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Contents

Acknowledgements List of Contributors Introduction Hong Kong on the Move: Creating Global Cultures Kam Louie 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Ten Years Later: 19972007 as History John M. Carroll Power Plays: Alternative Performance Art and Urban Space in the Political Life of the City Carolyn Cartier The Haunted City: Hong Kong and Its Urban Others David Clarke Chinese English, English Chinese: Biliteracy and Translation Elaine Yee Lin Ho Louise Ho and the Local Turn: The Place of English Poetry in Hong Kong Douglas Kerr From Xu Xi to the Chief Executive: Hong Kong in the Dock Michael Ingham The New East Asia and Hong Kong Cinema C. J. W.-L. Wee

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vi Contents

One Country Two Cultures? Post-1997 Hong Kong Cinema and Co-productions Chu Yiu-wai

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9 Departing from The Departed: The Infernal Affairs Trilogy Gina Marchetti 10 On Spectral Mutations: The Ghostly City in The Secret, Rouge and Little Cheung Esther M. K. Cheung 11 Global Dreams and Nightmares: The Underside of Hong Kong as a Global City in Fruit Chans Hollywood, Hong Kong Pheng Cheah 12 Hong Kong Watcher: Tammy Cheung and the Hong Kong Documentary Chris Berry 13 Global Music/Local Cinema: Two Wong Kar-wai Pop Compilations Giorgio Biancorosso Notes References

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Acknowledgements

Preparations for this book began in 2007, when the Faculty of Arts at the University of Hong Kong convened a conference to look at Hong Kong culture a decade after the return. I must say that the exercise of acting as conference committee chair and then editor for this volume has been a humbling one for me. As a non-specialist of Hong Kong culture, I have not only learnt a great deal from the papers, but the innovative and penetrating manner with which the topics were explored was truly impressive. Although there were twenty excellent papers presented at the conference I was only able to select thirteen for inclusion in this book. I am sure that readers of this volume will discover, as I have, not only that the energy and variety of Hong Kong culture have engaged some very thoughtful and profound minds from across the globe, but also that the product of that engagement is a welcome addition to our understanding of cultures East and West. I am very grateful to the participants at the conference. Apart from those whose work is collected here, Li Siu Leung, Yu Siu Wah, Stephen Teo, Sheldon Lu, David Eng, Zhao Xifang and David Lung also enlightened the conference participants with their research papers. Comments and assistance from all the other conference participants made it a lively and productive event. We thank them all. In particular, we owe a huge debt to those whose support and advice helped turn a stimulating conference into an even more stimulating book. Among them, I am especially grateful to my research assistant Fiona Chung for her tremendous work on this project. I should also thank Tammy Ho, Paul Tam, K. W. Fung, Colin Day, Michael Duckworth, Dennis Cheung, Anne Platt, Crystal Ko, Louise Edwards, Chris Louie, Dawn Lau, Alan Walker and the two anonymous Hong Kong University Press readers for their advice and help. Financial support was received from the Hong Kong Research Grants Councils General Research Fund, the University of Hong Kongs China-West Studies Strategic Research Theme and the Faculty of Arts Louis Cha Fund.

Contributors

Chris Berry teaches at Goldsmiths College, University of London. His research is focused on Chinese cinemas and other Chinese screen-based media. His publications include Cinema and the National: China on Screen (with Mary Farquhar, 2006); Postsocialist Cinema in Post-Mao China: The Cultural Revolution after the Cultural Revolution (2004); and Cultural Studies and Cultural Industries in Northeast Asia: What a Difference a Region Makes (edited with Nicola Liscutin and Jonathan D. Mackintosh, 2009). Giorgio Biancorosso teaches musicology and film studies in the School of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong. Recent publications include an essay on sound in The Routledge Companion to Film and Philosophy (2008) and the chapter Ludwigs Wagner and Viscontis Ludwig, in Wagner and Cinema (2009). He is completing the book Musical Aesthetics through Cinema. Biancorosso is also active in Hong Kong as a magazine writer and concert programmer. John M. Carroll is professor of history in the School of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong. His recent publications include Edge of Empires: Chinese Elites and British Colonials in Hong Kong(2005) and A Concise History of Hong Kong (2007). He has also published articles in Modern Asian Studies, Twentieth-Century China, Chinese Historical Review, Journal of Oriental Studies andChina Information. Carolyn Cartier is professor of human geography and China studies in the China Research Centre at the University of Technology, Sydney. She is the author of Globalizing South China (2001) and the co-editor of The Chinese Diaspora: Place, Space, Mobility and Identity (2003). She works on cultural political economy and city-region formation in South China, currently focusing on urbanism and contemporary alternative art in Hong Kong and the Pearl River Delta.

x Contributors

Pheng Cheah is professor in the Department of Rhetoric, University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation (2003) and Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights (2006). He is also the co-editor of Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation (1998), Grounds of Comparison: Around the Work of Benedict Anderson (2003) and Derrida and the Time of the Political (2009). Esther M. K. Cheung teaches Hong Kong cultural studies, Chinese fiction and film, and urban cultures in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. She is the author of Fruit Chans Made in Hong Kong (2009), editor of In Critical Proximity: The Visual Memories of Stanley Kwan (in Chinese, 2007) and co-editor of Hong Kong Literature as/and Cultural Studies (in Chinese, 2002) and Between Home and World: A Reader in Hong Kong Cinema (in Chinese, 2004). Chu Yiu-wai is professor in the Department of Chinese and head of the Humanities Programme at Hong Kong Baptist University. His research focuses on postcolonialism, globalization, Hong Kong cinema and Cantopop lyrics. His recent publications include The China in Contemporary Western Critical Discourse (in Chinese, 2006) and Lyrics of Your Life: The Transformation of Hong Kong Cantopop (in Chinese, 2009). David Clarke is professor in the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Hong Kong. He has written extensively on both Chinese and Western art and culture, with a primary focus on the twentieth century, and is also active as a photographer. His most recently published book is Hong Kong x 24 x 365: A Year in the Life of a City (2007). Elaine Yee Lin Ho is professor in the School of English at the University of Hong Kong. Her recent publications include a co-edited book, China Abroad (2009), on interconnections of nation and diaspora in different historical and geographical Chinese spaces, and essays on Anglophone world writing and Hong Kong writing in PMLA, Critical Zone and Journal of Commonwealth Literature. Mike Ingham has taught English studies in the English Department at Lingnan University since 1999. His publications include City Voices: An Anthology of Hong Kong Writing in English (2003); City Stage: Hong Kong Playwriting in English (2005); Staging Fictions: The Prose Fiction Stage Adaptation as Social Allegory (2004); Hong Kong: A Cultural and Literary History in the City of the Imagination series (2007) and Johnnie Tos PTU (2009).

Contributors xi

Douglas Kerr is professor in the School of English at the University of Hong Kong. He is the author of Wilfred Owens Voices (1993), George Orwell (2003) and Eastern Figures: Orient and Empire in British Writing (2008), co-editor of A Century of Travels in China (2007) and a founding co-editor of Critical Zone: A Forum for Chinese and Western Knowledge. Kam Louie is dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Hong Kong. His publications include Inheriting Traditions (1980); The Literature of China in the Twentieth Century (co-authored, 1997); The Politics of Chinese Language and Culture (co-authored, 1998); Theorising Chinese Masculinity (2002); Culture, Identity, Commodity: Diasporic Chinese Literatures in English (co-edited, 2005); and The Cambridge Companion to Modern Chinese Culture (edited, 2008). Gina Marchetti teaches in the Department of Comparative Literature, School of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong.Her books include Romance and the Yellow Peril: Race, Sex and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction (1993), Andrew Lau and Alan Maks Infernal Affairs The Trilogy (2007) and From Tiananmen to Times Square: Transnational China and the Chinese Diaspora on Global Screens (2006), as well as other edited volumes. C. J. W.-L. Wee is associate professor of English at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and has held Visiting Fellowships at Cornell University and Cambridge University. He is the author of Culture, Empire, and the Question of Being Modern (2003) and The Asian Modern: Culture, Capitalist Development, Singapore (2007), and recently co-edited Contesting Performance: Global Sites of Research (in press).

Introduction Hong Kong on the Move: Creating Global Cultures

Kam Louie

It is now over ten years since Hong Kongs return to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. In the scale of Chinese history, mere decades seem relatively short. In many respects, the physical and cultural landscape of the former colony seems to have remained the same, yet we all know that there have been a great number of changes in that time. Some of the continuities and discontinuities such as the ubiquitous taxis and the replacement of the British flag with the Chinese at government buildings are superficial. Others are more subtle but more profound, and these constants and changes are not so easily identifiable because even when they are visible, they often need to be de-coded or contextualized before the lay person will recognize them. The problem becomes very complex when we try to consider culture in Hong Kong. What is Hong Kong culture? Anyone who has been to Hong Kong before and after 1997 would know that when it belonged to Britain, Hong Kong culture was not really British, and now that the former colony is part of China, its culture is not exactly Chinese either. It is a clich to say that Hong Kong today benefits from the economic growth in China, without the political restrictions the rest of China has to operate under. In order to explore the development of Hong Kongs cultural scene under the one country, two systems framework, I have gathered together a group of world experts on Hong Kong cultural matters to contribute essays related to their expertise on Hong Kong culture. To focus the minds of the contributors, and to encourage them to critically explore Hong Kong as a polyphonic, diverse source of cultural texts, I proposed the topic Post-1997 Hong Kong Culture: Word and Image to them as a working theme on which they could write. The chapters in this volume are the results.

2 Kam Louie

The majority of the authors wrote on literature and film. As well as these two genres, we sought to explore new types of texts that would illustrate the dynamism of Hong Kong culture. So our conception of word and image also includes visual culture, such as protest art, and urban architecture. In so doing we recognize that words and images are products of particular localities and spatial contexts as well as the intellect and emotions. And Hong Kongs space is certainly unique in the world today whether measured in demographic, political, economic or cultural terms. There is, quite simply, nowhere else like Hong Kong; so it is no surprise that the cultural products of this unique locality are imbued with a uniquely Hong Kong flavour. Hong Kong has been a cultural fault-line for centuries first, as a colonial space wrested from the Qing empire by the British and second, as a prize won back by the government of the Peoples Republic of China (PRC). In this shaky geopolitical terrain, Hong Kong found its firm cultural ground and became a translation space where Chinese-ness was interpreted for Westerners and Western-ness was translated for Chinese. As a cultural hub Cantonese culture also flourished along new cosmopolitan lines to build a modern, outwardlooking character. In combination, each of these interactions worked together to produce Hong Kongs unique culture. Global attention to the Hong Kong culture phenomenon is evident from the diverse nature of the contributors to this volume. Researchers from the United Kingdom, the United States, Singapore and Australia joined the Hong Kong based researchers. Moreover, the Hong Kongbased contributors are Hong Kongborn Chinese as well as long-term residents of Hong Kong from Scotland, England, the United States, Italy and Australia. This diverse group held a wide variety of opinions about Hong Kongs culture but it became clear that they all regarded it as a multifaceted, polyphonic culture that resists easy homogenization. Many of the essays also show that while the decade after 1997 was a convenient point of departure, it was an artificial marker. A solid study of current Hong Kong culture required a longer-range view to draw out its full significance and impact. The chapters in this book reflect this expanded perspective. As the following chapters will demonstrate, Hong Kong culture, while unique, has many facets that can be traced to Chinese roots and global influences. Like some other rapidly changing urban centres such as Shanghai, the Hong Kong skyline is pierced by skyscrapers and residential high rises even before traces of the old tenement houses that they displace have disappeared or the reclaimed land on which they stand has solidified. Indeed, as Esther M. K. Cheung demonstrates, the city is haunted not just by the spectacular and more subtle changes that have occurred in recent times (Chapter 10), it is also haunted by the urgency with which it feels it needs to re-define itself with reference

Hong Kong on the Move: Creating Global Cultures 3

to other cities such as Sydney, a point clearly made in David Clarkes essay (Chapter 3). Hong Kong residents may even feel a sense of alienation and rootlessness as they are confronted daily by the fast-paced and never-ceasing transformations in their surroundings. Successfully managing this sense of the unstable is precisely what makes Hong Kong such a modern city, and its citizens such good survivors in the modern world. Indeed, John M. Carroll shows (Chapter 1) quite clearly in his historical sketch of Hong Kong in the last dozen odd years that despite some uncertainties that led up to the handover in 1997 and the implications of the one-country, two-systems policy, the city that emerged is cosmopolitan, prosperous and stable. Moreover its civil service kept the citys operational bureaucracy intact while local artists have become more concerned with expressing local identity issues. Ironically, the return to the motherland has prompted local artists to seek and assert their own uniquely Hong Kong identity. As Carolyn Cartier shows (Chapter 2), contemporary art in Hong Kong has increasingly become political. Artists have embraced causes such as heritage conservation and humanistic concerns: promoting the value of human qualities in economic spaces amidst the rampant commercial development of the territory. This is most noticeable in the performance art that Cartier brings to our attention, not only because the artists deliberately show their creations in public spaces, but also because they champion the conservation of Hong Kong iconic sites such as the Star Ferry Pier and Queens Pier. These icons are already indelibly etched in peoples consciousness, and the possibility of losing them is equated with the loss of ones own individual memories and experiences. In the many pictorial exhibitions and personal reminiscences, Hong Kongs past is thus remembered through nostalgia and fondness for public places of personal and community experience rather than colonial history. Against the expectations of many, Hong Kongs decolonization and return to Chinese rule did not bring economic ruin or political instability, but it did not bring outpourings of patriotic sentiment or self-governance either. People who live in Hong Kong continue their lives in multidirectional and hybridized ways. Leung Ping-kwans poem An Old Colonial Building (about the University of Hong Kongs Main Building) captures well the notion that political movements and power mostly change the superstructures: their impact on ordinary lives are limited. While old monuments such as the Main Building are continually renovated, and their colonial origins and reconstructions no doubt remarkable, those that live and work within them are more concerned with the occasional glance here and there and the inconsequential words that are exchanged between its inhabitants.

4 Kam Louie

This poem and its English translation are analyzed in Elaine Yee Lin Hos article (Chapter 4). In this chapter, Ho also examines both the Chinese and English texts of Wong Mans Indulgence and Tammy Hos Going to My Parents Place on a Crowded Bus and My Home. Elaine Hos chapter is more than a literary appreciation of the poems. She uses these poems to illustrate her concerns about biliteracy and translation in the two major languages in use in Hong Kong: Chinese and English. This concern is prompted by the intense debates on the issue of the medium of instruction in schools that took place around 1997. In fact, the controversy around the medium of instruction in schools, with its emphasis on formal education, has oversimplified Hong Kongs complex linguistic situation into one of Chinese versus English. This oversimplification overshadows the fact that neither Mandarin Chinese (as in the spoken Putonghua or written baihua) nor English is the native language of Hong Kong locals. The majority of Hong Kong residents speak Cantonese, yet few among them write Cantonese unless they want to signal that the text is meant to be vernacular and not weighty in significance. It is most commonly used as chatter in media such as comics or on blogs and social networking sites. Cantonese holds an ambiguous position as both the authentic indigenous tongue and yet less useful than Putonghua, the national language. English is closely associated with a colonial past, yet it is also undeniably the key to an international future. It is also a good instrument for inscribing cross-cultural encounters between Hong Kong and other lands not necessarily England, the original home of English. As Douglas Kerr shows in his discussion of the poet Louise Ho (Chapter 5), for example, English links the divided states of mind between Australians and Chinese. Hong Kong provides the point of contact, a place where cultures meet and a cosmopolitan traveller can regard as home or another place where she can leave a mark and continue her journeys. The Hong Kongborn Chinese Indonesian writer Xu Xi is another example of such a cosmopolitan traveller. She too adopts an English-speaking country as home the United States and her essays on Hong Kong that Michael Ingham examines in Chapter 6 are also written in English. As well as highlighting Xu Xis critical insights on Hong Kong, Ingham explores another type of essay in his chapter: the film essay in the form of a drama-style documentary. The film under consideration, Herman Yaus From the Queen to the Chief Executive, puts the judicial system of Hong Kong in the aftermath of the handover on trial. This is done through an examination of both its subject matter the legal case of a controversial murder committed in 1985 involving juveniles and in the discussion of the way the film was condemned in the Legislative Council at the instigation of the Home Affairs Bureau. This film clearly shows the powerful impact of the film essay as a tool for social critique.

Hong Kong on the Move: Creating Global Cultures 5

Chris Berrys chapter provides further evidence of the importance of documentary film to contemporary Hong Kong culture (Chapter 12). In his discussion of the independent filmmaker Tammy Cheung, Berry argues cogently and convincingly that while Hong Kong cinema has seen a decline in boxoffice figures over the last fifteen years or so, the rise of documentaries such as Cheungs has provided an alternative to mainstream Hong Kong cinema. Previously associated with action and comedy, the recent upsurge in documentary film production in Hong Kong reveals the industrys capacity to generate a diverse critical and socially engaged product as well. Filmmakers such as Cheung are also increasingly commenting on mainland China and not just on Hong Kong. Border crossings between Hong Kong and China number in the millions every year and significantly the border itself is becoming increasingly more permeable. Hong Kongs unique creative arts context occupies a global space in which the Hong Kong perspective on China has often been regarded by audiences and the film industry as being modern, advanced and cosmopolitan. Hong Kong views on China now carry a special validity within global cinematic audiences newly hungry for insights into China. Hong Kongs capacity to create such transborder projects documentaries in particular, but also in cinema more generally is rapidly gaining global and local recognition. Tammy Cheung, Louise Ho and Xu Xi also draw our attention to another important feature of Hong Kong culture the importance of overseas Chinese to the vibrancy of the arts sector. Hong Kong has long been a zone of cultural transitioning. For decades after 1949, people leaving the PRC either passed through Hong Kong on their way to third countries or remained to contribute to its polyglot community. Fujianese lived alongside Shanghainese and Sichuanese within a Cantonese city. This mobility reached another peak in the last decades of the twentieth century when long-term Hong Kong residents began leaving the colony in advance of the departure of the British. In the lead-up to the 1997 handover, large numbers of Hongkongers emigrated to live either permanently or temporarily in third countries in order to secure a non-PRC passport. In recent years, large numbers of these emigrants have returned to Hong Kong, and increasing numbers have moved to Macau and the PRC. The mobility of Hong Kong people over many decades ensures its role as a transmission zone and a transnational city where the processes of leaving and returning energize artists and audiences alike. Hong Kong is a haven a place to find refuge from the vicissitudes of radical politics in the PRC for some, and for others relief from the isolation and alienation of the West. As a result of this constant sense of coming-and-going filmmakers and writers like Tammy Cheung and Louise Ho are able to simultaneously stand apart from Hong Kong and be embedded

6 Kam Louie

within it. This dual perspective is at once unsettling and reassuring in its instantly recognizable Hong Kongstyle self-reflexivity. In fact, many of the film chapters in this volume directly discuss the China problem or allude to it in some way. In contrast to the optimistic appraisal of the transborder venture with the Mainland proposed by Chris Berry, Chu Yiu-wai cites James Wong, known as the godfather of Cantopop, who saw the 1997 handover as the demise of Cantopop. By tracing MainlandHong Kong co-productions in the film industry since the 1960s, Chu Yiu-wai shows that in fact Hong Kong films had a chance to flower during the Cultural Revolution period when cooperation was cut off and Hong Kong films were able to develop a distinctive identity. Chu is concerned that the one country, two systems formula may not guarantee a one country, two cultures result (Chapter 8). This concern is justified when we consider regulations governing co-productions stipulate that more than half the main actors must be Mainlanders. This and other factors such as local talents including John Woo shifting to Hollywood have resulted in the Hong Kong film industry losing its Hong Kong brand identity. More subtle but fundamental changes also followed these shifts. Whereas previously Hong Kong films were spoken mainly in Cantonese, with the Putonghua dubbing process of secondary interest, many are now filmed in Putonghua in the original. Thus, a crucial foundational feature of Hong Kong culture its spoken language is being slowly made less pronounced and more marginalized. Nevertheless, even though Cantonese is spoken less frequently on the big screen and heard less often, it clearly cannot be silenced. Even as Cantopop, it still plays a significant role in the sounds and images of popular culture. In Giorgio Biancorossos discussion of Wong Kar-wais use of pre-existing songs to fashion his movie Fallen Angels (1995), for example, James Wongs most widely known Cantopop song Forget Him is very successfully used to set an unmistakably Hong Kong mood in the film (Chapter 13). However, Biancorossos thesis is more than just that Wong Kar-wais films are very Cantonese, but quite the reverse. By analyzing one of Wongs later movies, My Blueberry Nights (2007), Biancorosso shows that song compilations in movies do not necessarily reflect moods of locality merely by where they originate. As well as Forget Him, for example, Fallen Angels features British group Massive Attacks Karmacoma and American singer Laurie Andersons Speak My Language. But the soundtrack structures the environment into an integrated whole. By contrast, sound and image fail to coalesce as a coherent whole in My Blueberry Nights. The globalized circulation of sounds and images can therefore sometimes produce the desired effects, but not all the time sometimes dissonance can result.

Hong Kong on the Move: Creating Global Cultures 7

And at times, the desire for the global can lead to monstrosity, a point insightfully demonstrated in Pheng Cheahs examination of Fruit Chans Hollywood, Hong Kong (Chapter 11). The central character in this movie is a beautiful young Shanghainese woman working as a prostitute in Hong Kong where she unleashes tragedy and havoc on the male residents of the village near where she lives in her drive to get to America. Hong Kong aims to be a global city, but it is also the stepping-stone connecting the Chinese mainland and the rest of the (Western) world. Although movies such as Hollywood, Hong Kong may suggest a one-way human and cultural traffic, the cultural flow is of course much more complex. By looking at the connections between Andrew Lau and Alan Maks Infernal Affairs and Martin Scorseses The Departed, Gina Marchetti points to an obvious but nevertheless intriguing and interesting truth: that cultural passages and influences between China, Hong Kong and America have for a long time been constantly flowing both ways, and by imitating the other, often one unknowingly imitates oneself (Chapter 9). Taken together, these essays consistently alert us to one key phenomenon: that present-day Hong Kong culture is fascinating because it is a confluence of various cultures from around the world. Most point to the mutual influences between the indigenous (Chinese) and the West, but Hong Kong is more than that. It also occupies a focal point for other parts of the globe and in particular from around the Asian region. C. J. W.-L. Wees essay on Hong Kong cinema shows how the increasing circulation of culture in the East Asian region has helped create an intra-Asian mass culture and a new Asian regional identity (Chapter 7). Wees essay is an indication that todays Hong Kong culture is extremely diverse and complex. Its vibrancy stems from local practices enriched by Chinese, Asian and international influences. By focusing on words and images, we have in this book only been able to deal with some aspects of it that are readily accessible (such as books and films). The cosmopolitan nature of Hong Kong culture is also evident in all other aspects of the cultural scene. We have concentrated on Hong Kong as a place that receives and transforms cultural forms that come into the territory. However, cultural flows in the opposite direction can also be detected. Some of the contributors to this book such as Gina Marchetti have indicated that Hong Kong film in particular can be seen to have impacted on the industry in both China and America. Less visible but equally important influences emanating from Hong Kong to the rest of the world are also significant. For example, Cantonese cooking and eating habits such as dim sum or yum cha are spreading all over the world mainly due to Hong Kong restaurants. Perhaps in some future work, we can look at the influences Hong Kong exerts on China and the rest of the world.

1
Ten Years Later: 19972007 as History
John M. Carroll

How has Hong Kong changed since July 1997? Is it better or worse off as a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of the Peoples Republic of China than it was as the only significant remaining colony of a long-gone British empire? These are two of the most frequently asked questions since Hong Kongs reversion to Chinese sovereignty, but a question that is asked much less often is how the past decade fits into the overall history of Hong Kong. This chapter provides an overview of the decade since the 1997 retrocession by framing it within the wider scope of Hong Kongs history and within comparative colonial history. After briefly reviewing some of the changes and continuities in the period between 1997 and 2007, the chapter considers three main issues: the problems of periodization and definitions inherent in Hong Kongs unique decolonization process, the difficulties involved in commemorating Hong Kongs first postcolonial decade, and some of the regions colonial legacies and current political realities.

Changes and Continuities

The flags and other official symbols of Hong Kong have of course changed since 1997. The term Royal has been dropped almost everywhere except, for example, at the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club and the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society. In perhaps one of the most noticeable recent changes, Tsang Tak-sing, the leftist journalist imprisoned by the colonial government in 1967 simply for distributing so-called inflammatory leaflets in his high school, was recently appointed secretary for home affairs. The overwhelming majority of tourists are no longer Westerners but mainland Chinese, who often learn the hard way that their compatriots are only too happy to sell them replica

10 John M. Carroll

watches and defective goods (manufactured, of course, on the Mainland). Whereas Westerners used to travel to Hong Kong to catch a glimpse of Red China across the border, they also came to see traditional China, preserved in the New Territories and seemingly unchanged by the Communist revolution. Now, newspapers and magazines overseas frequently carry articles about Hong Kongs heritage and the dynamic, hybrid flair reflected in its cinema, cuisine and architecture. Still, observers are often struck by how little the region seems to have changed since 1997. Even though the British presence in Hong Kong has been dramatically reduced, and Mandarin (or Putonghua) is spoken much more widely than before, English remains the language of success in business and government. British colonial street names survive. Chief Executive Donald Tsangs talk about his humble roots notwithstanding, the older and relatively conservative make-up of his cabinet is remarkably similar to that of its colonial predecessor. Far from being threatened by the transfer to Chinese sovereignty, Hong Kongs laissez-faire system has been enshrined in the Basic Law and blessed by the PRC government. Like its colonial predecessor, the SAR government has tried to promote economic growth and development as a way of helping its subjects forget about Hong Kongs political retardation, although it now has a new cause to push: collective memory, which entered Hong Kongs political discourse almost overnight in December 2006 after the destruction of the Star Ferry pier in the Central district. Horseracing has retained its fanatical following, recalling Deng Xiaopings famous promise that the horses will still race (ma zhao pao) after 1997. Hong Kong maintains its own representation in many international organizations and retains control of its immigration jurisdiction and procedures. The reversion to Chinese sovereignty has in some ways had only a moderate effect on informal relations between Hong Kong and the rest of China. On the one hand, Hong Kong and Guangdong have become more closely integrated than at any time since the 1949 revolution in China, to the extent that anthropologist Gregory Guldin has predicted the emergence of a giant Pearl River megalopolis which includes Guangzhou, Macau, Hong Kong and some smaller Mainland cities. More people than ever before cross the border between Hong Kong and Guangdong, especially to Shenzhen, while intermarriage mainly between Hong Kong men and Mainland women has helped to reshape the texture of Hong Kong society. Nevertheless, mainland Chinese still need permission to visit Hong Kong, while tourists from many other countries enter visa-free. And while survey results often seem to disagree on whether people are identifying more or less as Hongkongers, Chinese or Chinese Hongkongers, local attitudes toward Mainlanders seem little changed from the early 1990s,

Ten Years Later: 19972007 as History 11

when surveys found that many Hong Kong people considered Mainlanders poor, lazy, unfriendly, superstitious, coarse, uncultured and unintelligent. Given that these surveys found that these negative impressions increased the more often the two groups came into contact, it is not surprising that surveys in 2007 revealed that, despite a rise in Chinese identity, many Hong Kong youth admitted that they were not willing to build good relations with Mainlanders, and that Hong Kong people were superior to Mainlanders (South China Morning Post [hereafter SCMP], 2007b). Perplexed and disappointed that they sometimes fail to grasp the importance and significance of the one country in one country, two systems, the Beijing government remains as suspicious as ever of Hong Kong people. In June 2007 the head of the National Peoples Congress (NPC), Wu Bangguo, declared in Beijings Great Hall of the People that Hong Kong was not entitled to any sort of residual power and that Hong Kongs high degree of autonomy had been bestowed by the central government rather than constituting an inherent feature of Hong Kongs new constitutional status. Wus remarks were interpreted by many as a warning about the pace of democratization in the SAR, and as a reminder that the people of Hong Kong should not try to interfere in the absolute power of Beijing to determine when the region would be ready for universal suffrage; nor should Hong Kong try to emulate the Western model of separation of powers (SCMP, 2007a). Shortly afterward, Lian Xisheng, a prominent Mainland legal scholar and a member of the Basic Law Drafting Committee, cautioned that Hong Kong people were not yet ready for universal suffrage, noting that their low degree of political awareness and lack of participation in elections showed that they could not be relied upon to elect a suitable leader (SCMP, 2007c). In terms of whether Hong Kong is better or worse off than on the eve of 1997, the race seems too close to call. Even with the Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement signed in 2003 between Hong Kong and Guangdong, the growth in gross domestic product (GDP) for the period 19972007 (41 per cent) was slightly lower than for 19871997 (43 per cent). Certainly, there are doubts and uncertainties, as well as considerable economic, social and political concerns: Hong Kongs vulnerability in the face of the Mainlands seemingly unstoppable economic growth, threats to the regions political and legal autonomy, the possible erosion of civil rights, and a political system that some observers have rather charitably termed dysfunctional, which is weakened by both unstable relations between Beijing and the pro-democratic camp and distrust between the pro-Beijing parties and their pro-democratic counterparts. On the other hand, Hong Kong remains cosmopolitan, prosperous and stable; the local economy is strong, and so is confidence in the Mainlands economy. Pollution, crowding

12 John M. Carroll

and income disparities have worsened, but Hong Kong people have greater access to an ever-increasing choice of goods, services, and leisure and cultural activities.

Hong Kongs Unique Decolonization

Part of the difficulty in making any meaningful comparisons between Hong Kongs brief postcolonial history and that of any other former colony lies in the uniqueness of its decolonization and transition to Chinese rule in 1997. Not only was Hong Kong the last significant British colony to decolonize; it was the most economically successful colony and had become more economically advanced than most independent countries. Apart from being a major financial centre, by the end of British rule tiny Hong Kong held the worlds seventhlargest foreign reserves and was the third-largest exporter of clothing. It had the second-highest per capita GDP in Asia (after Japan) and had surpassed that of Australia, Britain and Canada. As Leo Goodstadt notes, Hong Kongs record of sustained and self-generated growth seemed to redeem the reputation of both colonialism and capitalism. The last remnant of the British empire in Asia had made itself the equal of First World cities against considerable political and economic odds (Goodstadt, 2005, p. 4). Far from a colonial embarrassment, Hong Kongs transition to Chinese sovereignty brought Britain a new sense of prestige and respect.1 In the years counting down to 1997, the British, who had not introduced political representation until late in their rule over Hong Kong, were magically transformed particularly in the Western media into stalwarts of democratic reform, especially compared to the PRC regime. A BBC television news report praised Hong Kong as Britains legacy, a free market low-tax paradise, the perfect marriage of Chinese energy and benign British administration (Knight, 1999, p. 122). Hong Kongs decolonization was also prearranged in a way that distinguished it, for example, from the independence of India in 1947, the domino-like decolonization of the British and French empires in Africa, or the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union. On one hand, this meant that the transfer to Chinese sovereignty went relatively smoothly and that Hong Kongs populace had more than a decade to prepare. Where else in the world was decolonization so peaceful? Where else were so many civil servants able to keep their jobs after the change of sovereignty? Where else did most people see so little difference in their daily lives? On the other hand, the prearranged nature of decolonization meant a period of prolonged anxiety, as reflected in the emigration figures: from 1984 to the eve of the transition, around 10 per cent of Hong Kongs population departed, mainly

Ten Years Later: 19972007 as History 13

for Australia, Canada and the United States, but also to Britain, New Zealand and Singapore. Hong Kong people had been emigrating before and throughout the Sino-British negotiations in the early 1980s, but the scale and intensity of emigration increased dramatically after the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984, when the colony saw a gathering wave of emigration (Wong, 1999, p. 136). Whereas some twenty thousand people left every year from 1980 to 1986, according to government figures the number rose to almost thirty thousand in 1987 and forty thousand in 1989.2 Although many emigrants returned after obtaining foreign citizenship, this mass emigration had a serious impact on the regions social fabric. Contrary to the expectations of Deng Xiaoping, architect of the one country, two systems model, the official declaration in 1984 that Hong Kong would cease to be a British colony on 1 July 1997 did not arouse the kind of patriotic joy and excitement that accompanied decolonization elsewhere. While many people were relieved that a deal had finally been struck, opinion polls showed that most of the population preferred Hong Kong to remain a British colony. With the impending transition to Chinese sovereignty, many local artists became more concerned with expressing their local identity and their concern with Hong Kongs uncertain future (Clarke, 2001 and 2008). And even though by the late 1980s most people in Hong Kong had reluctantly accepted the inevitability of Hong Kongs reversion to Chinese sovereignty, the Tiananmen Massacre in June 1989 sent the whole colony into mourning (Rafferty, 1989, p. 7) and became a defining moment in Hong Kongs history. Tiananmen changed local attitudes toward the 1997 transition and the Chinese government, leading many people in Hong Kong to lose all faith in the Chinese government and in Hong Kongs future, and to reevaluate their identities and their options for the future (White and Li , 1993, p. 180). This was reflected in the 25 per cent fall in the stock market and the drop in property values, while applications for immigration visas soared. Surveys later that year also showed that confidence in the PRC not to make changes after 1997 had plummeted. A group of Hong Kong tycoons even tried to offer Beijing HK$10 billion in return for self-rule for ten years after 1997. Nor did decolonization lead to independence, as it did in most other European colonies in the decades after World War II. Indeed, to some observers Hong Kong was not decolonized; rather, it was re-colonized, with control simply shifting from London to Beijing (for example, Vines, 1998; MacNeil, 1997). Rather than being granted independence, Hong Kong was turned over to a considerably more authoritarian regime than the colonial government that had ruled for so long, a point that became particularly obvious after the brutal crackdown in Tiananmen Square. And, despite its supposed dedication

14 John M. Carroll

to ending imperialism around the globe, the Communist government of China had never tried to liberate Hong Kong. The main cause of the termination of colonial rule in Hong Kong was also very different from that in most colonies. Neither internal demand far from it, given that most Hong Kong residents preferred British colonial rule to Chinese rule nor international pressure produced the impetus for decolonization: it came almost reluctantly from the Chinese government, which in 1972 had declared Hong Kongs future a purely internal Chinese matter to be resolved when the government decided the time was right.

Periodizing and Defining Post-1997 History

Other dates are much more important than 1997 or 2007 for defining the regions postcolonial history, partly because the new SAR had a rather rocky start, even though the most pressing challenges to the new government had little to do with the reversion to Chinese sovereignty. From early 1997 to early 1998 the chicken flu (the H5N1 bird flu virus) killed six people and prompted the Hong Kong government to order the slaughter of almost 1.5 million chickens. The Asian Financial Crisis, brought on by currency devaluation in Thailand only one day after the end of British rule in Hong Kong, precipitated a decline in the Hong Kong stock market and property values, unemployment, and a recession from which the SAR did not fully recover until late 2000. On the other hand, the posthandover doom-and-gloom scenarios that had been predicted, especially in the Western media, did not materialize. Surveys in 1998, one year after the handover, showed that a growing public confidence in the SARs political future, even with the economic recession, was based on satisfaction with Beijings lack of interference in SAR affairs. Even observers in the United States and Taiwan, the two countries that had predicted the bleakest future for Hong Kong, conceded that Beijing had stayed out of Hong Kong affairs. The first of the eventful dates in SAR history, in January 2002, ended the right-of-abode controversy and highlighted the question of Hong Kongs legal autonomy. The Basic Law stipulates that Hong Kong residents of Chinese descent qualify for right of abode in Hong Kong, provided that at the time of birth at least one parent was a Chinese citizen holding Hong Kong right-ofabode status. In 1997, however, the new Legislative Council passed ordinances restricting the procedures for proving eligibility for right of abode, which led to court challenges. When the Court of Final Appeal supported the legal challenges in January 1999, the Hong Kong government warned that the courts ruling would extend right-of-abode eligibility to some 1.6 million potential immigrants from the Mainland. It claimed that this would strain Hong Kongs

Ten Years Later: 19972007 as History 15

resources, and estimated that housing and educating these new immigrants would cost more than HK$710 billion. When the government took its case to the Standing Committee of the NPC, which has the right to interpret the Basic Law, the committee sided with the Hong Kong government. This led to a massive legal challenge on behalf of more than five thousand applicants for right-ofabode status, who argued that the NPC decision deprived them of the benefits of the Court of Final Appeal ruling. Critics accused the Hong Kong government of manipulating figures and exaggerating strains on housing, employment and public health to create a climate of fear and encourage public sentiment against immigrants. Accepting the ultimate authority of the Standing Committee to interpret the Basic Law, in January 2002 the Court of Final Appeal reversed its earlier decision and ruled against the claimants. For critics, the 2002 ruling was concrete proof of the fragility of Hong Kongs autonomy under the one country, two systems model. Such fears appeared to be confirmed when on 6 April 2005 the Standing Committee of the NPC ruled that any local attempts to modify election laws would require approval from Beijing, that the Hong Kong chief executive could not introduce any electoral reforms bills without approval from the Standing Committee, and that the Legislative Council could not introduce electoral reform legislation. After local opposition parties condemned the ruling as a violation of the one country, two systems model, on 26 April the Standing Committee declared that direct elections for chief executive or the Legislative Council violated the Basic Law, thus ruling out the possibility of popular elections for chief executive in 2007 and expanded elections for the legislature in 2008. Surveys in spring 2004 found that public dissatisfaction with the Hong Kong governments handling of relations with the central authorities in Beijing was at its highest level since the 1997 retrocession. The most significant event in Hong Kongs first postcolonial decade came in spring 2003, when the region was struck by Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). From 19 March, when the government belatedly announced the first five deaths from this extremely contagious and potentially deadly form of pneumonia, to 23 June, when Hong Kong was removed from the World Health Organizations (WHO) list of SARS-affected areas, some 1,800 people had been diagnosed with SARS, and almost three hundred of these had died. One of the hardest-hit places was Amoy Gardens, a residential complex in Kowloon where by the end of March more than half of the two hundred residents of Block E were suffering from SARS. Fears peaked on April Fools Day when a teenage boy hacked into the website of the respected Ming Pao, posting a fake news story that Hong Kong would soon be declared an infected port and quarantined from the outside world. People lined up by the thousands in supermarkets

16 John M. Carroll

to stock up on food and supplies. On the same day, though apparently not related to the SARS crisis, film and pop idol Leslie Cheung committed suicide by jumping off the twenty-fourth floor of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in the Central district. Already depressed, Hong Kong plunged into deep mourning (Seno and Reyes, 2004, p. 11). The SARS outbreak affected Hong Kong more directly than any crisis since the Tiananmen Massacre, revealing the political, social and medical consequences of the reintegration with China. Erupting when confidence in the SAR government was already extremely low, SARS created a sense of vulnerability. Until the Amoy Gardens outbreak, explain Dominic Lee and Yun Kwok Wing, most local citizens believed that they could avoid SARS by not leaving their homes. But now the home itself had become a dangerous site. In response, most families started the ritual of cleaning the furniture and floor daily with diluted bleach solution. The acrid stink of chlorine bleach became a regular reminder of the perils of daily life (Lee and Wing, 2006, pp. 133, 137). And even though the SARS crisis brought out the best in Hong Kongs population, witnessed by the tremendous outpouring of donations and support, and created a sense of community and civic pride, it also brought out the worst. Local newspapers were filled with countless reports of SARS-related stigma, including medical staff reluctant to treat SARS patients, funeral homes refusing to handle the bodies of SARS victims, patients and families forced to quit their jobs, and health professionals shunned by colleagues. The Hospital Authority prevented family members from visiting SARS patients, creating even more stress (Kleinman and Lee, 2006, p. 193). Although Hong Kongs economy did not shrink seriously over the long term, property values fell dramatically, tourism dropped to its lowest level since the Tiananmen Massacre, hotel occupancy plummeted, and airport traffic fell to about twenty thousand per day one-fifth of the usual volume. Hong Kongs economic woes prompted the government to announce a relief package worth HK$11.8 billion (approximately US$1.5 billion), including tax rebates and reductions in utility charges, and on 1 May the newly formed Tourism Coalition of Hong Kong launched the We Love Hong Kong campaign, aimed at reviving the regions economy by boosting consumer spending and rebuilding confidence in the SAR. The SARS crisis also severely weakened Hong Kong peoples confidence in the SAR and PRC governments. Because Mainland authorities had refused to acknowledge the extent and severity of SARS, Hong Kong became the de facto epicentre of the outbreak (Loh, 2004, p. 236). Only because of intense international pressure after retired surgeon Jiang Yanyong informed the foreign media on 8 April that there were many more cases in Beijings military hospitals than the Chinese government had claimed did the Chinese

Ten Years Later: 19972007 as History 17

government release accurate SARS figures. On 20 April the PRC Ministry of Health announced 339 confirmed cases and 402 suspected cases of SARS in Beijing alone nine times more than earlier figures indicated. Even before it became clear that the Chinese government was concealing the true number of SARS patients, the Hong Kong government faced a barrage of criticism for not recognizing the disease earlier and for downplaying reports that the infection was coming from the Mainland. When E. K. Yeoh, secretary for health, welfare, and food, accused the WHO on 17 March of spreading panic and denied that SARS had spread in Hong Kong, he was contradicted by Sydney Chung, dean of the medical school at the Chinese University, who claimed that the spread of SARS could not be controlled. Only after Chung informed the press that SARS cases also existed outside the medical community did the government announce the first five SARS fatalities. As Lee and Wing argue, the way in which Chung along with K. Y. Yuen, the University of Hong Kong microbiologist who first identified the SARS coronavirus, and Joseph Sung, head of the teams that cared for SARS patients at the Prince of Wales Hospital were elevated to the status of public heroes, if only temporarily, says a lot about what Hong Kong residents were desperately seeking as a moral response to feelings of uncertainty and contempt. They wanted a sense of courage in despair. The death on 13 May of Joanna Tse Yuen-man, a respiratory care resident at Tuen Mun Hospital who had volunteered to treat SARS patients in the hospitals intensive-care unit but became the first physician to die from SARS, caused both mourning and profound outrage at the government for mishandling the crisis. The anger and frustration cut across social divisions, becoming something of a unifying force among the general population (Lee and Wing, 2006, pp. 13839). The SARS crisis profoundly affected Hong Kongs civic and political culture. As Michael DeGolyer argues, the outbreak created a medical emergency and public health disaster that completely permeated Hong Kongs social consciousness at all levels of income and education. On the Mainland and in Hong Kong, it played a key role in driving home the connection between freedom of the press and the need for transparency and accountability in government. What had once been abstract and rather remote issues of interest to a small number of people suddenly became important matters of life and death for everyone (DeGolyer, 2004, p. 136). The massive demonstration on 1 July 2003, the largest such event since the Tiananmen Massacre in June 1989, and attended by some five hundred thousand people, was both a consequence of the SARS outbreak and a vivid manifestation of how the crisis affected Hong Kongs political culture. The tremendous turnout of citizens from all walks of life at the protests, argue Alexandra Seno and Alejandro Reyes, was an indication that Hong Kong people were seeking to play a more active role in

18 John M. Carroll

determining how Hong Kong would develop and who its leaders would be (Seno and Reyes, 2004, p. 15). Lee and Wings informants replied unanimously that they would not have participated in the march had there not been a SARS outbreak (Lee and Wing, 2006, p. 146). As DeGolyer has observed, this was the largest anti-government demonstration since the 1967 riots and the first time in Hong Kongs history that a major demonstration was motivated primarily by events inside Hong Kong and focused on the need for changes locally. The demonstration resulted not only in the resignations of the financial and security secretaries, but also in the postponement of the controversial Article 23 Security Bill. As DeGolyer writes, Hong Kong people realized that passage of the proposed Article 23 legislation posed a direct threat to their personal health and well-being, not just a few of their freedoms or political rights. He predicts that over the long term SARS may even end up being as important as 1967 and 1989 (DeGolyer, 2004, pp. 13536).

Celebrations, Protests and the Politics of Commemoration

Many of the official activities commemorating the tenth anniversary of the reversion to Chinese sovereignty were remarkably similar to those held in 1997. Yet, underneath the official celebrations of the tenth anniversary of the SAR, which attributed the regions success to its position as the gateway to China, lay serious concerns about Hong Kongs ability to remain competitive, especially against Shanghai and Singapore, and fears that Hong Kong would simply become another Chinese city. Similarly, Hong Kongs civic identity crisis has moved the SAR government to promote Hong Kong as Asias World City, on a par with London and New York. Official commemorations are often as much signs of anxiety and fear as they are of confidence and security. They can also ignore and even deliberately obscure more important events that challenge official narratives. The anniversary of the reversion to Chinese sovereignty has become as much an occasion for protest as for celebration; the massive demonstration in 2003 was only the largest such protest. On 30 June 1999, for example, some two hundred people held a candlelight vigil to commemorate the dark days of the SAR. Legislative Council member and union leader Lee Cheuk-yan argued that Hong Kong needed a new chief executive. Members of the pro-democracy group The Frontier criticized the hegemony of the new administration. On 1 July, political groups and the Hong Kong Federation of Students staged a march to government headquarters in the Central district. Wearing black armbands that symbolized the demise of the rule of law in Hong Kong and bearing pictures of Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa, Secretary for Justice Elsie Leung

Ten Years Later: 19972007 as History 19

and Secretary for Security Regina Ip, the protesters accused the government of betraying Hong Kong people and ruining the rule of law. Lau Ka-yee of the political group Democracy 2000 called the one country, two systems concept a lie. The protesters ended their march by reading a list of the governments numerous sins. Democratic Party Chairman Martin Lee explained in a press conference that the honeymoon is over and the two systems are being blurred, and accused Elsie Leung of leading the water of Mainland law into the common-law well water and assaulting the common-law system and the rule of law. In an interview the same day, Lee argued that whereas when the British were here it was a society under the rule of law, now it is the rule of man. Emily Lau of The Frontier noted that many Hong Kong people believed that former colonial governor Chris Patten had done a better job than Tung Chee-hwa. As Lee Cheuk-yan declared in 2006, the July 1 march has become a tradition and people will march year after year until we have universal suffrage (SCMP, 2006). In several different demonstrations on 1 July 2001, thousands of pro-democracy activists protested against the erosion of democracy since 1997. One group of protesters carried a mock tomb symbolizing the death of democracy, human rights, and the rule of law in Hong Kong, while another group demanded direct elections for the chief executive, chanting one person, one vote. On 1 July 2004, hundreds of thousands of people protested the PRC governments decision to prohibit general elections. The demands of the 1 July 2006 march from Victoria Park to government offices included a minimum wage, action against pollution, early childhood education, and, most importantly, universal suffrage. March organizers claimed that fifty-eight thousand people, joined by former chief secretary Anson Chan, took part in this march triple the number of participants in 2005. On 1 July 2007 a march from Victoria Park to government headquarters in Central included Anson Chan, Cardinal Joseph Zen (head of Hong Kongs Roman Catholic Church), Martin Lee and Jimmy Lai (chairman of Next Media and founder of Apple Daily). The organizer of the march, Civil Human Rights Front, estimated that the event had drawn some sixty-eight thousand participants, the highest turnout for three years. Waving flags and banners with slogans such as one person, one vote, Hong Kongs future is in our hands, fight for democracy, trust the Hong Kong people and return power to the people, the marchers demands included universal suffrage, a minimum wage, academic freedom and the release of journalist Ching Cheong, imprisoned on the Mainland for allegedly spying for Taiwan. Although Donald Tsang, sworn in earlier for a second term, had promised more democracy, many participants vowed to march every year until democracy came to Hong Kong. Beijings chief official in Hong Kong, liaison office director

20 John M. Carroll

Gao Siren, argued that the march was an indication that Hong Kongs freedoms had been preserved. It should also be noted that government supporters and Beijing loyalists have organized events in honour of the anniversary of retrocession. In 2006, for example, these events included a parade of fifty thousand marchers, while a variety show organized by the pro-Beijing Federation of Trade Unions and attended by several high-ranking SAR officials included traditional lion dances and a martial arts performance by the Peoples Liberation Army. We should also not allow the annual 1 July protests to obscure the fact that Hong Kongs political retardation is a product of its colonial past, as well as its postcolonial present. However, there is no justification for assuming, as the authorities in Beijing so often do, that the participants in these protests are all members of the pro-democratic elite. People from all walks of life have regularly expressed their dissatisfaction with the SAR government. On 1 July 1999, a delegation of senior citizens petitioned Tung Chee-hwa to honour the vows he had made during his campaign in 1996 to provide better services for the elderly. Among the marchers on 1 July 2007 was Ho Kwai-ying, a sixty-four-year-old woman with a walking stick who had participated in the annual pro-democracy marches since 2003. Furthermore, the sentiments expressed by the marchers have often mirrored those of the community in general. An opinion poll conducted in 1999 found that even though public perceptions of the PRC government had improved, one-third of respondents felt either quite negative or very negative about the Tung government. Fewer than 20 per cent were quite positive or very positive, while fewer than 8 per cent felt positive about the anniversary. Surveys in the first few years of the SAR showed that many people felt that Tung Chee-hwa was more interested in ingratiating himself with and helping big businesses than in providing the medical services, care and housing for the elderly, and better housing for the general population that he had promised.

Political Disappointments
Shortly after midnight on 1 July 1997, when the British flag was lowered and the Chinese flag raised, accompanied by the new flag of the Hong Kong SAR, President Jiang Zemin, the first PRC leader to visit Hong Kong, declared that the date would go down in the annals of history as a day that merits eternal memory. Jiang explained that the return of Hong Kong to the motherland after going through a century of vicissitudes indicates that from now on, the Hong Kong compatriots have become true masters of this Chinese land and that Hong Kong has now entered a new era of development. He promised that the PRC government would unswervingly abide by the one country, two

Ten Years Later: 19972007 as History 21

systems concept. In his inaugural speech, Tung Chee-hwa, the first Chinese to administer Hong Kong in more than 150 years, declared that for the first time in history, we, the people of Hong Kong, will be master of our own destiny. Stressing how Hong Kong and China are whole again, Tung reassured his new constituency and the world that we value this empowerment and we will exercise our powers prudently and responsibly. Earlier, as midnight and the end of British rule drew near, Britains Prince Charles promised the people of Hong Kong that we shall not forget you, and we shall watch with the closest interest as you embark on this new era of your remarkable history (all three speeches are reprinted in Knight and Nakano, 1999, pp. 195200). This rhetoric from Beijing, Hong Kong and Britain notwithstanding, the end of British rule did not give Hong Kong a fresh start. On the contrary, Beijing is committed to keeping Hong Kongs political structure in the form it had assumed by the last years of the colonial era. This is especially true of the functional constituency model for the new Legislative Council, because legislators from these constituencies consistently vote against any measures to promote democratic reforms, civil liberties, or political accountability. Like the local magnates who in 2005 urged Beijing to remove Tung Chee-hwa, PRC leaders oppose greater democratic reform in Hong Kong, fearing that democratization there might fuel demands for the same on the Mainland, while both PRC leaders and the local business moguls worry that democratization would result in higher taxes and demands for more government spending. Furthermore, some critics argue that the Basic Law prevents the SAR from modifying or expanding its welfare and economic policies to fit the needs of changing times, and that it has expanded the role of the business elite, especially those from the property sector, in Hong Kongs power structure. According to Goodstadt, the Basic Law has made it difficult for the SAR government to break from the old laissez-faire doctrine, guaranteeing that Hong Kongs economy should be managed along the most conservative lines (Goodstadt, 2005, p. 134). All former colonies have suffered from adjustment problems, and Hong Kongs unique postcolonial status has made it a particularly complex place to manage. By the late 1960s Hong Kongs colonial administrators enjoyed considerable autonomy from the British government. Before then, they had generally paid little attention to public opinion. Hong Kongs new rulers have a much greater challenge: they must satisfy not only the central government but also the powerful business interests and, to a lesser degree, the local population. The premature resignation of Tung Chee-hwa in March 2005 exemplified this problem. Although Tung insisted that he was stepping down for health reasons, his resignation was widely seen as proof that he had failed to please the central government: he had lost his main backer in Beijing, former president Jiang

22 John M. Carroll

Zemin, and new president Hu Jintao, faced with complaints from Hong Kongs business tycoons about Tungs performance, felt no obligation to retain him. According to Hugo Restall, Tung was also losing even the small semblance of control he once enjoyed over his cabinet. Tung resigned just in time for the selection committee, whose term was to expire in mid-July 2005, to pick his successor. Had he waited any longer to resign, argues Restall, Beijing would have had to form a new selection committee, drawing attention to the undemocratic nature of the selection process (Restall, 2005, p. 40). As C. K. Lau has argued, one of the most serious weaknesses of Hong Kongs post-1997 political system the failure to produce effective political leadership is both a legacy of the colonial period and a product of Hong Kongs new postcolonial status (Lau, 1997, p. 54). Indeed, the premature resignation of Tung Chee-hwa was only the most celebrated example of this leadership problem. In January 2001, Anson Chan, the highly popular chief secretary, suddenly announced that she would resign in May, a year before her contract expired. And on 16 July 2003, two members of Tungs cabinet resigned. Secretary for Security Regina Ip resigned after the 1 July demonstration against her proposed National Security Bill. Hours later, Financial Secretary Antony Leung, already under fire for failing to reduce the SARs high unemployment rate and restore consumer confidence in the economy, stepped down. Leung had been criticized for purchasing a luxury Lexus automobile just before delivering the 2003 budget, which included an increase in the tax rate on new cars. In July 2004 two top health officials stepped down after a Legislative Council report on the SARS epidemic of 2003 found that the government had been slow in trying to contain the contamination from SARS. While we cannot expect politicians to be historians, it might be interesting to note by way of conclusion that history appears to be of great interest to Hong Kongs leaders, especially when it relates to democracy. Attempting to prove that democracy is not a miracle cure, former security secretary Regina Ip once reminded Hong Kongs people that Adolf Hitler had been democratically elected. In May 2007, the late Ma Lik, leader of the pro-Beijing Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong, explained that the Tiananmen Massacre had not really been a massacre and that he saw no reason to pay attention to a bunch of gweilos (Westerners) who claimed that it had been. In October 2005, Donald Tsang told the Canadian Globe and Mail that it would take time to develop democracy after more than 140 years of British colonial rule. He compared Hong Kongs slow progress towards universal suffrage with that of the United States, where women only gained the vote 100 years after America became independent of Britain. In October 2007, Tsang argued that the violence and chaos of the Cultural Revolution were an example of democracy

Ten Years Later: 19972007 as History 23

gone wrong. Shortly after Tsang made this comment, a local schoolgirl wrote a letter to the South China Morning Post lamenting that colonialism had left Hong Kong people without a sense of Chinese history, and claiming that they should learn more about Chinas glorious history and civilization. It is hard to blame colonialism for this kind of historical ignorance, and equally difficult to accept the premise that learning more about Chinese history will somehow solve Hong Kongs problems, but the girls letter nevertheless serves as a reminder of how the past decade and the next must be framed within Hong Kongs colonial legacies and current political realities.

2
Power Plays: Alternative Performance Art and Urban Space in the Political Life of the City
Carolyn Cartier*

In the decade since the handover, political life in Hong Kong has entered the realm of the performative. Political perspectives have moved beyond debate in broadcast media and institutional forums to emerge in performances in the public sphere alternative art actions and performance artworks about social and political issues that have taken corporeal shape in the life of the city, in the spaces of daily life and in demonstrations and marches, across the island, from park to town and in the heart of the citys zones of connectivity and mobility, culminating in demonstrations at the Star Ferry and Queens Piers in 20062007. From individual artists and cultural workers and small groups to crowds in the hundreds of thousands, people have organized and created community events, art actions and alternative art forms to express a range of local, regional and national concerns. This assessment of performance art and the political in Hong Kong examines artworks and related social actions by Hong Kong artists, cultural workers and activists that have enlivened the cultural and political life of the city. It focuses on contemporary and alternative performance works concerned
* The author wishes to thank and give particular acknowledgement to the artists whose work appears in this essay, especially to Anthony Leung Po-shan, whose comments on an earlier draft of the essay yielded several important points of interpretation; to Wen Yau, who provided the introduction to the performance art collection of the Asia Art Archive and corrections to the essay; to Clara Cheung and Gum Cheng Yeeman for sharing documentation of their history of performance art; and to Dawn Lau and Serina Poon at Hong Kong University Press for their collaboration in producing the illustrations for the chapter. The interpretations expressed in the essay and any limitations or errors they may represent are the responsibility of the author alone.

26 Carolyn Cartier

with expressions of social and political realities in post-handover Hong Kong, and takes an open approach to understanding performance art and art actions as expressions of the expansion of cultural activity and political experience in Hong Kong society and as part of the process of production of art. The analysis considers especially artworks that incorporate text and images related to the institutional dynamics of the formation of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) of the Peoples Republic of China (PRC). In this context a historically unprecedented territorial formation and a political movement geared to increasing democratic practice alternative performance art and art actions contribute to the articulation of an urban cultural politics with national dimensions and a spatial expression in public life. Reflecting our focus on word and image, this discussion focuses on performance artworks concerned specifically with text, speech acts, statements and enactments, and those whose use of images or representational images have resonated beyond their moments of production to become known among artists and the art-viewing public as a consequence of social documentation. This outlook, however, is actually at odds with definitional views of the performance art genre, whose theorists have posited that its only life is in the present; and that it cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations [because] once it does so, it becomes something other than performance (Phelan, 1993, p. 146). While documentary forms of performance artworks are no substitute for direct experience, in this highly mediatized era, alternative performance art is increasingly recorded and, for example, videos of performance art are now collectable. This discussion relies on the social documentation of performance art, and draws on the performance art archive of the Asia Art Archive, whose researcher and curator, Wen Yau, is herself a performance artist and thus involved in the social production of contemporary and alternative performance art in Hong Kong. Some of her works, in addition to those of other contemporary artists and cultural activists, are introduced below. Interest in the production of art in the city differs from the perspectives of art critics or art historians focusing primarily on artworks, because we find some of the most creative politics in Hong Kong in the first decade of the postcolonial era in the dynamics of art actions performed in public spaces and in the dedication of artists to humanistic concerns about identity formation and its (in)stability under the one country, two systems policy platform. Concomitant with these events, the Hong Kong government has promoted a cultural industries focus for contemporary economic development, which is associated with the usual large-scale property development projects and continued razeand-redevelop priorities that characterized the built environment of the city

Power Plays 27

under colonial rule. Art actions in support of conservation of historic sites in Hong Kong, especially the Star Ferry and Queens Piers on Hong Kong Island, are directly related to the apparent contradictions of this political economy i.e. redeveloping historic sites in the name of new cultural facilities, a process that ultimately eviscerates places of peoples experience and local memory. Consequently, the following discussion focuses on artistic productivity between society and space in Hong Kong, in recognition of the unanticipated rise of an alternative arts and culture movement in the first decade of the SAR era, against the backdrop of a continuing property development-led regime. The following discussion unfolds in two main sections. The first section introduces ideas about relations between alternative performance art and the dynamics of the production of space, and related differences in perspective and power relations between peoples interests in local places and state interests in urban space in the context of Hong Kong cultural politics. It also introduces the protest rally or march as the context for several significant performance works, as well as the idea of the march itself as a performative action. The second section concerns the production of specific works, with a focus on text and image in performance artworks and cultural projects, including art actions in support of conserving the Star Ferry Pier, with its iconic clock tower, and Queens Pier. Most of these performance works have actually been documented or recorded and featured in exhibits, as well as covered in the popular press and alternative media. They represent only a fraction of the many performance works produced during the first decade of the SAR era, and this brief treatment can therefore only suggest their significance and await a fuller assessment.

Ideas: Speech, Space and Alternative Performance Art

Interest in space for the production of art traces an intellectual lineage to Paul Valery (1964), who observed that art in its originating contexts i.e. wherever it is actually practised and produced maintains its distinctive meanings and connections, grounding the life of the artist and positioning artwork as the product of social relations, rather than resulting in works to be individually and independently (e)valuated. Certainly such sites have particular social and historical contexts in China, especially the radical restructuring of artistic institutions in the Republican period, when changes in art practices challenged both artists and audiences (Tang, 2008). However, the art historical lineage is less at stake here than the possibilities for critical, alternative art in a city that is highly subject to both localizing and globalizing forces. The production of art depends on having space in which it may be practised; while in Hong Kong, the city with the highest density in the developed world, where public space

28 Carolyn Cartier

is scarce and monitored by the state, making space for art is always embedded in the tensions between small living and work spaces and volatile property rents. Thus, the dialectic of theorizing the production of performance art in public space works through the space for artistic production and state-capital interests in producing a remunerative urban space economy which arguably marginalizes cultural production or alternative and avant-garde art that is not legible within a consumerist framework. Alternative performance art also draws on a history of action art and its interest in processes of artwork formation that have a social agenda (Chung, 2006). Such performance artworks are not concerned with genre or media specificity, and tend to draw on mixed-media inspirations. This focus on action, process and social context has the effect of questioning normative political economic conditions and especially hegemonic social formations that would undergird authoritarian social and political systems. The regulating functions of urban governments in structuring the space of the urban landscape and rights to the city make urban space the most likely scene for the production of alternative performance art. With limited public space and highly constrained space for alternative art, making space for contemporary and avant-garde art in Hong Kong is always a political project, and requires using alternative sites for performance art or performing alternative artworks in conventional sites or contexts used primarily for other purposes. Indeed, it is performance out-of-context or performing an action out-of-place that spurs the imagination of artists, performers and viewers or audience. Such art actions, or action art, find their meaning and power in the discrepancy between the performance act, site and situation. The time-space of performance art discrete, relevant to the moment and context elicits a relationship, an intersubjective quality, between performer and audience. Yet often, instead of directly shocking or objectifying like some iconic political artworks, and unlike the cool screen of digital media or video, the performance artist speaks directly to the viewer: consider my presence, the multi-sensory performance that I offer and the questions I raise whether by symbolic actions or through speech and text. In other words, performance works repeatedly test the nature of social or public space not via grand gestures of dramatic interventions (tactics which are already suspicious or problematic) but rather by means of infiltration, private task, public ritual or subtle intervention in the shared space of a street, a city, or a landscape (Etchells, Heathfield and Keidan, 2000, p. 6). Indexed to local issues in public space, the immediacy of performance art often resonates with legibility for an attentive audience. Perceptions about the origins of the contemporary popular march in Hong Kong are associated with the outpouring of public concern over the events of 4

Power Plays 29

June 1989, when up to one million Hong Kong residents took to the streets. Since then, and also on 1 July, the date of establishment of the Hong Kong SAR, and other designated dates associated with the movement for universal suffrage, public streets and parks have become spaces for political actions and art performances concerned with the future of democratic practice and political selfdetermination in Hong Kong. Yet contrary to perceptions that political activism in Hong Kong is a recent phenomenon, activism and public demonstration date back to the colonial era and workers rights movements among the working and professional classes (Lam, 2004). Knowledge of an episodic history of public demonstrations in twentieth-century China in association with changes in leadership and political crises also underscores the significance of the political demonstration, no less so for its symbolic historic ritual form (Esherick and Wasserstrom, 1990). Thus public participation in social and political issues has a deeper history in Hong Kong, and arguably forms a basis of memory and experience in which people find strength and legitimacy for popular political participation. Significantly, the place and content of the protest rally and march in Hong Kong from Victoria Park, the site of the beginning of the march route in Causeway Bay to government headquarters in the Central district has evolved as a broad-scale community event, punctuated by diverse interest groups and discrete performances, especially in Victoria Park where people gather to rally sometimes hours in advance of a march. Any participant-observer in the Hong Kong political rally experiences its landscape of dynamic creativity. In June 2004, the arts and culture critic for the South China Morning Post observed that: This years Tiananmen Square memorial on June 4 in Victoria Park was reportedly the biggest and most important since the handover. What wasnt widely reported was that it was also the most creative Rather unexpectedly, 6 4 has become something of a showcase for original local filmmaking, dance, stage direction, illustration and musical composition short dramas, humorous skits, a cappella performances, even contemporary dance, as three white-clad women abstractly acted out the feelings of the victims mothers. A song by a local composer drew applause from the crowd, who sang along while reading off lyric sheets. The crowd laughed and cried (Lau, 2004). In such contexts, the relationship between performers and a viewing public who may exchange positions from one event to the next, watching each others performances comes together in sometimes unexpected ways, yielding what Gilles Deleuze (1981; 1997) called art as sensation, or how multi-sensory possibilities of multimedia art may surprise and engage the viewer, challenging perceptions and leading to the possibility of new perspectives. This characteristic of performance art, its power to convey meaning about ideas and social issues through creative composition in actions,

30 Carolyn Cartier

words and images, works through a dialectic of portrayal and reception between artist and audience. The power of words, text and speech in alternative performance art is an element of the form that enhances the transfer of meaning since, if we follow Judith Butlers exposition in Excitable Speech, to speak is not quite the same as to act. Butler (1997) complicates the relation of speech to act and deconstructs the relation of the body to speech, arguing that language and the body are neither parallel nor separable forms of expression, but come together in a social speaking subject. She acutely observes that a certain performative force results from the rehearsal of conventional formulae in non-conventional ways, finding the force of the performative in its decontextualization and its capacity to assume new contexts (Butler, 1997, p. 147). This force of the utterance as it breaks with prior context (ibid., p. 148) finds its singularity and unrehearsed condition especially in alternative performance art, whose enactments out of place, in diverse sites of public space become excitable, whether by breaking silences, producing legibility, inciting participation or other possibilities, and come into potential through words, images, actions and their symbolic meanings. Performance artworks that may be interpreted to exemplify these effects are the subject of the next section.

The Production of Artworks

In the run-up to 1997 and the first decade of the handover period, the production of contemporary and alternative art in Hong Kong increased significantly. Alternative performance art is central among these art media, and it grew especially during years of key issues and debates. (See Figure 2.1). This chronology, based on the performance art research project by Wen Yau for the Asia Art Archive, summarizes alternative performance art events between 1975 and 2005 by theme. Here we see that the history of alternative performance in Hong Kong pre-dates the current decade, while the genre intensified in association with major events marking the handover and transition to the SAR era. We can identify some milestones. Critically, the record also shows that social and political artworks emerged and wholly dominated in 1989; and they have subsequently maintained a strong presence through the post-1997 period. Works concerned with personal themes or personal and individual identity positions have increased in proportionate representation, in line with widespread questions about the changing conditions of daily life and their potential impact on local Hong Kong identity in the SAR era (e.g. Fung, 2001; 2004). The two high points are clearly the years 1997 and 2003, when artworks concerned with social and political issues dominated. Of course 1997 is the highly anticipated year of the

Power Plays 31

handover itself. The year 2003 witnessed widespread concern over a proposed anti-subversion law associated with Article 23 of the Basic Law that would have eroded freedom of speech and increased government surveillance over political organizations in Hong Kong. The 1 July 2003 demonstration was the largest since 1989 and, in association with diverse social and economic concerns, represented the first major crisis of confidence in the one country, two systems policy (J. Cheng, 2005). Government subsequently rescinded the measure, while Beijings concern to develop and promote a nationalistic outlook in Hong Kong grew through 2004 (Hung, 2005). In the process, local concerns became more highly articulated, including agendas for better development of Hong Kongs future, which coalesced in the Star Ferry and Queens Piers demonstrations. If we take 1997 as the entry point for an analysis of alternative performance art in Hong Kong, any local assessment observes its debut with the Red Man Incident, the unusual action of Pan Xinglei, a native of Liaoning and former student of the Beijing Fine Arts Academy. On 16 September 1996, the opening day of the Contemporary Hong Kong Art Biennial (at which his work was not featured), he covered the statue of Queen Victoria in Victoria Park with red paint, disfigured the statues nose with a hammer, and then doused himself in red paint and waited to be confronted; he was charged with criminal vandalism and served a short jail sentence. Most media commentators decried
Mapping HK Performance Art
12 Others Unknown/Various 10 Personal Body/Gender Social-Political Experimentation of Art Form 8

(No. of Events)

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Figure 2.1 Chart of Hong Kong Alternative Performance Art Events, 19752005 (Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong Performance Art Research Project, 2006).

2005

32 Carolyn Cartier

the act as out of step with Hong Kong sensibilities of public comportment and responsible management of public infrastructure, which constructed a questionable reputation around alternative performance art in the city (Clarke, 2002, p. 119). Yet we can also evaluate such boldness by Pan as not particularly characteristic of art produced in Hong Kong. As Anthony Leung Po-shan (2005, p. 65) observes, in an overview of performance art in Hong Kong, comparing the works of performance art in China and Taiwan, Hong Kong artists seem to adopt a much less radical manner [they] tend to take politics with a sense of humor, absurdity and carnival-like forms of expression. Pans style is more common among contemporary artworks in the PRC, which tend to feature bold colours and symbols that index mid-twentieth-century Chinese politics, while his daring action was arguably less about Hong Kong than inviting notice from the global art world (see also Leung, 2007b). Pan continues to work in Hong Kong periodically, while by the early mid-2000s local Hong Kong artists gained critical appreciation in the alternative performance art scene.

Power Plays
Distinctive artworks dealing with social and political themes especially emerged in the context of debate over Article 23, which heightened questions about maintaining political freedoms and civil rights, interpreting the Basic Law, and relations between the SAR and the PRC. Among performance artworks, one video stands out for its ways of representing connections between democratic practices, the political rally and differences in worldviews between Hong Kong and Beijing. Tozer Pak Sheung-cheuns A Present to the Central Government: The Yellow Ribbons (Pak, 2005) symbolically delivered Hong Kong peoples concerns to the heart of the Chinese capital. The video begins with the installation of a strip of yellow cloth 0.2 m x 10 m across the route of the 1 July 2004 march, where it collected the footprints of tens of thousands of participants. The camera focuses on the marchers feet stepping on the cloth, as if imprinting on the fabric the significance of the right to participate, to demonstrate and to speak. After a time, a support team pulls up the cloth, folds and collects it. Next, the project relocates to Beijing, where we see Pak walking along the sidewalk facing Tiananmen Square and around the Forbidden City, pulling out of a shoulder bag strips of the yellow cloth, and tying this now internationally recognized sign of hope to a pedestrian guardrail here, a signpost there. As the video depicts in a map overview, Pak circles the entirety of the Forbidden City as if in a ritual circumambulation, an act of concern and devotion. While videotaping the action, his crew follows behind and removes the yellow ribbons along the way, suggesting the limits of such representative politics in the PRC.

Power Plays 33

In 2005, Para/site Art Space in Hong Kong presented Power Plays, an exhibit in the city of huge and creative demonstrations [of] eleven of the most important political performance and video works of the last three decades (Berger, 2005). The Yellow Ribbons project appeared along with ten other video works from around the world. The artist, Pak Sheung-cheun, a founder of the 2nd Floor 5 Sons Studio in Hong Kong, is known for conceptual, installation and performance art that exemplifies a certain subtle style, in allusion, humour and irony, seeking to draw connections between otherwise disconnected realms, to connect something that seems unrelated to you, to make you join together with other people (Pak, 2006). By effectively drawing people from different backgrounds, perspectives and places into a shared if not comparative outlook, The Yellow Ribbons exemplifies how performance art makes its greatest claims on the cultural politics of the city by contesting its interrelated realms at all levels, from the immediate sites of public space and public participation, to the circumscribed space of the Hong Kong SAR and its different citizenship rights within the nation-space of the PRC. Developed in the year after the historic protest against Article 23, The Yellow Ribbons is a conceptual, installation, performance and video artwork that succeeds by symbolically demonstrating critical concerns of the Hong Kong people in a different city-space where their counterparts otherwise dare not engage in political rallies. In terms of the Beijing-based act itself, is it a political transgression to tie a yellow ribbon around a pedestrian guardrail or the pole of a traffic sign? If so, it is likely a minor one, but The Yellow Ribbons was reportedly barred from a satellite exhibit associated with the Guangzhou Triennial in 2005 (Lau, 2006, p. 90).

Wedding Engagement at the 1 July Protest

Another artwork performed at the 1 July 2004 march, Wedding Engagement at the 1 July Protest, produced a striking image that was widely printed in the popular media. The photograph of two artists known as Clara and Gum, a team who work as part of the Hong Kong art group Project 226, became an iconic representation of Hong Kong peoples sentiments in the mid-2000s. (See Figure 2.2). Believing good performance art can arouse peoples interest in politics (J. Cheng, 2005), Clara and Gum, wearing traditional red Chinese wedding clothes, became engaged to be married in the process of the 1 July march. This engagement performance representing fidelity, unity, tradition and luck made an impact at a time when the government was arguably not prioritizing the people; and as an art action symbolizing trust, honesty and caring suggested a relationship that government should have with the people. In

34 Carolyn Cartier

Figure 2.2 Photo of the Wedding Engagement artists being interviewed during the July 1 march (2004). Courtesy of C&G Artpartment.

their embodied fidelity, the traditional appearance of this young Hong Kong couple in the 1 July march coded historic Chinese culture as a representative restatement of Hong Kong priorities and fundamental qualities of relationship. The striking real-life performance demonstrated strength of character in the context of local concerns over PRC-interpreted policies defining the SAR, which had generated confusion and mistrust over whether the SAR-PRC governing axis would maintain or break its agreements in the interests of Hong Kong people. As Leung (2005) interpreted, Clara and Gum entwined private histories with public histories. The engagement performance of Project 226 symbolically urged Hong Kong to focus on community and a transcendent cultural politics of Chinese identity. As a strategic performance art action, images of Wedding Engagement gained iconicity, circulating repeatedly and beyond the originating context. Analytically, we find here what Butler identifies as a performative force that results from the reproduction of conventional acts in non-conventional contexts, contrary to expectations of place and time.

TengSeWong/Voice-Writer Series
If we consider the institutional documents at stake in the making of the Hong Kong SAR the text of the Sino-British Joint Declaration itself, the Basic Law and the proposed Article 23 each is a textual account of the time-space contexts of Hong Kongs present and future policy regimes, and each has been

Power Plays 35

the focus of extensive questioning and interpretation. Reflecting public interest in and controversy over meanings of these texts, many Hong Kong artworks in the period after the handover represent themes dealing explicitly with words and text, and the meaning and power of discourse to inform, shape, constrain, construct and deconstruct social, economic and political realities. Such artworks also operate in a long regional tradition of wordplay in spoken and written Cantonese, through punning, deployment of linguistic tropes and use of Chinese characters that are unique to the Cantonese language in South China. In a series of performance works, artist and performance art researcher Wen Yau (2007) made use of a voice-writer or transcription and translation software to transform texts. In the process, the artworks demonstrate not only how words or characters and meaning are changed and even lost, but the symbolic miscues and even incommensurability between perspectives among Hong Kong people and elite state interests in Hong Kong and Beijing. In a performance piece that processes the text of the Basic Law, the output from the voicewriter is surprisingly absurd, if amusing. In TengSeWong/VoiceWriter on the Basic Law at Para/Site Art Space in 2005, Wen Yaus performance generated a new copy of the Basic Law relating to the appointment of Hong Kongs chief executive. After reading Cantonese into the voice-writer, the software reproduced Mandarin (or Putonghua) and character text. But even the relatively simple phrase Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Basic Law ( ) emerged as triangular-iron-select-prosthesis-idiotic-avowal (). The properties of such linguistic dissonances underscore how Cantonese is effectively a different language from Putonghua the sixth character in the translated series () is not in use in standard Chinese, but as a compound is a modern translation for idiotic while the symbolisms demonstrate how the text is meaningless if not handled and interpreted properly, raising particular kinds of questions. What is the meaning of the Basic Law? If translation technology renders it into gibberish, is it even translatable or worth the effort? Could it be a duplicitous document? Does it have any meaning at all? Wen Yau presented another work in the series, entitled / Ill _____ forget, in memory of 4 June and the Tiananmen Incident, as part of the June Art Action for the 2005 Hong Kong Performance Art on the Move Project, which was a year-long event that brought together most of the performance/ live artists in Hong Kong for the first time. Wen Yau situated this mediated live performance in a public plaza in Yau Ma Tei between an art house theatre and a low-income housing estate, effectively delivering critical art to the public sphere. She started by reading (Ill never forget) into the voicewriter; an assistant read the output text out loud, while Wen Yau, on her hands

36 Carolyn Cartier

and knees, wrote the characters in chalk on the plaza. She then engaged in repeated instances of speaking the generated output text back into the voicewriter, which produced increasingly unrecognizable sentences and words. The original language and meaning disappeared in the process, submerged in a palimpsest of excess discourse, mis-translation and ultimately nonsense text. As Wen Yau herself concludes about the work, What I will never forget seems to be a myth at the end (Wen Yau, 2007).

Back to the Basic

To commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Hong Kong handover, Project 226 held the Back to the Basic exhibit in July 2007 at C&G Artpartment, an alternative art space in Mong Kok. The exhibits curatorial invitation asked artists to develop works based on personal and individual understandings of the Basic Law, and to reveal complex relationships between people and the Basic Law through symbolic meanings. Among the works featured at the exhibit, Anthony Leung Po-shan performed Basic Law Is Burning at the opening. In this public act of private burning, Leung (2007a) read a page or two from the Basic Law to an individual viewer, then removed the pages from the Basic Law booklet and burned them, collected the ashes in a plastic bag and presented them to the participant. In performing this intersubjective reading, she spoke closely into the ear of the listener as if to ensure that Hong Kong people hear the reality of the absence of local interpretation of the Basic Law after all, Hong Kong people had effectively no representation in its drafting. After the opening performance, a plastic bag containing ashes was fixed to the gallery wall alongside a commentary on the work. The artist performed a variation of the same work at Queens Pier in April 2007, as one of a series of performance actions associated with expressing support for maintaining public space in Hong Kong in the face of the governments continued raze-and-redevelop priorities. As a cultural activist, writer, multimedia and performance artist, Leung Po-shan regularly produces diverse and significant works, of which this essay considers only a few from the decade under review (see e.g. Lee, 2007). Her recent conceptual interpretations of social issues and political themes tend to demonstrate deft handling of complex questions, often in minimalist form, works that reliably discern the limits of political critique. If we view Basic Law Is Burning through histories of book burning as representative of statesociety relations, we initially react with alarm since, whether we consider Qin Shi Huangdi or Hitler and the Third Reich, authoritarian states have burned books to banish alternative modes of thought and regimes of rule. Indexing yet

Power Plays 37

shifting this history, Leung Po-shans work is a reflection on private burning a means of silent dissent so we need to consider the ritual act of burning for its symbolic properties of cleansing, purification and memorial, as well as the significance of the residual material because she gifts her viewers with the ashes of the pages that have been read. In this act, the audience receives that which Hong Kong is denied: the central government issued repeated statements that Hong Kong had no residual power under the Basic Law in the run-up to 1 July 2007. Moreover, based on the interest of the government in passing Article 23, the Basic Law has not fully represented protections on freedoms to express local thoughts and ideas. Does it protect the Hong Kong people and their ways of life? In a different performance for the 1 July 2007 march, Leung Po-shan reflected on the passing of time since the handover. With an outlook on sovereignty without decolonization [as] a long journey backwards, Leung (2007c) walked backwards the full length of the march from Victoria Park to the government headquarters, and then returned to Queens Pier. Is the questioning effect of the performance to walk back against time, or to face the past? The work emerged in the context of another local exhibit dealing with reflections on the handover, Talkover/Handover at 1a space, and was also featured in black-and-white photography at the handover exhibit, Time After Time, which was one of the first alternative art exhibits sponsored by a major local corporation, the Sino Group property development firm.

