Youth Studies and Timescape: Insights from an Ethnographic Study of ‘Young Night Drifters’ in Hong Kong's Public Housing Estates

Youth & Society44(4) 548 –566

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1Hong Kong University of Science & Technology, Hong Kong, PRC2City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, PRC3Australian National University, Canberra, Australia

Corresponding Author:Julian M. Groves, Division of Social Science, Hong Kong University of Science & Technology, Clear Water Bay, Kowloon, Hong Kong, PRC.Email: [email protected]

Youth Studies and Timescapes: Insights From an Ethnographic Study of “Young Night Drifters” in Hong Kong’s Public Housing Estates

Julian M. Groves1, Wai-Yip Ho2, and Kaxton Siu3

Abstract

This article draws on insights from the sociology of time to examine how scheduling influences social interaction and identity among young people and those who work with them. Drawing on an ethnographic analysis of “Young Night Drifters” and youth outreach social workers in Hong Kong’s public housing estates, we create a framework to understand youth in the context of time scheduling. Certain time schedules provide opportunities for young people to enjoy greater intimacy and looser authority structures. The particular scheduling of young people’s activities can expose them to delin-quent groups and activities and isolate them from mainstream society. Time is also a marker that creates new identities and shapes interactions between youth workers and their clients. By focusing on the timing of youth activities,

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we redress an imbalance in the literature on youth studies which has been preoccupied with space.

Keywords

delinquency, Hong Kong, time, space

Introduction

A large preoccupation in youth studies, particularly with regards to delinquency, has been with the places that young people occupy. Since the days of the Chicago School, sociologists have identified transient areas of cities where “ganglands” were likely to develop (see Tita, Cohen, & Engberg, 2005, for a review). More recent theorists have argued that space is more than just another “variable” in delinquency. Space, when infused with human activity to become “place,” mediates social life in a multitude of ways (Gieryn, 2000). Place sus-tains segregations and hierarchies between people by distributing them in various class-specific localities. Place creates new identities and solidarity when ethnic enclaves develop. Place can be a symbol of political power in the form of imposing architecture. Places bring people together and initiate social movements. Certain places, such as the street, are known to be where young people are free from conventional constraints, such as parents, schools, and institutional youth clubs (Robinson, 2009).

Although we are not dismissing the importance of place, we argue that time and, in particular, scheduling, has been neglected in accounting for the social worlds that young people inhabit, the people they interact with, the kinds of behavior they engage in, the identities they assume, as well as the strategies used by youth workers to deal with them. The issue of time is particularly pertinent to marginal youth in global cities in which public spaces are becoming increasingly off-limits, leaving them only with vast amounts of discretionary time. In crowded cities, space in desirable areas—designer coffee shops, lux-ury malls, public squares and fountains—are available mostly to the employed, the propertied, and the consuming classes. Yet as Zygmunt Bauman (1998, pp. 88-89) points out, whereas for the wealthy “space has lost its constrain-ing quality and is easily traversed,” for the poor “space is heavy, resilient, untouchable” and free time stretches ephemerally.

Previous considerations of time in youth studies, however, are limited when explaining social relationships among young people. One strand of this litera-ture considers the question of how youth spend their time. Time is conceptual-ized as a finite resource that young people allocate to various activities. In her

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quantitative study of adolescent time use, for instance, Zick (2010), used time-diary surveys to show how adolescents have increased the amount of time they spend on leisure as opposed to employment. Others in this vein have looked at the time that youth allocate to homework, reading, watching television (Tepper, 2001), physical activity (Gordon-Larsen, Nelson, & Popkin, 2004), or house-work (Raley, 2006). These studies are useful to policy makers and economists who are concerned with educational achievement or consumer trends. They do not, however, offer an appreciation of the implications of such time allocation for the social worlds that young people inhabit, the people they meet, the type of interactions they engage in, or the reasons behind their choices.

Rather than trying to impose adult concerns (such as homework) on young informants, a second strand in the literature on time and youth examines young people’s subjective experiences of time, that is, the social construction of time. Keneko (2006), for instance, examined perceptions of time held by Japan’s socially withdrawn youth, known as Hikikomori. By withdrawing from society, Hikikomori believe that they are freeing themselves from the pressures of punctuality, speed, and efficiency in contemporary Japanese society. Hikikomori challenge the Japanese temporal order, replacing it with their own schedules. But why do they do this? And how does their new temporal order structure their everyday relationships?

