Hotel Management and Architecture

Keen to take a break from routine, we often hope to get away from the habitual and summon the desirable versions of ourselves in order to take on a different perspective to look at the world. But change is not always easy. One possible reason is that we tend to think of our homes as anchors of identities. If homes are indicators of who we are, it is perhaps because they are often the material articulation of what we think a good life is. Not only they help lay down a framework of our identities, but they also subtly suggest the values we hold dear to.

However, problems arise because our homes are often reluctant to change. Our furniture and decor implicitly suggest that the values we are liable to adopt are more praiseworthy than the ones that are left unexplored. But there are times when we doubt whether we are heading to the wrong direction and are no longer sure who we really are. Hence, in order to get away from our moral confusions and the chatter of societies, a change is needed. The solution is travel.

Only until we encounter a temple in Kyoto, an exotic palm tree, a landscape of Dutch modernist houses, we may venture to revise our previous assumptions of life and initiate a breakthrough. Unfortunately, aside from cities like Las Vegas, books and tour guides written on the subject tend to seduce us to generate a receptivity to famous tourist sites instead of the places all tourists and travelers are necessarily clung to, namely, hotels.

Travel guides often avoid in-depth descriptions of hotels except matters regarding prices, the kinds of restaurants, and the kinds of entertainments as if hotels are merely a means to shelters. To exaggerate the facilities in hotels is to disregard the settings and the layout of them, that is, the architecture itself and how it may be beneficial to the people. But tourism is a field that is constantly evolving. It often investigates what may attract tourists and how it may improve the general quality of travel. If tourism is a field that constantly demands new ideas, why can't we direct our focus on hotels as ideal tour sites rather than cliche landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower and the Tokugawa Castle? Can we not spend more time in hotels that we favour instead of forcing ourselves to be moved to tears by what all tourists are supposed to like?

Hotels, like airports, may be thought to be centres of cultural diversity and globalisation where people from all over the world, through the struggle of choices of hotels that are available, finally settle on a particular one to be their temporary homes. It is interesting to witness how many people with different cultural backgrounds envisage an identical vision of happiness, offering conclusive evidence of a global village. Yet hotels are far from being merely shelters whose rooms offer comfortable beds for us to stretch our legs, wrap ourselves up with blankets, and extinguish consciousness for several hours. They operate like our homes, suggesting a certain visions of what we might want to become.

If buildings are meant to be functional, yet translations of our psychological make-up, we may be tempted to look at the Villa Savoye at the summit of Poissy constructed by the renowned French architect Le Corbusier. Though Le Corbusier once remarked that the sole function of a house was shelter against severe weather and to accommodate us with a range of activities such as cooking that were essential to our survival, it seemed rather hard not to detain our attention when the flat roof sprang a leak in a bedroom where the boy of the Savoye family suffered from a chest infection because of the amount of water the roof had invited during rainy days. However functional Le Corbusier insisted the house was, what motivated him to construct the house was aesthetic interest rather than practical concerns. Behind this principally technological house lies the implicit attempt to support a way of life that appealed to the modernists: science, technology, efficiency, democracy etc. Le Corbusier wished the house to contribute to a certain mood, a transubstantiation of what we value into a material medium. How ironic the fact that he subtly designed a house out of beauty that was theoretically justified on technological terms rendered it uninhabitable.

For architectural gravity, many great religions are its practitioners. Over the course of human history, we have constructed temples, churches, and cathedrals to enforce our moral aspirations within ourselves. In the face of financial necessity, political disgrace, and romantic pessimism, the heaviness concentrated upon our mortal souls is perhaps too great to be fortified within our material casings. Hence we are tempted to inscribe certain values on works of architecture to act as sobering reminders of what we hold dear to. Gazing at the coloured windows that depict the story of Christ and frescos that illustrate the majesty of God at once harbours within us a feeling of solemn awe and force us to contemplate ideas that might have been inconceivable in the commercial world. Surrounded by the Gothic grandeur, ideas that might seem laughable in the secular world would begin to make sense and assume an air of sanity, for works of architecture beautifully administer the correct dosage of our missing virtues we wish to savour in our hearts.

