Abstract
Polley views Hong Kong from many angles: population demographics, critical theory, vernacular criticism, the media, and autobiography. These intersect in the work of Wong Kar Wai. His 1960s’ trilogy—Days of Being Wild (1990), In the Mood for Love (2000), and 2046 (2004)—provides a discursive entry to a discussion of what the fractious identity marker “Hongkonger” speaks to 20 years after the 1997 handover to China. Wong’s films prize nostalgia, discontinuity, ambiguity, and deferral. Polley adopts a similar destabilizing approach. He makes a virtue of fragments, margins, and counter-narratives. Wong’s Hong Kong is not the global one of fast finance and free-markets. Polley’s Hong Kong, when reviewed through Wong’s lens, is assembled through competing paratexts, narrative layers that complement and contradict one another.
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Notes
- 1.
In speaking of 2014’s “Umbrella Movement,” which detonated out of “Occupy Central” in no small part because of “police charging pro-democracy protestors with pepper spray” (Connors 2015, np.), Cheng (2016) provides the data for what he aptly calls the “localist framing” that “appeared to define the protestors: as many as 81 per cent self-identified as pure Hongkongers, much higher than the 42 per cent of the general population and the 60 per cent of 18- to 29-year-olds as of December 2014” (402). For an idea of the increasing “ambiguity” of Hong Kong’s “localist terminology,” see Kwan et al. (2016). See also Wong et al. (2016), which, like all articles in this note, addresses Hong Kong’s culture of protest while also stressing that the center of localism’s inexactness is “the uniqueness of Hong Kong identity” (np.). I thank a Hong Kong-born, ethnically Chinese colleague for alerting me to these articles. The colleague wished to remain anonymous and did not grant me permission to paraphrase their (used in the singular) own understanding of the term due to concerns about defining the term incorrectly, of being unable accurately to convey its nuances.
- 2.
The clause “I didn’t think we’d be like them” replaces the oft-iterated “We won’t be like them” in In the Mood for Love. “We Won’t Be Like Them” is the title of Nancy Blake’s (2003) essay subtitled “Repetition Compulsion in Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love.”
- 3.
Regular variants of the name are Wong Kar-wai, Wong Kar Wai, and Wong Kar-Wai. I use Wong Kar Wai because this is how my Hong Kong students’ names appear on attendance sheets and online platforms. With the variant of the surname capitalized and followed by a comma, this too is how the names of Cantonese “Hongkongers” appear on ID cards and passports, sometimes followed by a Romanized non-Chinese first name—namely, the surname is followed by two given Chinese names and sometimes by an “English” name, which is often not actually “(in) English.”
- 4.
My subtitle reworks the chapter “Wong Kar-wai: Hong Kong Filmmaker” from Ackbar Abbas’ monograph Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance. I stress “Hongkonger,” a new, increasingly politicized, official identity marker in Hong Kong, a loaded qualifier Abbas essentially prophesied two decades ago in 1997.
- 5.
Zerby (2003, 3).
- 6.
Grafton (1997, 9).
- 7.
English Oxford Living Dictionaries (2014, np).
- 8.
“The Gov. of the Hong Kong Special Admin. Region. Census and Statistics Dept.” (2017, np).
- 9.
This designation gains in opacity the more one looks into it. In some renditions of this data, “Whites” is replaced by “British” at 0.5%, followed by “American” and “Australian,” each at 0.2%. The “Others” category, one would posit, must also include some “Whites.” The “Note” to the “Others” category in an online table appended to one version of the 2011 Population Census maintains this (puzzling?) ambiguity. It reads: “The figures include ‘Black’, ‘Latin American’, etcetera.”
- 10.
See pp. 6 and 101 in Anderson’s rev. ed. of Imagined Communities (2006). For instance, Hong Kong, as the last bastion of Cantonese language and culture in Greater China, finds itself in the face of institutional compromise, if not erasure. Hong Kong, a Special Administrative Region, is, perhaps especially in the imaginary of localist groups, on the brink of losing its very specialness, its distinction from the Mandarin-speaking provinces of its Beijing-directed mainland cousins. A Hong Kong local communal imaginary that resists Beijing control threatens the collective imaginary now sanctioning China’s national mandate.
- 11.
Witness the complex Indian imaginary Rushdie speaks to directly on p. 2 in the “Introduction” of Imaginary Homelands (1991). Rushdie’s concern, as is Wong Kar Wai’s, so I address in this chapter, is not about national or communal authenticity, which fosters exclusion, but about diversity, inclusion, and connection. One of Wong’s key stakes is the provision of a Hong Kong counter-narrative.