Time, like space, is more than just a finite resource to be distributed or a social construct. Time has a physical property that facilitates or inhibits social interaction. Scheduling affects the potential for certain groups to exist at all. A local tennis club’s team involving middle-age men whose matches take place on Saturday afternoons may or may not be viable as result of conflicts with family commitments (Winship, 2009). When families are working increasingly nonstandard hours, scheduling can affect marital quality (Presser, 2003). Scheduling can segment or segregate populations. Individuals or groups may occupy the same place but never interact because they occupy that space at different times. Drug dealers and prostitutes can thus cohabit peacefully with families and children in the same location because they operate at different hours (Winship, 2009).

The significance of scheduling was taken up in Murray Melbin’s classic essay, Night as Frontier. Melbin argued that the nighttime offers opportunities for groups that would not normally flourish during the day. The “colonization” of the night overcomes the limitations of space. Such unconventional schedul-ing throws up new identities and groupings as well as new industries that follow those who have already established their activities in the night. “Along with landscape,” argues Melbin (1987, p. 128), “think timescape.” A timescape may have several dimensions (Adam, 2000). It may encompass tempo (speed), time

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frames (e.g., seasons), duration (length of time), and sequence (the ordering of events). Timescapes are, according to Adam, “the temporal equivalent of land-scapes, recognizing all the temporal features of socio-environmental events and processes, charting temporal profiles in their political and economic con-texts” (p. 137).

Some attention has already been given to significant time frames in young people’s lives. “Peak offending,” for instance, occurs during adolescence when youngsters are granted more adult privileges, experience fewer con-straints, and associate with new peer groups (Agnew, 2003). The focus of this article, however, is on everyday timing, that is, the synchronicity in which vari-ous actors and events come together at certain times to structure interactions among young people, essentially cocooning them in a delinquent subculture. This approach complements existing studies that seek to explain delinquency in terms of weakened social bonds with conventional authority figures, such as parents, teachers, and religions organizations (Hirschi, 2002). Such perspec-tives rely on cross-sectional surveys and provide little understanding of the context or triggers that cause social bonds to weaken in the first place. An examination of young people’s schedules sheds light on the ever changing nature of their social worlds, in which they continuously drift in and out of different degrees of social control within a 24-hr period. What follows is a brief ethnographic account that fleshes out the implications of these theoretical points for both young people and youth workers.

SettingHong Kong, like other postindustrial economies, has experienced the coloni-zation of the night (Melbin, 1987) and the growth of a nighttime economy (Hobbs, Hadfield, Winlow, & Hall, 2000; Joe-Laidler, 2009). The shortage of physical space in Hong Kong has driven many of its citizens to occupying the night. During the frenetic period of Hong Kong’s industrialization, night workers would rent their beds to day workers while they worked their shifts (Melbin, 1987). Tourism also played a large part in the expansion of the night. Tailors, for instance, became accustomed to working all night to make suits for short-term visitors to the territory (Melbin, 1987). The first nightclubs, discos, late-night markets, and shopping arcades developed around the hotels and restaurants of Tsim Sha Tsui’s “Golden Mile” (Lui, 2001).

Hong Kong’s nighttime economy, however, is not restricted to upmarket bars and expensive clubs in the city center, promoted in tourist brochures as Hong Kong’s glitzy “night life.” The growth of 24-hr fast-food restaurants,


convenience stores, cybercafés, and game centers in Hong Kong’s high-density, low-income housing estates outside the commercial areas has facilitated an “alternative night life” (Newbery, 1999). In the late 1990s, social workers began to notice that this “low-end” night life was increasingly inhabited by young people on the margins of schooling and work. In 1999, Peter Newbery of the NGO Youth Outreach observed in 1999 that

We have found that young people of all ages are numerous on the streets at night. They gather in small groups in playgrounds, under footbridges, in back alleys in most areas of Hong Kong, Kowloon, and the New Territories. Small groups can be found almost everywhere. They normally hang out in groups of six or seven. In general these groups are composed of boys but sometimes one or two girls will be present. (Newbery, 1999, p. 108)