Among Others
Another performance project of 2007 made the art of literal expression in banner writing part of the demonstration at the 1 July march and the subject of an interregional art action. Co-curated by Shu Yang and Tobias Berger, the director of Para/Site Art Space, Among Others invited a group of Hong Kong and Mainland artists to combine to compose slogans for banners to be used by the artist-marchers. Shu Yang, the Beijing-based independent curator and performance artist, established Chinas significant DaDao Live Art Festival and gave talks during the 2006 June Art Action of the Hong Kong Performance Art on the Move Project. He invited several artists from the PRC to travel with him to Hong Kong and join with prominent local artists (and three anonymous artists) to work from a collective perspective that Hong Kong should be the accelerating agent for Chinese democracy (Yang, 2007). The banners, which included Milk Tea Takes the Street by Tozer Pak, in reference to traditional Hong Kong tea habits, and Refuse to Forget 1989, by anonymous, went on exhibit at Para/Site after the march. A banner proclaiming ! I hate

38 Carolyn Cartier

this party! in simultaneous reference to political parties (the Chinese version) and the party for the tenth anniversary of the handover itself an obvious critique of the one country, two systems formula hung over the faade. Such interesting engagements between PRC-based artists and Hong Kong artists are taking place between the major centres of contemporary and alternative art, including Shanghai and the cities of the Pearl River delta, and deserve further exploration.

The Star Ferry and Queens Piers

From the collective art projects at the 1 July march to the demonstrations in support of public open space and conservation of the Star Ferry Piers, the Star Ferry clock tower and Queens Pier in the Central district on Hong Kong Island, creative collective actions unfolded across the urban landscape in the first decade after the handover, especially during the mid-2000s, culminating in 20062007. Reactions by government and mainstream media reflected the demonstrators concerns about heritage loss in the built environment a typical reaction in a society dominated by property development interests while the local political movement that galvanized around the piers has a more complex agenda than political economic problems in the postcolonial period. By December 2006, the entrance to the Star Ferry Piers had become the scene of a standoff. Authorities had boarded up the pier entrances, while a coalition of cultural and heritage activists, NGO workers, artists and students mounted placards, information boards and banners around the site. Periodic art actions and demonstrations drew public crowds and the media. Countless numbers of local people left tributes in the form of signs, photos and personal notes about their memories of place over the years. Many focused on the clock tower, including images of the skyscrapers of Hong Kong with the outline of the clock tower cut out from the heart of the landscape. (See Figure 2.3). In the second half of 2006, dedicated activists, students, artists and cultural workers in alternative media, including members of Hong Kongs InMedia group, gathered on Sundays and staged a series of performance art actions to demonstrate concern about the loss of local heritage and sense of place, and to promote awareness of the need to maintain public space and peoples rights to the city. Among them, students of Kith Tsang Tak-ping, a mixed-media artist, founder of Para/Site Art Space and faculty member of the School of Design at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, articulated a manifesto defining not only their rationale for a series of art actions in the public interest but the relationship between performance art action, urban space and conservation of the cultural landscape as fundamentally entwined arenas for social expression and quality of life:

Power Plays 39

Our art action responds to the urban environment; Our art action looks after the urban environment; Our art action brings history back to the forefront of urban spaces; Our art action aims at raising public awareness of caring [for] our own historical-urban environment; Our art action appeals to the publics support to save the Star Ferry [Piers] and the clock tower; Our art action questions why and how our histories have been systematically erased from both sides of the Victoria Harbour; Our art action welcomes public participation. (Critical Intermedia Laboratory, 2006) By early 2007 these groups had further organized under the name Local Action and redoubled their efforts for the conservation of nearby Queens Pier, another historic site under threat of removal in the governments unrelenting programme of reclamation-led development. Local Action continued performance art actions and informational forums to raise public interest about the issue, and promote wider understandings about the meaning of public participation and local democracy in the face of rapid urban transformation. One included a dance across the stars, chalked onto the pavement; another entailed burning a model clock tower of paper money, an elemental ritual practice of the region associated with engendering luck and fortune. As one commentator described the situation, art in public space is rare in Hong Kong, especially as a means to mediate social and political issues. This series of art interventions were the first of their kind in the Hong Kong art scene (Tsui, 2007). While a full explanation of the significance of performance art in the movement for public space and social

Figure 2.3 Protest flyers in front of the Star Ferry clock tower on the last day of service at the historic piers, 12 November 2006. Photograph by Michael Somers.

40 Carolyn Cartier

justice in Hong Kong lies beyond the scope of this assessment, we can observe that the role of artists, intellectuals, cultural activists and many young people in the Hong Kong movement is not surprising if we recall that avant-garde art and culture in any citys history have emerged from their collective projects. Queens Pier was ultimately razed in February 2008, a year after the demolition of the Star Ferry Piers. Yet despite their loss a landscape of disappearance if we follow the outlook of Ackbar Abbas (1997) at the time of the handover the movement surrounding these historic sites galvanized new public interest and state-society dialogue about the fate of place in Hong Kong and the meaning of public space in the city. As a consequence of the multiple performance art actions and the plethora of banners, commemorative signs, images and personal tributes memorializing the site, the news media and independent video coverage of the protest movement produced multiple records, images and an ever-widening circulation of information and concern. In early 2008, a search on Youtube.com produced 598 entries for Star Ferry alone, and a further 172 for Queens Pier. The Star Ferrys greater iconicity, in the image of the clock tower, will no doubt be reproduced for years to come, standing as a symbol of local Hong Kong identity.

Conclusion
The emergence of performance art in the life of the city in Hong Kong parallels the presence of the genre in other world cities that are centres of contemporary and alternative arts such as Beijing, Berlin and New York. Such alternative art forms were also ascendant in the 1990s, when traditional media, especially painting, were in relative decline. In the process, alternative performance art has moved beyond its relevance in the moments of production to become a highly documented art form. The role of the Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong is central to this reality for the Asian region; without its special collection on Hong Kong, this chapter could not have been written in its current form. Alternative performance art transforms the space of the city into arenas of public engagement, sparking new perspectives and ideas. Its intersubjective capacity weaves social fabric from mere passersby. From being an art form once out-of-context in Hong Kong, in the work of Pan Xinglei, to the culmination of the movement for public space and rights to the city in the preservation art actions for the Star Ferry and Queens Piers, alternative performance art has become part of the landscape of Hong Kong identity, etched indelibly into spaces of local experience and into many peoples memories. This is the capacity of performance art to reveal the human qualities of place in economic space, the retrieval of ideas about the integrity of daily life from contexts of still rampant development in the Hong Kong SAR.

3
The Haunted City: Hong Kong and Its Urban Others
David Clarke

When we travel to other cities as a result of personal desire for example in our identity as tourists we are driven to a significant extent by the place that city has in our imaginative life. Early in Prousts monumental work In Search of Lost Time the young narrator looks forward in anticipation to a family visit to a town called Balbec on the French Atlantic coast (actually a fictionalization of the name Cabourg), and like that fictional character our notion of a place and its attractiveness can be fuelled by textual and visual images of it we may have consumed (and these may have been derived from film, literature and art as much as from factual television programmes or holiday brochures and their glossy illustrations). In the case of Prousts narrator, the reality of Balbec fails to match the promise of those images, and one major lesson of Proust is the recognition of a gap between the world and our desire-laden images of it. Nevertheless it would be a mistake to think we could ever escape our imaginary images of a place by going there. No fully demystified relation to the world would ever be possible, even if it were desirable. Even after we have visited a city or even lived in it, our sense of it is still a mediated one, its concrete realities entangled with the stories we have gathered and generated about it.1 Even when we dont travel even when we stay in our home city the images of other cities stay with us. No city is absolutely different from other cities, so we think about our own city with reference to others, comparatively. We describe it to people by telling them what other cities it is like, for instance. At the level of the city itself, too, there is a constant awareness of its others, and since this awareness is not simply neutral but tainted by the desire to emulate or compete, I want to talk of cities being haunted by other cities. By using the word haunted I wish to convey the sense of other cities as always uncomfortably

42 David Clarke

present, even when a city might wish to exorcize all trace of them, and to signal that the relationship with other cities can, on occasion at least, be a problematic one. Although the everyday sense of the word haunting implies a disruptive invasion of the present by a trace of the past, I choose to extend its application here, applying the term to a spatial rather than a temporal dimension. Perhaps not all cities are significantly haunted by others, but I suspect that all cities with the ambition to be thought of as world cities are, as well as all cities that are going through significant phases of physical or socio-political development (as is the case with many Asian cities today).2 Perhaps such haunting is more common now than in the past, due to the increasing pace of globalization and our increasing awareness of other cities or at least of their images, but I believe it was already quite widespread in developing cities during earlier periods of modernity. Although, if one can imagine cities for a moment as people, there might be particular historical moments when a city might be so deeply affected by trauma that it appears to turn in on itself (perhaps New York in the wake of 11 September 2001 might be considered such a place) or so sure of itself that it does not seem to recognize any peers (again New York at an earlier skyscraper-constructing stage of its modern history might potentially serve as an example); in fact the narcissism induced by both the two extremes of abjection and triumph is unlikely to be complete. Indeed, if one discovers a contemporary city that seems to be free of haunting by its others, one is likely to have found a city without a clear sense of itself as a city, without a civic life in any expanded sense. And a major city at a crucial juncture of its history can on the other hand be haunted by several other cities. Of course, cities are not the same as people, so to talk of a city as being narcissistic or as emulating another is something of a convenient shorthand or metaphorical turn of phrase, there being no actual consciousness and psychology involved in the case of an entity of concrete, steel and asphalt. However, there is a sense in which one can usefully talk of cities as something more than the sum of their inhabitants own individual psyches. There is a city as subject even if it is usually the citys government and its various agencies for urban development, tourist promotion and so on that determine its actions and speak for its subject position. When these agencies articulate their developmental plans they may make reference to other cities that they explicitly hope to learn from or emulate in certain respects, but for the most part the work of their town planners and architects (and that of their private sector counterparts) is less likely to reveal the debts to other cities so openly. To do so would be to give too much ground, to expose a weakness or debt, and thus it falls to critical interpretation to expose the ways in which their apparently self-confident monuments and grand redevelopments betray a haunting by civic otherness.

The Haunted City: Hong Kong and Its Urban Others 43

While the case of architecture can demonstrate how a citys imaginary life is not simply something insubstantial that is laid over its actual physical being, but something embodied in that actual physical reality, it is more often in the case of visual artists, filmmakers and other cultural workers (whose work, with the exception of public art and the like, does not generally directly transform the urban fabric itself) that we see a critical engagement with the city a contesting of a citys existing identity and of the top-down plans for its rebranding or physical remaking. Not all artists succeed in doing this of course a surprising number produce work which is consonant with their governments civic promotion rhetoric but where a citys haunting by other cities is revealed, it is often through their efforts. This, at least, is the case with Hong Kong, the specific city that is the focus of the following discussion. Visitors to Hong Kong are often struck first by its harbour. This fact of physical geography which was responsible for its annexation by the British and its subsequent development as a port city has however been somewhat neglected by government city planners, who even today are more inclined to treat the harbour as a possible site for lucrative land reclamation than as a potential aesthetic or cultural resource for the city itself. Despite featuring heavily in tourist imagery, the actual harbourfront is often taken up with structures and activities that do not show an openness to the harbour itself, and public access is frequently restricted. In the period following the Joint Declaration of the Chinese and British governments in 1984, which sealed agreement on the citys return to Chinese sovereignty in 1997, there was some relaxing of this unremitting process of privatization, however. In the face of the uncertainty created by the impending historical transition, it was considered necessary to give the city some cultural monuments to front the harbour as part of a larger plan to create an optimistic mood and sense of belonging. Most prominent among these was the Hong Kong Cultural Centre on the Tsim Sha Tsui waterfront (see Figure 3.1). I read its curved roof, a self-consciously aesthetic gesture, as a reference to a rather more successful cultural-complex-in-a-harbourfront-setting-as-acivic-icon, the Sydney Opera House (see Figure 3.2). That a degree of anxiety accompanied this emulation, or that it might be judged to have failed to even register as of the same significance as its Sydney counterpart (it proved a very unpopular building when it first opened), may be indicated by the fact that a second, more prominent structure that mimicked the elaborate roof structure of the Sydney Opera House more openly was to follow only a few years later. This was the Extension to the Convention and Exhibition Centre in Wan Chai, which was completed in 1997 and used as the venue for the handover ceremony. Of course in neither case could the resemblance be made too obvious, but the engineering complexity of its curved roof, combined with its setting, makes

44 David Clarke

Figure 3.1 Hong Kong Cultural Centre. Photo courtesy of the Department of Fine Arts, University of Hong Kong.

Figure 3.2 Sydney Opera House. Photo by the author.

it clear that Hong Kong was attempting to re-imagine itself with reference to Sydney.3 Interestingly, Australia (along with Canada and New Zealand) was one of the most favoured destinations for emigration in those pre-1997 years among Hong Kong people worried about what the handover might bring. While decisions about emigration are prompted by many causes, a purely economic explanation of such flows would seem too limited. Clearly there is an element of desire or of the imaginary involved in the choice of destination, and I suspect one part of Australias attraction, like that of Canada and New Zealand, might have been that in some sense it resembled the Hong Kong that was about to

The Haunted City: Hong Kong and Its Urban Others 45

disappear, with the Queens head on coins, Union Jacks incorporated into flags, and the word Royal prominent in the names of various organizations (see Figure 3.3). Emigration there was therefore in some sense a vote to stay living in Hong Kongs pre-handover present, but a present cleared of all the negative downside of colonial existence, such as a lack of democracy. Another place, as it were, served as an imaginary past to retreat to. While architecture constructed on Hong Kongs harbour in the prehandover period showed signs of the city being haunted by Sydney, and thus being perhaps less confident of its own identity than it might have seemed during that period of economic expansion, a much more traumatic civic haunting also became apparent during that pre-handover period. This was a haunting by Shanghai. While I am focusing here on events that have a cultural or imaginary dimension, I do not wish to deny the actual links between these two cities. Clearly the large flow of people from Shanghai to Hong Kong around 1949 was one way in which the fate of the two cities became linked, with many of those migrants going on to play significant roles in Hong Kongs political and economic life, even to the present day. But with the approach of the handover something else started to happen. As Hong Kong began to worry that its way of life might be threatened by reunification with the Mainland, it began to notice similarities between its historical trajectory, as a major Chinese capitalist city being absorbed into a communist country, and that which Shanghai had undergone about half a century earlier. Just as Shanghai had fallen into a kind

Figure 3.3 Coins issued in colonial-era Hong Kong (left) and Australia (right). Photo by the author.

46 David Clarke

of frozen stasis for most of its post-1949 life, so Hong Kong feared a similar fate. In the immediate pre-handover years Hong Kong, with its future already decided, entered into a period of premature mourning, a looking back on its present as if from a future perfect vantage point from which the handover had already happened. This premature sense of loss, this backward turning gaze, began to encompass an engagement with pre-revolutionary Shanghai, given the affinities felt between the two times and places. Although a nostalgic fascination with pre-1949 Shanghai is now a more widespread phenomenon in the world, Hong Kong was one of the first places in which that fascination developed, and furthermore its take on pre-Communist Shanghai can be distinguished from the late period orientalist fantasies about that city which circulate in the West through the degree of empathy or identification that could sometimes be involved. Admittedly, at one end of the scale this Hong Kong fascination with Shanghai meant a purely straightforward nostalgia expressed through commodity consumption, as for instance in the case of the store Shanghai Tang, which at that time was selling Shanghai-tailored clothes with an ironic postmodern twist, and various artfully chosen products redolent with the flavour of the past (such as leather-bound photo albums, which even at the level of function are involved with a backward-looking gaze). At the other end of the scale, however, were cultural products that engaged with the perceived affinity between Hong Kong and Shanghai rather than simply exploiting it. Prominent among these are two films by Stanley Kwan, Centre Stage (1991) and Rouge (1988). The former set up a direct parallel between the two cities by using the Hong Kong actress Maggie Cheung to play 1930s Shanghai actress Ruan Lingyu. In addition to Cheung as Ruan, the film offers us original footage of Ruan herself, thereby bringing a degree of self-consciousness to the comparison. Straightforward realism that would collapse the present into the past is also denied by the introduction of documentary footage in the form of an interview with Cheung about her role. In Rouge, a ghost from pre-revolutionary Shanghai comes to haunt Hong Kong in search of a lost love, who she believes is now living in the city. Again a conscious juxtaposition of the two cities is given, with footage from the two eras interwoven through the film. The fifty-year gap between the two periods explicitly echoes the length of time that Hong Kong was guaranteed to retain its existing way of life after the 1997 handover. Following the return to Chinese sovereignty, coinciding as it did with the pan-Asian economic crisis, questions of identity that had preoccupied many of Hong Kongs residents became worries of the government too worries for or of the city itself.4 Anxiety that Hong Kong might lose its distinctiveness following absorption into a now economically burgeoning and demonstrably

The Haunted City: Hong Kong and Its Urban Others 47

transforming Peoples Republic, which seemed to have escaped the downturn felt by the rest of Asia, gave birth to a compensatory rhetoric that Hong Kong wished to become Asias world city. Hong Kong was now openly declaring its desire to be a city of the stature of New York or London, and was beginning to be haunted by those cities. This world city rhetoric (and the mention of those two Western cities in particular) was first articulated in Hong Kong Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwas 1999 Policy Address, and was further specified in the February 2000 report of the Commission on Strategic Development. As this new ambition developed it came to have an impact on the fabric of the city itself, most prominently in plans for a West Kowloon Cultural District following the belated discovery that world-class cities tend to have active cultural lives as well as economic ones. Sustaining the idea that Hong Kong was an equivalent to New York or London, despite the economic recession it was facing and its lack of basic democratic freedoms, was not easy. One cultural effort to raise the citys depressed mood and kick-start the flagging tourist trade was the Harbourfest, a series of concerts held on the Tamar site, a prominent harbourfront location formerly the site of a colonial-era naval base but at that time lacking any defined role. The stars of these concerts were largely Western artists such as the Rolling Stones, and this served to present Hong Kong not as the equal of major Western cities but as their mimic. A sign of the anxiety hidden by the world city claim is the way in which Hong Kongs government officials and planners were to move constantly from one overseas city model to the next, with no closure proving possible. Detailed influences from New York or London were not to predominate, however: instead we saw the construction of a cyberport (an attempt to remake Silicon Valley in Hong Kong, albeit in miniature), and a Hong Kong Disneyland (again, a city-within-a-city solution, a confining of the haunting by civic otherness to one specific part of the urban topography). Fact-finding tours were also made during this period to Las Vegas (with the thought that tourism revenues might help to rekindle economic growth) and to Bilbao (to examine the ways in which the Bilbao Guggenheim Museum had helped to rejuvenate that citys image).5 The proliferation of cities now haunting Hong Kong, including those of much smaller scale, demonstrates the loss of a sense of identity and direction, and although Western examples have been highlighted here, cities of the Asia-Pacific region have also influenced Hong Kongs self-presentation. The West Kowloon Cultural District brief for potential developers required them to incorporate a large Norman Fosterdesigned canopy over the entire project.6 One cannot help but see this as a third attempt to echo the Sydney Opera House on a waterfront site, but on this occasion at a scale greatly surpassing the original model, thus

48 David Clarke

drawing attention away from the belated nature of the planned Hong Kong structure. A more serious haunting in this period was by Singapore, in economic terms a real rival to Hong Kong for example, as a possible alternative base for the regional headquarters of international companies. The competition between the two cities has been referred to in many newspaper reports, and on 23 November 2007 Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao even issued a public warning to Hong Kong Chief Executive Donald Tsang about what he perceived to be strong competition from Singapore.7 It is telling that when Hong Kong turned to image consultants to devise a symbol that could be used to market the city as distinctive, they came up with a dragon logo (launched in May 2001 as part of the Brand Hong Kong initiative), echoing Singapores use of a mythological animal, the Merlion, as its emblem.8 Ironically, the Hong Kong government had to turn to international sources for this advice about how best to define the citys uniqueness, being unable to generate an answer to the question locally.9 Despite the nationalistic rhetoric that the Hong Kong government promulgated in the post-handover era, the actual relationship between Hong Kong and other Chinese cities tended to involve as much competition as cooperation. Shanghai, as in the pre-handover era, was the Mainland city that most haunted Hong Kong, although now the focus was on the Shanghai of the present, rather than the Shanghai of the past. This newly resurgent city, recovering and overtaking its previous modernity, was seen as a more direct economic competitor than even Singapore, whether as financial centre, port, or location for regional head offices. A comforting statement in 2001 from Shanghai Mayor Xu Kuangdi, that Hong Kong and Shanghai were like strikers in the same football team, only served to highlight the very anxiety it was trying to assuage; a comment in 1999 by then senior Chinese leader Zhu Rongji (a former mayor of Shanghai himself) that Shanghai would become Chinas New York, while Hong Kong should rather be compared to Toronto, only served to underline the Mainland citys challenge to Hong Kongs world city ambitions. In July 2001, Donald Tsang (now Hong Kongs chief executive but then chief secretary for administration) continued the East-West metaphorical competition with Shanghai that Zhu had begun, when he reaffirmed that Hong Kong could be compared to New York whereas Shanghai could be compared to Chicago.10 While it is not yet so easy to see physical traces in Hong Kong of this verbally expressed fear of Shanghai, I suspect that the nightly Symphony of Lights, a spectacle of lights projected onto and from the buildings of the Hong Kong Island skyline (see Figure 3.4), may have been inspired by the flashing lights and searchlights that can be seen on various tall buildings in Shanghai (see Figure 3.5).

The Haunted City: Hong Kong and Its Urban Others 49

Figure 3.4 Building with nighttime light display, Hong Kong, 2005. Photo by the author.

Figure 3.5 Building with nighttime light display, Shanghai, 2005. Photo by the author.

50 David Clarke

While for the most part I have been talking here of the haunting of Hong Kong by other cities as an anxiety creeping through official discourse that would prefer us to read it as self-confident in tone, and concerned with uniqueness rather than with mimicry and influence, there are also certain films or artworks by Hong Kong directors and artists that explore more openly the citys relation to its urban others. One example is Wong Kar-wais movie Happy Together / , which came out in 1997, the handover year. Although set in Buenos Aires, the Argentine location does not prevent the film from referring to the Hong Kong experience, and not simply because the main protagonists, played by Tony Leung Chiu-wai and Leslie Cheung Kwok-wing, are Hong Kong people communicating with each other in Cantonese. Although I think it would be wrong to see the film as a straightforward allegory about Hong Kong (I once had it explained to me that the two main characters in the film stand for Hong Kong and mainland China, while a third Putonghua-speaking character who appears later in the film represents Taiwan), some oblique comment on posthandover life in the city certainly seems to be intended, just as it is with his 2004 film 2046, a science fiction work (at least in part), whose title refers to the year before Hong Kongs guaranteed fifty-year post-handover period of retaining its existing way of life comes to an end. This reading can be firmed up by noting that Buenos Aires is not just a city far away from Hong Kong with no obvious connection to it (in other words, not a city that haunts Hong Kong), but is in fact a city more or less directly at the antipodes of Hong Kong, so opposite to it that it becomes its twin. The Argentine setting thus becomes a way of finding a fresh point of view on Hong Kong, and this is even obliquely acknowledged within the film itself at one point when Hong Kong is alluded to: some footage of the city is inserted, but upside down, as if to remind us that we are viewing the place from an antipodean perspective.11 A product of a later, postcolonial, moment than Happy Together in which the world city rhetoric of the Hong Kong government had already been propagated, Fruit Chans Hollywood, Hong Kong/ (2001) seems intended as a direct critical response to that new civic rhetoric. Not only does it focus on the lives of a family of squatter hut dwellers whose reality is anything but globally connected, it also (as the films title itself indicates) makes play with attempts to sustain a comparison between Hong Kong and another valorized urban location. Chan does this by setting the action of his film in Diamond Hill (see Figure 3.6), where in reality and not just in the world of the film a large shopping mall named Hollywood Plaza overlooked a squatter village (until the latters eventual clearance at around the time of the films making).12 Among visual artists to look at Hong Kong in relation to other cities is Warren Leung Chi-wo, whose photographic images of urban skyscapes have

The Haunted City: Hong Kong and Its Urban Others 51

Figure 3.6 View of Diamond Hill, Hong Kong, with squatter housing in foreground and tower block housing above Hollywood Plaza in background, 30 April 2001. Photo by the author.

featured the city, as well as others he has lived in or visited such as New York, Venice or Shanghai (e.g. Chambers, 1999). By focusing on the sky, or rather the silhouette of the sky as framed by a citys architecture viewed from below, Leung finds an aspect that links all cities. Although different cities may have different characteristic silhouettes, the sky at least is something they all have in common. This may lead one to see a continuity between works of this kind made in Hong Kong and those made elsewhere, but the relationship between the cities he images can even be inscribed within the individual artworks themselves. One of his New York works, Frank Lin Meets Broad Wai (1999), for instance, makes punning connections between actual street names denoting an intersection in lower Manhattan (represented through four different silhouettes captured in photos taken in different directions from the same location) and fabricated English personal names of Chinese people such as one might encounter in Hong Kong (see Figure 3.7). In Crossing Sky (2001), there is a different and more explicit kind of entanglement or cross-infection between cities: here the skyline is a fabricated hybrid, including elements of both Hong Kong and Venetian architecture to produce the silhouette. This silhouette was also used as a template for constructing a chandelier and for cookie shapes, which were included in Leungs work that was presented in Venice on the first occasion Hong Kong was represented at the Venice Biennale. Seven photographic images of the Hong Kong skyline and seven of the Venetian skyline were also used in Leungs work, and presented on table-tops: the spectator was invited to look downwards at images of skylines made with the camera pointing upwards.

52 David Clarke

Figure 3.7 Warren Leung Chi-wo, Frank Lin Meets Broad Wai (1999). Photo courtesy the artist.

Of course, biennales are nowadays a commonplace part of international artistic culture, but it is not surprising that Hong Kongs first venture to the Venice Biennale in 2001 came in the post-handover era of anxiety about civic identity that I refer to here, and not at an earlier date (as had been the case with Taiwan, for instance). Presenting Hong Kong artists at Venice was one part of the citys aspiration to world-class status, and the speech given at the Hong Kong exhibitions opening by the then chair of the Hong Kong Arts Development Council, Patrick Ho (later to become secretary of home affairs in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government), drew parallels between Hong Kong and Venice as cities, even mentioning Tai O, a Hong Kong fishing village with stilt houses that was often referred to as the Venice of Hong Kong.13 In the 2005 Venice Biennale another linking and even identification between Hong Kong and Venice occurred when Stanley Wong Ping-pui recreated a Hong Kong teahouse in the Hong Kong pavilion with his work redwhiteblue: Tea and Chat (see Figure 3.8).14 While biennales and city-to-city cultural exchange projects (which have proliferated in Hong Kong in recent years) might by their very structure encourage artists to think about the relationship between cities, one further

The Haunted City: Hong Kong and Its Urban Others 53

Figure 3.8 Stanley Wong, redwhiteblue: Tea and Chat (Hong Kong Pavilion, Venice Biennale, 2005). Photo by the author.

artistic project I want to mention was produced outside any such frame. This is Young Hays Bonjour Young Hay (After Courbet), a performance project created in collaboration with various photographers that took place over several years in a number of different cities. The first part took place in Hong Kong in 1995, but the other segments belong to the post-handover period I am trying to specify here, involving New York and Berlin performances in 1998 and a Beijing performance in 2000. Only in the final exhibitable photographic form (the photographic collaborators being from the cities represented) can cross-city comparison be made, and because Hong Kong was the first city documented and the one from which the artist has journeyed, one inevitably compares the works produced in the other cities primarily with the ones produced in it. Structured almost like a scientific experiment to enable and encourage cross-city comparison, in that it keeps one important factor constant in order to enable the changes in other variables to be observed, Young Hays work involved the artist moving across cityscapes with a blank canvas strapped to his back. In my opinion the sequence shot in Beijing the last city visited is the most interesting. This might be partly, I would suggest, because Beijing is the city of the three that most haunts Hong Kong (despite the parallels that exist between Hong Kong and Berlin, with one containing a capitalist enclave in a communist country which later along with the rest of West Germany absorbed its communist hinterland, and the other being a capitalist enclave in a communist country that was later reabsorbed by it). As the capital of the country

54 David Clarke

Hong Kong has now been reunited with, a post-handover journey to Beijing had particular resonances, which Young Hays work investigates.15 The works of these artists explore dimensions of the relationship between cities that differ from those of official civic rhetoric, and in Young Hays case they venture towards the realm of the political (security officials initially attempted to prevent him from undertaking his performance in Tiananmen Square, for instance). For an unofficial identification with another city, a haunting by it that has a more overtly political dimension, we would need to turn to the realm of street politics, and in particular to the annual rally held in Hong Kongs Victoria Park to commemorate the events of 4 June 1989 in Beijings Tiananmen Square. Because the rally has at its centre a small-scale mock-up of Tiananmen Squares Monument to the Peoples Heroes (but with its calligraphic inscription changed to make a call for democracy), there is a sense in which the participants in the rally are not simply remembering events that happened in that Beijing location, but are making an imaginative recreation of those events, making Beijing present by virtue of a collective theatrical gesture in the here and now of Hong Kong (see Figure 3.9). Here the haunting of one city by another becomes overt, and one might even want to describe it as something more extreme, as a state of possession, albeit one that has been voluntarily chosen.

Figure 3.9 Annual memorial rally, Victoria Park, Hong Kong. 4 June 2005. Photo by the author.

4
Chinese English, English Chinese: Biliteracy and Translation
Elaine Yee Lin Ho*

In the past decade, local activism has encouraged public interest in cultural identity but there is little doubt that the global attention on Hong Kong evident around 1997 has receded. As one local historian and sinophone literary scholar lamented,
Before 1997, Hong Kong was the focal point of the world. Everywhere, there was Hong Kong fever, and a whole mass of publications on many areas of Hong Kong appeared. Unfortunately, this turned out to be a five-minute fever. After 1997 all that was splendor returned to quietude. Very quickly, everything seemed to have fallen back into silence. (Wong, 2007, pp. 17677).

The years before and after 1997 did witness an unprecedented surge of activity in research and publications on Hong Kong, notable among which was the work of Wong Wang-chi () and his collaborators (see, for example, Wong et al. 1997, Wong 2000). Such work disseminated into the discourse on Hong Kong cultural identity and politics perspectives on the local opened

Part of the research for this chapter is supported by a grant from the General Research Fund, University Grants Council, HKSAR. I would like to thank my colleagues, Janny Leung, Katherine Chen and Chris Hutton for sharing with me their knowledge on bilingualism and the language situation in Hong Kong.

56 Elaine Yee Lin Ho

up by Western post-structuralist and postcolonialist thinking. They critiqued various attempts to translate a globally disseminated theoretical discourse on hybridity (and related terms) into specificities of Hong Kong cultural identity. At the same time, they made sustained efforts to conceptualize a non-essentialized local in terms of the postcolonial paradigm of hybridity. Gesturing towards Hong Kongs colonial past, this discourse often posits hybridity in terms of interwoven Chinese (Zhong) and English (Ying) elements (see Lee in Wong et al., 1997; Chan in Wong et al., 1997; Wong, 2000). But surprisingly, Zhong and Ying rarely refer to actual languages. The silence on this point is surprising for at least three reasons: first, the linguistic turn instantiated in much post-structuralist and postcolonial theorizing; second, the language issue as a nexus of ongoing postcolonial contestation globally; third, and crucially, how Chinese and English, as linguistic media in interaction, inscribe and transcribe the movements of the local as hybrid. The third reason develops a particular urgency in view of the official HKSAR policy of biliteracy (Chinese and English) and trilingualism (Cantonese, Putonghua, English) announced in the chief executives policy address in 1999. The policy address sought to define within a wider aspirational framework measures concerning medium of instruction announced two years earlier, and to legitimize these measures. In 1997, the Medium of Instruction Guidance issued by the Education Department stated that a school should use Chinese as the medium of instruction unless it could demonstrate that its teachers and students were proficient to teach and learn in English. After a year, only 114 of the 411 secondary schools in Hong Kong were designated English medium; others with English medium status had to change to Chinese (Cantonese or Putonghua), and those that had planned to change to English found their plans thwarted. There was immediate outcry and protests from schools, pupils and parents, and their pressure on the government has never slackened in the decade since 1997. Recently, in 2009, the government decided to adopt what it called fine-tuning (), allowing schools to choose which medium of instruction to use and in which subject. This effectively means the abandonment of the 1997 policy and a return to the pre-1997 situation.1 Language policy issues were by no means straightforward before 1997, and the passion they can arouse in the public domain has been repeatedly attested to in the years since the handover. The medium of instruction controversy important though it undoubtedly is has telescoped Hong Kongs complex linguistic geography so that it has become largely visible as a single issue. It has created a situation where public debate over language use becomes excessively focused on oral performance and classroom and pedagogical competency at the expense of other aspects and contexts of language use that biliteracy

Chinese English, English Chinese: Biliteracy and Translation 57

and trilingualism2 involve. Because biliteracy concerns reading and writing rather than speech, it is even more overshadowed, so much so that conceptual discussion of what constitutes biliteracy that can draw upon actual language use in a social domain beyond the classroom rarely merits attention. Until now, the notion of Chinese English hybridity in Hong Kong language use has largely been studied by linguists under the framework of code mixing and code switching.3 Focusing on the spoken language, scholars describe and categorize intralingual features, and inquire into who is or is not bilingual with references to language acquisition and development. Sociolinguists situate intralingual features in relation to different media, social class and larger demographic movements (see Li, 1996; Pennington, 1998).4 But rarely visible in Hong Kong is research in which cultural identity is posited as a conceptual category or a process that language use inscribes and transcribes. Thus until now, studies of cultural identity in Hong Kong have been inflected, on the one hand, by the paradigm of hybridity that seldom deals with issues of languages. On the other hand, studies of bilingual language use in Hong Kong tend to be focused almost exclusively on code mixing or code switching but rarely as a phenomenon of cultural hybridity. In light of this situation, this chapter wishes to study biliteracy or bilingualism not through code mixing but the multifocal lens of translation. Translation studies scholars engage with language as artefact and effect, and theorizing about cross-linguistic and crosscultural encounters. This will help forge connections between biliteracy and cultural identity, and trace how cultural hybridity emerges from the exchange between Chinese and English. The dynamic changes in translation studies in recent decades make its choice even more compelling. Besides having outcomes for translation practice these changes also generate conceptual rethinking that affiliates with critical and cultural theories. Furthermore, translation, as Haun Saussy observes, is one of the metaphors of our time, traversing comparative and world literary studies, discourses on globalization and cosmopolitanism, and media and communication (Saussy, 2008, p. 1). This essay will first give an account of recent translation studies and delineate the critical issues about language and cultural identity that it raises. These issues will then frame detailed discussions of three sets of Hong Kong literary texts in both Chinese and English as instantiations of biliteracy; each of these sets can posit a way of seeing, or a modality, of biliteracy. Translation studies can help disclose the insights of these modalities for both language use and cultural identity. Against the separatist view that assigns mother tongue and native speaker proficiency to languages, this essay explores the three sets of texts as examples of interlingual practice that have different outcomes for cultural identity. Each set of texts locates a particular horizon of possibility

58 Elaine Yee Lin Ho

toward or against which both discussion and uses of English and Chinese vis--vis each other may proceed. The elaborations of these texts as translational language use and cultural identity will also reveal their internal contradictions, and may generate further discussion, adaptation and inventiveness.

Translation
Like other literary and language-based studies, translation as an academic subject has been destabilized by post-structuralisms radical critique of origins. The traditional source-target formulation of translation is founded on the concept of an original or source text in one language, and the assumption that its meaning is transparent and can be reproduced with some exactitude in another language or target system. This places the demands of fidelity and equivalence upon the translator whose responsibility is conceived of as the preservation of the meaning of the original, and whose labour is largely assessed in technical terms. But the absolute power of the original over the translation and translator, in the light of Walter Benjamins critique (The Task of the Translator) and that of post-structuralist thought, has been seriously challenged. Far from faithfully reproducing the original, Maria Tymoczko submits, Translators select some elements of the source text to highlight and preserve , prioritize and privilege some parameters and not others , represent some aspects of the source text partially or fully or others not at all in a translation. By definition, therefore, translation is metonymic: it is a form of representation in which parts or aspects of the source text come to stand for the whole (Tymoczko, 1999b, p. 55). This is tantamount to an acknowledgement that traditional standards of fidelity and equivalence are neither practised nor possible in practice. Earlier, Lawrence Venuti (1992) has challenged originality and equivalence as myths that conceal how translation conforms to existing cultural and social hierarchies. To Venuti, thinking from the traffic of foreign literature into America, traditional translation performs the task of domesticating the foreign, enabling readers to recognize the familiar in the unfamiliar. In shedding a foreign culture of its difference, translation enacts a form of cultural assimilation that is neoimperialistic. Against this practice, Venuti advocates a reconceptualization of translated texts as comprised of multiple discourses and linguistic features that intermix references to the cultural semiotics of both source and reception. In this description of selectivity that Tymoczko would later call metonymic, the translator can devise tactics that resist the impositions of dominant cultural or ideological views. More recently, the Hong Kong translation studies scholar Matthew Leung (2006) has given an account of the ideological turn that follows on from the linguistic and cultural turns in his subject area.

Chinese English, English Chinese: Biliteracy and Translation 59

Germane to my argument is how such recent theorizing articulates the critique of translation to the critique of cultural identity as a function of power. This articulation is captured in postcolonial translation studies and its research into translations complicity with colonial constructions of knowledge and the other (Bassnett and Lefevre, 1990; Bassnett and Trivedi, 1999; Tymoczko, 1999a and b).5 Susan Bassnett has made the crucial conceptual link between translation and colonialisms commitment to the stability and superiority of the original, and historicized it in the context of European imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Europe was regarded as the great Original, the starting point, and the colonies were therefore copies, or translations of Europe, which they were supposed to duplicate. Moreover being copies, translations were evaluated as less than originals, and the myth of the translation as something that diminished the great original established itself (Bassnett and Trivedi, 1999, p. 4). Critics have also shown how the target or translated text in the colonizers language can disorient the indigenous sources semantic compass, and dispossess it of its cultural power (Basnett and Trivedi, 1999; Cheyfitz, 1997; Niranjana, 1992; 2002). In a significant shift of focus to the agency of the colonized, Gentzler and Tymoczko have argued that translation is not simply associated with colonization or oppression, but also with the ability to act upon structures of command, such that translation becomes a means to resist that very colonization or exploitation (2002, p. xvii). One of the most dynamic interflows between translation and postcolonial studies occurs under the sign of hybridity. Michael Cronins description of the translator as floating in an entre-deux (home/away, source language/ target language, mother tongue/non-mother tongue) (2000b, p. 138) strongly resonates of the unstable, ambivalent subjectivities in between cultures and discourses that postcolonial studies theorize and historicize. In Cronins latest study (2006), the translators language-based, practical work is seen as the everyday performance of an intercultural subjectivity. Translation as metonymic and a translational subjectivity as a trope of identity Cronin articulates these two registers of translation discourse as paradigmatic of the contemporary flows connecting local and global. Bermann and Wood have called translation an important border concept in the humanities (2005, p. 5), an allusion to its ability, actual and potential, to traverse and contest disciplinary boundaries (see also Duarte et al., 2006). The critique of origin and equivalence; translations complicity with and resistance to dominant power; translation as hybridizing process, and as the contemporary trope of cross-boundary identities and discourses the multidimensionality of translation studies helps to articulate a conceptual framework for the study of three sets of English-Chinese texts Leung

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Ping-kwans An Old Colonial Building / , Wong Mans Indulgence / , and Tammy Ho Lai-mings Going to My Parents Place on a Crowded Bus and (English title translated by author as My Home; see Ho, 2008). However, only the first set of poems can be considered translations in the conventional sense. The other two are translational in that the multiple perspectives that translation studies have opened up throw light on their thematics, significations, and as tropes of cultural identity that play on the simultaneity and distance of two languages. My readings do not focus on individual writers as biliterates, or their texts as exemplary models that can be reduplicated, or as misprisions to be inveighed against. The point of emphasis is on the sets of texts as modalities of biliteracy that are situated locally and globally. What emerges from the traffic between English and Chinese, the space that conjoins and separates the two languages is the subject of this essays critical inquiry. In attending to the I, the first-person subject positions that mark and is marked by this traffic, the essay studies a discourse of identity generated by the texts in relations that are forged by a literacy that is bilingual and interlingual. The relational dynamic can be discerned at a number of levels simultaneously in content and thematics, as formal equivalence and distantiation of two semiotic systems, and in how biliteracy enables the texts to turn in various directions on the double axes of the local and global. In its referentiality, this I that is elaborated in each set of double language texts develops contemporary significance at a time when language as oral and educational medium dominates public attention, and relations between biliterate language use and cultural identity are rarely studied in Hong Kong.

An Old Colonial Building /

Leung Ping-kwans (Ye si ) An Old Colonial Building / was first written in Chinese in October 1986, and translated into English by Michelle Yeh for the 2002 anthology, Travelling with a Bitter Melon / (pp. 31819, see Figure 4.1).6 In the poems thematics, Hong Kongs history as colonial, fixed in the material form of a building, is dislodged by a postcolonial sensibility and rewritten as an ongoing itinerary of everyday social life and activities. The titular structure is the Main Building of the University of Hong Kong, long regarded as the icon of the universitys status as the oldest higher educational institution in Hong Kong and by the more stringent members of the general public as the unmistakable sign of a colonial institution. Its exterior, a composition of red-brick and neo-classical columns, is of an architectural style replicated in major public buildings that define the urban landscape of the British empire. Construction began in 1910, the year the universitys foundation stone

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was laid; the building survived bomb damage in World War II, and is now one of the few large-scale colonial landmarks remaining and named as Declared Monuments.7 This monumentalism, a function of its colonial-institutional history, often renders invisible the ordinary activities and informal sociality that are the everyday life of the Main Building. It is this everyday life that the poem narrates, as an itinerary of ongoing movement and a passage through shifting visual signs. In the poem, the building as monument is first demolished and then remade. The doubled sense of the building as original the first of its kind in Hong

Figure 4.1 The Two Versions of Leung Ping-kwans Poem

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Kong and being recognized as such and declared monumental is countered by the poems double act of destructuration and recomposition. The building translated, a function of this double act, becomes recognizable only through the fragments of the origin reassembled. But like Walter Benjamins famous broken vessel, this reconfiguration actually serves to undermine further the concept of an origin in its own time and its epistemological authority over all succeeding temporalities. What coordinates the building, the postcolonial, and the everyday is movement, or time and motion, sometimes embodied in a mobile subject for example, in stanza two when the I appears. History is localized in the itinerary of the subject I moving in time; times passage is recalibrated in the subjects movements as he takes apart the buildings original structure and selectively reconfigures it as habitat. Alternatively, as for example in stanza one, the speaking subject is implicit. It seems time and motion itself, rather like that enacted by a moving camera, is passing down corridors, zooming in and out, so that the dust, the shadow, the scaffolds, the repair and renovation work that is going on, the stairs that connect the building with others move in and out of view. The building re-presents itself as serial spaces of everyday signification whose metonymy is the pond of shimmering water with floating signs (ibid., p. 319). The significant function of this cinematic narrative is to identify the time of the buildings dislocation and recomposition with present time the buildings interior is turned inside out in a temporality of present movement. At the same time, the double act is re-performed every time the poem is read, and with every reading, its moment of origin, October 1986, is displaced. Without a beginning or origin, an ending makes no sense: in both its thematics and reading effect, the poem affirms that everyday as translational poeisis is always in the present. This point is made even more explicit in the English translation which is throughout in the present tense. The poem is about beginnings and endings from another point of view. It captures the juncture of colonial end-time, but clearly eschews a nationalist point of view that celebrates a new era in banners or fireworks in the sky. Nor does it see the juncture as the inaugural moment of a community of the local, a bond of you and I as the substance of a realist poetics: In the midst of changes / our thoughts neither evade the ripples nor bend in the breeze. / I know you dont believe in banners or fireworks in the sky. / These broken words of mine dont claim to be realistic / nor are they the centre surrounded by highrises, just a pond / of shimmering water with floating signs.

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(Leung, 2002, p. 318)

Neither colonialism nor nationalism can assert its claim as the source of history reconstituted as everyday Hong Kong life and subjectivity. The poems multidirectional critique of stadial historical time criss-crosses anti-colonial, nationalistic and communitarian discourses. In so doing, its subjectivity skirts nimbly around ethnicized binaries of self and other. The way Leung writes about a colonial building is not identifiably anti-British or anglophilic-nostalgic or conservationist of British colonial heritage. Nor does it imply support for Chinese narratives with their imperative of return to an ethnocultural homeland. The two poems as language performances in Chinese and English confirm its non-ethnicized thematics. Written in Chinese, the poem does not suggest in any way that its language choice is either anglophobic or sinophilic. Language choice has been represented as a political act in the transitional poetics from colonialism to nationalism, as the example of the Kenyan novelist Ngu g wa Thiongo famously argues.8 In Hong Kong, national reversion can be seen as one of the motivations behind the governments 1997 directive to the majority of schools to change to Chinese medium. A decade before 1997, Leung Pingkwans sinophone poetics already eschews an organic bond between indigenous language and nationalist culture. In this respect, it inscribes a specific, local translation as departure and difference rather than similitude from a global postcolonial discourse in which colonial end-time is coeval with the resumption of indigenous culture and language. At the same time, it also transcribes a resistant strain to this discourse in Hong Kongs language and cultural politics in the run-up to 1997. What then of the poems translation into English? Between its first publication date and appearance in translation, the poem straddles pre- and post-1997. In that time, as if going in reverse, it has moved from Chinese to English. Given the poems translational poeisis that I discuss above, what does its actual rendering into English signify? What issues of temporality does this accession of English argue? How does the availability of the poem in English elaborate or problematize its micro-politics of the local? My queries are not about the translation per se. It abides by the rules of fidelity and equivalence; only if one were to fetishize small differences would one see the punctuation added as a possible disruption of the seamless itinerary of mobility the source text foregrounds. From one point of view, the English translation articulates the poems critique of origins and the monumental to a global postcolonial discourse, and

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in so doing, situates the poem in a different horizon from the local. One may well argue that the postcolonial critique is already embedded in the Chinese source text. So the English translation, in rendering the poems postcoloniality as global, is also a form of back translation that draws attention to the poems localized beginnings. The translation also enables the poems entry into a contemporary discourse of world literature conceptualized as boundarycrossing, that contests monumentalized national literatures on the one hand, and on the other, reductive generalizations about nation and culture in positivistic area studies.9 While the Chinese source text represents an alternative horizon of seeing, the translation reconstitutes the poem in yet other horizons. Thus, the poems de-ethnicizing agenda may be renewed as it is studied as an act of transglobal literary performance. Or, if incorporated into a schema of world literature like Franco Morettis, it may be re-ethnicized as specifically Hong Kong in its references to British-colonial and Chinese-national discourses.10 There is the risk that world literature runs of becoming the discourse of anglo-globalism, as Jonathan Arac has warned, and thus, for Leungs translation to become complicit in it. In other words, the poem could be seen to have broken free of the shackles of an earlier colonization only to become resubjected in late modernity to the function of English as a privileged link in the teleological chain of globalisation (Cronin, 2000b, p. 113). Arac posits the contemporary agenda of English and world literature through referencing Edward Saids early work on Joseph Conrad, an agenda that transforms the study of English as it addresses the current conditions of world literature in a state of globality the formal and psychological question of the interdependence of literary and sociological approaches in dealing with how English is at once a national and a world language (for some writers a first and for others a second language) (Arac, 2002, p. 44). Adapting Arac, one can ask: Reading Leungs poem and its translation, how does it conceive of the issue of English as a Hong Kong that is, local if not national language? A second language for Leung and for the many like him who can read the sinophone source text? An everyday language? What the translations grammar usefully makes explicit, as we have seen, is the ever-present nature of the poems itinerary. But it is precisely on this formal point that the poems voicing of what Andreas Huyssen has called an earlier activist imagination of the future is at its most equivocal (Huyssen, p. 5). The translation of Leungs poem from Chinese to English paradoxically brings back the concept of origins, one that the poem so explicitly deconstructs. Indeed, one may say that both the concept of origin and the poem as original are reborn through translation. In this second coming, Chinese is once again prior, the authentic source, and English, the copy a superb copy it may be but one that a reader of Chinese may well dismiss or simply ignore.

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Historicizing this formal logic, as a Hong Kong text, the identity of the local enacted in the poem and its translation speaks not of hybridity but of Chinese as core, primary and the medium of an authentic expressivity and communicative discourse. English, in contrast, is secondary and, insofar as it enables the sinophone subject to enter contemporary globality, utilitarian. Here, translation as an intercultural act also paradoxically enables continued discrimination between Chinese and English in a hierarchy of value literary, conceptual and sociocultural. Arranged along a unilinear trajectory from local to the world, the target text in English continues the decolonizing and deethnicizing itinerary of the Chinese source. Read against each other, however, the appearance of the English rendering of the Chinese text raises the issue not only of complicity with anglo-globalism but also a return to an ethnolinguistic identity as authentic. The point here, I wish to emphasize, is not whether Leungs poems should or should not be translated into English or indeed into any other language. What is at stake is that a pre-1997 poem situated in a denationalizing and de-ethnicizing critique of identity can, through its translation post-1997, be reinscribed into precisely what it critiques. The implications are profound for it argues that biliteracy, instantiated as literal translation from one language to another, is a double and ambivalent act: an act of departure from and of reversion to an origin. If English is indeed the lingua franca of current globalization, it is also the language by which the worlding of Hong Kong takes place.11 But this worlding through English is also emphatically an affirmation of Hong Kongs original Chineseness. Thus access to and being accessible through both English and Chinese do not, and cannot, be automatic indicators of Hong Kongs cultural hybridity and cosmopolitanism.

Indulgence /in Between Two Worlds /

Leungs Chinese poem and its English translation appear as parallel texts in the 2002 collection, an appearance that creates a simulacrum of parity and simultaneity between them and, by indirection, the two languages. Publication in parallel texts is most often associated with translation practice. However, as a form of self-and-other-representation, it can have multiple ramifications for identity discourse. What I wish to speculate on next is how in parallel texts a translational subjectivity is made visible without invoking the hierarchies of origin-copy that literal translation puts in place. At this point my chapter ruptures from or in De Certeaus words, enters into a relation of indebtedness and rejection (De Certeau, 1988, p. 2) with translation studies.

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To further probe parallel texts as biliterate modality, I would like to discuss the poem Indulgence / ; it was published in 1956 in a volume of poems in parallel English-Chinese texts called Between Two Worlds / by Wong Man ()12 (see Figure 4.2). In its content and thematics, Indulgence can be positioned in the genealogy of an anti-colonial critique traceable in Leung Ping-kwans poem and the 1997 discourse on hybrid English Chinese identity. The poem postulates two nations England, China in structural terms, and delineates their opposition. Each of the four stanzas places side by side momentous events in China and the recreational pursuits of bourgeois English life. The epic versus the pastoral, or the dynamic of national upheaval versus the rhythm of a nation at leisure the persona stands poised between these two contrary conceptions of the national, committed to neither. He is intelligent enough to perceive the historical irony this dual perspective generates the two very different lifechoices it proffers but as a spectator of both, he reduces them to the same level in his consciousness. Thus, reading about the floods in China is no different from watching cricket at the Oval; admiring the Chinese revolutionaries is as enjoyable as the performance of an Edwardian actress; the Chinese warlords are like rugby players; and finally, the satisfaction of hearing news of modern progress on the Mainland is like the satiety of tea in the comfort of a Hong Kong salon. Bourgeois English lifestyles flow into the anglicized rituals of colonial Hong Kong, in an imperialized habitus whose outlook on global historical and social transformation is as complacent as it is trivializing. The interiority of the colonial subject is laid bare in his self-justifications in each stanza, and at precisely the moment in-between the lines on China and England O put off studies till another day; One must get rid of those Manchus of course; O those important lessons better wait; Good show of course. The subject in his habitual procrastination takes shape as a symptomatic expression of colonial psychology as trivializing fugue. In 1956, anglophone and sinophone groups in Hong Kong were almost completely segregated, and biliteracy in literary writing the rarest phenomenon.13 Publishing in Chinese alongside English institutes a kind of parity between the two languages, and can be seen to foreground the claims of an ethnonational identity and affiliation depressed by colonialism. Also, the bilingual gesture enables the poems anti-colonial critique to be accessible to both minority anglophone and majority sinophone readers.14 But arguably, as biliterate modality, the poem in parallel texts is far more radical than its thematics and contemporary positioning would allow. The parallel texts deliver one poem in two languages but there are no dates in the collection that identify and differentiate the texts as source and target as there are in Leungs

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Figure 4.2 Wong Mans Indulgence/.

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collection. There is also no available biographical or textual information within the collection or elsewhere in the minimalist archival references to Wong Man that enables a dating of the two texts and institutes a source-target distinction.15 In other words, the parallel texts do not show that the English version is prior and the Chinese text secondary which may be designed to increase its ethnic Chinese readership and mass appeal. Nor do they show the reverse which may suggest an alternative move of taking a Chinese anti-colonial critique into the very system of English, a kind of empire-writes-back through translation move. Wong Mans poem, registering multiple subject positions and temporalities, will always exist in two languages. The two texts cannot be situated in a unilinear movement from one semiotic system either one to the other but need be moving with each reading and rereading toward and apart from each other in simultaneity. Or enacting an immobility, an impasse. The identity of the poem as utterance in two languages is its sameness and difference, a sameness and difference that invite but also resist both hybridity and synthesis. From this perspective, its identity as biliterate performance cannot be conceptualized in terms of self-other, self-othering, othering self. Indeed, it is arguable whether the issue of identity emerging from a binary or hierarchical formulation however constituted of self and other, English and Chinese, can have any relevance at all. In the absence of dates, a reading of the parallel texts must necessarily focus on their Chinese English simultaneity. To say this is not to deny that there are two language systems, each with its own formal logic and culturalized semiotics. What does not arise is a subjectivity constituted of an origin in a linguistic code and that is divided against itself in being subjected to an alien code. At the same time, there is no sign of a subject constituted by its appropriation of an alien code into indigenous compass. Seen from this perspective, the subject of the poem as utterance is not anglophilic-sinophobic or sinophilic-anglophobic but simultaneously Chinese English, English Chinese. It must be posited as necessarily in two languages with no self-other, hierarchical, core-peripheral or primary-secondary discriminations. In 1997, the governments decision to make Chinese the medium of instruction in the majority of Hong Kong schools was consistent with the nationalistic language policies that mark the inauguration of many postcolonial states. In an irredentist climate, English bore the stigma of colonialism, and yet also continued to be claimed as a Hong Kong language and the point of distinction between Hong Kong as world city and other indigenous-language urban zones on the Chinese mainland and elsewhere in the region. As this chapter is written, the governments recent fine-tuning policy on medium

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of instruction has clearly not been able to manage public discontent.16 Amid the ongoing contest between official directed and school- and parent-centred actions to shape language policies, a Chinese English or anglophone sinophone simultaneity posits a conceptual challenge to modal transformation, a challenge that situates the two languages in a space of parity and as systems of formal exchange that predicate Hong Kong subjectivity and identity.

Going to My Parents Place on a Crowded Bus and (My Home)

Going to My Parents Place on a Crowded Bus Im sandwiched by two unattractive men on a Citybus to the land of Sky and Water. An hours crossroad journey from one home to another Outside: the metamorphosis of high-rise glass buildings to fragile trees. Inside: ten pairs of eyes staring at my breasts involuntarily pressed against the back of a seat. My lungs absorb enough foul-smelling air recycled from peoples breath to choke a fatal enemy. Dignity I sacrifice for several hours with my family. (Ho, 2007)

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(Ho, 2008)17 Tammy Ho Lai-mings My Parents Place and(My Home): the two titles set out the poems cognate relations that their content and first person perspectives elaborate. The titles signify two temporalities that are continuous, contiguous but also discrete; between my parents home and my home is the transition from childhood to adulthood. At the nexus of the poems contemplation of transition is place: Tin Shui Wai (), apparent to the reader of the Chinese poem but veiled by the literal translation the land of Sky / and Water in the English poem. A new town in the northwest of the Hong Kong region, Tin Shui Wai is where the I grew up; it is where her parents live (in the English poem), and where she still does and calls home (in the Chinese poem). The Chinese poem invokes the memory of first arrival in the familys

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public housing flat, and childhood moments spent in the company of younger sisters. Place is also everyday: both poems begin with the familiar journey of an urban Hong Kong commuter and are crowded with vivid details so that the self, as it reflects on its own situation, is also unfolding in relation to its multiple familiar environments, past and present. What is apparent and critiqued in the Chinese poem is the social stigma that has become attached to the name Tin Shui Wai in Hong Kong. It is the city of sadness ( ), the tragic city ( ), populated by poor families ( ), where family tragedies one after another ( ) have been widely publicized by a media hungry for scandal ( ).18 None of this is on view in the English poem, displaced by the lyrical land of Sky / and Water that transforms both family and place into pastoral idyll at the end of the first-persons commute, and makes the sacrifice, that is, the acute indignities of the trip, bearable. (Or is it the family who demands the sacrifice?). From their different narratorial vantages, both poems posit family as place and the family in place. The English poem underlines the emotional logic of sacrifice invoked against everyday depredations on the womans self. In the Chinese poem, the negativity of this logic disappears as family and kinship enable a counter-narrative of the self to the oppressive discourse of Tin Shui Wais urban angst. In narrating its relations with myriad Hong Kong others, the I as Hong Kong subject emerges, a hybridized construct of lived experience and linguistic artefact. The poems acknowledge this emergence, implicitly in the English version, and much more self-consciously in the Chinese:

who wants to listen to stories the lower the fall the higher the tv ratings mine not tragic no rise and fall still has to be told (/ still has to tell) addictive autobiography (/autobiography as a kind of addiction) [we] talk about ourselves so [we] rest (/ die) content [youre] not narcissistic (/ self-enamoured) [youre] not modern (/ a modern person) (Translation mine)19 Furthermore, the movements that identify and separate the two poems also suggest that the I may have different addressees in mind. This goes beyond

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the obvious point that readers who are monoliterate will get an impression of Tin Shui Wai and the first-person persona very different from those who can read both poems. In the English poem, the I becomes highly conscious of itself as a body sexualized by the others gaze, and invaded by the others breath. This is contrasted with the renaturalization produced by the subjective gaze as high-rise/glass building is metamorphosed to fragile green trees. In this movement, the English poem has translated one womans commute that begins locally (particular and in Hong Kong) to an experience that can be generally recognized by women urban commuters anywhere. In contrast, the Chinese poem is more thickly localized: it imbricates childhood and family with the adverse perceptions of Tin Shui Wai circulating within Hong Kong. To readers of the English poem, these perceptions do not pertain, not least because the land of Sky / and Water and the experiential and narrated I can be discerned without any knowledge of Tin Shui Wai as place. That the Chinese poem appears addressed to readers for whom Tin Shui Wai has specific historically situated meanings is reinforced by the ending: the new year is coming trust (/ believe) me there will be firecrackers not every family has to be sad (/ wants sadness) (Translation mine) The implicit you addressed in(trust/believe me) can include actual residents of Tin Shui Wai and/or an imagined community of Hong Kong Chinese readers for whom the new town has become synonymous with blighted families. The poem may circulate in the sinophone world outside Hong Kong but there, its effect as local will not deliver the same impact, and it will be more like the English poem. In other words, the poems generate different affective communities among whom the name Tin Shui Wai comes replete with or depleted of local content. In their different readerships, the two poems, as biliterate performances, are also diglossic; the Chinese English languages set up a traffic between biliteracy and diglossia. The poems map the two cultural geographies, external and internal, of Hong Kong writing but the relation between them is not a movement from local to global or vice versa, or local and global arranged in binary, hierarchical or equivalent order. Instead, the poems inscribe and transcribe the traffic between the two geographies as linguistic, or more precisely, as predicated on the strategic manipulations of biliteracy and diglossia. The I in both poems may begin from the same nexus of local origin: family, childhood, Tin Shui Wai,

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everyday. But the I that emerges from both poems has departed from these origins; through a biliterate diglossic practice which is both communicative and aesthetic artefact, it develops multiple resonances in different discursive encounters. In positioning Tammy Hos poems as the third in the three sets of texts, it is not my intention to give them any special privilege as contemporary though they may seem so because of their investment in a rhetoric of identity performance that has enjoyed recent currency. Each of the sets is modal but not singular; intermodality can be posited, to adapt Hayot et al., in terms of a chiasmus, the old made present in the now, the now justified and given value by its structuring relation to [the] past (2008, p. ix). At this point, biliteracy exceeds reading and writing to affirm its end in poeisis and self- and world-making. The discussion in this chapter focused on three actual sets of Chinese-English texts in Hong Kong and their different ramifications as biliterate language practice and performance. Taking its cue from translation studies, the discussion of these texts considers criteria of equivalence as well as their displacement. It explores proximity and distantiation between the two languages at a number of levels: from the practical level of language use and effects to the metalinguistic critique of the discourses of origin and power as they operate in culture. As tropes of cultural identity, these biliterate language acts speak of encounters with forces that shape individuals and communities and connect them with others globally. The three acts co-exist in contemporary Hong Kong, and as modalities of biliteracy, they present tactical advantages that demand far greater attention than the controversy over medium of instruction can comprehend or allow.

5
Louise Ho and the Local Turn: The Place of English Poetry in Hong Kong
Douglas Kerr*

The year 2009 saw the publication by Hong Kong University Press of Incense Tree: Collected Poems of Louise Ho, a book by Hong Kongs leading English-language poet. The consecration of the poets work by publication by an academic press says something about the institution of literature in English in Hong Kong, but so does the fact that the title refers to a tree, aquilaria sinensis, whose fruit produces the incense that gave Hong Kong its Chinese name (incense port), but is today, as the title poem says, an endangered species.1 The book contains work from three earlier publications, as well as a substantial body of new poems, from a writing career spanning five decades. The opening poem is entitled Hong Kong Riots 1, 1967, and the last poem, set as its title says only The Other Day, is about struggles of reorientation in Ad hoc Australia, a landscape that seems to the poet in exile to lack the landmarks of culture and history necessary to bring it into visibility. Sun scorched land lost / Purblind / I lose / My cardinal points. The story that unfolds between those riots and that reorientation is a poetic record unique in English, a Hong Kong story of colonization, decolonization, exile and diaspora and many returns, happy and unhappy. Among the new poems in the collection is one called About Turn. Turning is always interesting to poets. The turn of the verse at the end of a line constitutes the visible difference between poetry and prose. Poetry works through a series

This is a revised and expanded version of an essay, Locating Louise Ho: The Place of English Poetry in Hong Kong, in Douglas Kerr, Q. S. Tong and Wang Shouren (eds), Critical Zone 3: A Forum for Chinese and Western Knowledge (Hong Kong and Nanjing: Hong Kong University Press and Nanjing University Press, 2008), pp. 1536.

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of linguistic figures or tropes, a term deriving from the Greek word for turn. Poetic metaphor is metamorphic, turning one thing into another. Poetry is also, like Homers Odysseus, polytropic, many-turning, both inventive and devious. The poets craft is always a bit disreputable, like table-turning or turning a trick The truest poetry is the most feigning, in Shakespeares words, and The turn of a verse / a sleight of hand go together, as this poem shows. Turning can be creative, it can disclose new possibilities, but we are also right to be suspicious of turning, and being turned and turned again can turn the head. About Turn is one of a number of poems in which Louise Ho reflects about poetry itself. But the trope of turning and being turned also turns out to be a way of talking about the context of the poetry, that of Hong Kongs return to China. The turn of a verse A sleight of hand Two nations Each taking turns To turn us around Leaving us With many a confounding turn

Here the balance seems to shift between a creative turning, and a deceptive turn practised by two nations on a helpless victim. The poem recalls the widespread sense that in the negotiations between Britain and China to decide the future of Hong Kong, Hong Kong people themselves were of little account: nothing much turned on their opinions or actions, before or after the return. The poem concludes: In the end We turned inside out And that was the end Of all that turning

To be turned inside out means to be completely bamboozled or tricked. Of course it could mean to be eviscerated. But perhaps in the jaunty rhythms of the poems ending, and the active voice of the verb here (We turned) is another possibility, which reactivates the creative and poetic resonances of turning. At a moment of crisis in its history a community may turn inwards to discover a new sense of itself, before turning outward again to face the world. The unexpected result of being given its marching orders About turn! might be Hong Kongs discovery of where it stands, its own identity and difference, its location.

Louise Ho and the Local Turn: The Place of English Poetry in Hong Kong 77

This chapter is about the intersection between history and the local in the English poetry of Louise Ho.

Three Locations
Louise Shew-wan Ho was born in Hong Kong, spent some of her childhood in French-speaking Mauritius, returned with her family to Hong Kong, went to university, and later taught English at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She now spends most of her time in Australia. Here is one of her poems that is a favourite of anthologists. Home to Hong Kong A Chinese Invited an Irishman To a Japanese meal By the Spanish Steps In the middle of Rome Having come from Boston On the way home.

This is not a poem of intellectual complexity or emotional intensity. Its language is neither original nor beautiful. What it does is to tell a lively story about a Chinese cosmopolitanism, apparently available to Hong Kong people, although still, in the 1980s when the poem was written, not much more than a dream to most mainland Chinese. It builds a cumulative structure that resembles that of a joke. The act of invitation narrated in its main verb is one that places the inviter in the position of host at home, wherever the invitation is actually issued. It is a cosmopolitan illocution. Here is a life of international friendship, of eclectic taste, of frictionless mobility between scholarly, spiritual and commercial centres, old world and new, West and East. The poem, like the traveller, is in circulation, beginning and ending at home, with the only endrhyme anticipating the bump of arrival, the return to the starting place, laden with each lines trophy of experience or travellers tale. What could be more desirable, simpler or more fun? Home underwrites the poem, as homecoming underwrites the travelling. Local belonging is the warrant for global mobility and gives it shape. The poem first appeared in Louise Hos collection Local Habitation (1994). It used to be quite common to meet a disbelief that Hong Kong could be thought of as home. It was a city of exiles, populated by people who had come, for the most part, from the mainland of China in search of business opportunities

78 Douglas Kerr

or political refuge, and the wind that had blown them to the colony might just as easily carry them further in due course, to other cities in Southeast Asia, to Australia or North America. Hong Kong was a transit camp of the Chinese diaspora, a city of sojourners, economic migrants and refugees, and not a place to develop sentimental ties. From the point of view of the Chinese mainland, it was hard to imagine people feeling at home in a modern Chinese city that, however rich, differed from other Chinese cities in being the colonial possession of a foreign power, won by force legitimated by unequal treaty. Besides, since the signing of the last of those treaties in 1897, the colonys days were exactly numbered. Hong Kong in the past had not participated in the narrative of the Chinese revolution; it had no future as itself. Anomalously insulated, for a while, from Chinese history, to observers in the Mainland it often seemed culturally empty too, a place without an inner life of its own, where materialism was the only language. As for its non-Chinese population, this was essentially expatriate, consisting of people who after a contract or a career would take their money and go home. There were reasons why people might want to live in Hong Kong, but who could really belong to such a place, or wish to? And yet there were more than sufficient conditions of difference to constitute Hong Kong as a locality, its own place, a place of affective investment, to know and belong to. The closing of the border in 1950 (hitherto there had been free traffic of people to and from mainland China) drew a line between the colony and the Peoples Republic and turned the Chinese population of Hong Kong into a settled one (Tsang, 2004, p. 181). If Hong Kong sometimes worried that it might be a cultural desert, it suffered no Cultural Revolution. The colonial government, certainly not democratic, was subject to the rule of law. By the early 1970s a majority of the population was local-born. Prompted by its alarm at the repercussions of the upheavals over the border in the form of serious disturbances on the Hong Kong streets in the mid-1960s, the colonial government actively began to encourage an already emergent sense of a Hong Kong identity, crystallizing round indigenous popular music, film and television, and campaigns of civic responsibility, and articulated, for the most part, in Cantonese (see Turner and Ngan, 1995). This might seem a classic case of the emergence of identity out of difference in this case a difference from both the colonial and the national culture that in turn differentiates Hong Kong from most other examples of postcolonial identity formation. One apocalyptic narrative of this development has it emerging, in the decade or so before 1997, only to be overtaken and swallowed up by the renationalizing of Hong Kong in Chinas resumption of sovereignty (Abbas, 1998). The mayfly existence of a Hong Kong subjectivity, in this telling of the story, appears poignantly only in the fleeting moment of its disappearance. It appears, to be lost. Not surprisingly,

Louise Ho and the Local Turn: The Place of English Poetry in Hong Kong 79

the post-1997 morphology of the phenomenon had proved difficult to descry (see Erni, 2001; Fung, 2001). The in-betweenness, and the vulnerability, of colonial Hong Kong is the subject of Louise Hos poem Living on the Edge of Mai Po Nature Reserve. The location, in Hong Kongs northern New Territories near the Chinese border, is quite specific, and the scene opens in the mode of pastoral. This garden this stream these marshes A bird sanctuary among the mangroves, Herons perch egrets glide, The hills gather from afar.

The place of nature is protected from history; nothing happens here. The scene is set with no verbs at all, then traversed by the intransitive activities of herons, egrets and hills. This first impression is deceptive, however. Within sight of this enclave are shadows of city blocks, and at night a long row of lights like jewels marks the electrified high fence separating the colony from mainland China. The line of lights written across the landscape is also a sentence, in the future tense, pointing to the reclamation of Hong Kong, and the gathering of the hills in the first stanza starts to emerge into transitivity as the landscape reveals its animate and political meanings (for to gather means to cluster, but also to scoop up). The poem ends like this. The horizon closes in like two long arms. We are surrounded, China holds us in an immense embrace. Merely the lie of the land.

This is the first appearance in the poem of us, the locals of this locality, who now become visible as the passive victims, or beneficiaries, of being where they are. This edgy poem about a local place twists and turns on itself with a restless ambivalence very characteristic of the divided state of mind (we might call it a structure of feeling, if structure does not sound too fixed and solid) in Hong Kong in the years leading up to the transfer of sovereignty in 1997, years when the nation over the border impended increasingly over everyday life. The horizon the future is felt as claustrophobic, but may also be sheltering. Surrounded is ominous, but embrace is reassuring but then an immense embrace seems out of scale for a gesture of maternal solace, and is, besides, not something open to dissent. Who wants, or could refuse, to be held in an immense embrace? The tropes applied to the inanimate topography of the scene begin to stir into a story, and a disquieting one; living on the edge of Mai Po Nature Reserve is indeed living on the edge. The poems last line appears to move in to

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defuse the situation, and disarm the tropes of surrounding and enclosing and holding these were after all only a manner of speaking, it seems, and the poem itself is simply a description of landscape, nothing more. Merely the lie of the land. The last line, like the first, is verbless and static. This after all, it seems to say, is just a poem about scenery. It is a picture, not a history. But this classic dmenti puts the preceding lines, we might say, under erasure, without expunging them. It contradicts what comes before, but a contradiction is not a resolution. The ending does not take the edge off the poem. There is, besides, the worrying ambiguity of the lie of the land, a turn of phrase that could indicate simply topography this is just the way the contours run, no reason to read anything more into it but also contains a hint of duplicity, of lying (see Empson, 1972, pp. 12759).2 And if the look of the landscape is misleading, what is misleading about it: the claustrophobia, or the embrace? Denial, a classic defensive trope, often draws attention towards what it wants not to see. Thus the poem lifts up its eyes to the Chinese horizon, but shrinks from it at the same time. There is, however, a world elsewhere, and a third poem, Migratory, reaches for it uncertainly. I floated alone in my kingsize bed I steered between abysses To my left 1997 To my right 1788 I hugged the shorelines Crossed the high seas And drifted here Landing on terra firma Terra Australis.

This is different from the sociable globetrotting of Home to Hong Kong, for this time the journey is isolating, alienating and sounds dangerous, even in fantasy form. It is the journey of exile, and despite the new immigrants dutifully taking note of new shapes new sounds / And endless possibilities, the glance is drawn backwards, inevitably, to locations left behind. At first the heart longs For the absent familiar Cosmopolitan Hong Kong Its chaos, its anomalies, its power Or England, my other world Or some landmark somewhere

Louise Ho and the Local Turn: The Place of English Poetry in Hong Kong 81

A villa by Serlio on the way To Erbusco, outside Milan Or family, relatives In New York, San Francisco Vancouver, Toronto Then, like lightning The shock of the void struck.

In this drifting sentence the poem turns for consolation to a nostalgic reverie of being once more at home in the world, in an easy drift of memory across favourite places (Just reeling off their names is ever so comfy, to appropriate Auden), a sort of global freedom like that enjoyed in Home to Hong Kong. But that earlier cosmopolitanism was anchored and guaranteed by the local groundedness from which it departed, to which it could always return; and here in Migratory, as the title had warned, that groundedness is no longer a given. Hence the interruption like lightning that shows up that catalogue of geographical alternatives as empty air. The shock of the void struck the historic tense is an ungrammaticality, incongruent with the present tense in which the sentence started, yet functioning paradoxically to drag the mind back to the present, from the absent familiar to the alien here and now, to having to live in history. Meanwhile, Australia in Migratory is not so much a place as the loss of place, a dislocation. This may seem unfair after all The neighbours are kind, the dogs are friendly / The land is veritable Eden but these amenities can only be enjoyed by someone who is really there, who has successfully negotiated the enigma of arrival and made landfall. Space-tost, land-lost I float, I drift, I hover Cannot settle Cannot come to stay

Hovering, a recurrent idea in Hos poems, is not bad in itself, but here it indicates an incomplete exchange of places, one land lost (as in The Other Day, Sun scorched land lost) and a new one not yet inhabited. For the cosmopolitan the globe is mapped by pathways, relationships, histories, but the wouldbe migrant is adrift over a landscape without known landmarks, the subject pronoun helplessly repeating itself only to state its lack of agency and purchase. The southern landscape is seen as an existential void, and the migrant needs to embark on the discursive task of knowing it Measure the land / Foot by foot / Step by step so as to acquire the weightiness to Sink the ankles /

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Touch the ground / Walk normally. It does not seem an extravagant ambition. Measures, and feet, belong to the language of poetry as well as to that of surveying, for poetry too is a form of knowledge, both a cartography and a way of asserting tenancy in a place claiming it, and settling it, hopefully without the bitterness these actions inherit from Australian history. There is, of course, an Australian precedent for the discourse of inhabitation that this poem enacts or promises: These are my songlines: Claiming by declaiming Over my land O land, walk with me May the dust settle Wherever I may stand.

Migration is a turn without a return. But relocation makes possible, though it does not guarantee, a new and much more difficult kind of freedom, one that is not given but made. In Migratory we see it establish a narrow and precarious foothold, where the home left behind is replaced by a more abstract location, a modality and subject position, wherever the subject pronoun makes a stand. But in this move, Migratory is paradigmatic of Louise Hos poetry as a whole. For the Hong Kong poet of her generation, who has known a Hong Kong colonized, internationalized, globalized, decolonized and renationalized, locality a place to belong to has always been something to be created, brought into being, through writing. Writing is a way of finding your feet. One thing that makes Louise Ho particularly interesting is that she finds hers in English.

The Place of English

Trade and empire spread European languages around the globe. No one thinks it odd that Borges wrote in Spanish the former imperial language is the national language in Argentina. Nor is it mystifying to find a great Indian writer like Narayan using English, an option that was a way of reaching a large readership of his own countrymen in a multilingual nation, besides others around the world. But Hong Kong is a Chinese city, full of Chinese people, and there is a Chinese language, with, of course, an incomparable literary tradition. Why articulate a modern Hong Kong Chinese experience in a residual colonial English language brought to the China coast with the traders, the missionaries and the gunboats of empire? In Hong Kong it was never, to be sure, a simple choice or contention between a local language and that of a distant imperial authority (see Hutton, 2006). For one thing, there was already an imperial, Mandarin, language in China.

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Cantonese, incidentally fostered and promoted by Western missionaries and ideologues as a regional identity independent of the Chinese empire, became the language of the local, the communitys mother tongue. Cantonese was the organic alternative to the colonial language, and both played a more important role in forming the territorys sense of itself than (first) the imperial and (after the Revolution) the state or national language of China. In such circumstances it cannot be adequate to claim that Chinese is the local language in Hong Kong. Further, the existence of a literature in English in Hong Kong, however tenuous, at least makes it a little harder to think of the place in terms of the hoary binarism of West and East.3 Finally, with the anticipation of renationalization in 1997 and now in its aftermath, there has been a very significant increase in Putonghua speakers, and Putonghua use, in Hong Kong. Cantonese however remains overwhelmingly the language of common speech and popular culture, but the fate of Cantonese was, for some, one focus of an anxiety about the consequences of a homogenizing renationalization. So we have the apparent anomaly of Louise Ho, in Flags and Flowers, using English to make a plea for Cantonese after the handover, in what looks very like a version of a trope belonging to the nativist phase of postcolonial discourse. Change our flag as you must / But let us keep our speech, the qualities of that local speech being the expression of a locality but also since it is believed that Cantonese is phonologically closer to older forms of Chinese an important bearer of an ethnic tradition. Our local voices Our nine tones Our complex homophones Our own configurations of meaning Our own polite formalities Our resonances from the Hans of old.