Therefore, if we wish to change ourselves through travel, can we not regard hotels the kinds of places that help enforce the aspirations we wish to secure? If they are our temporary anchors of our undiscoverable identities, can we not direct our energy towards where we want to stay at instead of dedicating at full force our geographical interests to the place where we set foot on? The field of hotel management has long rested the improvements of hotels on the regulation of prices, the sorts of facilities, and customer service. Yet the notion of architecture largely leaves unnoticed, if noticed, neglected.

If the field of hotel management is to make some serious progress, perhaps its practitioners may need to invite architects to reconcile beauty with what is functional. There comes the time where we need to find a balance between hotels and the destination that can supposedly change us. The value of a beautiful work of architecture lies in its ability to grant us permanent access to certain emotional textures that allows us to arrest the transient moments, and solidify them, the kind of things that a beach or an exotic plant might not profess to do. It allows us to experience certain visions of a good life which we can regularly attend to.

What makes hotels significant is that they are the only places that retain the possibility to strike us with familiarity when we travel abroad. Through a setting that differs greatly from our homes, our continued exposure to it, rather than the places we tend to only visit once upon travel, suggests that the qualities contained within the hotel may assume a greater hold on us. It makes allowance for the possibility to bind our emotions to the fabric of our temporary homes, project them up to the sky, and reflect them back onto the ones that are located thousand miles away.

We shouldn't be repelled by Wittgenstein's claim that doing philosophy is nothing compared to being a good architect. A beautifully constructed hotel not only inspires examination of one's own self, but also reflects the values of the place where it is situated. It seeks to compress all the memorial qualities of a place and translate them into a material language we are all inclined to understand- so to hope to reform our deeply flawed characters. Upon travel, perhaps nothing can be more tiresome than selecting a hotel to fathom our souls.

W

Why Self-Help Books Should Be Useful

A piece for the Pub:

There is no more ridiculed genre than the self-help book. Yet far too many turn to this genre to escape from bureaucracy and the chatter of societies. If self-help book seems to offer consolations of our miserable lives, it is perhaps because it wishes to pin our hopes firmly on the sentiment of fierce optimism. Rather than telling us how the world actually operates, it tends to depict the world as totally just and equal, rendering it completely meritocratic.

Whatever shortcomings self-help books may have, though novels and literature may offer a better solution to human condition, to undermine the value of self-help book is to downplay its traditional role in literary history in contribution to our wellbeing. Much of the history of this genre spent its gloriest history analysing aspects of human psychology and aiming to enrich our lives through practical advice on the art of living such as friendship, romantic love, and diet instead of how we might boost up our self-esteem . The prestige of self-help books owed its success to its practitioners who were largely made up of philosophers and essayists, whose writings seduce us to bear a philosophical mind to even the most trivial details of our everyday life, through sensitising our awareness of the habitual, attuning our minds to pick up certain details that we are previously ignorant of.

Many of these writers were Stoic thinkers. Philosophers ranging from Epicurus and Seneca, Cicero to Marcus Aurelius, wrote a great deal of self-help books almost on every topic, offering practical advice to help us deal with death, the rejections of our lovers, and how to be happy without being rich. Instead of telling us how we might save up our money and invest in stock market, their advice went to the very core of human nature, urging us to perfect the art of going with the flow even when what was before us was as hard to swallow as, to use Arthur Schopenhauer's phrase, a toad.

This is precisely the bent of thinking that underlay the prominence of traditional self-help books. Not only they ventured to portray the world as it is, but also convinced us to be lightened by life's absurdities, adapting to the change rather than resisting it. But this is no optimism. Rather, it suggests pessimism, refuting the grave assumption that we will be cheered up when we are told all is well, and instead drawing us to the thought that we should never expect anything to go well, so we may restore the tranquility of our mind.

If the tradition of self-help books is deliberately divorced from philosophy, then perhaps philosophers are largely to blame, for they are no longer concerned with how to live happily, but, rather, how to get facts and concepts right. The greatest enemy of this genre may be thought as analytical philosophy, whose main objectives are clarification of concepts and logical consistency which seem almost totally irrelevant to our everyday experience however much we need logic to distinguish good arguments from the bad ones. Modern philosophy is entirely lacking its traditional vigour to improve our wellbeing.