These young people, referred to in Cantonese as yehchīng (literally “Children of the Night”) or “Young Night Drifters” (YNDs) continue to congre-gate on the streets at night to socialize, engage in “extreme” sports (skateboard-ing, BMX biking, and breakdancing), drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes, and occasionally take recreational drugs and participate in gang fights. Estimates of how many night drifters there are vary between studies. In 1998 Newbury (cited in Lee, 2000) estimated that there were some 20,000 youngsters on the streets at night. The most recent statistics cited by Lee (2010) suggest that there are now between 50,000 and 60,000. The reasons for the increasing num-bers of YNDs may be attributed to various changes in the labor market brought about by the Asia-Pacific recession of the 1990s and the relocation of manufac-turing jobs to the Chinese Mainland resulting in a shortage of unskilled jobs for high school graduates and early school leavers. As in Japan, this has created entire categories of youth, such as the Hikikomori, who, as noted above, have “withdrawn” from mainstream society (Furlong, 2008).

In 2007, the NGO Youth Outreach surveyed 1,008 YNDs, of whom 66.2% were male, and 80% were aged between 14 and 21, with a mean age of 16.9 years. In terms of economic status, 59.7% claimed to be full-time students (though many of these were not attending classes and close to dropping out), 3.4% were students doing part-time jobs, 12.7% were full-time workers (mostly employed as waiters, dishwashers, hairwashers, and couriers), 6.3% were part-time or casual workers, and 0.9% were unemployed. The remainder were either waiting for a school place or training program, or had dropped out of school and were waiting to reach the age where they could be legally employed (Youth Outreach, 2007).

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Method

The goal of this research was not simply to quantify the amount of time youth spend on various pursuits or even to understand their subjective conceptual-ization of time. Rather, we wanted to know about the choices and conse-quences of their time schedules. This required, first, direct observation of night drifters as they went about their everyday (or rather “everynight”) activities. We accompanied outreach youth social workers on their nightly patrols to identify “youth at risk” in the parks and podiums of public housing estates, convenience stores, 24-hr fast-food restaurants, game centers, pool halls, and cybercafés in the New Territories of Hong Kong. The area is known for its high concentration of low-income families, new immigrants, unemployed, and elderly residents. We shadowed the social workers for a period of 2 years, from the hours of 11 p.m. to 3 a.m., making 15 field visits in total.

Second, during each visit we were able talk to 15 to 20 youngsters and observe many more. Over the course of 2 years this amounted to contacts with more than 200 youth. During our contacts, we asked the youngsters to describe their schedules and routines as well as their relationships with their parents, schools, the social workers, and the police. We also asked the youngsters to reflect on their preferences for congregating at various locations at particular times. During our visits, we also interviewed the social workers themselves (a team of 15) who became a part of this study. We asked them about their schedules and working hours, their preference for night work, and their relationships with their clients, the police, schools, and other nighttime workers (security guards, convenience store staff, cybercafé, restaurant, and food-stall opera-tors). Since the nighttime was an organizing theme in our research, we also visited the same areas during the day and inquired about the social workers’ daytime visits so that we could draw comparisons between the two settings.

Throughout the research we took field notes, photographs, and, in some cases, digital recordings of everything that we observed and heard and created a computer database using the qualitative software analysis program NVivo. This allowed us to code the data according to themes, paying most attention to references to time schedules. The interviews and informal conversations were conducted in Cantonese and were then translated into English by the second and third authors and several student assistants who accompanied us on the field visits.

In the course of this research we occasionally spoke with and observed young teenagers (aged between 14 and 16). This raised ethical issues about the chil-dren’s ability to provide informed consent. All the fieldwork, however, was conducted in the presence of licensed outreach social workers who granted us


access to the informants. These informants had essentially volunteered to take part in the project, since the social workers recruited them on a voluntary basis to meet “students and professors at the University who were writing a report on the lives of night drifters.” We did not record any of the informants’ identifying details. Aside from anonymizing them, we also had to consider that some of these youngsters were engaging in illegal activities such as drug pos-session and dealing. We followed the social workers’ policy of not being present, and therefore, not bearing witness to any illegal activities such that they would not become part of our field notes. In addition to the layer of pro-tection that the social workers provided to our informants, we sought approval from the first author’s university Institutional Review Board, which was satis-fied that these measures provided sufficient protection for the informants.

