Imagining Place Through Linguistic Landscape: Silent Signs of Resistance in Nga Tsin Wai Village, Hong Kong

This paper examines how linguistic landscape is created to imagine a place. Intrinsically tied to the ideas of space and place in human geography, linguistic landscape studies in the past have analyzed how dominant groups exploit the symbolic capital of linguistic landscape, and on the other hand, how guerilla linguistic landscapes, such as graffiti and protest signage, are employed as acts of resistance. Illustrating the pedagogical application of the second line of research, the current study discusses a sound-art workshop at a secondary school in Hong Kong, during which students created linguistic landscape and imagined another possibility for an urban village that is soon to be demolished. The only walled-village that remains in urban Hong Kong, Nga Tsin Wai was founded in the mid-14th century. Citing the poor living conditions in the village, the Urban Renewable Authority initiated a "conservation" project in 2007, which will ironically only conserve eight of the 36 existing buildings and create 750 new residential flats. In April 2013, the instructors of a sound-art workshop named "Word Chimes" at a secondary school took their students on a field trip to the village and gave them transparency slips and marker pens to write down what sounds they could imagine hearing as they walk through the village and tie the slips onto structures nearby. An analysis of 37 of the word chimes that have not been taken down immediately by security guards shows an overwhelming sense of nostalgia for traditional village life and sense of fear and helplessness at its future prospect. Although the workshop intended to train the students to imagine sounds in an unfamiliar place, their word chimes created a new layer of the linguistic landscape in the village and imagined an alternative place.