Unfortunately, our steering away from analytical philosophy is not enough. The crucial danger of modern philosophy is that many philosophers suffer from the rigid inability to write beautifully. If we survey the history of philosophy, most of the philosophers, aside from the ancients, are terrible writers. Their inability lies not in being unable to articulate their ideas clearly, but, rather, in taking on a wrong perspective of how the human mind operates. The fact is the human mind needs to be seduced and entertained. Instead of employing the art of writing in merely a logical, coherent manner, they should pay more attention to plotting, a characteristic to which novels and literature are anchored.

Therefore, not only philosophy should resume its importance in self-help books, philosophers should also relearn to recast our moral confusions and griefs and collapse an old wisdom into beautiful, communal sentences in order to appeal to the lay audience. I wish to imagine one day where philosophers write much less for philosophy journals and fill their own writings without the slightest trace of jargons, where the self-help sections in any franchise bookshops whose bookshelves will be filled with volumes of Stoic writings, the entire collection of Alain de Botton's popular philosophy, and Bertrand Russell's essays instead of books with lurid covers and images of optimistic-looking faces that tend to falsely do away our anxieties and worries. Because, as the British philosopher John Stuart Mill put it so well, "ask yourself whether you are happy and you cease to be so."

W

On Novels and Literature

A piece for the Pub:

If we walk into any franchise American book shops nowadays, most bestsellers may be classified into one broad category: self-help. Self-help books tend to bear optimistic titles that supposedly help us to cope with our existence, hovering between "How To Boost Up Your Self-Esteem" and "How To Awaken The Giant Within Yourself".

But it wasn't always like this. Much of our literary history has rested its glory on the genre of novels and literature. Classics ranging from Shakespeare's and Oscar Wilde's to Harry Potter and Twilight, it seems rather hard for us to neglect their importance to our wellbeing. But why would novels and literature start to lack their appeal? Do self-help and finance books help us make some serious improvement of the quality of life so we may legitimately ignore the lessons novels and literature have to offer?

If self-help and finance books are the guidance of how to live, it is perhaps because these genres supposedly aim to seduce us to get something practical out of them and help us improve our lives in a certain way. But as we contemplate pages of practical advice in our beds, sadness might have been returned, for not only they are filled with illusions of what life actually is, they also go on to paralyse our imagination of possible happiness. The drawback of self-help books lies in their attempt to explicitly temper our worries and anxieties with a sense of primordial optimism, while subjugating our accurate views on life, they tend to falsely describe the world as one full of opportunities rather than one that is inherently depressing.

If we are to find a way to console ourselves in the midst of economic hardships and political disgrace, yet self-help books are unable to recast an old truth or wisdom into passable communal sentences, then perhaps we may need to turn to novels and literature in order to remind ourselves of how we should live. One valuable lesson from novels and literature is that they tend to mirror our experience. Rather than making false additions to an already muddied picture of life, their stories are generally founded on our everyday experience, harbouring in us a sense of belonging. But what's so special about mirroring our experience?

If mirroring our experience is essential to helping us to cope with our existence, it is because it sensitises our awareness of what we all have experience with. It allows us to pay attention to the minutest details what we may easily neglect. Upon reading a romantic novel, while we all may have experience falling in love, it transforms itself into a prism and forces us to adapt its content to our experience, allowing us to take on a different perspective that we may be previously ignorant of. It stretches to an ability to describe our emotions and our psychological make-up far better that we do. It guides our mind to pick up certain signals that initially bypasses our consciousness, and from that, cultivating our emotional sensibility and generating an entirely new experience of what we are familiar with.

What's more is that it allows us to understand experience that is not our own. While most of us tend to work in offices as ordinary white collars, seldom we are detectives, murderers, spies, and the like. Novels and literature present before us professions we are unlikely to have experience with and tell us what the world is like from their perspectives. Hence the business of novelists is also to enlarge our sympathy. They engage us into an experience we are unfamiliar with and ward off our bias and prejudice that might have been arisen through our conceptions of these professions as outsiders. This is also precisely one of the most admirable values of democracy. The virtue of tolerance lies not in respecting the differences in ideas and opinions, but, rather, in trying to understand them, through discussions and debates. How easy novels and literature may prompt us to understand others.

The limits of the modern form of self-help and finance books stem from an incompetence to portray our lives accurately and offer relevant insights to improve our wellbeing. In our current moral confusions, novels and literature are crying out to resume their importance.