Reliance on outreach social workers to access informants did, however, impose a particular set of methodological biases. It is possible, for instance, that the youth who had cooperative relationships with the social workers were less marginal or delinquent. We may thus have neglected those who were more isolated and delinquent. The opposite bias may also have occurred. These youth could be associated with the social workers precisely because they had experienced problems with drugs, crime, and isolation. Whichever scenario is the case, our focus is not so much on the individual characteristics of delin-quents or even delinquency per se, but the effects of nighttime scheduling on the behaviors of youth regardless of their marginal status.

Four major themes emerged with regards to the way in which time sched-ules shaped the social worlds of the youngsters we observed. First, in the con-text of crowding during the daytime, the nighttime provides young people with greater intimacy and freedom from conventional restraints than they face dur-ing the day. Second, assembling at night exposes youth to older blue-collar workers, the unemployed, triads, drugs, and gang fighting, essentially cocoon-ing them from people in the mainstream daytime economy. Third, night drift-ing bestows an identity on its participants that shapes the way in which youngsters and youth workers present themselves. Finally, the prevalence of youth activ-ity on the streets at night encourages a distinct style of decentralized regula-tion that is administered mostly by young, single, and predominantly male social workers who share the same tolerance for the loose authority structures and informality of the night as the YNDs.

YNDs and the Allure of the NightAs the label suggests, YNDs are distinguishable not so much by the spaces that they occupy, but by the unconventional hours that they keep. Typically, they

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wake in midafternoon and go to sleep at 6 a.m. As with people migrating geographically, Melbin (1987, p. 4) notes, those who colonize the night do so because the daytime is “too crowded”:

Now, venturing into the night, we have the same motives as our predeces-sors who migrated geographically. The daytime is too crowded. Its carry-ing capacity is being strained, and still it does not yield all that the community wants.

The nighttime allows YNDs to occupy public spaces in large numbers in public parks and benches as well as 24-hr fast-food restaurants and conve-nience stores. During the day, these areas are populated by elderly residents and families with small children. Much of their business is shopping, whereas YNDs, half of whom are either students or unemployed, cannot participate in the formal economy of luxury items sold in upmarket shopping malls. The activi-ties that YNDs pursue are much more likely to be skateboarding, BMX bik-ing, breakdancing, and, more generally, hanging out and chatting with friends, all of which cannot be accommodated during the day on Hong Kong’s crowded and noisy streets. Low-income families in the city reside in small, cramped apart-ments with rooms often separated by thin partitions, where domestic disputes frequently occur. The relative quiet of the night and lower density of people provide an opportunity for more sociability and intimacy than the daytime, as one YND observed:

Some people are just bystanders in the daytime, but at night they come together and they chat and talk with each other. They are happy and they have fun.

The streets, normally considered a public space during the day, become tem-porarily transformed at night to provide an opportunity for intimate sharing and a private space away from home, school, and work, as Lovell (1992, p. 101) notes with respect to street people in the United States:

Nighttime . . . for the middle class is a private time anchored in private spaces, such as bedrooms and living rooms. Nighttime for the non-propertied becomes a frontier space for carrying out private business in public places, such as sleeping in doorways, stairwells, on the sidewalks in front of stores and corporate skyscrapers.

Indeed the nighttime permits YNDS to use public places to create their own private spaces to share personal problems. One YND thus explained:


Normally my life on the street is my private life. In fact in school I per-formed very well. Why do they bother with my life on the street?

Suggested here is that a further lure of the night is the lack of formal regula-tion from parents and teachers. At night, Melbin notes (1987, p. 43), “the top administrators of ongoing organizations and cities go to sleep, and a decentral-izing of power follows.”

YNDs describe successful nights on the streets as comprising “being happy,” “drinking,” “dancing,” “playing,” and “eating.” Through such activities, they explained, “time flies.” They described their lives in terms of “spontaneity” and “coincidence.” They claim to meet up with each other “by chance” and “ran-domly” decide at which place to gather. They often go to the streets to avoid conflicts with their parents or because there was no one at home to monitor their activities since both their parents were working. Places that are arenas of for-mal control during the day become playgrounds at night. One group of second-ary school dropouts, for instance, would congregate in the playground at the school they used to attend during the day. There they smoked cigarettes (strictly prohibited in the school) and got high on cough medicine and drugs.

