About the Author

Gordon Mathews is professor of anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is the author of Global Culture/Individual Identity: Searching for Home in the Cultural Supermarket and What Makes Life Worth Living? How Japanese and Americans Make Sense of Their Worlds, coauthor of Hong Kong, China: Learning to Belong to a Nation, and coeditor of several books.

Reviews

"In this wonderful book Gordon Mathews takes on an intriguing project: daily life as it is lived, articulated, dreamed, denied, regretted, and defended in a rather run-down but very public building in Hong Kong. The residents of Chungking Mansions are economically blocked from the rest of the city and often racially discriminated against, so how do such marginalized people survive, much less prosper? This is the conundrum at the heart of Ghetto at the Center of the World. Mathews tackles it by providing a vivid description of the people who live their lives in the building's dimly lit hallways, restaurants, and shops, and by analyzing the larger material and political forces at work." -William Jankowiak, author of Sex, Death, and Hierarchy in a Chinese City"