Gabriola Island seemed smaller. Chicago’s South Side became farther removed from the places where Morgan Jennings lived as she grew older. Places change in response to larger forces, too. Anthropogenic climate change is stealing blue from montane lakes in western Canada. It’s also stealing green from the mountains of western India, in the form of threatened food and medicinal plants from the Garcinia indica family, as Sushant Pathak notes in his piece. Both the Rocky Mountains and Western Ghats are being threatened as well by ever-rising tides of tourists. Urbanization is another vector of change. Hu remembers the muddy fields, narrow roads, and dark nights in the villages that once rested in Mount Lu’s shadow, but have since been razed and rebuilt as modern cities. ter Horst highlights the beings and objects that remain from the pre-urban and early urban eras of the Fairview Slopes. These slopes have been subject to colonial resettlement, like the Treaty One Territory of which Catherine St. John writes. With time and instruction from her mother, St. John becomes able to locate the remnants of tallgrass prairie all but eradicated by the modern, monocultural farming regimes that Euro-Canadians transplanted there.
Places are political. Some featured in this series bear the traces of formal ideologies. Hu notes Guling Town’s appeal to Communist Party leaders during the first half of the twentieth century. Zhao notes how the conflicting forces of capitalism and socialism have left their marks on Hong Kong in the past and present. The places where we live have also felt the press of power more broadly. Different human and non-human actors and forces have had the capacity to reshape these places over time, both individually and communally. Both ter Horst and St. John wonder how their places will look in the future, as urban densification proceeds on the Fairview Slopes and reconciliation continues to unfold in Treaty One Territory. While ter Horst accepts that he and his family will likely move on, St. John dreams of a decolonial future in which she, a settler, feels at home in southern Manitoba at long last.
Notes
1. Malay Pramanik, Uttam Paudel, Biswajit Mondal, Suman Chakraborti, and Pratik Deb, “Predicting Climate Change Impacts on the Distribution of the Threatened Garcinia Indica in the Western Ghats, India,” Climate Risk Management 19 (November 2017): 95, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.crm.2017.11.002.
2. The Chinese Communist Party has believed, since the 1980s, that it can govern People’s Republic of China by building “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” This means embracing market economies and acknowledging private ownership while maintaining the Communist Party’s leadership.
3. “Da Jiu” is a ritual to worship the Taoist deities and pray for peace and harmony. Da Jiu Festival in Cheung Chau is also called the “Bun Festival.” People build three towers and cover them with buns for “bun-snatching.” The higher the position and the greater the number of buns they grab, the more blessings they receive. In April 2022, although the “bun-snatching” was still suspended, people held other celebrations actively. I ate a big bun, which symbolized great fortune.
Featured Image: Lushan Waterfall, Mount Hu, China. Photo by Hang Pen.
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