What does it mean for a Hong Kong Chinese writer to use English? The more common postcolonial scenarios do not apply: English is not the national language in Hong Kong, nor a linguistic hegemon threatening to engulf a relatively weak indigenous language, nor the only medium available whereby a local writer might hope to reach a larger readership. English is, to be sure, a world language in a way that Chinese at the moment is not, and the literaryhistorical paradigm influentially proposed by Pascale Casanova in The World Republic of Letters may help us to think about this, if only up to a point. Casanova argues that what she calls world literary space is now organized in terms of an opposition between an autonomous literary and cosmopolitan pole on one side, and a heteronomous political and national pole on the other.4 Her contention

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that the latter is composed of relatively deprived literary spaces at early stages of development can scarcely apply to either the traditions or the institutions of Chinese writing; however, there is more potential explanatory power in her view that the internal configuration of each national space is similarly bipolar in structure, and shaped by a rivalry between what she calls national writers (who embody a national or popular definition of literature) and international writers (who uphold an autonomous conception of literature) (Casanova, 2004, p. 108). International writers in Casanovas sense are those who, often in exile, seek greater freedom for their work in a turn to a common universal measure of literary value, authorized in a denationalized universal capital, such as Paris, through metropolitan aesthetic models, publishing networks and critical functions.5 The turn to the metropolitan and universal is a turn away from the peripheral and local. What clearer sign of this intent than to write not in a national language like Chinese but in an international language like English?6 To assess how useful this is as a way of thinking about Hong Kong writing in English, it is instructive to consider a neighbouring case, that of the body of English-language poetry written by Malaysian Straitsborn Chinese, principally Ee Tiang Hong and Wong Phui Nam. These writers grew up in the ethnically and culturally distinct Baba communities of the peninsula, but fell foul of the nationalist myth of the Bumiputra (son of the soil) promoted in postcolonial Malaysia, assisted by a traditional resentment of the commercially successful Chinese minority and a vigorous promotion of Bahasa Malaysia, displacing English in education and public life as the national language. Some writers, notably the poet Muhammad Haji Salleh, gave up working in English to devote themselves to nationalist cultural projects and the Malay language. Others, like Ee and Wong, though Malayan born and in Ees case Straits Chinese of the seventh generation, experienced the distinctly cold shoulder of Malaysian Malaysia. The alienation of the Baba Malay, as in the case of Ee Tiang Hong, writes the Singaporean scholar Rajeev S. Patke, shows how the political idea of autonomy was fetishized along exclusionary, nativist and fundamentalist lines (Patke, 2003, p. 73). And as language policies in Malaysia drained English out of the national life, the English-using poets who stayed on found themselves increasingly marginalized and beleaguered in terms of readership, publication and sponsorship. Wong Phui Nam, whose first language was Cantonese, reflects gloomily on the predicament of the writer of verse in English in Malaysia in his essay Out of the Stony Rubbish, with its titles quotation from Eliot flagging its affiliations with a distant metropolis, where furthermore Ways of Exile, the book containing the essay, was published (Wong, 1993). The rivalry Casanova finds between internationally oriented writers and those involved in the nationbuilding project could hardly be more clear-cut than in this instance.

Louise Ho and the Local Turn: The Place of English Poetry in Hong Kong 85

Wong Phui Nam finds a theme in the traditional ways and minority practices including the scant inheritance brought from China by his impoverished migrant ancestors (Wong, 1993, p. 134) now disregarded or worse in the homogenizing vulgarity of a new nation, and becoming unavailable, lost to decay and exile. The cast of his own literary identity in English is itself part of the tragedy, for writing in English not only limited his readership at home and might even be construed, as Alan Durant says, as a form of cultural dissent in nationalist Malaysia (Durant, 1993, p. 150),7 but also seems not to have compensated him with a sense of being at home in the other language. In internal exile in the culture of his own country, his facility in English does not provide him with a passport to citizenship of the world, for the history inscribed in it keeps reminding him that it belongs to somebody else.
To internalize a language is to allow it and the broad assumptions that the community of its native speakers hold about the universe to become a part of oneself. The non-English writer who writes in English and has no similar recourse to his own language is thus, in allowing English to take over his affective faculties, in a very deep sense a miscegenated being, very much and yet not an heir to the tradition of Shakespeare and Milton. The language he uses to name, organize and express his experience of the life around him removes him from that life and, whether he is aware of it or not, he becomes a stranger cut off and always looking in as an outsider into that life. In that sense, the more facility he has with the adopted language, the more unauthentic he becomes. Culturally and so, spiritually, he is induced to place himself in exile from England and be cast out of an imagined Eden. (Wong, 1993, p. 140)

The intellectual integrity of Wong Phui Nams position is due the greatest respect, and so is the creativity of his response to this dilemma, a process he describes as involving a flooding out of English words with ones own immediate apprehension of the world to clean out their traditional English connotations whenever they intrude inappropriately into the texture and feel of the writing (Wong, 1993, p. 141). But having said this, it seems also important to say that Wongs dilemma is not one that can be generalized as an affliction of all English-language writers in what Casanova calls peripheral literary spaces. Certainly the language has to be adapted to express local experience and the creativity of such transformations by postcolonial writers is by now a truism of the literary history of English but the distance between that experience and the habits and conventions established in the metropolitan tradition need not necessarily burden the writer with fears of inauthenticity. To turn to English does not have to entail turning ones back on ones own place, nor is it always necessary, desirable or possible to purge English of its accumulated connotations.

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There are several reasons for this. First, what Wong describes as the native tradition of English poetry never had a stable centre, or rather its centre was always subject to continuous shifts under the pressure of revolutions and reformations in idiom and subject matter from various points of what had been the periphery (Dryden and Wordsworth being as revolutionary, in this narrative, as Robert Burns or Gertrude Stein), a process that Malaysian or Caribbean or Hong Kong English poets honour and continue. Second, the character of local poetry in English is not just the product of the agon of the peripheral poet with the metropolitan, formerly colonial, language. Rather, as Bruce Clunies Ross has shown in an important essay, it is marked by the complex linguistic interactions of the local scene itself, and these may include several varieties of English as well as different forms of indigenous speech and writing. It is these, says Clunies Ross, and not the imperially transposed English heritage, which impel the creation of poetic language (Clunies Ross, 2004, p. 312). Third, Wong Phui Nams frustration at being, as a poet in English, a stranger cut off and always looking in as an outsider into [the life around him] is perhaps well answered by Louise Ho herself in her observation that [l]iterary language is an alienated language, anyway (Ho, 2002, p. 175). A poet is always in some sense a stranger. Formally and rhetorically and institutionally too poetic writing is already apostatic, standing aside; though it must be rooted in ordinary discourse it is also a divergence from it, and would not otherwise be poetry. Louise Ho appears quite content to work with a language that might be thought a colonial residue, or a cargo of inappropriate and distorting associations, without seeking to purge it of its traditions, which on the contrary she is quite ready to make use of, or to sport with. At times she uses Cantonese words or sounds within her English poems (as in the macaronic Jamming, with its carnivalesque Cantonese nonsense-refrain, geeleegulu),8 and describes one of her goals as the creation of a space where the English literary language expresses as well as is incorporated into the local ethos, thus becoming almost a tertium quid, but which remains at the same time definitely English (Ho, 2002, p. 176). At the same time, while certainly oriented outward to international readers and outlets, she is from beginning to end a poet of Hong Kong experience and history. And hers is not the kind of work readily harnessed to nation-building projects or a national moral and aesthetic agenda far from it nor is it shaped by a rejection of local aesthetic and linguistic practices, especially as instantiated in Cantonese. The poem Well-Spoken Cantonese, in Local Habitation, describes an eloquent man, and ends like this: His modulated resonance Creates a civilized space

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Or a proper silence Which was not there Before he spoke.

The medium of written English and the subject of Cantonese speech collaborate, as it were, to make a civilized space. Language builds the city. The Chinese-language Hong Kong poet Leung Ping-kwan tells a story about a proposed book of poems and photographs (the latter by Lee Ka-sing), on the theme of home, which never saw the light. It was to have been about what happened in China in 1989. Squeezed out of publication space by the publishers failure of nerve or the requirements of the market, Leungs poems were in danger of becoming homeless. But later he worked with the American poet Gordon Osing on turning them into English, so that these poems of mine, which had found no chance of publication in Chinese, were able to move into what looked like a temporary home in the space provided by a foreign language (Leung, 1998, p. 89).9 It was an important moment in the establishment of Leungs wider reputation. Perhaps it signalled his arrival in Casanovas international literary space. But to the poet himself it felt like the securing of a home space, so that at the time Lan Kwai Fong, the bar district where they met to talk about the collaboration, became for him something of a local allegory.
Lan Kwai Fong always makes me think of Hong Kong. The space we have is a mixed, hybrid space, a crowded and dangerous space, carnival-like even in times of crisis, heavenly and not far from disasters, easily accessible and also easily appropriated by political, economic, and other forces. Is there anything we can do to ensure this remains an open space for all? What appears to be prudence can easily turn in to selfcensorship; what seems to be free speech can easily infringe upon others freedom. All sorts of pressures and interpersonal relations keep intervening, affecting how we use words and images to express ourselves and communicate with others. This space that is open to us can all too easily be lost to us. And, without a home that is friendly, stable, and tolerant, we can only drift from place to place lugging with us our words and photographs. (Leung, 1998, p. 95)

This is home as locality, and it has more than one language. There is, at least, no official hostility to English in Hong Kong, as there was until recently in Malaysia. Hong Kong government officials and educators speak piously of a wish to create a biliterate and trilingual civil service and, eventually, society.10 In the jittery 1980s, when post-handover postures were being rehearsed, there was some tendency to decry English as the language of colonial oppression, though much of this disappeared when it became clear that the Chinese central government regarded English as the language of global business. And herein lies the really important factor for the English-language

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writer in Hong Kong, for if there is a significant linguistic-ideological rivalry to contend with, it is not with classical written Chinese, Standard Written Chinese, Putonghua, or Cantonese, or even the Great Tradition of English poetry, but with the mighty ambient drone of the variety of English that Michael Toolan has christened Global (see Toolan, 1997; and Toolan, Nation Languages). For there is a kind of English that is a prized commodity precisely because it is a-local; it goes everywhere and belongs nowhere, its defining characteristic being not a surplus of associations and affiliations, but an emptiness of these things. This tumbleweed English is entirely instrumental, an English for data and proposals and sales pitches but not for ideas, for negotiating postures and social talk but not arguments and conversations. Adrift from location, intellectually weightless and bleached of history, this is a kind of language poorly equipped to help its users pay critical attention to where they are, for they might indeed be anywhere. Toolan characterizes Global as a non-creolizing pidgin, a second-language language, one whose locality-free de-culturating renders it denatured, artificial, geared to pragmatic or profitable ends (Toolan, Nation Languages). A speedy informational language unbothered by culture or history, uncluttered by nuance, ambiguity or abstraction anyone who has been into an English-language bookshop in Hong Kong or scanned the advertisements for tutorial schools (or indeed met some Hong Kong students) will know that this is what many want from English. The drowning out of humanistic values by discourses geared to the informationalization of knowledge in a fast globalizing economy seemed to Rey Chow who grew up in Hong Kong in the 1960s and 1970s to have got off to an early start in the colonized world, in places such as Hong Kong, though the process as she sees it is now globally pervasive. Indeed, on the Chinese mainland itself, the informationalization of knowledge these days includes frenzied attempts at popularizing the English language as information, with words and phrases reiterated by masses like political and/or commercial slogans (Chow, 2005, p. 52). The aspirations for financial reward and socioeconomic standing that fuel this desire for instrumental English are not to be despised.11 But they are part of a situation that adds value (ironically enough) to the different kind of language that can produce reflective and humanistic knowledge, a knowledge that is not information but cultural memory, consciousness and conscience. This is what poetry is for.

A Place to Stand
The shadows of June the fourth Are the shadows of a gesture,

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They say, but how shall you and I Name them, one by one?

Louise Hos poem Remembering 4th June, 1989 asks difficult questions about memory, the memory of the national crisis named in its title, and it does so in an inflection set by Hong Kong and by English. In this, it is another episode in this poets long commentary on the history of her own times and places, stretching back to two poems about the Hong Kong riots of 1967, and commemorating cultural, demographic and architectural changes, besides events such as the 1997 handover itself. It is a historical record, the poetry being witness to a changing structure of feeling in a place that has been, whatever else, both unique and exemplary as the site of so many of the shaping forces of modern times. In that history, 4 June 1989 is one of the most painful moments, and cast more than one long shadow, not least in Hong Kong, where the unfolding events in Tiananmen Square were followed with an attention sharpened by the certain prospect of a return to Chinese sovereignty in eight years time. So the job of remembering the event, and naming its shadows, is an urgent and very difficult one for the Hong Kong poet. All the more bizarre, then, the opening stanza of this memorial poem. Remembering 4th June, 1989 Yes, I remember Marvell, Dryden, Yeats, men who had taken up the pen While others the sword That would have vanished Were it not for the words That shaped them and kept them.

This seems no less than perverse. The solemn mnemonic duty enjoined by the poems title veers off immediately, in the first of the poems many turns, into a different kind of remembering, a naming instead of three canonical English poets, and the revisiting of a truism (the pen is mightier than the sword) that in context just looks smug: in the end, it is poetry that matters more than political action, because poetry is not ephemeral. It looks as if the poem has already broken the promise of its title, and instead of remembering 4 June 1989 it is commemorating Marvell, Dryden and Yeats in an evasive trope that turns the poem away from its difficult agenda and immediately buries its head in the golden treasury of the English tradition. Scandalously, the poem seems to be just asking to be dismissed as proof of the distance between English poetry and Hong Kong experience, and the hopeless irrelevance of the former to the latter.

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But of course it is when we bring these two fields of knowledge together that this opening gambit makes sense. What it affords is not just a cross-cultural moment, but one in which Chinese experience is seen from within through the optic of English. Dryden, Marvell and Yeats two seventeenth-century poets and one twentieth-century one are no random selections from the canon, but are, as the poem says, writers whose work participated in and interpreted the great public events of their times. John Dryden, dramatist, satirist, historiographer royal and poet laureate of the Restoration court, was a loyalist to the precarious political authority of Charles II (and later James II) over a country still riven with religious and ideological divisions in the aftermath of the Civil Wars and Cromwells Protectorate. The political affiliations of Drydens older contemporary Andrew Marvell were different; he was a friend and assistant of Milton and sometime tutor to the family of the parliamentary general Fairfax, and himself a member of parliament during the Cromwellian Protectorate and the Restoration. These men, in the century of the English Revolution, produced some of the most trenchant political poetry in the language, and can stand for later poets as models of possibility for loyalism, dissent, satire, polemic, tragedy in the response of the writer to times of political turmoil and rebellion, times too when the publication of a poem might well be not just a political intervention but also a calculated political risk. Marvells poem An Horatian Ode upon Cromwells Return from Ireland (1650) the Oxford Companion to English Literature calls it the greatest political poem in English seems to celebrate Cromwell as a selfless revolutionary hero, but has been especially prized for its judicious and even-handed account of both sides in the conflict between Charles I and Parliament, and its famous description of the execution of the King. Such is Marvells mastery of inclusive irony and ambiguity, and so deft is his footwork in the poem, that there is still debate as to just where he stands.12 It was written, in the year after the Kings death, to commemorate Cromwells return from his ruthless and bloody campaign to crush opposition in Ireland. The point of this seventeenth-century excursion is to suggest how English poetry can work in a Hong Kong poem, how its history and associations perhaps the very things that embarrassed Wong Phui Nam can be mobilized both as a modality, a point of view on things from a certain experience, and as a code.13 English poetry has a history of thinking about political power and opposition to it, which is activated in the way this poem triangulates Marvell, Dryden and Yeats, thus creating an intellectual location that can be in effect a locus standi, the turn to English poetry providing a standpoint, or footing. A history inscribed in the words and names of English provides this other place, within the poem, from which its topic remembering 4 June 1989 can be

Louise Ho and the Local Turn: The Place of English Poetry in Hong Kong 91

contemplated. A place to stand enables a way of looking. The complexity ambiguity indeed of this poetic history prevents this move from being simply an orientalizing trope in which a Chinese experience is to be stuffed into the procrustean model of somebody elses protocols, or condemned to be seen as just repeating actions and responses performed in some other time and place. The third poet invoked, Yeats, shows this most clearly. Remembering 4th June, 1989 orients its subject in relation to Marvell, Dryden and Yeats. Marvell and Dryden then disappear from the poem, but Yeats remains a crucial reference point as he is, in my view, by a long chalk and in many ways the most important English poet (English-language poet, that is, for he was not an Englishman) for Louise Ho. It is important that this poem is cast in the form of talk, and indeed seems to start in the middle of a conversation:14 it is responsible to an offstage interlocutor, answered in the opening words, addressed later as My friend, and embraced from time to time in the communal pronoun we. In the poem that pronoun is a prolocution of the Hong Kong people in general (it is we, / Who, riding on the crest of a long hope, / Became euphoric) and of the sharers of this conversation in particular (how shall you and I / Name them, one by one?). This shows that these reference points, and particularly the recurring remembering of Yeats, are not to be taken just as part of the poets singular experience, but of a shared culture and common language belonging to those educated in English in Hong Kong a speech community, or more accurately a community of literacy. Here the aptness of Yeats to the Hong Kong situation is especially rich, for Ireland and Hong Kong stand at either end of the history of the dismantling of the British empire in the twentieth century. Both Irish and Hong Kong writing can be read, with due account of the difference of their circumstances, in ways opened out by developments in postcolonial studies. Yeats, the Irish poet using English, takes as his great theme the revolution through which Ireland lived in his own lifetime. He rises, as Edward Said finely says, from the level of personal experience to that of national archetype, without losing the immediacy of the former or the stature of the latter (Said, 1985, p. 23). Yeatss engagement with the Irish predicament could be painful, even violently so, and a critical example is his poem Easter 1916, about the anti-colonial rebellion on that date in the streets of central Dublin, which was crushed after six days by British troops, its leaders later court-martialled and executed. Yeats, himself awkwardly situated as a member of the relatively privileged Protestant Anglo-Irish minority, was no great admirer of the rebellions leaders, and was unconvinced of the efficacy of direct action at this time in Ireland; nonetheless, he acknowledges the rebellion as a seminal moment, both heroic and tragic, in his countrys history, in fact a moment of nation formation. Easter 1916 keeps returning to this idea of

92 Douglas Kerr

violent transformation. All changed, changed utterly: / A terrible beauty is born. It is in particular to summon up Easter 1916 that the ghost of Yeats is invoked at the start of Remembering 4th June, 1989, another poem commemorating fearfully a critical moment in history, and the painful ambiguities of the Yeats poem help to place the complex feeling of Hong Kong Chinese in that month as the Tiananmen events unfolded, when an unprecedented political consciousness expressed itself, with demonstrations of up to half a million people on the streets, in solidarity with the Tiananmen students and in a patriotic idiom.15 For the Hong Kong poet as for the Irish poet in his time, the question is how a poet ought to respond to, name, and remember, a desperate moment in history, arousing painful and divided emotions as it happens, and bringing consequences like a stone cast into water, in Yeatss image whose implications will take a long time to ripple out from the centre. The focus of the poem is not so much on China as on Hong Kong itself, and on the way events over the border catalyzed, in the territory divided and uncertain and anxious about its own future, a sense of itself as a single community what I earlier called a locality. Before we went our separate ways again, We thought as one, We spoke as one, We too have changed, if not utterly And something beautiful was born. As we near the end of an era We have at last Become ourselves

This moment of becoming does not crystallize into a political resolution (it is hard to see where the agency for such a resolution could have come from for Hong Kong people in 1989) but is an awareness that was not fully there before. The problem of 4 June and its aftermath for people in Hong Kong was a problem of where to stand. Whoever would not [] Rejoice at a return / To the Motherland? On the other hand, 4 June created a fear of the future that might outweigh even the miseries of alienation and exile (in a phrase remembering a poignant image of homelessness, the figure of Ruth in Keatss Nightingale ode) rather pick ears of corn / In a foreign field. Realizing where you are entails realizing who you are, and only then can freedom be a possibility. The first-person pronoun returns at the end of Remembering 4th June, 1989 with a newly sharp sense of its modality or locus standi, a footing now understood to be precariously narrower than the foot itself. It craves wary walking.

Louise Ho and the Local Turn: The Place of English Poetry in Hong Kong 93

Ours is a unique genius, Learning how to side-step all odds Or to survive them. We have lived By understanding Each in his own way The tautness of the rope Underfoot.

The intelligence, poise and integrity of poems such as Easter 1916 and Marvells Horatian Ode have played a part in bringing this predicament into visibility. Nonetheless it is quite specific, a moment of Hong Kong autobiography. The tightrope is an uncomfortable location, yet suited to Hong Kongs genius a predicament, but also a performance, the balances and the turns in which Hong Kongs future will be played out in the open. My focus on questions of location, on English and on Hong Kongs turns and stances, has meant I have neglected Louise Hos aesthetic subjects, yet these, with her satirical themes that I have also not had room for, make up a large portion of her repertory. To consider now her poem about a sculpture, Bronze Horse, will not however involve a move away from the political, any more than we move away from the political if we move from Yeatss Easter 1916 to his Leda and the Swan. The sculpture in question, called Man, Horse, is a representation of a horse on its back, legs in the air, its neck hanging down and mutating into the torso and legs of a man.16 It is the work of the Hong Kong artist Antonio Mak (Mak Hin-yeung), who died in 1994, the year in which the poem appeared in Local Habitation. Like plenty of other poems in that collection, the poems relation to Hong Kongs own approaching metamorphosis in 1997 does not need to be spelled out. (Chinese leaders were at pains to reassure Hong Kong people that what they supposed were Hong Kongs favourite pursuits horse-racing and dancing would continue in the territory after the transfer of sovereignty.) Bronze Horse Earth is kind to fall of sparrow fall of horse. Iron ore, ungiving, props up sculpted bronze head

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as it breaks its back on iron pedestal, its legs flaying the air. Tree trunk neck Sprouts athletes legs. Taut thighs direct downwards where horses head would have arched upwards. Two motions clash like trains into each others velocity, two bodies countermining, two contraries forced into one orbit: the unseen body, fully in control, meets the unseen head, losing control, at the neck of a bronze horse.

Here are brought together two subjects the horse, and the human figure with a rich history in sculpture, East and West. The image in monumental form most often carries a meaning of mastery, the horse a symbol of the strength of nature and the rider representing the domination of nature by the human, and hence political or military authority. In Maks sculpture horse and man are both in trouble, abject, in painful postures, and incomplete. In this grotesque configuration they cannot possibly belong together, yet they do, contradicting each other but constituting a single thing. And at the same time the image has a strange beauty, of a transition arrested in seamless mid-process, at the moment of the birth of something new. This is a poem of the aesthetic moment, the creation of something still, well-formed and permanent (aere perennius, indeed) from a turbulent and agonizing process, at once violent and held in perfect balance. Here the trope is a miraculous turning-into, horse turning into man or man turning into horse, both of them headless and sightless, unconscious of themselves or each other. This is history in the moment of its making, unable to know itself. The birth of beauty out of conflict and violence a terrible beauty

Louise Ho and the Local Turn: The Place of English Poetry in Hong Kong 95

is a powerful and recurring theme in Yeats, whose contraries again haunt this poem: this is another case in which the knowledge inscribed in English poetry has helped the Chinese poet to see the subject, which is nonetheless an organic expression of its own place and time Hong Kong, and its own metamorphosis. The poem is entitled Bronze Horse, but it is not about a horse (any more than the sculpture is); it is about a place of fabulous meeting, a contact point of different worlds. Pared down to a minimalist descriptive language, the poem holds its contradictions in balance to be contemplated. There are more ways than one of knowing your place. In case this essay should have given an over-solemn impression of this vigorous and often satirical poet, I will end with a short recent poem, Skeltonics. It is an impeccably traditional English poem, using a form of verse invented in the late fifteenth century by John Skelton, a scholarly poet with a sardonic eye for politics and manners. It turns on a single rhyme and tells all you need to know about the history of Hong Kong in the decade since 1997. Ten years on and what have we got Good times bad times the lot The first headman was put on the spot Up North noticed the snot And made him trot The new man a sot he was not Still he wasnt all that hot Before the dreaded slot Everybody said the city would rot But nothing has gone to pot Oh no oh no we have not lost the plot.

6
From Xu Xi to the Chief Executive: Hong Kong in the Dock
Michael Ingham

As Hong Kongs culture and politics have become more inexorably intertwined over the years since the handover, it is significant that its cultural production has reflected a subtle shift away from pure escapism toward something approaching a critical discourse. While a few critical swallows cannot be represented as constituting a more lucid summer, to adapt the proverb, it is significant that the last dozen or so years have seen the rise of the film essay in Hong Kong, as well as the development of the critical essay form juxtaposing the cultural and political histories of the territory. Veteran Hong Kong film director Herman Yau and English-language writer and Hong Kong literary commentator Xu Xi would seem on the face of it an unlikely pairing. Yaus work has been mainly in commercial genre cinema (including the genre of pornography), while Xu Xis efforts to develop both creative and critical discourses in relation to Englishlanguage writing in Hong Kong from the publication of her first stories, Chinese Walls and Daughters of Hui in the mid-1990s have been very much on the margin of recognition. Despite a presence in Hong Kong and a subject matter that is predominantly related to the city of her birth, her work sells better in the United States, her second home, than here. Perhaps what links Xu Xi and Yau is a distinct fearlessness about speaking their minds on controversial issues, not a characteristic that is always welcome in any Chinese society, or many other societies, for that matter. In the present chapter, I will discuss one of Xu Xis most critically acute recent essays, A Short History of Our Shores, and Herman Yaus controversial 1999 film essay Danghau Tung Chee-hwa Fatlok /(From the Queen to the Chief Executive) and argue that they are among the most uncomfortably critical and stylistically virtuosic works made in the SAR and designed to prick Hong

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Kongs post-1997 self-congratulatory bubble. In the spirit of the argumentative essay these works tend to go against the grain of conventional, collectivist thinking and received ideas about the citys culture, institutions and heritage. Given the orientation of the present volume toward both word and image in the Hong Kong cultural scene, I believe it appropriate to posit a connection between two types of creative non-fiction that would not normally be bracketed together. Both are, however, as I will argue, exceptional examples of the essay in their respective media. Referring to these two examples, I will present the case for encouraging the development of more critically polemical work in arts and literature in Hong Kong. I will refer to other examples of implicitly critical artistic works and discuss the thin line between fiction and non-fiction that the essay form so often, as here, successfully straddles.

The Essay Form Film as Essay

The essay can be defined as:
any short composition in prose that undertakes to discuss a matter, express a point of view, persuade us to accept a thesis on any subject or simply entertain. The essay differs from a treatise or dissertation in its lack of pretension to be a systematic and complete exposition, and in being addressed to a general, rather than specialised, audience; as a consequence, the essay discusses its subject in non-technical fashion, and often with a liberal use of such devices as anecdote, striking illustration and humour to augment its appeal. (Abrams, 1985, p. 82)

The word essay, which comes from the French word essai, means literally an attempt or trial. In literature it has come to describe a non-fictional form of writing, which discusses a topic or topics and usually attempts to persuade the reader of the wisdom of a particular ideological position or point of view. Such persuasion can be attempted implicitly or more explicitly by the writer, depending on style and temperament. The essay as cultural or political intervention has a long and distinguished tradition, and many eminent writers have tackled issues of culture or social and political injustice with varying degrees of formality or informality in style and tone. Frenchman Michel de Montaigne (153392) is generally acknowledged as the father of the modern essay, although his essais were themselves influenced by the meditations of Roman authors such as Marcus Aurelius. Some essays adopt a more imaginative, semi-fictive approach, while others are more factual and informative. All, as Abrams states, attempt to persuade the audience of the validity of a viewpoint, whether directly or indirectly, seriously or whimsically. Clearly the concept of the academic essay based on argumentation derives from the original literary

From Xu Xi to the Chief Executive: Hong Kong in the Dock 99

form. The main difference is that the professional writer usually allows her or himself the license to engage in what is known as creative non-fiction, and to disregard formal register and conventional structure. As we shall see, this is precisely the method adopted by Xu Xi. As with the literary essay, the cinematic essay permits itself a wideranging field for its subject matter, and, far from avoiding what would in the past have been considered stylistic dissonances, frequently embraces them. Still designated in the broader, generic term documentary cinema (despite the inadequacy of this broad classification in accommodating such a radical form), the film essay has evolved into a plural, cross-over form in its own right. From Jean-Luc Godards intensely subjective perspectives and the innovative work of Chris Marker to the more recent sociopolitical polemics and intervention of filmmakers such as Michael Moore, Nick Broomfield, Ken Loach, Errol Morris, Michael Winterbottom and Morgan Spurlock, the cinematic essay, even in the guise of documentary, is now a flourishing and popular form, and one that is no longer viewed as purely experimental or avant-garde. In the Hong Kong context the obvious example of this kind of film practitioner is Evans Chan. Chan has made a number of essayistic documentaries. The subject matter varies from the return of Hong Kong and Macau to Chinese sovereignty (Journey to Beijing /[1998]; Adeus Macau /[1999]), to a film adaptation of a play based on the life of 1970s political activist Ng Chung-yin (The Life and Times of Wu Zhong-Xian /[2003]) and a portrait of avant-garde Singaporean pianist Margaret Leng Tan (Sorceress of the New Piano / [2004]). However, the strong influence of the essay form, its topicality and lucidity in its best instances, such as in the writings of fellow New Yorker Susan Sontag, whom Chan admires and has translated and edited in Chinese editions, is discernible in much of his work: This strain of filmic essay in European cinema has come to be regarded as increasingly outside the mainstream, and although I may not be practicing it so overtly of late, this tradition is still an important background to my work (Chan, cited in Berry, 2005, p. 514). Although the essay form is a highly appropriate vehicle for engaging in a more critically reflective level of discourse than, for example, the newspaper editorial or television reportage, which strive for journalistic balance rather than critical profundity, I do not intend to imply that it is a commonly practised form of expression in Hong Kong literary or cinematic circles. Indeed, as in most national cinemas and literatures, essay-writing or essayistic documentary tends to be undervalued in Hong Kong. It should however be pointed out that there is a long-established tradition in Hong Kongs Chinese-language press of essay-length pieces by regular columnists. The same cannot be said of English-language essay writing which, for all the eminent indigenous literary

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traditions of the form from the eighteenth century onward from the likes of Addison, Steele and Hazlitt to Woolf, Orwell and Greene can claim to have had very little influence in the colonial context of Hong Kong. Therefore, to a considerable extent the English-language essay-writing of Xu Xi and the essayistic filmmaking of a handful of contemporary Hong Kong filmmakers can justifiably be considered ground-breaking, at least in respect of Hong Kongs creative-critical cultural environment.

A Crack in Space and A Short History of Our Shores

Why then a crisis of calm, this apparent oxymoron? A climactic calm is characterized by an absence of wind and freedom from storms, high winds or rough activity. Our citys storms, whether economic, viral or otherwise have hit squally seas slightly larger than teacups, quickly followed by periods of calm. (A Crack in Space, in Xu Xi, 2008, p. 6)

The Hong Kongborn Chinese-Indonesian writer Xu Xi is an established figure on the literary scene in this city. I have collaborated with her in a number of ventures and have found her approach to contemporary culture refreshing and inspirational. Normally a writer of fiction, she has recently begun to essay a move into the territory of creative non-fiction. In her collection Overleaf Hong Kong, which consists of short stories and short essays, she deals with issues arising from the wah kiu () (overseas Chinese) experience and also with the role of the writer. One of the few local essayists working in English, but with a local sensibility and culture, Xu Xi has been a seminal figure in the recognition of Hong Kong writing overseas, an indefatigable anthologist and an effective, if unofficial, ambassador for Hong Kongs cultural scene. While Overleaf Hong Kong was a more unassuming attempt to blend creative fiction and non-fiction in one highly idiosyncratic but successful collection, Xu Xis recent essays reveal the kind of broader, critical vein only hinted at in her earlier non-fiction writing. It seems that a growing self-confidence, not only in the validity of her own social, cultural and political insights but also in her ability to articulate these views and attitudes in a lively and readable style, is part of her maturation process as an international, Hong Kong writer. The seeming oxymoronic quality of this latter description of her is, I would argue, very much at the heart of her significance to the cultural beat of our citys heart. The contemporary literary essay, as Sontag, Naipaul, Lessing and others have demonstrated, should not be parochial in its scope, and Xu Xi in her life and work combines the best of local and global. I am sure I was not the only reader to detect in one or two of the final essays in Overleaf Hong Kong a sense of disillusionment with the tarnished image of Xu Xis adopted country, the United States. Previously supportive of her second

From Xu Xi to the Chief Executive: Hong Kong in the Dock 101

home, as many diasporic people are, her reflections on the belligerent and xenophobic direction the country has been taking in the new millennium reveal a profound, but elegantly worded, sense of disquiet. In her collection Evanescent Isles: From My City-Village she turns her critical attention to Hong Kong, its culture and history. The collection is divided into four main sections, three of them consisting predominantly of personal reflections and reminiscences, and one of them more deliberately distanced, employing the playful pseudonymous moniker, Loong Hei (, Dragons Breath). This section, entitled Space Break, engages with aspects of the citys culture and politics that, as a critical, independent essayist, she feels obligated to discuss. Keystrokes, the second piece, is a series of brief responses to print media articles on topical issues of considerable local and national significance (strokes evoking perhaps both artistic brush movement and the act of punishing or whipping!). Her responses, which are playfully deconstructive but also evaluative and deliberately rational in tone, assess phrases and ideas that are current in the Hong Kong media, such as psychological reversion and Chineseness. Xu Xis approach in these short pieces is to scrutinize those concepts and ideas that are bound up with the ideology of loving the mother country, with a critical, less emotional eye, and not to accept platitudes and clichs in relation to what constitutes patriotism and identity politics. In Pop Goes the Idol she explores two apparently unrelated topics, one being the instant fame/celebrity enjoyed by Hong Kong Chinese student William Hung whose appearance on American Idol was remarkable for his inability to sing or dance in any recognizable style. The other issue examined in this essay is Hong Kongs dismissive attitude to less superficial cultural practices than mere media celebrity. Making a lucid and incisive connection between these two subjects, Xu Xi discusses the stereotypes that inhibit Hong Kong from developing a more mature and positive attitude towards creative writing, and by extension cultural development. The collection is full of witty, thought-provoking pieces. However in this article I propose to focus my attention on her introductory piece, A Crack in Space and her coda or tailpiece, A Short History of Our Shores. In the introduction she delineates what she sees as the crisis of calm affecting Hong Kong, relating its obsessive properisity for stasis and conservatism to the twin mantras of stability and prosperity. She also uses the metaphor of the crack in space (like the cracks between the train and platform of the MTR or the cracks through which busy people squeeze as the automatic doors close tseng siu sam yuet toi kap tse mun gaan sze hung kwik / meaning literally please have a little heart for the crack in space between the train carriage and platform), to evoke both a sense of opportunity and the risk of falling, as well as the liminal nature of Hong Kongs existence.

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In her longest essay in the collection, A Short History of Our Shores, she boldly conceptualizes and brilliantly realizes a dialogue between herself as interviewing author and Hong Kong as a plural personification of the city. Call us Hong Kong. That was our name. Our new one is Xianggang but the world still calls us Hong Kong (Xu 2008, p. 97), the city laconically states, evoking the distinguished literary reference points of the opening sentences of both Melvilles Moby Dick and Vonneguts Cats Cradle in its offhand but familiar style. The call me Ishmael allusion is picked up a few lines later in an unlikely metonymic comparison between Hong Kongs sprawling mass and that of the whale in Melvilles magnum opus. Throughout the essay the writing is laced with literary allusion and playful intertextual references, underlining both its culturally hybrid provenance and its almost casual compression of events in the Hong Kong timeline. Paul Virilios influential thesis about postmodern flattening of time and space in the urban cosmopolitan context comes very much to mind when reading the piece, although there is no specific reference to any postmodern theory to offset the essential lightness of the style.1 The audacious manner in which Xu Xi reels off Hong Kongs history from neolithic tombs and cave carvings to modern times, covering the Tang, Song and Qing dynasties at breakneck pace, is not intended purely to dazzle the reader. On the contrary, underneath the veneer of flip informality lies a skilful rhetoric and serious erudition in relation to Hong Kongs past and present. However, rather than reproduce the tone and style of the serious and formal historical study, Xu Xi opts to underplay and understate her subject and theme, relying on the readers empathy and ability to discern her central ideas. The paradoxical combination of critical distance and closeness to the subject, i.e. Hong Kong itself, reflects her own geographical and emotional relationship with her home city being a Hongkonger by birth, but of Indonesian Chinese parentage; being a resident some of her life, but not all of it; belonging and yet not belonging. It is precisely this ability to step back from the subject, which most other Hong Kong writers find difficult to do, that enables her to look at the city from the perspective of the outsider or visitor, as opposed to the culturally embedded insider. Neither nomad nor exile, to refer to the theories advanced respectively by Deleuze and Guattari and Edward Said, she is best described by the idiosyncratic Hong Kong metaphor of tai hung yan () or astronaut, denoting someone who lives between two places. This phenomenon was increasingly common in the years prior to and following 1997. An alternative reading of the Cantonese tai hung yan () is one whose wife is absent, which is also true of Xu Xi in terms of her resistance to stereotypical categorization.

From Xu Xi to the Chief Executive: Hong Kong in the Dock 103

Having introduced her interview conceit in the opening lines of the essay, the interviewing author points out that, although the form the city uses to speak of itself is the Royal We (a humorous reference to the official form of selfdesignation used by the territorys former imperial sovereign, of whom more later), Cantonese does not have an exact equivalent of plural. Neither does it think in English, even though it can and in our interview it chose to speak in Canto-lish, mainly Cantonese with a dash of English (Xu, 2008, p. 97). Apart from a few transliterated expressions, however, the language in which the author renders the interview is the more internationally accessible English. Choosing to represent Hong Kong with the first person plural pronoun in English does, however, imply a pluralistic and inclusive approach to the citys history and culture, underlining that the citys cosmopolitan character in the twenty-first century derives from its hybrid and formative ethno-cultural influences. She thus challenges the view that we are monolithic entity; We never were British, just as most of us are not Chinese the way they are on the Mainland (Xu, 2008, p. 4). A mongrel caste (p. 5) is her verdict on the Hong Kong population, not really a description that the citys believers in pure Han ethnic identity would readily subscribe to. Her take on the city indeed suggests that this non-nation state is defined not by what it is, but by what it is not. In that sense her essay connects with the formulation of Hong Kong as the floating city on the part of a writer often confused with her by the non-Chinese reader, namely Xi Xi (pronounced Sai-Sai), in the evocatively surreal piece, Marvels of a Floating City. This floating quality is not only a result of the citys past and future the fifty years that the city is deemed to require before becoming fully reintegrated culturally and politically into the Mainland but can be seen, as the essayist elucidates, in the Chinese traditions and attitudes myths and superstitions long abandoned in modern China (p. 3) that obstinately endure in the citys otherwise postmodern psyche. Part ode, part elegy to an often neglected but colourful history, the writers tone is imbued with a very urban, contemporary caustic wit. It is the voice of both a scathing New York intellectual, which Xu Xi remains, and a flippantly irreverent Hong Kong political sceptic. This droll, tongue-in-cheek approach to the telling of Hong Kongs chequered history is not as culturally alien or as incompatible with the citys character as it may appear. Typical Hong Kong punning, colloquial humour is by turns mordantly self-deprecating and cheekily disrespectful of authority. Furthermore, given the abundance of myth and legend, much of it inconsistent, or even conflicting, about Hong Kongs past, her playful quips and deliciously sly rhetorical questions have the effect of undermining deconstructing, one might assert received interpretations of Hong Kongs history. A good example of this is the way she plays down the

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excessive emphasis on Hong Kongs historical role in the opium wars that one finds in official histories of the territory. Xu Xis witty disclaimer for the citys responsibility for what happened is amusing and I think timely:
Dont blame us. There we were, minding our own business with a hospitable harbour for pirates and traders [note that she purposely gives precedence to the pirates]. Did we sprout poppies from our soil? Inspissate the juice? Roll out those reddish-brown, malodorous and bitter-tasting cakes, balls and sticks of the drug? Moreover, did we insist the British sail through our waters with ship loads of the junk from India? No. We were just a peace-loving transit point, with a few folks making the odd buck on that noisome trade, providing a den or two for addicts (Xu, 2008, p. 100)

Clearly, the voice here is double-edged, the protestation of innocence intended to function as a critique of Hong Kongs freewheeling laissez-faire and sometimes ethically blinkered attitude to regional or international events, but at the same time as a genuine plea for understanding of Hong Kongs perennial lack of autonomy in its own affairs. A prolonged adolescence remained our highest pinnacle of existence. It was terribly post-modern of us, dont you think, to be so perpetually youthful? (p. 101). Again, the sardonic tone of this observation contains both deliberate distortion and a certain deeper truth. The perception that Hong Kong lacks political maturity and the citys undoubted passion for youthful looks, as well as the cultivation of immature behaviour for the sake of cuteness, are all implicitly referenced in this tongue-in-cheek remark. Conceived as a lively, often whimsical and ironic potted history of the city, the essay A Short History of Our Shores advances the thesis by implication that Hong Kong needs to transform its value system and try to shake itself out of its catatonic limbo. Thats the problem when you do the slow dissolve. It tricks the eye and the other senses as well. What folks dont see is our quiet disappearance Who will remember us when were just another Chinese city (p. 98), she enquires rhetorically but pertinently, with an appreciative nod of acknowledgement in the direction of Ackbar Abbass astute critical study of Hong Kongs disappearance syndrome, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance. The state of limbo she depicts in memorable metaphors and vivid tropes is of course analogous to the limbo experienced by the detainees who are the subject of Herman Yaus film essay. Instead of limbo she envisages an alternative: We are Hong Kong, a city-village of the world. We want to live in the global collective imagination. Allow us now to ruminate, reflect, despair, rejoice, celebrate, recall and record the space of history we were, the space in the world we are, and let us sing an ode to the city we may eventually become (p. 98). Her epithets are superbly, and often irreverently, funny. For example, talking of Sun Yat-sen, who found a temporary home in Hong Kong, from which

From Xu Xi to the Chief Executive: Hong Kong in the Dock 105

he and his fellow revolutionaries plotted the overthrow of the decaying Qing dynasty: Sun was a typical Chinese geek, studying hard to please his family, while fomenting revolt in his spare time (p. 103). Another of the essays funniest remarks is a simile concerning the shape of Hong Kong Island: So thats how we began with an island shaped like half a plucked chicken (p. 101). The essays witticisms put one in mind of a Victoria Wood solo performance, in which stand-up comedy is as much a part of the concept as drama, or in this case, the serious essay. Xu Xis high-speed potted history has the great virtue of being wittily urbane and entertaining, devoid of both didactic or moralizing statement and pomposity. One might with justification compare her essai with the great Montaigne tradition of the form, in which wit, wisdom and shrewd social comment are judiciously mixed. She nails the moral hypocrisy and cynical philistinism so rife in both the colonial era and the brief postcolonial period we have experienced to date with a fiction writers felicity for the mot juste or telling phrase, adapting proverbial sayings while slyly subverting their received meanings, e.g., the historians can make what hay they wish while the sun still occasionally shines (p. 107). As interviewer and interviewee discuss the relative advantages of contemporary Chinese cities and Hong Kong itself, the city points out that it has not simply been compromised by its history, but perpetually occupied, and that our history, my dear, is fiction (p. 108). That particularly felicitous locution is also an intertextual reference, not to another writer in this instance, but to the title of Xu Xis own 2001 collection of short stories set in Hong Kong. Indeed, as a critique of official versions, of the self-aggrandizing grand colonial narratives and teleologically patriotic pro-Mainland perspectives, the idea of history as fiction and fiction as history is a gloriously subversive refusal to accept the spin of 1997 and all that. The trouble with the ruling class is that they lack a sense of humour and simply dont learn from history, which is why we think history might as well be short (p. 100), opines the city at an early stage of the interview. The trouble [the other trouble!] with the ruling class is that they are prone to telling lies, in which case a puppet with an elongated nose would at least be a useful indicator of what not to listen to (p. 107). Xu Xis comment encapsulates all ruling classes, whether colonizers like the British, invading occupiers like the Japanese or our present-day tycoons ruling by proxy. One final, ludic image we are left with is that of Hong Kong as a gigantic silvery ngahn si gyun minibaguette (literally, silver slivers spiral) spiralling through time and space. Then the city fades, Cheshire Catlike, from view. Its pollution, you know, not nature, it wheezes as it fades. What is left but to write in language wild and even wicked that we existed, that we exist (p. 109). Thus at the end of the

106 Michael Ingham

essay the predominant whimsical mood is replaced by a more poetic and even philosophical vein. Xu Xis cryptic closing reference to the power of absence (p. 109) could relate to the disappearance of the city, or to her own ability to fade out at will, or to both. What we are left to reflect on is a brilliantly compressed, unorthodox reading of Hong Kongs cultural, linguistic, political and historical heritage, unlike any other.

From the Queen to the Chief Executive: Cracks in the System

Neither just, objective, nor accurate that is the bureaucratic system that determines our fate. (Elsa Chan, From the Queen to the Chief Executive, quoted in the opening credits of the film version)

Above Causeway Bay and east of Tai Hang is Braemar Hill (Bo Ma Saan), a quiet residential area, which sadly became notorious for the 1985 double murder of English Schools Foundation school students Nicola Myers and Kenneth McBride. Members of the teenage gang that committed the rape and murders were caught and sent to prison, detained at Her Majestys Pleasure, to cite the archaic British legal term. As the 1997 handover approached, the lack of a fixed and definitive sentence for these juveniles especially the youngest, who pleaded that he had been coerced against his will into participating in the crime by the older youths became a test of the transitional judicial procedure of the new SAR, based as it is on the Basic Law, agreed between China and Britain. Herman Yau (director) and Elsa Chan (scriptwriter) made an intriguingly titled and compellingly recounted dramastyle documentary about the predicament of such former juveniles in 2000. From the Queen to the Chief Executive (the Cantonese title approximating to the more politically charged Waiting for the Verdict of Tung Chee-hwa) starred one of Hong Kongs best theatre directors and stage actors, Tang Shu-wing, in the role of real-life Legislative Councillor Leung Yiu-ching or Leung Chiu-ken, as he is called in the film. Leung spearheaded a robust campaign in Legco to force Tung Chee-hwas government to announce a determinate term for twenty-three young men, juveniles at the time of their serious offences, detained at Her Majestys Pleasure. There was a real concern that, falling between the cracks of colonial law and the Basic Law, such prisoners might be vulnerable to capital sentences, which are operational in China, though not in Hong Kong, where the death penalty was repealed in 1993. The films title certainly courted controversy when it was scheduled to open the 25th Hong Kong International Film Festival programme in 2001. For one thing, Tung Chee-hwa was due to give the opening address, a potentially

From Xu Xi to the Chief Executive: Hong Kong in the Dock 107

embarrassing scenario given his refusal to deal with this troublesome issue. After a Legco debate in which the film was ludicrously condemned at the instigation of the governments Home Affairs Bureau (still at time of writing the unqualified but ultimate arbiters of taste in our city) for artistic reasons (Secretary for Home Affairs responding to the Honourable Andrew Chengs question, Legislative Council Transcript, 14 March 2001), the producers withdrew it. The press release issued on 19 February by the Leisure and Cultural Services Division, a body that is under the direct control of the Home Affairs Bureau, purported to speak for the joint organizers of the 25th HKIFF in emphasizing the criterion of quality in the choice of the opening film. In reality the threat of mass resignations by Film Festival staff that was the upshot of the whole murky affair underlined the need for a much more autonomous Film Festival organization beyond the political manipulation of career civil servants. One of the more felicitous outcomes of the controversy was that Hong Kong now has a more independent if inevitably more commercially driven Hong Kong International Film Festival body. Government cronyism in arts committee appointees and artistic interference has resulted in a climate of conservatism in the arts, and if we regard Yaus film more as a drama, which was the genre it superficially fitted, we may see it as a victim of such conservatism. However if, as I believe, the film represented a reasoned but powerful attack on the chief executives cowardly refusal to face a human rights anomaly and an indictment of his and the previous colonial administrations wilful neglect of human rights legislation, employing essayistic technique to devastating effect, the vindictive official reaction to the film was perfectly logical and indeed predictable. Moreover, the damning and politically motivated negative judgment on the films artistic qualities has caused this bold and articulate film one of the top ten Hong Kong films of the last ten years, I would argue to be neglected by distributors and thus the public. In an excellent and critically distanced report entitled Anniversary Blues: Bureaucracy and Political Meddling Threaten Hong Kong Film Festival shortly after the controversy, Jeremy Hansen emphasized the damage to the image of the festival, and pointed out both the warm reception of Yaus film at the Berlin Film Festival in January of that year and the hints of censorship and the heavy hand of Beijing (Hansen, 2001). Clearly the artistic judgment of the bureaucrats was at variance with that of the global industrys experts in Berlin. Seen from the perspective of Hollywood or Hong Kong dramas one might be inclined to agree with the bureaucratic verdict on the films qualities. But From the Queen to the Chief Executive should not be judged purely on its merits as a piece of filmed drama, but rather as a skilful piece of filmic rhetoric and an idiosyncratic tribute to grassroots activism in our essentially plutocratic city. Put simply, what counts about the film is its skilfully

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expounded argument and its carefully constructed case for the open-minded viewer. Instead of leaving one satisfied with a neat dnouement, the real-life openendedness of the film at least at the time it was completed posed more questions than it answered. What really impresses, though, is the recognition by the writer and director that, unlike the moral certainties of most fabricated fictional dramas, the viewer, very much like activist Cheung Yue-ling (Ai-jing), is left to struggle through the swamps of moral ambivalence and relativism. Elsa Chans script is based on her book of the same name, so clearly the rhetorical nature of the script and its thought-provoking debate owe much to this source. Perhaps, though, the idea of linking forces with maverick director Herman Yau enabled Chan to express her arguments more compellingly and, as it turned out, more controversially. From the Queen to the Chief Executive once again brought the plight of Cheung Yau-ming (prisoner 67544) barely sixteen at the time of the murders and twenty-two similar detainees to the attention of the public. Herman Yaus extremely even-handed yet remarkably humanizing treatment of the case rekindled curiosity in the incident, with opinion sharply divided between those who had sympathy for Cheung and fellow-detainees and those who did not. Yau certainly does not flinch in portraying the brutal events by means of Cheungs remorse-triggered flashbacks and the tremendous emotional impact of them, but he studiously avoids any sensationalizing or graphically exploitative details. The ironic title of the film in English, equating two equally remote figureheads, served to focus the audiences attention, as did the documentary footage of the handover and the inauguration ceremony of Tung Chee-hwa, as well as the simultaneous pro-democracy demonstrations by Martin Lee Chu-ming and other democrats. These were skilfully intercut with the reconstructed sit-ins outside Legco by protestors pressing for the law on nondefined terms of sentence to be clarified. Indeed, the protest footage of both a factory strike in the 1980s and the pro-democracy protests in 1997 are significant in sounding the first strongly dissonant note in the film following the relatively calm and harmonious handover. Interestingly, the films documentary element foreshadows Tammy Cheungs July /, which was to document the huge peaceful demonstration against Tungs inept and inflexible government in 2003. Yau, a director normally associated with violent, adult-oriented movies, produced a low-budget, raw-edged, minor masterpiece in his intuitively edited study. It may well have helped to promote the debate about the issue that eventually facilitated Cheung Yau-mings release from prison. The parents of the slain teenagers generously expressed their forgiveness toward the youngest of the assailants in a letter to the press, an important development that is also captured in Yaus film.

From Xu Xi to the Chief Executive: Hong Kong in the Dock 109

The question to what extent the film is purely a fictional reconstruction of past events or rather a polemic by implication, attacking the present policies of equivocation and prevarication in relation to non-fixed sentences, is clearly crucial. A polemical essay argues, whether explicitly or implicitly, the need for change in a particular situation, and this is precisely what drives Yaus film. Cheung Yau-ming and fellow inmates detained at Her Majestys Pleasure have fallen between the cracks in space between the platform and the through-train of reunification with the Mainland. As one of the smarter prisoners points out, there is no point writing to the Queen, since the formulation of their nonsentence is just a form of words. The Queen is an abstraction, but hardly more so than Tung Chee-hwa, as the film shows us. The controversy over the films appearance at the HKIFF was caused not by sexually explicit content, but by the weight of the films argument and its underlying essayistic and contentious style. Its skilful use of data presented by a young activist highlights the inconsistencies and even absurdities of this loophole in the Hong Kong legal system. Moreover, it is significant that Cheung Yue-ling, the young female activist who approaches Councillor Leung, is first attracted by an essay written by Cheung Yau-ming for an essay-writing competition at the Open University at which the two are classmates. The film accentuates the power of rational argument as in the short essay form to combat entrenched bureaucracy and obfuscation, and it is striking how many scenes and images present us with oral debate and written texts, including footage of real and reconstructed public protests with placards, letters and editorials and, most striking of all, reconstructions of Legislative Council debates. What comes through more strongly than any appeal to the emotions generated by the films dramatic content is its appeal to rationality and the power of oral persuasion based on logic, consistency and legal precedent. Language (dialogue and expository statement) is the films great strength. The use of cinematic technique or film language, assured though it is, is very much subordinate to the language of its propositions. For this reason I would argue that the film is best categorized as a crossover pice thse rather than a dramatic narrative. Formally, the non-fictional essayistic film, as Burch has pointed out, is always challenging. Whereas the fiction film invites us to enter a fictional world and suspend our disbelief, the investigative film genre invites viewers to engage with a putatively real and present world and correspondingly suspend their belief. It then proceeds to make a case on the basis of evidence. Of course, that evidence may well appear selective, and, given the mixed mode approach of docu-drama reconstruction, deliberately biased. On the basis of documentary evidence, which the film puts before us with candour, we can see that every effort is made to present both sides of the argument. However, it must be

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accepted that the essay, and by extension the essayistic film, uses all the tools at its disposal in this case dramatic reconstruction and empathy to persuade the target audience of the justness of its ideological position. Yaus approach to his subject is authenticated for the viewer by his judicious use of relevant documentary material from the electronic and print media, some of which is clearly archival material from the 1980s. At the same time the media come in for implicit criticism for their tendency to ignore and misrepresent peaceful protest and grassroots activism in the city, be it picketing textile workers as shown in the early part of the film or activists protesting the appointment of the undemocratic Provisional Legislative Council in 1997. However, one of the most important issues raised in the film, and one raised by a contemporary news item, which reported that 42 per cent of young people in the territory felt they had no one to discuss their problems with, was about the abuse of young people. More specifically, the film took on traditional Chinese cultural assumptions about parents right to beat their children in whatever way they choose, in order to educate them. Added to this powerful critique of conservative attitudes among opinion leaders in the territory, the films unpopular core proposition that prisoners are entitled to human rights and that the juvenile offenders are deserving of compassion made it about as welcome as an economic downturn to both the citys ruling classes and the population at large. Perhaps the essay film like the documentary genre to which it ultimately belongs requires a different kind of evaluation from the fiction film. Rather like a prophet, it may be unpopular in its own country, and yet it refuses to lie down or go away. Despite, or even because of, the embarrassment caused to the ruling classes at whom Xu Xi directs her sardonic barbs in A Short History of Our Shores, such films, if they are properly promoted, tend to generate and regenerate interest among international audiences. Above all, From the Queen to the Chief Executive is about rationality and clearheaded thinking on social issues. Councillor Leung places great emphasis on this in the reconstructed Legco debate, in which he rebuts the knee-jerk prejudices and political calculation of his opponents with lucidly developed argument and non-emotive language. After an eventual ruling on the terms to be served by the juvenile offenders terms that are viciously punitive and in effect considerably longer than sentences being served by adult offenders Leung excoriates the faceless bureaucrats thus: Your so-called discretionary life sentence is just an excuse to avoid responsibility, to keep your hands clean. No fair-minded individual could describe the situation otherwise. As the screenwriter makes clear, anyone who violates the law should receive reasonable punishment. Thus the film does not challenge the concept of reasonable punishment, or evade the enormity of the crime in which the young

From Xu Xi to the Chief Executive: Hong Kong in the Dock 111

Cheung Yau-ming participated. However, as the Legco sequence demonstrates, even sophisticated societies such as Hong Kongs are often less susceptible to rational argument than to culturally embedded preconception. This deliberately extended sequence is at the heart of the films essayistic strategy. It would have been even more convincing had Tang Shu-wing worn the obligatory jacket and tie, since the first to challenge the Legco dress convention was Councillor Longhair Leung Kwok-hung several years after the events the film portrays. On the other hand, we should perhaps give credit for the films prescient representation of such iconoclastic developments in Hong Kongs political life in the first years of the new millennium. For, as we appreciate with hindsight, much has changed, even if the fundamental reactionary attitudes are still evident at the highest levels of government in the SAR.

Conclusion
To conclude, I would like to clarify and justify my title, and at the same time draw together the various threads of argument explicit or implicit in my chapter. The essay form provides a critical platform for the writer or filmmaker to produce more trenchant and topical commentary on local and global issues of culture and cultural politics. I believe it is healthy for such individual talents to provide a critically distanced perspective, whether or not they are specialists in fields such as history, politics, law or economics. Putting Hong Kong on trial may seem a more drastic course of action than simply interviewing the city about its past, present and future, but of course this is an allusion to the lack of proper sentence in the case of those detained without term. It is also a reference to the essays and the films call for political accountability and a critical evaluation of the last ten years, as well as the colonial years. On a positive note it is a call to trial something new, more open and inclusive, in the form of transparency and universal suffrage. As Xu Xi ironically implies in Evanescent Isles, the idea that Hong Kong lacks the maturity at present for universal suffrage is simply risible. Finally, the more negative connotations of the word crack in Xu Xis introductory essay, A Crack in Space, can also be counterbalanced by the positive associations of the word craic in the popular Irish/English usage, meaning fun or having a good time, a connotation that globalization and especially Irish theme pubs is helping to spread. Evanescence or indeterminacy can be seen as negative in the case of disappearing skylines and heritage and detention without limit. But they may also be seen as good adaptive qualities in our contemporary world, befitting a small place on the South China coast once memorably described by Kipling as somewhere between heaven and earth (Kipling, cited in White, 1996, p. 100).

7
The New East Asia and Hong Kong Cinema
C. J. W.-L. Wee*

A notable cultural development during the 1980s and the 1990s, the decades of the so-called East Asian Miracle, has been the increased cultural production, innovation and circulation of both high culture and mass culture within East Asia. Mass culture includes films from Hong Kong, China, South Korea and Japan, and more recently transnational co-productions, as well as pop music from Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and Hong Kong. The historic political divisions in the region that led to the Greater East Asian War or the Pacific War, although the former term is more revealing of the stakes in the conflict make this dynamic regional cultural productivity somewhat unexpected. I will argue that post-1980s intra-Asia cultural production does not represent a common culturalist condition: there is often no assertion of (state-supported) Asian values, no superlatively exotic way of life and no idea of a pan-Asia taken as a unified or organic cultural category that draws upon culturalisms, statisms, and theories of civilization (Wang, 2007, p. 14). It can be argued that the New East Asia that has emerged is predicated upon an increased sense of a shared capitalist modernization and modern culture, manifested primarily through rapid urbanization prompted by a desire to foster premier world cities as assets in capitalist development, rather than upon essentialized and regionwide primordial values. Tokyo, Hong Kong, Seoul, Taipei and Singapore stand out in a network of aspiring modern Asian metropoles,1 now joined by Shanghai
* Thanks go to the following for their responses to the chapter: Petrus Liu, Brett de Bary, Elizabeth Helsinger, Joan Kee, Takahashi Yuichiro, Uchino Tadashi, Stephen Teo and Charles Kronengold. This chapter was completed during a 200708 Visiting Fellowship at the Society for the Humanities, Cornell University.

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and Beijing. In other words, one common vision of the New East Asia is an urbanmodern one. However, East Asia is not a decentred urban intercultural festival without hegemonic struggles or centres: there are divisive and competitive national and cultural differences, with historical resonances. The East Asian Modern that emerges, such as it is, is fractured, and any triumphalism needs to be interrogated for the (often not even) hidden dissensions within it. While regional cultural production does not compete at a global level as an effective counter-balance to American mass culture products, it does in toto offer the essentially cultural productivity required for economic development to continue to expand by producing a shared vision of everyday urban life even as the tensions in the region are showcased in it.2 Specifically, this chapter will examine the increased dimensions of a New Asian regional identity since the 1980s by considering how Hong Kong cinema in the early twenty-first century has reworked itself in terms of this fractured New Asia, as part of the ongoing creation of an intra-Asia mass culture. That is to say, Hong Kong and Hong Kong culture participate in the larger movements of modernity in the region. I will examine two films indicative of the particular cultural productiveness at stake: Jingle Mas Tokyo Raiders (Dongjing Gongle /[2000]) a Hong Kong film set almost entirely in a glossy Tokyo consonant with what might be said to be the libidinization of market modernity in the region and Johnnie Tos Fulltime Killer (Quanzhi Shashou /[2001], co-director Wai Ka-fai). Mas film was one of the most popular in Hong Kong in 2000, and is distinct both in being a Hong Kong film set mainly in Japan and having extensive Japanese dialogue. Tos even more multilingual film unavoidably becomes an allegory of the East Asian core states competing: two professional killers from Japan and China struggle to determine who will be recognized as the regions best. These two films evocatively recognize both the shared contemporary desire for a First World East Asia and the historic ideational and militarily enforced formations of a Greater East Asia associated with Japans historic and disastrous attempts to leave Asia, as it were, with its backwards nature, and modernize or risk coming under full Western colonial domination. The current versions of the new are haunted by the spectre of an earlier version of the new: the tense history of modernitys debilitating entry into the region, intimately linked with colonialism and the first modern Asian nation-state, Japan which also took on the colonialist characteristics of the Western nation-states and thus their very colonial modernity (Duara, 2003) has not dissipated. The older and newer versions of the new are inextricably linked. Thus, the question of the circulation of culture and cultural products within the region is inextricably linked to the questions of both commonalities and

The New East Asia and Hong Kong Cinema 115

differences. The three concerns are not only conjoined, but are also thematized in cultural innovation. The central commonality is the ongoing development of urban-modern lifestyles; the differences are not only linguistic and nationalcultural, but are based on the historico-political struggles to become modern in the first place; and the very circulation of cultural products by their producers and intermediaries suggests that the foregrounding and examination of the common and the different are that which, paradoxically, can generate a cultural economy of resonance.3 The history of commonality-in-difference becomes a realm for culturalist deployment, and the urban-modern becomes the contemporary nodal point through which it can be narrativized. However, because this commonality-in-difference is historically conditioned and remains sensitive, it may appear as lacunae in the films, requiring a form of suspicious approach to their analysis.

The New East Asia and East Asia and the New
Globalization and thus capitalism possibly unexpectedly, given the meaning of the former expression lead to greater trade and can strengthen political relations within regions (Therborn, 2002, pp. 29495), and increased regional trade may in turn contribute to an emergent and improvised cultural and other imagining of an East Asian Modern in cultural production. This is so, even though we should take as a given that the omnibus term Asia is a colonial and ongoing postcolonial problematic, made to cover a great deal of cultural and social diversity that arises because of its definition (or co-figuration) against and with the West (Sakai, 2003). Nevertheless, despite the dangers of culturalisms and civilizational theories in the thinking on the region, an economically interdependent region does exist, entrenched through interstate organizations such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and other formal inter-state dialogue groupings such as ASEAN Plus Three Japan, China and South Korea which deal with security and related concerns. To begin with, we may question how we are to take the newness that is represented in many mass-cultural products. In terms of East Asia and modernitys way of organizing the world, in which East Asia emerges as an apparently new alternative modernity empowered by the successes of that very same [Western] modernity (Dirlik, 2005, p. 159),4 the 1980s were pivotal. They were the boom years under Ronald Reagan, during which the ideological triumph of the right was consolidated by the collapse of the Soviet Union. The so-called grand narratives did not disappear, and the grandest narrative of all became prominent: the seemingly universal story of prosperity and the victory

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of the market. During that decade, the cartographic imaginary that can be called the New East Asia increasingly came into its own, able to actively participate in the grand narrative of Progress through the emergence of a multicentric world order that had North American, European and Asian-Pacific zones.5 The thenAsian Miracle economies of the 1980s formed part of the so-called flying geese model of development led by Japan. What is pronounced in the newness was also a political rhetoric with a culturalist dimension the imagining of the New Asia in the form of the various Asian values and Asia-that-can-say-no discourses deployed not only by the expected Southeast Asian politicians such as Lee Kuan Yew and Dr Mahathir Mohamed, but also by others such as Tokyos right-wing governor, Ishihara Shintaro, for their own local purposes. If modernity as a concept had run into trouble during World War I, its postWorld War II reinvention as modernization theory was key in allowing the bourgeois idea of progress an afterlife, one that was adopted assiduously during the years of the Cold War by some pro-capitalist, new nation-states such as Singapore and the other mini-dragon states of then-British Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan in defiance of the Bandung-era wisdom of avoiding neocolonialism. The refurbished new itself has become a commonality in the region. Fredric Jameson complains that the outmoded concept of modernity is in fact back in business all over the world, and virtually inescapable in political discussions from Latin America to China, not to speak of the former Second World itself (Jameson, 2002, p. 6). The wish for a supposedly better Western modernity is an optical illusion nourished by envy and hope, by inferiority feelings and the need for emulation. Alongside all other paradoxes built into this strange concept, this one is the most fatal: that modernity is always a concept of otherness (Jameson, 2002, p. 211). Jameson seems to fail to appreciate the acuity of his own insight that the combined envy and hope and desire for the modern are surely what one might expect, given the history of Western European colonialism and the subsequent history of an imperial Pax Americana. Recently, of course, the centre of the New East Asia has begun to move away from an economically weakened Japan. The Asian Financial Crisis of 199798, when the devaluation of the Thai baht initiated the flight of capital from South Korea, Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia, was a defining moment of this change. While the crisis was largely over by the last quarter of 1998, the post-1997 centre firmly became China. The latters market power since the late 1990s has already affected regional culture industries, including the Hong Kong film industry (Pang, 2007), and will continue to do so.

The New East Asia and Hong Kong Cinema 117

The embrace of modernization and the new does not mean that national boundaries disappear amid state-driven economic imperatives and circulation of cultural products; nor does it imply that old histories are forgotten. The new, historically, was a dividing factor in the region. Japans earlier, nineteenth-century entry into the modern era represented a concerted attempt to take the place of and thus gain autonomy from Chinas longstanding regional dominance, and in the process also to confront the West. Japan tried to shed an Asia, or deAsianize, in Fukuzawa Yukichis (18351901) (in)famous formulation,6 which, in historicist thinking drawn from German idealism, was traditional, politically despotic, agrarian, and still lacked nation-states, even if Asia was the starting point of world history. Ideologically, Japan located its position via the idea of Asia, in its triangulation of itself, the historically dominant China, and the colonial-modern West. In internally recoding its society and culture, Japan had managed both to exceed an Asia-West binary opposition thinking (Sakai, 2006) and to conceive of the new nation-state as the political form that could overtake China to be the putative leader in a less modern Asia; China, crucially, became the historical hidden resource for modern Asian thinking (Sun, 2000). Thus, the pressing questions of national state formation and modernity pertained not only to oppressive relations with the colonial West, but to struggles within the region. This ideological history remains with us giving us a fractured or nonmonolithic East Asian Modern and is embedded in the cultural productions I will examine. Nonetheless, East Asian urban localities did participate in the deterritorialized locale East Asia that exists with an operational logic (or set of logics). Various subject and identity formations of the 1980s were able to encompass this imagined region based on economic success, and deploy it for political and other purposes in ways not possible during the early years of European decolonization. The grand narrative of spirit as the story of unfolding progress and truth, as it were, is brought home to East Asia, which is new in its ability to claim possession of the justifying myth of modernity and the claim for this newness itself supports the need to keep expanding development.

Circulation, Commonality, Difference and the Urban-Modern

The increasing export and circulation of culture within the region has been an inherent part of generating a contemporary Asian way of life that is also, in turn, inextricably linked to the consumerism that is the very linchpin of the [US] economic system (Jameson, 1998, p. 64), a lifestyle form extensively exported through American media products. But, as we might expect, East Asian culture industries do adapt the American way of life to the regions cultural pluralism

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and differing states of development levels, and also in turn draw from the regions own particular history of mass cultural production, in order to generate common and/or aspirational images of the New East Asia. As noted earlier, the circulation of culture and cultural products within the region is tied up, in many respects, with the questions of both commonalities and differences, past and present. Indeed, commonality-in-difference on occasion becomes a theme in itself in the regions cultural production. Conceptions of urban-modern Asia function as a major expression of a shared commonality-indifference as they offer points of transnational connection that avoid organicistcultural unity for thinking Asia.7 There is a history of mass-consumed products circulating in the region. Apart from Hong Kong films and music and music from Taiwan, Singapore, for example, received Japanese TV programmes in the 1960s and then again in the 1980s; in Hong Kong, during the 1970s and 1980s, as much as 30 per cent of programming could be taken up by Japanese productions (Iwabuchi, 2002). The difference between this earlier period and the 1990s is that the later resurgence rested on a much broader consumer base than had previously existed. With greater regional economic development, the cultural flows had intensified, first with a Japanese wave by the early 1990s that exceeded an earlier wave in the 1980s, and followed by the Korean wave from the late 1990s, as South Korean political and cultural life was liberalized. Cultural flows within the region therefore are not new, and even the combination of circulation, commonality and difference is not without precedent. Co-productions in East Asian film effectively intra-Asia film (see Lo, 2005; and Yeh and Davis, 2002) go back to Empress Yang Kwei Fei (Yang Guifei /; Yo kihi in Japan) in 1955. It was produced by the Japanese Daiei Motion Picture Company and the Hong Kongbased Shaw Brothers, directed by Mizoguchi Kenji, the first picture to bear the common name of a Hong Kong Japan co-production (Law, 2000, p. 105; cited in Morris, 2004). In fact, in the 1960s, Hong Kong filmmakers had looked up to Japan for its advanced technical and creative capacities. Regarding the thematization of circulation and difference in Sino-Japanese film, there was the 1971 co-production by Daiei, Katsu Production Company, and the Shaw Brothers of Yasuda Kimiyoshis Zatoichi Meets the One-Armed Swordsman /(Shin Zatoichi: Yabure! Tojin-ken), which cultural critic Meaghan Morris takes to be a fine symbolic starting point (Morris, 2004, p. 185) for East Asiabased globally marketed action films. The film the twenty-second instalment of the Zatoichi series has the blind masseurswordsman Zatoichi (Katsu Shintaro) meet the popular hero of Hong Kong director Zhang Ches The One-Armed Swordsman (Dubi Dao / , 1967),

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Wang Kong (Wang Yu). While visiting Japan, the Chinese swordsman rescues a young boy from marauding samurai and becomes an outlaw. Zatoichi sees the mortally wounded father of the boy, whose last wish is that the former take care of his son. There is a deadly showdown between the two, because of a mutual linguistic incomprehension and despite the fact that both are similarly constructed good heroes. What is distinctive is not only that the studios took into account the different markets they were targeting, but also the way this occurred, given the historical enmity between the two polities. The film contains both Mandarin and Japanese, and in the ending for the Japanese audience Wang Kong dies, while in the version for Chinese-language markets Zatoichi dies. National/cultural and linguistic differences and prejudice are exploited jointly in the creation of an intra-Asia cultural product. To ensure circulation, differentiated unhappy endings are required. Thus, even in 1971, circulation, commonality and difference could happily come together. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the politico-identitarian discourses and urbanizingindustrializing practices related to the East Asia in the 1980s and the 1990s became enmeshed with cultural production itself but this did not mean that the embedded regional histories of fractured modernity and the prior history of culturally interactive intra-Asia production were forgotten. Arguably, it is the combined presence of these imbricated histories that can account for the presence of cultural intertexts that cross national boundaries in later films such as Tokyo Raiders /and particularly Fulltime Killer / ; I will return to this point. If one accepts the larger argument that the new and the modern still matter in the region, then the regions cultural production, even given a lifestyle-consumerism, cannot be simply postmodernist in its most reductive sense of art that is quotation about quotation, but has historical reference, even if heavily mediated. But cultural production must also make reference to the present economic modernizing context, with China increasingly taking the place of Japan as economic centre and also as the country that postcolonial Hong Kong returned to in 1997. Hong Kong cultural production at the end of the twentieth century must refer to the monumental event of the return, if only obliquely, with its implications of Hong Kongs present experience of the new. A practical question in the 1990s was how Hong Kong film could reach out to new markets, including China. Distinct developments in Hong Kong intraAsia cinema or pan-Asian cinema, as it is also described (Yeh and Davis, 2002; Lo, 2005) had become noticeable from the 1990s. The heyday of Hong Kong cinema had been the 1980s and 1990s. The Asian economic crisis of 1997 greatly weakened the Southeast Asian markets on which Hong Kong cinema had relied to consume its products (Pang, 2002, p. 325).8 With the increasing realization that

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the Hong Kong market might now be too small to sustain its cinema in a time of crisis, new strategies needed to be found to reinvent Hong Kong film. The appropriation of Japanese mass culture had begun earlier in the 1990s, in the use of Japanese motifs and stars in televisual and film production. By the late 1990s, Hong Kong cinema had incorporated mainland Chinese and Korean actors, and had begun to pay more attention to the China market. What emerged has been described as a strange cosmopolitan fantasy with pan-Asian casting, as manifested in Benny Chans Gen-X Cops (1999), a fluffy but well-choreographed action thriller in which renegade young male cops with attitude deal with a vicious punk and a Japanese arms dealer. In such films, the multicultural ensembles flawlessly switch from Cantonese to English or Japanese as they jet around the region (Yeh and Davis, 2002).9 While we have seen some precedent for bilingual intra-Asia film, monolingual film remained the norm and so the use of multilingualism to bridge regional differences was unusual, as the subtitling it required was associated more with art-house cinema.10 If linguistic and national/ethnic differences pose a continual challenge to mass-cultural circulation, a shared sense of or an aspirational desire for a common urban-modern culture and lifestyle offers one easier way to narrativize the commonality-in-difference of the New Asia, assisted, when necessary, by a multilingual cosmopolitanism.11 Tokyo has become both a major instance and representation of this urban modernity, as has Hong Kong itself, though with differences between the two. The dramatic difference between the current representation of urban East Asia and that of the not-so-distant past becomes apparent when we consider a famous but older Western image: urban Hong Kong as captured in Richard Quines The World of Suzie Wong (1960), which premiered in Hong Kong in March 1961. While the film is a sort of travelogue with an accompanying exotic melodrama, the bargirls in the film are sympathetically represented as dignified beings, with a sense of community even if, in the end, Suzie (Nancy Kwan) needs the Great American Hero Robert Lomax (William Holden) to save her. The quality of the depiction of Hong Kong street life Centrals banking district, the markets of Yau Ma Tei and Wan Chai, Wan Chais waterfront, Wan Chais bars with American soldiers is a major source of the films appeal.12 But the uncertain transit port city of the 1950s has been replaced by a financial centre; Wan Chais waterfront is now composed of tall buildings, and Fenwick Harbour has become reclaimed land, with the Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts sitting on top of it. An exotic, down-at-heel urban-modernity has been supplanted by a less exotic modernity. Such urban images were important to the region at large, if nothing else, as images that needed to be superseded via development agendas.

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The emphasis in a number of regional mass-cultural products from the 1990s on seemingly common but also new urban lifestyles that offered a modern environment of personal freedom that could be aspired to was evoked by Tokyo, as Japanese TV dramas increased in sophistication from the early 1990s. Fuji TVs Tokyo Love Story (1991) in which the heroine was presented as unhesitating in her choice of the man she wanted, displaying an emancipated attitude that contrasts with Suzie Wongs dependent one was the drama that led to a revivified Japanese cultural wave in the 1990s. It was a surprise hit in Taiwan, Hong Kong and, in 1997, in China (translated as Dongjing Ai de Gushi / ). Tokyo itself, as the foremost Asian metropolis, seemed a key part of the serials popularity.13 The city, more than just the capitalist home of technological innovations, could now be depicted as an urban centre that potentially can spread modern attitudes through its cultural products. Tokyo grew in world-city stature from the 1980s, the important decade for the New East Asia. At that point, foreign direct investment increasingly flowed out of Japan to East and Southeast Asia, as Japan started to participate in the New International Division of Labour by outsourcing some of its industrial production. This in turn led to an unprecedented focus on commercial land in Tokyos central wards, as the infrastructure and physical environment to turn Tokyo into a centre for both finance and transnational production and trade needed to be built (Douglas, 1993). This has led to the gleaming Tokyo on display in many mass-culture products. The increased intensity of daily life in regional cities with their rapidly morphing and high-rise cityscapes more so than in advanced Western cities unsettles but simultaneously indicates the open horizons of the new. These two poles seem to inhere within a shared vision of everyday life as urban-regional cultural practice circulated by East Asian culture industries. The image of Hong Kong embodied in Wong Kar-wais now-iconic Chungking Express (Chongqing Senlin /[1994]) perhaps offers us the fragmented but yet complementary counterpart to Tokyos gloss. Wongs film revolves around two parallel stories of cops (Kaneshiro Takeshi14 and Tony Leung Chiuwai) and their attempts to find love. The two do not connect, although they occupy the same urban spaces. The locations a dclass Kowloon district that houses people from all over; a snack shop in the Central district, with its unique escalator climbing up the crowded slopes to the Mid-Levels on Hong Kong Island become urban characters in their own right. Chungking Express can even offer a model for other forms of Asian cultural production. A curator of a multi-city set of exhibitions, Under Construction (19992002), holds up Chungking Express as a prime example of productive-fragmented creativity and the everyday:

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The movie captured everyday life in a contemporary Asia, conveying the atmosphere of its speed He turns his gaze to the nitty-gritty of the urban landscape, and to sights from everyday life where elements of culture from domestic and foreign are all mixed up [sic] What emerges is the reality and the fantasy that belong to all Asians in an age where things, information, and people are all moving The gaze of new-generation artists onto their everyday lives overlaps with that revealed in the movie of Wong Karwai, in which he is inspired by urban daily life. (Kamiya, 2002, p. 133)

This is the now slightly clichd rhetoric of the global postmodern: a rush of images signifying the transnational; cultural hybridity; social fractures caused by the circulation of capital and people. But to say this without qualification is to dismiss the intensified nature of daily life and the signifying power of the commonality-in-difference of the East Asian urban-modern. Hong Kong cinema in its return-to-China phase of production appears able to embody contrasting depictions of the urban-modern, along with the historical challenge of the new, in the larger regional context.