Male YNDs typically tint and spike their hair—associated with being a sec-ondary school dropout or part of Hong Kong’s “new dance-drug scene” (Joe-Laidler, 2009). They wear black Adidas track-suit tops (considered to be “trendy” and, therefore, rebellious) and dark jeans. They overtly slouch and avoid eye contact or hide their faces in their hands when approached. They boast about being “hāaksewúi” (triad society members). They generously use “chōuháu” (foul language) with sexually explicit references and speak of various fights and robberies that they experienced among each other and with figures of authority. They do this, the social workers told us, to shock us, particularly if women are present. Female YNDs wear low-waist jeans and sport colorful makeup and glitter on their faces and eyelashes. YNDs frequently consume drugs, evident by empty bottles of cough medicine discarded in the garbage cans in toilets of game centers, discarded tissues around convenience stores, and dis-carded syringes in the toilets of shopping malls. Some appear thin and wasted, their bodies relentlessly agitated, twitching and shaking from drug use.

Segregation and the NightThe scheduling of YND activities ensures that YNDs interact with other inhab-itants of the night, but remain segregated from mainstream society. Appearing on the street late at night, smoking, marks the beginning of a deviant career (Becker, 1963) for the YNDs. Having taken to the street, they rely on each other

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for company, since their friends in school often abandon them for fear of being associated with them. One YND told us:

I’ve got no friends at school. They don’t like me because I always go to the street and they don’t like smoking or drinking beer. At school most of the time I’m unhappy. Here we are happy because we are with friends.

Residents who have family responsibilities, those who work in middle-class jobs with regular daytime hours and those trying to succeed in Hong Kong’s highly competitive educational system are not usually available for nighttime drifting. More than half of the drifter population are unemployed. The remainder work in blue-collar, manual jobs such as delivery, truck driving, and restaurant work—jobs that require them to work late shifts. Regular leisure facilities (gymnasiums, diners, and cinemas) close at 11 p.m. Since their work ends late at night, much of this marginal population’s leisure time is spent on the streets until early morning, chatting, slurping noodles, smoking, drinking beer, and playing cards. And since these jobs are usually undertaken by men, the majority of YNDs are male.

The scheduling of working-class jobs, the activities of the unemployed, and those who are marginalized at school thus coincide after dark, ensuring that a nighttime culture exists in isolation from mainstream society. This per-mits younger drifters to mix with the older blue-collar workers and to be exposed to working-class lifestyles and counterschool culture (Willis, 1981). Older YNDs, who have jobs and access to cash, make excursions across the Chinese border to visit prostitutes and attend discos where cheap narcotics are increasingly available. They then attempt to recruit younger drifters into their gangs or sell them drugs. One social worker explained how this happens:

When many children are hanging around in the street at night, they become the target of triads or gangs. . . . They never directly say they want to recruit them as triad members. They just make friends with them and provide them with gifts; Coca-Cola or some foods. Then when they become friends, they will involve them in some illegal behaviors. These are their tactics.

Negotiating New Identities in the NightTemporal markers are a way for us to get to know the ecology of a population (Melbin, 1987). Naturalists often classify animals in terms of their nocturnal activities or plants by season. Similarly, we can assume much about the characteristics of a particular restaurant simply by its hours of operation:


luncheonettes, all-night diners, tearooms, and supper clubs (Fine, 1996). YNDs are given a temporal rather than spatial classification too. They are “night kids” (rather than “street kids”). This shapes how social workers view the youth and design their programs. The term “night drifter” did not always exist. Rather, it was first coined by local academics in the late 1990s. Heightened academic attention to nighttime activity encouraged social work-ers to extend their services later into the night. Thus, one Youth Outreach worker recalled:

Actually, there was no such term as “Young Night Drifters” at that time. It was proposed firstly by academics. Before we just talked of runaway young people and at that time they were commonly called “youth who can’t go home” or “youth who play overnight.” It was after a scholar used the term “YND” in his research report. After that, the whole social work industry wholeheartedly embraced such a term and thus used this term ’til now.

