Six degrees of separation from professor Gordon Mathews

Gordon Mathews, a professor of anthropology at Chinese University, will be giving a lecture about Chungking Mansions, at the Royal Geographical Society of Hong Kong, on Tuesday. For more than four years, Mathews embedded himself in the 17-storey Tsim Sha Tsui building, undertaking immersive and comprehensive research for his 2011 book, Ghetto at the Center of the World: Chungking Mansions. Home to a large African and South Asian immigrant population, the block is a key setting in the 1994 film Chungking Express, directed by Wong Kar-wai …

The Shanghai-born filmmaker moved to Hong Kong with his mother when he was five. “I sometimes compare making a film to cooking,” he once said. “Some dishes need to be stewed while others need to be fried.” Perhaps it’s this unique approach to filmmaking that inspires his slow-motion action scenes, distorted close-ups and fight sequences shot from disorienting angles. As critic Jeremy Tambling writes in a book about Wong’s film Happy Together, the director also finds inspiration in the works of deceased Argentine writers Manuel Puig, Julio Cortázar and Jorge Luis Borges …

Considered one of the 20th century’s greatest writers, Borges was a voracious reader. In an autobiographical essay, he wrote, “If I were asked to name the chief event in my life, I should say my father’s library.” He’s been described as “the best-read citizen of the globe in his day”. Among his heroes were philosophers David Hume and Arthur Schopenhauer but he was a “conservative in politics”, writes a professor at Yale University, and Borges was “repulsed” by the theory and practice of Karl Marx …