The Gleaming Urban-Modern

Jingle Mas Tokyo Raiders is one key example of the urbanized cosmopolitan fantasy strain of intra-Asia Hong Kong cinema, with cross-border casting featuring Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Ekin Cheng, Kelly Chen, a cameo by Cecilia Cheung, and Japanese leading male actor Nakamura Toru, supported by Abe Hiroshi. Showcasing the New East Asia and thinking of a broader Asian market create an increased need for bilingual cultural production in which Japanese and Cantonese are used, and even the passing use of Mandarin and English. Contemporary Tokyo evoked by its most shiny built environment and as a world city with broadly recognizable urban architectural icons itself becomes one of the films stars in this upbeat depiction of commonality-indifference. There are also unexpected plot twists that further gesture to a new orientation towards (supposed) common regional interests (even if we are not to take the plot too seriously), as well as a leading man who turns out to be biracial and bi-cultural a Sino-Japanese character who can represent the interests of both Hong Kong and Japan in a neutral fashion. The positive face of the New Asia thus requires a suppression of older dissensions. Tokyo Raiders, Hong Kongs top-grossing film in 2000,15 is a humorous spy thriller spoof and pastiche that draws upon James Bond 007 as an intertext, in the line of related Hong Kong action films since the mid-1960s (Bordwell, 2000, p. 150). It is worth noting that the early Hong Kong Bond lookalikes were directed by Japanese contract directors who were themselves using Japanese film models that utilized the Bond motif (Yeh and Davis, 2002, p. 63) Tokyo

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Raiders thus draws on earlier patterns of interactive intra-Asia productions. The storyline itself is intractably complicated, but humour, clever fight and chase sequences (including one on motorized skateboards), and Mas light directorial touch propel it along. The plot detail is important. The heroine, Macy (Chen), multilingual in Japanese, Cantonese, Mandarin and English, is left at the altar in Las Vegas by her Japanese fianc Takahashi Yuji (Nakamura), who heads a U.S. investment firm in Tokyo. The U.S.-West is rapidly left behind as she returns to Hong Kong to look for him. There, she learns that he has gone to Tokyo, and meets an interior designer, Yung (Cheng), who just happens to be a martial-arts expert, and to whom her boyfriend owes a large sum of money. Yung trails her to Tokyo, and there they link up with an impossibly cool private investigator, the transplanted Hongkonger Lam (played with droll panache by Leung) he of many spy gadgets and his team of four Charlies Angelstype assistants. A yakuza boss, Ito (Abe), is after Takahashi, as he has run off with his woman. We finally discover the plots major twists first, that Takahashi is a CIA agent tasked to flood Japan with counterfeit yen, who has become distracted with the gangster bosss woman; second, that Lam is not really a private investigator, but an officer of Sino-Japanese descent in the internal division of the Japanese Ministry of Defence, who has gone undercover to foil the dastardly American plot; and, finally, that Yung is a private bodyguard sent by Macys rich banker father to protect her her father had objected to Macys liaison with a Japanese man. The implicit inter-ethnic/national discomfiture is rapidly glossed over, becoming a suppressed moment of difference in the film. All is resolved in the end, after a speedboat chase sequence the films set piece in Tokyo Bay and the Sumida River. What is noteworthy is the way in which cool is evoked in Tokyo Raiders clever dialogue and slick action sequences aside via urban images. The opening sequence is representative. We first get a birds-eye view of Tokyo, and are shown the orange-and-white Tokyo Tower in Shiba Park, taller than the Eiffel Tower and built in 1958 as an expression of Japans 1950s boom symbolizing its postwar, modern rebirth. Then we see the Sumida River, and the camera zooms in on the commercial, urban-transit and public-administrative hub that is Shinjuku, a special ward of the city. We see the towers of Shinjuku, with the iconic, modernist and metal-clad New Tokyo City Hall Complex, designed by the late Tange Kenzo (19132005). The camera then settles near the south entrance of Shinjuku Station, where we see the suited office crowds and young women wearing the kogal (or kogyaru, small or child girl) subcultural fashions that emerged from the mid-1990s the platform boots, coloured hair and designer accessories that exert so much influence on youths in the region. There is no

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need to explain fully the architectural icons, or the fashionableness of the city and the stylishness of Shinjuku though the camera does rest for a moment on a stainless-steel kanji sign that proclaims Shinjuku any more than it is necessary to explain fully Londons West End or midtown Manhattan. After the initial swoop, the camera moves to a Shinjuku back lane, where Lam with stylish and (inevitably) camp moves fights off villains sent by the yakuza with an umbrella, assorted gadgets and his martial-arts skills, to the accompaniment of spirited Latin music by Hong Kong composer Peter Kam. We find here the extended starting action sequence of every Bond film combined with the American Western; this approach signals the directors self-reflexive, wink-wink, nod-nod stance throughout the film. Although Tokyo Raiders is lightweight, Ma, a former cinematographer, delivers a high-gloss visual style that captures Tokyos daytime sheen with a lifestyle magazines precision. This bilingual thriller implies and thus helps to reinforce the idea of a shared, urban Us-ness for Hong Kong and Japan, a world far removed from Suzie Wongs oriental urbanism, even though we should keep in mind that Japanese capital contributed significantly to the regions economic development. The lead characters are constructed so that they are part of this cosmopolitan world. Macys fluency in Japanese and clear comfort with Tokyo even when she wanders aimlessly through its streets when emotionally distraught makes her a Hong Kong character well and truly at home in the world. The worldliness of her world is enhanced with a Japanese setting and characters (Yeh and Davis, 2002, p. 65). What is unexpected is that Lams sophisticated biculturalism is literalized and he is made to be miscegenated, biracial. This puts him in an easy position to be a sociopolitical and cultural interstitial, occupying an embodied third space between the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) a part of China, and no longer a British colony and Japan, even while he is an agent of the Japanese government. Any discomfort with Lams position betwixt and between the two core states of East Asia is papered over unusually, to say the least by a plot that makes the United States the ultimate villain in the story: for some inexplicable reason, it wants to damage its most important East Asian ally by weakening the Japanese yen. While we should not take the films gestures too seriously, it is nevertheless suggestive that a Sino-Japanese Asia can be constructed in the first place to share a commonality that places it at odds with the U.S. hegemon. Regional blemishes are powdered over in the happy face of urban-modern Asia.

Competition in the New Asia

If the urban-modern can offer a connecting East Asian commonality achieved partly by sneaking in a biological dimension to embody harmony, what

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happens when entrenched regional differences are directly put on display in the cosmopolitan Asian city? As with earlier intra-Asian cultural productions, the acknowledgement and thematization of difference, rather than any direct resolution, may be enough to facilitate circulation. Hong Kong auteur-director Johnnie To and co-director Wai Ka-fais Fulltime Killer offers a more reflective and complex version than Tokyo Raiders of the ideological and historical tensions between national-cultural identities and languages, and of the complications of reaching out to an East Asian audience. To has reflected on the difficulty of envisioning what an Asian audience looks like for Fulltime Killer:
Suppose we think of this movie as an Asian movie For international audiences, the language of the dialogue whether it is Chinese, Japanese, or Korean doesnt really matter. Hong Kong audiences may experience something new by having to pay close attention to subtitles when watching a Hong Kong film, but for Westerners, they probably wont notice a difference. If theres a Hong Kong movie that can be called an Asian movie, I think something has changed then in Hong Kong cinema Of course I do hope it can be accepted by audiences in Asia, but its not easy. (quoted in Leary, 2004)

Linguistic differences are real, and To wonders if the viewing practices of a cosmopolitan, if mainly Western, art-house audience can be recreated among mainstream East Asian moviegoers less accustomed to reading subtitles. Can linguistic-cultural differences be overcome in the presentation of heterogeneous East Asia? To try to achieve this would be to exceed Hong Kong films achievements thus far. Fulltime Killer is one of Tos more stylistically experimental films, and he himself has said that Its not a movie that a lot of people will like. But I think its a good experiment (quoted in Teo, 2007, p. 239). The psychological accounts the film offers of the two professional killers are opaque: it is not clear why the Japanese assassin lives in Hong Kong, or why he has become what he has; and while we are offered a history of the Chinese killers failure as an Olympic athlete, it is not clear why this failure would lead him to professional killing as a form of alternative achievement. These opacities and fractured subjectivities combine to become an excess in the film that generates the allegory of the two East Asian core states competing: two professional killers from Japan and mainland China work to see who will be the recognized best in the region. The battles take place mainly in Hong Kong SAR, the modern regional urban hub and the transnational stage on which diverse East Asians can meet. The film also functions largely in Japanese, with some English, but also features Cantonese and Mandarin; subtitles abound in this Hong Kong Chinese film attempting to become an Asian movie.

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Fulltime Killer a deconstructivist, anti-killer genre film and psychodrama that sends up the John Woo/Ringo Lamtype gangster film genre of the 1980s features an emotionally inward-looking and deliberately unnamed, monolingual Japanese hit man, known only as O (Sorimachi Takashi); his mainland Chinese competitor Tok (Andy Lau), a self-dramatizing and showy cinephile who wants to exceed Os reputation and be the gold medalist of assassins, and to become a legend in his own time; and a polyglot Taiwanese woman who works in a Japanese video-rental store, Chin (Kelly Lin), who also cleans Os flat and posts his faxed-in assignments up on the notice board. O actually lives across the road, and can look at his flat (and his notice board) through a telephoto lens and also keep a literal and emotional distance from Chin. She is confused, personally and culturally, and seems to be looking for the adventure and self-fulfilment that the two rivals offer. As with Tokyo Raiders, the details of the plot do matter, even more so in this case. Tok, whose real name is Lok Tak-wah, was a failed shooting participant in the 1992 Olympic Games. He is epileptic, and flashing lights send him into a fit, sometimes at life-and-death moments, undermining not only his attempts to be the first mainland Chinese to win a gold medal in the event, but even his love-making attempts with Chin. Toks older brother had a similar problem in the 1984 Olympics there seems to be a lot to prove in their competition. There is also an English-speaking Interpol cop from Singapore, Albert Lee (Simon Yam), who, obsessed by the titanic clash, cathartically turns to writing about it. O is tiring emotionally of his profession, especially as he was not able to save Chins predecessor, Nancy, from being killed by gangsters as collateral damage. He only slowly realizes the challenges Tok poses. The latter knows that Chin works for O, and has deliberately courted her for that reason. A huge debacle for O occurs in Macau, where Tok undermines Os assassination assignment, and Chin and O end up on the run from both the police and the mobsters. Towards the end of the film, Chin meets the now ex-inspector Lee in a caf he is now so dysfunctional that he has dropped out of the police service. Chin tells Lee that there has been a showdown between the two professionals in a warehouse with hidden weapons, and that Tok has killed O. As she leaves, the penny drops, and he dashes out to see Chin leaving in a Mercedes with O: he understands that O has retired as the reigning killer in favour of love and a private life, and has given the arriviste Chinese killer the legendary status he wants. Indeed, both receive what they want: a way out of the profession for O, and legendary status for Tok. In fact, though, the fireworks that have been accidentally set off in the warehouse have also sparked another epileptic fit. But in the end Lee decides that he will recount the version of events that Chin has told him.

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The cartographic imaginary of the New East Asia is immediately put on show in the film. Fulltime Killer begins by literalizing the flow of competitive difference. While the film is set primarily in Hong Kong, the first ten minutes rush into stunning overkill. There are bravura set-piece killings by the two first O, efficient and restrained in a train station in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia;16 and then Tok, in a police station near the River Kwai, Thailand, in a typically showy and excessive manner riding a bike, using a bouquet of flowers to disguise his shotgun and, finally, using hand grenades. The contrasting styles of killing form part of an essential understanding we are to have of the pair. A confrontation between Tok and Fat Ice, the crime boss who hired him, follows in Harrys Bar at Boat Quay, in Singapore, where we see Tok exotically playing the erhu (a Chinese stringed instrument). Finally, O meets with his agent in Pusan, South Korea (actually Toks brother). We are given a mapping of East Asia in which apropos of the post-1997 Asian economic crisis region Southeast Asia is a subsidiary realm to Northeast Asia. The Southeast AsianSingaporean Lee (who speaks English, often the regions lingua franca, as his first language) is thus the appropriate witness to and scribe of the Northeast Asians fight for dominance. From the start, it is difficult not to read the film as an allegory about the heterogeneity of intra-regional competition for hegemony in New-World(Dis)Order(ed) Asia. The competition between O and Tok for the culturally confused Taiwanese Chin, with her unsettled linguistic and national identity (and given Taiwans troubled relationship with the Mainland), becomes a synecdoche of the larger issue of power and ego that the film investigates. Thematically, Tos film draws in the first instance on themes investigated in previous films Wai and he made for their company, Milkyway Image, established in 1996. Pang Lai-kwan argues that the downturn in Hong Kong filmmaking in the 1990s led Milkyway to follow but also challenge Hong Kong cinemas masculine tradition, even though these films end up choosing to reproduce [the tradition] instead of creating new male subjects (Pang, 2002, p. 337).17 The development in Fulltime Killer lies in Os renunciation of professional violence for love: the killer figure is softer than in earlier films. This change of direction is part of what shifts Fulltime Killer from anti-killer genre movie to intra-Asia allegory. This becomes apparent after O discovers that he has been set up by his Korean handler Toks brother, Lok Gan-wah. O goes to Pusan to confront him, and shoots Loks right hand instead of killing him. Lok claims that he had nearly become number one in pistol shooting in his 1984 Olympic bid, but and here there is plot confusion in the end, O (who has not participated in any Olympic Games) had defeated both brothers. The scenes overdetermination suggests a displacement from a psychological loss in the form of an Olympic failure to larger issues of national identity and pride, even if the film never offers

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a direct explanation of why this displacement of meaning takes place. It is telling that O does not kill the handler: the glory and the honour can go to the brothers to China rather than to Japan. There is intentionality at play in the films disjunctures and displacement. This can be seen in the way in which the main characters have been modified from those in the original Chinese-language novel Full Time Hitman / (1999) by Edmond Pang, upon which the film is based. In the novel, O is a Chinese assassin and Tok is Eurasian (Teo, 2007). The change in ethnic composition is suggestive, to say the least. But Fulltime Killer is more than an adaptation of Pangs novel. The presence of many filmic intertexts demonstrates a careful craftsmanship at work: there are references to other action films such as Kathryn Bigelows Point Break (1991) and Richard Donners Assassins (1995). One revealing allusion is to John Fords classic western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), in which a news reporter, after learning what had actually happened in a shootout, decides to stick with his original printed version of the event, as legend has become fact. As we have seen, Fulltime Killer is a transnational collage and transcultural hybrid of action film that far exceeds any notion of Asia (Lo, 2005, p. 150). While that contention is accurate, it also suggests that intra-Asia production somehow needs to be regionally self-contained if it is claimed to be Asian. This takes us back to the problem of essentializing East Asia but it is exactly because the region is not essentialized as a common culturalist condition in the film that culturally plural intertexts can abound. However, there are two other vital intertexts purposefully inserted in the film that firmly embed regional national-cultural difference at its centre. The first is maverick Japanese director Suzuki Seijuns absurdist and selfmocking yakuza thriller, Branded to Kill (1967; Koroshi no rakuin), now a cult classic. The film deals with third-ranked hitman, Hanada Goro (Shishido Jo), who has a fetish for boiling rice, and who fumbles one of his jobs and consequently receives a visit from the legendary but nameless Number One Killer (Nanbara Koji) as retribution. The egotistical Number One toys with Hanada for an extended stretch, and ends up being fatally shot by him in a boxing arena but not before returning the favour. As Hanada dies, he mutters that he is a champion and, befuddled, instinctively but accidentally shoots the woman he loves as she enters the arena. To adapts the yakuza urban myth, transforming the Hanada character into the Number One O, who forsakes the top ranking for love but not for death. The lower-ranked Chinese Tok, much more than Hanada as Number Three, becomes the aspirant who achieves the top rank and becomes a legend but a dead legend. Tos transformation is almost moralistic in its re-assignment of cultural meaning.

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The second and even more vital intertext becomes apparent when Tok first meets Chin in the video store where she works. Over the course of several meetings, he finally reveals his face. At a caf the same caf where Chin meets O on the first of every month Tok addresses her in Cantonese; until then, he has only spoken to her in Japanese. He tells her that he is Chinese, an assassin, and wants to kill a Japanese assassin possibly trying to seek sympathy for his cause based on an ethnic appeal. He then says that she is like Emu in Crying Freeman, a quiet girl transformed into a sexy woman after she meets an assassin, presumably referring to himself: he tries to ingratiate himself with her in the hope of using her to get to O. This fleeting and cryptic reference the only time in the film is to a Japanese manga, Crying Freeman, written by Koike Kazuo with artwork by Ikegami Ryoichi, which originally appeared in Weekly Big Comic Spirits between 1986 and 1988.18 Fulltime Killers intertextuality encompasses non-filmic East Asian texts, indicating that even the boundaries of different regional cultural texts are porous. The comic series revolved around an assassin who shed tears after his assassinations. Hinomura Yo , a Japanese potter, is kidnapped by the 108 Dragons, a Chinese gang, who have him hypnotized and turned into a killer, sardonically giving him the name Freeman. He nonetheless remains a sensitive soul, and cries after every killing. One murder of a yakuza boss is witnessed by Hino Emu, a lonely and beautiful artist. She knows Hinomura must kill her, but asks him to make love to her first, so that she would not die a virgin. Inevitably, Hinomura falls in love and marries her. As the story progresses, the heads of the 108 Dragons recognize Hinomuras talent and name him as the heir to the leadership of the organization, despite opposition from within the gang. In the end, new Chinese names are bestowed on Hino and Hinomura Hu Qinglan (tiger pure orchid, ) and Long Tai-yang (dragon sun, ), with the latter name deliberately made to be consonant with the gangs name. The two become honorary Chinese in Japan, gaining a central place among the racially marginal in Japanese society, a marginal group that has actually reordered its sociocultural identity. Like the Branded to Kill intertext, Crying Freeman functions as a significant structuring device in the film. O is clearly the sensitive Freeman: at the start of the film, O mourned the death of his previous cleaner, killed when she would not divulge information about him. A voiceover by O at the beginning of the film states: Killing is easy. Its harder to put the memory behind you. Tok is professional, but he is not sensitive and he is using Chin. The film also shows him to be unable to complete love-making with her, rendering the fits that beset him a metaphor for a larger weakness overweening ambition, the desire not only to be the new Number One, but to become apotheosized into a legend.

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The particular transposition of the manga story to Hong Kong is complex. O and Chin are crowned but they do not and do not want to take charge. Although Crying Freeman can be said to portray a stereotyped view of Chinese gangsters in Japan, this is not directly repudiated in the film. Instead, it is transposed into a larger field of competitive ethno-national differences, in which there is some narrative repetition, if inverted, from the manga (a Japanese assassin is sanctioned in the way Freeman is, and the love stories both have fruition), as well as some deliberate disconnections (the Chinese killer Tok, unlike the Chinese gang, is unable to really take charge). In the end, there seems no need to resolve the problem of difference. The contradictions at the heart of Fulltime Killer are acknowledged by the Ancient Mariner figure in the film, ex-inspector Lee. To the arriviste Chinese killer go the glory and the creation of the legend; the rest will take a quieter life. What does this say of a rising China and its role in the New Asia? The memory of past violence and the framing context of the history of old animosities and new politico-economic situations muddy up the ending of the film. Fulltime Killer as an Asian movie displays and contains contradictions. Although Asia remains an elusive concept, certainly if taken in ideationalideological terms, there has been enough interdependent economic development to make it real enough to try to cater to it. But if Asia is also changed more new and desirous of intense and rapid development that change is part of the context that some new films take into account. What Johnnie To takes to be part of the new is the emergence of an expanded middle class in East Asia who have been the beneficiaries of an urbanizing Asia, even if we must keep in mind that globalization is of course uneven and that the images of the fractured East Asian Modern that emerge from the films examined here are the very result of uneven globalization:
Only a few years ago, many movies in Hong Kong were, for example, films with a lot of dirty jokes or stories about gangsters. But now Hong Kong has changed very much, and in Asia I think something has changed too. There has been a recent wave of Korean films, all alternative in a way because of their emphasis on a middle class setting. And in Japan, the films show more and more of the middle class, because of the economic changes there. The people have changed, and so movies have to change. (Johnnie To, quoted in Leary, 2004)

8
One Country Two Cultures? Post-1997 Hong Kong Cinema and Co-productions
Chu Yiu-wai

The one country, two systems idea famously proposed by the late Deng Xiaoping maintains that within one socialist China there can be capitalist economic and political systems in special administrative regions such as Hong Kong and Macau. Shortly before the tenth anniversary of Hong Kongs reversion to China, Donald Tsang, the chief executive of Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR), claimed in Hong Kong Letter Just Because You Are Here, an open letter broadcast on Radio Television Hong Kong on 18 June 2007, that the ten years since 1997 had proved that the implementation of one country, two systems had been a success in Hong Kong. In the ceremony celebrating the tenth anniversary of Hong Kongs reunification with the motherland that was held on 1 July 2007, Chinese President Hu Jintao also highlighted the successful implementation of the one country, two systems concept and paid tribute to Deng for proposing it. Some might agree that one country, two systems is, in general, not just valued but practised in Hong Kong; but it comes with no guarantee of one country, two cultures. While capitalist economic and political systems continue to operate in Hong Kong, its highly original and vigorous popular cultures, which were once widely consumed across Chinese communities, are generally agreed to have been in decline since 1997. The godfather of Cantopop, James Wong, among others, used 1997 to mark the demise of Cantopop (J. Wong, 2003). Cantopop was certainly not alone in its decline. Hong Kong cinema, the leading popular culture industry in Hong Kong, has faced similar problems since 1997. Over the past decade its popularity declined so drastically that local film critics were moved to mourn the death of Hong Kong cinema. Back in 1995, the November issue of Ming Pao Monthly featured a special issue entitled The Death of Hong Kong Cinema. If it was

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controversial in 1995 to argue that Hong Kong cinema had died, perhaps this was no longer the case in 2006. When compared to the HK$1.5 billion in boxoffice revenue in 1992, the mere $300 million in box-office takings of Hong Kong films in 2006 (including MainlandHong Kong co-productions) is striking. And this decline in box-office revenue has had another effect on Hong Kong films. Since 1997 the market share of local Hong Kong productions has been declining (with the market share of Hong Kong films falling to 30 per cent in 2006), and the market has gradually been taken over by foreign-language films. Hong Kong cinema was once a cult phenomenon not only in Asia but also in the West. According to the Baseline Study on Hong Kongs Creative Industries conducted by the University of Hong Kong for the Central Policy Unit of the Government of SAR, Hong Kong is renowned as one of the major film producing centers in Asia. Output in the early 1990s was prolific: the sector recorded the highest production of 242 films in 1993 and dropped thereafter significantly (2003, p. 104). David Bordwells Planet Hong Kong, now a classic study of Hong Kong cinema, begins with the following paragraph:
Hong Kong cinema is one of the success stories of film history. For about twenty years, this city-state of around six million people had one of the most robust cinema industries in the world. In number of films released, it regularly surpassed nearly all Western countries. In export it was second only to the United States. It ruled the East Asian market, eventually destroying one neighboring countrys film industry. Distributed in the West, Hong Kong films became a cult phenomenon on an unprecedented scale. (Bordwell, 2000, p. 1)

When Hong Kong celebrated the tenth anniversary of its return to China, however, it also in a sense waved goodbye to its special role as the centre of Chinese popular cultures. The MainlandHong Kong Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement (CEPA) gave Hong Kong cinema hope whether real or false it is perhaps too early to tell by opening the door to the enormous Mainland market. CEPA was first concluded in June 2003 and was put in place from 1 January 2004. Under the provisions of CEPA I, Hong Kongproduced Chinese-language films are no longer restricted by the global import quota of twenty foreign films per year for screening on a revenue-sharing basis. Co-production requirements have also been relaxed. Under CEPA II, it is generally agreed, the audiovisual industry will receive another boon with enhanced participation in the Mainland market: Wholly-owned companies can be set up in pilot areas of the Mainland to distribute Mainland-produced motion pictures (including co-productions) upon approval by the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT). Co-produced motion pictures can be processed outside the Chinese Mainland

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upon approval by the SARFT (Hong Kong Trade Development Council, 2004). CEPA has led to the increasing dominance of co-productions, which many Hong Kong filmmakers believe will be the future of the Hong Kong film industry. When asked about the most significant change in Hong Kong cinema since reversion to China, the leading Hong Kong director Ann Hui named the rising trend towards co-productions (Hui, 2007). Hui is not the only one to have this opinion. Nansun Shi, famous producer and former senior advisor for Media Asia, also considers that co-productions have had the greatest impact on the development of Hong Kong cinema in the past decade (Shi, 2007). The rise of co-productions on the one hand, and the decline of Hong Kong cinema on the other, have brought Chinese cinema into a new age in which Hong Kong cinema has been taken over. No wonder Henry Fong, a senior actor-producerdirector, lamented in 2006, just a decade after Hong Kongs reunification with China, that From now on Hong Kong cinema is Chinese cinema (Fong, 2007). This essay endeavours to examine the impact of the rise in co-productions after 1997 on the development of Hong Kong cinema. If Hong Kong cinema, once popular not only in Chinese communities but across the world, will (or has) become Chinese cinema, we can say that one country, two systems does not necessarily guarantee one country, two cultures.

A Very Brief History of MainlandHong Kong Co-productions

Mainland influence on the Hong Kong film industry has a history almost as long as Hong Kong cinema itself.1 In the early stages of its development, Hong Kong cinema was closely linked to Chinese cinema, as filmmakers who had emigrated from the Mainland played an important role in the development of the film industry in Hong Kong. There were many influential leftist filmmakers and directors in Hong Kong, but their works were cooperative films rather than co-productions in the strict sense. Leftist film companies, because of their special relationship with the Mainland, had the opportunity to cooperate with Mainland organizations during the 1960s. In 1964 Phoenix Motion Picture Company shot the film Golden Eagle /in the Mainland, marking the first MainlandHong Kong cooperative film venture. But the Cultural Revolution cut off opportunities for cooperation, and cooperative film ventures did not reappear on the scene until the 1980s, after the introduction of the Open Door Policy. Hong Kong cinema grew swiftly in the 1960s and 1970s, and acquired a distinctive identity, but the situation changed in the late 1970s after Deng Xiaoping opened Chinas doors to the world in 1976. The Mainland market with its unlimited potential began to attract worldwide attention. The founding of China Film Co-production Corporation (CFCC) in 1979 marked the dawn of a

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new era of cooperative films. The Great Wall Motion Picture Company and the Phoenix Motion Picture Company, leftist filmmakers with a close relationship with the Mainland, were among the pioneers of cooperative films in the early 1980s. Romance in China /(1980) and To Kill the Big Villain in Mt. Tai /(1980), inter alia, were early examples of cooperative films by Great Wall and Phoenix respectively. The most remarkable cooperative film in 1980 was arguably The Enigmatic Case /(1980) directed by the now widely acclaimed Hong Kong director Johnnie To. The film was shot in the Mainland with Hong Kong actors including Damian Lau and Cherie Chung. At that time, however, strict regulations meant that only leftist filmmakers were given the opportunity to cooperate with Mainland organizations, and thus mainstream filmmakers such as Shaw Brothers and Golden Harvest did not play an active role. The impact of cooperative films remained limited until mainstream film company Shaw Brothers shot the widely discussed Reign behind a Curtain /(1983). Li Han-chiang, famous for his Qing-dynasty historical romances, shot the film in the Forbidden Palace, which contributed not only to its verisimilitude but also to its box-office success, as Hong Kong audiences of the time found the Mainland setting exotic, if not mysterious. Early cooperative films can thus be said to have had an eye to using the Mainland as an exotic setting. As the Mainland was not as modern at that time as it has since become, most of the films shot in the Mainland were period films, which were rather limited in terms of theme. The most popular films were those related to the Shaolin Temple, and international kung-fu star Jet Li first stole the limelight in his debut The Shaolin Temple /in 1982. Although these cooperative films were popular in terms of box-office revenue, they remained outside the mainstream Hong Kong film industry. The 1990s saw a radical transformation of the mediascape in the Greater China area, which paved the way for the rise of Mainland and the decline of Hong Kong productions. Mainland film workers, such as the Fifth Generation directors Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou, who won many international awards in the 1980s, began to turn to commercial productions. With the further restructuring of the Mainland film industry, the Mainland and Hong Kong entered another stage of collaboration, producing films that can be considered as co-productions in a stricter sense. Farewell My Concubine /(1993) is a notable example of cooperation between Mainland artistic directors cooperation and commercial Hong Kong film stars, taking co-productions into a new direction. In the meantime, the revival of martial arts films in the early 1990s thanks to Tsui Hark also gave rise to opportunities for cooperation in martial arts films such as New Dragon Gate Inn /(1992) and the Once Upon a Time in China /series. In 1992, the number of co-productions increased to

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forty-four. The Leisure and Cultural Services Department and the South China Film Industry Workers Union, in association with Sil-Metropole Organization Ltd and Southern Film Co. Ltd, jointly presented a Retrospective of Mainland HK Co-productions of the 80s90s in October 2006 to give Hong Kong audiences a more in-depth appreciation of early film co-productions. A brief look at the films selected for this Retrospective gives us a picture of co-productions in the 1990s. Besides Farewell My Concubine and New Dragon Gate Inn, the chosen films included A Chinese Odyssey Part One: Pandoras Box / (1994), A Chinese Odyssey Part Two: Cinderella / (1994), The Terracotta Warrior /(1989) and The Story of Qiuju / (1992), In the Heart of the Sun /(1994) and Eighteen Springs /(1997), The King of Masks /(1995) and The Day the Sun Turned Cold /(1994). Apart from New Dragon Gate Inn and Stephen Chows (aka Stephen Chiau) A Chinese Odyssey, the films were not box-office hits (and A Chinese Odyssey was not as popular as Stephen Chows other comedies). The first set of regulations governing co-productions, Provisions on the Administration of Chinese-foreign Cooperative Film Production, was issued by the former Ministry of Radio, Film and Television on 5 July 1994 (and abolished when the new Provisions on the Administration of ChineseForeign Cooperative Production of Films became effective on 10 August 2004). Since that time, a proper mechanism has been established for co-productions, leading to a formalized but limited environment for the development of coproductions. According to the regulations, more than half of the main actors in a co-production must be Mainlanders. Thus, the number of co-productions did not grow as expected in the mid-1990s. Although it is generally agreed that Hong Kong cinema had begun to decline since 1993, it still fared well in terms of box-office figures, and so filmmakers did not favour co-productions because of the many regulations they entailed. To sum up, MainlandHong Kong co-productions have experienced significant changes in the past three decades. At first, Hong Kong filmmakers looked north with an eye on Mainland locales to suit particular themes (e.g. shooting Reign behind a Curtain in the Forbidden Palace was more spectacular than another setting). In the 1980s, while co-productions were not unpopular, with only a few notable exceptions such as The Shaolin Temple, they played a supporting role to mainstream Hong Kong films. When the Hong Kong film industry was doing well, co-productions played a supporting role in its development. But when the Hong Kong film industry began to decline in 1993, the loss of the critical vigour of local productions paved the way for the rise of foreign-language films and co-productions and the decline of Hong Kong cinema in the late 1990s.

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The Decline of Hong Kong Cinema and the Rise of Co-productions

The irreversible decline in Hong Kong cinema started back in the early 1990s. In the introduction to Faces, Silhouette & Montage: 19972007 Review, the editor provides figures that confirm the fall of Hong Kong cinema over the past decade (Cheung, 2007, p. 6). In 1988 a total of 130 films brought in HK$0.97 billion in revenue, and the total audience was 64.6 million (the average ticket price was $15). Although total revenue had risen to $1.5 billion in 1992, audience numbers had fallen to 46.8 million (the average ticket price was $32). In just five years, Hong Kong cinema had lost an audience of 17.8 million people. A brief examination of box-office statistics from 1981 to 2006 hammers the last nail into the coffin of Hong Kong cinema. The programme for the 26th Hong Kong Film Awards lists the top thirty box-office hits from 1981 to 2005, and this list encapsulates the story of the rise and fall of Hong Kong cinema over the last twenty-five years (Hong Kong Film Award Association Board of Directors, 2007). According to these figures, The Battle for the Republic of China /ranked thirtieth in 1981 with a box-office revenue of $2.9 million, and in 1987 Code of Honor / ranked thirtieth with $10 million in revenue, almost four times that of The Battle for the Republic of China. Box-office revenues continued to rise until 1993. In 1994, the box-office takings of the thirtieth film were under $10 million, and in 1999 they had fallen to just over $3 million. In 2005 the situation had come full circle: Kung Fu Mahjong II /2ranked thirtieth with box-office revenue of $2.4 million, less than that of The Battle for the Republic of China in 1981 (without taking inflation into consideration). In 2006 the situation was even worse Dating a Vampire /ranked thirtieth with revenue of only $1.96 million. Judging from these figures, it is reasonable to say that Hong Kong cinema grew swiftly in the 1980s, peaked in 1993, and then began to decline. At first the decline was a result of over-commercialization and standardization in terms of theme and style. In 1998, the Asian financial crisis dealt a deadly blow to Hong Kong cinema, and piracy and file-sharing also played a part in its demise. But if we take into consideration the rapid growth of film industries in Asian countries such as South Korea and Thailand in the new millennium, these factors cannot adequately account for the downturn in Hong Kong cinema. One of the main problems Hong Kong cinema faced was the shrinking market after 1997, which created other serious problems that propelled Hong Kong cinema into a vicious cycle. When the number of local productions fell sharply after 1997, many film workers had to look for other job opportunities. On the one hand, superstars such as Chow Yun-fat, Jackie Chan and John Woo went to Hollywood; on the other, there were not enough opportunities for local young talent to develop their careers in the film industry. When the market for local

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productions contracted, filmmakers and investors diverted their attention to the few genres that could guarantee box-office success. As a result, comedy and crime/gangster films came to dominate the market to an unprecedented extent. The failures of local blockbusters such as The Legend of Zu /(2001) and The Wesleys Mysterious File /(2002) further motivated Hong Kong filmmakers to direct their attention to co-productions. When Manfred Wong, chairman of the Hong Kong Film Awards Association, outlined the gains and losses of Hong Kong cinema since 1997, he made eight important points, three of which are worth noting here. First, Hong Kong films opened the door to the Mainland but lost their domestic market; second, Hong Kong films merged with Chinese culture but sacrificed their local characteristics; and third, Hong Kong film workers won international acclaim but forfeited the Hong Kong brand (M. Wong, 2007). These remarks tell the real story of the death of Hong Kong cinema. In the programme for the 2007 Hong Kong Film Awards, Manfred Wong once again underlines the fact that the future of Hong Kong cinema is inextricably intertwined with the development of Mainland film industry. During the heyday of Hong Kong cinema, there were co-productions that supplemented mainstream local productions. But since the decline in Hong Kong cinema after 1997, co-productions have taken over from local productions the dominant role in the market. As the spokesman for the Film Bureau of SARFT explained clearly, Being cultural products, films must target the largest possible audience; undoubtedly the Mainland is an enormous market (Xie and Chen, 2005). In order to court the Mainland market, Hong Kong cinema must adapt to the tastes of Mainland audiences and the regulations imposed by Mainland authorities. The spokesman used the example of Stephen Chow to show how Hong Kong filmmakers can effectively integrate into the Mainland film industry without sacrificing their identity. But while Stephen Chows recent works have been successful in developing his film career, whether he can hold onto his distinctive Hong Kong characteristics is not yet certain. From Shaolin Soccer /onwards, Chow has shifted his attention to the overseas market. Kung Fu Hustle / , for instance, looks more like a Hollywood film than a Hong Kong production. The increasing number of co-productions is arguably a way out for Hong Kong films. According to the figures released by China Film Co-production Corporation (CFCC), the number of co-productions in the last ten years has been as follows: 1997: 7; 1998: 7; 1999: 10; 2000: 6; 2001: 6; 2002: 13; 2003: 26; 2004: 32; 2005: 26; and 2006: 26 (Zhang, 2007). In 2003, when CEPA was first concluded, the number of MainlandHong Kong co-productions jumped to 26, double the number in the previous year. Since then, MainlandHong Kong co-productions have become the predominant genre in the Hong Kong film industry. In 2006,

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52 Hong Kong Chinese-language films premiered in Hong Kong, of which 39 were co-productions. Of the top 10 Chinese-language films at the Hong Kong box office in 2006, ironically enough, 7 were co-productions. The top 5 were all co-productions: Box-Office Top 10 for 2006: 1. 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Fearless /* $30.20 m Rob-B-Hood /* $23.45 m Battle of Wits /* $15.58 m Curse of the Golden Flower /* $15.57 m Confession of Pain /* $14.44 m Re-cycle /$14.19 m Election 2 /$13.58 m Dragon Tiger Gate /* $12.10 m McDull, the Alumni /$10.65 m 2 Become 1 /* 10.24 m (Sina.com, 2007; co-productions are marked with an asterisk) There is no denying the fact that co-productions can attract investors and, more importantly, have developed a much larger market in the Mainland. When Hong Kong films straddled the border, however, they had to sacrifice their Hong Kong characteristics in order to gain an entry permit. It is now an open secret that Hong Kong directors have to self-censor their work in order to enter the Mainland market. Director and screenwriter Chan Hing-ka put it very succinctly: When co-productions began, we had to face lots of problems in term of productions. Themes tailored to the local audience became rare (Chan, Long and Ma, 2007). Because of strict regulations, genres such as crime/ gangster and erotic films were not allowed into the Mainland market. Comedies that displayed a characteristic Hong Kong sense of humour also needed to be adapted to the tastes of the Mainland audience, sacrificing most if not all of their Cantonese wit. Hong Kong filmmakers, famously commercial, are very good at guerilla tactics, and tactfully used different versions of their films to appeal to the Mainland market. A notorious example is Infernal Affairs (2002). Arguably one of the most widely known Hong Kong films of the past decade, the film needed a different ending to receive Mainland approval. Mainland regulations require that justice must be done, so the villain had to be put behind bars in the Mainland version. This two-version strategy, however, might only prove helpful in the short term for those who have the budget to shoot different versions. And in the long run Hong Kong cinema will lose its distinctive character.

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As Hong Kong cinema turned north and became Chinese, only a handful of established directors chose to remain local. For instance, Hong Kong director Stanley Tong noted in an interview on the tenth anniversary of Hong Kongs reversion to China that he had moved his base to the Mainland seven years earlier (Tong, 2007). Fruit Chan, famous for the Made in Hong Kong / series, is generally agreed to be the most local Hong Kong director of the post-1997 era. But, ironically, he has recently stopped directing Hong Kong films. As noted by Shu-mei Shih (2007, p. 188), Fruit Chan began to explore the many possible relationships Hong Kong could have with China other than the anti-colonial one, and what is distinct for Hong Kong artists is that these negotiations are not contingencies but necessities on their way to becoming Chinese (emphasis added). The only icon of local Hong Kong cinema is perhaps Johnnie To, who has repeatedly stressed that he has no interest in the Mainland market. But some of his recent films such as Election / (2005) and Election 2 /(2006) demonstrate that keeping the Mainland at bay is not entirely possible. It is also regrettable that apart from Johnnie To and his associates such as Wai Ka-fai, only smallbudget local productions have survived. While recent films such as Crazy n the City /(2005) and The Heavenly Kings /(2006) displayed some local characteristics (the local settings of Wan Chai and the mimicry of Hong Kong entertainment business respectively), they remained marginal when compared to the big-budget co-productions, and were thus not able to have a significant impact on the market. The number of cinemas in Hong Kong fell from 144 during the heyday of Hong Kong film to a surprisingly small 46 in 2006. Peter Chan, a leading Hong Kong director and inveterate fan of Hong Kong culture who has recently shifted his attention to co-productions with a Mainland emphasis, admitted in an interview after the premiere of Perhaps Love /(2005), his first coproduction, that he had turned to the Mainland market solely for commercial reasons (P. Chan, 2006). Takeshi Kaneshiros words in Perhaps Love provide an apt description of the mixed feelings of many Hong Kong filmmakers: I fell in love with someone I despised.

The M-shaped Hong Kong Film Industry

The heyday of Hong Kong Cultural Studies or Hongkongology when Hong Kong scholars, artists, and critics had taken a parting glance at their local culture with a profound sense of mission and equally intense sense of loss over their love at last sight of Hong Kong in the years leading up to 1997 now seems to have lost both its fervor and its reason for being. (Shih, 2007, p. 141)

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Shu-mei Shihs comments pinpoint the problem of Hong Kong culture in general and Hong Kong cinema in particular. Almost immediately after this love at last sight (Abbas, 1997, pp. 147), Hong Kong had become China. Some argued that it was CEPA that delivered the Hong Kong film industry into an ice age. But the spokesman for SARFT made a very insightful observation in his response to questions relating to CEPA: The problem faced by Hong Kong will still exist with or without CEPA (Xie and Chen, 2005). Rather than putting the blame on CEPA, we need to recognize that the most important question is how to theorize the transformation of Hong Kong film industry after 1997. As the title of a seminar on Hong Kong cinema, Not Quite Dead: How to Walk On? (Hong Kong Film Critics Association, 2007) suggests, Hong Kong cinema is not quite dead. But its magical star-making power seems to be disappearing. As Gordon Chan, president of the Film Directors Guild of Hong Kong, pointed out at the 2006 Hong Kong Film Awards ceremony, Hong Kong cinema has lost its vigour. He lamented the absence of rising young stars, as most of the candidates for best actor and actress awards were above the age of forty (Tzeng, 2007). A glance at the list of recent best actors/actresses in a leading role at the Hong Kong Film Awards proves this point. All of the best actors from 1997 to 2006 Andy Lau, Stephen Chow, Anthony Wong and the Tony Leungs (Chiu-wai and Ka-fai) are familiar names from the 1980s. Only Sean Lau is relatively new to the Film Awards. But Lau, a contemporary of Tony Chiu-wai Leung, is by no means new to the industry. Of the best actresses, only Cecilia Cheung can be considered a rising local star. The others are either familiar names (such as Maggie Cheung and Sandra Ng) or non-locals (Gong Li, Zhang Ziyi, Zhou Xun and Angelica Lee). Star-making is paramount to popular culture industries in general, and the film industry in particular. Hong Kong, no longer the trend-setter for popular culture in the Greater China area, has lost its ability to make popular cultural stars. This has had a severe enough impact to affect the structure of the local film industry, which has plunged Hong Kong cinema into a vicious cycle. As noted convincingly by film critic Long Tin at a seminar entitled Ten Years of Reunification, Ten Years of Films,
In the past Hong Kong could have more than two hundred productions a year, including many mid to small-budget productions. But some say Hong Kong will produce only ten films per annum in the future, all of them big-budget high-concept films, such as Infernal Affairs. The tastes of Hong Kong audiences have changed. They have greater expectations about the quality of films. Those who used to be fans of Wong Jings local comedies symbols of grassroots tastes have grown up and do not go to cinemas any more. Young audiences are fond of high-concept films with superstars In the past you might start shooting a film if you have two million, but now you cant unless you have ten million or so. The structure of film production has changed a lot. (cited in Wong Lai Ming, 2007)

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In short, the transformation of Hong Kong cinema has created an M-shaped local film industry. M-shaped society a concept discussed by Japanese business strategist Kenichi Ohmae can be borrowed here to examine recent developments in the Hong Kong film industry. According to Ohmae, the impact of globalization on Japans domestic distribution of wealth has generated an M-shaped society in which the middle class has begun to disappear. Not unlike Ohmaes notion of an M-shaped society, the Hong Kong film industry has recently witnessed the disappearance of its middle class. In a sense Hong Kong cinema is not quite dead, but its M-shaped structure has forced many Hong Kong film workers to quit their jobs. Henry Fong (2007) argued that bringing Hong Kong actors to the Mainland would develop new markets for Hong Kong on the one hand, and provide a healthy impetus for the development of the Mainland film industry on the other. I do not disagree with this interpretation, which does highlight the inevitable situation faced by the Hong Kong film industry in the years to come. But I would make the point that only actors and actresses, in particular those who are highly acclaimed, can enter the Mainland market. As most co-productions are shot in the Mainland to reduce production costs, Hong Kong film workers, apart from a select few, will not benefit from such co-productions. This is not to say that co-productions need to be restricted to high-concept blockbusters. Despite the crying need for mid-budget productions, though, there have recently been fewer and fewer mid-budget productions because of the difficult market conditions. The blockbusters have attracted the lions share of investors attention and dominate most cinemas in the Mainland. It is reasonable for the SARFT spokesman to claim that the domination of the market by high-concept blockbusters is not restricted to Hong Kong; it is also the case in the Mainland, in Taiwan and in many Asian cinemas. But that does not mean it is a healthy phenomenon. Vicky Leung, director of Hong Kong, Kowloon & New Territories Motion Picture Industry Association (MPIA), expressed the view at the 25th Hong Kong Film Awards that the Hong Kong film industry might hibernate in the near future, just as the industry in Taiwan did in the 1990s (Hong Kong Film Award Association Board of Directors, 2006, p. 87). The opinion of Peggy Chiao, chair of Arc Light Films and the godmother of Taiwan cinema, might shed light on the problems of the Hong Kong and Taiwan film industries, which face a similar predicament. Chiao noted in a seminar series entitled Romancing the Mid-Budget Film, hosted by Hong Kong Trade Development Council in March 2007, that both Taiwan and Hong Kong have been suffering from a lack of mid-budget productions (with budgets between US$1 million and $5 million), and that the solution to the M-shaped industry was government intervention (Hong Kong Trade Development Council, 2007).

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She suggested providing assistance to the film industry by funding/subsidizing mid-budget productions so that they could help to create a culture of diversity. The central issue at the opening seminar of Romancing the Mid-Budget Film was Is profitability possible for mid-budget Asian films? Leading industry players at the seminar recognized the long-term value of mid-budget films. A lot of directors cut their teeth in this range and have gone on to help their film industry tremendously, stated Jonathan Olsberg, chairman of Olsberg/ SPI, a strategy consulting firm specializing in film and currently advising the Hong Kong government (Hong Kong Trade Development Council, 2007). The establishment of the Hong Kong Film Development Council in April 2007 seems to provide a good opportunity for the revival of Hong Kong cinema. It should be remembered, however, that the government of SAR set up a Film Development Fund in 1999, but this has been seen by many filmmakers as a total failure. Andrew Lau, the director of Infernal Affairs, argued that it was wrong to divert all attention to small-budget artistic films tailored only to local markets. He recommended that the fund should subsidize mid-budget mainstream productions in order to re-activate the local film industry (Lau, 2007). The important point here is that these mainstream mid-budget productions need a market to survive. If the local market structure has changed, as claimed by Long Tin, these productions must also target the Mainland market at least the part of the market in the Pearl Delta region that speaks the same dialect in the long run. In an interview on the influence of CEPA on Hong Kong film productions, the spokesman for the Film Bureau of SARFT touched upon an important issue. While critics have suggested that it would be healthier for the film industry if the government can put in place policies to protect mid/small-budget coproductions, the Film Bureau spokesman claimed that it was not possible to do at present, because there are not enough cinemas in the Mainland (Xie and Chen, 2005). And thus it is very difficult to cater to the needs of different audiences. The Film Bureau spokesmans statement gives the impression that as the number of cinemas in the Mainland increases in the near future, the problem will be alleviated. But this is not necessarily the case. There have been many new cinemas built in the Mainland in recent years, most of them stateof-the-art multiplexes. More importantly, more than 80 per cent of total boxoffice revenue comes from these multiplexes (Chan To Man et al., 2007). Ticket prices at these new luxury cinemas are much higher than those at traditional cinemas. According to an audience survey, those who pay the higher prices to go to a multiplex generally expect more spectacular high-concept films (Si, 2007, pp. 13148). If the general trend of increasing demand for high-concept films continues, the increase in the number of cinemas in the Mainland will not

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necessarily represent a way out for middle to small-budget productions in Hong Kong. Nansun Shis point is worth noting here: In Hong Kong it is possible to survive with commercial films alone, but the industry would be healthier if there are different genres. At the same time, however, she expressed the following wish: I hope the categorization system, the cinema structure, television broadcasting and DVD distribution in the Mainland will become better (Shi, 2007). The survival of Hong Kong cinema and the possibilities for developing different genre films in the future, sadly enough, must depend upon regulations in the Mainland. It is another irony that Hong Kong has to depend on China to keep its own identity.

Concluding Remarks
This is the best of times. This is the worst of times. Charles Dickenss words in A Tale of Two Cities are perhaps among the most frequently quoted to describe the situation of Hong Kong since 1997. Hong Kong cinema is no exception. The editor of Faces, Silhouette & Montage: 19972007 Review (Cheung, 2007, p. 5) also borrowed Dickenss words to examine the development of Hong Kong cinema from 1997 to 2007. For post-1997 Hong Kong cinema it seems that the best has passed and the worst will last. Li Cheuk-to, renowned Hong Kong film critic, claimed optimistically that Dickenss words are no longer applicable because for Hong Kong cinema the worst has passed (Ma, 2007). Be that as it may, Hong Kong cinema has experienced a shift in emphasis from production to financing. Known for its exceptional productions and creative talents, Hong Kong has evolved from an Asian leader for filmmaking to an incomparable hub for coproduction in the hot region, reads the introduction to the seminar programmed by Hong Kong Trade Development Council at the American Film Market conferences and seminars in Los Angeles in November 2006 (Hong Kong Trade Development Council, 2006). Recently the Hong KongAsia Film Financing Forum (HAF), organized by the Hong Kong International Film Festival Society (HKIFF), the Hong Kong Trade Development Council (HKTDC) and the MPIA, has acted as a film project market that aims to bring the most exciting Asian filmmakers with upcoming film projects to Hong Kong for international coproduction ventures. Hong Kongs film industry has begun to shift its focus from production to financing, in line with its role as a so-called financial centre laid down by the chief executive. When Hong Kong no longer has the power to produce new film stars and directors, it can at best be a financing centre for Chinese cinema. By then MainlandHong Kong co-productions will have become Chinese films financed in Hong Kong. If Fruit Chan were to shoot a new

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film in the future, the title would probably be Financed in Hong Kong rather than Made in Hong Kong. The indiscriminate umbrella of Chinese cinema seems to rule out the possibility of different filmic imaginaries in the Greater China area. Sheldon Lu and Emilie Yeh (2005, p. 10) used the term Chinese-language film to highlight the fact that [r]ecent historical developments in the Greater China area have changed academic conceptions of what China is and even more so the potential meanings of Chinese cinema. That Hong Kong has become China is probably a fait accompli. Hong Kong cinema, once widely believed to be a vigorous multifaceted cinema, will (or has) also become Chinese cinema. But as Meaghan Morris rightly stated, Hong Kong cinema does not fit into anthologies bravely attempting a transnational approach to Chinese cinemas, not least because the diversity and scale of Hong Kongs industry exceeds their grasp (2005, p. 10). Rey Chow also claimed that any particular groups attempt to appropriate the term Chinese for itself would be best served, in the long run, not by monopoly and exclusivity but by having to coexist with similar attempts by other groups (2007, pp. 2425). If we agree that multiplicity was the most important characteristic in the success of Hong Kong cinema (Xu, 2007, p. 133; Fu and Desser, 2000, p. 5), we should note that multiplicity can hardly survive under the indiscriminate umbrella of Chinese cinema. As noted by Gary Xu, Hong Kong cinema was even more Chinese than mainland Chinese cinema when the latter concerned itself with class warfare instead of Chinese culture from 1949 to 1979. It is thus reasonable to say that the more hybrid Hong Kong cinema is, the more Chineseness the constructed images and imaginations of what China ought to be like it reveals (Xu, 2007, p. 134). Two anecdotes, by way of conclusion. When the band Alive, made up of actors Daniel Wu, Terence Yin, Andrew Lin and Conroy Chan, performed in the 26th Hong Kong Film Awards presentation ceremony, they held placards expressing their discontent with the Hong Kong entertainment business. Their mimicry of the Four Heavenly Kings of 1990s Cantopop in their film The Heavenly Kings /can be seen as resistance to the popular culture of Hong Kong, which they consider has lost its self. They urge Hong Kong to keep its own identity, seeing it as the most important thing for Hong Kong popular culture if it wants to stay alive. Meanwhile, a conference entitled Ten Years after Reversion to China was held in June 2007 to investigate the possibilities for future development of Hong Kong cinema. The conference was hosted by Chairman of the Federation of Hong Kong Filmmakers Ng Seeyuen, and participants included Tong Gang, the president of the Film Bureau of SARFT, and famous Mainland directors such as Chen Kaige and Feng Xiaogang. The conference concluded with three recommendations to the government: 1)

One Country Two Cultures? Post-1997 Hong Kong Cinema and Co-productions 145

abolish the import film status of Hong Kong productions; 2) relax censorship and Mainland actors percentage of co-productions; and 3) simplify statutory requirements for lodging import/export declarations (Sun et al., 2007). Again, it is apparent here that the future of the Hong Kong film industry, as with its politics, cannot but rely on the Mainland. China has become a predicament as well as a condition for Hong Kong cinema. Keeping its own self or becoming China might be a dilemma that places Hong Kong between the devil and the deep blue sea. But the devil is no longer a devil when one has fallen in love with someone one despised.2

Notes
Translation and romanization: all translations from Chinese materials are mine; for film titles, I have used the English export titles of the films, and for Chinese names, I have retained the way they have been transliterated by convention in Hong Kong, Taiwan and the Mainland.

9
Departing from The Departed: The Infernal Affairs Trilogy
Gina Marchetti

Hong Kongs fortunes have been linked to its status as an entrept an import/ export merchandise mart for the worlds manufactured goods and a point of assembly, repackaging, re-labeling, recycling and transshipment. As the world economy swings from goods to intellectual property and image commodities, Hong Kongs role as entrept also shifts so that ideas, styles, fictions, images and the wealth of Hong Kongs creative industries play a more important role as do its financial institutions, tourism, retail sales and the rest of the service sector. While Made in Hong Kong may signify plastic flowers and transistors to an older generation, today it means advertising campaigns for the global city, design houses such as Shanghai Tang, stars such as Jackie Chan, Hong Kong action films, and Cantopop. However, the marketplace of brand labels, images and ideas has proven to be no less volatile than the world of manufactured goods. Hong Kongs once lucrative movie business has seen particularly hard times over the past decade. Hollywood imports, regional competition from Korea and other emerging Asian film industries, the brain drain of talent after the signing of the Joint Declaration, the rise of home entertainment, and the digital revolution have all taken their toll on the Hong Kong film industry.1 Although the industry has been in the commercial doldrums, Hong Kong film style from the visual panache of Wong Kar-wai to the grittiness of Fruit Chans independent features has kept the Hong Kong film brand viable within the international art film market. Similarly, although arguably fading stars in Asia, the rise of Jet Li and Jackie Chan as marketable commodities in world cinema points to a disconnect between the reality of decreasing production and revenues and increasing world recognition of a few key Hong Kong film players.

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With ties to both the New Wave art film and the popular Young and Dangerous triad series, Andrew Lau and Alan Maks Infernal Affairs / (2002) makes a statement about the state of Hong Kong cinema as well as an intervention in a depressed market. With star power, visual allure and an engaging script, the film did very well critically and financially, spawned two sequels and a television series, and attracted the attention of Hollywood. However, instead of the film being picked up for distribution, the script was optioned for a remake and eventually became The Departed (2006). Repackaged, re-labelled and reassembled in the United States, Infernal Affairss transformation into The Departed begs the question of Hong Kongs role in the export of images and commodities to the rest of the world as the territory enters its second decade as an SAR (Special Administrative Region) of the Peoples Republic of China. Hong Kong films may continue to find a welcome reception, or the Made in Hong Kong label may fade as Hong Kong inevitably clashes with the American film industry, brand-name directors and the vicissitudes of the world market for entertainment Made in the USA or outsourced to Bollywood or other industries in Asia.

Infernal Affairs Departed at the Oscars

Many of these issues came to a boil on 25 February 2007, when Martin Scorsese won the Oscar for best director for The Departed (which also took best motion picture of the year, among other awards). He had already won the Directors Guild of America (DGA) award for the film. The appearance of his good friends and fellow filmmakers Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg2 at the Academy Awards was a tip-off that Scorsese would get the honour. With the other movie brats there, the occasion celebrated more than just Scorsese as the best director of the year; it confirmed his place within the ranks of American auteur cinema, which had emerged out of university-based film schools, the French New Wave and the American underground during the Vietnam War years. However, Scorseses smiling face hides questions about the financially successful films relationship to Hong Kong cinema. Hollywood celebrates the director as moneymaker with the award, but critics and cinephiles tend to view it as an affirmation of auteur status. For Scorsese, the two merge. His place as an auteur long established, he now joins the ranks of Hollywood star directors as well. Ironically, Roland Barthes wrote La mort de lAuteur / The Death of the Author in 1968 (1977, pp. 14248), around the same time Scorsese was making independent shorts in New York City, searching for his own interpretation of Alexandre Astrucs camra stylo (Astruc, 1968), which laid the foundation for

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the auteur theory. Although French New Wave directors stormed against the well-made adaptation of tasteful plays and novels and Francois Truffaut led the fray with his essay La politque des auteurs / The Auteur Policy (1976), they likely never imagined the auteurs personal style in relation to the remade film. The remake, though, is the subject of French critic-turned-filmmaker Olivier Assayass Irma Vep (1996).3 In this film, a director played by Jean-Pierre Laud attempts to remake the classic silent serial Les Vampires (1915). However, inspired by Johnnie Tos Hong Kong action fantasy The Heroic Trio / (1993), he decides to replace the French lead with Hong Kong actress Maggie Cheung. In many ways, Irma Vep resembles Francois Truffauts Day for Night (La Nuit Amricaine, 1973). In the case of Irma Vep, Laud, who had played an actor in Day for Night, takes on the role of the director, played in the earlier film by the director Truffaut himself. However, in Irma Vep, the director (Assayas as well as the character that Laud plays) looks to Hong Kong rather than Europe or America for inspiration. With The Departed, Scorsese fits the same mold as Assayass fictional New Wave director. A picture forms in the mind: the cinephile Scorsese at a New York art house enthralled with Infernal Affairs, or Scorsese poring over the DVD version, his remote at the ready, dissecting the Hong Kong thriller. However, in an age of media globalization and cross-border intellectual property rights moving between profit and piracy, film authorship becomes more complicated. Romantic ideas of creators, their influences and inspirations evaporate on this hotly contested terrain. In fact, both scriptwriter William Monahan and Scorsese claim The Departed is not a remake of Infernal Affairs:
Monahan: I hadnt seen Infernal Affairs, and I didnt want to watch it before adapting the story. I worked from a translation of the Chinese script. Scorsese: Infernal Affairs is a very good example of why I love the Hong Kong Cinema, but The Departed is not a remake of that film. Our film was inspired by Infernal Affairs, because of the nature of the story. However, the world Monahan created is very different from the Hong Kong film.4

On another occasion, Scorsese said:

I didnt think of it as Hong Kong, I just thought of it as how Bill [Monahan] put together the script. Really, I liked the idea. You know, Hong Kong cinema once I saw John Woos The Killer, you cant go near that. You cant even begin, as far as my skills as a filmmaker, you cant. Thats taking our films and their culture and mixing everything up together (Murray, 2008)

Portions of John Woos The Killer (1989) echo Scorseses Taxi Driver, so the admiration appears to be mutual.5 To bring things full circle, Alan Mak and

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Felix Chong based Infernal Affairs on John Woos Face/Off /(1997). Woo has observed that when Hollywood directors look to Hong Kong films for inspiration, they end up imitating themselves, since Hong Kong has poached from American cinema for decades:
It is ironic that Hollywood began to imitate Hong Kong movies in the late 1980s and 1990s because Hong Kong films (to a certain degree) are imitations of Hollywood films, so Hollywood is imitating Hollywood. (Woo quoted in Stokes and Hoover, 1999, p. 309)

Infernal Affairss co-director Andrew Lau made a film with the English title The Mean Street Story /(1995) and served as the cinematographer for Wong Kar-wais As Tears Go By /(1988), a tribute to Scorseses Mean Streets (1973). In fact, Laus signature moving camera may not be so far removed from Scorseses own sense of movement on the mean streets of New York City. While global co-productions and international remakes have been common enough throughout the history of world cinema, the intercourse between Hong Kong and Hollywood has accelerated in recent years. Although it may never compare to the kung fu craze of the 1970s, the ability of Hong Kong cinema to win an Oscar for best picture/best screenplay by proxy marks a new point in the relationship between Hollywood and Asia, as well as a particularly ironic turn in Hong Kong film away from Hong Kong. Much has been written about remakes and piracy involving Hong Kong films by scholars such as Laikwan Pang (2006), Wang Shuqin (2003) and Pat Aufderheide (1998), among many others, and Quentin Tarantino has established his reputation by remaking and reworking Hong Kong action films. Bliss Cua Lim articulates the economics behind these transnational remakes:
The recent emergence of a generic practice, the remake, as a vehicle for Hollywoods globalist deracination of Asian genre films points to the recruitment of generic intertextuality for flexible accumulation. Generic repetition and influence are here a function of the speed with which film industries respond to their rivals by mimicking and deracinating their local, cultural, or national signatures on screen. (Lim, 2007, p. 112)

The relocation of film talent and movie remakes bookend these changes in Hong Kongs place in global cinema. In fact, ten years of cinema in the SAR can be demarcated by films happening elsewhere from John Woos 1997 Face/Off to Martin Scorseses 2007 Oscar win. Infernal Affairs (based on a script, of course, inspired by Face/Off, beholden to Scorseses movie brat take on the gangster genre) sits stubbornly in the middle, set in Hong Kong, and linked at both ends to global Hollywood hemmed in and frustrated, if not yet totally departed.

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Critical reception of The Departed in Hong Kong has been cool, and the buzz on the blogs focused on the disappearance of Hong Kong and Infernal Affairs at the Academy Awards ceremony. First, the source for The Departed became Japan rather than Hong Kong, and, then, in his acceptance speech, Scorsese neglected to mention the title of the earlier film. Although Scorsese did mention the fact that the original film was from Hong Kong, he did not name both directors conspicuously neglecting Alan Mak (who also co-wrote the script and has a credit on The Departed for it). Here is an example of the feelings expressed by a disgruntled Academy Awards viewer from Hong Kong:
I am so angry that this unfortunate event has occurred that I am moved to request that the Academy make a public apology. This apology should be addressed to the original team involved in Infernal Affairs and to the people of Hong Kong. I also request that a correction is published visibly online, so that all viewers to your website are informed of this error, and are directed to more informed sites regarding Hong Kong cinema I hope that you will address this situation with the utmost urgency and due respect. (Iris, 2007)

Another blogger writes:

And best screenplay? Oh my god, thats even worse. Its like taking my friends great Mandarin essay, paraphrasing it a little and translating it into English, and then winning an essay competition with it. Has William Monahan, the screenwriter for The Departed, no shame? What a hollow win for him. (Chan, 2007)

With Hong Kong, the films title and the films co-director/co-writer Alan Mak erased at various points in the awards ceremony, The Departeds sweep of the major Oscar categories gives Ackbar Abbass idea of Hong Kong cinema as dj disparu (Abbas, 1997) a new twist. At the Oscar presentation, Infernal Affairs had departed. Alan Mak, who disappeared from Scorseses acceptance speech and who has not been happy with The Departed, observed:
It stuck so close to the original it looked like they are just making Infernal Affairs again well in that case Im, of course, happy because it is like Infernal Affairs winning an Oscar Of course, I wouldnt want my screenplay to be moved about when it was made into a film for the first time but when it was being used for the second time, I would have hoped some new elements were being introduced to it. (Lukacs, 2007)

Supporting Alan Maks opinion, Stephanie Lee makes a convincing case on her blog (Lee, 2007), illustrated with copious stills from both films, for looking at The Departed as a very direct remake. Given this, Maks mixed feelings seem understandable. He benefits from the attention Infernal Affairs receives for winning an Oscar as an adaptation, but he remains uncomfortable with the

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disappearance of the film, his script and Hong Kong cinema as The Departed garners these awards. However, the issue of the remakes relationship to a film directors vision does not disappear that easily. Scorsese could be said to have stolen Infernal Affairs by failing to properly credit the script, but The Departed also remains a product of Scorseses authorial vision, stamped by his signature style, and can be taken as a tribute to him as a true auteur. Looking closely at the film, an argument can be made in support of either case. Scorseses authorial presence announces itself in Jack Nicholson/Frank Costellos initial voiceover accompanied by a montage of street life in 196070s Boston (including the 1974 riots over the desegregation of the school system) and the music of the Rolling Stoness Gimme Shelter. Scorsese had used the Stoness song in Goodfellas (1990) and Casino (1995), and it is a far cry from Tsai Chins Forgotten Times, which is heard throughout the Infernal Affairs trilogy. The deft editing of Thelma Schoonmaker (who won an Oscar for The Departed and edited many of Scorseses other films, including Goodfellas) is apparent in the montage, and the cinematographic panache of Michael Ballhaus (Goodfellas and Gangs of New York, among other Scorsese films) marks the opening as classic Scorsese. The voiceover narration resembles Ray Liotta/Henry Hills As far back as I can remember, Ive always wanted to be a gangster, from Goodfellas. Like Henry Hill, Frank Costello turns out to be a snitch for the FBI. Also, like Hill, Costello is based on an actual gangster/FBI informer, James Whitey Bulger of Bostons Irish Winter Hill gang, and Colin (Matt Damon) on John Connolly, his FBI handler. Whiteys brother, William Bulger, was in the Massachusetts state senate, so it is particularly ironic that Colins apartment overlooks the sparkling golden dome of the state capitol building. The rat on the loose in the final shot could conjure up an image of Whitey still on the lam and now one of his former employers (the FBIs ) most wanted (Lush, 2007). With the shift to the Irish gangs and the intense father/son relationship between Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his dark nemesis/benefactor played by Jack Nicholson, The Departed also resembles Gangs of New York (2002), with Daniel Day-Lewis prefiguring Jack Nicholsons gang boss. Frank begins The Departed with the lines: I dont want to be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me. Backlit, Frank appears in profile on screen, shadowing the director calling the shots, providing a clear point of identification between the filmmaker and his character. Most directors aspire to make their environments a product of their authorial vision. As much as critics have praised/condemned Jack Nicholson for adding to the film/being out of control, Scorsese clearly uses Frank as a stand-in (however evil) for himself as the director. Frank creates the environment, and he calls the

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shots in his domain of the Irish mob in Boston. Out of control as an actor who wrests control from the director and his fellow actors, Jack Nicholson stands in for Scorsese, the man who has taken control of his Hong Kong source, but who cannot quite stay in control as an auteur. His environment is not a product of me. It is the product of competing global forces and transnational cultural transactions that bring Hong Kong and Hollywood together to make a profit. In many scenes, The Departed allegorizes filmmaking and the state of global cinema. Frank emerged from the urban jungle of the 1960s and 1970s to be king of the hill, just as Scorsese emerged as the maverick director to take control of American film culture with the other movie brats of his generation. Frank pulls the strings, and the cops (all played by recognizable mass media regulars as stand-ins for the studios), Detective Sergeant Dignam (Mark Wahlberg/Marky Mark), Detective Captain Oliver Queenan (Martin Sheen) and Detective Captain George Ellerby (Alec Baldwin), really cannot match him. Frank has Scorseses apparent vices as well as his sense of taste (Italian opera over porn) and Catholic education. At one point, Frank, quoting John Lennon of the Beatles, calls himself an artist. Although Nicholsons devilish demeanour harkens back to The Witches of Eastwick (1987) and his toying with a severed hand at breakfast may be a Heres Johnny! moment straight out of Kubricks The Shining (1980) or a morbid prank worthy of the Joker from Tim Burtons Batman (1989), the meeting of director and star/actor in the character of Frank appears to be a harmonious union of Scorsese and Nicholson. Even though Frank fulfils the same narrative function as Sam (Eric Tsang) in Infernal Affairs, the two characters differ considerably. Although Sams command of his gang resembles Lau and Maks directorial role to a certain degree, the connection does not have the same compelling force as it does in The Departed. Sam begins the trilogy with orchestrating the lives of his moles in the Hong Kong police force at a Buddhist temple, envisioning himself as a triad grand general, and his voice commands the opening of the film as Franks does in The Departed. However, in The Departed, Jack Nicholson (given his international star presence and acting style) occupies more imaginative space, and stands as a more convincing surrogate for the directors authorial presence. Even though both characters end up dead at the hands of their protgs, Franks death carries an aura of grand tragedy while Sam ends up in a pool of blood on the floor of an indoor parking garage.

Frank and Sam Go to the Movies

The Departed, the film Scorsese claims as is his only movie with a plot,6 follows Infernal Affairs closely often scene for scene. Both films, for example, feature

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a meeting between the mob boss (Frank in The Departed, Sam in Infernal Affairs) and his mole in the police force (Colin Sullivan in The Departed and Lau Kinming/Andy Lau in Infernal Affairs) at a movie theatre. The mole in the mob (Billy Costigan in The Departed and Chan Wing-yan/Tony Leung in Infernal Affairs) lurks in the shadows of the movie auditorium trying to identify his counterpart on the other side of the law. The joke in Infernal Affairs revolves around the fact that the movie theatre provides a great venue for a triad rendezvous because no one goes to the movies. In fact, the theatre appears to be nearly empty. A Chinese art film plays on screen, and Sam wonders about its appeal since it features unattractive women. Infernal Affairs itself, on the other hand, offers star appeal, and it gives its viewers a decidedly different experience from the one Sam has in the movie theatre within the fiction. In the hallway outside the theatre, posters advertise Hollywood films such as Men in Black II, and the characters, standing in for the film itself, are sandwiched between the two cinematic worlds of the PRC and the U.S.. Hong Kong cinema burrows in like a mole in the multiplex highlighting its uncertain identity, questionable viability and unknown future. Infernal Affairs, as a Hong Kong blockbuster hopeful, inserts itself into the space of the global film economy in this local multiplex, and, as the eventual returns showed, delivered on its promise to reconcile Chinese art cinema with Hollywood fluff. In the history of world cinema, films-within-films are relatively common. From silent classics such as Man with a Movie Camera (1929) and Sherlock Jr. (1924) to the nearly mandatory film-within-a-film element of French New Wave features (e.g. Day for Night), many films pause their plots (at least momentarily) to remind the viewer of the constructed nature of what is on the screen, the processes of film production and/or viewing and the business being conducted inside the movie theatre, as characters comment on the nature and quality of the film product and ticket sales. In The Departed, the scene at the porn theatre replaces Infernal Affairss scene at the multiplex. Both scenes serve an identical narrative function in bringing the moles and the gang boss into the same space for the first time in the film. They stand in a self-reflexive position vis--vis the narrative, and both briefly interrupt the plot for Frank and Sam to comment on the nature of cinema. Moreover, both scenes lay claim to a common cinematic legacy of the film-within-the-film and remind the savvy viewer of their New Wave antecedents. However, the porn cinema and the multiplex remain worlds apart, and Scorsese and Monahans insistence that they are creating their own environment that is a product of them makes some sense.

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Of course it follows Infernal Affairs, but the scene also follows Scorseses Taxi Driver (1976) combining Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro)s date at the porn theatre with an outraged Betsy (played at her prim and prickly best by Cybill Shepherd) with Scorseses cameo appearance in the film as Traviss homicidal passenger looking to blow apart his errant wife, who may be having an affair with an African American man. Inspired by John Fords The Searchers (1956), Scorsese recreates racial hysteria within an urban rather than a frontier wilderness. Unlike Sam who simply sits back and watches the film in Infernal Affairs, Frank creates his own show by whipping out a black dildo. (Matt Damon claims in an interview included on the DVD that he was not expecting the marital aid Nicholson used to expose himself.) The black dildo, a piece of impromptu serendipity cooked up by Jack Nicholsons warped (and racist) sense of humour, clearly worked for Scorsese on some level, and the director kept it in. Observing this scene, Scorseses Taxi Drivers subterranean sexuality, rooted in the porn house and the threat of interracial sex, comes to the forefront. Of course, sex in the cinema may be on Sams mind as he comments on the Chinese film in Infernal Affairs; however, the economy of film exhibition really provides the punch-line for Lau and Maks joke. The Departed operates differently, and moves from the scene to what Jean Baudrillard might call the obscene with Franks gesture. This has nothing to do with the porn on screen or the marital aid in hand, however, and everything to do with The Departeds engagement with the breakdown of meaning associated with a shift from the modernist challenge to the real associated with the scene and the postmodern hyperreal evacuation of authorial power enacted through Nicholson/Franks obscene performance:
For something to have meaning, there must be a scene; and for a scene to exist, there must be illusion, a minimum of illusion, of imaginary movement, of challenge to the real, one which transports you, seduces you, revolts you (Baudrillard, 1983, p. 194) We are all actors, all spectators, there is no more scene, the scene is everywhere, there is no more rule, everyone acts out their own drama, improvises their own phantasms. (Baudrillard, 1983, p. 192)

As an illustration of this shift, the porn theatre is nearly empty. In an age of digital interactivity on the internet, audience numbers have dwindled. Frank also wonders about the need for porn movies, but he does not attribute the rise or fall of porn theatres to the impact of new technologies and changing motion picture viewing practices. Rather, he has never understood masturbating to porn, because he sees himself as always able to get plenty of real sex. His ego takes

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the place of the crisis in world cinema voiced in Infernal Affairs. When asked why he organized the rendezvous in the porn house, Frank throws up his hands and says he owns the place. From playing a homicidal character worrying about the African American penis in Taxi Driver to using a character brandishing a black dildo as his surrogate in The Departed, Scorsese maintains a remarkably unified cinematic world. The director does, indeed, own the place or, at least, he claims it and clings to it. Hong Kong fades away and American masturbatory fantasies conquer the screen. When Billy pursues Colin, it becomes clear that the porn theatre is located in the middle of Chinatown. The Departed peoples the space with Chinese workers presumably handling the garbage from the restaurants in the area and Colin, on the run, knifes one of them, mistaking the worker for his pursuer. Rather than being any shadowy alley outside a nondescript multiplex in urban Hong Kong, Franks porn house must be in Bostons Chinatown racially and ethnically marked, part of a foreign enclave within the American body politic. One of Nicholsons more memorable screen roles was as Jake Gittes in Roman Polanskis Chinatown (1974), a film that helped to define postmodern noir by alluding to Hollywoods long history of Chinatown-set stories. Even the knife Colin wields in the alley (shown in close-up as a riff on the dildo of the previous scene) glimmers like the switchblade Polanski (playing a thug) pulls on Nicholsons very nosy kitty cat to slice up his nose in Chinatown. Villains (or heroes, for that matter) knifing coolies in Chinatown back alleys have traditionally been the stuff of B-movies, and Scorsese picks up on the edges of ethnic Boston here to bring in a Hong Kong left behind during the process of adaptation. Even a brief shot of a mirrored wind chime breaking up Billys face harkens back to Welless Lady from Shanghai (1947) and the hall of mirrors that also appears in the Bruce Lee vehicle Enter the Dragon /(1973). Ethnic China clings to the backdoor of porn houses, acting as a reminder of the Hong Kong film source and Scorseses feelings about the proximity of his past (i.e., Travis at the porn theatre) to his present circumstances (i.e. the distance between Taxi Driver and The Departed via the detour into the alleyway of Hong Kongs Infernal Affairs). Geographically, the Italian North End and Chinatown maintain a separate identity from Southie/Charlestown/the Irish South End, and Frank serves as the bigoted conductor of the ethnic symphony that surrounds him. He draws from the Irish ethnic enclave with the Catholic Church and the police force as his main competitors within that constituency. African Americans, Italians and the Chinese remain at the periphery, as if Frank never stopped fighting the 1974 desegregation decision. The porn theatre in Chinatown is his small inroad into

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non-native turf. The ethnic Irish surrounded by the forever foreign Chinese of Boston. It is in Chinatown that Colin is caught in the act by video surveillance.7 However, he returns the gaze of the camera and manages to track down the footage. It seems important that the film makes the viewer aware of the characters awareness of the camera in Chinatown. Surveillance, paranoia and cinema link up with the films Chinese connection. It is a classic moment that illustrates Michel Foucaults notion of the Panopticon and the way in which vision, power, complicity and theatricality come together, so that jail cells can become [s]mall theatres, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible (1978, p. 200). Knowledge of that visibility makes the viewed complicit with the viewer:
He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously on himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection. (Foucault, 1978, p. 200)

Within the world of moles depicted in Infernal Affairs and The Departed, the dynamic of the Panopticon becomes part of the fiction. Conscious of being scrutinized, the characters must always be on guard, always acting a part and forever on exhibit. Chinatown Hollywoods construction of the mysterious, inscrutable Orient provides the appropriate backdrop for this theatrical display. The last line of dialogue, directed at Nicholsons Gittes, in Polanskis Chinatown, is: Forget it, Jake. Its Chinatown. If Gittes has been asked to forget, Colin must erase any memory of his presence in Chinatown and take control of the cameras gaze in order to identify his nemesis. Scorsese, too, attempts to forget The Departeds debt to Hong Kong and takes control of Infernal Affairss plot points in order to establish his own authority over the story.

