For the first time in a long time, I have an address to find – “40 Lyndhurst Terrace.”  Easy enough to locate, at least after having consulted the MTR street map.

Except, when I actually get to number 40, there’s nothing there.  I’m baffled.  Until I walk back a little bit and find a handwritten sign: “[We’ve] moved to 29 Hollywood Rd., 7/F.  Go up the stairs and turn right at the corner.”

Very well then – I follow the sign, and sure enough, a small sign points to the inside of an old building.  A single elevator and a staircase stand just beyond the front door.

I’ve played this game before.  I step into the elevator and ride to the seventh floor.

A quick (slightly creaky) stop, I exit the doors and enter the store and –

Good Lord, what is this place?!?

It is, obviously, a bookstore.  But in order to understand something more, it would probably help to figure out where said bookstore is.

First and foremost, I’ve landed in Central (中環) – probably the most important district on the Island (hence its name), and probably the most important district in Hong Kong overall.  In another sense, Central is the Hong Kong of postcards: it boasts the majority of the skyscrapers that constitute the Island’s skyline.  In case that still doesn’t say enough, then just picture a fusion of Times Square (the one in NYC, not the one in neighboring Causeway Bay) and Wall Street and you’ve got a clear enough image of Central.

Three sentences (and even this post), of course, are hardly enough to describe what this district offers to everyone.  Besides, if you’ve actually been here yourself – it’s home to the swanky hotels that aren’t in the equally tourist-oriented area of Tsim Sha Tsui (尖沙嘴) in Kowloon – then you’re likely familiar with at least some of the general atmosphere and locations.

So rather than give the full tour-guide treatment, I’d like to zoom back toward the present (tense), which finds us in this…this…

Good Lord, what is this place?!?

It is, indeed, a bookstore – Flow, to be precise, and one of the few used (keyword: used) English-language bookstores available in Hong Kong.  And there are, indeed, books, and I’m guessing that this is…a…store…

Good Lord, what is this place?!?

There are books everywhere.  Everywhere.  Mobile shelves crammed full of titles; I step into one and find myself trapped between several deliverymen – I forgot to mention them; there are people dropping off even more books into the store, in huge burlap sacks – and a lone customer who’s perusing some title.  (Good Lord, what is this place?!?)  Compressed between shelves and people, I survey the titles.  Popular fiction – the standard bevy of modern romance, mystery, drama, action, etc.  It’s a decent sign, even if I would probably never work through any of these books.

After about two minutes, the deliverymen leave; the sacks form a small wall that nearly blocks off access to the rest of the whatever-this-place-is.  I step over several of them and find even more shelves, all filled to the brim with tomes of varying date and quality.  Titles of all kinds, ranging from history to biography, from science to art, from travel to home and leisure, from children’s books to adult fiction.  Something for everyone.

But it’s not just the shelves that are brimming.  There are, after all, books everywhere…and as it turns out, that includes the floor.  Haphazard stacks of even more titles, though the names are getting more familiar: Burney, Austen, Shakespeare, Ibsen, Dickens, Milton, Rousseau…  There is no sign nearby, but it looks like this is the “classics” section.

I kneel down on the concrete floor and start lifting stacks to figure out what lies underneath.  Everything is readable and recognizable – there’s even a text featuring essays on the theory of narrative – and the books themselves are largely in good condition.  Decent prices (at least half of what one would expect to pay in the US/UK) as well.

Disorganized as everything is (the owners certainly pay no mind), I dig deeper into the stacks as well as the shelves.  Removing one title reveals another more fascinating one, even if the latter is one that I’ve already read.  In fact, it almost becomes fun, this act of shuffling and reorganizing – there’s a sense that people who have visited before have done the same, such that each permutation reflects the literary fancies (or spontaneous searching) of the previous visitor. After several minutes (I’m not looking for anything in particular), I rise again and continue to peruse the shelves.

“Shuffling,” indeed, is an evocative term for how Central developed over time.  It began as a military and administrative center for the British in 1841 – in fact, they had landed at “Possession Point” (水坑口) in neighboring Sheung Wan (上環) earlier that year.  The center grew into Victoria City – or more specifically, one of its four districts – and became a thriving residential and commercial area for both British settlers and Chinese locals, until the latter were relocated to Sheung Wan the following year.  With Victoria now a British port, the local government fortified the city over successive decades; by 1904, much of the waterfront had been reclaimed as well, allowing the city – and Hong Kong as a whole – to flourish commercially due to sea trade.

