Chungking Mansions, a dilapidated seventeen-story commercial and residential structure in the heart of Hong Kong’s tourist district, is home to a remarkably motley group of people. Traders, laborers, and asylum seekers from all over Asia and Africa live and work there, and even backpacking tourists rent rooms in what is possibly the most globalized spot on the plan-et. But as Ghetto at the Center of the World shows us, the Mansions is a world away from the gleaming headquarters of mul-tinational corporations — instead it epitomizes the way globalize-tion actually works for most of the world's people. Through candid sto-ries that both instruct and enthrall, Gordon Mathews lays bare the building’s residents’ intricate con-nections to the international circu-lation of goods, money, and ideas.

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.