The Chinese Connection

In Chinese Face/Off: The Transnational Popular Culture of Hong Kong (the title of the book inspired by the John Woo film that inspired Infernal Affairs), Lo Kwaicheung discusses Hong Kong in Western media as follows:
The significance of Hong Kong for the West lies in its challenging or subverting of an emerging China and also in its mirroring of a superior Western cultural identity and values The idea of Hong Kong perpetuates the East-West binarism in todays world, although such a culturally essentialist structure should have been seriously questioned long ago. (Lo, 2005, p. 15)

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Watching The Departed, Jacques Derrida on the supplement comes to mind:

It adds only to replace. It intervenes or insinuates itself in-the-place-of; if it fills, it is as if one fills a void. If it represents and makes an image, it is by the anterior default of a presence As substitute, it is not simply added to the positivity of a presence, it produces no relief, its place is assigned in the structure by the mark of an emptiness. (Derrida, 1976, p. 145)

Hong Kong, Hong Kong cinema and Infernal Affairs are still present but marked by emptiness in The Departed. However, as the Academy Awards telecast indicated, they are all somehow under erasure as Infernal Affairs becomes a Japanese film (in fact, a clip from Miikes Audition (1999) appears in The Departed), directed by Andrew Lau without Alan Mak, Boston superimposed over Hong Kong, all springing from the fertile imaginations of Monahan and Scorsese who claim not to have seen Infernal Affairs before making The Departed. As The Departed departs from Infernal Affairs, the supplement supplants Hong Kong cinema and becomes instead Chinatown the Chinese intrusion into America. Bloggers have noticed this, and they have become incensed by a subplot involving the Chinese military:
Sure, the scenes involving the mainland Chinese comprise only a small portion of the film, and sure the characters in the film also insult women, gays, blacks, Italians, and countless other groups. But this remake is supposed to be a tribute to Hong Kong cinema. Perhaps Scorseses denial that this is in fact a remake exonerates him from having to pay respect to the originating culture. Hollywood doesnt need to be politically correct; it needs to be culturally honest. (Brian Hu, quoted in Lee, 2006)

If Hong Kong cinema departs from the backdoor leaving the plot of Infernal Affairs behind, the PRC comes in the front door as the glue that links cop and crook in The Departed. Although only Infernal Affairs was purchased for The Departed, a plot strand from Infernal Affairs III /IIIappears as the Chinese supplement. In Infernal Affairs III, Sam and his gang become involved in a munitions deal with corrupt officers from the Peoples Liberation Army. As in The Departed, the deal is bogus from the start. Sam plans to use it as an excuse to get rid of Chan and irritate Superintendent Yeung (Leon Lai). He has no thought of actually going through with the deal. Similarly, Frank sets up the sale of the U.S. military microprocessor to cheat his Chinese connection and make detectives Dignam and Queenan crazy. Monahan and Scorsese cheat a bit on their deal by taking the idea of the PRC military transaction without actually paying for it.

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However, where Infernal Affairs III complicates matters by making one of the PRC gunrunners a mole for the police, The Departed does little to integrate the subplot into the overall narrative. Also, while the gunrunners in Infernal Affairs III want to dump their goods in Hong Kong (with the triads as the likely buyers), the spies in The Departed try to pick up U.S. military contraband from the Irish mob, presumably to enhance Chinas bid to become a global superpower. Infernal Affairss renegade Peoples Liberation Army crooks become legitimate, patriotic PRC operatives in The Departed, with Chinatown triads acting as intermediaries. While Sam manipulated the deal to rid himself of both Chan and his PRC contact Shadow (Chen Dao-ming) in Infernal Affairs III, Frank ironically bonds with his fellow Americans on the other side of the law by tricking the Chinese into thinking they have purchased something genuine. (He may be willing to give the Irish Republican Army nukes, if he could, but Frank draws the line at the Chinese.) A similar plot device involving the transfer of technology to China via the United States also surfaced in the television series 24. (Former U.S. President Bill Clinton came out as a fan, even though an uber-right-wing guy writes it, he admits [OBrien, 2007].) As reality imitates fiction, the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission announced, in its November 2007 annual report to the U.S. Congress, that the Chinese threaten U.S. military interests through their aggressive pursuit of technology (Press Release, 2006). A niche market of dedicated fans may exist for Hong Kong action cinema, but mid-America clearly has China not Hong Kong on its mind as well as its television screens. Post-9/11 and with the war in Iraq raging, Americas Orient insinuates itself into many popular narratives; the PRC vies with Iran and North Korea for the lead role as arch-nemesis. Of course, as part of the Vietnam generation, Scorsese has had Asia on his mind for decades. His Travis Bickle serves as the poster boy for disgruntled, psychotic, homicidal Nam vets on screen. One of the cinemas most famous victims of the Cold War, Travis remains an ambivalent figure, his vigilante tactics inspiring awe as well as horror. Martin Sheen, too, serves as a reminder of the directors friend, Francis Ford Coppola (who helped to award Scorseses 2007 Oscar), and his film on the war, Apocalypse Now (1979), starring Sheen in the trip up river to look for Kurtz (Marlon Brando). Jack Nicholson, too, brings a resume of roles in films such as Easy Rider (1969) and Five Easy Pieces (1970) that mark him as part of the Vietnam generation still living with anger, distrust and ambivalence about the U.S. government and the domestic impact of its foreign policies in Asia. The American war in Vietnam ended over thirty years ago, but Asia continues to be on Scorseses mind. In 1997, he had a direct run-in with the PRC

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over Kundun, which was the directors take on the Chinese invasion of Tibet and the exile of the Dalai Lama in 1959, and another way of celebrating the 1997 handover. (In 2007, President George W. Bush awarded a special distinction to the Dalai Lama marking ten years in another way.) In Kundun, the Dalai Lama takes his place within Scorseses cinematic universe watching one of Georges Mlis silent films on screen. With The Departed, China remains part of Scorseses cinematic world as well part of what Edward Said might call his underground self (Said, 1979). However, looking at The Departeds Chinese gunrunners from a different angle allows them to drift away from any particular political statement Scorsese may or may not be making about U.S.-China relations. Again, rats really are everywhere, and Whitey Bulger did, indeed, trade in guns for the IRA and the episode in the bar with Frank and the putative IRA member may allude to that (Murphy, 2004). Certainly, including a clip from John Fords The Informer (1935) makes that point quite clear, and the screen history of rats and moles draws The Departed away from Hong Kong and its Chinese connections.

Class Anxieties: Hong Kong and Boston

In Hong Kong, complaints revolve around The Departed as a pale imitation of the original film, while in Boston families of victims of mobster Whitey Bulger grumble about the films glorification of this wanted murderer. Different audiences seem to see very different films when they view The Departed. However, the plot works as well in Boston as in Hong Kong, and a case can be made that Infernal Affairs uses Hong Kongs historical and geographic specificity to craft a story that draws on the local to mirror global concerns. Vertiginous changes in time/space relations, uncertainty of national/ethnic identities, dramatic changes in gender roles and sexual expression, the increasing flexibility of capital in a world with porous borders, and the changing class divisions that become part of the post-industrial global landscape all have a role to play in Infernal Affairs.8 Hong Kong represents a more general postmodern malaise, and The Departed picks up on that and sets it in Boston. In fact, one of the most telling aspects of this narrative transplantation involves class. Globalization, new technologies and post-industrial information/finance/service economies change the bottom line in Boston as well as in Hong Kong. Gangsters and their transnational dealings speak to a changing class dynamic when the old neighbourhood of Bostons Southies really does not seem so distant from a Hong Kong dai pai dong or mahjong parlour. Cops and crooks in Boston deal with the same economic forces as their counterparts in Hong Kong, and the

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uncertainty of the nation, of the economy, of politics and of gender definitions and family structure put the characters in both films on edge. As narratives with male leads, both films intertwine class anxieties with patriarchal instability and a crisis in masculine identity.9 While the characters in Infernal Affairs display their cultural capital through the appreciation of commodities such as classic stereos, Frank, Billy and Colin in The Departed quote and misquote Shakespeare, Hawthorne and Joyce. Education, in the city of Harvard and MIT, becomes more of a factor than the display of goods. Queenans son, from the upwardly mobile Irish-Catholic working class, goes to Notre Dame in Indiana. Apparently, he cannot get into, cannot afford or feels alienated from the Ivy League in his hometown. The view of the state capitol building marks Colins condo as upper-class location is everything. The realtor knows the apartment must be out of the cops league, but he does not bat an eye when Colin notifies him of a co-signer with money, power and, presumably, connections (whether through a gay boyfriend or a corrupt mobster makes little difference to him). Class is appearance: Youve already proved you can pretend to be a Costigan from South Boston; do it again. Although both Colin and Billy must play their parts in The Departed, just as Lau and Chan do in Infernal Affairs, the class dimension of The Departed complicates matters a bit more. Both Chan and Lau aspire to bourgeois respectability in Infernal Affairs. Although Chan clearly enjoys the violence of the underworld, he still would rather shop for stereos than trade in cocaine. Lau, too, wants to become a real upwardly mobile cop so much that he kills all in his path to his Hong Kong dream of middle-classness. Colin and Billy, however, share a more ambivalent relationship to their class standing. The film carefully gives each an option out that is not offered to Frank. Frank, as a poor Irish kid growing up in the 1950s (before JFK broke the glass ceiling and made it to the White House), really may have had only the chance to be a cop or a crook. However, Colin and Billy do have options. If they can get into the state police academy, they can likely get into college. However, while Colin has been bought (and paid for with a couple of bags of groceries) as a kid, Billy remains perversely rebellious. Pulled out of the Irish ghetto as a child, Billy need never go back as either a cop or a crook. Billys father is described as an honest donkey handling baggage at the airport and his uncle as a thug, so his mothers choice to marry out of the neighbourhood seems reasonable. Even Frank cannot figure out why Billy would want to follow in either ones footsteps, and it is only Billys clear love of violence that even marginally quells Franks suspicions. The cops also have difficulty accepting Billy. Dignam pegs him as a kid torn between two worlds divided by class a different accent cultivated for

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each community. Dignam knows Billy is prime mole material because he has a track record of class passing. Bottles of pills and family photos visually indicate an interior struggle played out, but not completely voiced, in the film. From Scorseses Catholic perspective, Billy has sins to expiate, and these sins appear to revolve around class difference, ethnic alienation and a divided desire to clean up as well as reconnect with the old neighbourhood. He may be guilty for abandoning his old father, for wishing to be like his criminal uncle or for having access to the good life of the suburbs while both rotted away in the ethnic Irish ghetto. The gangster tragedy has always been a drama about overreaching class boundaries, and the cop story often involves class and ethnic shame. In The Departed, the two fuse so that questioning a characters motives becomes ludicrous in a society defined by corruption, duplicity and the dissolution of solid identity. If the cops and crooks of an earlier generic incarnation felt conflicted when confronted by the possibility of upward mobility, Billy does not seem to fit into that earlier mold. If Colin can be read as an unlucky kid happy to have a chance out of the slums as either a cop or a crook, Billy revels in slum life as both a cop and a crook proud to keep his hand steady in the company of mass murderers and popping pills to stay in the game. Just as Infernal Affairs deals with a crisis in identity that goes beyond Hong Kongs change in sovereignty, The Departed departs from modernist alienation and moves away from Scorseses Travis as Gods lonely man. Colin and Billy are so fragmented, volatile and inconsistent that questions of identity move beyond alienation and loss to absolute non-identity, masquerade and performance. Since childhood, they have performed the roles assigned to them. While Colin grasps all aspects of his performance as cop and crook, Billy cannot quite get the hang of either role. His outburst in his psychiatrists office is telling. He works undercover as a hoodlum and he really operates as a street thug; he plays a drug addict and he really pops pills; he manipulates his doctor into feeding his habit by pretending to be suicidal, and he may well be suicidal; he questions her professional ethics by forcing her to confront his addiction and/ or real threat of suicide, and he manages to get her off balance enough to agree to go out with him. DiCaprio puts on quite a performance, Billy does as well, and the doctor runs after him to give him the prescription. Inside and outside the fiction, all are taken in and know it. (DiCaprio grabs the viewer, and Billy gets both his drugs and a date with the pretty doctor.) Any illusion of a fixed identity evaporates, and both the act of and the fact of the performance command the screen. Neither Billy nor Colin has enough of an identity to be Gods lonely man. They play their parts but the illusion of substance (e.g. Traviss diary in voiceover in Taxi Driver) is gone.

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As a consequence, psychiatry becomes an act as well an allusion to Analyze This (1999), Analyze That (2002) and The Sopranos (19992007) filtered through Infernal Affairs (with perhaps a glimmer of Scorseses favourite Hitchcock and his string of screen psychiatrists thrown in). Mary (Sammi Cheng) and Dr Lee (Kelly Chen) from Infernal Affairs become a single character, Dr Madolyn Madden (Vera Farmiga), in The Departed. The doctor is clearly Chans love interest in Infernal Affairs, but both Chan and Lau end up on Dr Lees couch. In The Departed, Colin and Billy both end up in her bed. In Infernal Affairs, the doctor serves as a symbol of her profession (and its inadequacies) as well as an object of romantic interest. Love and state-sponsored psychiatry fail to save either Chan or Lau. However, in The Departed, the psychiatrist functions as a professional woman positioned between rivals for her affections. Rather than simply (and unprofessionally) falling for a patient, she wavers between Billy and Colin. Presenting Colin with the sonogram of the unborn baby seems to indicate she has made a choice even though she, the viewer, and likely Colin (who has been established as at least occasionally impotent) must wonder about the paternity of the fetus. Colin, a rat with an apartment with a view of the capitol, must be worth more than Billy, a mole with a drug habit. Even the heart of the state embodied by a woman, a professional, a healer smells like a rat that can sniff out upward mobility and hitch her own wagon to it. The emergence of the professional woman as the new face of a rising consumerist/cosmopolitan class links The Departed directly to Infernal Affairs. The connection between global capitalism and a crisis in local/national male privilege seems clear in each film. These stories about men, their control of the state and their domination of trade end up with women (reduced to supporting roles in each film) coming out on top at the end of the drama. The male actors are the stars, but their characters collapse in bloody piles while the love interest walks away. More than the plot links The Departed and Infernal Affairs; they share a certain perspective on capital, state power, class differences and gender roles. Hong Kong translates easily into Boston. Buddhist/Confucian ethics metamorphose into Irish Catholic values. Corruption among the police, inter-agency rivalries, domestic and foreign infiltration, capitalist competition, shadow economies, class antagonisms, the rise of the professional woman, the crisis of masculinity in the post-feminist age and urban angst all remain the same. The rituals also stay the same. Police pomp and circumstance, funerals, the eruption of violence to establish standing in the underworld, the dissemination of information/disinformation to rise in the ranks, jockeying for power using any means available and exercising power through sex punctuate the story. Hong Kong and Boston are specific cities, but also generic places. Moreover,

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they are places at a particular moment in history with shared anxieties about global capitalism, nationalism and individual identity (changing gender roles as well as highly malleable class, ethnic and even racial identities in the digital age). Hitting the delete button on a computer personnel file stands as the ultimate act of villainy in both films. In the midst of the decay of individual identity, Scorsese tenaciously tries to hold on to the mantle of auteur rather than give in to the vicissitudes of the global market and the implosion of Hollywood and Hong Kong film into a single, homogenous entity. Alan Mak struggles with claiming and denying The Departed as his film, and Scorsese wrestles with a similar problem in being unable to accept the fact that he won an Oscar for a remake of a Hong Kong movie. Scorsese is a cinephile, film-school-trained, beholden to Hitchcock, Ford, Welles, Godard, Lang, and even willing to reference Takashi Miike.10 Therefore, Scorseses reluctance to talk about The Departed as a remake of Infernal Affairs seems odd. Brad Pitt first acquired the rights to Infernal Affairs, and maybe he would admit to seeing the film (given Monahan and Scorseses reluctance). Scorsese did not dance around the issue of authorship with his remake of Cape Fear (1991, based on the 1962 film). Scorsese may fear he will be among the departed with the erosion of auteur cinema in the face of the dual forces of postmodernism and globalization. He may also feel uneasy about the prospect that The Departed may be a distorted remake of his own films. He may have crossed the line separating New Wave modernist allusion and postmodern consumerist pastiche by remaking a Hong Kong film. As Bliss Cua Lim points out in her work on Hong Kong/Hollywood interactions, selling a film from another country can be easier than selling an original script. The film has been proven feasible to bring to the screen and already has a box-office track record. Adapted plays, novels or original screenplays cannot make these claims. Knowing that a film can be produced (within a certain budget) and can do well in an important market (like Asia) can be enticing. The economic allure of the remake cannot be denied. Seeing the film or not makes little difference; seeing the film and denying it is a remake may not hurt.

Who Smells a Rat?

When Marky Mark steps in to save the day at the end of The Departed, the scurrying rat only adds to the irony. Not only did Mark Wahlberg build part of his star image on his past life as a juvenile delinquent in Boston, but he finishes the film outside the law. He looks a bit like Travis Bickle at the end of Taxi Driver,

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but without the cinematic drama of that films overhead tracking shot or Traviss flamboyant madness. Dignam remains a vigilante; his decision to take the law into his own hands and shoot Colin indicates his utter lack of confidence in the system he represents. Like Superintendent Wong (Anthony Wong) in Infernal Affairs II, he becomes embroiled in a murder to bring justice to a system that cannot deliver it to his satisfaction. The only difference is that Dignam takes up the gun directly and appears to get away with murder. Dignam would rather kill the rat Colin than rat him out. However, Dignam is still a rat for murdering a fellow cop even if Colin is dirty. (For the more paranoid viewer, Dignam could be a dirty cop dug in so deep that it is impossible to tell if he is also a mole like Colin or not. From this point of view, Dignam uses the opportunity to rid himself of a competitor rather than avenge the death of a fellow cop.) Colin dies with a bag of groceries in his hands a pitiful commentary on how Frank had bought him out as a kid as well as an ironic comment on how he remains trapped by his class background. The rat as an obvious symbol, Brechtian A-effect or postmodern trope ties up stylistic as well as dramatic loose ends. As the closing shot of the rat in front of the Massachusetts state capitol indicates, rats are everywhere (even if the reference to Whitey Bulgers brother as the president of the State Senate does not register). Frank obsessively draws them, looks for them in his ranks and admits to being one himself. Pedophile priests reluctantly share a beer with mobsters, and Frank can honestly smell a rat wherever he goes. Billy, Colin, Dignam and Frank all scurry around Boston like rats, but they are rats in a maze all ultimately frustrated by a system they think they have mastered that has, in fact, mastered them. The Departed may ultimately be a story of frustration. Frank, the creative force, inspired by Donizettis Lucia di Lammermoor, fuelled by cocaine, aroused by two women, still cannot produce an heir. No matter how large the dildo, it cannot make Frank fertile. Colin confronts him with this before he kills him, when he asks Frank if all this is about the fact that he cannot have a son and must make the best of having Colin as heir apparent. Similarly, Billy mirrors Frank both sport scruffy, devilish goatees and Frank directly confronts Billy with the accusation that he covets his position as gang boss. While Billy readily admits that I could be you, he also continues, I dont want to be you. Billy refuses a tacit offer disguised by a real threat, while Colin simply shoots the guy. The narrative configurations appear to be classically Oedipal Billy and Colin vying for the affections of the same maternal (pregnant), nurturing (psychiatrist) woman, and each positions himself as a possible son to Franks father, to whom he feels loyal but wants desperately to eliminate. Scorsese can no longer easily see himself in the rebellious son, since he has more in common with Frank the ageing kingpin. Depicting Frank as the

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tragic demonic father-creator, in fact, may have something to do with the fact that this film represents the pinnacle of Scorseses career for a work that has publicly, internationally, called his position as an auteur into question. With Coppolas Godfather (1972), Lucass Star Wars (1977) and Spielbergs Jaws (1975) and E.T. (1982), Scorseses The Departed pushes beyond New American Cinemas modernist roots into the realm of postmodern consumer culture. A pastiche of global mob films, The Departed draws on Scorsese as another brand name with Marky Mark, Jack Nicholson and Leonardo DiCaprio. While bloggers in Hong Kong may smell a rat at the Oscars when Scorsese takes the statuette for the Japanese film he did not remake, he stands with others of his generation on the line between American cinematic modernism and postmodernism at the meeting ground of the Vietnam generation and the heirs of global capitalism. The particular place of Hong Kong cinema and, specifically, Infernal Affairs at this meeting point merits consideration. Infernal Affairs expresses many sentiments linked to the 1997 handover from the uncertainty of national (as well as other aspects of) identity to questions of how the legacy of British colonialism can be reconciled with Chinese sovereignty and the dictates of the Communist Party. However, while Infernal Affairs, with a happy ending similar to the bloody conclusion of The Departed, played on PRC screens across the border, The Departed failed to get Chinese approval. Both films deal with the ways in which capitalism and the state intertwine. However, The Departed takes up the residue of the suspicion of China from the Infernal Affairs trilogy and blends it freely with American xenophobia. Where Infernal Affairs sees capitalism out of control, The Departed imagines an avaricious Chinese government hungry for U.S. technology. Drugs and guns for gangsters metamorphose into high-tech military gadgets. The Hong Kong hybrid may be absorbed easily, but intercourse with the Chinese supplement its racial, national and political otherness moves The Departed from global hybridization to cultural miscegenation. Frank may need to take control of the black dildo and stage a mnage trois with an African American woman in order to master this fear of racial alterity. Scorsese may also need to take control of Infernal Affairs to master a fear of the disintegration of auteur cinema within the economic imperatives of global Hollywood production. In the third edition of A Cinema of Loneliness, Robert Kolker keeps Scorsese (with Altman and Kubrick) on the side of film modernism as a director who continued to experiment with the expressive potentials of the medium (Kolker, 2000, p. xiii). He continues:
There were few others. Those who have since attempted some new explorations move mostly through postmodern territory where film became less a means of exploring the self and the world than of deflating both within images that either lack

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self-consciousness or mock it by turning inquiry into a sometimes indiscriminate embrace of pop-cultural images. Many recent filmmakers seem to have less a view of the world than simply a view of film. More accurately, they are filled with film, and they seem sometimes inclined to dump out their images with no driving idea, no articulation of what they or we should be seeing and why. Postmodern absurdity replaces modernist angst; cynicism edges out irony. (Kolker, 2000, pp. xiiixiv)

With this shift, the American auteur becomes a brand name in the new Hollywood. The Oscar has multiple meanings: it celebrates box-office success and the approval of the industrys creative professionals, and serves as an indication of critical acclaim. However, the prestige of the Oscar as a sign of the American auteur has been tarnished by the commercialization of the brand name director and the pressure that the forces of globalization have placed on the myth of individual creative genius. Although the American auteur may have always been a myth, transnational commerce has made his feet of clay disintegrate at a faster pace. Scorsese, Coppola, Lucas and Spielberg may feel a need to stand firm at the Oscars to allay these fears and belie these seismic changes in world film culture. Running along the fault lines from the Hong Kong script to the Hollywood Academy Awards, this cinematic earthquake buries auteur cinema in the rubble of postmodern high concept (Wyatt, 1994) movies, and Scorsese reaps the rewards of imitating an imitation of a film that could have been made by someone resembling himself.

10
On Spectral Mutations: The Ghostly City in The Secret, Rouge and Little Cheung
Esther M. K. Cheung*

What we now call hauntology in critical and cultural studies arises from attempts by critics and theorists to articulate the relation between textuality and materiality. Some are particularly interested in the new world order after the world-wide events of 1989 a time [which] is out of joint, as Jacques Derrida calls it, citing Shakespeares Hamlet.1 In my study of the spectral city in Hong Kong cinema, the invocation of the ghostly has provided us with a means through which the shock impact of the urban phantasmagoria can be restored to itself by way of the things made strange, by ostranenie, which the formalists call defamiliarization (see Shlovksy, 1994; Thompson, 1988).2 This sense of estrangement from the world can therefore be seen as a moment of aestheticization when allegories are screened. If the turn to ghosts, spectres or apparitions offers tools of defamiliarization for artists, spectral analysis in the present context is in no way an attempt to focus on metaphysics and mysticism. On the contrary, it follows the post-metaphysical strain in philosophical thinking, and in the recent trend of spectral analysis to trace and track the material conditions of everyday life in the mundane space of the city (see Paetzold, 2000; Gordon, 1997; Pile, 2002). In some cases, visible and invisible cross-cultural flows of various kinds have shaped what one critic calls the global uncanny in the deterritorialized space of the city (Wilson, 2005). When Walter Benjamin remarked on the French

Research for this paper was completed with the generous support from the General Research Fund of Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (Project no. HKU 7416/05H).

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Surrealists in the 1920s, he wrote poetically, No face is surrealistic in the same degree as the true face of a city (Benjamin, 1978, p. 182). As ghostly appearances always challenge linear time, temporality in our analysis is more kairotic than chronological. In Greek, kairos and chronos are two concepts of time. As opposed to chronos, which refers to sequential chronological time, kairos is associated with an opportune moment in which something critical and special happens.3 The surreal, then, always intrudes at kairotic times, times that are out of joint. Instead of occultism and mysticism, one may then speak of a special kind of profane illumination that Benjamin observes in the work of the French Surrealists: There, too, are crossroads where ghostly signals flash from the traffic, and inconceivable analogies and connections between events are the order of the day (Benjamin, 1978, p. 183). Intricately put, the sense of ghostliness is felt in the everyday, mundane space of postWorld War I Paris. When critical changes are happening, some materialist anthropological inspiration can be derived from the profane urban space. As Benjamin suggests, the city is the region from which the lyric poetry of Surrealism reports (Benjamin, 1978, p. 183). Almost a century apart from Benjamins time, the trope of the spectral city in contemporary Hong Kong cinema carries the resonances of everydayness and profanity at a different time and space. Such a different time and space of course require specific contextualization of the rise and popularity of what critics now call the New Hong Kong cinema. Not only does the cinema provide intriguing texts for spectral analysis; it is in fact a product of Hong Kongs changing cultural space, as an aesthetic ostranenie emerging out of the intersecting filmic space of art and industry. In this chapter, by reading three versions of the spectral city in contemporary Hong Kong cinema, I attempt to trace how various moments of disjointed time in Hong Kong history are associated with the expression of a sense of ghostliness, alienation and homelessness. My aim is to explore the possibility of writing a meta-history of Hong Kong over the past thirty years or so through a hermeneutical reading of the cinematic depictions of space. Writing a concise meta-history of space, this chapter asks two related questions: Does 1997 matter? What concerns us after the 1997 handover is over? In asking these seemingly macroscopic questions, the emphasis is on how an allegorical reading of the ordinary, quotidian aspects of urban life offers us chances to understand the effects of eventful changes. Just as the eternal would be the ruffles on a dress rather than an idea, as Benjamin puts it (Wolin, 1978, p. 130), the trivial and the mundane lead us to deduce the profound aspects of Hong Kongs transformations during these kairotic moments. The three films discussed in this chapter Ann Huis The Secret / (1979), Stanley Kwans Rouge /(1987), and Fruit Chans Little Cheung /(1999) cannot be strictly classified as ghost films. In fact,

On Spectral Mutations 171

in The Secret and Little Cheung, there is a clear absence of ghosts. The former is closer to a psycho-thriller in which the female ghostly victim is in fact very much alive; the latter is often hailed as a social-realist growing-up story with only occasional references to half-seen and disappearing humans in the old neighbourhoods of Hong Kong. Rouge is a supernatural melodrama, but the ghost is less a spooky and horrifying phantom than a beautiful and nostalgic spectral figure. The semi- or quasi-fantastic mode of these films provides us with evidence to examine the feeling of ambiguity and unsettlement that elides the boundary between waking and dreaming in a mutating city. While there has been a long tradition in Hong Kong cinema of horror and ghost films, what ties these particular films together is less the literal presence of the ghost than the ways in which they evoke a sense of ghostliness in the space of the city at various critical moments in Hong Kong history (see Cheung, 2004). Between the emergence of Huis The Secret as a representative New Wave film in 1979 and the production of Chans Little Cheung, Hong Kong was transformed from a British colony to a postcolonial city known as the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. Hong Kongs complicated cultural space has been shaped by colonialism, postcolonialism, globalism and postsocialism. During this time, the cultural imaginary of Hong Kong has shifted as much as the socioeconomic environment of the city. These moments are deeply associated with the ways in which Chinese identities are defined and redefined in the intersecting space of the local, the national and the global. Hong Kong also sees itself changing from manufacturing to service industries that are aptly encompassed in the acronyms FIRE IT Finance, Insurance, Real Estate and Informational Technology. Within this global city, issues about urban development and how it is intertwined with peoples perception of their identities are worthy of our attention. The selected films provide clues to understanding both the subtle and explicit mutations that occurred throughout these years. From the death of old Chinese tradition in The Secret to the imminent disappearance of old urban neighbourhoods in Little Cheung, these films show the power of recalcitrant memories through the construction of spectral, surreal images. We will soon see in our spectral analysis that both films feature the birth of new identities out of the old tenement houses. Separated by almost twenty years, however, they convey very different interpretations of the old neighbourhoods as domestic, homely spaces. While the former film inflects a gradual process of desinicization as a crucial feature of British colonial legacies in Hong Kong, the latter allows us to trace the influences of Chinas postsocialism on the cross-cultural space in Hong Kong. As uncertain as the countdown days to 1997, the years after 1997 chart a series of escalating cultural flows between Hong Kong and China that have been shaping new identities in

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the city. As a post-1997 cultural production, Little Cheung not only articulates the formation of new subjectivities and interstitial spaces but also foreshadows recent debates on historical preservation and urban renewal. It is also around these recent discourses that the notion of Hong Kong as home is redefined. The well-known Burkean sublime suggests that the uncanny derives from the sense of terror and dread associated with the comforting hearth of the domestic space. Inspired by Anthony Vidlers sophisticated notion of the architectural uncanny, the spectral city I discuss here is also associated with two kinds of actual space: the unhomely interior and the ghostly urban exterior. The formulation of this trope brings together the intricate relation between aesthetics, space and the city (Vidler, 1992). In both the domestic and the city spaces, the uncanny needs to be understood in its aesthetic dimension in connection with the representation of a mental state disturbed by the ambiguity between what is real and unreal, between waking and dreaming (Vidler, 1992, p. 11). Undergoing a process of allegorization and defamiliarization, the representation of this mental and psychical state creates a shocking viewing effect. In her interesting book, Avery Gordon discusses the relation between the perceiver and the perceived in spectral analysis. While the ghostly haunt gives notice to that something [which] is missing, the perceiver says with empathy, I see you are not there (Gordon, 1997, pp. 10, 16). Spectral analysis is undeniably always associated with the problems of visuality. One can even trace such an etymology in the Latin root of spectral: spectare means to behold. However, in my discussion, unlike Ackbar Abbass famous reverse hallucination not seeing what is there, what concerns us is an empathetic way of seeing: I see you are not there (Abbas, 1997, p. 6). In the mundane spaces of the tram, the old tenement houses and the reclaimed land portrayed in the selected films, I argue that the haunted perceiver shares Gordons empathy when he or she comes into contact with the half-seen and disappearing humans. The semantic double of the Freudian uncanny is translated visually in the context of Hong Kong cinema into the unhomely home that predominantly embodies the contradictory sense of being Chinese in a space of diaspora such as Hong Kong.4 However, it must be asserted that this sense of contradiction has undergone many mutations. Since the originary Chinese identity is constructed on the premise of blood-tie relationship, the genres of the family romance and romantic story mixed with horror or fantastic elements provide the natural habitats for the embodiment of the spatial uncanny. In fact, as generally known, the 1997 handover has been imagined as an extended family romance of a highly politicized nature. At one point in the history of Hong Kong, the natal tropes of biological and foster mothers were favoured by cultural critics,

On Spectral Mutations 173

writers, filmmakers and even historians who wrote on Hong Kong history (see Cheung, 2001). As the spectral city that I have invoked is an aesthetic category that is inseparable from spatiality namely the domestic and the urban spaces the discussion of the mutation of identity in this case will require us to pay due attention to the lived experience associated with built space, especially that of the domestic space. In the following discussion, the three versions of the spectral city are linked to two major types of interior space: the old tenement houses and the modern residential high-rises. A historicized view of the spectral city will need to be explored in the concrete context of Hong Kongs residential housing. This unhomely home, however, is always a metonym of the spectral city; the former deals with claustrophobia while the latter opens itself up to the agoraphobic space of the urban. Apart from the banal angst of feeling homeless and rootless in a modern life-world, the trope of the spectral city in Hong Kong cinema opens up ways in which we can write a meta-history of space of Hong Kong through the analysis of genres such as crime thriller, melodrama and the story of growing up.

The Spectres of the Past in the Tenement Houses

Huis The Secret heralded the coming of age of the first-generation Hong Kong citizens after the Communist revolution in China in 1949. Historian David Faure rightly calls this group of film practitioners and others the generation of the 1970s. This time was characterized by the growth of a clearly distinguishable Hong Kong local identity, although historians might always trace this sense of localness to as early as the late 1800s (Carroll, 2007, p. 167). Unlike their predecessors who were Chinese sojourners in Hong Kong, they are Hong Kong people of Chinese descent (Faure, 1997). Their Western-style education, their cosmopolitan outlook, their indigenous experience of growing up in a British colony and their ambiguously distanced relationship with the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) shaped the way they perceive colonial modernity as more intimate and relevant to their sense of identity-making. This process reveals how colonialism as a form of globalization is always accompanied by its modernizing power to transform the natives by alienating them from their cultural traditions. This process of cultural transformation is less coercive domination than colonial hegemony. As John Carroll, aptly puts it:
This was not a matter of a Hong Kong identity trickling down from the top. Rather, this sense of belonging was shaped by several factors, among them Hong Kongs rising economic prosperity, its closer ties with China, and the efforts of the colonial government to foster a sense of local identity. (Carroll, 2007, p. 168)

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The haunted city in The Secret clearly allegorizes the haunting feeling one has at a moment of dissociation from unwanted cultural traditions. Such cultural traditions are portrayed in association with symbols of superstition, fear and madness. The spectres from the past, which are thus menacing and threatening, haunt the modernized and Westernized young men and women who hang around in the old and obsolete districts of Hong Kong (Figures 10.1 and 10.2). Furthermore, this sense of cultural distancing from China cannot be divorced from the Cold War dynamics and the socioeconomic differences between Hong Kong and the PRC after 1949, although at this time the fear of the onset of the 1997 handover was not yet widely felt. The binary opposition between the modernized, capitalistic Hong Kong and the culturally and economically backward China is translated cinematically into the clash between modernity and superstition. The film portrays how Ming (played by Sylvia Chang), a Westernized nurse, tries to solve the heinous murder of her friend Li Yuen (Chiu Ah-chi) after seeing the ghostly Li frequent her former abode. It turns out that Li is not a ghost, but has been driven out of her mind by her unfortunate circumstances. She becomes pregnant, and finds out that her boyfriend is seeing another woman. To her, this situation is an impasse. After killing her boyfriend, she goes into hiding, and plays the role of a ghostly figure haunting her old neighbourhood. As a victim of the outmoded tradition, Li is also a symptom of that tradition. She is perceived by the people in the neighbourhood as a ghostly figure, but the meaning she symptomatically signifies is incomprehensible and undecipherable to her neighbours. While the feeling of fear and awe caused by superstition is meant to be exorcised and demystified by Mings scientism, rationality and modernity, Ming is more complicated than the archetype of a rational detective. Able to make clear and sound judgments, she is also caring, sensitive and courageous. The film shows how the murder case is objectively analyzed by the rational and scientific detectives; nevertheless, the final revelation cannot be achieved without Mings intuition and humane concern for her neighbours. The film shows that she is constantly inspired by involuntary memories, which give the text a non-linear structure. Very much like a spectral analyst, Ming is an empathetic perceiver who echoes Gordon: I see you are not there. She is haunted not in the sense of being scared but rather in being drawn into a structure of feeling through which she can recognize the meaning of what is missing and ghostly. In an essay on Hong Kongs New Wave, Law Kar observes that the cinema can be understood historically in connection with the global, activist and counter-culture movements (Law, 2001). When anti-establishment movements were emerging around the world in the 1960s and 1970s, Hong Kong filmmakers such as Ann Hui, Allen Fong and Tsui Hark were also developing a strong

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Figure 10.1 The Secret: The film opens with an image of burning an offering to the deceased.

Figure 10.2 The Secret: Young Li Yuen (right, Chiu Ah-chi) bends her knee to Grandma (Lai Cheuk-cheuk) on the latters birthday.

sense of social consciousness. In Huis films in particular, one can observe an impressive ensemble of humane and resilient, if not strong, female characters whose independence of mind challenges the authority of traditional culture. Viewers familiar with Huis films may connect Ming to Hueyin in Song of the Exile /(1990) as well as the ordinary middle-aged housewives in Summer Snow /(1994) and in Huis most recent film The Way We Are /(2008). The haunting homely space in The Secret was shot in the old tenement houses of the Western district in Hong Kong. Many of these houses were built before or during World War II to accommodate the influx of refugees and immigrants from mainland China. The tenement houses are also known as tong lau () in Cantonese, which literally denotes residential blocks of a unique Chinese style. Little attention was paid to health, sanitation and safety regulations. Many of these buildings were clearly older than the rapidly and quickly built public housing estates that were constructed for similar reasons in the early 1950s (see Fong and Chik, 1993). When Hui made the film in the 1970s, these tenement houses were already old enough to be perfect locations for creating a sense of spookiness, but in fact their existence can be considered as a culmination of a series of historic forces resulting from the economic developments of Hong Kong, World War II, as well as the influx of Chinese migrants to Hong Kong (see Urban Renewal Authority, 2009a). These domestic spaces literally belong to what Faure calls the sojourners in Hong Kong; they also become the spatial embodiment of the residues of family and cultural history that no one wants. The use of dark spaces in the film noir style not only clouds our understanding of what truth is, but also evokes threat and dread. Dark space is the harbinger of the unseen, which erodes our sense of security. The photograph of Li Yuen,

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the supposed victim, as a lingering presence in the darkened interior, haunts the audience as much as the people in the neighbourhood (Figure 10.3). Darkness is not simply the total absence of light, but also signifies the lack of distinction of inside and outside. These unhomely home spaces are metonymic of the agoraphobic uncanny open space. Not only do the sight and sound of a bamboopole seller in the open city space indicate the haunting presence of the past; the dingy alleys and street corners where images are half-seen are also extremely spectral in nature (Figures 10.4 and 10.5). As noted earlier, the lack of knowledge of the truth is challenged by the modernity of the new generation, represented by Ming, who finally solves the murder case. Although the tenement houses might have created a sense of Chineseness in the new generation because they are the domestic spaces where they grew up, they have been used in the film for their association with imprisonment, backwardness and madness to designate a clear sense of de-sinicization. In other words, these spaces have been used to represent the gradual process of British colonial hegemony through which a sense of distancing from China as a cultural and political entity is produced.

Figure 10.3 The Secret: Lis portrait is highlighted in the darkened interior of the old tenement house.

Figure 10.4 The Secret: A seller of clothesdrying bamboo poles on the street.

Figure 10.5 The Secret: An alley in the Western district.

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A strong sense of home at Hong Kong mentality was interpellated, especially after the 1967 riots, through the colonial governments systematic programmes of industrialization and modernization (Carroll, 2007, p. 172).

The Sense of Homelessness in the Residential High-Rises

If the feeling of de-sinicization in The Secret finds its spatial habitat in the old tenement houses, the modern residential high-rises in Kwans Rouge provide a powerful meta-historical interpretation of the haunted house in Hong Kong cultural imaginary. These ghostly spaces of the residential high-rises were conjured up when the spectre of 1997 loomed large in the 1980s and 1990s. As a supernatural melodrama of romance and lost history, Rouge follows a high-class courtesan of the 1930s, Fleur (Anita Mui), as she returns from the underworld to look for her love, Twelfth Master Chan Chen-pang (Leslie Cheung). As Abbas remarks, the film weaves Hong Kongs history into the stories of romantic relationships, showing how the supernatural is suspended in favor of the uncanny. The ghost genre is only utilized as a source of inspiration (Abbas, 1997, p. 41). Caught in a doomed relationship, the lovers decide to commit suicide in order to be with each other. However, Fleur discovers that she is alone in the underworld and, after waiting for fifty years, returns to the world of the living to search for her love. She receives help with her quest from a pair of journalists. Yuen (Alex Man) and his feisty, occasionally jealous girlfriend Ah Chor (Emily Chu) begin to reflect upon their own relationship as they come to know more about Fleurs past romance. Fleur discovers that the city has mutated as much as its inhabitants have (Figure 10.6): the pleasure house where

Figure 10.6 Rouge: Fleur (Anita Mui) comes back to Shek Tong Tsui, the notorious red-light district of pre-war Hong Kong, in the hope of meeting Twelfth Master.

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she worked has now become a kindergarten. Her search for her love yields the most ironic result, as she finally discovers that Chen-pang survived the suicide attempt. Produced after the signing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984 which sealed the political fate of Hong Kong, Rouge is often considered a nostalgia film. Critics agree that the film explores how nostalgia as a sentiment of looking backward is temporally anticipatory of a great change in the future and, at the same time, culturally symptomatic of the anxiety bound up with this anticipation (Chan, 2000). Some have discussed how the double temporal structure and non-linear temporality in the film provide ways in which reflections of history are made (see Abbas, 1997, p. 42; Chow, 1998). Nostalgia here is closer to what Svetlana Boym calls reflective nostalgia (Boym, 2001, pp. 4955), a term she uses to denote the critical reflection of the past with the emphasis on rupture and uprootedness, unlike restorative nostalgia, which pays attention to community building and continuity. Although the beautiful past in Fleurs remembrances is in part romanticized, and there is also a clear intention to build up our identification with the ghosts perspective, nostalgia is reflective and critical because ghosts are employed to provoke our understanding of how a disappearing site evokes the melancholic sense of love at last sight/site (Eng, 1993, p. 75). No doubt the present world is portrayed as boring and unimaginative; it is a space where love is rather practical. Yuen and Chor are in love but constantly display a mutual reluctance to commit fully to each other. However, the past is not romanticized and idealized. The older world is subject to principles of class and hierarchy, as well as distrust and selfdeception. Twelfth Masters parents oppose the young couples romance and propose solutions through which marriage is negotiated in monetary terms. Fleurs passion for her lover is genuine and strong, but she demonstrates a lack of trust and self-deceptive possessiveness when she puts sleeping pills in the opium to ensure Twelfth Masters death. One critic even observes that her decision to return to the world of the living confirms her earlier sense of distrust for her lover. When Twelfth Masters survival as an ageing wreck at the end of the film proves to be a form of punishment for not keeping faith, it is an ironic moment of revelation not only for the revenant but also for the living (Abbas, 1997, p. 44). While this ironic ending naturally suggests that weakness and wrong judgment are inevitable even in great love, the total disappearance of her lovers romantic image is also a form of punishment for her which leads to her final illumination. In this case, nostalgia is not depicted as a yearning for a bygone era but is closer to a sense of melancholic loss that laments the fleeting present that will come to pass. The ghost, like other spectral tropes in the film such as the tram and traditional Chinese opera, embodies a strong

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notion of spatiotemporal nonsynchronism in which different aspects of social life of different temporalities coexist in a discontinuous present (Lim, 2001, p. 288). Reflective nostalgia in Rouge works in this manner to show us critically the romance of the present through the tale of the past. Fleur and Twelfth Masters emotional relationship is less a mirror of reflection than a ghostly image of epiphany for the modern lovers. In such a changing space, the old and the new seem to merge with each other to eradicate differences. There has been much discussion about the complex portrayal of history in the film. Abbas, for example, sees the ghost as a figure carving out a space of otherness in the present, as if to bring the two realms together in a historical montage (Abbas, 1997, p. 41). Bliss Lim, with a different vocabulary, expounds on the palimpsestic nature of history by referring to the way Fleur sees a glimpse of the vanished Tai Ping Theatre in the reflective glass outside a modern shopping mall. In the language of photographic technology, I would add that the old and new are more like images of double exposure. What has yet to be explored in regard to these ghostly urban spaces is the socioeconomic origin of this aesthetic dimension. This question naturally brings us to the relation between the spectator as a textual construct and the actual viewers when the film was released. In the film, the activities of the contingent and fleeting present take place in the mundane, haunted spaces of Hong Kong modern high-rises both the commercial and residential blocks. These everyday locations of work and love for middle-class people are also ghostly habitations frequented by the beautiful courtesan from the underworld (Figures 10.7 and 10.8).
Figure 10.7 Rouge: Fleur appears in Yuens (Alex Mans) newspaper office.

Figure 10.8 Rouge: Fleur stays in Yuens home.

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We can see that these architectural spaces in the film belong to a modern-day Hong Kong middle-class couple who are naturally involved in contemporary forms of the service industry such as journalism and the media. While these residential high-rises are literal homes for many Hong Kong inhabitants, the way in which these spaces can be appropriated textually as unhomely and ghostly can be partly explained with reference to economism. For those viewers who are sensitive to the relation between base and superstructure, the spectral qualities of their lived spaces correspond indirectly to the spectral flows of finance capital in a global city. Architecture, as Fredric Jameson observes, is not only the symbol of capital but also the very concrete site of finance capital (1998). With this neo-Marxist view of the political unconscious, Hong Kongs living space can be imagined in association with a sense of homelessness. Whether in colonial or postcolonial times, the Hong Kong government has always been the sole supplier of land and the ultimate landowner, with the exception of some land in the New Territories. Home ownership is not the equivalent of land ownership. A substantial number of the Hong Kong urban inhabitants thus share a similar feeling to that noted by Karl Marx in the Economic and Philosophical Notebook of 1844: everyone inhabits a dwelling that they cannot regard as home. The rent system makes one feel that: Here I am at home but where instead he finds himself in someone elses house, in the house of a stranger who always watches him and throws him out if he does not pay his rent (cited in Vidler, 1992, p. 5). This is especially true in regard to the owners of private housing who have to mortgage their flats and are subject to high and speculative property prices. It has therefore been taken for granted that young, middle-class Hong Kong couples, who do not qualify for public housing and welfare, have to work diligently all their lives to possess a private home. When the market was overheated during the 1990s, some even spent more than 70 per cent of their incomes on mortgages and home acquisition. And some became owners of negative assets, in the sense that if they had sold their homes they would owe the bank more than the price of the property. As well-known as the commercial high-rises that define Hong Kongs famous Victoria skyline, the real estate market has been an index of Hong Kongs economy for a long time. It has generated huge revenues for land developers, property investors and agencies, until information technology and logistics businesses have recently begun to contest its leadership. Space is scarce in Hong Kong but it can always be exploited for profit. The socioeconomic aspects of the inhabitants life-world are never separable from its political dimension. The lamentation of and reflection on a fleeting present in the film seem to echo Hong Kong peoples desire to maintain their capitalistic way of life in the wake of the transition to a different political state after 1997. While this desire was shared by a great majority, it was only upper and

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upper-middle class people who could afford to emigrate. For those who chose to stay, dealing with a mutating, haunted city was an everyday necessity. At this disjointed time, residing in this city is also a moment of historical reflection. Rouge provides such a moment of profane illumination where the spectator is sutured to assume a viewing position to flirt with and scrutinize history. The film begins with a series of fascinating shots showing Fleur doing her makeup (Figures 10.9 and 10.10). Director Stanley Kwan and his crew have made a significant departure from Lee Bik-wahs (Li Bihua) original novel by shifting the narrative focus from the male narrator Yuen to Fleur. The film begins with an intense process of involving the viewers. It is also through this process that the ghost is presented both as subject and object, seeing herself being seen, as Rey Chow observes with interesting insight. Like the situation of a dreaming subject, she argues, the ghost is both the perceiver and the perceived (1998, p. 137). In light of what I term spectral analysis, historical reflection is generated in an extremely complex manner. Throughout the film, both the modern couples and our understanding of the past tale are mediated through the revenants journey of self-understanding and narrativization. The famous scene in which Twelfth Master and Fleur fall in love at first sight is spellbinding. However, our view is not completely limited by it. The textual process through which identification and dis-identification are made is constantly invoked. Both Yuen and Chor play the role of the I-see-you-are-not-there perceivers with a combination of fascination and criticism, sympathy and scrutiny, as well as restorative and reflective nostalgia. Their mixed attitude suggests that history is nuanced and complex, awaiting the perceivers passionate engagement and cautious interpretation.

Figure 10.9 Rouge: Fleur doing her makeup.

Figure 10.10 Rouge: Fleur doing her makeup.

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The Palimpsests of History in the Old Tenement Houses

While Rouge evokes nostalgia at an earlier stage in the transitional period to 1997, Chans Little Cheung comes to grips with the ethos of postcolonial Hong Kong, which is in close relation to China in a postsocialist era. As the third part of Chans 1997 Trilogy / , the film represents a new chapter after Made in Hong Kong /(1997) and The Longest Summer / (1998), in which themes of death and amnesia predominate. The film shows the production of new subjectivities and the waning significance of traditional culture by parallelling the mundane everyday life of Little Cheung (Yiu Yuet-ming) with the death of the well-known opera actor Sun Ma Si Cheng (Brother Cheung). In this story of growing up, Hong Kongs cultural space is complicated and defined by an array of characters and their shared and yet different sense of homelessness. This is a space witnessing the disappearance of the older generation, the old buildings and the old neighbourhoods. In light of the recent debates and developments after the Star Ferry Pier and Queens Pier saga, the word disappearance may be replaced by terms such as revitalization or reincarnation to echo our spectral vocabulary. As the voiceover by Fan (Mak Wai-fan) tells us, the people living in the old Hong Kong buildings have a lot of stories (Figure 10.11). Unlike the old buildings in The Secret that signify the backward, unwanted cultural tradition, the dwelling spaces in Little Cheung are occupied by at least four groups of people: the older generation of Hong Kong Chinese who were once refugees from China, their descendants, the migrant workers and the so-called new immigrants. In a later film, Durian Durian / (2000), the sex workers from mainland China emerge as a fifth category of occupants of such spaces. In these cases, the old tenement houses in our metahistory of space return less as the haunting repressed than as sites of subjectivities, where palimpsests of history are crafted. Their differential histories are nonchronological, being shaped and brought together by various types of visible and invisible cultural flows people, capital, ideas, images, sex, desire and media. Despite their different backgrounds, the characters are somehow uprooted and alienated from their immediate environment. The fact that the film features how Little Cheung develops intimate relationships with border-crossers such as the illegal immigrant Fan and Filipina maid Armi suggests subtle changes in their emotional world in the midst of such a floating landscape. These vibrant crosscultural flows between the two places have been escalating since postsocialism gathered momentum after 1989 in mainland China. The return of sovereignty over Hong Kong to China, including the establishment of the CEPA (Closer Economic Partnership Agreement), undoubtedly provided a crucial impetus for the shaping of this landscape. However, one doubts very much whether

On Spectral Mutations 183

Figure 10.11 Little Cheung: Little Cheung (Yiu Yuet-ming) recalls Grandmas stories in the old tenement house.

the impact of postsocialism will always bring about a borderless world in which strangers encounter one another and transcend their differences, like the film imaginary in Little Cheung where characters of non-kin relations develop friendships and intimacy. As with the other living spaces discussed above, the old tenements are frequented by surreal and ghostly intruders. The difference in film style lies in Chans mixed use of documentary realism and surrealism. When the surreal intrudes at kairotic times, what Michel de Certeau calls the mythical texts of the city are being written (1998, pp. 13343). In the first instance, Grandma narrates to Cheung the story of his elder brother Hangs birth in their old Chinese apartment. As a missing figure who was expelled by his parents because of his recalcitrant behaviour, Hang is only half seen, and emerges as an image rather than as a full-blown character. He exists in Grandmas storytelling as miraculous and fantastical because his birth trails a blood path in the old tenement house (Figure 10.12). However a miraculous birth that is only legendary does not always yield a fruitful life. The second surreal moment arrives after Little Cheungs Grandma has passed away. Towards the end of the film, Grandma is also half seen and is vanishing in her old abode (Figure 10.13). Speaking serenely, she expresses her wish to be gone from this complicated world. Hang signifies the disaffected youth whose destiny is to embark on a journey of death trips, very much like Chans characters Moon and Ga Suen in Made in Hong Kong and The Longest Summer respectively. Grandma represents the older generation who, like the old traditions and neighbourhoods, are gradually erased from peoples memory. The surreal always intrudes at a disjointed time or, more precisely in these cases, we can say that the ghostly always returns with a story to tell. It is

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Figure 10.12 Little Cheung: A stream of blood appears on the floor when Grandma recounts the birth of Little Cheungs elder brother.

Figure 10.13 Little Cheung: Grandma (Chiu Sun-yau) gradually vanishes.

storytelling as a form of meta-history that allows their deadly journeys of no return to return as the repressed in the space of the film narrative. The stories that the above characters write through their spatial experience in the old tenement houses are metonymic of other spatial narratives. These surreal scenes remind the audience of an earlier collage of documentary and realistic images of the old neighbourhoods in Mong Kok, Yau Ma Tei and Sham Shui Po: the old grocery store is still intact but foreshadowing its own disappearance in a post-industrial city where the new post-fordist mode of flexible accumulation is practised widely (in ParknShop and 7-Eleven, and so on) (Figure 10.14); the coffin shop associated with death does not suggest its

On Spectral Mutations 185

own extinction but serves as a broader metaphor for what persist as cultural residues in the space of a fast-moving city (Figure 10.15); the ruinous faade of an old tenement building readily suggests its imminent collapse (Figure 10.16). Among these exterior spaces, the Filipina migrant workers gathering in the reclaimed, transitory land of the Central district suggests the significance of interstitial spaces in a city of drastic transition (Figure 10.17). As Henri Lefebvre argues, being a subject involves accepting a role and a function, which implies a location, a place, a society, a position that we can call space (1991, pp. 182 83). Through his films, Chan claims the subject speaking position to articulate his visions of Hong Kong to create a moment of dis-alienation that Lefebvre suggests. Situating his subjects in the quotidian space of the city offers them an opportunity to recognize for themselves their right to a city that has forgotten their existence (1991, p. 35). Unlike the haunted spaces in The Secret, the old tenement houses are mundane, ordinary, unattractive and familiar spaces without an acute feeling of dread and fear. They do not emphasize the intellectual, critical spirit of the former where scientism and rationality seek to expel the backward elements of the Chinese cultural tradition. They are the quotidian spaces being subject to constant erasure by forces of urbanization and modernization. Chans subsequent films return constantly to similar spaces of erasure. In Durian Durian (2000), the prostitute Xiao Yan (Qin Hailu) from Northeast China frequents the streets of Mong Kok (Figure 10.18); Tai Hom village slums portrayed in Hollywood, Hong Kong /(2001) are literally ghostly spaces (Figure 10.19); and the derelict low-cost housing estates in Dumplings /(2004) have become sites for secret trafficking of desire (Figure 10.20). These disappearing spaces constitute what I would call the spectral landscape of the ghostly city which, in my view, is more haunting than haunted. To link Little Cheung to Hong Kongs urban development and global connection is a productive discourse. Since the 1997 handover, there has been a growing need in Hong Kong society to use history and preservation to create a sense of belonging. Officially, the Hong Kong SAR government has been inculcating such a discourse within the larger framework of Chinese nationalism and Hong Kongs global dream.5 In the Hong Kong Museum of History, the exhibit entitled The Hong Kong Story confirms the linear success story of the city, showing its miraculous transformation from a fishing village to a worldclass metropolis. The display ends with the handover and with the citys re-entry into Chinese political reality, suggesting a need to negotiate with the discourse of Chinese nationalism in Hong Kong. At the same time, the Urban Renewal Authority (URA) has been working actively to create quality and vibrant urban

186 Esther M. K. Cheung

Figure 10.14 Little Cheung: An old grocery.

Figure 10.15 Little Cheung: A coffin shop.

Figure 10.16 Little Cheung: The exterior of Little Cheungs house in Mong Kok.

Figure 10.17 Little Cheung: A Filipina migrant workers gathering in the Central district.

On Spectral Mutations 187

Figure 10.18 Durian Durian: Xiao Yan (Qin Hailu) in Portland Street, Mong Kok.

Figure 10.19 Hollywood, Hong Kong: A ghostly image of Tai Hom Village.

Figure 10.20 Dumplings: Mrs Li (Miriam Yeung) goes to the old Shek Kip Mei estate for the special dumplings.

188 Esther M. K. Cheung

living in Hong Kong a better home in a world-class city and to preserve by maintaining and restoring buildings of historical and architectural value, and to sustain local characteristics (see Urban Renewal Authority, 2009b). Among the many revitalization projects involving old tenement houses, the most famous are the Blue Houses in Wan Chai (see Hong Kong Housing Society, 2009). As cultural heritage industries, such government-initiated activities are often challenged by the two networks that set the conditions for an urban aesthetic. De Certeau calls them gestures and narratives (1998, pp. 13343). The NGOs critiques of the governments urban redevelopment projects often aim to assert the gestural importance of the urban landscape.6 They refuse to comply with the governments attempt to fetishize and museumize neighbourhoods; instead they believe that revitalization of old houses would be meaningless without the inhabitants and their neighbourhood relations and lived experience. The true archives of the city should refer to the past that is selected and reused according to present custom (p. 141), as well as that enlivened by the ordinary inhabitants. On a different note, a film such as Little Cheung belongs to what de Certeau calls narratives tracing out memories that no longer have a place childhoods, genealogical traditions, timeless events (p. 142). When dealing with the latter, the spectral approach developed in this chapter is not only pertinent but also revitalizing.

Towards the Shaping of a Spectral Vision of a Hong Kong Style

The cinematic spectral city finds its echoes in Hong Kong literature of the same period. Dung Kai-cheungs intriguing short story Yong Cheng Jie xing shuai shi (The Rise and Fall of Wing Shing Street) is a shining example. Since a discussion of this text would require another essay, I refer to an interesting excerpt from the story to close this discussion of the spectral city. The story takes place in one of Hong Kongs old, derelict tenement houses in Hong Kong. It begins with You Xin, a returnee from Canada in the mid-1990s, meditating upon the relations among personal, familial, social and national histories. In his haunted apartment in Wing Lok Street in the Western district of Hong Kong, he seeks illumination from the mundane space of everyday life. At the beginning of the story, he is portrayed as a hybrid trope of Chinese and Western literary traditions through which we can observe that a spectral vision of a unique Hong Kong style is in the making. In a first-person narrative voice, he laments nostalgically the passing of time:
In solitude, the empty nocturnal wind envelops the street. There is not a single soul, not even a falling leaf. In this fast-paced city, it is just another ordinary street. This is

On Spectral Mutations 189

Wing Lok Street; it isnt my long dreamed-of Wing Shing Street. I am not dreaming. I always wish I could enter Wing Shing Street one day, traversing upon its traces of prosperity. In my reverie, I imagine myself becoming a poet, ascending the tall tower and lamenting the passing of time. (Has the song been sung? Oh yes, it starts like this, The cool faithful wind keeps its promise in a boundless moonlit night.) Wing Lok Street has now become a mundane, quotidian street but it looks quite erotic even after nightfall when its make-up is washed away. (Dung, 1997, pp. 299300, my translation)

After this initial meditation on the melancholic search of the ghostly Wing Shing Street, which literally means The Street of Everlasting Prosperity, You Xin narrates his erotic relationship with a ghostly companion in his haunted apartment. Dungs surrealism, like the spectral landscape in Hong Kong cinema, is presented as if it were self-evident and taken for granted. The familiar archetypical reference to the haunted scholar in Liaozhai zhiyi (Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio), written by Pu Songling (16401715), merges later with the image of the poet-writer ascending the tall tower. This well-known image of the poet climbing a tall building comes from Yan Shus poetry:
Last night the west wind shrivelled the green-clad trees, Alone I climb the high tower To gaze my fill along the road to the horizon. (cited in Wang, 1977, p. 50)

In the Chinese literary tradition, the acquisition of a panoramic, grand vision is what Wang Guoweis Renjian cihua (Poetic Remarks in the Human World) refers to as the first state of enlightened vision in intellectual pursuit. Dungs narrative brings forth echoes of the Chinese visions when he alludes directly to Yan Shus poetry. Interestingly this literary trope takes a surprising twist when attention is shifted to the profane space of a vanished Hong Kong street. Wing Shing Street, with its feminized image, is associated with the ghostly woman in his apartment. As in a dream, the flirtation with the ghostly woman is not unlike what one does with history. According to the narrators research, and known to any modern-day Hong Kong inhabitant, the street has completely disappeared from the map of Hong Kong. Between waking and dreaming, the city, like a ghostly woman, acquires a gendered vision to render a typical melancholic sentiment that Western readers find in the lyric poetry by Charles Baudelaire. While the nostalgic bird in Baudelaires The Swan may be dissimilar to the ghostly companion in Dungs narrative, the melancholic sentiment is comparable. The Chinese poet-scholars spectral vision is then expanded by the humane, compassionate concern for the exiles, the uprooted and the homeless echoing with the ineradicable heaviness of memories in Baudelaires poem:

190 Esther M. K. Cheung

Paris changes, but nothing of my melancholy Gives way. Foundations, scaffoldings, tackle and blocks, And the old suburbs drift off into allegory, While my frailest memories take on the weight of rocks. (Baudelaire, 1989, pp. 10911)

The lines of the nanyin song (Southern tune) Ke Tu Qiu Hen (translated literally as Melancholy on an Autumn Trip), which are embedded in the above translation as well as throughout the entire story as palimpsestic intertexts, sound out the theme song of this spectral, exilic symphony: The cool faithful wind keeps its promise in a boundless moonlit night. This is a spellbinding song that has drawn many souls together, including Twelfth Master and Fleur in Rouge, who fall in love with each other at first sight. In this disenchanted postmodern world, the re-enchantment of a spectral vision elicits a Benjaminian profane illumination that allows us to see connections and analogies between inconceivable and disconnected events and moments. Perhaps we can join Benjamin by saying that the reader, the thinker, the loiter, the flneur, the dreamer, and ourselves in solitude will form an exciting array of illuminati in the quotidian space of the city. Although the traditional Chinese literati do not share the profane Benjaminian flneurs critique of commodity culture, their vision of decipherment on the tall tower captures a breathtaking panorama of an endless landscape. After all, isnt spectral analysis an intellectual practice of an engaging, politicized kind? Will this spectral vision include Wangs second state of intellectual pursuit, which is characterized by deep thought?
My clothes grow daily more loose, yet care I not. For you am I thus wasting away in sorrow and pain. (Wang, 1977, p. 50)7

What is more, how can we make sense of the third state which emphasizes the arrival of a moment of epiphany?
I sought her in the crowd a hundred, a thousand times. Suddenly with a turn of the head [I saw her], That one there where the lamplight was fading. (Wang, 1977, p. 50)8

With such a hybrid trope of illuminati in film and literature, can we formulate a spectral vision of a Hong Kong style?

On Spectral Mutations 191

Epilogue
The spectral city enables haunting as an epistemology to help us demystify the hidden reality. The return of the repressed might not always frighten us, as Freud suggests. After all, being canny means being shrewd and being able to know; spectral analysis confronts the prefix un in the spatial uncanny; it is a kind of cultural criticism which relies on the assumption that the ghostly is an antidote to mystification. The spectral city in this chapter is an aesthetic category that cannot be contained only in the ghost story, as I argue elsewhere (Cheung, 2004, p. 368). It corresponds to a dislocated affect produced by the transforming perception of the mutating urban environment, which has an intimate relationship with its own material, economic dimension. In brief, it is a meeting place of textuality and materiality. It is not confined by a particular genre but can be identified by a finite ensemble of formalistic elements. These include a mise-en-scne of contradictions of light/dark, absence/presence, past/present, victim/hero, identification/ distancing, danger/security, as well as the return of the familiar as the unfamiliar. Between waking and dreaming, such contradictions are translated into non-linear spectral time, montage of differential spaces, and images of double exposure in an urban dreamscape. The spectral city, which is constituted by the incessant flows of people, money, images, media and technology, is in my view clearly an overdetermined cinematic trope that transmogrifies in the history of Hong Kong. It is a short and concise one that is inseparable from the citys complex experiences of colonialism and postcolonialism as well as interactions with globalism and postsocialism. Yet, so much has happened in a compressed space of a few decades that perhaps a concise meta-history is not enough.

11
Global Dreams and Nightmares: The Underside of Hong Kong as a Global City in Fruit Chans Hollywood, Hong Kong
Pheng Cheah*

The tenth anniversary of Hong Kongs handover to China took place amid great media attention. Of particular note are the full-page official newspaper declarations, in Hong Kong and abroad, that celebrate the event by attributing Hong Kongs success to the fact that it has achieved the status of the premier world city of Asia (Asias World City) and to its economic position as the prime gateway to China. Indeed, the Hong Kong government published a book of commemorative glossy photographs of the city with a dust jacket in the auspicious red of a Chinese New Year money packet or, alternatively, the Communist red of Maos Little Red Book, as part of its effort to promote Hong Kong as a global brand (see Brand Hong Kong website). The theme of Hong Kong as Asias World City is elaborated in the following script:
Gaze into the heart of a great city. Look closer and youll see what really makes a city great its people. People with ideas. People with vision. People who dream outrageous dreams, and make them come true. People who embrace the new, yet who respect tradition. Inspired by culture, by art. Creative. Contemporary.

My thanks to Chris Berry, Rey Chow and Linda Williams for their helpful comments on this essay.

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Who excel on the worlds stage. Here, people have built a vibrant society, where education is prized. and educators stimulate young minds. A society where expression is free, where imagination is limitless, where choice is endless. Here, at the hub of Asia, people have built communications and transport networks that are the envy of the world. They nurture a solid and transparent financial framework, rule of law, accountable government. They compete hard on a level playing field. Here, at the gateway to China, people are born traders. who exult in enterprise and relish the art of the deal. Here, they strive for success, encourage success, applaud success. A progressive, stable and free society. A city of quality. A city of opportunity. Hong Kong: Asias world city.

But what does it mean to be a global city? Does a global city have a specific cultural form, and if so, what is it? Strange as it may seem, the global city has become a cultural form. It is, of course, a description, a phenomenon that is the subject of analytical study in the social sciences. But through the instrumental imperatives and calculative logic of governments, the concept or idea of the global city has become an ideal that has circulated throughout the globe, becoming in the process a prescriptive norm to strive for a dream or an aspiration. Accordingly, the archetypal global cities of New York, London and Tokyo have served as ideal images (Bilde), types or models for the economic and cultural development of other cities in the attempts of various countries to climb the hierarchy of the international division of labour. There is therefore an element of plasticity, self-reflection and self-making in the process of becoming a global city. One might even say, to use an old-fashioned German word I am especially fond of, that there is an irreducible dimension of Bildung. In a 1998 news report from the Hong Kong Trade Development Council (TDC), Edward

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Leung, the Councils chief economist, described this process of Bildung in the following way: Hong Kong manufacturers and Hong Kong in general must begin to see itself as a world city that serves as a services hub for its extended manufacturing network into the Chinese mainland and other parts of the world. As such, the decline in the number of manufacturing workers in the city hub is not necessarily a sign of trouble. Indeed, it may be a sign of economic strength Hong Kong Trade Development Council, 1998). What does it mean for a city to see itself as global? This governmental imperative to go global is interesting for two reasons. First, it suggests that a certain global vision that maps Hong Kongs position in the global capitalist system, a vision that the government seeks to inculcate in the people of Hong Kong, is crucial to enable them to see what is really happening in the big picture, notwithstanding the more immediate experience of the loss of manufacturing jobs. One function of the imperative is consolatory: see, Hong Kong is really getting economically stronger, whatever the manufacturing workers who have lost their jobs and their families may be feeling. But the imperative is also an injunction and a challenge to the Hong Kong people to assent, to say yes to globality so that the city can ascend within the global capitalist hierarchy. The handover is merely the political marker of this assent to/ascension within globality. Second, what is at stake here is the power of the image, the power of the virtual, which works at four levels. First of all, the internalization of a virtual image projected by government policy opens up a horizon of possibility and capability for Hong Kong the virtual in the sense of dynamis or potentia. Second, the form of production that typifies a global city is also virtual. For the deindustrialization of production in the global city (the shifting of industrial production to the hinterland and the rise of sophisticated producer services that coordinate production) is precisely a process of dematerialization. These producer services and the information technologies needed to sustain them do not themselves produce any material products, but without their connecting and facilitating function nothing would be produced. These services are therefore virtual products in a double sense: they are immaterial, but they are also the condition of possibility of material production, that which makes it possible for real things to be actualized or brought into existence. Accordingly, the Trade Development Council celebrates the fact that Hong Kong has transcended its traditional historical role as a mere cosmopolitan entrept, a city, both Eastern and Western, that functions as a gateway to China. It has now become a global integrator, a centre for orchestrating production chains.
Hong Kong today acts as much more than a gateway for trade with China. As a trade intermediary, it integrates and coordinates rationalized production chains reaching

196 Pheng Cheah

into the Chinese mainland and other low-cost production sources Hong Kong has moved up the value chain as a trade intermediary and become an integral part of both the trading and the execution process. As we extend our reach, Hong Kongs infrastructure, knowledge and talent make it a uniquely effective and efficient base location from which to orchestrate everything. (Hong Kong Trade Development Council, 1999, emphasis added)

Hong Kongs ambition to displace Tokyo as Asias premier global city generates a third modality of the virtual: the anxiety about competition from other emerging global cities in the region such as Singapore, and more recently Shanghai, which may cause it to regress in the global capitalist hierarchy. This anxiety is structural to the very idea of global cities. Cities are global only in relation to others. Although the top-tier global cities of New York, London and Tokyo form a non-competitive league, other cities compete with each other to join the second tier, or to leap into the first tier. In this respect, what makes a city global is partly determined by how many leading international finance, accounting, law and advertising firms have affiliates there. Such firms repeatedly produce new studies that rank global cities in their endless search for new opportunities in global markets. The position and promise of a given city within the rankings can determine whether such firms will relocate elsewhere, thereby dealing a blow to that citys global dreams.1 This anticipated and feared possibility of being left behind is a virtual force that acts as an incentive and stimulus for a city to work harder to attract global flows of finance, talent and knowledge. As such, this structural anxiety informs and affects the lives and subjectivities of a citys inhabitants, either unconsciously or consciously, especially given the real facts of job insecurity and unemployment in the wake of deindustrialization and their consequences for the intensification of economic and social polarization. Fourth, the power of the virtual is also seen in the cultural form specific to a middle-tier global city. In general, the culture or ethos of its institutions is characterized by flexibility and pluralism, values that make its infrastructure more accommodating and attractive to global flows. In a speech delivered in Chicago to promote Hong Kong as a site for transnational business opportunities in June 1998 that is, in the aftermath of the financial crisis TDC Chairman Victor Fung described Hong Kong as a dynamic cosmopolitan city with a pluralistic community, characterized by pragmatism and tolerance (Fung, 1998). This cultural form has various components or moments. First, the rise of production services is premised on a form of sociality or culture of informal or non-contractual trust or confidence that guarantees that commitments and obligations will be fulfilled. In the case of Hong Kong, it is suggested that the development of this culture of trust is enabled, and indeed enhanced, by

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existing relations of guanxi between Hong Kong and the Mainland (see Tao and Wong, 2002, p. 2346; Meyer, 2002, pp. 24951; and Crawford, 2001, pp. 4749). Second, there is an active need to foster a vibrant cosmopolitan culture and built environment as the symbolic marker of global city status to attract foreign talent.2 Third, there is also an active attempt to develop a higher and more sophisticated culture of consumption that is desirable to high-level expatriate professionals. These components point to the inherently plastic character of the global citys cultural form, something that has not been discussed in social-scientific studies of global cities, despite the repeated use of metaphors of transformation through ingestion to characterize the effects of global inflows of capital.3 In Hong Kong, we see this plasticity not only in the active endeavour to physically transform social and public space for instance, the controversial attempt to develop West Kowloon as a cultural district with distinctive buildings designed by world-renowned architects to enable Hong Kong to become a cultural hub in Asia but also in the importance accorded to education in producing the human capital needed to sustain knowledge-based services, in fostering innovative research and development, and finally, as a form of crisismanagement in retraining citizens whose skills have been made redundant by structural economic changes.4 The importance of culture and, more generally, the power of the virtual image in the making of global cities indicate that global cities have an aesthetic dimension. They seek to appeal to the senses and to desire for example, to foster luxury consumption, a cosmopolitan lifestyle or a vibrant artistic scene in order to attract talent and capital flows. Consequently, a global city is inherently plastic because it is always in the process of making and remaking itself, or being made and remade, in response to global flows. Prima facie, this plasticity is in the service of capitalist interests and ends. Hegemonic forces circulate triumphal virtual images that constitute the sociopolitical imaginary of a given global city. But, at the same time, this plasticity also makes the global city structurally unstable insofar as it is inherently susceptible to virtual forces. The hegemonic imaginary that is part of the making of a global city can be contested, either by being deformed or by the presentation of counter-images. This is especially true in the case of post-handover and post-financial crisis Hong Kong, where the rapid de-industrialization of production and the intensification of low-skilled migrant flows from the Mainland have led to the intensification of economic inequality and social polarization. For the local poor and the socially stigmatized new immigrants who are structurally excluded from sustainable employment and social welfare, the dream of globality is lived as a nightmare.5

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Fruit Chan is an independent Hong Kong filmmaker who was born in Guangdong, China, in 1959 and moved to Hong Kong at the age of ten. He first gained international critical acclaim with his second film, Made in Hong Kong / (1997), the first part of his handover trilogy, which was shot with leftover film stock, an extremely small crew and a cast of amateur actors. Chan has a predilection for unusual and edgy topics. After the completion of the handover trilogy, he made two films in a still unfinished trilogy on Mainland sexworkers in Hong Kong, a film on the use of public toilets in various cities around the world (Public Toilet / , 2003) and another on the cannibalistic consumption of human fetuses (Dumplings / , 2004). Several of his films are significant for present purposes because they venture into the dark shadows of the global city. They map out the disjunctive coexistence of Hong Kongs global dreams and nightmares by offering images of Hong Kong that are disturbingly different from its official imaginary. Fruit Chans films should therefore be seen as part of a broader ongoing endeavour of engaged Hong Kong critics, scholars and activists organic intellectuals in the Gramscian sense who critically question and contest through writing, protest and organizational political activity the Hong Kong governments official discourse and images of post-handover Hong Kong, pictures that are largely projected for the benefit of the global media and transnational corporate investors.6 Hollywood, Hong Kong / (2002), the film that is the focus of this essay, positions Hong Kong within the circuit of global capitalism and unflinchingly portrays the inhuman consequences of global connectivity. What makes it exemplary in a manner that goes beyond the specific case of Hong Kong, I suggest, is that it captures the aesthetic form of the global city. Fruit Chans films are centrally concerned with the related themes of desire, money and consumption. The opening voiceover by the title character of Little Cheung /(1999) foregrounds moneys animating power. The uncannily savvy child says: I was already very wise when I was nine I have known from an early age that in everyones heart, money is a dream, an ideal fantasy, and also a future. This is why everyone who lives on our street strives so hard (my translation). The power of money is also the governing principle of the global city, whose very connectivity exists to facilitate capital flows. But whereas Little Cheung and the first half of Durian Durian / (2000), the first installment of Chans unfinished sex-worker trilogy, are set in the very heart of the global city and give us a sense of the frenetic pace of life in its seedier sections, Hollywood, Hong Kong, the second part of the sex-worker trilogy, does not portray globality directly. Its setting is not the more cosmopolitan and central parts of the city, but Tai Hom Village, a squatter area in Diamond Hill, whose rusty zinc structures and slow alleys are a throwback to 1960s Hong

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Kong poverty. The village is inhabited by the most socially stigmatized groups in Hong Kong society: the uneducated and unskilled local underclass, new immigrants and their offspring.7 This setting is an appropriate subject for the gritty quasi-documentary realism of Chans previous films, the Hong Kong handover trilogy and Durian Durian, the first installment of the sex-worker trilogy.8 But the films opening sequence immediately takes us into a more whimsical world. It focuses closely on the different aspects of the process of roasting pigs, the livelihood of the Chu family, and cleverly weaves the opening credits into this process by having them appear as stamps on the skin of an uncooked pig. The musical score accompanying this sequence recalls the music of cartoons and screen and television versions of fairytales for children. Yet, even here, there are undertones of something more sinister. The various images and sounds of the process of making a roast pig chopping, the torch that is used to burn off hair from the pig are all sounds of killing. They hint at the quotidian violence and murder that are structural to human consumption. The quasi-documentary mode of Chans earlier films only surfaces briefly towards the end of the film, when we see a character return to the village to take nostalgic snapshots of her former home before it is demolished, as well as other inhabitants moving out. The film creates a picture of Tai Hom Village that is whimsical and even magical rather than realistic precisely because the village will soon leave the order of reality. It is about to be destroyed because it has been targeted by the government for integrated development as part of Hong Kongs plan to become a global city (see Lee, 1999). Indeed, by the time the film was released in 2002, Tai Hom Village no longer existed. Its life, with its slow, anachronistic rhythm, had finally been overwhelmed and stifled by the frenetic pace of global capitalism. Henceforth, it could only be portrayed through the romanticizing lenses of memory and nostalgia. In contradistinction, the perspective that predominates in the film is that of the villages inhabitants, their sense of inferiority and their frustrated consciousness of their own immobility. Unlike the films viewer, their gaze is directed outwards, at the larger world that lies beyond their squalid surroundings. We see the global city from its margins, through the eyes of the Chu family and Wong Chi-keung, a young pimp. Their poor employment prospects render them incapable of upward mobility and bar them from access to globality. The villages narrow, dark alleys and the window grills on its shabby housing and chicken-wire fencing suggest that they are trapped and caged in. Yet, at the same time, their lives are indelibly impacted upon by the very globality that excludes them: their lived environment is about to be destroyed. Mid-way through the film, Chi-keung receives an official letter notifying him that his house is an

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illegal structure that is unfit for human habitation. The film ends with the Chu family driving away in their truck. Indeed, the lives of the main characters are quite literally pressed upon by the luxury high-rise condominiums and Plaza Hollywood, the modern shopping mall across the highway. These condominiums are where many middle-class associate professionals who service the global city reside. Plaza Hollywood, which incorporates the Diamond Hill subway station, is connected to Tai Hom Village by a pedestrian overpass. It is literally the border zone that links the shanty area to the global city, and therefore functions as a synecdoche for Hong Kong as a border zone that connects Mainlanders to the rest of the world. The viewer is repeatedly made to feel the imposing presence of these buildings in the skyline because the towers are an important object towards which the gaze of the films main characters is directed. The characters are often depicted in shots where they seem Lilliputian against the background of the towers, almost lost in the vortex of the towers centripetal pull (see Figures 11.1 and 11.2).