The social workers, however, learnt to use this temporal identity strategically. On the one hand, they avoid the term because of the negative connotations associated with the night. On the other hand, they know that precisely because of the night’s association with social problems, they can use the label to pro-cure funding from the government to continue their services. One social worker told us:

Honestly, I dislike using this term because I think that yehchīng has a negative connotation and a labeling effect on these youths. We only think that these youngsters are “late home boys and girls”—going home late. But when presenting the issue to the government and to legislators we need to use this term to emphasize the characteristics of these groups of youngsters so as to arouse their interest.

The label also has implications for the way in which the YNDs see them-selves and negotiate their identities. All of the youngsters that we encountered know of the term yehchīng. Some of the youth embraced the term, romanticiz-ing their nocturnal activities. “Do you think our lives are colorful?” one group of YNDs asked us, keen to tell us about their adventures on the street. Others, however, reject the label since it carries negative connotations about wasting time, aimlessness, disturbing residents, and vandalism. On a few occasions we observed young people actually running away from the social workers, pro-claiming “we’re not yehchīng!,” as if they were afraid of being contaminated by the night. One group, known as the “B-Boys” because of their passion

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for breakdancing sought to cleanse their nighttime image by meeting in a gymnasium that had extended its hours to accommodate them. Aside from ensuring that they did not disturb sleeping residents, the gym was a place where people working in the mainstream daytime economy also frequented. This elevated the B-Boys’ status in the community. Parents were satisfied to know that breakdancers were not attending discos that carried the association of drugs and promiscuity. “Here, my parents don’t have to worry about me,” a B-Boy told us.

Youth Workers in the NightAs people colonize the night, an industry of auxiliary services develops around them, encouraging further growth and development of the colony (Melbin, 1987). These auxiliary industries have much in common with the clients that they serve, once again reinforcing the isolation of the nighttime inhabitants from mainstream society.

Prompted by the growing number of YNDs in the late nineties, social workers were forced to accept their clients’ idiosyncratic temporal regime and set up “Mobile Outreaching Teams” that moved between housing estates from the hours of 11 p.m. and 6 a.m. in four-wheel drive vehicles. These outreach workers have much in common with the YNDs themselves. They are relatively young (early to mid-20s), single, and mostly male. Most are recent graduates. It is, once again, scheduling that accounts for this demographic. Older social workers have family commitments that prevent them from undertaking night outreach work. Social workers almost always quit the night shift after getting married or having children. Women see themselves as less suited to night work than men do. Two female social workers commented on the physical stress of the job that put them out of synch with their sleeping patterns and their friends. One told us:

Most of the YND workers don’t live very well because their sleep rou-tines are irregular. Sometimes after the night shift we don’t want to sleep any more. . . . Sometimes it affects my social life. Most of my friends leave work by 6 p.m. and they gather and have dinner about seven or eight. And then I need to go to work at nine. . . . My friends always say, “Change your work!”

Given the large proportion of male outreach social workers at night, it is not surprising that most of the activities they organize are more attractive to their male clients—breakdancing, skateboarding, and BMX biking competi-tions. Since it is only considered appropriate for male workers to counsel male


clients, the male YNDs generally get more attention than the females YNDs do, who are generally talked about only in terms of their relationships with the men (e.g., as “girlfriends” who follow the male YNDs).

As with the YNDs, social workers believe that there are advantages to work-ing at night, most notably, opportunities to establish more intense relationships with their clients since the clients are less distracted by the daytime attractions of shops and arcades. Also, there are fewer social services available at night, which means that the youth can give the remaining social workers more atten-tion. One social worker thus commented on the quality of his nighttime inter-actions with clients:

There is a lack of social service in the nighttime. I can put in more effort because I’m still young and the youngsters give me energy. They have many, many ideas about how to plan their lives, but no one to commu-nicate with them. They need a social worker to go out and reach them on the street and talk more about their lives, to train them to be good people. I can get more insight during the nighttime. Night is quite magical . . . comfortable, relaxed, dangerous, secretive and beautiful.

Night drifting thus provides the YND workers with opportunities to get a glimpse of private social problems that might not otherwise be visible. As noted above, at night YNDs are more likely to bring their private problems into the public domain. This makes it easier for the social workers to counsel them. Clients openly share stories with YND workers about accidental preg-nancies, relationships, and family problems. We observed social workers dis-playing physical intimacy with their clients, for example, hugging clients, and female clients playing with a female social worker’s hair.