Land limits essentially slowed down Victoria’s territorial expansion by the mid-20th century, leading to successive trends of redevelopment and modernization.  A number of government and financial centers were torn down – some as recently as five years ago – to make way for newer residences and buildings.  The main transition, however, came in the early 1980s with the construction of what was then the MTR’s “Chater Station,” named after the nearby road (遮打).  But the Chinese name was chosen to be 中環, the name for the “central district” of Victoria.  Confusion between the names led to the MTR renaming the station (and its neighbor, Pedder) as “Central,” and by the mid-1980s the surrounding district adopted the name as well.  (“Victoria” had essentially been phased out of Hong Kong nomenclature by that point in time.)

In a way – and yes, I know I’m stretching the metaphor here – the Flow bookshop embodies at least of some of the characteristics and trends that define Central.  Physically, it’s cramped (low ceiling and narrow aisles make free navigation difficult) yet teeming with culture and variety.  It’s likely that any arrangement of books you see at any one moment is a permutation that could easily change with the arrival of a future visitor; likewise, Central is still evolving even today, with redevelopment and construction very much a part of its daily progress.  And even the relocation of the bookstore itself says something about the nature of change not just in Central, but in Hong Kong overall: what’s in front of you one day could very well go somewhere else the next.  Maybe that’s why they named the bookstore “Flow.”

But there’s another aspect of Flow that lends it a character so emblematic of Hong Kong as a whole – the element of controlled chaos.  An oxymoron, to be sure, yet I’ve found that it aptly describes so much of what I’ve observed here.

The basic premise of controlled chaos is that what appears to be disorderly and hectic at first is, from a distance and/or over time, governed by an unseen order (call it what you will) that prevents this chaos from, well, wreaking havoc.  It’s not quite the same phenomenon as spontaneity, nor is it exactly the same as entropy.  Controlled chaos, ultimately, is checked: there are patterns that allow for predictable behavior even amidst the mess and confusion.  For Flow, this arrives in somewhat-subtle ways – for example, there’s some organization to the placement of books (by genre), and even the shelved titles are arranged by alphabetical order or date of publication/last use.  An order to the mess.

The same overarching model can apply to much of Hong Kong as well, but in Central it manifests itself quite remarkably.  Crossing the street here – when done properly, at least (i.e. no jaywalking) – is a coordinated ritual: you wait for the walking light to turn green before attempting to cross.  (Jaywalking can actually get you fined in Hong Kong if you’re caught doing it, which explains why you’ll often find people waiting patiently to cross even if the road is empty; of course, it’s a sensible rule.)  Traffic works in the same way; there are aggressive drivers and congested roadways, to be sure, but somehow everything flows even as things start to look ugly.  Even the act of walking itself is coordinated to a high degree – locals and businessmen will instinctively form distinct ‘directions’ when walking on a footbridge, even if there are no demarcated dividing lines.  (In a way, it’s how one can detect first-time visitors, including myself.)

Not that control and chaos have to be synergistic.  Time and space direct the flow of things here as well, to the extent that you tend to see contrasts juxtaposed in disorienting (sometimes unsettling) ways.  Housing is probably the most prominent manifestation of this juxtaposition – old apartments are dwarfed by higher and higher condominiums and flats.  Aging markets along Graham (嘉咸街) and Gage Streets (結志街) – both of which have been active for over 150 years – thrive in the shadows of hotels and office complexes; even nearby eclectic galleries, bars, and restaurants find themselves competing for space in the surrounding streets.  In one sense, everything looks like a beautifully integrated portrait; in another, it may as well be a haphazard assemblage.  Take your pick.

Of course, whether or not you choose to acknowledge the presence of controlled chaos (or even the phenomenon itself), the obvious reality is that things get done, one way or another.  People may either struggle or get by comfortably, but overall, they live.  Construction is deafening and irritating to drivers and residents alike, but everyone learns to cope and buildings still get erected.  It’s how the world works.

But to observe these patterns from a distance – and to compare them with those of, say, New York – actually makes being here in Hong Kong so fascinating.  It’s neither the chaos nor the control alone that compel me to dig deeper; it’s how the two cooperate (and even clash) with each other in so many ways, in so many combinations.

Controlled chaos.  Even for a tourist district, Central – and, naturally, Hong Kong as an island, as a destination – becomes all the more interesting because of it.

To be revisited…