Figure 11.1

Figure 11.2

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The films title, , which literally translates as There is a Hollywood in Hong Kong or Hong Kong has a Hollywood, evokes Plaza Hollywoods symbolic place within global capitalisms great chain of being. The Plaza is merely a simulacrum or sign. It points in Fukuyama style to the United States as apex, telos and final destination the country where the real Hollywood is, the capital of the global culture industry, where dreams and fantasies are produced for the rest of the world. Visual allusions to the United States pervade the film, most notably in the images of white stars on a blue and red background printed on the fabric of the clothing, panties and backpack of Tung-tung, a Shanghainese prostitute, as well as the fabric of Chi-keungs wifebeater. The films plot is simple. Tung-tung or Hung-hung (she has various names), a prostitute from Shanghai who lives in a condominium tower in the Hollywood development, comes into the village and seduces three of the main male characters Mr Chu, his elder son, and Chi-keung. She then extorts money from them by pretending to be a minor, and leaves a trail of violence and death in her wake before migrating to the United States as a student. In the beginning, the films mood and tone are whimsical and comical. But as the film progresses, it becomes darkly satirical, bloody, gruesome and grotesque. The motor animating the plot is the existential anxiety of those who live on the margins of a second-tier global city. This anxiety stems from the sense of inferiority caused by the social stigmatization of their territorial location and their desire to transcend this limitation either by finding consolation in a world of sexual fantasy or by moving beyond the trap of Tai Hom Village into what they imagine to be larger Hong Kong society. Throughout the film, Chi-keung, Tung-tung and the Chu family are shown pointing and looking upward, as though to the heavens, with reverse shots of the objects of their gaze. For example, a long shot looking up from inside Tai Hom Village towards Hollywood Plaza taken from Chi-keungs position at the window of his shack suggests the unbridgeable chasm of socio-economic class that separates the global city from those who live on its margins (see Figures 11.3 and 11.4). The image of the five fingers of Chi-keungs right hand (see Figure 11.3) mimics and recalls an earlier gesture by Tung-tung in a softly shot wouldbe romantic night scene with twinkling stars and street lights after they first have sexual relations (see Figures 11.5 and 11.6). But by the middle of the film, Chi-keung will have his right hand violently chopped off because of her cruel machinations, a clear indication not only of physical castration but the sharp truncation of the hopes and dreams he has for his future life and the beginning of a living nightmare.

202 Pheng Cheah

Figure 11.3

Figure 11.4

Figure 11.5

Figure 11.6

Global Dreams and Nightmares 203

Globality as symbolized by Plaza Hollywood bears heavily on the minds of those who live in Tai Hom Village as an ambivalent object of fantasy and anxiety. The first time Chi-keung has sex with Tung-tung, he suffers from performance anxiety. Afterwards, when he asks her where she lives, she points upwards to the towers and says, Hollywood. The Hollywood behind you. Is it beautiful? To compensate for his sense of inferiority because he cannot afford to live there, he dismissively replies, Beautiful, my ass. Tung-tung, however, immediately puts him down and lets him know that she is aware of his inferiority complex: If you havent lived there before, she says, dont be so cocky and condescending. When she learns that he was born in the village, she immediately tells him: You are in a markedly worse/more lowly position than I am. You have lived in an impoverished place from the moment of your birth. With Hollywood always pressing down on you, dont you feel uncomfortable/ill at ease (, ng shu fook)? The symbolism of Plaza Hollywood works on two levels: socioeconomic and libidinal. As the promise of entry into mainstream society, it is a burdensome norm toward which to strive. At the same time, the glittering consumer lifestyle that goes on inside the mall is also an object of desire, especially when contrasted with the squalid interiors of the village shacks, where filthy walls are plastered with film posters and pictures of sexy pinups. In a scene before he meets Tungtung, Chi-keung states that he wants to go to Hollywood. This desire becomes transferred to the person of Tung-tung, who insinuates herself into the fantasies and dreams of the male characters. As a libidinal object, she is the bringer of comfort, pleasure, healing and escape. On her webpage, where she is known as Hung-hung, she describes herself as a Shanghainese angel or a Shanghainese nurse, a female figure of solace and healing. The objective correlative for the rapture she arouses is a swing. In a sequence that blends realistic shots with fantasy and dream, we see her on a swing that transports her beyond the zinc rooftops of the slums, giving her a better view of the Plaza and its residential towers. She squeals in playful girlish laughter as the swing is pushed by the younger Chu son. But as Mr Chu and his elder son gaze at her, they are filled with a different kind of pleasure and joy. From then onwards, they have a recurring erotic fantasy of her on the swing as a femme fatale in a vibrant red dress, the colour of happiness and sexual passion that contrasts with the dull, dirty red of the rusty rooftops. Indeed, the swing itself becomes a means of pleasure. Swinging on it brings each member of the Chu family happiness and laughter. But the pleasure that Tung-tung brings belies her cold calculating motives. Unlike Xiao-yan/Siu-yin, the main character in Durian Durian, Tung-tung is no ordinary Mainland prostitute. She is an unscrupulous well-educated girl who

204 Pheng Cheah

has no qualms about hurting others in her deft manipulation of men to achieve her dream of being a student in the United States. Her intellectual superiority to the villages inhabitants is clear from the start. The cocky Chi-keung is no match for her. From the beginning, she is an ambivalent libidinal object. She makes him uneasy by tapping into his insecurities. He thinks he can make use of her because she is merely a nave Mainland prostitute, but ironically, he ends up being brutally victimized by her. The purveyor of comfort and solace turns out to be a cruel, castrating woman. Indeed, she is more upwardly mobile and more of a global citizen than Chi-keung, who has never left Hong Kong. In a clear allusion to the growing competition between Hong Kong and Shanghai, she exacerbates his anxieties and frustrations by telling him that Shanghai is now a more glamorous city than Hong Kong. Here, China is a cause of anxiety and a source of competition. But personified in Tung-tung, the competition is not that of cheap factory labour, but of brainpower. Tung-tung is emphatically distinguished from the Hong Kong stereotype of the new immigrant who is a burden on Hong Kongs social welfare system. She is the entrepreneur par excellence, skilled at using the internet to snare her prey. She also has a keen eye for advantageous professional connections. As Fong-fong, she has a special rapport with Peter Chau, a lawyer she services so that he will help her by sending out extortion letters to the men she has slept with.9 If Peter Chau, a professional, is a representative citizen of the global city of Hong Kong, Tung-tung can be said to occupy a position analogous to that of an associate professional, who has the potential of becoming a professional herself after receiving an American education. She does not share the fate of the inhabitants of Tai Hom Village: trapped in a vicious cycle of poverty and low social status because of the impossibility of accruing enough human, social and cultural capital to move upwards.10 The film, however, repeatedly reminds us that global dreams are also lived as nightmares by the marginalized. Tung-tungs ascension to globality causes gruesome violence, epitomized by the amputation of Chi-keungs right hand and the surgical attachment of the left hand of another Chi-keung who was mistakenly dismembered, as well as Mr Chus accidental killing of his mainland Chinese employee, whose corpse is ground into pig food. What is interesting about the film is that it portrays Tung-tung in a light ambivalent enough to make it difficult for the viewer to come to any easy moral judgments. For Tung-tung is also a victim of the desire for globality. Like the hapless Chi-keung, she pines for a Hollywood the real one in Los Angeles. In the romantic scene after they first have sex, she tells Chi-keung that Hollywood is her Five Finger Mountain and that she lives inside the mountain. The residential towers are repeatedly imaged as five fingers in shots where both Tung-tung and Chi-keung hold up their hands

Global Dreams and Nightmares 205

and gaze at the towers through the gaps of their spread fingers. They represent ideals, aspirations and hopes towards which to strive. But in Journey to the West, Five Finger Mountain refers to a mountain transformed from Buddhas palm, under which the Monkey King becomes imprisoned. Buddha had promised the Monkey King that he could go free, despite the havoc he had caused in his battle with the heavenly army, if he could get out of the palm of his hand. But when the cocky monkey, skilled in the arts of levitation and flight, jumps from one finger to the next, Buddhas palm extends infinitely and finally becomes a mountain that falls on the Monkey King, imprisoning him by burying his entire body. The episode therefore depicts an arrogant individual who thinks he has escaped from a trap or attained freedom only to be frustrated by a supreme divine power. The metaphor of the Five Finger Mountain certainly refers to Tung-tungs power over her prey the power of erotic fantasy. Chi-keung is repeatedly figured as the Monkey King. In the trap Tung-tung sets for Chi-keung, Peter Chau hires some triad youths to amputate his arm to intimidate him into paying Tung-tung. At the same time, the metaphor also suggests that Tung-tung herself is caught in the global web of desires and dreams. The film at times also portrays her in a sympathetic light. She shares a genuine friendship with Ah Sai, Mr Chus younger son, and expresses an innocent child-like happiness when she plays with him. In a moment of genuine rapport, she confides to him that she wishes to go to America because it is the home of Hollywood, Disneyland and many universities. Later, in a poignant scene where she converses on the telephone conversation with Peter Chau while she sits by a large window in her Plaza Hollywood apartment, she asks him to take her to America. Here, Tung-tungs figure is framed by her view of a seemingly endless landscape of skyscrapers beyond Plaza Hollywood. She peers out pensively at what is both a dream and also an abyss that threatens to overwhelm and engulf her. When Peter Chau brushes her off and hangs up on her, we see her cry for the first time (see Figures 11.7 and 11.8). This ambivalence towards Tung-tung reflects the deep ambivalence about globality that pervades the film. On the one hand, Tung-tungs predatory relations with men exemplify the relations of human alienation and exploitation that make up the global capitalist system. But on the other hand, the film also highlights the fact that predatory relations are structural to human existence by offering cogent darkly satirical images of the inhuman nature of human life. These images express and develop three related motifs: cannibalism, the blurring of the line between human and animal, and the interplay between technologies of virtuality and human desire. The metaphor of cannibalism is foreshadowed by sounds of the chopping cleaver in the opening credits, and is clearly thematized in an early scene where

206 Pheng Cheah

Figure 11.7

Figure 11.8

Mr Chu feeds his pig a roasted pig trotter. Later, the body parts of the mainland Chinese employee who is mistakenly killed are ground into food for the pig. Second, the quasi-cannibalistic nature of human existence is made more explicit by the repeated rendering indeterminate of the line between humanity and animality. The family surname, Chu, is a homophone for pig, and the film is full of grotesque images of the bare torsos of the Chu family that suggest their porcine animality. The cleaver used to cut roast pork is the same instrument the older Chu son uses to lop off Chi-keungs reattached limb at the end of the film. The films whimsical tone, which is largely suggested by its music and scenes of characters engaged in playful activity, serves to make this indistinction between humanity and animality appear quotidian, even to the point of normalizing it. Finally, it is suggested that technologies of the virtual image stimulate desires

Global Dreams and Nightmares 207

that make individuals vulnerable to predatory relations. Notwithstanding the marginality of Tai Hom Village in relation to the global city, all of the films main characters are connected to the global culture industry through the internet. Chikeung uses it to find more sex workers to manage, the older Chu son uses it to surf for pornography and Tung-tung uses it to attract victims. The mere fact of connectivity through the internet makes people susceptible to the dreams and desires aroused by virtual images. The first two motifs suggest that, at a biological level, there is something inhuman or bestial about human beings, and the third points to the power of inhuman techne in the formation of human desire. The three motifs become intertwined in what is in my view the films most grotesque image: the mainland Chinese doctors insane experiment to implant human embryos in rabbits, before transferring them to the womb of Leong-leong, the mother pig, to be carried to full term. The new immigrant doctor is a mad scientist figure who responds to Mr Chus advertisement for a stud for Leong-leong. In the film, she also performs a variety of medical procedures, both traditional and Western, including the reattachment of Chi-keungs limb. She tells Mr Chu to have faith in modern science and technology, and assures him that there has been success with such experiments overseas. In the United States, she reports, a baby boy was successfully delivered from a cow. She adds that Western medicine has always experimented with animals to find cures for human beings, thereby implying that the human/animal distinction is indeterminate. In this satire of biotechnology as a marker of globality, biological and technological inhumanity become united in the crafting of the biological human being by inhuman techne. The nightmare of children born from a pig frightens Mr Chu when the doctor tells him that the pig could be the mother of the future Mrs Chu. But in fact such monstrosities, as metaphors for human alienation in global capitalism, are merely the logical extreme of the constitutive play of the inhuman in human existence. Indeed, it is even questionable whether the monstrosity we commonly associate with global capitalism can be understood in terms of the Marxist concept of alienation from an original humanity. Living in a global city undoubtedly induces anxiety, but that anxiety is not forced on us from the outside. It is caused by the human desire for more rather than less connectivity. The inhabitants of Tai Hom Village do not wish to delink or to disconnect from global capitalism rather, theirs is the anxiety of not being connected enough or of only being connected in a way that excludes them. The film therefore enacts a certain mirroring effect. The viewer watches, in a voyeuristic manner, these people in Tai Hom Village who dream of a life that lies beyond the village in the global city in which the putative film viewer is presumably located. But in watching them (gazing at us), we also see ourselves. Their dreams and fears reflect back to us our own

208 Pheng Cheah

Figure 11.9

ambivalent fascination with globalization, especially its promise of modes of spatio-temporal connectivity and inclusion of the greatest possible scope. The film ends with two lessons for survival in globality. First, Tungtung migrates to Los Angeles and is pictured at the close of the film wearing a backpack, suggesting that she has become an Americanized college student (see Figure 11.9). The focus is no longer on Hong Kong or China. For her, Hong Kong is only a transit point for America, the final destination within the global consumer market. One suspects that if she returns to Hong Kong it will be as a highly prized professional. In one sense, Tung-tung has escaped the Five Finger Mountain. She has not received any retribution for the violence she has unleashed in Tai Hom Village but has instead attained her dream of going to America. But in another sense she remains trapped within the Five Finger Mountain of global capitalism, here symbolized by the Hollywood hills in the background. A second lesson is offered by what happens to the two Chi-keungs. The main character, who now has two left hands, is appalled by his own monstrosity, and begs the older Chu son to chop off the reattached limb, saying that it will not cause him any pain because the limb does not belong to him (see Figure 11.10). In contradistinction, the films final scene shows us the second Chi-keung adapting to his second right hand and using it to drive. Reading the metaphorical logic, we can say that globality only produces monsters, but that this is the only way to survive. Indeed, this monstrosity or inhumanity was always already in us. It is the power of the virtual image or originary prosthesis that makes us human. Hollywood, Hong Kong, I suggest, is exemplary of the aesthetic form of the global city. In his provocative idea of cognitive mapping, later elaborated in his famous book on postmodernism, Fredric Jameson argued that in late capitalism,

Global Dreams and Nightmares 209

Figure 11.10

the function of art is to offer through allegorical forms a cognitive mapping of the totality of the global capitalist system that would otherwise be inaccessible to the experience of individual subjects. This discontinuity between individual experience and socioeconomic formations comes into being in the age of monopoly or finance capital, and reaches its apex in the age of transnational capitalism. From this point onwards there is, Jameson argues,
a growing contradiction between lived experience and structure, or between a phenomenological description of the life of an individual and a more properly structural model of the conditions of existence of that experience We can say that, while in older societies and perhaps even in the early stages of market capital, the immediate and limited experience of individuals is still able to encompass and coincide with the true economic and social form that governs that experience, in the next moment these two levels drift even further apart Those structural coordinates [that determine daily experience] are no longer accessible to immediate lived experience and are often not even conceptualizable for most people. There comes into being, then, a situation in which we can say that if individual experience is authentic, then it cannot be true; and that if a scientific or cognitive model of the same content is true, then it escapes individual experience. (Jameson, 1988, p. 349)

These fundamental realities are unrepresentable. But they function as an absent cause that can express itself in the aesthetic domain through figures that distort it. By deciphering these distorting figures so as to make conceptually available the ultimate realities and experiences designated by these figures, cognitive mapping allows us to imagine the totality that is global capital, and enables the formation of a radical class-consciousness that endeavours to transcend this totality (Jameson, 1988, p. 351). The vocation of art today (and the method of deciphering it), Jameson elaborates elsewhere, is to enable us to grasp our

210 Pheng Cheah

positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion (Jameson, 1991, p. 54). Fruit Chans film, however, indicates that the vocational function of aesthetic form has been radically transformed in the form of contemporary global capitalism called the global city. In the global city, the geopolitical totality is quite visible and accessible to quotidian experience because everyday existence is consciously and patently all about connectivity. The film offers in its seemingly realist form a highly stylized analysis of the existential anxiety of the underclass marginalized by the global city. But the concrete everyday reality of this underclass is thoroughly suffused by virtual connections. Sexual experiences are formed through the virtual images of the internet, and interpersonal relations and connections emerge from, are consolidated by and in turn facilitate global flows of money. In other words, the virtual image plays a constitutive role in the global citys mode of production. The only form of realism adequate to representing this kind of reality is one that amplifies its fantastic and grotesque nature. But if the connectivity of the global whole is already completely present in daily lifes traffic with the virtual, it becomes redundant for aesthetic form to figure this connectivity for consciousness. Moreover, whether or not we want to admit it, it is also pointless to dream of transcending the networks of global capitalism. The chains of consumption that characterize these networks are not imposed on individual subjects as ideologies that prolong their alienation. The recurring images that render indeterminate the border between the human and the inhuman, the organic or natural and the artificial, physis and techne images of cannibalism, prosthetic enhancement and biotechnological monstrosity point to the constitutive nature of the consumption of living beings and artificial objects, virtual images and, in a figurative sense, the instrumentalist consumption of other people, in the human life process and social existence. Given the inhuman way of the human world, we can no longer subscribe to the comforting idea that there is a pure or original state of human existence that is subsequently alienated by globalization and that it is the task of politically engaged art to point the way towards overcoming alienation. Indeed, the very existence of independent film directors, even those who make films that question the pernicious effects of globality, is part of the dynamic of the global city, whose processes of self-reproduction and selfdevelopment require the presence of a creative class as the sign of its global status. Fruit Chans deliberate decision to mainstream his work so as to reach a larger audience both in Hong Kong and the Mainland by choosing Zhou Xun, a Mainland star with commercial appeal, to play the leading female role, attests to his own desire to be more deeply imbricated in globality, even though this may

Global Dreams and Nightmares 211

be motivated by the hope that his films can be more effective in representing the plight of the marginalized people that globality excludes. One might even argue that insofar as the global city is partly sustained by the production of images that refer to its own globality, even aesthetic images that are about globalizations negative consequences are literally images of globalization (double genitive), images that are part of the process of the making of the global city itself because they are generated by the process and feed back into it. All of this is to say that the aesthetic form of the global city exhibits a strange kind of self-referentiality. Instead of pointing to something that lies beyond globality, the films images such as the towers of Hollywood Plaza or the seductive figure of the femme fatale on a swing represent the characters self-conscious desires for globality, desires that have been crafted by the global circulation of virtual images through the internet and mass media. The films images thus point back to themselves qua the material conditions of their own genesis in the fabulous production of globality. Contra Jameson, the figures appropriate to this self-referential aesthetic form are not allegory but symbol and synecdoche. There is a natural connection between the films virtual images and the virtual character of globality and each component part of globality stands in for the whole. At the level of aesthetic form, globality creates an endless series of microcosm-effects wherein every image reveals the global whole because its structure has thoroughly permeated everything and incorporated them as its parts. Globality is, in other words, a plane of immanence without exteriority. But by the same token, globality is always unstable and cannot be enclosed as a totality. Its constitution through virtual images opens it up from within and makes it vulnerable to the alterity of the image as such. In the case of Hollywood, Hong Kong, the aesthetic image captures and preserves marginal forms of sociality (Tai Hom Village) that have been globalized out of existence and the entire process of their vanishing. Of course, such aesthetic images can always be appropriated by hegemonic calculations. For example, independent films such as Fruit Chans have a symbolic value in calculations of global city status for Hong Kong. The new vocation of aesthetic form, I suggest, is to dissect and anatomize global connectivity at each and every level of its manifestation in daily life and to show what it enables and disenables, without nostalgia, despair or utopian hope. It is to show the protean nature of the global network that constitutes us, the substrate in which we are all inescapably mired, and the different modes of survival within its transformations.

12
Hong Kong Watcher: Tammy Cheung and the Hong Kong Documentary
Chris Berry

Tammy Cheung (Cheung Hung, ) is a prominent member of Hong Kongs independent filmmaking community, and possibly the citys only full-time independent documentarian at the time of writing. As such, she is an example of just how much and how little Hong Kongs culture has changed over the last decade or so. This case study analyzes Cheungs career and films within this larger framework, with a focus on Hong Kongs screen culture, and particularly its independent documentary culture. Born in Shanghai in 1958, Cheung came to Hong Kong with her family at the age of three. After studying sociology at Shue Yan College in Hong Kong, she studied film at Concordia University in Montreal. In 1986, she helped to found and run the Montreal International Chinese Film Festival. But:
Like everyone else, I wanted to be a director. I tried to look into the situation in Montreal. I realized there wasnt much I could do, so I decided to come back to Hong Kong. At the time the Hong Kong industry was doing well. That was in 1994. I got

This paper grows out of a long friendship with Tammy Cheung. We were first in touch when she was running the Chinese International Film Festival in Montreal in the 1980s. More recently, I have interviewed her several times. This particular piece is part of a larger project that I am conducting with Laikwan Pang from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. The work was partially supported by a grant from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (Project no. CUHK4552/06H). I am very grateful for the financial support, for the cooperation and help of all the people interviewed for this paper, and to our postdoctoral fellow Yeung Yang for her work in gathering data for the project in general and this paper in particular.

214 Chris Berry

some work with the commercial film industry. But I realized I really didnt like the system you know, the traditional way of doing things I was working mainly as a script girl, or continuity So I left.1

While in Montreal, Cheung had been taken with uncontrolled documentary and the Direct Cinema associated with Frederick Wiseman in particular (Documenting Hong Kong, 2007). She has made a series of video films over the last decade that manifest not only a persistent interest in uncontrolled documentary, but also a tendency to stimulate public debate. Her first work, a thirty-minute documentary called Invisible Women / , was made in 1999 and focused on the lives of three Indian women living in Hong Kong. It was financed with HK$10,300 from the Home Affairs Bureau (Kwok, 1999). Since then, the Arts Development Council has been the primary source of small but crucial amounts of funding.2 In 2002, Cheung founded her company Reality Films and the non-profit organization Visible Record () along with her partner and cinematographer, Augustine Lam (). In that year she made two films. Rice Distribution /is a thirty-five-minute video, which won the grand prize in the Hong Kong Independent Short Film and Video Awards in 2002. It documents an annual media event in Hong Kong the distribution of rice to the poor by Taoist organizations during the Festival of the Hungry Ghost ( ) in the middle of the seventh lunar month, which usually falls in late August or early September according to the solar calendar. Secondary School / , also made in 2002, is a feature-length film modeled on Wisemans classic, High School. It documents life in Hong Kongs most prestigious band one schools schools of the sort Cheung herself attended. The Hong Kong education system is the subject of much anxiety among parents. The film therefore was in circulation for some time and attracted considerable attention. In 2003, Cheung made Moving / , which looks at the relocation of old people as part of the effort to improve public housing. In 2004, her film July /, about the 2003 demonstrations against proposed national security legislation, showed her commitment to documenting political as well as social events.3 It is the combination of the observational mode and her focus on Hong Kong that leads me to say that Cheung is a Hong Kong watcher. The only departure from this pattern during this period was an MTV montage of archival footage called War /, which was commissioned by Richard Lis IPTV venture, Now TV, to accompany Children Dont Understand Fear () by local

Hong Kong Watcher: Tammy Cheung and the Hong Kong Documentary 215

singer Eason Chan (). Calling Cheung a Hong Kong watcher resonates with the phrase China watcher, in reference to the journalists and spies who used to gather in Hong Kong to observe and comment on China during the Maoist era, when it was difficult to gain entry to that country. This has nothing to do with Cheungs career, of course. But I do want to use those resonances to emphasize the border-crossing, insider/outsider quality of her career and her work. In the middle of this decade, Cheungs filmmaking branched out both stylistically and geographically. Her 2005 Hong Kong film Speaking Up / is not a pure observational documentary. Instead, it is a montage of sixty interviewees many of them well-known local figures talking about Hong Kong life. Although still uncontrolled, its use of interview to provoke responses makes it closer to the French cinma vrit style than the Direct Cinema mode. Cheung also ventured to Yunnan on the Mainland in 2006 to make a so-far unreleased follow-up to Secondary School, tentatively entitled Village Middle School / . During a visit to Jiangsu province on the Mainland, she interviewed primary-school students for a twenty-minute montage film entitled Speaking Up 2 /. Her latest film at the time of writing, Election / (2008), returns to her favoured fly-on-the-wall approach with coverage of the 2004 Hong Kong Legislative Council elections. Cheungs career so far highlights a number of issues about the development of Hong Kongs culture over the last decade. First, how does Cheungs emergence as Hong Kongs most prominent independent documentarian relate to the development of local screen culture? Is Hong Kongs screen culture in decline, as many claim, or is it just changing its style? Second, why does Hong Kong have so few independent documentary filmmakers? A comparison with the more extensive independent documentary scenes in Beijing and on Taiwan highlights some of the factors that encourage and inhibit documentary culture in Hong Kong. Third, what does Cheungs documentary practice tell us about Hong Kong independent culture today? Cheungs adoption of Direct Cinema is driven less by commerce or aesthetics than by the stimulation of public debate and culture. Finally, what does it mean that the idea of public culture and the adoption of Direct Cinema, together with Cheungs own biography, is a transborder practice? To understand this, I will turn to debates on cosmopolitanism and cultural translation to suggest that perhaps this is part of a larger pattern that rhetorically seeks to position Hong Kong as more advanced and therefore contributing to Chinas modernization by leading the way forward.

216 Chris Berry

The Development of Independent Film Culture in Hong Kong

If there is a general image of what has been happening to Hong Kong cinema over the last ten or fifteen years, it is a picture of decline. Ironically, as more academic attention is being paid to Hong Kong cinema around the world, both feature film output and local box-office revenue have declined. In 1997, when Stephen Teo published his now-classic Hong Kong Cinema: The Extra Dimensions, he noted that market share in Hong Kongs own territory had dropped by as much as 40 per cent over the previous four years and that, for the first time in many decades, Hollywood had gained a secure foothold (Teo, 1997, p. vii). Three years later, when David Bordwell published Planet Hong Kong in 2000, he seems to have been eager to begin on an upbeat note. But the celebratory opening paragraph slips quickly into the past tense: Hong Kong cinema is one of the success stories of film history. For about twenty years, this city-state of around six million people had one of the most robust cinema industries in the world. In number of films released, it regularly surpassed nearly all Western countries. In export it was second only to the United States. Bordwell goes on to name 1997 as the year in which Hollywood took over 50 per cent of Hong Kongs box office (Bordwell, 2000, p. 1). Chu Yiu-wais essay in this volume dashes any remaining hopes that the downturn might have been a temporary blip related to handover anxieties. However, these accounts depend on a narrow understanding of cinema, defined solely as feature filmmaking. If we apply a broader definition, including documentary, short films, animation and so on, it may be more accurate to consider the cinema of Hong Kong as undergoing a transformation. The development of Tammy Cheungs career as an independent documentarian is a part of this glass half-full/half-empty situation. What are the characteristics of this transformation, and how should we assess it? First, Hong Kongs cinema culture and production have diversified. For most of the so-called heyday of Hong Kong cinema before the recent downturn, mainstream commercial filmmaking was dominant. Independence is a relative term that varies from place to place (Berry, 2006). But in Hong Kong, as in most other capitalist societies, it denotes cinema that operates autonomously from big-budget corporate productions destined for movie theatre releases. Even when the Hong Kong New Wave filmmakers the kind of filmmakers one might associate with independent cinema elsewhere came along at the start of the 1980s, most worked within the mainstream system, as do most of Hong Kongs art film and festival auteurs, such as Wong Kar-wai (). This is not to say that independent filmmaking, including some documentary, did not exist in Hong Kong before the 1990s. In a 1986 publication commemorating

Hong Kong Watcher: Tammy Cheung and the Hong Kong Documentary 217

ten years of the Hong Kong International Film Festival, Roger Garcia noted, Largely helped by student-oriented film club movements, culminating in the Phoenix Cine Club and its independent short film festival (presently defunct), independent activity has always been present in Hong Kong since the 1970s (Garcia, 1986, p. 15).4 Indeed, the Hong Kong International Film Festival showcased independent short films made on Super 8, 16 mm and later video throughout these early years, as well as the occasional feature by figures such as Kwan Park-huen () and Jim Shum (). However, the scale of production in the past cannot be compared with the situation since the late 1990s. Jimmy Choi (), former head of the Film and Video Department at the Hong Kong Arts Centre, is currently researching for the Hong Kong Film Archive the history of what he points out was once called experimental rather than independent cinema. He argues that, although many middle-class Hong Kong film buffs could afford 8 mm and later Super-8 cameras, the relative complexity of the technology and the cost of editing severely limited the number of filmmakers. The home DV camera and editing on home computers changed that completely. Combined with the grants from the Arts Development Council, it made the development of a much more extensive independent scene possible.5 The downturn in the commercial industry since the early 1990s has made independent production even more visible. Quantity, institutional support and distribution opportunities have all grown. The range of independent work includes short films, experimental films, low-budget independent feature films made outside the commercial mainstream, animation films and independent documentaries such as those made by Tammy Cheung. Cheung is by no means the only independent doing all their filmmaking outside the mainstream these days. Other figures, such as Evans Chan () and Anson Mak (), also got started in the 1990s. Like Cheung, they often film in non-celluloid formats and with relatively low budgets in what could even be termed an artisanal mode. In addition to the appearance of a greater quantity of independent filmmakers, a variety of institutions have sprung up to support the independent sector. The Hong Kong Independent Short Film and Video Awards (IFVA) was initiated by the Hong Kong Arts Centre in 1995, when Jimmy Choi was still there. There are currently four categories for local filmmakers, and since 2002 an additional category has been instituted for Asian independents. The number of both applications and submissions in all categories has been rising, indicating that the sector itself is also growing. For example, the IFVA received 57 submissions in its opening year, 1995. In 2008, excluding the Asian New Force category, there were 287 submissions.6 As well as giving Tammy Cheung

218 Chris Berry

an award for Rice Distribution, the IFVA can also claim to have discovered Jia Zhangke (). His fifty-nine-minute first film, Xiao Shan Going Home / won in 1997. Not only did the prize money make it possible for him to shoot his breakthrough debut feature, Xiao Wu /, he also met his future producer, Chow Keung () and his cinematographer Yu Lik-wai (aka Nelson Yu, ) through the event.7 Less evident to the public but equally crucial to the independent scene is the local distributor, Ying E Chi (), which announces itself as Hong Kong Independent Films Distribution on the opening page of its website.8 The organization was established in 1997, the year of the Asian economic crisis, and states that its mission is: to promote and distribute Hong Kong independent films through theatrical and non-theatrical exhibition, film festival screenings, television and internet broadcast, home video sales and other means in Hong Kong and throughout the world.9 It realizes this mission with all manner of exhibition and distribution practices, ranging from school screenings to theatrical releases. Since 2004, Ying E Chi has been running the Hong Kong Asian Film Festival together with the Broadway Cinematheque, itself an important part of the independent scene. Ying E Chi has been co-sponsoring the event partly in order to create a platform for the promotion of its own releases.10 Its catalogue serves as an index not only of Ying E Chis growing importance but also of the growth and range of Hong Kongs independent film culture in general. In its first three years, Ying E Chi handled two or three new films each year. Annual figures have varied since then, but have tended to be higher, and seventy-six titles are currently listed.11 Most are also released by Ying E Chi on DVD and VCD, and they include many of Tammy Cheungs documentaries. Since 2003, Ying E Chi has been joined by another independent distributor, InD Blue ( ), which focuses more on short films. The emergence of this independent sector suggests that the general picture of Hong Kong cinemas recent situation as one of decline and even collapse has been too simplistic. The appearance of figures such as Tammy Cheung is a sign of diversification and transformation. However, the fact that the independent sector has risen as the mainstream has declined opens up some complicated questions. Does it suggest that the mainstream and independent sectors should be seen in opposition? Have the independents benefited from the decline of the mainstream? To answer these questions definitively would require entry into a realm of policy and economic research beyond the scope of this chapter. However, a few observations can be made. First, it is certainly the case that Cheungs own career trajectory operates on a rhetoric of opposition between the mainstream and the independent sector, as indicated by her own account of her early

Hong Kong Watcher: Tammy Cheung and the Hong Kong Documentary 219

career. No doubt, many other long-term independents would express a similar commitment to the control over what they make that independence gives them. Other independent filmmakers also construct an opposition between independence and the mainstream in their rhetoric, but on different grounds. Mak Yan-yan () debuted in 2001 with another Ying E Chireleased lowbudget feature, Brother /, before making the lesbian-themed feature Butterflies /. She remembers her decision to go independent as a matter of funding rather than preference: I graduated from the Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts. It was the lowest year for the Hong Kong film industry. We could hardly find a job. One of our friends, Nelson Yu Lik-wai, he got funding from the Arts Development Council to start his first film. Then I got funding from the ADC.12 Although she only received HK$320,000 (approximately US$40,000), it was enough to make Brother, which was filmed in Qinghai near Tibet. From the perspectives of filmmakers, audiences and critics, mainstream and independent filmmaking are different practices with different aesthetic and even political values, and often opposed to each other. However, viewed from a policy and economics angle, the situation may not be so clear. First, it is certainly true that maintaining a commercially successful feature film industry is beneficial to film culture in general, including independent film culture. This is because it helps to maintain a range of trained personnel, from actors to editors, as well as all the ancillary services, from labs to special effects and equipment rental companies, required to support all kinds of film activities. Second, maintaining a diverse range of film and video practices can help to nurture new talent. This is especially important where the apprenticeship practices of the old major studios have long disappeared and each film is treated as an individual production. Michael Curtin has noted the resulting talent deficit problem for all Hong Kong media companies today (Curtin, 2007, p. 281). In this sense, even though filmmakers such as Cheung might see their values as very different from or even opposed to those of the mainstream, the existence of both can be mutually beneficial. Maybe this is why the Arts Development Council began to fund films in the late 1990s. Simon Chung () is one of the founders of Ying E Chi, and is also the director of the gay short Stanley Beloved / (1998) and the feature Innocent / (2005), which was released by Ying E Chi. In an interview, he indicated that the availability of ADC funding has been crucial for both the production of independent films and the maintenance of organizations such as Ying E Chi.13 Debates about this relationship between the independent and commercial sectors underlie government policy designed to support filmmaking in all its

220 Chris Berry

different modes from mainstream to independent. In Hong Kong, as elsewhere, an ongoing topic is the purpose of government support. Is it there to assist local commercial enterprise? To support art that is not commercially viable? Or to support the development of public debate and the creation of an informed public? If all three, what should be the balance? Certainly Tammy Cheung does not see her primary aims as commercial. And although she also emphasizes that she is not an activist filmmaker,14 her practice supports and promotes the development of public culture and debate in Hong Kong.

Independent Documentary in Hong Kong, Beijing and Taipei

If the development of a diverse film and screen culture is judged to be desirable whether from a commercial, aesthetic or public culture angle, then Tammy Cheungs appearance and the continued production of independent documentaries must be welcomed in Hong Kong. However, it is true that Cheung is one of relatively few independent documentarians operating in Hong Kong. This section examines this glass-half-full/glass-half-empty situation by comparing the Hong Kong independent documentary scene with those in Beijing and Taipei, in order to gain a better understanding of the specific conjunctures that shape independent documentary filmmaking in Hong Kong. In addition to Cheung, some of the more experimental filmmakers in or from Hong Kong also sometimes work in a documentary mode. Examples include Evans Chan, who divides his time between Hong Kong and New York, and Anson Mak, mentioned already as examples of other independent filmmakers who began their careers in the 1990s. Sometimes filmmakers who usually work in fiction have made independent documentaries for example, Stanley Kwan (), with Still Love You after All These /(1997) and Yang + Yin: Gender in Chinese Cinema /(1996). At the activist end of the spectrum, since 1989 the collective Videopower () has made a wide range of material that intervenes in various local issues.15 But the very fact that one can name most of the other independent documentary makers in a paragraph indicates that their numbers are small. In contrast, both Beijing and Taipei have developed very extensive independent documentary scenes over the last decade and a half, and especially since the advent of the mini DV camera. Both cities sit at the centre of informal documentary networks that extend to other cities in China and Taiwan, and production runs at a rate high enough to sustain regular festivals and other events. (In Hong Kong, it should be acknowledged that Videopower runs the Social Movement Film Festival regularly. Tammy Cheung organized the first Chinese Documentary Festival in Hong Kong in January 2008, but was unable

Hong Kong Watcher: Tammy Cheung and the Hong Kong Documentary 221

to find suitable local Hong Kong films to show along with those from other Chinese-speaking areas.) It is not possible to detail the Beijing and Taipei scenes here, but mentioning some of their important characteristics may help to explain why these scenes have grown so much more quickly and become so much more established than the scene in Hong Kong. In Beijing, there is a longstanding culture of amateurism, analyzed by Yiman Wang (2005) and Valerie Jaffee (2004), that precedes and extends beyond the amateur aesthetic of the DV documentary culture itself. The maintenance of this amateur culture is directly related to the political system of the Peoples Republic. As is well known, the party-state apparatus has relaxed its control over many areas of society and the economy and has encouraged individual citizens to take the initiative rather than wait to learn their role in this years plan, as was the case with the centralized command economy. Nevertheless, film and video culture is still regarded as part of the realm of propaganda. Because of its potential ideological consequences, this sector remains more monitored than many others. In these circumstances, cultural workers of all kinds have long grown used to the idea that any ideologically sensitive () works are best produced outside the official system, i.e. without submitting them to the censors. The entire independent documentary scene in Beijing operates in this manner. Furthermore, not only is it taken for granted in the Peoples Republic that one cannot really make a living working on independent documentaries, but it is also possible for many people to have a main job and make documentaries on the side. In Hong Kong, it is much less clear if this is possible, partly because of the demands of fulltime employment, and partly because of the cost of living. Most independents like Evans Chan and Anson Mak, and including Tammy Cheung, engage in other activities such as teaching to supplement their incomes. Nevertheless, it appears to be harder to get by financially in this way in Hong Kong and there is no established culture of amateur activity in the same way there is in Beijing. While this may help to explain the difference between Beijing and Hong Kong, it does not explain why there is a much more vibrant documentary scene in Taipei than in Hong Kong. In Taipei, although filmmakers may feel poor and marginalized, greater institutional support and income possibilities account for the comparatively better health of the local documentary scene. The state-funded Public Television Service (PTS, ) has been an important outlet for independent documentary in Taiwan since it was founded in 1998. The series Point of View /has been airing since 1999, and not only produces in-house documentaries but also commissions independents to make documentary films for it. According to Sylvia Feng (), series producer at the time of interview and president of PTS at the

222 Chris Berry

time of writing, the programme currently produces more than a dozen films a year and buys in maybe ten films from Taiwan and abroad. Of those, she estimates that only two or three are bought in from abroad. Furthermore, Feng emphasizes the role of the documentary in stimulating debate: I wanted the title of my programme to be Independent Point of View ( ), stressing the independent point of view. But it was rejected by the president of the station, saying that the word independent was too sensitive. So I said that it had to have the Point of View You have to be neutral in news, but in documentaries you have to clearly express your point of view.16 In most places, airing on television reduces the theatrical box office for a film, and therefore release windows are sequenced to avoid this problem. However, in Taiwan the television broadcast can actually spur an audience to want to see a film in the movie theatre. This is partly helped by the saturated television environment in Taiwan, where eighty-plus channels compete for the audience.17 As a result, relatively few people get to see any one programme. Feng says, We try to be above the PTS average and we have managed to do that, and at my best, I can go up to 0.5 or 0.6 [rating].18 Hong Kong remains far less saturated, and a larger proportion of a smaller audience is likely to have seen a popular documentary on television. This is not the only special circumstance that works to the advantage of independent documentarians in Taiwan at the moment. At the time of writing, Yang Li-chou () headed the Taiwan Documentary Development Association (). He notes the success of what he refers to as Love Taiwan documentary films () in movie theatres not only after television broadcast but even after DVD release. He attributes this to the islands special circumstances and the desires of the local audience. The local feature film industry has collapsed. We lack confidence in ourselves and in our international situation, even in our continued existence. When we see stories true stories about Taiwan, when we see the desperate struggles of the old farmers [in Let It Be /], we are really moved The documentary audience is a new audience. They are young and group-oriented. If they like a film and are moved, they go to see it again.19 Furthermore, although the exhibition sector has been transformed by the arrival of chains and multiplexes such as Golden Village in East Taipei, there are still many independent theatres, especially in Taipei, and these are willing to take a chance with documentary films.20 They are also willing to try different release patterns from the wide releases of the same title in many theatres that are standard practice today. For example, they may keep one title in only one or two theatres, do only one or two screenings a week, and maintain the release for several weeks, to encourage word-of-mouth.21

Hong Kong Watcher: Tammy Cheung and the Hong Kong Documentary 223

In Hong Kong, such circumstances do not exist. A few chains dominate the exhibition sector and the only remaining arthouse theatres of note are the Broadway Cinematheque (part of the Broadway chain) and Hong Kong Arts Centres independent, the Agns b. Cinema. The commercial television channels are unlikely to be interested in independent documentaries. RTHK, the Hong Kong public broadcaster, does not operate its own television channel. Instead, it produces an average of 10.5 hours a week of programming for broadcast on TVB and ATV (RTHK, 2006, p. 14).22 Some of this is commissioned.23 But there is no special programme like Point of View to showcase the material. Therefore, this has not worked to encourage independent documentary production such as Tammy Cheungs, which is intended to be part of the public debate about Hong Kong. This leads to the question of the relationship between Cheungs documentary practice and Hong Kong culture.

Independent Documentary and Independent Culture

One thing is clear about Tammy Cheungs motivations they are not commercial. Making documentary films has barely been a way to survive, let alone make a living. Yet, when asked why she does it, she flatly denies that it is out of any sense of duty as a citizen or concern to contribute to society. Its so much fun, she claims. I get to know about other peoples lives, and I have this license to be nosy.24 Certainly, Cheung is not part of the social movement filmmaking community. She does not make films that are designed to mobilize people behind a particular cause. However, Cheung is not nosy about just anyone. Her focus is very much on contemporary Hong Kong and (more recently) mainland China. Furthermore, she does not focus on named individuals and their personal histories or psychologies. Pushed on this point, she concedes, I personally think social systems affect individuals greatly A person who lives in a different social system lives differently. So, Im more interested in social systems than individuals. In other words, Im more interested in sociology than psychology. And when her growing interest in politics in films such as July and Speaking Up is pointed out, she adds, The way a place is ruled affects everyone deeply. Look at the difference between Taiwan and China Its the most important thing in any society.25 Cheung also often mentions audience response in discussions about her films. The whiteboard in her office has a calendar that is always full of screening dates that she will attend in person. When this is pointed out to her, Cheungs response indicates both her awareness of the financial price paid for this and the higher priority she assigns to it:

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Tammy Cheung: This is very cost ineffective! Chris Berry: But you like that, you find it interesting? Tammy Cheung: Its very interesting and also I learn a lot from them.26

Despite Cheungs own positioning of her filmmaking as something she does for fun, this section investigates how the ideal of public space and public debate manifested in this second response is related to her uncontrolled documentary practice. American Direct Cinema and its French cousin, cinma vrit, are two variations on uncontrolled documentary that originated in the 1960s. A variety of technological innovations combined with an anti-authoritarian ethos to create this new type of cinema in which nothing was rehearsed. For the French cinma vrit filmmakers, lightweight cameras and sound equipment enabled them to act not only spontaneously but also sometimes provocatively. In other words, they became active participants in the films they made. In contrast, the American Direct Cinema filmmakers preferred to pursue a fly-on-the-wall approach that effaced their own presence in the name of capturing reality. Both types of filmmaking eschewed voiceover, added music or other elements that might guide the audience.27 These uncontrolled modes of documentary have been popular among independent filmmakers in mainland China since the 1990s, as well as having been picked up by Tammy Cheung in Hong Kong. Is this pure coincidence? Wu Wenguang, Duan Jinchuan, Jiang Yue and their colleagues on the Mainland discovered Direct Cinema and Frederick Wiseman in particular via their participation in the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival in Japan, during a year when Wiseman and his works were being featured (see Reynaud, 1996). On the other hand, as already noted, Tammy Cheung discovered Wiseman in Montreal during her studies there. If they found Wiseman separately, what was the appeal of his cinema and of uncontrolled documentary? Was there anything connecting the cultural formation of filmmakers in mainland China and an migr Hong Kong filmmaker in Canada that might help to account for this? Here, one can only speculate. Maybe both were facing a kind of cultural change and crisis around the status of the real and perception that might make the appropriation of this kind of cinema into their local circumstances what Lydia Liu calls translingual practice appealing and refreshing (Liu, 1995). The authoritative narrated documentary featuring the voice of god or, in the PRC, the mouthpiece of the Party () was dominant on both Hong Kong and mainland Chinese television until the 1990s. But in both places, for different reasons, faith in dominant discourse was in crisis by the 1990s. In the case of mainland China, the legacy of the Cultural Revolution and the 1989

Hong Kong Watcher: Tammy Cheung and the Hong Kong Documentary 225

Tiananmen Square Massacre, together with the changing economic system, all played a role. For Hongkongers such as Cheung, the 1984 Joint Declaration, in which Beijing and London announced that a decision had been made about Hong Kongs future without any consultation with the locals, was also perceived by many as a betrayal that shook their faith in the local system and the future. In both places, this lack of faith in authority combined with tumultuous change to inspire a desire to document on the part of young filmmakers, who often felt that aspects of that experience were not visible in the mainstream media. However, although there may be some broad similarities underlying the appropriation of uncontrolled documentary modes in mainland China and Hong Kong, it is also necessary to pay attention to local specificity. Lius idea of translingual practice emphasizes the local horizon against which the appropriation of the foreign occurs. So, what might be the differing appeals of Direct Cinema in Beijing and Hong Kong? In addition to its apparent ability to witness what is happening without interfering, the absence of commentary in the form of either narration or music must have been appealing in an environment like that of the Mainland, which remains characterized by a constant underlying worry about the authorities. If anyone in power objects to what they see, the filmmaker can point out that they are only a witness, that they did not construct what has been shot, and that they are not commenting or using it as part of any movement with political implications. Of course, there are limits to how far this argument can go. The presence of a camera will affect what goes on in front of it. And the selection and editing of material by a filmmaker can constitute a form of commentary. However, the Mainland climate of anxiety about the authorities does not prevail in Hong Kong. Hong Kong has only recently acquired even limited democracy, and censorship has certainly been a feature of life in the former colony and now Special Administrative Region.28 However, there is no history of government repression on the same scale as on the Mainland. In these circumstances, we must look elsewhere to understand the appeal of Direct Cinema in Hong Kong. The evidence of Cheungs work suggests that this must be seen more as part of an effort to build a public culture of participation and debate in Hong Kong. This drive to promote participatory public culture can be seen in the themes and form of Cheungs films, as well as in the ways she distributes and exhibits. Nearly all of her films are about social or political issues that are already to a greater or lesser degree established. For example, in Rice Distribution, we clearly see the television news cameras reporting the event, as they do every year. The huge demonstrations of July 2003 against the proposed anti-subversion Article 23 that are documented in July were reported worldwide. Higher education,

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the subject of Secondary School, is always a subject of concern to Hong Kongs ambitious parents and of debate in the press. And her most recent film at the time of writing film, Election, focuses directly on the issue of the Special Administrative Regions mode of democracy. The themes of Cheungs films intervene in public culture. However, the form indicates that intervention is not direct advocacy of a position. Instead, a form that eschews commentary demands that the audience interpret the material for themselves. However, as already noted, editing can still convey a filmmakers position clearly if desired. Cheung is careful to avoid this. Rice Distribution, for example, includes footage of the elderly being rude to each other, pushing and shoving, shouting at the police as the latter try to help them, trying to cheat the rice distributors and so on. It also includes footage of the elderly sitting for hours in the heat, being excluded from the rice distribution despite travelling from far and wide to line up, being shoved around and shouted at by the police, struggling to carry huge bags of rice, and, in some cases, fainting and needing to be taken away in ambulances. Exclusion of the first set of images would push audiences to interpret the event as exploitation of the elderly, whereas exclusion of the second set would portray them as a mob. The openness of the Direct Cinema form and its ability to elicit different interpretations from different audiences are even clearer from the storm of controversy around Secondary School. According to Cheung, when she completed the film she showed it to some of the teachers at the two elite schools documented. They were happy with what they saw, recognizing everyday life in their schools. However, when the film had a short run at the Hong Kong Arts Centre, many audience members perceived not well-behaved and quiet pupils, but bored and passive students. Instead of seeing a traditional curriculum, they saw outdated and useless lessons. Cheung gave her personal perspective outside the film in an interview: For me, its a womens issue. Why do the girls have to learn this [sewing]? Its totally useless! You know what a pressure foot is? I mean, when are you going to use this word? If you work as a factory worker, you dont use English, do you? (Berry, 2004, p. 15). But because she eschews any commentary in the film itself, different audiences responded in different ways to different elements. The principal of one college responded to the storm of criticism by protesting in the press that the film depicts intentionally or otherwise certain episodes to project wrongly the image of the school in a willful and undesirable manner (Ming Pao, 15 April 2003, p. 4). While the school principals defense seemed to acknowledge that what was depicted was a problem, the critic Sek Kei responded to the controversy with surprise, feeling that the education system depicted was fine (Sek Kei, 2003). After the Arts Centre run, the film

Hong Kong Watcher: Tammy Cheung and the Hong Kong Documentary 227

screenings continued at commercial and community venues into early 2004, often with Cheung herself in attendance. In 2004, she concluded, in a comment that indicates her aim to open up public debate, I think the movie has achieved its purpose. It has stimulated thoughts about our education system (Cheng, 2004, p. 3).

Conclusion: The Politics of the Trans

Finally, if one of the functions of independent documentary is to stimulate a culture of independent thinking and public debate, it must also be acknowledged that Cheungs use of Direct Cinema is a transborder project, as are the very ideas of independent documentary and independent cinema. What are the political implications of this appropriation? The evidence suggests that those engaged in these practices, including Cheung, do not see this as a case of colonized mentality or mimicry, but may in fact position it as part of Hong Kongs advanced modernity and patriotic contribution to Chinas own modernization. In one published interview after another, Cheung explains the model for her practice in Direct Cinema and Frederick Wisemans films in particular. In one case, the newspaper takes such a serious interest in this that it publishes a break-out box devoted to introducing Wiseman and Direct Cinema to its readers (Chen, 2003, p. 25). This clearly has a practical function, because it equips readers (and potential viewers) to cope with an unfamiliar form. However, the ready discussion of this lineage indicates no embarrassment about taking something from overseas, and indeed suggests that this is a positive cosmopolitanism. Cheung is frank not only about the foreign origins of her preferred documentary form, but also about the impact of living overseas on her own perspective: I would say the fact that I spent a long time outside Hong Kong helps. I look at the place from a Western point of view as well as from the point of view of someone raised and educated here I try not to take things for granted, and I always ask stupid questions only aliens from outer space would ask (see Documenting Hong Kong, 2007). Now that she is working in the Mainland, she brings a Hong Kong perspective to bear there. To touch upon these cosmopolitan qualities is to enter into the complex politics of the trans. How should such borrowing be understood? Is it mere colonial mimicry yet another example of the colonized mentality of Hongkongers? Or is it evidence of their cosmopolitanism? Even this is not necessarily free from imbrications with imperialism, because cosmopolitanism has been a useful tool for enabling imperialism and more recently global capitalism.29 However, Cheung shows no such concerns about her transborder practices.

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Lydia Lius idea of translingual practice emphasizes not only the local horizon against which appropriated elements are made sense of, but also the active appropriation. Writing about the colonial environment, she emphasizes that this appropriation is not mere mimicry or evidence of a colonized mentality, but is often undertaken with local interests in mind. (Indeed, in many cases it resists imperialism as for example in the appropriation of the idea of national sovereignty.) If we are to transfer this understanding to Hong Kongs situation, perhaps the appropriation of aesthetic practices that promote public debate and autonomous thought independent culture can be seen in this light and appear as part of Hong Kongs modern culture. The idea of Hong Kong as a more modern space than the Mainland is a well-established trope. This is a huge area that requires much more research and analysis than can be undertaken here. But, for example, Yiman Wang has recently discussed the various Chinese remakes of the Lubitsch film The Love Parade (1929), including the 1957 Hong Kong film/ (My Kingdom for a Husband). The latter film features Ali, a musician and now Prince Consort who has spent a long time abroad. On his return, he repeatedly uses his overseas experiences as a positive other that his home country can benefit from. As Wang notes, this trope implies Hong Kongs self-positioning vis--vis mainland China and the West in the Cold War world system (Wang, 2008, p. 16). In the 1950s, this ability to appropriate helped Hong Kong to differentiate itself from mainland China. But perhaps in a post-1997 environment, the appropriation of practices from the West in Hong Kong be they its legal practices or something like Direct Cinema may be positioned as something it can contribute to Chinas modernization. In Tammy Cheungs own case, this possibility may be implicit in the transfer of her practices in Hong Kong to the Mainland. She has already made a film about a Mainland school (Village Middle School) modelled on her very successful Hong Kong-based Secondary School, and an interview film shot in a Mainland primary school (Speaking Up 2) that is modelled on the techniques used in Speaking Up. Can this be understood as a patriotic desire to inspire in the Mainland the same independent thought and public debate that her films have created in Hong Kong? For Cheung and others involved in building Hong Kongs independent culture, is this an aspect of modernization and progress? On the Mainland, who will share their perception, and who will resist it? These questions will help to determine not only the future of independent culture in mainland China itself, but also back in Hong Kong, as Hong Kong and its culture grow ever closer to and more integrated with the Mainland.

13
Global Music/Local Cinema: Two Wong Kar-wai Pop Compilations
Giorgio Biancorosso

Primarily as a result of his own statements in various interviews, much ink has been spilled over Wong Kar-wais literary tastes and cinephilia. The names Murakami, Cortazar, Puig, Garcia Marquez and Liu Yichang on the one hand and Hitchcock, Suzuki, Scorsese, Bertolucci and Antonioni on the other appear with increasing frequency in the literature on his cinema. And yet the extent of the influence of these texts and authors on Wongs cinema remains unclear. This is not only because I am naturally skeptical of directors statements about their own work, but also because tracing influences sheds only partial light on the finished product. The texts and materials that are said to have played a major role are often not so much models dutifully transposed or transformed but rather ways of getting started, little more than a springboard. They are for Wong but another element in a heady mix of influences, ranging from modernist novels to narrative, visual and aural motifs drawn from local films and popular culture. High and low, new and old, and local and global are all thrown onto a blank canvas, one that assumes shape, relief and perspective only during the notoriously crucial and, in Wongs case, often extremely laborious process of editing. Without the benefit of the directors comments, it is in any case hard to detect influences apart from those that are patently obvious. Even in the case of the novel that inspired In the Mood for Love /, Liu Yichangs TteBche, besides some apparent parallels in structure and the intertitle quotations unattributed anyhow! one is hard put to trace a direct transposition of the motifs and characters of the literary source.1 If one was unaware of the derivation beforehand, the relationship of the film to the novel might well go overlooked. Indeed, literary and visual models have a way of insinuating themselves into the

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body of a Wong Kar-wai film so that they blend in to the point of disappearing as independent entities. Non-diegetic music the original music written as a background score for a film partakes of this as it is often modelled on preexisting works and styles, sometimes shamelessly imitating them, and yet also disavows these models in the process. In most cases, recognizing the sources or models of a film score is simply not crucial to its understanding. Pre-existing songs are a different case. By their very nature and short of being radically rearranged, they retain their identity as independent, alreadyconstituted artefacts that betray a distinctive point of origin and a context of production, as well as a known reception history. Does this relate to the fact that songs stand out in the sonic fabric of the perceptual everyday as well in a way that, say, images, do not? Indeed, why do images need framing while songs do not? Is this the reason that they are themselves used as a framing device of sorts in films as elsewhere? And if so, can the use of a song in film be legitimately called a form of quotation or, at least, a conscious intertextual reference? Whatever the answer to these questions, songs offer a prima facie secure, reliable window onto Wong Kar-wais musical knowledge, taste and ability to probe the global music market. Wong uses songs frequently, often as a fundamental component of the narrative machinery of his films; so much so, in fact, that Yeh Yueh-Yu has suggested they may be responsible for the unique charm of his oeuvre (Yeh, 1999, p. 121). A complete study of the pop compilations of Wongs films would, of course, be beyond the scope of this essay. Here I wish to limit myself to examining how the directors use of pre-existing songs has undergone drastic changes under the strictures of a new working environment. I will do this through a close reading of the pop compilations of Fallen Angels / (1995) and Wongs first English-language production, My Blueberry Nights /(2007). Both films, despite their somewhat marginal standing in the Wong Kar-wai canon, are paradigmatic in that they rely heavily on pre-existing songs, and on popular idioms more generally. They provide perhaps the best demonstration yet that, despite endlessly looping mantras on Wong as a visual artist, predictably voiced again on the occasion of the recent release of My Blueberry Nights, songs are of the essence in Wongs cinema. In particular, in both films, songs impart to the sequences in which they appear the quality of musical numbers that is, modular, detachable segments of representation that while propelling the action forward can be contemplated as self-contained entities (like set pieces in opera or musical sequences in a musical). Despite its seemingly episodic, rambling structure, Fallen Angels is a fully integrated musico-dramaturgic entity, one that because of the nature of the

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chief materials it manipulates recognizable local singers and stars, images of Hong Kong as a distinctive urban space, music associated with displaced communities in Hong Kong and Taiwan, globally distributed pop music echoed concerns with the history and the future of Hong Kong as a cultural and political entity. In retrospect, the timing of the films release 1995 makes these resonances seem even more inescapable, its elegiac tone, in no small measure due to the soundtrack, all-too-easily attributed to a desire to depict the last few days of colonial Hong Kong.2 My Blueberry Nights, Wongs first foreign-language film, marks by comparison a much more light-hearted stage in his career its fabulously rich pop compilation notwithstanding. Like most other contemporary productions, the film deflates expectations that cinema be in one way or another a reflection of seismic changes in Hong Kongs cultural and political landscape as a result of the handover in 1997. What it does reflect is, more modestly, the irreversible changes taking place within the Hong Kong film industry and their roots in both the Chinese and the global production and distribution circuits. As technical and stylistic elements associated with Hong Kong cinema are internalized by filmmakers working in China to feed the creation of what appears to be a pan-Chinese cinematic style, so local funds and resources are merging with those from neighbouring regions especially China and are thus becoming more difficult to allocate for a Hong Kong production with distinctly local characteristics.3 Like his Taiwanese festival darling counterpart Hou Hsiao-hsien, however, Wong has a considerable reputation overseas and has now reached the point where he is able to command the money and resources to produce a film without the backing of the local industry.

Fallen Angels
The significance of songs to film construction is an old characteristic of Chinese cinema in general.4 But Wong Kar-wai has given the ingrained habit of integrating songs with a film a distinctly local accent, on account of the range of songs he chooses from and the novel ways in which he uses them. It is worth stressing that it is the range of musical choices, his reliance on singers/ actors and the manner in which the songs themselves are used, rather than their linguistic or stylistic characteristics per se, that define Wongs pop compilations as expressive of a distinctly local sensibility. This sensibility has been nurtured by the simultaneous pressures and influences of television, karaoke and the Cantopop industry. Besides shedding much needed light on the sources of Wongs audiovisual style, then, pop compilations reveal implicit assumptions about the audiences expectations, responsiveness to musical trends and

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perception of the city soundscape, from which the films themselves emerge as a crystallized counterpart. Like the films of his Taiwanese counterparts and a few decades after those made by a number of prominent Japanese, European and American auteurs, Wongs films have partaken of the gradual process of disenfranchisement of movie soundtracks from standardized studio procedures and romantic and neoromantic orchestral styles. As Claudia Gorbman has suggested,
In the auteur cinema, born of the New Wave in Europe and the Film School generation in the US, music was to take an unprecedented role as an element of personal expression. Since the 1970s especially, the tendency has grown for directors to indulge their own musical tastes in scoring a film. The advent of MIDI technology which makes it simple to bring music to the set and the increasing personalisation of recorded music have conspired to encourage the auteur cinema to etch its signature ever more deeply through directorial choices of music. (Gorbman, 2006, p. 17)

Allowing for certain differences intrinsic to the way in which the Hong Kong film industry operates, the soundtracks of Wong Kar-wais films partake in the process sketched by Gorbman. Yet to think of them merely in terms of personal expression would be limiting. The dazzling array of popular music found in Wongs films seems to me incompatible with the idea of a universe shaped by the tastes and preferences of a single, controlling agency (much as this idea fits the films of a director like, for example, Kubrick). In the way they function in the finished films, songs force one to revisit the idea of the filmmaker not so much as author but rather as enabler, mediator a vessel through which a work comes into fruition an idea that fits particularly well not only with the scavengers aesthetics of many of Wongs early productions but also with the richly multi-vocal, polyphonic texture of the soundtracks themselves. Nowhere is this more evident than in Fallen Angels. Though not explicitly titled after a song as Happy Together /or In the Mood for Love were Fallen Angels hinges on songs. Cunningly edited and seemingly after facile, predictable effects, rather like a harmless string of MTV videos, the film turns out upon close scrutiny to feature music in a rigorous and provocative disturbing, even fashion. The songs in particular stand out in the sonic texture for while they help to build a continuous sound space through their consistent acoustical qualities volume, reverb and texture they at the same time fragment this very space because of the diversity of their meanings. This is further heightened by their association with characters and locales that are different in the extreme. The effect of the string of musical numbers featured in Fallen Angels may be described with the by-now-familiar term heteroglossia a layered, polyphonic complex evocative of a wide range of psychological types, personal

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trajectories and cultural and historical spaces impossible to reduce to one master narrative and that cannot be attributed to an all-encompassing personality or singular point of view. The choice of songs and the manner in which they are used set into motion a dual, paradoxical movement toward greater and greater stylistic individuality on the one hand a recognizable Wong Kar-wai style or signature and at the same time opens up a space where the songs take discursive centre stage, usurping agency and in the process dissolving authorial responsibility. The key to the latter is a very special kind of integration: without losing their physical, sonic integrity, the songs become one with the life of the characters they voice and, sometimes, inhabit. Take the first spectacular shootout scene, cut to an arrangement, complete with new text, of Massive Attacks Karmacoma (the arrangement is the work of Frankie Chan and Roel Garcia, who also wrote the original cues of the soundtrack). The choice of the British bands hit as a model to be rearranged is a fine instance of Wong and his collaborators predatory instinct. The title and text of the original song fit like a glove the nature of the pathology of the killer who performs his duty as if in a state of metaphorical coma, rather like a self-induced trance.5 Knowledge of the text also provides a hint about what led Wong and his team to this particular choice, and possibly also suggests a cryptic subtext to the episode.6 The textual link remains a rather cerebral affair, however, unless one happens to be well versed in this specific brand of experimental pop (also referred to as trip hop). For the full range of roles performed by the song to emerge, we must consider its music as a pattern of sounds in time. After all, it is the temporal aspect of music that distinguishes it as a pre-existing material. Irrespective of its derivation from Karmacoma, the success of the sequence lies in the fact that the music makes the characters pathology tangible in a compelling, temporally driven, audiovisual complex. Despite the slow tempo, the music possesses a rhythmic drive that sustains the march forward of the killer, its martial character sounding rather like an incitement to violence. The music drowns out diegetic sound entirely; moreover, the acoustical bubble in which the action unfolds onscreen conveys a skewed perception of the space the killer is crossing. The rhythmic pulse and the length of the song, finally, are a visceral representation of his perception of the time it has taken him to reach the restaurant and kill the mob members playing mahjong7 (see Figures 13.113.4). While in an earlier scene Karmacoma accompanied images of the hit man inside the MTR Kwun Tong station, enhancing the impression of emptiness and the slightly menacing character of the cavernous spaces of the underground station, here it works against, not in concert with, the images. The songs presence erases the locale as an acoustical space with distinct physical properties, as the

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Figures 13.113.4 Leon Lai as the contract killer in Fallen Angels

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killer is prey to extraordinarily strong emotions he is perhaps under the influence of drugs.8 His extreme perception produces a radical transformation, a feverish recreation of the restaurant he has just walked into and is now crossing, oblivious to the lively action unfolding before his eyes, his mind singularly focused on finding the target and carrying out his job.9 But the sequence is more than a subjective reinterpretation of the scene. Combined with the impossibly choreographed movements of the actors, slow motion and temporally and logically inconsistent cutting of the images all of which suggest a cubist understanding of space and a warped sense of time the music becomes a fundamental ingredient within a re-creation in which the hit man is himself the actor and of which he is the director also. Fed by the memories of countless films internalized to the point of confusing cinematic images and images of his own life, the episode is a lush, baroque parody of a John Woo-ish shooting spree, screened to an imaginary score consisting of a song he has made entirely his own. Significantly, ambient sound is of paramount significance in the presentation of the same restaurant in an earlier sequence, when the Michele Reis character pays a visit to the triad members her partner will soon kill (see Figure 13.5). While we see Reis patrolling the scene, rather like an assistant director scouting around for locations, we also hear the sound of the restaurants patrons chatter and, in the background, Chinese opera (not in Cantonese but rather in the Chaozhou dialect). The music, presumably played on a tape recorder, not only completes the setting but also conveys a subtle sense of the unfamiliar, a suggestion that the triad members playing mahjong, who are about to be killed, are a body external to the world of the protagonists.

Figure 13.5 Fallen Angels: Michele Reis aka the killers partner.

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Delusion and the Aesthetics of the Self

This first, spectacular shootout sequence in Fallen Angels is the culmination, the visual and musical climax, of a gradual build up. Aside from the cue over the images of Kwun Tong MTR station mentioned above, another occurrence of Karmacoma over images in slow motion of Michele Reis indicates that the two partners are bound to one another by more than just professional duty. After she has scouted the restaurant in the sequence just described, the song begins to play just as she leaves the restaurant, walking defiantly in the streets of Wan Chai (see Figure 13.6). The combined effect of music and slow motion suggests that we are looking at her and yet also looking at what she imagines she looks like. The two partners share not only a similar background and professional odyssey but a similar aesthetic of the self. We see them refashion their own identities in a mythical realm defined by cool sounds and beautiful images it is only in this realm that their love, too, exists. The film makes this beautifully explicit in a later sequence, set in a beauty parlour owned by Indians, in which the editing collapses the before Reiss preliminary visit, and the after the killings. At the sound of, predictably, Karmacoma, the two partners look for and inevitably miss one another, the mock shot-countershot pairs creating the impression of a ballet of missed encounters (see Figures 13.713.8). Wong is careful to point out that this narcissistic recreation takes place against the background of real pain inflicted on real people, however hence the closeup of the faces of the terrified relatives of the victims with which this sequence ends (echoing the horrific sound of the screaming victims heard at the end of the restaurant sequence).

Figure 13.6 Fallen Angels: (Self-) Portrait.

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Figures 13.713.8 Fallen Angels: Missed encounter.

Later in the film there is an even more flagrant case of self-fashioning performed at the sound of music when the Michele Reis character goes to the bar where her partner is known to hang out (the implicit suggestion being that she does this repeatedly, as if attached fetishistically to an absent lover, whose steps she is constantly retracing) (see Figures 13.913.11). Sitting alone at the bar, cigarette in hand and affecting a dejected look, she mumbles a manifesto of sorts, heard as is often the case in this film in a voiceover rendition: Some people you really dont want to get too close to. Find out too much about a person and you lose interest. I am the practical kind I know how to make myself happy. The large mirror that fills the image of the bar is not merely a formal device but an essential prop in a film in which characters are constantly busy projecting images of themselves. Just as her appearance betrays the awareness that it is being reflected by a mirror, so the voiceover can hardly count as a spontaneous expression of her innermost feelings; it too bears the signs of having been rehearsed as part of an elaborate presentation.

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Figures 13.913.11 Fallen Angels: Jukebox melancholia.

Deliberately timed to follow the voiceover monologue, we see images of Reis dropping a coin in a jukebox to play Laurie Andersons Speak My Language, a track from her 1994 Bright Red / Tight Rope album. The song, which Wong may have heard in Wenderss 1993 film Faraway, So Close a suggestion, if any was needed, that cinephilia and musicophilia are for Wong closely intertwined is a tongue-in-cheek hymn to reconstruction in a post-dystopian, post-nuclear world

Global Music/Local Cinema: Two Wong Kar-wai Pop Compilations 239

of survivors. The jukebox figures in the scene as both a throwback to a bygone era and a reference to a cybernetic future; it also doubles as a masturbatory device as we see her curl over it in suggestive ways. The acoustics of the music are not easy to account for. The foregrounded, sumptuous, clean sound of the jukebox is germane to a sphere that is, once again, fantastic, mythical, unbound by the laws of physics on the one hand and the conventions of realistic setting on the other. The song must be placed alongside her demeanour, clothing style and cryptic voiceovers as one facet of her complex, delusional self-portrait. Andersons music then smoothes over a cut to a series of images of the city at night, seen in a blur from an MTR train. As if serendipitously, Michele Reis can suddenly be seen inside the hit mans apartment, which she cleans regularly as part of her assignment. Another cut takes us there. She is lying on his bed, masturbating. Although there is no indication that very much time has passed since we last saw her, her clothes have changed. By this point, the music has no ostensible source. But it matters little whether it is diegetic or not; once again, it is best understood as originating from within the characters mind, an ingredient of her construction of the self, and as such occupying a dimension that film theory has not yet charted. Rather like a paradigmatic aria in eighteenth-century opera, one through which a character announces him/herself to the audience, the sequence as a whole is presentational rather than representational, with the character offering herself up to the audience body and soul, literally in a ritualistic rather than naturalistic fashion. As the song ends, over images of Reis lying in bed, exhausted, the ambient sounds of Kwun Tong are heard for a brief while. The rush of adrenaline inside her body is now extinguished and the onscreen space takes on a different character altogether. No longer like a stage, it regains its status as a squalid, tiny flat in depressing surroundings. The most explicit instance of integration between a pre-existing song and dramatic action lies at the very heart of the film. This is the scene in which the hit man sends his partner a not-so-coded message in the form of Shirley Kwans flamboyant, highly melismatic version of James Wongs Forget Him (). Having left a coin with the barman and instructed him to play song 1818, the hit man leaves the bar. Then, just as Reis sits at the bar, the song starts playing on the now familiar jukebox. The message is not lost on her. Forget Him, meant to end their relationship once and for all, does not simply accompany images of the aftermath of a break-up, as it would in a more conventional treatment of the story. The song delivers the message that it is over, and as such it performs an action. Poignantly, it also doubles as an elegy for Teresa Teng, who made Forget Him famous in the Chinese-speaking world James Wong wrote a new text to a much older Japanese tune and died only a few months before the films release.10

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In a world where hired killers glamourize their deadly, daily routine, love exists as the fetish for an absent person, lovers part ways using a jukebox as their middleman, and the boundary between real and fabricated self is so volatile, is the pain real? The question, as befits a Wong Kar-wai film, remains deliciously open. Yet few would deny that it is precisely by showing us characters at one remove from actually experiencing heartache that Wong manages to bring out its raw, unmitigated force. In this connection, one need only think of the roleplaying sequences in In the Mood for Love, among the most moving in recent cinema. There is a third main character in Fallen Angels He Zhiwu, a Taiwanese orphan recently immigrated to Hong Kong (played by Japanese actor Kaneshiro Takeshi). He too engages in endless self-fashioning exercises through images and songs drawn from popular culture; in this role, he too is a generating force of the films visual and aural style. An especially hilarious instance of the cartoonish and improvisatory spirit that animates his presence in the film and, through him, the film itself, occurs inside a Wan Chai restaurant. In love with Cherry (played by star Charlie Young), still too preoccupied with her schemes to get back her former boyfriend, he finds himself taking part in a spectacular, and frankly improbable, fight that erupts seemingly out of nowhere, in order to protect her (see Figure 13.12). It is an exercise in absurdist, comical cinema at the sound of a textless arrangement of a generic rock tune, functioning effectively here as a sonic image of cool and internationalism (in what is otherwise an extremely local and modest setting). Along with the music, the chaotic ballets of injured bodies, dazzlingly mobile camera and stretch printing impart a mangalike character to this attempt to erase the banal and disappointing nature of

Figure 13.12 Fallen Angels: Kaneshiro Takeshi aka He Zhiwu.

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everyday life, helping him to project a vision of himself as young, carefree and courageous in the eyes of his beloved. The soundtrack of Fallen Angels features many more songs than can be examined in detail here.11 The numerous occurrences of Chinese opera excerpts alone, in their different regional inflections, would warrant separate treatment. The extraordinary geographical, linguistic and stylistic diversity of the preexisting music is of course a direct reflection of the cultural space we have known Hong Kong to be. Though cut to fit specific sequences, and sometimes guiding the rhythm and pace of the editing itself, the songs do enter into relation with a myriad of other sounds, both man-made and mediated by technology, giving shape to one of the richest sonic portraits of the city to date. But Fallen Angels is no unequivocal celebration of this space. Nor is Wong Kar-wai its mere chronicler. Songs inform and shape identities, console their listeners and speak on their behalf, but they are also symptoms of alienation and inability to articulate feelings and desires. In the most extreme instances the ones I have chosen to dwell on at some length songs are instruments of self-deception and myth-making, created by the characters themselves to carve out a fictional, escapist, delusional cinematic space in which they can project themselves as the protagonists which, in Wong Kar-wais film, they obviously are, thus resulting in a dizzying representation of the equivocal role of popular music as a soundtrack to everyday life.

A Road to Nowhere? My Blueberry Nights

Despite being in America and with an entirely non-Chinese cast, while producing My Blueberry Nights Wong operated just as if he was at home.12 A hugely popular singer (Norah Jones) is the films protagonist and another star musician (Chan Marshall aka Cat Power) makes a powerful cameo appearance at one of the films most poignant junctures. Wongs use of pop stars and his fascination with their media-inflated aura date from his early days as a filmmaker, and is a legacy of his apprenticeship in the Hong Kong film industry. An eloquent case in point is Fallen Angels, in which Leon Lai is only slightly disguised as a hit man and Michele Reis plays herself.13 The commercial rationale for this casting strategy is obvious. But the dividends it pays artistically are as, if not more, rich. Aside from galvanizing the creative process, in the finished product the persona of the chosen star happily conflates with that of the character he or she plays, giving rise to a dramatically and psychologically productive ambiguity between the elusive reality of pop stardom and the even more elusive one of the characters who populate Wongs stories. What is literally absent the singers music and lyrics, her own artistic

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trajectory, the people and places associated with her becomes something like a metaphorical presence, a halo that envelops the narrative from beginning to end. Ever the sentimental, as well as the shrewd marketer, Wong only sees aura, glamour and rejuvenating myths in the stories and personages fabricated by the pop music industry. Norah Jones, for whom My Blueberry Nights was to be the first feature, had been reassured that none of her music would be used so that she could focus on her acting. Then, one day, at six in the morning, after a night of shooting and on the spur of the moment, she composed The Story. Delighted, Wong used it as a frame in both the beginning and the end credits. It is a fitting homage to his main actress on the directors part but also a fine instance of the kind of subtle yet crucial role that songs are capable of performing in a film. While I cannot say it matched the Lynchian, extreme close-up that dominates the credits very well the by-now famous shot of ice-cream melting into the cavernous body of an eaten-into slice of blueberry pie the casual stand-up bass, musky brush work on the drums and nearly honky-tonk piano establish a distinctly jazzy feel that agrees with the improvisatory, laid back yet soulful core of the film. The references to blues and jazz also hint at a locale New York that while unequivocally and distinctly urban is also tinted with the warm colours of the South (as is only fair, given the history of the city and its role in the imaginary of the country as a whole). But while on the one hand Joness The Story takes us decisively into the world of the film, on the other its aloof text maintains a certain distance from it hence, perhaps, Wongs felicitous decision to play it only in the credits. As if making a secret confession to herself and yet also seemingly assuming the storytellers identity, Joness frank soliloquy tells of not knowing how to begin: I dont know how to begin / cause the story has been told before / I will sing along I suppose / I guess its just how it goes . In a somewhat disingenuously vague statement, Jones suggested that the song made sense because it definitely was influenced by my experience of the film. It does not take a professional critic, let alone a malicious ear, to hear in it a delicate yet firm send up of Wongs creative process. Heard over the end credits as well, The Story gracefully contains the film like a pair of bookends. Next in structural importance, though in and of itself rather more powerful and moving, is Chan Marshalls The Greatest (performed by Chan Marshall under her singers name, Cat Power). Wong placed it at the onset of the love story between Jeremy (Jude Law) and Elizabeth (Norah Jones), cued in just as he slices her the first of many slices of blueberry pie. The melancholic mood and slightly self-reproaching tone of the song colour the pillow shots scattered throughout the first New York section of the film

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as well as images of Jeremy, alone, in his bakery. Though literally absent in that instance, it also ends up permeating the other iconic image of the film: the kiss Jeremy inflicts on an unsuspecting Elizabeth who is drunk and still asleep on the bakerys counter. Like the blueberry-cum-ice-cream-shot, inspired by Lynch and Godard, the kiss sequence has to my eyes and ears at least a precedent: the marvellous sequence in Hitchcocks Rear Window in which Lisa (Grace Kelly) gently kisses Jeffries (James Stewart), who was then asleep in his wheelchair, awake. Kelly first appears as a shadow over Stewarts face. Then, in a daring camera set-up Hitchcock shows her luminous face from below, approaching Stewart, as if from his point of view and finally caresses her with a horizontal shot to highlight her impossibly exquisite profile just as her lips touch his. As in My Blueberry Nights, the kiss is also singled out sonically, as everything around the couple falls silent and all we hear are the subtle traces of the rubbing of the fabric of her clothes against his, and perhaps the sound of their kiss (is it imagined?). Wong and his team, too, created a fine piece of sound design to go with the kiss, the soundtrack consisting of nothing but tiny vibrations in the air and the sonic residue of microscopically small objects the slight quiver of reality, as it were, captured in a moment of extreme absorption. The second kiss may legitimately be said to be a two-way affair, thus marking the beginning of the love story proper (a beginning which, in turn, paves the way for the films ending). Marshalls The Greatest reappears just when the two protagonists begin the route that will lead to the kiss with which the film ends, again like the second of two framing bookends (this time closer to each other than the two statements of the Jones track: a frame within the frame, as it were). Here Marshalls song sounds different less retrospective and elegiac, more soothing and giving, some may say even sentimental. Given Wongs interest in making full use different kinds of identities the self-fashioned, the one fashioned by others or contrived by the industry it is entirely appropriate that the song is performed by Marshall, who in the film performs as Cat Power and does a cameo appearance as Katya, Jeremys much beloved, and improbably Russian, ex-girlfriend. It is like saying that Katya is, via Marshall as Cat Power, still present in Jeremys mind, delivering him into Elizabeths arms. After the action moves to Memphis, the song selection (Otis Redding, Ruth Brown) comes to reflect the new locale, the texts either anticipating or responding to a specific dramatic incident. Sometimes, as with Looking Back, performed by Brown, the textual link is disappointingly obvious, or simply too cerebral. Yet the subtle and strategically calculated way in which the music is edited makes the experience always a meaningful one. Whether cast against this or that image, timed in relation to a specific event or employed as an integral

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element of the richly textured sound effects, the songs come surprisingly alive in a way in which some of the complacent camera movements or visual motifs, however pretty to look at, do not. As for mood, Wong seems to place a blind sort of trust in his selections: if the text of a musical track can be read in terms of his story then the music will somehow fit. Find the right text, he seems to be saying, and the music will magically take care of itself. This modus operandi may seem too simple but, incredibly, it works in My Blueberry Nights as it does in most of his films. In this respect, and like many other filmmakers, Wong may be said to exploit the genius inherent in the genre of the song, which calls for appropriate musical framing or imitation or both of the feeling expressed by a poetic text. The night scenes in Memphis also bear the marks of David Lynchs cinema, in the form of a drone, which gradually morphs into the noise of an off-screen, distant thunder. Memphis was an important centre in the development of rockabilly, and the rockabilly-like sound of many a guitar featured in the film, too, brought to mind sonic images of Lynchs cinema and especially his own road movie, Wild at Heart (1990). The extremely short montage sequences that show Elizabeth crossing the country at the sound of short musical miniatures, concentrated to the point of stillness, betrayed to the cinephile in me echoes of Bob Rafelsons unaccountably underestimated Five Easy Pieces (1971). In one such transitional sequence, when Elizabeth and Leslie (Natalie Portman) find themselves at the last crossroads in their journey and say goodbye to one another, each in her own car, Wong uses a textless cue composed for the occasion by Gustavo Santaolalla (composer, among other soundtracks, of the music for Brokeback Mountain, The Motorcycle Diaries and Amores Perros). The kinetic quality of the music underscores well the motion of the cars on screen and brings out the epic dimension of cross-country travel, but stands in curious contrast to the plaintive character of the tune itself, which emerges out of a series of accompaniment figures played by a small ensemble of plucked instruments. More than a mere homage to the films Santaolallas style inevitably calls to mind, the music captures the extraordinarily elusive feeling to which travellers fall prey when, however happy, excited or optimistic about their prospects they may be, the inexplicability of travel, and with it human affairs, forces them into a melancholia to which they see no end. It is disappointing that the film wastes this poetic moment by introducing it without preparation and letting it go without any kind of follow up. It is hard to escape the impression that Wong has treated the road movie subtext of My Blueberry Nights all too casually. Only Ry Cooders three original tracks occasionally lift Elizabeths cross-country trip to a higher level of poetic and intertextual resonance. Aside from evoking Wenderss Paris, Texas (1984), yet

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another road movie for which Cooder wrote a minimalist yet powerfully evocative soundtrack that made him justly famous, his music shoulders the job of adding emotional weight to the segment set in and around Las Vegas. As heard in the compact disc of the films soundtrack the melodically barren tracks come across as even more remarkable. On Cooders guitar, memories of instruments, genres and protagonists of the first half-century of American rock clash in an exciting stream of individual, powerfully expressive gestures. On the evidence of My Blueberry Nights, then, American music is alive and well, its ability to renew itself fuelled by, among other forces, cinema. Whether this is a compliment to the film remains, of course, another question. My Blueberry Nights is not only symptomatic of a certain trend in the flow of capital and allocation of resources but also a personal artistic crisis that I read as the result of the abandonment of the distinctly local anchoring of Wongs earlier productions and with it the loss of the ability to integrate plot and character construction with music. The numerous songs, for all the sophistication of the editing and the sound design, fail to coalesce in a convincing musicodramatic whole. Rather, they come across as having been superimposed onto independently conceived narrative episodes, and thus fail, time and again, to emerge as an integral element of them. Entered in the orbit of Hollywood stars and the arena of globally funded cinema, the marks of Wongs highly personal use of pop compilations have lost their force. As a result, instead of sounding like a mere souvenir, as is often the case when the music of a film is distributed as a self-standing recording, the released soundtrack of My Blueberry Nights is more like the fulfilment of a film that was not meant to be. It is conceivable that like certain elements of Hong Kong action cinema one thinks of Matrix a washed-out, trivialized version of Wongs idiosyncratic treatment of pop compilations and singers-turned-actors will be absorbed into the film language of some Hollywood directors. But the path to a longer-lasting influence, as Tarantinos Kill Bill indicated well before Wong even considered shooting overseas, lies in the sustained exploration of forms of expression indigenous to Hong Kong, even when they take the form of a Laurie Anderson song.