YND workers actually incorporate various nighttime activities into their programs: breakdance classes, hip hop, graffiti art, and skateboarding. Some of the job retraining programs offered by the social workers prepare YNDs to take part in the nighttime economy, such as how to serve drinks in a bar. The social workers tolerate, and at times encourage, a degree of misbehavior from the YNDs. In one encounter we had on the street, one of the social workers gave the YNDs permission to “be cocky, but not too cocky.”

Furthermore, social workers distance themselves from the formal daytime agents of control, such as the police (who humiliate the YNDs with rough searches) and parents (with whom they have conflicts). Instead, social workers attempt to build harmonious relationships with various constituents of the nighttime community—convenience store staff, security guards, cybercafé opera-tors, and even local triad gang leaders. They thus form a “decentered network”

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of governance (Castells, 2000) or, as one social worker and academic put it, a “soft side” of urban control, sometimes left to philanthropic or religious organizations in other nighttime economies (Hadfield, 2009).

The decentralization of power regulating young people at night is also evi-dent in the social organization of nighttime social work. Night outreach work is much more informal than its daytime counterpart. There are fewer administra-tive tasks. Interactions between the nighttime social workers are casual. Like their clients, they laugh and tell jokes among themselves, poking fun at mis-takes they make while driving or accidentally stepping in dog excrement while on their patrols. The social workers dress in much the same way as their cli-ents, and it can be easy to mistake them for their clients. A few of them experi-ment with trendy clothes, like the YNDs themselves. Whereas there is a formal hierarchy among the social workers (a “Team Leader” and a “Supervisor”), these roles are often indistinguishable during nightly visits.

In sum, rather than trying to bring the YNDs back into the routines of the daytime economy, the nighttime scheduling of YND work ensures that YND workers and their clients essentially occupy a similar demographic: young, unattached with an appreciation or at least an acceptance of the loose author-ity structures, sociability, and intimacy of the night. In order to maintain good relationships with their clients, YND workers avoid contacts with the tradi-tional authorities of the daytime—police, parents, and schools—and instead build up a network of other nighttime workers—triad members, operators of cybercafés (known to be involved with triads and drugs), nighttime security guards, convenience store owners, illegal street hawkers, and even taxi drivers (some of whom have been known to transport drugs). This further ensures that YNDs are cocooned in a world of like-minded people that reinforce the cul-ture of the night, isolating them further from mainstream society.

DiscussionWhereas studies of youth and gang culture focus on the places in which young people gather, our ethnographic account of YNDs suggests that when they gather is just as important as where. The nighttime provides a setting for young people to enjoy a degree of intimacy not normally afforded them during the day. The nighttime releases young people from the formal controls of home, school, and work. It also ensures that a like-minded population are gathered together and isolated from the mainstream society that operates during the day. In this context, blue-collar workers and others involved in the informal economy of the night, especially those involved in illegal activities, have easy access to youth who are situated on the margins of school and work.


The scheduling of nighttime activities has implications for social policy too. Nighttime youth workers share many of their clients’ characteristics, hav-ing become accustomed to the same nighttime environment—one of intimacy, loose control structures, and one in which young men feel particularly com-fortable. It is no coincidence that the male clients in our study received more attention from the social workers than the female clients could and that their programs were designed more with young men in mind, even though the num-ber of female clients is now increasing and the female clients are more vulnerable than their male counterparts.

Time, rather than space, takes on a particular significance for marginal youth. Unlike their more affluent counterparts in the world of formal educa-tion and employment, night drifters are confined by space, but move in time. To return once again to Bauman (1998, pp. 88-89),

For the increasingly cosmopolitan, extraterritorial word of global business-men, managers or global academics . . . space does not matter, since spanning every distance is instantaneous. For the inhabitants of the second world, the walls built of immigration controls, of residence laws and of clean streets and zero tolerance policies grow taller; the moats separating them from the sites of their desire . . . grow deeper. . . . Their time is void . . . monotonously ticking away; it comes, it goes . . . imma-terial and lightweight, ephemeral, with nothing to fill it with sense and so to give it gravity, time has no power over that all-too-real space to which they are confined.