W

Can Feminists Fall in Love?

A slightly edited version from the Pub:

Wearing bikinis and lingeries may be considered the triumph of feminism. As we glance through the gossip magazines and sexually appealing images in calendars, we should bear in mind that nudity offers substantial female confidence. Instead of regarding their bodies as areas of potential shame, women are finally able to display their physical candour and identities through various styles of bikinis and lingerie, mitigating the tension of the equality between men and women. However equal they may get, feminism is in violation of the fundamental law of seduction, forcing us to give away a vital ingredient of love, namely, romance.

Seduction is an art that is never easy to master. The irony is that it seems easiest to seduce those we are least attracted to instead of the ones we actually like, because the ones we desire elicit in us a sense of inferiority as compared to the perfections we have located in our beloved. What makes seduction difficult is that it lies not in revealing our character as a whole, far from offering a sense of intimacy, it is founded on the display of our finest qualities, because the desirable versions of ourselves are often not ours to summon at will. But how may we carefully administer the correct dosage of our admirable virtues? How can we ever be sure this or that virtue may appeal to our beloved?

The usual solution, and often an effective one, is to be modest. But as long as modesty stems from our crippling sense of inferiority, we often appear to be extremely reserved, and on some occasion, have the need to lie. Hence the experience of seduction is inevitably bound up with that of an actor. It’s because we need to take on a self that is not entirely our own in order to seduce the angelic face we happen to be dining with. All of a sudden, we are stripped of a sense of individuality and reminded of the anthropological wisdom that we are all social animals, that our existence is critically dependent on the others.

But what does it mean to be modest? One common answer often comes from fashion. But it is often an ambiguous one. The traditional view of how to modestly dress aims to unearth the desirable parts of skin textures yet cover some of the most intimate parts to assure masculine blindness until one is, perhaps, granted intimate access to one of the most sensitive and softest tissues among our sensory organs. To be modest is therefore to temper our modern need to be nude. The evolution of fashion, however, suggests there is no proper distinction between nudity and modesty today. What is modest in women's fashion constantly involves with the active participation of a desirable form of nudity. Wearing bikinis and lingerie get on fashion runways as much as those who conform to the traditional dressing code.

Of course, modesty suggests far more than that. Aside from fashion, we may also need to be modest in our manners and behaviours. As for a man, besides a constant need to display his wit and humour, he may need to suppress his usual tendency to swear and engage into conversations regarding pornography and a rather superficial appreciation of feminine physical beauty, and instead be drawn to offer fine knowledge of various types of wine and the like. Whilst for a woman, she may refrain from being far too outspoken, though occasionally may be permitted to ventilate bits and pieces of her intelligence, and suggesting a belief in the openness in sex. How could one be oblivious to the fact that men are highly deluded by the concept of virginity.

The current trend of acclaiming feminine identity through nudity therefore risks harbouring an opposite sentiment that does away the romantic conception of love and inspiring an unfair neglect of the merits of being reserved and modest. Not only it ignores the vital role seduction has to play before embarking on a romantic journey, it also renders love impossible, because many are seduced just because of the absurdly reserved behaviours mentioned. Modesty is the mother of love.

Perhaps it’s time to readjust the values advocated by feminism. The limits of feminism make a case for the impossibility of romantic love and seek to destroy some of the best qualities possessed solely by women. One of the best parts of civilisation lies not in promoting the equality of both sexes, but instead in how to express their inequality in a desirable, democratic way.

W

On Ancestors

In ancient China, it was not uncommon to witness signs of ancestor worship. If it was important in ancient China, it was perhaps because it was believed that people might be able to foster luck by tracing back their ancestral roots. Unfortunately, this tradition can hardly sustain in the modern secular world. It's not just because people no longer entertain the superstition of the blessing of their ancestors, but it's also because all sorts of new technology conspires to kill their ability to be alone and unstimulated, thus lacking the essential patience to study the tablets inscribed with the names of their ancestors.

But, of course, ancestor worship has deeper implications than just mere psychological value. In the west, people, unlike the Chinese, traditionally tend to lack the rigours to embark on the journey of extensive research into the origin of their families and trace them through successions of generations. They are instead drawn to an ancestral memory that is rather myopic, a curiosity that is quenched when they touch on the generation of their grandparents. The remaining work is left for the historians.

