The Shop on High Street by Souchou Yao

Author:Souchou Yao
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789811520310
Publisher: Springer Singapore

Hosgood calls the living quarters upstairs at the shop ‘mercantile monastery’, a fraught and pregnant phrase. In the Edwardian social order, the retail clerks were not gentlemen. They did not have their own homes, and their gentleman status was a fake, a sad put-on. The women who worked on the same premises fared no better. They lived above the shop as well, but men and women were segregated. The living-in accommodation provided no opportunities for friendship—or any kind of relationship—across the sexes. The result was to compromise the sexual identities of men and women alike. Hosgood concludes: Thwarted of their masculinity or femininity, and kept within their separate quarters, the shop assistants ‘entered a stage of suspended adolescence’.7

The High Street shop was no Edwardian draper-retailer. Its workers were men and boys. They lived in a contemporary modern city, and they did not suffer sexual segregation and forced celibacy as did the Edwardian salesclerks. The idea that the shop assistants ‘had few opportunities to escape their master’s influence outside the workplace’ doesn’t resonate here.8

Yet for all that, ‘mercantile monastery’ remains a potent idea—when we broaden its meaning, when we see it as fostering a system of denials that put under stress the shopboys’ lives and aspirations.

At the High Street shop dormitory at night, monastic seclusion was never complete. Shopboys went to the cinema or left to meet friends at the Indian tea stall, and they returned and brought news. The buoyant sprit of their night out was infectious. Those who had stayed wanted to know: Did Jet Li do his ‘no-shadow kick’ (in the movie)? Has Ah Liew got a job yet? Did you drop by at Sakura (karaoke lounge) and check it out? If the dormitory was monastic with its canvass beds and austere living, it was also a place of freedom. Here they talked freely, exuberantly. It was an hour or so before bedtime; the dim light cut them off from the outside world. With no more need to put on a civil front, they bantered and told stories amongst themselves. The shop floor at night abetted certain thoughts, a certain consciousness even, but it’s hard to know what it was exactly.

In any big city you meet people like our shopboys but we barely notice them as we go about our business. They are unremarkable and invisible, like the person behind the ticket booth at a busy train station. What is striking, though, is their sheer number. Strolling through any Southeast Asian city, the shop-floor young men and women are so numerous as to resemble an army of workers who fill the high fashion boutiques, the hair dressing salons, the supermarket check-outs, the promotion kiosks and mobile phone stalls at the shopping mall. There are the ‘new proletariat’ of the urban economy. They do not own the shop or stall where they work. They are mobile, they change from petty job to petty job, and they dream the dreams that always seem to elude them. Multiply them by the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.