Ghetto at the Center of the World

Chungking Mansions, a dilapidated seventeen-story commercial and residential structure in the heart of Hong Kong’s tourist district, is home to a remarkably motley group of people. Traders, laborers, and asylum seekers from all over Asia and Africa live and work there, and even backpacking tourists rent rooms in what is possibly the most globalized spot on the plan­et. But as Ghetto at the Center of the World shows us, the Mansions is a world away from the gleaming headquarters of mul­tinational corporations—instead it epitomizes the way globaliza­tion actually works for most of the world’s people. Through candid sto­ries that both instruct and enthrall, Gordon Mathews lays bare the building’s residents’ intricate con­nections to the international circu­lation of goods, money, and ideas.