Though the people from the west generally exhibit a lack of interest in the origins of their own families, their love of ancestors is beautifully expressed in the modern form of biography. If we pay close attention to any biography, we can hardly pass their first page without a symmetrically constructed family tree. If family tree is essential to understanding the life of a great man, it is because it's interesting to follow a series of births and alliances which lead us to a chosen creature. The study of family tree not only suggests that greatness and genius may be passed on through genetic and cultural heritage of one's family, but it is also studied in the interest of ventilating a fantasy of how the ancestral experience of the recorded subject may mirror our own, so we may escape our financial assaults and the chatter of societies and aspire to greatness.

Whatever motives we may be inspired by studying the Chinese tablets or reading biographies, they wish to harbour within ourselves a distinctive sense of belonging and continuity. Just as our societies are formed by our past to establish their own identities, our need to understand the genesis of our own families is essential to knowing who we are. Biographies and the Chinese tablets offer a vision of a logical, complexly related world, that every generation of our family members must be traced and recorded in order to wage a war against amnesia, thus acquiring a sense of the self. It's because we will be nothing if we don't know who we are. Only through a sense of belonging and continuity, we may fortify our own identities within our souls.

But the majority are bombarded with the idea that not everyone is worthy of a biography. But to record the bits and pieces of ourselves is to foster a memory for our descendants to which their sense of the self is anchored. The creation of our own biographies helps unfold certain versions of themselves which are not theirs to summon at will, which cannot be arrested by mere experience. It is a sobering reminder that we will one day also become ancestors. So what must we do? Create a biography in either literary or visual form and assure a proper environment for our descendants so they may grow out of it without being lost.

W

On Memory

My piece for the Pub:

It's always tempting to lay your eyes on Central in the morning. A trip to the Starbucks coffee may offer us the best scenario for sight-seeing. In any morning on the weekdays, we may be in solemn awe of the landscape of Central being carpeted by a flock of black suits, rushing into Starbucks Coffee so they may rejuvenate themselves for a long day of work. The endorsement of Central values cannot be more obvious. The adoption of the American middle class lifestyle hints at a refusal of local values, which hardly warrants a restaurant of local flavour anything beyond ordinary pedestrian appraisal.

If drinking Starbucks Coffee is a vital ingredient for Central values, it is perhaps because a paper or plastic cup that carries a familiar green logo suggests a vision of more international tone. Rather than straying into a local restaurant for a ham and egg sandwich along with a cup of coffee blended in a style of local flavour, a cup of Starbucks may actually align us with an upper level in the pyramid of social hierarchy. Small wonder why Hong Kong is an international city.

However much Starbucks coffee we may drink, what is interesting is the fact that our desire for a cup of Starbucks stems not from our tendency to cherish work values, but, rather, from our romantic fantasy to centre our values rooted in a traditional American middle class routine. Behind the Starbucks drinking ritual hardly suggests our effort to reconcile the kind of happiness typical of the bourgeois outlook with financial necessity, rendering the surface more superficial than it seems. A sip of Starbucks in the morning may offer solutions for our fallible souls, for it carries the correct dosage of our missing virtues that are only deemed discoverable in the West.

This is, perhaps, precisely the reason why such scenario provokes a feeling of distance. But everywhere is like this in Hong Kong nowadays. While many may acknowledge the notion of historical value, but hardly there is anyone who offers sympathy for sentimental value. We may learn how our society and identity are formed by the past and traditions in order to acquire a sense of belonging and community. Our government may venture to do away the Tsim Sha Tsui Bus Stop and deprecate anything of sentimental value, yet too seldom they realise the merits of most buildings in Hong Kong lie not in their historical value, but, rather, sentimental value. Having breakfast at a restaurant of local flavour may not summon back a range of old yet valuable traditions, but the fact that being sat there might invite us to attend to a collection of life-enhancing thoughts in order to acquire a sense of the self.

What originally furnishes our sense of belonging and community is not merely architectural styles that offer aesthetic relief which reminds us of the past, it is also the resemblance of style and taste that triggers our bondage to what we may call a Proustian moment. Promoting ourselves to remember something often leads to an undesirable result. It often requires the charity of a friend's patience for us to utter the bits and pieces that seem to stretch too far to recall at all. True memory is different. It can only be experienced only accidentally and occasionally. Instead of being forced on us by another intrusive question of a friend, our memories might have only been returned to us only by an incidental encounter of a similarly constructed fried rice six years later in a restaurant.