Notes

Chapter 1 1. 2. Somewhat oddly, Hong Kong is either almost entirely absent from many studies of British imperialism, or referred to only fleetingly as the endpoint of empire. These figures are even more significant in that they represent only the people who were actually able to find host countries willing to accept them rather than those who wanted or tried to emigrate.

Chapter 3 1. 2. On the complex relationship between expectation and experience in travel, see Duro, 2007. A haunting of Macau by Las Vegas is discussed in Clarke, 2007a. Like Hong Kong, Macau underwent a late decolonization that did not result in independence, and was thus in particular need of resources for a postcolonial civic identity. The unavailability of the normal discursive resources for constructing national identity in a postcolonial era is part of what distinguishes the cases of Hong Kong and Macau from that of Singapore, a city that is also an independent state. I discuss the Cultural Centre and the Extension to the Convention and Exhibition Centre in Chapter 4 of Clarke, 2002, which also treats many other aspects of Hong Kong art and visual culture in the late colonial and early postcolonial period. Hong Kong architecture and urban planning since 1997 is further discussed in Clarke, 2007b, and I deal with issues of Hong Kong cultural identity during the same period in Clarke, 2007c. As the then chief secretary for administration Anson Chan put it in an 11 June 1998 speech at the Asia Society Washington Center annual dinner, the real transition is about identity and not sovereignty. [] Late on the evening of June 30, 1997, between the lowering of one flag and the raising of another in that instant when Hong Kong seemed truly without identity identity became the issue. That was one of the handovers defining moments and is the challenge Hong Kong faces today (Asia Society website). On the visit of Donald Tsang (then financial secretary) to Las Vegas, see Torode, 1999, Review, p. 1. Fosters canopy design had been the winner of an architectural competition for the West Kowloon Cultural District site, which took place prior to serious detailed

3.

4.

5. 6.

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consideration (even within the Hong Kong government itself, it seems) of what would actually happen on the site. Public opposition to the notion of private sector control over such a major cultural site (in particular to the proposed idea of a single for-profit entity being given sole possession, and to the high density of development the three short-listed bidders proposed in their plans) eventually led the Hong Kong government in 2006 to abandon the process of bidding between property developerled consortiums it had initiated in 2003. When the project was revived in a new form, the idea of using Fosters canopy (which had never received widespread public endorsement) was abandoned. A summary of the history of the project and details of the new proposals announced in 2007 (which envisaged a non-profitmaking statutory authority taking charge of the site) can be found on the Hong Kong Government website at: http://www.hab.gov.hk/wkcd/pe/eng/doc/CC_Report_ eng/3_executivesummary.pdf (accessed 22 January 2008). The West Kowloon Cultural District Authority Ordinance was enacted by the Legislative Council on 11 July 2008, and an upfront endowment of HK$21.6 billion was approved. Although an independent statutory body, the authority is chaired by the chief secretary for administration, enabling the Hong Kong government to exercise a high degree of control over it. For details see the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority website, http://www.wkcdauthority.hk/en/bkgd/wcda.htm (accessed 13 May 2009). 7. Wen Jiabaos comment was made shortly after returning from a visit to Singapore. Wen stated that during his visit to Singapore he kept thinking of Hong Kong, adding that It is facing very strong competition the situation is pressing. Tsang replied that he visited Singapore every couple of years to observe its development, and had also learned from the experiences of Shanghai and Beijing (see Fung and Wu, 2007, p. A1). Tsang had already referred to Hong Kong and Singapore on 15 July 2006 as the closest twin cities on earth in terms of development and their peoples ambition, adding that Hong Kong had much to learn from the other city (see Leung, 2006, p. 1). Tsangs views were challenged by former chief secretary Anson Chan, who stated in an interview on 22 July 2006 that she did not believe the Singapore model of democracy was the one Hong Kong should follow, and that there was not much Hong Kong could learn from that city about how to develop political talents (Sinn, 2006, p. 2). A South China Morning Post leader on 18 July (2006a) also took issue with Tsang. 8. For further information on Brand Hong Kong (note the terminology, which treats the city as if it were a commercial product needing to find a place in a crowded marketplace), see the official website: http://www.brandhk.gov.hk/brandhk/ eindex.htm (accessed 17 January 2008). 9. This irony was pointed out at the time by commentator Jake van der Kamp (So Easy to Imitate, So Difficult to Create, So Easy to Borrow Brands, South China Morning Post, 15 November 2005, p. B16). 10. Xu Kuangdis comments were made on 10 March 2001 (see Xu Kuangdi: Shanghai Not to Replace HK, Peoples Daily Online, 12 March 2001, http://english.peopledaily. com.cn/english/200103/12/eng20010312_64780.html, accessed 17 January 2008). On Zhus and Tsangs comments concerning Hong Kong and Shanghai, see Yeung,

Note to p. 50 249

2001, p. A1. Tsangs comparison between Hong Kong and New York, and Shanghai and Chicago apparently coincides with the view of the expert on globalization and world cities, Saskia Sassen: see Schifferes, BBC News website (international version), 27 June 2007, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6240994.stm (accessed 29 August 2007). Wang Zhan, director of the Development Research Center of the Shanghai Municipal Peoples Government, apparently suggested that Hong Kong should become the Switzerland of Asia (see Lo, 2005, p. 1), while author Simon Winchester claims to have angered Hong Kongs last colonial governor, Chris Patten, by suggesting to him that in fifty years Beijing would be Chinas Washington D.C., Shanghai its New York and Hong Kong its New Orleans (Winchester, 2006, p. 54). More recently politician and former government official Regina Ip has explored the parallels between Hong Kong and Tianjin (see Ip, 2008, p. A11), and a departing speech by British Consul-General Stephen Bradley to the Foreign Correspondents Club on 13 March 2008 claimed that Hong Kong was still a very small town when compared to London and New York, at least with respect to cultural provision. One response to Bradleys speech was Gordon, 2008. An alternative view that Hong Kong could indeed be reasonably compared to London and New York was expressed in an article in Time (Elliott, 2008). Newspapers have been a major site in which the discourse of a supposed rivalry between Hong Kong and Shanghai has been propagated since 1997. Not all such accounts have simply voiced fears of Hong Kong being overtaken by Shanghai, however, and in the period since the retirement of Chinas Shanghaiassociated leaders Jiang Zemin and Zhu Rongji there has sometimes been a picture of that city as also faltering in its direction (see, for instance, South China Morning Post, 2006b). A 2009 decision of Chinas State Council to turn Shanghai into an international financial hub by 2020 has however again raised the stakes (see Yeung, 2009, p. 8, on how this has contributed to the pressure on Chief Executive Donald Tsang, who was already facing low popularity ratings). 11. The inverted footage of Hong Kong comes just after the Tony Leung Chiu-wai character, Lai Yiu-fai, states in a voiceover his recognition that Hong Kong is on the opposite side of the world from Argentina. Shortly before this point in the film he has taken a job in an abattoir, working nights, and his voiceover has indicated that such a work schedule suits him since it puts him on Hong Kong time. Hong Kong is mentioned at various points during the film, but becomes more a focus of attention in the latter part (to which the previously mentioned episodes belong), for example with Lai making a phone call to his father there in a failed attempt at reconciliation. This culminates in Lais final break with Ho Po-wing (the Leslie Cheung character) and his return to Asia. At the end of the film he is seen in Taipei, on a brief stopover on his way back to Hong Kong, but not in Hong Kong itself. Although with Lais return to Hong Kong Lai and Ho are now on the other side of the world from each other (as Wong Kar-wai pointed out in a 1997 interview on the film), the return home comes across as a reconciliation but with Hong Kong this time, rather than his former partner. As Wong states: they start as exiles, and I think in the end its a kind of return. Hes going back to his daily life, his own cities, and going to face his own people (Wong Kar-wai Exclusive Interview, WBAI, 99.5, New York, http://www.asiastudios.com/interviews/members/wongkarwai.html, accessed 10

250 Notes to pp. 5056

12.

13.

14.

15.

January 2008). For this reason the soundtrack music, Happy Together, which gives the film its title and which plays in its last moments as Lai is leaving Taiwan for Hong Kong, can be read as having affirmative connotations and not simply ironic ones. This more positive connotation of the track is accentuated since very unusually for such non-diegetic film music Wong has chosen to use a live recording in which sounds of audience appreciation serve to guide our own interpretive approach by offering a pre-existing frame. Since Hollywood is so strongly associated with filmmaking, Chans invocation of it in his film title might also be said to remind us of the rush towards that location, which was a feature of Hong Kong cinema during this post-1997 era (leading to such products as John Woos Face/Off of 1997). Tong Tong, a Mainland Chinese prostitute and the main female character in Hollywood, Hong Kong, dreams of going to America, and eventually succeeds in doing so, offering another sense in which the film links the two locations mentioned in its title. This departure for America echoes that of the Faye Wong character at the end of Wong Kar-wais Chungking Express (1994), which makes a play between a Hong Kong restaurant named California and the American state of the same name (referenced also in the soundtrack via the song California Dreaming). At a later date Patrick Ho seems himself to have developed doubts about the world city rhetoric, perhaps because such rhetoric is hard to easily reconcile with the quite different post-handover imperative of propagating Chinese national ideology in Hong Kong. At an Asian cultural cooperation meeting held in Hong Kong in 2005 he gave a speech in which he decried the way in which Asian cities are tagged with nicknames such as the Venice of Asia, the Las Vegas of the East, or Paris in China. Soho here, West End there and Manhattan everywhere. Heaven knows we are liable to forget that we are in Asia (quoted in van der Kamp, 2005, note 9). Wongs teahouse was constructed using a kind of red/white/blue plastic fabric that is widely used in everyday contexts in Hong Kong, and which has come to signify local Hong Kong identity for many. Wong has employed this material in other art and design works as well. Hong Kong and Beijing are also linked in Tozer Paks performance work A Present to the Central Government (2005). The first part of this work took place in Hong Kong on 1 July 2005, when Pak placed a strip of yellow cloth across the path of a democracy march; the second part took place in Beijing on 17 July 2005 when he tied fragments of that cloth around the periphery of Tiananmen Square (a friend documented the process and removed the cloth strips not long after they had been placed).

Chapter 4 1. The recent policy paper on fine-tuning the medium of instruction defines its objectives as follows: Hong Kong needs to enhance its position as a modern international city and a global financial centre for sustained economic growth. Hong Kong also has a key role to play in contributing to the prosperity and development of our country. For these, we must equip our students with the requisite proficiency in both Chinese and English. Further, we are entering a new era as globalization has taken hold, and our younger generation will meet unprecedented challenges of the

Notes to pp. 5764 251

ever-changing environment. Our education system, including the curriculum and pedagogies, has to progress in tandem. The New Senior Secondary academic structure to be implemented this September will provide a wide and broad curriculum so as to enable our students to achieve all-round development and to lay the foundation for life-long learning. To learn how to learn, our students must master the skills to collate information, identify and analyze the issues involved, and articulate their opinions. All these require a good command of both Chinese and English. From discussion paper of the Legislative Council Panel on Education: Fine-tuning the Medium of Instruction for Secondary Schools, 15 January 2009, http://www.legco.gov.hk/yr1112/english/panels/ed/papers (accessed June 1, 2009). 2. For a summary account of biliteracy and trilingualism and the medium of instruction, see Adamson, forthcoming. 3. See Bhatia and Ritchie for the areas of interest in bilingualism, and within this framework, a discussion of the Hong Kong situation by Li and Lee, 2005. 4. These earlier studies need to be supplemented by the work of Katherine Chen on code mixing and code switching differentiations between Hong Kong Cantonese speakers and returnees who have studied or lived in anglophone countries for an extended period of time. Chens study takes into account the changing demographics of the local population where older triangulations between mainland China, Hong Kong, Britain/United States, are complicated by mobile and diasporic ethnic Chinese subjects from different global locations. Some studies of code switching, however, disagree about whether the practice is sociolinguistically motivated. See the literature cited in Li and Lee, 2005, 3.1. 5. For a systematic discussion of literary translation and postcolonial writing as analogues of intercultural writing, see Tymoczko, 1999a. 6. For insightful discussions of Leungs work situated vis--vis 1997, see Chow, 1998 and 2002. Martha Cheungs introduction offers an excellent overview of Leungs work (Leung, 2002, pp. 1935). 7. The exterior of the Main Building, most frequently identified with the university in the public recognition, is one of eighty-four Declared Monuments in Hong Kong. Any alteration or renovation is subject to official approval. 8. See Ngu g wa Thiongo, The Language of African Literature (1985), rpt., and other essays in Ngu g , 1986. For one of the best-informed and insightful studies of Ngu g and his work, see Gikandi, 2002. 9. In one conception of world literature by David Damrosch, 2003, it is a mode of circulation and of reading (p. 5) in which literary works move beyond their culture of origin, either in translation or in their original language (p. 4). This conception is not directed towards canon formation though the actual choice of texts in Damroschs study can be seen to posit the criteria of selecting works that enter into global circulation. 10. Franco Morettis conception of world literature is much more systemically oriented than Damroschs. It presupposes quasi-organic links between national literatures as resources from which texts for collections and anthologies of world literature can be derived. In its actual institutional organization, world literature appears to reinvent a hierarchy between national literature specialists as peripheral

252 Notes to pp. 6569

11.

12.

13. 14.

15.

16.

and theorists of world literature at the centre. In Morettis schema, Leungs poem would be positioned as national literature, and Leung himself as Chinese literature specialist with all the irony they imply. I am adapting the well-known use of cultural worlding by Gayatri Spivak (Spivak, 1985, p. 262) as the incorporation of a native project into imperial cultural governance. Wong Man was from a rich comprador family in Hong Kong. After qualifying as a medical doctor in England, he practised in a London public hospital before returning to Hong Kong. In the 1930s, he went on to Shanghai to look after Chinese soldiers injured in the war against Japan. There, he befriended leftist intellectuals and public figures including Soong Qingling (Madame Sun Yat-sen). From Shanghai, he travelled to Guangzhou (Canton) where he helped set up the Chinese branch of the International Red Cross. After 1949, he returned to Hong Kong where he continued to practise as a doctor, and also translated and wrote poems. As a writer and historical figure, Wong Man has long been consigned to collective oblivion. His name, as far as I know, is not mentioned in any of the anthologies or narratives of Hong Kong literature. I have written elsewhere of what little is known of Wong, his significance, and that of his writing in poetic and other genres in the cultural-historical contexts of 1950s Hong Kong and the Cold War (Ho, 2009b). Eileen Chang Ailing was possibly the only other and more famous writer who wrote and published in both languages. This issue is discussed in another essay (Ho, 2009b), but situated in Hong Kong literary culture during the Cold War and Wong Mans other writing and cultural activities. There are two main sources of biographical information on Wong: his series of essays, Bygone Travel Notes about his early childhood, in the English-language magazine, Eastern Horizon II (196263), published in Hong Kong, and the obituary, In Memory of Dr Wong Man, by J. M. and Rose W. Y. Tan, Eastern Horizon III:1 (January 1964), pp. 6263. A copy of Between Two Worlds signed by Wong himself and dedicated to Chan Kwan Po, former librarian of the Fung Ping-shan Chinese library, is in the Hong Kong Collection, University of Hong Kong Library. At a meeting of education groups, the chairman of the Association of Heads of Secondary Schools is reported to have said: The changes [in the fine-tuning policy] are obviously in response to some complaints about students poor English under mother-tongue education. We are not saying students need not brush up on their English, but the new policy cannot serve the purpose. It will worsen the labelling effect on students who remain in Chinese classes (Ng, 2009). In their response to the governments discussion paper on fine-tuning, the Association of English Medium Secondary Schools writes: We agree that mixed-code teaching, e.g. the use of English textbooks with classroom instruction in Chinese, should not be allowed, as this will seriously compromise the students ability to speak and write well in English. While some Chinese terms may be used in an initial bridging programme in Secondary I, this should not last for more than three months (http://www.legco. gov.hk/yr11-12/english/panels/ed/papers/ed_m1.htm, accessed June 7, 2009). Here, the example of mixed-code teaching is another of the variants on what mixed

Notes to pp. 7087 253

code in the classroom can entail. It implicitly maintains the separation between Chinese speech and English writing even as it posits the co-presence of the two in the classroom as mixed-code. The responses of the two groups suggest they perceive the fine-tuning policy and its aims quite differently. 17. According to Tammy Ho, The poem was written in 2008, shortly before Lunar New Year. I was struck by how much media attention Tin Shui Wai (where my parents and sisters live) received then and wondered how much of that excessive attention was genuine. I disliked thelabel that the town had earned:Town of Sadness . Its not only an untrue description of the place, its also an unfair comment affectingall the citizens living in Tin Shui Wai.At the end of the day, Ithought there are many humbleand decent families leading a normal life, and it is their stories that build the town, and Hong Kong as a whole (Ho, 2008). 18. For an article, Tin Shui Wai: City of Sadness, written in December 2007 at around the same time as Tammy Hos two poems, see http://www.asiasentinel.com/index. php?Itemid=149&id=934&option=com_content&task=view. See also the Hong Kong filmmaker, Ann Hui On-wahs diptych on Tin Shui Wai, The Way We Are (2008) and Night and Fog (2009). The Chinese language website, http://www.tinshuiwai.com. hk/, posts community information and activities. 19. For the purpose of this chapter, my translations are literal, which means including the alternative meanings of the Chinese characters within parentheses and after a slash. The pronouns in brackets are not in the Chinese original but are implied in the grammar. Chapter 5 1. 2. 3. All quotations from Louise Hos poetry are taken from Ho, 2009. In William Empsons taxonomy, this is an ambiguity of the third type. For recent Hong Kong literature in English, see Xu and Ingham, 2003, which has a foreword by Louise Ho. 4. These modalities are understood by Casanova to stand in oppugnancy, rather than, for example, in dialogue; the model seems to be one of economic rivalry or even military hostility. If letters is a republic, it is in a state of civil war. 5. Every work from a dispossessed national space that aspires to the status of literature exists solely in relation to the consecrating authorities of the most autonomous places (Casanova, 2004, p. 109). 6. Also of relevance to this question of internationalization is the anthology of translations edited by Louise Ho and Klaus Stierstorfer, 2006. 7. The essay by Durant, a London professor of English, appended to this collection of Wongs poems is, it could be argued, a further instance of Casanovas international writings bid for consecration by metropolitan authorities. 8. Geeleegulu is glossed in a note as Double Dutch; it is the kind of burbling with which infants are sometimes addressed by besotted adults. Varieties of English also jostle in the poems. In The Australian O, a favourite word is reborn as heaoaium. 9. The Leung-Osing collaboration is in Leung, 1992. 10. The policy is set out in the written reply of the then secretary of the civil service to a question put in the Hong Kong Legislative Council, 5 July 2006 (http://www.

254 Notes to pp. 88113

11.

12.

13.

14. 15.

16.

csb.gov.hk/english/info/326.html, accessed 23 June 2009). Biliteracy in Chinese and English, and trilingualism in Cantonese, Putonghua and English is the aim. Indeed, teachers of literature in English are very aware that the primary motivation of most of their students, and the families who support them, is the enhanced career prospects enjoyed by those who have majored in English studies at university. Not surprisingly, it is not only in Hong Kong and mainland China that this is the case. See Lukmani, 1993. Several of the essays in this volume whose main title, The Lie of the Land, is without deliberate ambiguity as far as I can see are pertinent to the question of English and education in Hong Kong. Marvell attracted Empsons admiring attention in three of the chapters of Seven Types of Ambiguity; see especially pp. 196204. For a recent episode in the debate about the Ode, see Moore, 2003. This leads me to dissent, obviously, from Ackbar Abbass strange view that English literature figures in Louise Hos work, we might say, somewhat like the Don Quixote figures in Pierre Menards (Abbas, 1998, p. 125). If we think of the mobilization of the language of canonical English poetry as switching on or giving access to a kind of knowledge that then operates as another code within the new poem, we might return to Home to Hong Kong, for example, and note the spooky resonance of the Spanish Steps as not just a tourist destination but a signifying English site, that of the death of Keats in 1821 in a house overlooking the Steps; so that the comedy of the globetrotting Chinese poet takes place in the shadow of the tragedy of the exiled English poet, whose name was writ in water and who never went home. It takes its place in an interesting little genre of English poems that begin with the word Yes. Steve Tsang gives a figure of over half a million for the demonstrations in Hong Kong on 21 May and on 5 June 1989 (Tsang, 2004, pp. 246, 247). These marches were notable, like the Tiananmen demonstrations themselves, for patriotic slogans and songs. The poem Bronze Horse in Ho, 1997 is accompanied by Louise Hos sketch of the sculpture (p. 74). Photographs of Man, Horse and other work by Antonio Mak can be accessed via the Hong Kong Art Archive, http://web.hku.hk:8400/~hkaa/hkaa.

Chapter 6 1. Virilio observes: Cinema is the end in which the dominant philosophies and arts have come to confuse and lose themselves, a sort of primordial mixing of the human soul and the languages of the motor-soul but the same could also be said of Xu Xis invention of the high-compression, high-speed, quasi-cinematic essay (Virilio, 1991, p. 31).

Chapter 7 1. Tokyo of course is a premier world city, and, in Taylor et al.s account, Singapore and Hong Kong are part of an alpha world city band, though at a level just below that occupied by London, Paris, Tokyo and New York (Taylor, Walker and Beaverstock, 2002, p. 102). It remains to be seen how, in the longer term, Shanghais financial development may change the present ranking of regional world cities.

Notes to pp. 114118 255

2.

3.

4. 5.

6. 7.

Fredric Jameson has observed that despite buying Columbia Pictures and MCA in the 1980s, and possessing financial and technological prowess, the Japanese were unable to master the essentially cultural productivity required to secure the globalization process for any given competitor (Jameson, 1998, p. 67). The general point still holds, but Jamesons position does not take into account the extraordinary outburst and significance of regional mass-cultural production and circulation in the 1990s. The expression is media critic Koichi Iwabuchis (Iwabuchi, 2003). His point is that how exactly subtitling of dramas or pop songs incorporating more than one language and cultural translation that which comes about when the viewer feels that there is cultural proximity between the TV programme he/she is watching and his/her own urban context lead to the creation of regional cultural resonance is not apparent. My attempt is to think through this question of resonance. For a critique of alternative modernity as an emancipated zone free from EuroAmerican economic hegemony, see Wee, 2007. Cf. Ching, 2001. Ching argues that first of all, regionalism represents a mediatory attempt to come to terms with the imminent transnationalization of capital and the historical reterritorialization of national economies. Rather than being a corrective to global capitalism, regionalist reterritorializations underscore an invariable contradiction within capitalism itself. Second, mass cultural Asianism is a symptom of deeper structural and historical changes in the ways Asia is being perceived as both a mode of production and a regime of discursive practice in the Japanese imaginary. If the earlier Asianism was conditioned on the unequivocal difference between Asia and the West in todays Asianism that difference itself exists only as a commodity, a spectacle to be consumed in a globalized capitalist system precisely at the moment when exteriority [to the West] is no longer possible (Ching, 2001, p. 282). It is now clearer that mass-cultural Asianism is part and parcel of changes in the ways in which Asia is perceived in the larger regional and not only Japanese imaginary. The claim though that todays East Asian difference is a spectacle to be consumed in the larger globalized capitalist system seems overstated. Many of the cultural products are primarily for regional consumption. The discussion, unfortunately, is not matched or substantiated by a corresponding analysis of enough mass-cultural examples. Ching considers, only cursorily, the old Nippon Ho so Kyo kai (NHK, or Japan Broadcasting Company) drama Oshin (1983), directed by Hashida Sugako, about a long-suffering heroine and the deceptiveness of modern values, which found a wide regional audience, though escaping the interest of major English-speaking territories; and the TV anime, Doraemon, about a cat-like robot who makes childrens wishes come true. The latter is even older than Oshin; Doraemon was created in 196970 by Fujimoto Hiroshi and Motoo Abiko. The formulation was in Datsu-A Ron, an editorial published in the newspaper Jiji Shimpo on 16 March 1885. Lo, 2005, is an example of a study so committed to denouncing any hint of an essentialized East Asia that the critic cannot see that it is actually difference that structures the films he examines. Lo analyzes cultural difference entrenched at the centre of films such as Tos Fulltime Killer /and Lee Chi-ngais Sleepless

256 Notes to pp. 119120

Town (1998; Fuyajo in Japanese, Bu ye cheng in Chinese), only to return to the question, If Asias heterogeneity is primordial and irreducible and if it designates a unity that can never be contained by any cinematic representation, should we understand those Asian films of Japan and Hong Kong as tokens of presence for that which is absent? (Lo, 2005, p. 143). 8. The countries that are particularly important are Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam, where there is the presence of ethnic Chinese citizens. See Teo, 2000. 9. Other films in the same cosmopolitan fantasy action mode include Purple Storm /(1999) and 2000AD /2000(2000). The latter was coproduced by Hong Kongs Media Asia Films and Peoples Production Limited and Singapores MediaCorp Raintree Pictures, and is an indicative instance of a transnational/regional co-production strategy of film production. 10. The multilingual strategy for overcoming difference also applies to pop music. A major indicative example is Lee Soo Mans successful S. M. Entertainment Group, South Koreas leading production house. BoA (real name Gwon Bo-A), who learnt Japanese and English and was groomed for the Japanese market, was S. M.s first major overseas success. Her debut Japanese-language album in 2002 was the first nonJapanese Asian album to reach number one in Oricon magazines album charts. Lees sights also turned to China, and in an interview he predicted that the China market will exceed Japans by 2010; when asked why he was not thinking of the U.S. market, Lees response was revealing: China will soon become the U.S.; why waste energy by entering the U.S. market? Its Asians after Whites, Blacks, and Hispanics. Even if I go there, it would be difficult to get out of minor market (Interview with Lee Soo Man, 2005). This has meant, for example, that the S. M. boy band TVXQ (debuted 2004) had their first album, Tri-Angle (Avex Trax AVKCD80152A), released in China under the title Dongfang Shenqi (China Record Corporation, CCD 1994), the groups Chinese name. This version includes three songs that appear twice, first in Korean and then in Mandarin. In Korean, TVXQ are known as Dong Bang Shin Ki, and in Mandarin as Dongfang Shenqi, both meaning Gods Rising in the East. They have since done well in Japan, with Japaneselanguage versions of their songs, under the name To ho shinki, which has the same meaning as the Korean and Chinese names. 11. Sociologist Chua Beng Huat argues that interest in the region should move on from Confucianism and its supposed links with capitalism to the urban and the modern and the construction of a pan-East Asian identity [as] a conscious ideological project for the producers of East Asian cultural products, based on the commercial desire of capturing a larger audience and market (Chua, 2004, pp. 216, 217). An emphasis on the seeming commonality of regional urban lifestyles allows at least temporary suppression of national/ethnic differences in order to construct televisual products. 12. The obvious mistake in the films main urban location Wan Chai, where Suzie is to be found, is actually Hollywood Road and Ladder Street in the Central district does not in itself detract from the films overall representation of the then-colonys urbanscape.

Notes to pp. 121164 257

13. Cf. Ko: Research on Japanese idol dramas in Taiwan point out that Taiwanese youths consider the urban Tokyo setting as the major reason for their popularity (Ko, 2004, p. 118). 14. Kaneshiro himself, as a leading man in film and television productions in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan and China, embodies trans-regional elements: of TaiwaneseJapanese parentage, he speaks English, Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese, Taiwanese and Japanese; see Tsai, 2004. 15. It grossed HK$28 million, then US$3.5 million (Elley, 2000). 16. This scene was actually shot at a railway station in Singapore. 17. In these earlier films, the male characters are often insecure and fearful with tentative relationships between the men, who also lack the confidence to relate successfully to the opposite sex. 18. In 1988, Toei Animation adapted the manga series for an anime original video animation (OVA), meaning that it was a direct-to-video product. Chapter 8 1. The Hong Kong International Film Festival has featured special discussion topics on the early relationship between China and Hong Kong cinema; see for instance the special issues of the 14th Hong Kong International Film Festival (1990) and the 19th Hong Kong International Film Festival (1995) programmes: The China Factor in Hong Kong Cinema and Early Images of Hong Kong & China. See Ain-ling Wong, 2005, for a study of the early Hong KongGuangdong film connection. Peter Chans new war epic Warlords was released simultaneously in Hong Kong and mainland China in December 2007. Peter Chan was still not sure whether it was love or not (Perhaps Love) in 2005. But in 2007 it is surely love. The Chinese title of Warlords , Touming Zhuang means taking a blood oath of brotherhood. In the light of the rise of MainlandHong Kong co-productions, there seems to be a cryptic message in the Chinese title.

2.

Chapter 9 1. For more on the state of Hong Kong cinema, see Yau, 2001; Cheung and Chu, 2004; and Stokes and Hoover, 1999. 2. Brian De Palma was also in the wings. 3. For more from me on this film, see Marchetti, 2004. 4. Quoted by Levy, 200408. 5. Discussed by a blogger on a site devoted to the DVD release of The Killer. See Kuby. 6. Quoted on the Internet Movie Database (IMDB), http://www.imdb.com/name/ nm0000217/bio (accessed 7 June 2008). 7. For an analysis of Scorseses interest in the gaze and the evocation of the Panopticon, see Kolker, 2000, pp. 2056. 8. For more on this see Marchetti, 2007. 9. Some of this common ground relating to masculinity may explain the cross-cultural appeal of stars such as Jackie Chan and Jet Li in Hollywood. For more on the masculinity embodied by these stars in relation to Chinese culture, see Louie, 2002. 10. For an insightful discussion of Scorsese in relation to the notion of the remake, see Kolker, 1998.

258 Notes to pp. 169197

Chapter 10 1. 2. This famous line from Shakespeares Hamlet has been used as an epigraph in Derrida, 1994, p. 1. For more recent discussions on hauntology, see Sprinker, 1999. This spectral approach was first conceptualized in my earlier publications in connection with Fruit Chans first film Made in Hong Kong, see Cheung, 2004, pp. 35268 and Cheung, 2009, Chapters 5 and 6. See Castoriadis, 1998, in which he develops the idea of kairos in relation to crisis. For the discussion of kairos in rhetoric, see Miller, 1992. As Sigmund Freud suggests, the complexity of the uncanny derives from the double semantic of the term uncanny in German. He argues that the term heimlich is an ambiguous term because on the one hand it means what is familiar and agreeable, and on the other, what is concealed and kept out of sight. So the German unheimlich involves what is unfamiliar and hidden at the same time. See Freud, 1964, pp. 22425. For the former, see Carroll, 2007, p. 237; for Hong Kongs aspiration to be a world city, see Government Information Center, 1999. See http://www.inmediahk.net/node/295539 and http://www.inmediahk.net/ node/275144 for the NGO known as the World City Committee, which aims to intervene in the governments redevelopment of Old Bailey Street and Graham Street. The original poetic lines come from Liu Yong. The original poetic lines come from Xin Qizhi.

3. 4.

5. 6.

7. 8.

Chapter 11 1. See, for instance, PricewaterhouseCoopers, 2007. For a comparison of Singapore and Hong Kong, see Sanyal, 2006; the author is director of global markets research for Deutsche Bank. For an account of how Hong Kong ranks in academic studies of global cities, see Forrest and Yip, 2004, pp. 20911. See, for instance, Forrest and Yip, 2004, for the point that global cities are typically the primary economic and cultural centers within their respective national economies and are distinguished by their social-cultural milieux and landmark buildings. They are also associated with major airports which connect them to other concentrations of economic and cultural power where the cosmopolitan elite can enjoy the highest standards of cuisine, accommodation and entertainment (p. 208). For instance, Saskia Sassen limits the cultural consequences of these global flows to the sphere of consumption and regards them as ancillary. See Sassen, 2002, Introduction. The infiltration of these global market processes, Sassen argues, leads to different forms of valorization of economic activities, as exemplified by inflation in the area of luxury consumption, which displaces and even destroys prior urban forms of economic activity. High prices and profit levels in the internationalized sector and its ancillary activities, such as top-of-the-line restaurants and hotels, have made it increasingly difficult for other sectors to compete for space and investments. Many of these other sectors have experienced considerable downgrading and/ or displacement, as, for example, neighborhood shops tailored to local needs are replaced by upscale boutiques and restaurants catering to new high-income urban elites (p. 17). At the same time, Sassen repeatedly uses the metaphor of feeding to

2.

3.

Notes to pp. 197214 259

describe how flows of capital and expenditure fuel or feed new forms of economic activity and urban growth. 4. Various TDC documents highlight the importance of culture as education in sustaining knowledge-based services (the financial sector) as something that Hong Kong can contribute to the Mainland that is, the development of financial markets, services in private banking and wealth management. It is noted that the government should adopt a policy that expands its commitment to research and development and improves Hong Kongs capacity for innovation and for being a technological incubator. See Hong Kong Trade Development Council, 2006. The importance of education in creating higher quality human capital that is adequate to the challenge of upgrading Hong Kongs position within the hierarchy of world cities is also noted. To solve these problems, an education system that helps to enhance labour flexibility and skill levels is essential. Moreover, homegrown professionals and intellects, not the imported ones, provide long-term support to the development of a world city. Hence, our education system will play a central role in reducing the mismatch in the labour market. See Hong Kong Trade Development Council, 2000. 5. Cf. Pun and Wu, 2006, pp. 13954, on the imaginary division of the global city of Hong Kong into two blocs the global side, which includes entrepreneurs, managers and professionals, and the local side, which includes new immigrants, the working class and underclass who are only afforded a deformed citizenship. 6. For a reading of the Handover Trilogy and Durian Durian in terms of the cultural politics and social anxieties of 1997 and its aftermath, see Lok Fung , 2002, pp. 12955. 7. For a discussion of the stigmatization of social identity based on inner-city territorial locations that are inhabited by new immigrants and the poor, such as Sham Shui Po, Kwun Tong, Yuen Long and Tuen Mun, see Law and Lee, 2006, pp. 23637. 8. For a discussion of the social realism of Chans Durian Durian that links Chan to the Mainlands Sixth Generation filmmakers such as Jia Zhangke, see Gan, 2005, pp. 3541. Cheung (forthcoming) suggests, however, that Chans use of long shots and takes in the same film are part of a more complex quasi-realist aesthetics instead of a more conventional documentary realism or cinma vrit. Hollywood, Hong Kong clearly marks a shift away from the documentary aesthetic of his earlier films, which had amateur casts. The Mainland star, Zhou Xun, plays the lead role of Tung-tung. 9. When we first see Tung-tung with Peter Chau, she gives him oral sex but refuses to take money from him and tells him she wants him to be her friend. He is also the bureaucratic instrument for the dispossession of the villages inhabitants. He sends out letters of notification that their houses are illegal structures slated for demolition. 10. It would be interesting to consider where exactly Tung-tung is in social-scientific descriptions of the labour market and social polarization in Hong Kong as a global city, given the sophisticated nature of her deployment of sex work. See Lee, Wong and Law, 2007. Chapter 12 1. Interview with Chris Berry and Laikwan Pang, 26 March 2007, Hong Kong.

260 Notes to pp. 214224

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

The ADC was established in 1995. Its support programmes have been crucial to the sustenance of independent cinema in Hong Kong in recent years. For more detailed discussion of this period of Cheungs filmmaking, see Berry, 2004. A full history of these early independent activities remains to be written. Thank you to Stephen Teo and others for pointing me in the right direction. Interview with Jimmy Choi, Hong Kong, 30 March 2008. Thank you to Mickey Choi of Hong Kong Arts Centre for supplying these figures by email on 26 November 2008. Interview with Teresa Kwong, director of the IFVA awards, 10 April 2007. Kevin Lee, Jia Zhangke, Senses of Cinema, http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/ directors/03/jia.html, accessed 20 November 2007. http://www.yec.com/, accessed 20 November 2007. http://www.yec.com/vm.htm, accessed 20 November 2007. Interview with Esther Yeung by Chris Berry and Laikwan Pang, 26 March 2007, Hong Kong. http://www.yec.com/en/film_catalogue.php#end, accessed 9 May 2009. Interview, 3 April 2007, Hong Kong. Interview with Simon Chung by Chris Berry and Laikwan Pang, 10 April 2007, Chinese University of Hong Kong. Interview with Tammy Cheung, 24 March 2008. http://www.xschina.org/show.php?id=3499, accessed 15 March 2008. In 2007, another group called V-Artivist () split off from Videopower. Interview with Ms Lee Wai Yi, executive manager of Videopower from 2002 to 2007, by Yang Yeung, 13 December 2007. Interview with Sylvia Feng by Chris Berry and Laikwan Pang, 29 June 2007, Taipei. For more information about documentaries broadcast on the programme, see http:// www.pts.org.tw/php/_utility/ehomepage/detail.php?PAGE=CAT&CAT=docu, accessed 15 March 2007. Curtin discusses the consequences of this in Chapter 6 of his book (Curtin, 2007, pp. 13350). Interview with Sylvia Feng. Interview with Yang Li-chou by Chris Berry and Laikwan Pang, Taipei, 28 June 2007 (my translation). Chris Berry and Laikwan Pang, conversation with Professor Ti Wei and Lu Fei-I, Taipei, 25 June 2007. Interview with Yang Li-chou. For further details of programmes, see pp. 1421. Available online at http://www. rthk.org.hk/about/brochure/RTHKbrochure2006_txt.pdf, accessed 2 January 2008. For commissioning details for 2008/09, including for documentary, see http://www. rthk.org.hk/tvcommissioning/tvce.htm, accessed 2 January 2008. Interview, Hong Kong, 24 March 2008. Interview, 24 March 2008. Interview with Chris Berry and Laikwan Pang, 26 March 2007. The best introduction to these movements, especially American Direct Cinema, remains Mamber, 1976.

Notes to pp. 225241 261

28. For a detailed discussion of censorship in Hong Kong, see Ng, forthcoming. 29. For example, Pheng Cheah discusses how some forms of Chinese diasporic cosmopolitanism work hand in hand with global capitalism in Cheah, 2006. Chapter 13 In his essay on In the Mood for Love, Thomas Y. T. Luk talks about mutation of the literary source. See Luk, 2005, pp. 21019. 2. So J. Hoberman, for instance, commenting on the recent presentation of Fallen Angels at the BAMcinmatek in New York, not only praised the film by way of contrast to My Blueberry Nights, but also described it as the last installment of his long goodbye to the lost paradise of colonial Hong Kong (Hoberman, 2007). On the impulse to read Hong Kong films as allegories of Hong Kong, and the need to resist it, see Tambling, 2003, pp. 921, and Chow, 2004, p. 129. 3. For an interpretation of the changes in capital flows in relation to the Hong Kong governments interest in city branding, see Pang, 2006, pp. 736. It may be added that Hong Kong can now rely on more than just local films to advertise its image, as international production companies are increasingly making use of it as a set for their own films (consider, for instance, the most recent instalment in the Batman series, The Dark Knight). 4. On the unspoken no songno movie rule in Chinese cinema from 1930s Shanghai onwards, and its reincarnations in contemporary Hong Kong cinema, see Hu, 2006, p. 410. 5. This way of working with pre-existing songs appears to be as old as the medium itself. Rick Altman has shown that titles and lyrics of a song were used to connect music to the image from as early as the nickelodeon business in the 1910s. See Altman, 2001, p. 22. 6. The original version of the text is written as a dialogue between two lost lovers a distant relation to the relationship between the two partners in the film. 7. The one exception to this confirms my interpretation. Once the hit man has entered the restaurant, we see a close-up of his shoes and calves, shot from floor level, as he makes his way toward his victims. Then, for a fleeting moment, the sounds of the restaurant become present the suggestion, before the fateful shootings begin, of a faint, temporary awareness on his part of the surrounding environment. 8. Yeh Yueh-Yu notes a similar suppression of sounds in Chungking Express, when California Dreamin marks the space of Fayes daydreaming (ostensibly Agent 663s flat, which she trespasses in and cleans while playing the song). See Yeh, 1999, p. 126. 9. On the character of the hitman and his affinities with the contract killer in Suzukis Branded to Kill, see Teo, 2005, pp. 90 and 96. 10. The best prcis I know of the significance of Teng and her music happens to be a reading of a film in which her music looms as a powerful reminder of both sameness and difference. See Cheung, 2007, p. 234 ff. 11. For an interpretation of Chyi Chins Missing You (Si-mu te jen), used by He Zhiwu as a soundtrack to images of his dying father captured on video, see Yeh, 1999, pp. 13132. A complete list of the music used for this film is not yet available. The movies 1.

262 Notes to p. 241

soundtrack album, released in 1995, does not contain every piece of music employed in the film. An online list only includes the music composed or arranged by the ChanGarcia team (see http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112913/board/nest/36715837, accessed 24 June 2008). 12. Part of my discussion of My Blueberry Nights draws on an essay originally published for MUSE 13, February 2008, pp. 1025 (permission granted by Eastslope Publishing Limited). 13. Brian Hu correctly stresses how in Hong Kong the fluidity of personnel between several media has taken on an unquestionably local character due to the extent to which the crossing between so many media is tolerated. See Hu, 2006, p. 411 ff.

References

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Chapter 4
Adamson, Bob (forthcoming). Language Policy and the Medium of Instruction, in P. Morris and B. Adamson (eds), Curriculum and Schooling in Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press). Arac, Jonathan (2002). Anglo-Globalism? New Left Review 16, pp. 3545. Bassnett, Susan and Andr Lefevere (eds) (1990). Translation, History and Culture (London: Pinter). Bassnett, Susan and Harish Trivedi (eds) (1999). Post-colonial Translation: Theory and Practice (London and New York: Routledge). Benjamin, Walter (1992). The Task of the Translator, Illuminations, trans. H. Zohn (London: Fontana), pp. 7082. Bermann, Sandra and Michael Wood (eds) (2005). Nation, Language and the Ethics of Translation (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Bhatia, Tej K. and William C. Ritchie (eds) (2005). The Handbook of Bilingualism (Oxford: Blackwell). Chan Hok-shing, Brian (1998). How Does Cantonese-English Code-Mixing Work? in Martha C. Pennington (ed), pp. 191216. Chan, Stephen C. K. (ed) (1997). Cultural Imaginary and Ideology (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press) (in Chinese). Cheyfitz, Eric (1997). The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from The Tempest to Tarzan (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press). Chow, Rey (1998). Things, Common/Places, Passages of the Port City: On Hong Kong and Hong Kong Author Leung Ping-kwan, in Ethics after Idealism (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press), pp. 16887. (2002). An Ethics of Consumption, Foreword to Leung Ping-kwan, Travelling with a Bitter Melon, ed. Martha P. Y. Cheung (Hong Kong: Asia 2000 Ltd.), pp. 917. Cronin, Michael (2000a). History, Translation, Postcolonialism, in Sherry Simon and Paul St-Pierre (eds), Changing the Terms: Translating in the Postcolonial Era (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press), pp. 3352. (2000b). Across the Lines: Travel, Language, Translation (Cork: Cork University Press). (2006). Translation and Identity (London: Routledge). Damrosch, David (2003). What Is World Literature? (Princeton: Princeton University Press). De Certeau, Michel (1988). The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press). Duarte, Joo Ferreira, Alexander Assis Rosa and Teresa Seruya (eds) (2006). Translation Studies at the Interface of Disciplines (Amsterdam: John Benjamins). Gentzler, Edwin and Maria Tymoczko (eds) (2002). Translation and Power (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press). Gikandi, Simon (2002). Ngugi wa Thiongo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Hayot, Eric, Haun Saussy and Steven G. Yao (2008). Sinographies: Writing China (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Ho, Elaine Yee Lin (2009a). Imaginations Commonwealth: Edmund Blundens Hong Kong Dialogue, PMLA 124:1, pp. 7691. (2009b). Nationalism, Internationalism, the Cold War: Crossing Literary-Cultural Boundaries in 1950s Hong Kong, in Elaine Y. L. Ho and Julia Kuehn (eds), China

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Abroad: Travels, Subjects, Spaces (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press), pp. 85 103. Ho, Tammy Lai Ming (2007). Going to My Parents Place on a Crowded Bus, in Spokenwar, rpt. Concelebratory Shoehorn Review (2008), http://concelebratory.blogspot.com/2008/ 07/tammy-ho-going-to-my-parents-house-on.html (accessed June 2, 2009). (2008). My Home, Poetry Sky Quarterly: Chinese Journal, rpt. http://www.poetrysky. com/chinese/2/heliming.html (accessed June 2, 2009). Huyssen, Andreas (2003). Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press). Leung, Matthew Wing-kwong (2006). The Ideological Turn in Translation Studies, in Joo Ferreira Duarte, Alexandra Assis Rosa and Teresa Seruya (eds), Translation Studies at the Interface of Disciplines (Amsterdam: John Benjamins), pp. 12944. Leung Ping-kwan (2002). Travelling with a Bitter Melon: Selected Poems (19731998) , ed. Martha P. Y. Cheung (Hong Kong: Asia 2000 Ltd.) (in English and Chinese). Li, David C. S. (1996). Issues in Bilingualism and Biculturalism: A Hong Kong Case Study. Berkeley Insights in Linguistics and Semiotics, Vol. 21 (New York: Peter Lang). Li, D. C. S. and Sherman Lee (2005). Bilingualism in East Asia, in Tej K. Bhatia and William C. Ritchie (eds), The Handbook of Bilingualism, Chapter 28 (Oxford: Blackwell). Moretti, Franco (2000). Conjectures on World Literature. New Left Review 1, pp. 5468. (2003). More Conjectures. New Left Review 20, pp. 7381. Ng Kang-chung (2009). Language Policy under More Fire, in South China Morning Post, June 1 (Hong Kong). Ngu g wa Thiongo (1986). Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London: James Currey). Niranjana, Tejaswini (1992). Siting Translation: History, Post-structuralism, and the Colonial Context (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press). (2002). Post-colonial Representation: Translation as Disruption, in Rukmini Bhaya Nair (ed), Translation, Text and Theory: The Paradigm of India (New Delhi and London: Sage), pp. 5576. Pennington, Martha C. (ed) (1998). Language in Hong Kong at Centurys End (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press). Robinson, Douglas (1997). Translation and Empire (Manchester: St Jerome). Saussy, Haun (2008). Media Creoles and the Invention of Delfeng. Conference presentation, Cambridge University. Sherry, Simon and Paul St-Pierre (eds) (2000). Changing the Terms: Translating in the Postcolonial Era (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press). Spivak, Gayatari Chakravorty (1985). Three Womens Texts and a Critique of Imperialism, rpt. in Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (ed) (1986), Race, Writing, and Difference (Chicago: Chicago University Press), pp. 26280. Tymoczko, Maria (1999a). Post-colonial Writing and Literary Translation, in Susan Basnett and Harish Trivedi (eds), Post-colonial Translation: Theory and Practice (London and New York: Routledge), pp. 1940. (1999b). Translation in a Postcolonial Context: Early Irish Literature in English Translation (Manchester: St Jerome).

References to Chapter 5 269

(2000). Translations of Themselves: The Contours of Postcolonial Fiction, in Sherry Simon and Paul St-Pierre (eds), Changing the Terms: Translating in the Postcolonial Era (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press), pp. 14763. Venuti, Lawrence (ed) (1992). Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology (London: Routledge). Wong, Man (1956). Between Two Worlds (Hong Kong: The Student Bookstore). Wong Wang-chi (2000). The Burden of History: A Hong Kong Perspective of the Mainland Discourse of Hong Kong History (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press) (in Chinese). (2007). Local Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Cosmosbooks) (in Chinese). Wong Wang-chi , Li Siu-leung and Chan Ching-kiu Stephen (1997). Hong Kong Un-imagined: History, Culture and the Future, ed. David D. W. Wang (Taipei: Maitian) (in Chinese).

Chapter 5
Abbas, Ackbar (1998). Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press). Bolton, Kingsley (ed) (2002). Hong Kong English: Autonomy and Creativity (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press). Casanova, Pascale (2004). The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Chow, Rey (2005). An Addiction from Which We Never Get Free, New Literary History 36, pp. 4755. Clunies Ross, Bruce (2004). Rhythmical Knots: The World of English Poetry, in Christopher Prendergast (ed), Debating World Literature (London: Verso), pp. 291318. Durant, Alan (1993). Making Ones Language as One Goes Along: Wong Phui Nams Ways of Exile, in Wong Phui Nam, Ways of Exile (London: Skoob Books), pp. 14557. Empson, William (1972). Seven Types of Ambiguity, 3rd edition (Harmondsworth: Penguin). Erni, John Nguyet (2001). Like a Postcolonial Culture: Hong Kong Re-Imagined, Cultural Studies 15(3/4) (2001), pp. 389418. Fung, Anthony (2001). What Makes the Local? A Brief Consideration of the Rejuvenation of Hong Kong Identity, Cultural Studies 15(3/4), pp. 591601. Ho, Louise (1994). Local Habitation (Hong Kong: Twilight Books). (1997). New Ends Old Beginnings, intro. Michael Hollington (Hong Kong: Asia 2000). (2002). Hong Kong Writing and Writing Hong Kong, in Kingsley Bolton (ed), Hong Kong English: Autonomy and Creativity (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press), pp. 17382. (2009). Incense Tree: Collected Poems of Louise Ho (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press). Ho, Louise and Klaus Stierstorfer (eds) (2006) Hongkong: Poems/Gedichte (Tbingen: Stauffenburg). Hutton, Christopher (2006). Writing and Speech in Western Views of the Chinese

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Language, in Q. S. Tong, Wang Shouren and Douglas Kerr (eds), Critical Zone vol. 2, (Hong Kong and Nanjing: Hong Kong University Press), pp. 83105. Leung Ping Kwan (1992). City at the End of Time, trans. Gordon T. Osing and Leung Ping Kwan (Hong Kong: Twilight Books). (1998). The Sorrows of Lan Kwai Fong, trans. Martha P. Y. Cheung and Leung Ping Kwan, in Martha P. Y. Cheung (ed), Hong Kong Collage: Contemporary Stories and Writing (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press), pp. 8595. Lukmani, Yasmeen (1993). Attitudinal Orientation towards Studying English Literature in India, in Rajeswari Sunder Rajan (ed), The Lie of the Land: English Literary Studies in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press), pp. 15686. Moore, Peter R. (2003). The Irony of Marvells Horatian Ode, English Studies 84(1), February, pp. 3356. Patke, Rajeev S. (2003). Nationalism, Diaspora, Exile: Poetry in English from Malaysia, Journal of Commonwealth Literature 38(3), pp. 7185. Said, Edward W. (1988). Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature: Yeats and Decolonization, Field Day Pamphlet no. 15 (Lawrence Hill, Derry: Field Day). Toolan, Michael (1997). Recentering English: New English and Global, English Today [52] 13(4), pp. 310. . Nation Languages, Local Literatures, and International Readers: A New Indigenization in Native English Writers?, http://artsweb.bham.ac.uk/MToolan/ nationlanguage.html (accessed 29 October 2006). Tsang, Steve (2004). A Modern History of Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press). Turner, Matthew and Irene Ngan (eds) (1995). Hong Kong Sixties: Designing Identity (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Arts Centre Publications). Wong Phui Nam (1993). Ways of Exile: Poems from the First Decade (London: Skoob Books). Xu Xi and Mike Ingham (eds) (2003). City Voices: Hong Kong Writing in English 1945 to the Present (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press).

Chapter 6
Abbas, Ackbar (1997). Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press). Abrams, M. H. (1985). A Glossary of Literary Terms (Orlando: Harcourt Brace). Berry, Michael (2005). Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers (New York: Columbia University Press). Burch, Nigel (1981). Nonfictional Subjects, in Theory of Film Practice (Princeton: Princeton University Press), pp. 15667. Carroll, John (2007). A Concise History of Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press). Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari (1986). Nomadology (New York: Semiotext[e]). Deming, Martin. (2001). Danghau Tung-Chee-hwa Fatlok, All Movie Guide, The New York Times, http://movies2.nytimes.com/gst/movies/movie.html?v_id=244102 (accessed 16 November 2009). Hansen, J. (2001). Anniversary Blues: Bureaucracy and Political Meddling Threaten Hong Kong Film Festival, Asiaweek Magazine 27(14), 13 April, pp. 5657, http://www.

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Chapter 7
Bordwell, David (2000). Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Ching, Leo (2001). Globalizing the Regional, Regionalizing the Global: Mass Culture and Asianism in the Age of Late Capital, in Arjun Appadurai (ed), Globalization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), pp. 279306. Chua Beng Huat (2004). Conceptualizing an East Asian Popular Culture, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 5(2), pp. 200221. Dirlik, Arif (2005). Asia Pacific Studies in an Age of Global Modernity, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 6(2), pp. 15870. Douglas, Mike (1993). The New Tokyo Story: Restructuring Space and the Struggle for Place in a World City, in Kuniko Fujita and Richard Child Hill (eds), Japanese Cities in the World Economy (Philadelphia: Temple University Press), pp. 83119. Duara, Prasenjit (2003). Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Lanham, MD.: Rowman & Littlefield). Elley, Derek (2000). Tokyo Raiders, Variety (23 October), http://www.variety.com/review/ VE1117788435.html?categoryid=31&cs=1 (accessed 29 November 2007). Fukuzawa Yukichi (196972). On De-Asianization by Fukuzawa Yukichi, trans. Okada Hidehiro, The Meiji Japan through Contemporary Sources, vol. 3 (Tokyo: Centre for East Asian Cultural Studies), pp. 12933. Interview with Lee Soo Man (2005). BoAjjang Forums, 1 September, http://forums. boajjang.com/index.php?act=ST&f=1&t=34315 (accessed 26 September 2006). Iwabuchi, Koichi (2002). Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press).

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(2003). Pop Cultures Lingua Franca: Language and Regional Popular Cultural Flows in East Asia, in Jennifer Lindsay and Tan Ying Ying (eds), Babel or Behemoth: Language Trends in Asia (Singapore: Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore), pp. 16173. Jameson, Fredric (1998). Globalization as Philosophical Issue, in Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi (eds), The Cultures of Globalization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), pp. 5477. (2002). A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London: Verso). Kamiya Yukie (2002). Communicative Approach, from Asia, in Kataoka Mami (ed), Under Construction: New Dimensions of Asian Art, exhibition catalogue (Tokyo: Japan Foundation Asia Center). Ko, Yu-fen (2004). The Desired Form: Japanese Idol Dramas in Taiwan, in Koichi Iwabuchi (ed), Feeling Asian Modernities: Transnational Consumption of Japanese TV Dramas (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press). Law Kar (ed) (2000). Border Crossings in Hong Kong Cinema: The 24th Hong Kong International Film Festival (Hong Kong: Leisure and Cultural Services Department). Leary, Charles (2004). Full Time Cinema: An Interview with Johnnie To, Off-screen 8(6), 30 June, http://www.horsechamp.qc.ca/new_offscreen/to_interview.html (accessed 15 November 2007). Lo Kwai-Cheung (2005). There Is No Such Thing as Asia: Racial Particularities in the Asian Films of Hong Kong and Japan, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 17(1), Spring, pp. 13358. Morris, Meaghan (2004). Transnational Imagination in Action Cinema: Hong Kong and the Making of a Global Popular Culture, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 5(2), pp. 18199. Pang, Laikwan (2002). Masculinity in Crisis: Films of Milkyway Image and Post-1997 Hong Kong Cinema, Feminist Media Studies 2(3), pp. 32540. (2007). Postcolonial Hong Kong Cinema: Utilitarianism and Trans(Local), Postcolonial Studies 10(4), pp. 41330. Sakai Naoki (2003). Asia: Co-figurative Identification, in Furuichi Yasuko and Hoashi Aki (eds), Asia in Transition: Representation and Identity (Tokyo: Japan Foundation Asia Center), pp. 22231. (2006). You Asians: On the Historical Role of the West and Asia Binary, in Tomiko Yoda and Harry Harootunian (eds), Japan after Japan: Social and Cultural Life from the Recessionary 1990s to the Present (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), pp. 98121. Sun Ge (2000). How Does Asia Mean? Part II, trans. Hui Shiu-Lun and Lau Kinchi, InterAsia Cultural Studies 1(2), pp. 31941. Taylor, Peter D., D. R. F. Walker and J. V. Beaverstock (2002). Firms and Their Global Service Networks, in Saskia Sassen (ed), Global Networks, Linked Cities (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 93115. Teo, Stephen (2000). Local and Global Identity: Whither Hong Kong Cinema?, modified paper, Second International Conference on Chinese Cinema, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong, 9 April, http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/00/7/ hongkong.html (accessed 5 June 2006). (2007). Authors Interview with Johnnie To, in Stephen Teo, Director in Action: Johnnie To and the Hong Kong Action Film (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press).

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Chapter 8
Abbas, Ackbar (1997). Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong Press). Bordwell, David (2000). Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press). Chan Hing Ka, Long Tin and Ma Ka Fai (2007). Ten Years after Reunification, Ten Years of Films, Ming Pao, 20 March, p. D04 (in Chinese). Chan, Peter Ho Sun (2006). I Have to Earn a Living (an interview with Peter Chan in Chinese), Apple Daily, 19 February, p. C7. Chan, To Man et al. (2007). Where Is Hong Kong Film Policy Going?, Media Digest, Radio Television of Hong Kong, http://www.rthk.org.hk/mediadigest/20070215_76_ 121331.html (accessed 18 May 2009) (in Chinese). Cheung, Kwan Mei (ed) (2007). Faces, Silhouette & Montage: 19972007 Review (Hong Kong: City Entertainment) (in Chinese). Chow, Rey (2007). Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films (New York: Columbia University Press). Fong, Henry (2007). Interview with Henry Fong, Sina Entertainment, http://ent.sina.com. cn/m/2007-06-18/20161602753.shtml (accessed 18 May 2009). Fu, Poshek and David Desser (eds) (2000). The Cinema of Hong Kong: History, Arts, Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Hong Kong Film Award Association Board of Directors (ed) (2006). The 25th Hong Kong Film Awards Presentation Ceremony Special (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Film Awards Association Ltd). (2007). The 26th Hong Kong Film Awards Presentation Ceremony Special (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Film Awards Association Ltd.). Hong Kong Film Critics Association (ed) (2007). Not Quite Dead: How to Walk On? Today 77, Summer, pp. 8390 (in Chinese). Hong Kong Trade Development Council (2004). CEPA I & II: Opportunities for Hong Kong Services Industries (Hong Kong: Research Dept of Hong Kong Trade Development Council). (2006). Hong Kong as an Asian Co-production Centre, American Film Market

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Conferences and Seminars, http://www.ifta-online.org/afm/2006seminars.asp#2 (accessed 18 May 2009). (2007). FILMART 2007 Seminar Series: Romancing the Mid-Budget Film, 21 March, http://www.hkfilmart.com/filmart/release16b.htm (accessed 18 May 2009). Hui, Ann (2007). Interview with Ann Hui, Sina Entertainment. http://ent.sina.com.cn/ m/c/2007-06-18/11531602090.shtml (accessed 18 May 2009). Lau, Andrew (2007). Use 300 Million to Light a Fire, Wenhui Pao, 12 March, p. C6 (in Chinese). Lu, Sheldon and Emilie Yeh (2005). Introduction: Mapping the Field of Chinese-Language Cinema, in Chinese-Language Film: Historiography, Poetics, Politics (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press), pp. 124. Ma Rongrong (2007). Hong Kong Cinema: Ten Years after Reunification with China, Lifeweek 431 (14 May), http://www.lifeweek.com.cn/2007-05-21/0002918496.shtml (accessed 18 May 2009). Morris, Meaghan (2005). Introduction: Hong Kong Connections, in Meaghan Morris, Siuleung Li and Stephen Chan Ching-kiu (eds), Hong Kong Connections: Transnational Imagination in Action Cinema (Durham and London: Duke University Press), pp. 118. Shi, Nansun (2007). Interview with Nansun Shi, Sina Entertainment, http://ent.sina.com. cn/m/c/2007-06-18/12051602113.shtml (accessed 18 May 2009). Shih, Shu-mei (2007). Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press). Si, Ruo (2007). The High-Concept Movies in China, Ph.D. dissertation, Hong Kong Baptist University. Sina.com (2007). Ten Years of Hong Kong SAR Films, http://ent.sina.com.cn/f/m/ hkmovie10y/index.shtml (accessed 18 May 2009) (in Chinese). Sun Linlin et al. (2007). Ten Years of Reunification: Feelings on Co-productions, The Beijing News, 23 June, http://ent.thebeijingnews.com/0615/2007/06-23/011@003428.htm (accessed 18 May 2009) (in Chinese). The 14th Hong Kong International Film Festival (ed) (1990). The China Factor in Hong Kong Cinema (Hong Kong: Urban Council). The 19th Hong Kong International Film Festival (ed) (1995). Early Images of Hong Kong and China (Hong Kong: Urban Council). Tong, Stanley (2007). Interview with Stanley Tong, Sina Entertainment, http://ent.sina. com.cn/m/2007-06-18/20111602749.shtml (accessed 18 May 2009). Tsang, Donald (2007). Hong Kong Letter Just Because You Are Here, http://www.info. gov.hk/gia/general/200706/18/P200706150139.htm (accessed 18 May 2009). Tzeng Jiaxin (2007). Hong Kong Cinema Lost Its Character When Adapting to the Mainland Market, Beijing Times, 16 April, p. 19 (in Chinese). Wong, Ain-ling (ed) (2005). The Hong KongGuangdong Film Connection (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Film Archive). Wong, Jum Sum (James Wong) (2003). The Rise and Decline of Cantopop: A Study of Hong Kong Popular Music (19491997), Ph.D. dissertation, University of Hong Kong (in Chinese). Wong Lai Ming (ed) (2007). Ten Years of Reunification, Ten Years of Films, Ming Pao, 20 March (in Chinese).

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Chapter 9
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Chapter 10
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Chapter 11
Brand Hong Kong website. http://www.brandhk.gov.hk/brandhk/eindex.htm (accessed 17 November 2009). Chan, Fruit (dir) (1999). Little Cheung /(film) (Hong Kong: Nicetop). (dir) (2001). Hollywood, Hong Kong /(film) (Hong Kong: Nicetop). Cheung, Esther M. K. (2009). Durian Durian: Defamiliarisation of the Real, in Chris Berry (ed), Chinese Films in Focus II (London: British Film Institute), pp. 9097. Crawford, Darryl (2001). Globalisation and Guanxi: The Ethos of Hong Kong Finance, New Political Economy 6(1), pp. 4565. Forrest, Adrienne La Grange and Yip Ngai-ming (2004). Hong Kong as a Global City? Social Distance and Spatial Differentiation, Urban Studies 41(1), pp. 20728. Fung, Victor (1998). Hong Kong: One Year after the Transition. Paper presented at Hong Kong: Business Opportunities in the New Millennium conference, Chicago, 11 June, http://www.tdctrade.com/tdcnews/9806/98061101.htm (accessed 4 November 2007). Gan, Wendy (2005). Fruit Chans Durian Durian (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press). Hong Kong Trade Development Council (1998). Hong Kong Sees Itself as World City That Serves as Regional Services Hub, Says TDC Chief Economist, 24 September, http://www.tdctrade.com/tdcnews/9809/98092401.htm (accessed 4 November 2007). (1999). HK on Track to Run Competitively, says TDC Chairman, 6 December, http://www.tdctrade.com/tdcnews/9912/99120602.htm (accessed 4 November 2007). (2000). The World-City Challenges, in Economic Forum, February, http://www. tdctrade.com/econforum/bea/bea000201.htm (accessed 4 November 2007). (2006). Hong Kong Should Focus on Knowledge-based Service Industries, 1 May, http://www.tdctrade.com/econforum/boc/boc060501.htm (accessed 4 November 2007). Jameson, Fredric (1988). Cognitive Mapping, in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press), pp. 34757. (1991). Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press). Law, Kam-yee and Kim-ming Lee (2006). Citizenship, Economy, and Social Exclusion of Mainland Chinese Immigrants in Hong Kong, Journal of Contemporary Asia 36(2), pp. 21742. Lee, Kim-ming, Hung Wong and Kam-yee Law (2007). Social Polarisation and Poverty in the Global City: The Case of Hong Kong, China Report 43(1), pp. 130. Lee, Sherry (1999). Twilight for Hard Existence, The Standard, 1 June, http://www. thestandard.com.hk/archive_news_detail.asp?pp_cat=&art_id=29838&sid=&con_ type=1&archive_d_str=19990601 (accessed 1 December 2007). Lok Feng (2002). Sheng Shi Bian Yuan ( ) (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press).

280 References to Chapter 12

Meyer, David R. (2002). Hong Kong: Global Capital Exchange, in Saskia Sassen (ed), Global Networks, Linked Cities (New York: Routledge), pp. 24971. PricewaterhouseCoopers (2007). London to Rise from Sixth to Fourth Place in Global City GDP Rankings by 2020, Says PricewaterhouseCoopers, 7 March, http://www. pwc.com/extweb/ncpressrelease.nsf/docid/1C917B3A01FAE5558525729600708154 (accessed 4 November 2007). Pun, Ngai and Ka-Ming Wu (2006). Lived Citizenship and Lower-Class Chinese Migrant Women: A Global City without Its People, in Agnes S. Ku and Ngai Pun (eds), Remaking Citizenship in Hong Kong: Community, Nation and the Global City (London: Routledge), pp. 13954. Sanyal, Sanjeev (2006). Singapore: Asias Global City? Paper presented at the Fourth Singapore Economic Roundtable, 11 March. Sassen, Saskia (2002). Introduction: Locating Cities on Global Circuits, in Saskia Sassen (ed), Global Networks, Linked Cities (New York: Routledge), pp. 136. Tao, Zhigang and Y. C. Richard Wong (2002). Hong Kong: From an Industrialised City to a Centre of Manufacturing-related Services, Urban Studies 39(12), pp. 234558.

Chapter 12
Berry, Chris (2004). Direct from Hong Kong: Tammy Cheung, Dox 54, pp. 1415. (2006). Independently Chinese: Duan Jinchuan, Jiang Yue and Chinese Documentary, in Paul Pickowicz and Yingjin Zhang (eds), From Underground to Independent: Alternative Film Culture in Contemporary China (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield), pp. 10222. Bordwell, David (2000). Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press). Cheah, Pheng (2006). Chinese Cosmopolitanism in Two Senses, in Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights (Cambridge: Harvard), pp. 12042. Chen Xiaolei () (2003). Bagua Nzi de Jiangji (Notes on the Award-Winning Nosy Woman), Mingbao yuekan, March, p. 25. Cheng, Andy (2004). Teachers Voice Concerns over Schooling, South China Morning Post, 14 January, Young Post, p. 3. Curtin, Michael (2007). Playing to the Worlds Biggest Audience: The Globalization of Chinese Film and TV (Berkeley: University of California Press). Documenting Hong Kong: Tammy Cheung Interviewed (2007). http://www.firecrackermedia-com/interviews/documenting-hk-tammy-cheu.shtml (accessed 21 November 2007). Garcia, Roger (1986). Ten Years After, in Li Cheuk-to, Wong Ain-ling and Tony Rayns (eds), Ten Years of Hong Kong Cinema (19761985) (Hong Kong: The Urban Council), pp. 1316. Jaffee, Valerie (2004). Bringing the World to the Nation: Jia Zhangke and the Legitimation of Chinese Underground Film, Senses of Cinema 32, http://archive.sensesofcinema. com/contents/04/32/chinese_underground_film.html (accessed 15 March 2008). Kwok, Yenni (1999). Hidden from Sight: A Documentary Sheds Light on the Lives of Hong Kongs Indians, Asiaweek, 13 August, http://www.pathfinder.com/ asiaweek/99/0813/feat3.html (accessed 18 November 2007).

References to Chapter 13 281

Lee, Kevin (n.d.). Jia Zhangke, Senses of Cinema, http://www.sensesofcinema.com/ contents/directors/03/jia.html (accessed 20 November 2007). Liu, Lydia (1995). Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity China 19001937 (Stanford: Stanford University Press). Mamber, Stephen (1976) Cinema Verite in America: Studies in Uncontrolled Documentary (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Ming Pao (2003). Fanying Xianshi/Chouhua Xuexiao? (Reflecting Reality/Vilifying Schools?), 15 April, p. 4. Ng, Kenny K. K. (2008). Inhibition vs. Exhibition: Political Censorship of Chinese and Foreign Cinemas in Postwar Hong Kong, Journal of Chinese Cinemas 2(1), pp. 2335. Reynaud, Brnice (1996). New Visions/New Chinas: Video-Art, Documentation, and the Chinese Modernity in Question, in Michael Renov and Erika Suderburg (eds), Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis), pp. 22957. RTHK (Radio Television Hong Kong) (2006). RTHK 2006, http://www.rthk.org.hk/ about/brochure/RTHKbrochure2006_txt.pdf (accessed 2 January 2008). Sek Kei (2003). Jiujing you shenme wenti? (Actually, Wheres the Problem?), Ming Pao, 25 April. Teo, Stephen (1997). Hong Kong Cinema: The Extra Dimensions (London: BFI). Wang, Yiman (2005). The Amateurs Lightning Rod: DV Documentary in Postsocialist China, Film Quarterly 58(4), pp. 1626. (2008). The Transnational as Methodology: Transnationalizing Chinese Film Studies through the Example of The Love Parade and Its Chinese Remakes, Journal of Chinese Cinemas 2(1), pp. 921.

Chapter 13
Altman, R. (2001). Cinema and Popular Song: The Lost Tradition, in P. Robertson-Wojcik and A. Knight (eds), Soundtrack Available (Durham and London: Duke University Press), pp. 1930. Cheung, Esther M. K. (2007). In Love with Music: Memory, Identity and Music in Hong Kongs Diasporic Films, in K. E. Kuah-Pearce and A. P. Davidson (eds), At Home in the Chinese Diaspora (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 22443. Chow, Rey (2004). Nostalgia of the New Wave: Structure in Wong Kar-wais Happy Together, in E. M. K. Cheung and C. Yiu-wai (eds), Between Home and World: A Reader in Hong Kong Cinema (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press), pp. 12746. Gorbman, Claudia (2006). Ears Wide Open: Kubricks Music, in P. Powrie and R. Stilwell (eds), Changing Tunes: The Use of Pre-existing Music in Film (Aldershot-Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 318. Hoberman, J. (2007). Redeeming Feature, The Village Voice, 31 July, online at http://www. villagevoice.com/film/0732,hoberman,77445,20.html (accessed 22 June 2008). Hu, Brian (2006). The KTV Aesthetic: Popular Music Culture and Contemporary Hong Kong Cinema, Screen 47(4), Winter, pp. 40724. Luk, T. Y. T. (2005). Novels into Film: Liu Yichangs Tte-Bche and Wong Kar-wais In the Mood for Love, in S. Lu-E. Yeh (ed), Chinese-Language Film: Historiography, Poetics, Politics (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press), pp. 21019.

282 References to Chapter 13

Pang, Laikwan (2006). City Branding and Cinema: The Case of Hong Kong, in S.-D. Kim and J. David (eds), Cinema in/on Asia (Gwangju: Asia Culture Forum), pp. 736. Tambling, Jeremy (2003). Happy Together and Allegory, in Wong Kar-Wais Happy Together (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press), pp. 921. Teo, Stephen (2005). Wong Kar-Wai (London: BFI Publishing). Yeh, Yueh-Yu (1999). A Life of Its Own: Musical Discourses in Wong Kar-Wais Film, Post Script 19(1), Fall, pp. 12036.