We have considered the significance of scheduling with respect to delin-quency. But scheduling, irrespective of place, can also be used to understand social worlds of young people in other contexts. Schools and universities, for instance, can create segregation by the scheduling of their classes. If science labs and athletics practice are scheduled on the same afternoons, there will be no athletes majoring in science, and athletics and science majors will have less contact with each other. Social clubs and religious groups similarly segregate their populations. Orthodox Jewish communities in New York schedule their sports leagues on Sundays (to avoid the Jewish Sabbath on Saturdays), thereby reducing the contact their children have with Christian children who attend church (Zerubavel, 1981). On an institutional level, scheduling conflicts between the end of the school day and the end of the work day have created a whole new temporal category of children, the so-called “latchkey kids” (Winship, 2009).

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Scheduling, as we mentioned above, is only one dimension of youth times-capes that might be considered in our temporal gaze (Adam, 2000). There are others. Young people experience time frames that have their unique social context. Adolescence is a time of reduced supervision and new experiences. It is not expected to last forever. Similarly, night drifting is often considered by social workers to be a temporary period that finally ends when the YNDs experience embarrassment when asking their parents for money and then enter the formal workforce. In this respect, they have much in common with middle-class youth in the United Kingdom who participate in Third World Gap Year projects before starting formal employment (Ansell, 2008). The annual release of the HKCEE exam results (determining access to higher education) in early August brings more YNDs and social workers onto the streets in celebration or commiseration. On weekend nights, younger YNDs occupy the streets because there is no school the next day. Public holi-days can leave the streets deserted because youngsters are having family meals, sweeping ancestors’ graves, or visiting extended family members on the Chinese Mainland.

Whereas neighborhoods change over the course of years, and sometimes even generations, the fluidity of time in the hands of young people provides the distinctive rhythms in their lives. Attention to these temporal rhythms more accurately captures the constantly changing worlds of young people as they drift in and out of authority structures within a 24-hr period than can the standard cross-sectional surveys of young people that try to pinpoint their social bonds and propensity for delinquency at any given moment in time.

LimitationsWe have used an ethnographic case study to conceptually map out the signifi-cance of nighttime scheduling in the lives of young people. Some social scien-tists might be uncomfortable about the representativeness of our informants who were selected by social workers and our reliance on a single case study in a single locale with a unique social context.

As mentioned earlier, we had no choice but to rely on social workers to access this vulnerable population. Besides, there was no official population of YNDs from which we could have drawn a random sample. We also focused on a group whose schedules are grossly at odds with those of other young people. The deviant case is useful, however, because it draws our attention to the norm. We hope that our research will encourage scholars to pay attention to scheduling among youth who operate at more conventional times to consider the role of scheduling in their interactions too. A more meaningful study might


be accomplished by devising more precise ways of measuring and quantifying different timescapes and then systematically comparing them and their influ-ences on the lives of young people.

The focus of our study was on low-income youth. They are not, however, the only inhabitants of the night. As noted earlier, Hong Kong has a formal night-time economy of expensive bars and restaurants in the tourist districts. These often require dress codes and covercharges, thus ensuring that their clientele are drawn largely from the cosmopolitan middle classes. Their patrons have more choices than their low-income counterparts and are not relegated to the margins of the city where our informants are forced to creatively improvise their entertainment on the streets. Again, this study might be complemented by further research that systematically compares choices and constraints faced by young people in their use of time and space among different social classes of youth.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publica-tion of this article.

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Bios

Julian M. Groves is a Visiting Scholar in the Division of Social Science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He has conducted ethnographic studies of migrant domestic helpers and their employers in Hong Kong. He is currently undertaking research for the HKSAR Government on non-engaged youth.

Wai-Yip Ho is an assistant professor in the Department of Applied Social Studies, City University of Hong Kong. He specializes in Islamic studies, Christian-Muslim relations and sociology of Muslim societies. His recent research interests include youth culture in Hong Kong and Muslim communities, digital Islam and the China-Gulf relations.

Kaxton Siu is a PhD candidate at the Department of Political and Social Change in the Australian National University. He conducts comparative research on the garment industry in China and Vietnam. His recent research interests include social class analysis, youth culture in Hong Kong, and industrial relations in China, Vietnam and Hong Kong.

Youth Studies and Timescape: Insights from an Ethnographic Study of ‘Young Night Drifters’ in Hong Kong's Public Housing Estates

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