The key to harbour our sense of belonging is whether that particular restaurant or this particular street can grant us access to certain emotional textures that only memory can attend us to. The problem of Hong Kong is that the landscape and what constitutes its soul fluctuate too much. Only through memory, our origin of birth may not be muddied up to a point where soul-searching is impossible.

Both physical and metal landscape of Hong Kong fails to recover a distinctive sense of community, belonging, and continuity. It deprives us of an essential medium to express our need for communication and commemoration, an attachment which can only be registered through memory, which only our will can transubstantiate through a material medium. Not until too long, we may no longer be able to tell others who we actually are nor we can remind ourselves of it.

W

The Herd Instinct Revisited

Here's my piece for the Pub:


The criticisms of the herd instinct might appear so common that they start to sound rather cliche nowadays. Though we are often reminded how it may strip us of our true identities, we still tend to be reluctant to detach ourselves from the bondage to the masses and establish our "i-confirmation". If the mass values are cordoned off questions, it is because they are deemed too implausible to be the targets of scrutiny. To start doubting the commonly accepted beliefs is to risk overthrowing the indisputable fact that great minds are scarce, that we are unlikely to be the pioneers of previously unknown truths.

Perhaps our tendency to follow the flock lies in the anthropological fact that we are all social animals. Rather than exaggerating the gravity of free will, our existence is actually critically dependent upon the existence of others. We can only be intelligent if others possess the same level of reasoning abilities. We can only be humorous if others are funny enough to get our humours. Small wonder why Aristotle remarked that friendship is essential to wellbeing.

However, humans are no machines. How seldom we may prefer to be obedient drones rather than creative originals. But how then might we solve the conflicts between the herd instinct and individuality? How might we discover our own identities if we are continuously forced to burden ourselves with the heaviness of inhabiting the same mentality? Is it impossible to reconcile mass values with our unique selves?

Mass values, at one level, might be easily regarded as deluded versions of truth, yet at another level they reveal something more than meets the eye. Mass values may be considered in the same light as fashion or wearing make-up. The quest to search for a decent pair of high heel shoes or a certain kind of mascara from Bobbi Brown provokes our philosophical sentiment to understand who we are. If we have a desire to understand ourselves, it is perhaps because identity is an inherently complicated, obscure notion, that one can bear various identities in different stages of life. Why do we have different identities? It's because we constantly succumb to new experience and are forced to harbour new visions about ourselves. Confused, we are therefore liable to adopt the suggestions forcefully made in the clothes and cosmetic section of a magazine to fit in a socially recognisable form. Similarly, the herd instinct works in the same mechanism. Unsure who we are, we need to surrender to the masses and begin our process of soul-searching.

Though I might have been charitable to the herd instinct, we should not deduce from my previous line of argument that the accusation against the flock is largely undeserved. To acknowledge the merits of the masses is not to legitimately consign them to respectability. Whatever sympathy we may have for the masses, it seems far from being inaccurate to generalise the herd between two acerbic notions commonly associated with them, namely, stupidity and ignorance. If stupidity and ignorance are the hallmark of social eminence, how might we tender the mass values as something valuable to justify the lifelong search for our souls?

The solution perhaps lies not in struggling to break free from the herd, but rather, in educating the masses. Much of the criticism has been focused on the individual self, but hardly there's any criticism focusing on the masses as a whole. What is valuable in educating the masses is that there are values perhaps the entire human race should hold dear to: democracy, science, emotional sensibilities etc. However democratic we may get, even in the most democratic society, there are never enough democratic participations, most notably, voting. To refuse to vote is to refuse to participate in the promotion of common wellbeing. Who could disagree freedom is desirable? Who could disagree science is the most reliable agent to civilisation? Perhaps only the exceptional few seem to suggest the otherwise.

The herd instinct might not muddy our identities as it tends to suggest. But the major criticisms against the flock push us into a baneful direction where we might hardly progress. What's important is the education of the masses instead of the other way round. How many years before the mass values might actually become praiseworthy?

W