Index

1a space, 37 2 Become 1 (film), 138 2nd Floor 5 Sons Studio, 33 7-Eleven, 184 9/11 (September 11, 2001), 42, 159 24 (TV series), 159 1967 riots, 18, 75, 78, 89, 177 1997 handover. see return to China (1997) 2000 AD (film), 256n9 Abbas, Ackbar, 40, 78, 104, 140, 151, 172, 1779, 254n13 Abe Hiroshi, 1223 Abiko, Motoo, 255n5 Abrams, M. H., 98 Academy Awards (Oscars), 14853, 1589, 164, 1667 action films, 5, 118, 120, 122, 128, 130, 147, 14950, 159, 245, 256n9 activism, 25, 29, 36, 38, 40, 55, 99, 10710, 174, 220 Adamson, Bob, 251n2 ADC. see Hong Kong Arts Development Council Addison, Joseph, 100 Adeus Macau (documentary film), 99 advertising. see Brand Hong Kong Africa, 12 African Americans, 1556, 166, 256n10 Agns b. Cinema, 223 alienation, 3, 5, 162, 170, 207 Alive (band), 144 alternative art. see performance art

Altman, Rick, 261n5 Altman, Robert, 166 amateurism (Beijing documentary film), 221 American Film Market conferences, 143 American Idol (TV show), 101 Amores Perros (film), 214 Amoy Gardens, Kowloon, 1516 Analyze That (film), 163 Analyze This (film), 163 Anderson, Laurie, 6, 238, 245 animation, 21617, 255n5, 257n18 see also comics anti-subversion law. see national security legislation Antonioni, Michelangelo, 229 Apocalypse Now (film), 159 Apple Daily, 19 Arac, Jonathan, 64 Arc Light Films, 141 architecture cinema, 200 Hong Kong, 2, 10, 38, 247n3, 2478n6 language & literature, 605, 89 performance art, 26 spectral cities, 172, 180, 188 Tokyo, 1224 world cities, 423, 45, 4851, 197, 258n2 see also heritage conservation & preservation; housing Argentina, 50, 82, 249n11 art, 3, 13, 2732, 40 see also sculpture

284 Index

art actions. see performance art art films, 1478, 154, 216, 223 Article 23 of the Basic Law, 18, 314, 37, 225 see also national security artists & cultural workers, 25, 43, 503, 93, 97, 107, 111, 197 Arts Development Council. see Hong Kong Arts Development Council As Tears Go By (film), 150 ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations), 115 Asia Art Archive, 256, 301, 40 Asia-Pacific region. see East Asia Asia Society, 247n4 Asian economic crisis. see Asian financial crisis Asian financial crisis (199798), 14, 467, 116, 119, 127, 136, 1967, 218 Asian New Force cinema, 217 Asian region. see East Asia Asian values, 113, 116 Asians, in the U.S., 256n10 Asias World City. see world city status Assassins (film), 128 Assayas, Olivier, 149 Association of English Medium Secondary Schools, 252n16 Association of Heads of Secondary Schools, 252n16 Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), 115 Astruc, Alexandre, 148 ATV, 223 Auden, W. H., 81 Audition (film), 148 Aufderheide, Pat, 150 Australia, 2, 4, 1213, 44, 75, 778, 802 auteur cinema, 1489, 1523, 155, 164, 1667, 216, 2323 see also film school style authoritarianism, 1314, 28, 36, 2245 B-movies, 156

Baba communities, 84 Bahasa Malaysia, 84 baihua, 4 Baldwin, Alec, 153 Ballhaus, Michael, 152 BAMcinmatek (NY), 260n2 Bandung era, 116 Barthes, Roland, 148 Basic Law, 1011, 1415, 21, 32, 347 see also Article 23 of the Basic Law Batman (film series), 153, 261n3 Battle for the Republic of China, The (film), 136 Battle of Wits (film), 138 Baudelaire, Charles, 18990 Baudrillard, Jean, 155 BBC television, 12 Beatles, 153 Beijing cinema, 1345 documentary film, 215, 2201 Fine Arts Academy, 31 government (see Peoples Republic of China (PRC)) Hong Kong compared & linked with, 114, 248n7, 250n15 performance art, 323, 35, 37, 40, 534 SARS outbreak, 1617 see also Tiananmen Square Benjamin, Walter, 58, 62, 16970, 190 Berger, Tobias, 33, 37 Berlin, 40, 53 Berlin Film Festival, 107 Berlin Wall, 12 Bermann, Sandra, 59 Berry, Chris chapter by, 56, 21328 cited, 99, 216, 226, 25960 (notes) Bertolucci, Bernardo, 229 Bhatia, Tej K., 251n3 Biancorosso, Giorgio, chapter by, 6, 22945 Bigelow, Kathryn, 128 Bilbao Guggenheim Museum, 47 Bildung, 1945

Index 285

bilingualism & multilingualism cinema, 114, 120, 1224 cultural identity & education, 567, 60, 656, 68, 723, 251nn24, 254n10 literature, 823, 86 pop music, 256n10 bird flu (H5N1 virus), 14 blockbuster films, 137, 141, 154 blogs. see internet Bo Ma Saan (Braemar Hill), 106 BoA (aka Gwon Bo-A), 256n10 Bollywood, 148 Bond films, 122, 124 border between Hong Kong & mainland, 5, 10, 789, 200, 215, 227 Bordwell, David, 122, 132, 216 Borges, Jorge Luis, 83 Boston, 77, 1523, 1568, 1605 box office. see Hong Kong cinema Boym, Svetlana, 178 Bradley, Stephen, 249n10 Braemar Hill (Bo Ma Saan), 106 brain drain, 147 Brand Hong Kong, 6, 48, 137, 147, 18891, 193, 248n8, 261n3 Branded to Kill (Koroshi no rakuin, film), 1289, 261n9 Brando, Marlon, 159 Brecht, Bertolt, 165 British culture, 6, 60, 634, 66, 68, 100, 1034, 176, 233, 261n2 British sovereignty cinema, 139, 166, 173, 177, 180, 182, 231 colonial history, 14, 910, 1214, 201, 434, 7880, 91, 1045, 111, 116, 247(Ch1)n1, 247n3 documentary film, 225 Hong Kong culture, 2, 56, 124, 171, 249n10 Hongkongers attitudes towards, 5, 19, 31 language, 56, 87, 251n4 legal system, 1067 literature, 76

performance art, 27, 29 political system, 22 broadcasting. see media Broadway Cinematheque, 218, 223 Brokeback Mountain (film), 244 Broomfield, Nick, 99 brothels. see sex workers Brother (film), 219 Brown, Ruth, 243 Bu ye cheng (Sleepless Town, film), 255n7 Buddhism, 153, 163, 205 Buenos Aires, 50 built environment. see architecture Bulger, James Whitey, 152, 160, 165 Bulger, William, 152 Bumiputra (Malaysia), 84 Burch, Nigel, 109 bureaucracy. see civil service Burkean sublime, 172 Burns, Robert, 86 Burton, Tim, 153 Bush, George W., 160 business. see commercial development Butler, Judith, 30, 34 Butterflies (film), 219 Canada, 1213, 22, 44, 81, 188, 21314, 224 see also Vancouver cannibalism, 2056, 210 Canto-lish, 103 Canton. see Guangzhou Cantonese cooking, 7 Cantonese culture, 2, 5, 138 Cantonese language biliteracy & translation, 56, 254n10, 256n14 cultural production, 6, 35, 50, 78, 868, 1023, 120, 1223, 125, 129, 142, 235 Hongkongers use, 4, 83, 175, 251n4 Malaysia, 84 Cantopop, 6, 131, 144, 147, 231 Cape Fear (film), 164 capital punishment, 106 capitalism

286 Index

cinema, 160, 1634, 166, 174, 180, 216, 256n11, 261n3 documentary film, 227 East Asia, 113, 11516, 1212 global system, 1959, 201, 205, 20710, 255n5, 258n3, 260n29 politics, 12, 45, 53, 131 Caribbean poetry, 86 Carroll, John M. chapter by, 3, 923 cited, 173, 177, 258n5 Cartier, Carolyn, chapter by, 3, 2540 Casanova, Pascale, 835, 87, 253nn45, 253n7 Casino (film), 152 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 257(Ch10)n3 Cat Power (Chan Marshall), 2413 Catholicism, 153, 156, 1613 Causeway Bay, 29, 106 celebrity, 16, 101 censorship. see freedom of speech Central district, 10, 16, 1819, 29, 38, 1201, 1856, 256n12 Central Policy Unit, HKSAR, 132 Centre Stage (film), 46 CEPA. see Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement Certeau, Michel de, 65, 183, 188 Cervantes, Miguel: Don Quixote, 254n13 CFCC (China Film Co-production Corporation), 133, 137 C&G Artpartment, 34, 36 Chan, Anson, 19, 22, 247n4, 248n7 Chan, Benny, 120 Chan, Chik, 175 Chan, Conroy, 144 Chan, Eason, 215 Chan, Elsa, 106, 108 Chan, Evans, 99, 217, 2201 Chan, Frankie, 233, 261n11 Chan, Fruit, 139, 147, 198, 21011 Dumplings, 185, 187, 198 handover trilogy, 139, 182, 1989, 259(Ch11)n6

handover trilogy (1) Made in Hong Kong, 139, 1434, 1823, 198, 257(Ch10)n2 handover trilogy (2) The Longest Summer, 1823 handover trilogy (3) Little Cheung, 1701, 1826, 188, 198 Public Toilet, 198 sex workers trilogy, 1989 sex workers trilogy (1) Durian Durian, 182, 185, 187, 1989, 203, 259(Ch11) n6, 259n8 sex workers trilogy (2) Hollywood, Hong Kong, 7, 50, 185, 187, 198211, 250n12, 259n8 Chan, Gordon, 140 Chan Hing-ka, 138 Chan, Jackie, 136, 147, 257n9 Chan Kwan Po, 252n15 Chan, Natalia Sui Hung, 178 Chan, Peter, 139, 257(Ch8)n2 Chan, Shijun, 151 Chan To Man, 142 Chang, Eileen Ailing, 252n13 Chang, Sylvia, 174 Chaozhou dialect, 235 Charles, Prince, 21 Charlies Angels stereotype, 123 Cheah, Pheng chapter by, 7, 193211 cited, 260n29 Chen Dao-ming, 159 Chen Gege, 140, 142 Chen Kaige, 134, 144 Chen, Katherine, 251n4 Chen, Kelly, 1224, 163 Chen Xiaolei, 227 Cheng, Andrew, 107 Cheng, Ekin, 122 Cheng, Joseph Y. S., 31, 33 Cheng, Sammi, 163 Cheung, Cecilia, 122, 140 Cheung, Clara, 25, 334 Cheung, Esther M. K. chapter by, 2, 16991

Index 287

cited, 171, 173, 191, 257(Ch9)n1, 257(Ch10)n2, 259n8, 261n10 Cheung, Kwan Mei, 136, 143 Cheung, Leslie Kwok-wing, 16, 50, 177, 249n11 Cheung, Maggie, 46, 140, 149 Cheung, Martha, 251n6 Cheung, Tammy Hung, 5, 108, 21321, 2238, 259n3 Cheung Yau-ming, 1089, 111 Cheung Yue-ling, 1089 Cheyfitz, Eric, 59 Chiao, Peggy, 1412 Chiau [aka Chow], Stephen, 135, 137, 140 Chicago, 48, 196, 249n10 chicken flu (H5N1 bird flu virus), 14 chief executive, 10, 15, 1819, 35, 478, 56, 107, 131, 249n10 see also Tsang, Donald; Tung Chee-hwa China Film Co-production Corporation (CFCC), 133, 137 China Watchers, 215 Chinatown (film), 1567 Chinatowns, 1567 Chinese cinema, 110, 137, 144, 149, 1545, 15760, 174, 176, 185, 231, 257n9, 261n4 see also Hong Kong cinema; mainland China Chinese culture cinema (see Chinese cinema) controversy, 97 Hongkongers and, 12, 103 literature (see Chinese literature) performance art, 334 popular cultures, 132 Chinese diaspora cinema, 131, 1334, 140, 144, 172, 255n8 cosmopolitanism, 260n29 culture, 5 Hong Kong and, 5, 78 language & literature, 75, 846, 100102, 251n4 Chinese Documentary Festival (2008), 220

Chinese history, 1, 23, 29, 46, 78, 83, 902 Chinese Hongkongers celebrity, 101 contributors, 2 cosmopolitanism, 77 groups, 182 identity, 10, 78 literature, 82 names, 51 officials, 21 right of abode, 1415 as sojourners, 5, 7, 78, 173, 175, 208 Tiananmen, 92 Chinese identity, 1011, 34, 1712 see also Chineseness Chinese language biliteracy & translation, 4, 5573, 99, 2501n1, 2523n16, 253n19, 254n10, 256n14 cultural production, 4, 125, 128, 138, 1445, 239, 255n7 documentary films, 2201 Hongkongers use, 824, 878 name of Hong Kong, 75, 102 performance art, 35 see also Cantonese language; Mandarin Chinese Chinese literature, 64, 66, 825, 88, 128, 18890, 205, 252n10 Chinese nationalism, 185, 250n13 Chinese New Year, 72, 193, 253n17 Chinese Odyssey, A (film), 135 Chinese opera, 178, 182, 235, 241 Chinese sovereignty. see Peoples Republic of China; return to China Chinese tradition. see tradition Chinese University of Hong Kong, 17, 77, 213, 260n13 Chineseness, 2, 65, 101, 105, 139, 144, 1568, 172, 176 see also Chinese identity Ching Cheong, 19 Ching, Leo, 255n5 Chiu Ah-chi, 1745 Chiu Sun-yau, 184

288 Index

Choi, Jimmy, 217, 259(Ch12)n5 Choi, Mickey, 259(Ch12)n6 Chong, Felix, 150 Chongqing Senlin. see Chungking Express Chow Keung, 218 Chow, Rey, 88, 144, 178, 181, 251n6, 261n2 Chow [aka Chiau], Stephen, 135, 137, 140 Chow Yun-fat, 136 Chu, Emily, 177 Chu Yiu-wai chapter by, 6, 13145, 216 cited, 257(Ch9)n1 Chua Beng Huat, 256n11 Chung, Cherie, 134 Chung, Gladys, 28 Chung, Simon, 219, 260n13 Chung, Sydney, 17 Chungking Express (Chongqing Senlin, film), 1212, 250n12, 261n8 Chyi, Chin, 261n11 CIA, 123 cinma vrit style, 215, 224, 259n8 citizenship rights. see civil rights Civil Human Rights Front, 19 civil rights, 11, 1921, 323, 47, 107, 110, 121, 259(Ch11)n5 see also freedom of speech civil service, 3, 12, 87, 1067, 10910, 249n10, 253n10 civilization, 115 Clara [Cheung], 25, 334 Clarke, David chapter by, 3, 4154 cited, 13, 32, 247(Ch3)n2, 247n3 class cinema, 141, 144, 1604, 165, 178, 1801, 199201, 217 East Asia, 130 economics, 110 language and, 57 literature and, 105 world cities, 259(Ch11)n5 Clinton, Bill, 159 Closer Economic Partnership

Arrangement (CEPA, 2003), 11, 1323, 137, 140, 142, 182 Clunies Ross, Bruce, 86 Code of Honor (film), 136 Cold War, 116, 159, 174, 228, 252n12, 252n14 colonial period. see British sovereignty colonialism comparative history, 9, 247(Ch3)n2 documentary film, 2278 East Asia, 11417 language & literature, 5966, 68, 75, 823, 86, 88, 105 legacies, 23, 45 spectral city, 191 see also decolonization Columbia Pictures, 254n2 comedy films, 5, 130, 135, 1378, 140, 240 comics, 4, 129, 257n18 see also animation commercial development documentary film, 243 East Asia, 11314, 1234, 256n11 film industry, 107, 147, 167, 220 language & literature, 10, 77, 878, 105, 250n1 performance art and, 3, 31, 39 politics and, 202 transnational business, 196, 198, 248n8 world cities, 248n7 Commission on Strategic Development, 47 communism, 10, 14, 456, 53, 131, 166, 173, 193, 294 see also postsocialism community art. see performance art commuting, 712 competition (world cities), 18, 12430, 196, 204, 248n7 computers. see information technology Confession of Pain (film), 138 Confucianism, 163, 256n11 Conrad, Joseph, 64 conservation. see heritage conservation & preservation

Index 289

conservatism, 10, 21, 101, 107, 11011 consumerism, 28, 46, 11719, 1634, 166, 190, 1979, 203, 208, 210, 258n3 Contemporary Hong Kong Art Biennial (1996), 31 Convention and Exhibition Centre, Wan Chai, 43, 247n3 Cooder, Ry, 2445 Coppola, Francis Ford, 148, 159, 1667 Cortazar, Julio, 229 cosmopolitanism capitalism and, 260n29 cinema, 5, 120, 122, 1245, 163, 171, 173, 256n9, 257n9 Hong Kong culture, 15, 7, 11 independent documentary film, 215, 227 language & literature, 4, 57, 65, 77, 801, 83, 1023 spectral cities, 169 world cities, 1958, 258n2 counter-culture movement, 1745 Court of Final Appeal, 1415 Crazy n the City (film), 139 creative arts. see culture Critical Intermedia Laboratory, 39 Cronin, Michael, 59, 64 cross-cultural encounters. see cosmopolitanism crowding. see population Crying Freeman (Japanese manga), 12930 cuisine, 7, 10, 77, 258n2 cultural identity Chinese, 1011, 34, 1712 (see also Chineseness) Chinese Hongkongers, 10, 78 cinema, 157, 162, 166, 171 East Asia, 7, 11330, 114, 244n11, 255n5, 256n11 language, 55, 5760, 636, 68, 73, 83 see also local issues & identity Cultural Revolution, 6, 22, 78, 133, 224 cultural translation, 2, 215, 255n3 cultural workers. see artists & cultural workers

culture Chinese (see Chinese culture) East Asia (see East Asia) global (see globalization) Hong Kong (see Hong Kong culture) Malaysia, 845 Curse of the Golden Flower (film), 138 Curtin, Michael, 219, 260n17 DaDao Live Art Festival, 37 Daiei Motion Picture Company, 118 Dalai Lama, 160 Damon, Matt, 152, 155 Damrosch, David, 251n9251n10 dance, 29, 93 Danghau Tung Chee-hwa Fatlok. see From the Queen to the Chief Executive Dark Knight, The (film), 261n3 Dating a Vampire (film), 136 Davis, Darrell William, 11820, 122, 124 Day for Night (La Nuit Amricaine, film), 149, 154 Day-Lewis, Daniel, 152 Day the Sun Turned Cold, The (film), 135 De Niro, Robert, 155 De Palma, Brian, 257(Ch9)n2 death penalty, 106 decolonization, 3, 9, 1214, 75, 82, 91, 117, 247(Ch3)n2 defamiliarization, 169, 172 DeGolyer, Michael, 1718 deindustrialization, 184, 1957 Deleuze, Gilles, 29, 102 Democracy 2000 (political group), 19 Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong, 22 Democratic Party, 19 democratization colonial period, 45, 78 documentary film, 108, 110, 215, 2256 essays, 111 performance art, 26, 29, 32, 37, 250n15 politics & history, 1113, 15, 1819, 203, 54 Singapore, 248n7

290 Index

world cities, 47 see also demonstrations; freedom of speech demography. see population demonstrations film, 10810, 198, 214, 225 history, 17, 1820, 92, 254n15 performance works, 25, 279, 313, 379, 54, 250n15 Deng Xiaoping, 10, 13, 131, 133 Departed, The (film), 7, 14867 Derrida, Jacques, 158, 169, 257(Ch10)n1 Desser, David, 144 Deutsche Bank, 258n1 development. see commercial development; property development DGA (Directors Guild of America) awards, 148 Diamond Hill, 501, 198, 200 diaspora. see Chinese diaspora DiCaprio, Leonardo, 152, 162, 166 Dickens, Charles, 143 digital age. see information technology Direct Cinema, 21415, 2248, 260n27 Directors Guild of America (DGA) awards, 148 Dirlik, Arif, 115 Disneyland, 47, 205 documentary films, 45, 46, 99, 106, 10810, 1834, 199, 21328, 250n15, 259n8 see also film essays domestic space. see neighbourhoods Don Quixote, 254n13 Dong Bang Shin Ki (TVXQ), 256n10 Dongfang Shenqi (TVXQ), 256n10 Dongjing Ai de Gushi (Tokyo Love Story, film), 121 Dongjing Gongle (Tokyo Raiders, film), 114, 119, 1224, 1256 Donner, Richard, 128 Doraemon (TV anime), 255n5 Douglas, Mike, 121 dragon states, 116

Dragon Tiger Gate (film), 138 drama, 29, 106 Dryden, John, 86, 8991 Duan Jinchan, 224 Duara, Prasenjit, 114 Duarte, Joo Ferreira, 59 Dumplings (film), 185, 187, 198 Dung Kai-cheung, 1889 Durant, Alan, 85, 253n7 Durian Durian (film), 182, 185, 187, 1989, 203, 259(Ch11)n6, 259n8 Duro, Paul, 247(Ch3)n1 DV cameras. see videos DVDs, 143, 149, 155, 218, 222, 257n5 East Asia cinema, 11330, 132, 136, 1413, 1478, 150, 159, 164, 255n5, 255n7 cities, 42, 250n13 culture & identity, 7, 11330, 244n11, 255n5, 256n11 documentary film, 217 history, 11415, 11718, 125, 255n5 Hong Kongs position, 7, 12, 40, 47, 115, 1934, 196, 249n10, 250n13 modernity, 11316, 11724, 125, 130 music, 256n10 New, 114, 11617, 11922, 12430 performance art, 40 regional identity, 114 transnational film production & casting, 113, 11819, 122, 128 East Asian Miracle, 113, 116 East-West binarism culture & history, 2, 5, 7, 11, 22 film, 115, 121, 157, 195, 227 language, 56 literature, 77, 83, 94 world cities, 478 Easy Rider (film), 159 economic conditions & systems China, 131 cinema production, 150, 1534, 166, 255n5 cinematic representation, 1601, 1634,

Index 291

171, 1735, 17980, 191, 203, 209, 255n4 documentary film, 21819, 221, 225 East Asia, 11421, 124, 130 Hong Kong, 1, 3, 1014, 16, 202, 448, 78, 88, 110, 147, 1937 language & literature, 250n1, 253n4 performance art, 268, 31, 38 world cities, 258n2n3 see also Asian financial crisis (1997 98); commercial development; prosperity education cinema, 161, 173, 2035, 208, 218 culture as, 2589n4 independent documentary film, 21315, 221, 2258 medium of instruction, 4, 56, 63, 689, 73, 84, 88, 2501n1, 251n2, 2523n16, 254n11 murder of students, 106 politics & government, 9, 15, 19, 63, 689, 878, 110 world cities, 197, 2501n1 Education Department, 56 Ee Tiang Hong, 84 Eighteen Springs (film), 135 elderly people, 20, 214, 226 Election (documentary film), 139, 215, 226 Election 2 (documentary film), 1389 elections. see democratization Eliot, T. S., 84 Elizabeth II, Queen, 44 Elley, Derek, 256n15 Elliott, Michael, 249n10 emigration cinema, 201, 203, 205, 208, 250n12 documentary film, 97, 224 emigrants return, 5, 13, 82, 188, 2278, 249n11, 251n4, 259(Ch11)n4, 259n10 Hong Kongs return to China, 5, 1213, 445, 78, 802, 845, 181, 247(Ch1)n2 employment, 15, 19, 22, 29, 108, 110, 197, 199, 221, 249n1 see also migrant workers

Empress Yang Kwei Fei (Yang Guifei, Yo hiki, film), 1389 Empson, William, 80, 253n2, 254n12 Eng, David, 178 England, 2, 4, 66, 80, 242n12 English language biliteracy & translation, 4, 10, 5573, 226, 2501n1, 2523n16, 254nn1011, 256n14 cultural production, 108, 120, 1223, 1257, 145, 1501, 2301, 252n15, 255n5, 256n10 Hong Kong writing, 97, 99100, 103, 111, 253n3, 253n8, 254n13 international use, 88, 103, 127, 251n4 literature in, 4, 7595, 253n3, 254(notes) Malaysian poetry, 846 street names, 10 English Schools Foundation, 106 Enigmatic Case, The (film), 134 Enter the Dragon (film), 156 entrept. see trade Erni, John Nguyet, 79 Esherick, Joseph W., 29 essays, 97, 98100, 10911, 252nn1415, 253n7 see also film essays E.T. (film), 166 Etchells, Time, 28 ethnicity. see race & ethnicity Eurasians, 128 European cinema, 99, 1489, 154, 164, 232 European imperialism, 13, 59, 11617, 255n4 European languages, 82 exile, 75, 77, 80, 102, 189, 249n11 expatriates, 78, 197 experimental films. see independent filmmakers Face/Off (film), 150, 157, 250n12 Fallen Angels (film), 6, 230, 23141, 260n2 family, 702, 81, 105, 110, 1612, 172, 175, 188, 200, 254n11

292 Index

Faraway, So Close (film), 238 Farewell My Concubine (film), 1345 Farmiga, Vera, 163 Faure, David, 173, 175 FBI, 152 Fearless (film), 138 Federation of Hong Kong Filmmakers, 144 Federation of Trade Unions, 20 Feng, Sylvia, 2212, 260n16, 260n18 Feng Xiaogang, 144 Fenwick Harbour, 120 Festival of the Hungry Ghost, 214 fiction. see literature Fifth Generation films, 134 Filipina migrant workers, 182, 1856 Film Awards, Hong Kong, 1367, 1401, 144 Film Bureau, 137, 142, 144 Film Critics Association, Hong Kong, 140 Film Development Council, Hong Kong, 142 Film Development Fund, 142 Film Directors Guild of Hong Kong, 140 film distribution, 21819, 231 film essays, 4, 97100, 10611 see also documentary films Film Festival. see Hong Kong International Film Festival film industry. see Hong Kong cinema film noir style, 175 film school style, 148, 164, 232 see also auteur cinema filmmakers generation of the 1970s, 173 world cities, 43 see also auteur cinema; independent filmmakers; New Wave financial industry cinema production, 1434, 254n2 cinematic representation, 123 Hong Kong as hub, 12, 1201, 147, 160, 180, 196, 250n1, 258(Ch11)n4 world cities, 48, 249n10, 254n1

FIRE IT (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate and Informational Technology), 171 First World status, 12, 114 Five Easy Pieces (film), 159, 244 Five Finger Mountain, 2045, 208 five fingers image, 2012 Fong, Allen, 174 Fong, Henry, 133, 141 Fong, Peter K. W., 175 food, 7, 10, 77, 258n2 Forbidden City, Beijing, 32, 1345 Ford, John, 128, 155, 160, 164 Foreign Correspondents Club, 249n10 Forrest, Adrienne La Grange, 258nn12 Foster, Norman, 47, 2478n6 Foucault, Michel, 157 Four Heavenly Kings. see The Heavenly Kings (film) France cinema, 1489, 154, 215, 224 culture, 84, 16970 empire, 12 language, 77, 98 Paris as world city, 84, 250n13, 254n1 freedom of speech, 4, 9, 312, 37, 97, 107, 138, 145, 221, 225 see also media freedoms. see civil rights Freud, Sigmund, 172, 191, 258(Ch10)n4 From the Queen to the Chief Executive (Danghau Tung Chee-hwa Fatlok, Waiting for the Verdict of Tung Cheehwa, film essay), 4, 97, 104, 10611 Frontier, The (pro-democracy group), 1819 Fu, Poshek, 144 Fuji TV, 121 Fujianese people, 5 Fujimoto Hiroshi, 255n5 Fukuyama, Francis, 201 Fukuzawa Yukichi, 117 Fulltime Killer (Quanzhi Shashou, film), 114, 119, 12430, 255n7 Fung, Anthony, 30, 79 Fung, Fanny W. Y., 248n7

Index 293

Fung Ping-shan Chinese library, 252n15 Fung, Victor, 196 future, 4, 1314, 225, 231 Gan, Wendy, 259n8 Gangs of New York (film), 152 Gao Siren, 20 Garcia, Roel, 233, 261n11 Garcia, Roger, 217 Garcia Marquez, Gabriel, 229 GDP (gross domestic product), 1112 Gen-X Cops (film), 120 gender, 161, 1634, 189, 226 Gentzler, Edwin, 59 German culture & history, 12, 40, 53, 107, 117, 194, 258(Ch10)n4 Gikandi, Simon, 251n8 global cities. see world city status globalization capitalism, 1959, 201, 205, 20710, 255n5, 258n3, 260n29 culture, 2, 5, 7, 27 documentary film, 11011, 227 East Asia, 115, 118, 122, 128, 130 film production, 128, 137, 141, 149, 1536, 15960, 1634, 1667, 22945, 254n2, 255n5 film representation, 171, 1734, 185, 191, 205, 20711 future, 4 language, 5960, 635, 73, 88, 251n4 literature, 57, 64, 66, 77, 82, 100, 104, 111 markets, 125, 132, 196, 256n10, 258n3 world cities, 42, 249n10, 250n1 Godard, Jean-Luc, 99, 164, 242 Godfather (film series), 166 Golden Eagle (film), 133 Golden Harvest (film company), 134 Gong Li, 140 Goodfellas (film), 152 Goodstadt, Leo, 12, 21 Gorbman, Claudia, 232 Gordon, Avery, 169, 172, 174 Gordon, Peter, 249n10

government Hong Kong (see British sovereignty; Hong Kong Special Administrative Region; Peoples Republic of China) world cities, 424, 46, 1945, 199 see also states Gramsci, Antonio, 198 Great Hall of the People (Beijing), 11 Great Wall Motion Picture Company, 134 Greater China area. see Chinese diaspora Greater East Asian War. see World War II Greek language, 76, 170 Greene, Graham, 100 gross domestic product (GDP), 1112 Guangdong, 1011, 198, 257n8 Guangzhou (Canton), 10, 252n12 Guangzhou Triennial, 33 Guattari, Flix, 102 Guldin, Gregory, 10 Gum Cheng Yee-man, 25, 334 H5N1 bird flu virus, 14 HAF (Hong KongAsia Film Financing Forum), 143 handover to PRC. see return to China (1997) Hansen, Jeremy, 107 Happy Together (film), 50, 232, 24950n11 harbour & waterfront, 43, 48, 52, 104, 120 Harbourfest, 47 Hashida Sugako, 255n5 haunted cities. see urban space Hayot, Eric, 73 Hazlitt, William, 100 He Zhiwu, 262n11 health, 1418, 20, 22, 252n12 Heathfield, Adrian, 28 Heavenly Kings, The (film), 139, 144 heritage conservation & preservation, 3, 10, 27, 3840, 63, 111, 172, 185, 188 Heroic Trio, The (film), 149 high-rise apartments, 173, 17781 High School (documentary film), 214 Hispanic market (U.S.), 256n10

294 Index

historic sites. see heritage conservation & preservation historical romance films, 134 history. see Hong Kong history Hitchcock, Alfred, 1634, 229, 242 Hitler, Adolf, 22 HKADC. see Hong Kong Arts Development Council HKSAR. see Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Ho, Elaine Yee Lin chapter by, 34, 5573 cited, 252n12, 252n14 Ho Kwai-ying, 20 Ho, Louise Shew-wan, 45, 7595, 253n3, 253n6, 254n13, 254n16 Ho, Patrick, 52, 250n13 Ho, Tammy Lai-ming, 4, 253n18 Going to My Parents Place on a Crowded Bus (My Home), 4, 60, 6973, 253n17 Hoberman, J., 2601n2 Holden, William, 120 Hollywood (U.S.) Chinatown settings, 1568 cinematic standards, 107, 137 film imports from, 147, 154, 216 Hong Kong filmworkers shift to, 6, 136, 150, 245, 250n12, 257n19 remakes of Hong Kong films, 148, 150, 1534, 164, 1667 symbolism in Hong Kong, 201, 2035, 208 Hollywood, Hong Kong (film), 7, 50, 185, 187, 198211, 250n12, 259n8 Hollywood Plaza shopping mall, 501, 200201, 203, 205, 211 Home Affairs Bureau, 4, 107, 214 homelessness, 170, 17781, 189 Homer, 76 Hong Kong brand (see Brand Hong Kong) cinema (see Hong Kong cinema) class (see class) culture (see Hong Kong culture)

government (since 1997) (see Hong Kong Special Administrative Region) history (see Hong Kong history) identity (see Hong Kong culture) immigrants to (see immigration) language (see language) legal system (see legal system) literature (see literature) performance art (see performance art) residents (see Hongkongers) style (see Brand Hong Kong) world city status (see world city status) Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts, 120 Hong Kong Art Archive, 254n16 Hong Kong Arts Centre, 223, 226, 259(Ch12)n5 Film and Video Department, 217 Hong Kong Arts Development Council, 52, 214, 217, 219, 259n2 Hong KongAsia Film Financing Forum (HAF), 143 Hong Kong Asian Film Festival, 218 Hong Kong cinema Asian region and, 11630, 255n7 box-office figures & revenue, 5, 132, 1348, 142, 216 Chinese co-productions & cooperation, 57, 46, 120, 13145, 210, 257(Ch8)nn12, 259n8 distribution, 21819, 231 documentary film (see documentary films) East Asian co-productions & cooperation, 113, 11819, 122, 128 government regulations, 135, 1378, 143, 145, 225 government support, 1412, 1445, 214, 21921, 259n2 international co-productions, 150 international remakes, 14867 markets for, 1323, 137, 1412, 1478, 164, 216

Index 295

music in, 22945 postcolonial, 166, 171, 180, 191 spectral city in, 16991 style & culture, 2, 57, 10, 29, 78, 1478, 18891 world cities, 46, 50 see also action films; art films; celebrity; documentary films; film essays; independent filmmakers Hong Kong Cultural Centre, 434, 247n3 Hong Kong culture cinema and (see Hong Kong cinema) definition & history, 13, 6, 10, 13, 247nn34 documentary film (see documentary films) global city, 457, 52, 194, 1967, 249n10, 250n13, 2589n4 language, 556 literature, 756, 78, 80, 8891, 101, 111, 252n12 performance art, 2540, 250n14 politics and, 43, 97111 Hong Kong Federation of Students, 18 Hong Kong Film Archive, 217 Hong Kong Film Awards, 1367, 1401, 144 Hong Kong Film Critics Association, 140 Hong Kong Film Development Council, 142 Hong Kong government (since 1997). see Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) Hong Kong history, 34, 923 film, 11011, 160, 171, 173, 1759, 181, 1828, 191, 231 literature, 60, 623, 66, 75, 77, 7980, 8892, 95, 97, 1016, 252n12 performance art, 39 periodization, 9, 1418 world cities, 45 see also British sovereignty; Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Hong Kong Housing Society, 188

Hong Kong Independent Films Distribution, 218 Hong Kong Independent Short Film and Video Awards (IFVA), 214, 21718, 260n7 Hong Kong International Film Festival (HKIFF), 1067, 109, 142, 257(Ch8)n1 Hong Kong Island, 27, 38, 48, 105, 121 Hong Kong, Kowloon & New Territories Motion Picture Industries Association (MPIA), 141, 143 Hong Kong Museum of History, 185 Hong Kong Performance Art on the Move Project, 35, 37 Hong Kong Polytechnic University School of Design, 38 Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) censorship, 225 cinema (see Hong Kong cinema) cultural production, 97, 1067, 111, 1245, 1313, 142, 148, 150, 1712, 247n3 culture (see Hong Kong) democracy, 226 government & culture, 111, 180, 185, 188, 193, 198, 258(Ch11)n4, 261n3 government & politics, 911, 1418, 213, 269, 31, 337, 39, 248n6, 258(Ch10)n6 Government Information Center, 258n5 history (see Hong Kong history) international comparisons, 478, 52, 2250n13 language (see language) literature (see literature) performance art (see performance art) research funding, 55, 169, 213, 258(Ch11)n4 see also Chief Executive; Legislative Council; one country, two systems framework Hong Kong Trade Development Council (TDC), 133, 1413, 1946, 2589n4

296 Index

Hong Kong University Press, 75 Hong Kong Watchers, 21415 Hongkongers cinematic production, 50, 123, 173, 180 documentary film, 225, 227 economic conditions, 12 emigration, 5, 13, 44 literary production, 768, 93, 102 performance art, 326, 38 politics, 19, 29, 76, 93 public opinion, 3, 5, 1011, 201, 23, 46 right of abode, 1415 Hoover, Michael, 150, 257(Ch9)n1 horseracing, 10, 93 Hospital Authority, 16 Hou Hsiao-hsien, 231 housing, 15, 20, 502, 71, 173, 175, 180, 185, 199200, 214, 259n9 see also residential high-rises; tenement houses Hu, Brian, 158, 261n4, 261n13 Hu Jintao, 22, 131 Hui, Ann On-wah, 133, 1701, 1737, 182, 185, 253n18 see also The Secret human rights. see civil rights Hung, Ching-tin, 31 Hung, William, 101 Hutton, Christopher, 82 Huyssen, Andreas, 64 hybridity East Asia, 122 essays, 1023 film industry, 144, 188 language, 567, 59, 656, 68, 71 iconic sites. see heritage conservation & preservation ideology documentary film, 221 East Asia, 115, 117, 125, 130, 256n11 essays, 98, 101 language, 58 see also capitalism; communism IFVA (Hong Kong Independent Short

Film and Video Awards), 214, 21718, 260n7 Ikegami, Ryoichi, 129 image commodities, 1478 immigration cinema, 133, 175, 182, 1979, 204, 213, 240 history, 10, 1315, 45 right of abode, 1415 social identity, 259n7 sojourners, 78 world cities, 259(Ch11)n5 see also migrant workers imperialism, 14, 59, 66, 82, 86, 116, 2278, 252n11 imprisonment, 9, 19, 104, 1089, 111 In the Heart of the Sun (film), 135 In the Mood for Love (film), 229, 232, 240, 260n1 InD Blue (film distributor), 218 independent filmmakers, 5, 147, 198228, 259n2 Independent Short Film and Video Awards (IFVA), 214, 21718, 260n7 India, 12, 82, 104 Indians, 214, 236 Indonesia, 4, 116, 255n8 Indonesian Chinese, 102 industrialization, 117, 119, 121, 177 see also deindustrialization Infernal Affairs (film series), 7, 138, 140, 142, 14867 information technology, 95, 160, 164, 180, 217 Informer, The (film), 160 Ingham, Michael chapter by, 4, 97111 cited, 253n3 InMedia group, 38 Innocent (film), 219 intellectual property, 147, 149 international division of labour, 121, 194 International Film Festival. see Hong Kong International Film Festival

Index 297

international organizations, 10, 115, 252n12 international relations, 16, 48 internationalism. see cosmopolitanism; globalization internet, 4, 15, 155, 203, 207, 21011, 218 Interpol, 126 Invisible Women (documentary film), 214 Ip, Regina, 19, 22, 249n10 IPTV, 214 Iran, 159 Iraq, 159 Iris, 151 Irish, in Boston, 1523, 1567, 159, 161, 163 Irish history & culture, 77, 913, 111 Irish Republican Army, 15960 Irma Vep (film), 149 Ishihara Shintaro, 116 Italian culture, 2, 513, 77, 81, 153, 165, 250n13, 254n13 Italians, in Boston, 153, 156, 158 Iwabuchi, Koichi, 118, 254n3 Jaffee, Valerie, 221 James Bond films, 122, 124 Jameson, Frederic, 11617, 180, 20811, 254n2 Japan Asia and, 12, 11517 cinema, 11314, 11826, 12830, 151, 166, 232, 240, 254n2, 255n7, 256nn1314 cuisine, 77 documentary film, 224 economic conditions, 12, 141 music, 256n10 television, 118, 120, 255n5, 256n10 war against, 61, 105, 11314, 252n12 (see also World War II) see also Tokyo Japanese language, 114, 11920, 1226, 129, 255n7, 256n10, 256n14 Jaws (film), 166 Jia Zhangke, 218, 259n8, 260n7

Jiang Yanyong, 16 Jiang Yue, 224 Jiang Zemin, 202, 249n10 Jiangsu province, 215 Jiji Shimpo (newspaper), 255n6 Joint Declaration, Sino-British (1984), 13, 34, 43, 147, 178, 225 Jones, Norah, 2412 journalists, 9, 19, 99, 215 see also media Journey to Beijing (documentary film), 99 Journey to the West (classical novel), 205 see also Five Finger Mountain judicial system. see legal system July (documentary film), 108, 214, 223, 225 June Art Action, 35, 37 Kam, Peter, 124 Kamiya Yukie, 122 Kaneshiro Takeshi, 121, 139, 240, 256n14 Katsu Production Company, 118 Katsu Shintaro, 118 Kau Kwai Fong district, 87 Keats, John, 92, 254n13 Keidan, Lois, 28 Kelly, Grace, 242 Kennedy, John F., 161 Kenya, 63 Kerr, Douglas, chapter by, 4, 7595 Kill Bill (film), 245 Killer, The (film), 149, 257n5 King of Masks, The (film), 135 Kipling, Rudyard, 111 Kleinman, Arthur, 16 Knight, Alan, 12, 21 Ko, Yu-fen, 256n13 Koike Kazuo, 129 Kolker, Robert, 1667, 257n7, 257n10 Korea. see North Korea; South Korea Korean language, 125, 256n10 Kowloon, 1516, 47, 121, 197, 2478n6 Kubrick, Stanley, 153, 166, 232 Kuby, Joseph, 257n5

298 Index

Kundun (film), 160 kung-fu films, 134, 1367, 150 Kwan, Nancy, 120 Kwan Park-huen, 217 Kwan, Shirley, 239 Kwan, Stanley, 46, 1701, 17781, 182, 190, 220 Kwok, Yenni, 214 Kwong, Teresa, 260n7 Kwun Tong district, 233, 236, 239, 259n7 Lady from Shanghai (film), 156 Lai Cheuk-cheuk, 175 Lai, Jimmy, 19 Lai, Leon, 158, 234, 241 laissez-faire system, 10, 21, 104 Lam, Augustine, 214 Lam, Ringo, 126 Lam Wai-man, 29 Lan Kwai Fong district, 87 land. see property development; reclaimed land Lang, Fritz, 164 language, 5573 bilingualism (see bilingualism & multilingualism) business & government, 10, 87 East Asia, 11415, 11920, 127 essays, 103 films, 109, 1225, 132, 135, 145 international, 64, 834, 87 medium of instruction, 4, 56, 63, 689, 73, 84, 88, 2501n1, 251n2, 2523n16, 254n11 multilingualism (see bilingualism & multilingualism) performance art, 30, 356 postcolonialism, 56, 5960, 626, 68, 834, 87, 106, 251n5 subtitles, 120, 125, 2545n3 translation (see translation) see also Chinese language; English language Las Vegas, 47, 123, 247(Ch3)n2, 247n5, 250n13

Latin America, 116 Latin language, 172 Lau, Andrew (director), 7, 142, 148, 150, 153, 158 Lau, Andy (actor), 126, 140, 1545 Lau, C. K., 22 Lau, Damian, 134 Lau, Emily, 19 Lau, Jasper K. W., 29 Lau, Joyce Hor-Chung, 33 Lau Ka-yee, 19 Lau, Sean, 140 Law, Jude, 242 Law, Kam-yee, 259n7, 259n10 Law Kar, 118, 174 Leary, Charles, 125, 130 Laud, Jean-Pierre, 149 Lee, Angelica, 140 Lee Bik-wah (aka Li Bihua), 181 Lee, Bruce, 156 Lee, Carrie, 36 Lee Cheuk-yan, 1819 Lee Chi-ngai, 255n7 Lee, Dominic, 1618 Lee Ka-sing, 87 Lee, Kevin, 260n7 Lee, Kim-ming, 259n7, 259n10 Lee Kuan Yew, 116 Lee, Martin Chu-ming, 19, 108 Lee, Sherman, 251nn34 Lee, Sherry, 199 Lee, Sing, 16 Lee Soo Man, 256n10 Lee, Stephanie, 151, 158 Lee Wai Yi, 260n15 Lefebvre, Henri, 185 Lefevere, Andr, 59 leftists, 9, 1334, 252n12 legal system, 4, 11, 1415, 1819, 78, 106, 1089, 111, 228 Legco. see Legislative Council Legend of Zu, The (film), 137 Legislative Council, 4, 1415, 18, 212, 10611, 195, 215, 248n6, 2501n1, 2534n10

Index 299

Leisure and Cultural Services Division/ Department, 107, 135 Lennon, John, 153 Lessing, Doris, 100 Let It Be (documentary film), 222 Leung, Ambrose, 248n7 Leung, Anthony Po-shan (performance artist), 25, 32, 34, 367 Leung, Antony Kam-chung (Financial Secretary), 22 Leung, Edward, 1945 Leung, Elsie, 1819 Leung, Kwok-hung (Longhair), 111 Leung, Matthew, 58 Leung Ping-kwan, 3, 87, 251n6, 252n10, 253n9 An Old Colonial Building, 59, 605, 66 Leung, Tony Chiu-wai (actor), 50, 1212, 140, 154, 249n11 Leung, Tony Ka-fai (actor), 140 Leung, Vicky, 141 Leung, Warren Chi-wo, 502 Leung Yiu-ching, 106, 10910 Levy, Emmanuel, 257n4 Li Bihua [aka Lee Bik-wah], 181 Li Cheng, 13 Li Cheuk-to, 143 Li, David C. S., 57, 251nn34 Li Han-chiang, 134 Li, Jet, 134, 147, 257n9 Li, Richard, 214 Lian Xisheng, 11 Liaoning, 31 Life and Times of Wu Zhong-Xian, The (film), 99 Lim, Bliss Cua, 150, 164, 179 Lin, Andrew, 144 Lin, Kelly, 126 Liotta, Ray, 152 literature Chinese, 64, 66, 825, 88, 128, 18890, 205, 252n10 cinema and, 229

English language, 7595, 253n3, 254n11, 254n13 Hong Kong, 2, 45, 7, 181, 188, 252n12, 252n14 international & world, 58, 64, 834, 87, 251n9, 2512n10 national, 58, 78, 825, 89, 91, 2512n10, 253n5 postcolonial, 91, 105 translation (see translation) see also essays; poetry Little Cheung (film), 1702, 1826, 188, 198 Little Red Book, 193 Liu, Lydia, 2245, 228 Liu Yichang, 229 Liu Yong, 258n7 Lo Kwai-Cheung, 11819, 128, 157, 249n10, 255n7 Loach, Ken, 99 Local Action (group), 39 local issues & identity artists, 3, 13 cinema, 1379, 163, 171, 173, 229, 231, 240, 244, 261n3 documentary film, 220, 2245, 228 essay form, 111 language & literature, 556, 5960, 625, 72, 7795, 100101 performance art, 25, 279, 37 world cities, 259(Ch11)n5 see also cultural identity; neighbourhoods Loh, Christine, 16 Lok Fung, 259n6 London, 18, 47, 124, 153n7, 194, 196, 249n10, 250n13, 254n1 Long Tin, 138, 140, 142 Longest Summer, The (film), 1823 Louie, Kam cited, 257n9 introduction by, 17 Love Parade, The (film), 228 Love Taiwan documentary films, 222 low-budget films. see independent

300 Index

filmmakers; mid- & low-budget films Lu Fei-I, 260n20 Lu, Sheldon, 144 Lubitsch, Ernst, 228 Lucas, George, 148, 1667 Luk, Thomas Y. T., 260n13 Lukacs, Paul Karl, 151 Lukmani, Yasmeen, 254n12 Lunar New Year, 72, 193, 253n17 Lush, Tamara, 152 Lynch, David, 2424 Ma, Jingle, 114, 1224, 150 see also Tokyo Raiders Ma Ka Fai, 138 Ma Lik, 22 Ma Rongrong, 143 Macau, 5, 10, 99, 126, 131, 247(Ch2)n2 MacNeil, William P., 13 Made in Hong Kong. see Brand Hong Kong Made in Hong Kong (film), 139, 1434, 1823, 198, 257(Ch10)n2 Mahathir Mohamed, 116 Mai Po Nature Reserve, 79 mainland China border with Hong Kong, 5, 10, 789, 200, 215, 227 documentary film, 215, 2235, 2278 emigration to Hong Kong (see immigration) film industry, 134, 137, 141, 144, 200, 204 Hong Kong as gateway to, 18, 1936 Hong Kong cinematic co-productions & co-operation, 57, 46, 120, 13145, 210, 257(Ch8)n2, 259n8 Hong Kong cinematic representation, 5, 50, 12630, 158, 198, 206 Hong Kongs relations with, 5, 911, 16, 45, 48, 103, 105, 197, 252n12, 258(Ch11)n4 immigrants & refugees from, 5, 1415, 175, 198, 207, 213

language, 66, 68, 88, 251n4, 254n11 legal system, 19, 109 market for Hong Kong cinema, 1323, 137, 1412 performance art, 37 poetry, 7780 sex workers from, 182, 185, 198, 2034 see also Beijing; Guangdong; Guangzhou (Canton); Pearl River delta region; Peoples Republic of China; Shanghai Mak, Alan, 7, 1489, 153, 155, 158, 164 Infernal Affairs (film series), 7, 138, 140, 142, 14867 Mak, Anson, 217, 2201 Mak, Antonio Hin-yeung, 934, 254n16 Mak Wai-fan, 182 Malay language, 84 Malaysia, 847, 116, 127, 255n8 malls, 50, 179, 200, 203 Mamber, Stephen, 260n27 Man, Alex, 177, 179 Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The (film), 128 Man with a Movie Camera (film), 154 Man Yau-yau, 219 Manchu (Qing) empire, 2, 66, 102, 105, 134 Mandarin Chinese cinema, 119, 1223, 125, 256n14 Hongkongers use, 4, 10, 823, 151 performance art, 35 songs, 256n10 see also baihua; Putonghua Mandarin Oriental Hotel, 16 manga. see comics Manhattan. see New York manufacturing industry, 12, 171, 195 Mao Zedong, 193, 215 marches. see demonstrations Marchetti, Gina chapter by, 7, 14767 cited, 257(Ch9)n3, 257n8 Marcus Aurelius, 98 Marker, Chris, 99

Index 301

market ideology, 116 markets East Asia, 256n11 global, 125, 132, 196, 256n10, 258n3 Hong Kong brand, 248n8 Hong Kong cinema, 1323, 137, 1412, 1478, 164, 216 music, 256n10 marriage, 10, 334, 178 Marshall, Chan (Cat Power), 2413 martial arts, 20, 1234, 134 Marvell, Andrew, 8991, 93, 254n12 Marxism, 180, 207 masculinity, 127, 161, 163, 257(Ch7)n17, 257(Ch9)n9 mass culture. see popular culture Massive Attack (British band), 6, 233 materialism, 78 Matrix (film), 245 Mauritius, 77 MCA, 254n2 McBride, Kenneth, 106 McDull, the Alumni (film), 138 Mean Street Story, The (film), 150 Mean Streets (film), 150 media freedom, 17 globalization, 149, 198 journalism, 9, 19, 99, 215 language, 4, 57 overseas, 10, 12, 14, 46, 117, 120, 157 politics, 25, 31, 33, 40, 110 pop stars, 241 return to China, 193 social issues, 71, 253n17 world cities, 48, 249n10 Media Asia Films, 133, 256n9 MediaCorp Raintree Pictures, 256n9 medium of instruction, 4, 56, 63, 689, 73, 84, 88, 2501n1, 251n2, 2523n16, 254n11 Mlis, Georges, 160 melodrama, 171, 173, 177 Melville, Herman, 102 Men in Black II (film), 154

Menard, Pierre, 254n13 Merlion (Singapore), 48 Meyer, David R., 197 mid- & low-budget films, 1413, 217, 219 see also independent filmmakers Mid-Levels, 121 MIDI technology, 232 migrant workers, 182, 1856 Miike, Takashi, 158, 164 military, 114, 1589, 166, 253n4 Milkyway Image (film company), 127 Miller, Carolyn R., 257n3 Milton, John, 85, 90 Ming Pao (periodical), 15, 131, 226 Ministry of Radio, Film and Television, 135 see also State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) Mizoguchi Kenji, 118 modernism (cinema), 162, 164, 1667, 229 modernity alternative, 115, 255n4 China, 134, 215 cinema, 155, 1734, 1767, 17981, 185 documentary film, 2278 East Asia, 11316, 11724, 125, 130 literature, 64 world cities, 3, 5, 42, 173, 250n1 Monahan, William, 149, 151, 154, 158, 164 Mong Kok neighbourhood, 36, 1847 Montaigne, Michel de, 98, 105 Montreal, 21314, 224 Montreal International Chinese Film Festival, 213 monuments, 43, 614, 251n7 Moore, Michael, 99 Moore, Peter R., 254n12 Moretti, Franco, 64, 2512n10 Morris, Errol, 99 Morris, Meaghan, 118, 144 Motion Picture Industries Association, 141, 143 Motorcycle Diaries, The (film), 244 Moving (documentary film), 214 MTR trains, 200, 233, 236, 239

302 Index

MTV. see videos Mui, Anita, 177 multiculturalism (cinema), 120, 122, 124 multilingualism. see bilingualism & multilingualism multimedia art. see performance art Murakami, Haruki, 229 Murphy, Shelley, 160 Murray, Rebecca, 149 music Cantopop, 6, 131, 144, 147, 231 cinema, 113, 118, 124, 1523, 199, 206, 22945, 250nn1112, 261(notes) demonstrations, 29, 78, 254n15 documentary film, 99, 2245, 228 language and, 254n3, 256n10 world cities, 47 My Blueberry Nights (film), 6, 2301, 2415, 2601n2, 261n12 My Kingdom for a Husband (film), 228 Myers, Nicola, 106 Naipaul, V. S., 100 Nakamura, Toru, 1223 Nakano, Yoshiko, 21 Nanbara, Koji, 128 Narayan, R. K., 82 national concerns cinema, 15961, 1634, 166, 171, 185, 188 documentary film, 2278 East Asia, 11417, 11920, 123, 125, 1278, 130, 256n11 essays, 101, 105 language, 626, 68 literature, 58, 78, 825, 89, 91, 251 2n10, 253n5 performance art, 256, 31 world cities, 48, 247(Ch3)n2, 258n2 National Peoples Congress (NPC), 11, 15 national security legislation, 18, 22, 314, 37, 54, 214, 225 nationalism. see national concerns neighbourhoods, 1717, 182, 185, 258n2 New American Cinema, 166

New Asia. see New East Asia New Dragon Gate Inn (film), 1345 New East Asia, 114, 11617, 11922, 12430 New Hong Kong cinema, 170 New International Division of Labour, 121, 194 New Orleans, 249n10 New Territories, 10, 79, 180 New Wave (Europe), 1489, 154, 164, 232 New Wave (Hong Kong), 171, 174, 216 New World Order, 116, 127, 169, 228 New Year, 72, 193, 253n17 New York cinema, 124, 14850, 242, 260n2 documentary film, 220 Hong Kong compared, 18, 42, 478, 51, 81, 194, 196, 249n10, 250n13, 254n1 literary production, 99, 103 performance art, 40, 53 New Zealand, 13, 44 Next Media, 19 Ng Chung-yin, 99 Ng, Kenny K. K., 260n28 Ng, Sandra, 140 Ng See-yuen, 144 Ngan, Irene, 78 NGOs (non-government organizations), 38, 258n6 Ngu g wa Thiongo, 63, 251n8 NHK (Nippon Ho so Kyo kai, Japan Broadcasting Company), 255n5 Nicholson, Jack, 1523, 1557, 159, 166 Night and Fog (film), 253n18 Niranjana, Tejaswini, 59 non-government organizations (NGOs), 38, 258n6 North America, 78, 116 see also Canada; United States North Korea, 159 Northeast Asia, 127 nostalgia, 46, 63, 81, 1789, 199 Now TV, 214 NPC (National Peoples Congress), 11, 15

Index 303

Nuit Amricaine, La (Day for Night, film), 149, 154 OBrien, Meredith, 159 Ohmae, Kenichi, 141 Olsberg, Jonathan, 142 Olsberg/SPI (consulting firm), 142 Olympic Games, 1257 Once Upon a Time in China (film series), 134 One-Armed Swordsman, The (Dubi Dao, film), 118 one country, two systems framework Beijing government attitudes, 11, 13 cinema, 131, 133 culture, 1, 3, 6 legal system, 1516 performance art, 26, 31, 38 politics, 201 Open Door Policy, 133 Open University, 109 opera, Chinese, 178, 182, 235, 241 opium wars, 104 Oricon (magazine), 256n10 orientalism, 46, 91, 124, 157, 159 Orwell, George, 100 Oscars. see Academy Awards Oshin (drama), 255n5 Osing, Gordon, 87, 253n9 overseas Chinese. see Chinese diaspora Pacific War. see World War II Paetzold, Heinz, 169 Pak, Tozer Sheung-cheun, 323, 37, 250n15 pan-East Asian identity. see East Asia Pan Xinglei, 312, 40 Pang, Edmond, 128 Pang, Laikwan, 116, 119, 121, 150, 213, 260(notes), 261n3 Panopticon, 157, 257n7 Para/Site Art Space, 33, 35, 378 Paris, 84, 170, 250n13, 254n1 Paris, Texas (film), 2445 ParknShop, 184

Patke, Rajeev S., 84 patriotism. see national concerns Patten, Chris, 19, 249n10 Pearl River delta region, 10, 38, 142 Pennington, Martha C., 57 Peoples Liberation Army, 20, 1589 Peoples Production Limited, 256n9 Peoples Republic of China (PRC) Asian region and, 11517 cinema, 11314, 11922, 124, 13940, 143, 145, 148, 154, 15860, 231, 256n14, 257(Ch8)n1 documentary film, 215, 2201, 2235 government & politics, 2, 1822, 54, 221 Hong Kongs place in, 916, 173, 182, 249n10 Hong Kongs return to Chinese sovereignty (see return to China (1997)) legal system, 1067 Ministry of Health, 16 music, 256n10 performance art, 26, 314, 378 State Council, 249n10 urban identity, 468 see also mainland China; one country, two systems framework performance art, 23, 2540, 534, 250n15 see also demonstrations Perhaps Love (film), 139, 257(Ch8)n2 periodization, 9, 1418 personal identity, 30, 34, 164 Phelan, Peggy, 26 Philippines, 182, 1856, 255n8 Phoenix Cine Club, 217 Phoenix Motion Picture Company, 1334 photography, 37, 501, 53, 87, 199 Pile, Steve, 169 Pitt, Brad, 164 planning. see urban development Plaza Hollywood, 501, 200201, 203, 205, 211

304 Index

poetry English-language, 7595, 254n13 Hong Kong, 34, 18990, 252n12, 253(Ch4)nn1718, 253(Ch5)n1, 253(Ch5)nn78, 254n13 language, 6073 Point Break (film), 128 Point of View (Taiwan documentary series), 2213 Polanski, Roman, 1567 political parties, 38, 221 politics East Asia, 11519 film essays, 1067, 111 film industry, 145, 1601, 166, 231, 259(Ch11)n6 Hong Kong, 1, 3, 5, 923, 97, 131 independent documentary film, 214, 21819, 2235, 227 language & literature, 55, 63, 789, 834, 8893 Peoples Republic of China, 2, 1822, 54, 221 performance art, 2530 spectral cities, 1723, 176, 178, 180, 185, 190 world cities, 42, 45, 54, 195, 1978, 248n7, 249n10 see also activism; demonstrations pollution, 11, 19, 105 polyphonic culture. see cosmopolitanism popular culture, 6, 834, 11315, 118, 1201, 1312, 140, 153, 22931, 240, 255n5 popular music. see music population, 11, 57, 78, 89, 251 pornography & adult films, 97, 108, 1536, 207 port. see harbour & waterfront Portman, Natalie, 244 postcolonial period East Asia, 115, 119 Hong Kong (see Hong Kong Special Administrative Region)

Macau, 247(Ch3)n2 see also decolonization; language postmodernism, 46, 102, 104, 119, 122, 160, 1647, 190, 208 postsocialism, 171, 1823, 191 post-structuralism, 56, 58 power, 59, 127, 159, 163 PRC. see Peoples Republic of China preservation. see heritage conservation & preservation PriceWaterhouseCoopers, 258n1 Prince of Wales Hospital, 17 privatization, 43, 248n6 progress, 116, 228 Project 226 (art group), 334, 36 property development, 268, 369, 478, 180, 248nn67, 258n6 prosperity, 3, 11, 101, 115, 173, 250n1 prostitutes. see sex workers protest art. see performance art protests. see demonstrations Proust, Marcel, 41 psychiatry, 163, 165 Pu Songling, 189 public health, 1418, 20, 22, 252n12 public housing. see housing public space. see urban space Public Television Service (PTS, Taiwan), 2212 Public Toilet (film), 198 Puig, Manuel, 229 Pun, Ngai, 259(Ch11)n5 Purple Storm (film), 256n9 Putonghua, 4, 6, 10, 35, 50, 56, 83, 88, 254n10 Qin Hailu, 185, 187 Qin Shi Huangdi, 36 Qing dynasty, 2, 66, 102, 105, 134 Qinghai, 219 Quanzhi Shashou (Fulltime Killer, film), 114, 119, 12430, 255n7 Queens Pier, 3, 25, 27, 31, 367, 3840, 182 Quine, Richard, 120

Index 305

race & ethnicity cinema, 1234, 12830, 1557, 160, 162, 164, 166 East Asian culture, 256n11 essays, 103 language, 635, 67, 834 mass culture and, 120 radicalism, 32 Radio Television Hong Kong (RTHK), 131, 223 Rafelson, Bob, 244 Rafferty, Kevin, 13 rallies. see demonstrations rationality, 174, 185 Reagan, Ronald, 115 realism, 46, 1834, 199, 203, 210, 239, 259n8 see also documentary films Reality Films, 214 Rear Window (film), 242 reclaimed land, 2, 39, 43, 120, 172 Re-cycle (film), 138 Red China. see Peoples Republic of China (PRC) Red Cross, 252n12 Red Man Incident, 31 Redding, Otis, 243 redevelopment. see property development refugees. see immigration Reign behind a Curtain (film), 1345 Reis, Michele, 2359, 241 Republican period, 27 residential high-rises, 173, 17781 Restall, Hugo, 22 Retrospective of MainlandHong Kong Co-productions of the 80s90s (2006), 135 return to China (1997) artworks, 301, 40 assessment & commemoration of first decade (2007), 1, 910, 16, 1820, 368, 95, 1313, 193 ceremony & celebration (1997), 43, 50, 247n4

documentary film, 99, 1089 essays, 99 film industry, 119, 122, 1313, 139, 160, 162, 166, 170, 174, 1823, 231 Hong Kong as world city, 43, 197 language & literature, 63, 76, 789, 83, 87, 93 lead up to, 3, 1214, 436, 89, 93, 171, 174, 177, 182 legal system, 106 music, 6 reunification. see return to China (1997) reversion. see return to China (1997) Reyes, Alejandro, 1618 Reynaud, Brnice, 224 Rice Distribution (documentary film), 214, 218, 2256 right of abode, 1415 right wing ideology, 11516, 159 riots (1960s), 18, 75, 78, 89, 177 Ritchie, William C., 251n3 road movies, 2445 Rob-B-Hood (film), 138 Rolling Stones, 47, 152 Roman Catholic Church, 19 Roman literature, 98 Romance in China (film), 134 Rome, 77, 254n13 Rouge (film), 46, 1701, 17781, 182, 190 Royal, in names, 9, 44 RTHK (Radio Television Hong Kong), 131, 223 Ruan Lingyu, 46 Said, Edward, 64, 91, 102, 160 Sakai Naoki, 115, 117 Salleh, Muhammad Haji, 84 San Francisco, 81 Santaolalla, Gustavo, 244 Sanyal, Sanjeev, 258n1 SAR. see Hong Kong Special Administrative Region SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome), 1518, 22 Sassen, Saskia, 249n10, 258n3

306 Index

Saussy, Haun, 57 schools. see education Schoonmaker, Thelma, 152 science fiction, 50 Scorsese, Martin, 7, 14867, 229, 257n7, 257n10 sculpture, 935, 254n16 Searchers, The (film), 155 Second World, 116 Secondary School (documentary film), 21415, 2268 Secret, The (film), 1701, 1737, 182, 185 security legislation. see national security legislation Sek Kei, 226 self-governance. see democratization Seno, Alexandra A., 1618 Seoul, 113 separation of powers. see democratization September 11 (2001), 42, 159 service industries, 147, 160, 171, 180, 195, 200 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), 1518, 22 sex workers, 7, 177, 182, 185, 198, 201, 2034, 207, 250n12, 259nn910 sexuality, 109, 155, 160, 189, 201, 2034, 210, 219, 239 Shakespeare, William, 76, 85, 161, 169, 257(Ch10)n1 Sham Shui Po neighbourhood, 184, 259n7 Shanghai cultural production, 38, 261n4 Hong Kong comparisons, competition & links with, 2, 18, 46, 489, 51, 113, 196, 204, 248n7, 2489n10, 252n12, 254n1 Shanghainese people, 5, 7, 44, 46, 201, 203, 213 Shanghai Tang (design house), 46, 147 shanties. see squatters Shaolin Soccer (film), 137 Shaolin Temple, 134 Shaolin Temple, The (film), 1345

Shaw Brothers (film company), 118, 134 Sheen, Martin, 153, 159 Shek Kip Mei estate, 187 Shek Tong Tsui district, 177 Shenzhen, 10 Shepherd, Cybill, 155 Sherlock Jr. (film), 154 Shi, Nansun, 133, 143 Shih, Shu-mei, 13940 Shin Zatoichi: Yabure! Tojin-ken (Zatoichi Meets the One-Armed Swordsman, film), 11819 Shining, The (film), 153 Shishido, Jo, 128 Shlovsky, Victor, 169 shopping malls, 50, 179, 200, 203 Shue Yan College, 213 Shum, Jim, 217 Si, Ruo, 142 Sichuanese people, 5 Sil-Metropole Organization Ltd, 134 Silicon Valley, 47 Sina.com, 138 Singapore cinema, 1267, 255n8, 256n9, 256n16 Hong Kong competition & comparisons with, 18, 48, 196, 247(Ch3)n2, 248n7, 254n1, 258n1 migration to, 13 music, 99, 118 position in Asia, 113, 116 scholarship, 2, 84 Sinn, Dikky, 248n7 Sino-British Joint Declaration. see Joint Declaration Sino Group (property development firm), 37 Sixth Generation filmmakers, 259n8 Skelton, John, 95 Sleepless Town (Fuyajo, Bu ye cheng, film), 255n7 S. M. Entertainment Group, 256n10 social class. see class social issues East Asia, 115, 122, 129

Index 307

essays, 989, 105, 110 film industry, 5, 129, 141, 171, 1745, 179, 188, 204, 209, 259(Ch11)nn67, 259n10 Hong Kong, 11, 16, 21 independent documentary film, 214, 221, 223, 225 performance art, 2532, 36, 3940 world cities, 42, 1967, 199, 201, 203 see also elderly people; language Social Movement Film Festival, 220 social networking sites. see internet social realism, 171, 259n8 socialism. see communism; postsocialism Somers, Michael, 39 Song dynasty, 102 Song of the Exile (film), 175 songs. see music Sontag, Susan, 99100 Soong Qingling, 252n12 Sopranos, The (TV series), 163 Sorceress of the New Piano (film), 99 Sorimachi Takashi, 126 South China, 35, 111 South China Film Industry Workers Union, 135 South China Morning Post, 11, 19, 23, 29, 248n7, 248n9, 249n10 South Korea cultural production, 113, 118, 120, 127, 130, 136, 256n10 history, 11516 Southeast Asia, 78, 11516, 119, 121, 127 Southern Film Co. Ltd, 135 Soviet Union, 12, 115 spaces. see urban space Spanish language, 82 Speaking Up (documentary film), 215, 223, 228 Speaking Up 2 (documentary film), 215, 228 Special Administrative Region Hong Kong (see Hong Kong Special Administrative Region)

Macau (see Macau) Spielberg, Steven, 148, 1667 Spivak, Gayatri, 252n11 Sprinker, Michael, 257(Ch10)n1 Spurlock, Morgan, 99 squatters, 501, 198, 200 stability, 3, 11, 101 stage productions, 29, 106 Stanley Beloved (film), 219 Star Ferry Pier, 3, 10, 25, 27, 31, 3840, 182 Star Wars (film), 166 State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT), 1323, 1401 Film Bureau, 137, 142, 144 see also Ministry of Radio, Film and Television states cinema, 162, 166, 221 East Asian region, 11314, 117, 247(Ch3)n2 see also government; Hong Kong Special Administrative Region; Peoples Republic of China Steele, Richard, 100 Stein, Gertrude, 86 stereotypes, 1012, 130, 204 Stewart, James, 242 Stierstorfer, Klaus, 253n6 Still Love You after All These ... (documentary film), 220 Stokes, Lisa Odham, 150, 257(Ch9)n1 Story of Qiuju, The (film), 135 Straits Chinese, 84 strikes. see employment subversion law. see national security legislation subway (MTR trains), 200, 233, 236, 239 suffrage. see democratization Summer Snow (film), 175 Sun Ge, 117 Sun Linlin, 145 Sun Ma Si Cheng, 182 Sun Yat-sen, 1045, 252n12 Sung, Joseph, 17

308 Index

surrealism, 170, 183, 189 Suzuki Seijun, 128, 229, 261n9 Switzerland, 249 Sydney, Australia, 3, 44 Sydney Opera House, 434, 47 Symphony of Lights, 489 Tai Hang district, 106 Tai Hom village, 185, 187, 198201, 2034, 2078, 211 Tai O village, 52 Tai Ping Theatre, 179 Taipei. see Taiwan Taiwan cinematic production, 232, 256n14 documentary film, 215, 2202, 223 dragon-state, 116 Hong Kong relations, 14, 19 Japan and, 256n13 language, 145, 256n14 market for cinema, 121, 141 music, 113, 118, 2312 performance art, 32 position in Asia, 113 representation in Hong Kong cinema, 50, 1267, 240, 24950n11, 256n14 Venice Biennale, 52 Taiwan Documentary Development Association, 222 Taiwanese language, 256n14 Tamar site, 47 Tambling, Jeremy, 261n2 Tan, J. M., 252n15 Tan, Margaret Leng, 99 Tan, Rose W. Y., 252n15 Tang dynasty, 102 Tang Shu-wing, 106, 111 Tang, Xiaobing, 27 Tange Kenzo, 123 Tao, Zhigang, 197 Taoism, 214 Tarantino, Quentin, 245 Taxi Driver (film), 149, 1556, 162, 1645 Taylor, Peter D., 254n1

TDC (Hong Kong Trade Development Council), 133, 1413, 1946, 2589n4 tea habits, 37, 523, 66, 250n14 technological innovations, 121, 166, 207, 210, 21718, 224, 254n2, 258(Ch11)n4 see also information technology television (TV) cinema and, 148, 159 cultural translation, 255n3 documentary film, 2215 East Asia, 256n11, 256n14 Hong Kong identity, 78 Japanese, 118, 120, 255n5, 256n10 journalism, 99 mainland China, 143 music, 199, 231 Taiwan, 2212 tenement houses, 2, 1717, 1828 Teng, Teresa, 239, 261n10 Teo, Stephen, 125, 128, 216, 255n8, 259n4, 261n9 Terracotta Warrior, The (film), 135 Thailand, 14, 116, 127, 136 theatre, 29, 106 Therborn, Gran, 115 Thompson, Kristin, 169 Ti Wei, 260n20 Tiananmen Square, Beijing 1989 events, 13, 1618, 22, 2830, 35, 54, 8792, 2245, 254n15 Monument to the Peoples Heroes, 54 performance art, 32, 250n15 Tianjin, 249n10 Tibet, 160, 219 Tin Shui Wai district, 702, 253nn1718 To, Johnnie, 114, 125, 1278, 130, 134, 139, 149 Fulltime Killer, 114, 119, 12430, 155n7 To Kill the Big Villain in Mt. Tai (film), 134 Toei Animation, 257n18 Tokyo, 11314, 116, 1204, 194, 196, 254n1, 256n13 Tokyo Love Story (Dongjing Ai de Gushi, film), 121

Index 309

Tokyo Raiders (Dongjing Gongle, film), 114, 119, 1224, 1256 Tong Gang, 144 Tong, Stanley, 139 Toolan, Michael, 88 Torode, Greg, 247n5 Toronto, 48, 81 Touming Zhuang (Warlords, film), 257(Ch8)n2 tourism, 910, 16, 412, 47, 147 Tourism Coalition of Hong Kong, 16 tower blocks, residential, 173, 17781 town planning. see urban development trade, 115, 121, 147, 160, 1956 Trade Development Council, 133, 1413, 1946, 2589n4 tradition Chinese culture, 20, 85, 110, 171, 1745, 182 tea habits, 37, 523, 66, 250n14 trams, 172, 178 translation cultural, 2, 215, 255n3 film industry, 120, 125, 145, 149, 2545n3 language, 57, 5860, 253n19 literature, 4, 6073, 99, 251n9, 252n12, 253n6 performance works, 35 transnationalism. see globalization triad films, 148, 159, 235 trilingualism. see bilingualism Trivedi, Harish, 59 Truffaut, Franois, 149 Tsai Chin, 152 Tsai, Eva, 256n14 Tsang, Donald, 10, 19, 223, 131, 247n5, 248n7, 2489n10 Tsang, Eric, 153 Tsang, Kith Tak-ping, 38 Tsang, Steve, 78, 254n15 Tsang Tak-sing, 9 Tse Yuen-man Joanna, 17 Tsim Sha Tsui, 43 Tsui Hark, 134, 174

Tsui, Hillary, 39 Tuen Mun district, 17, 259n7 Tung Chee-hwa, 1822, 47, 106, 1089 Turner, Matthew, 78 TVB, 223 TVXQ (Dongfang Shenqi, Dong Bang Shin Ki, To ho shinki, boy band), 256n10 Tymoczko, Maria, 589 Tzeng Jiaxin, 140 Under Construction (exhibitions, 1999 2002), 121 United Kingdom. see British culture; British sovereignty United States cultural production, 67, 114, 120, 1234, 132, 14767, 216, 2415, 256n10, 260n27 economic & cultural hegemony, 117, 124, 201, 207, 255n4 foreign policy, 159 language, 251n4 literature, 58, 87, 97, 100101 migration to, 4, 67, 13, 100101, 2035, 208, 250n12 Pax Americana, 116 research on Hong Kong, 2, 14 suffrage, 22 U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Committee, 159 world cities, 18, 42, 478, 51, 81, 194, 196, 247n4, 249n10, 250n13, 254n1 see also Hollywood; Las Vegas; New York universal suffrage. see democratization University of Hong Kong, 3, 17, 605, 132, 251n7, 252n15 see also Hong Kong University Press urban architecture. see architecture urban centres. see world city status urban development cinema, 199 East Asia, 11315, 11724, 125, 130, 256n11 spectral cities, 1712, 188

310 Index

world cities, 423, 478, 247n3, 258n3 urban planning. see urban development Urban Renewal Authority (URA), 185, 188 urban space cinema, 155, 185, 191, 231, 242, 256nn1213 essays, 1023 language, 701 neighbourhoods, 1717, 182, 185, 258n2 performance art, 3, 25, 29, 36, 3840 spectral cities, 16973, 179, 247(Ch3)n2, 257(Ch10)n1, 2578(Ch10)notes world cities, 43, 197 V-Artivist (group), 260n15 Valery, Paul, 27 Vampires, Les (film serial), 149 van der Kamp, Jake, 248n9, 250n13 Vancouver, 81 VCD, 218 Venice, 51, 250n13 Venice Biennale, 513 Venuti, Lawrence, 58 Victoria (Hong Kong), 180 Victoria, Queen, 31, 103 Victoria Harbour, 39 Victoria Park, 19, 29, 31, 37, 54 Videopower collective, 220, 260n15 videos, 323, 40, 214, 21721, 232, 257n18, 261n11 Vidler, Anthony, 172, 180 Vietnam, 255n8 Vietnam War, 148, 159, 166 Village Middle School (documentary film), 215, 228 Vines, Stephen, 13 violence, 108, 199, 201, 204, 208 Virilio, Paul, 102 Visible Record (non-profit organization), 214 Vonnegut, Kurt, 102 Wahlberg, Mark, 153, 164, 166

Wai Ka-fai, 114, 125, 127, 139 Waiting for the Verdict of Tung Cheehwa. see From the Queen to the Chief Executive Wan Chai district, 43, 120, 139, 188, 236, 240, 247n3, 256n12 Wang Guowei [aka Wang Kuo-wei], 18990 Wang Hui, 113 Wang, Kuo-wei [aka Wang Guowei], 18990 Wang Shuqin, 150 Wang Yiman, 221, 228 War (documentary film), 214 Warlords (Touming Zhuang, film), 257(Ch8)n2 Washington, D.C., 247n4, 249n10 Wasserstrom, Jeffrey N., 29 waterfront. see harbour & waterfront Way We Are, The (film), 175, 253n18 We Love Hong Kong campaign, 16 websites. see internet Wee, C. J. W.-L. chapter by, 7, 11330 cited, 255n4 Weekly Big Comic Spirits, 129 welfare. see social issues Welles, Orson, 156, 164 Wen Jiabao, 48, 248n7 Wen Yau, 256, 30, 356 Wenders, Wim, 238, 244 Wesleys Mysterious File, The (film), 137 West Kowloon Cultural District, 47, 197, 2478n6 Western colonialism. see colonialism Western culture, 1734, 1889, 207, 216, 255n5 Western district (Hong Kong), 1756, 188 Western media. see media Western-ness. see EastWest binarism Western tourists, 910 westerns (films), 124, 128, 155 White, Barbara Sue, 111 White, Lynn, 13

Index 311

WHO (World Health Organization), 15, 17 Wild at Heart (film), 244 Wilson, Rob, 169 Winchester, Simon, 249n10 Wing, Yun Kwok, 1618 Winterbottom, Michael, 99 Wiseman, Frederick, 214, 224, 227 Witches of Eastwick, The (film), 153 Wolin, Richard, 170 womens issues. see gender Wong, Ain-lin, 257(Ch8)n1 Wong, Anthony, 140, 165 Wong, Faye, 250n12 Wong, Hung, 259n10 Wong, James, 6, 131, 239 Wong Jing, 140 Wong Kar-wai, 6, 50, 1212, 147, 150, 216, 22945, 24950n11, 250n12, 250n14 Wong Lai Ming, 140 Wong Man, 4, 252n12, 252nn1415 Indulgence, 60, 659 Wong, Manfred, 137 Wong Phui Nam, 846, 90, 253n7 Wong, Richard Y. C., 197 Wong Siu-lun, 13 Wong, Stanley Ping-pui, 523 Wong Wang-chi, 556 Woo, John, 6, 126, 136, 150, 157, 235, 250n12 Wood, Michael, 59 Wood, Victoria, 105 Woolf, Virginia, 100 Wordsworth, William, 86 workers rights. see employment world city status cinematic production, 46, 50, 193201, 2034, 2078, 21011, 259n10 Hong Kong as Asias World City, 18, 47, 113, 1934, 196, 248n7, 249n10 Hong Kongs concerns, 23, 4154, 68, 104, 147, 185, 188, 250n13, 254n1, 258(Ch10)nn56, 2589(Ch11)nn25 language, 250n1 literature, 68, 104

performance art, 40 Tokyo, 1212, 254n1 World Health Organization (WHO), 15, 17 world literature. see literature World of Suzie Wong, The (film), 1201, 124, 256n12 World War I, 116, 170 World War II, 13, 61, 105, 11314, 116, 175, 252n12 Wu Bangguo, 11 Wu, Daniel, 144 Wu, Eva, 248n7 Wu, Ka-ming, 259(Ch11)n5 Wu Wenguang, 224 Wyatt, Justin, 167 Xi Xi, 103 Xiao Shan Going Home (film), 218 Xiao Wu (film), 218 Xie Xiao, 140, 142 Xin Qizhi, 258n8 Xu, Gary, 144 Xu Kuangdi, 48, 248n10 Xu Xi, 45, 97, 99, 100106, 11011, 253n3 Yam, Simon, 126 Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, 224 Yan Shu, 189 Yang + Yin: Gender in Chinese Cinema (documentary film), 220 Yang Guifei (Empress Yang Kwei Fei, film), 1389 Yang Li-chou, 222, 260n19, 260n21 Yang, Shu, 37 Yasuda Kimiyoshi, 118 Yau, Esther C. M., 257(Ch9)n1 Yau, Herman, 4, 97, 104, 10611 Yau Ma Tei district, 35, 120, 184 Yeats, W. B., 8993, 95 Yeh, Emilie, 144 Yeh, Michelle, 601 Yeh Yueh-Yu, 11820, 122, 124, 230, 261n8, 261n11

312 Index

Yeoh, E. K., 17 Yeung, Chris, 2489n10 Yeung, Esther, 260n10 Yeung, Miriam, 187 Yeung, Yang, 213, 260n15 Yin, Terence, 144 Ying E Chi (film distributor), 21819 Yip, Ngai-ming, 258nn12 Yiu Yuet-ming, 1823 Young, Charlie, 240 Young and Dangerous (film series), 148 Young Hay, 53 Youtube.com, 40 Yu, Nelson Lik-wai, 21819 Yuen, K. Y., 17 Yuen Long district, 259n7 Yunnan, 215

Zatoichi film series, 118 Zatoichi Meets the One-Armed Swordsman (Shin Zatoichi: Yabure! Tojin-ken, film), 11819 Zen, Joseph, 19 Zhang Che, 118 Zhang Junfeng, 137 Zhang Yimou, 134 Zhang Ziyi, 140 Zhou Xun, 140, 210, 259n8 Zhu Rongji, 48, 2489n10