- 12.
Lau (2013).
- 13.
Consider these selections from user nmp_inc’s (2014) long and sobering “comment,” the only serious one of the three on the SCMP “Hongkonger” article (Lam, 2014), as a vernacular reflection on the politicization of the Hongkonger neologism (all sics reproduced verbatim):
… [Hongkonger’s] inclusion probably more accurately reflects the appearance of those terms in … (mostly Western) media. …
While the anti-mainland sentiment may have help boosted the popular visibility in the West about the identity marker “Hongkonger”, … wrong and misleading to tie it to “anti-mainland sentiment”…. Hongkongers … long distinguished themselves from mainlanders…. no different than Beijinger or Shanghainese. (np.)
- 14.
I qualify the “official” length of the “79-day protest,” which “begins” on 28 September, the day Hong Kong police liberally tear gas student protesters, who (now iconically) protected themselves with umbrellas, because a smattering of occupying tents remains on Hong Kong Island’s Admiralty streets after the protest’s generally understood 15 December “conclusion.” Wikipedia supplies the dates of the “2014 Hong Kong protests” as “26 September to 15 December 2014.” Cheng dates “Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement” as the events “Between 28 September and 17 December 2014” (383). For a timeline of key related events, see Connors.
- 15.
To the patent condemnation of renowned international figures and local activists, in what is arguably a case of legal “double jeopardy” (being charged twice for the same crime), on 17 August 2017 student leaders Joshua Wong, Nathan Law, and Alex Chow were sentenced to between six and eight months of jail time though they had already completed their initial sentences of community service. Ensuing was a protest against the circuitous application of Hong Kong’s “Basic Law,” which O’Sullivan (2017) defines as “the closest thing Hong Kong has to a constitutional document” (136). See Siu (2017), Lam (2017), Pang (2017), Hollingsworth & Lau (2017), and Ewing (2017).
- 16.
Yi Wei Chew (2015) addresses the cultural tensions—or culture war—between mainlanders and Hongkongers preceding 2014’s Umbrella Protest. “An incident of topical interest,” she writes, occurred on Hong Kong public transport when a “Hong Konger reprehended a group of mainland tourists for eating … on the train” (52). The accuser “was met not with an apology but with irreverent mockery for his inadequate Mandarin. Hong Kongers … expres[s] little tolerance for and identification with their Chinese compatriots and refer to them disparagingly as ‘locusts’” (52). Mainlanders, for their part, “deride the Hong Kongers for their inferior Mandarin and accuse them of being jealous of mainlander affluence” (52–3). Yi goes on to address one Professor Kong Qingdong, “a Peking University academic known to be a vocal, trenchant critic of Hong Kong,” who (in)famously called Hongkongers “‘dogs trained by colonialists,’ ‘worshippers of the West,’ and ‘bastards’” (53).
- 17.
Christopher DeWolf (2017) characterizes this war in terms of phenomenological and urban spaces: “Twenty years after its handover to China, Hong Kong is once again in a state of existential angst, as the struggle for its soul is being waged not only in the classroom, courtroom and boardroom, but in the streets” (Borrowed Spaces, 15).
- 18.
A not unvocal minority of Hong Kong students and localist groups continue to take issue with what is now commonly called “Mainlandization” in Hong Kong. On university campuses, for instance, this “Mainlandization” is apparent in the graduate requirement of “Putonghua,” which literally translates to “language of the people.” Institutional and political literature in Hong Kong refers to the languages of Hong Kong’s “biliterate and trilingual” mandate as “Cantonese, English, and Putonghua,” rather than “Guangdonghua, Yingman, and Putonghua,” “Guangdonghua, English, and Mandarin,” or “Guangdonghua, English, and Putonghua.” Cantonese is officially de-privileged; unlike Putonghua, it is rendered in translation. First-language Cantonese speakers are thus explicitly told that they do not speak “the language of the people” and that they have no first language since Cantonese is a mere “dialect.”
WESMCL (2014) addresses this issue in his China Daily Mail opinion piece “Do Hong Kongers speak a language?” concerning the popular meme “Cantonese is just a dialect, it’s not a language” (np.). He avers that “saying” and “believing” that meme “makes exactly as much semantic sense as saying ‘A German Shepard is just a dog, it’s not a mammal’ and believing that. For someone to believe this sentence is true, they must be confused (or at least highly imprecise) about what the English words ‘dialect’ and ‘language’ mean” (np.). Let me quote in their entirety three points featured in the piece:
-
1.
Cantonese and Mandarin are not mutually intelligible, and therefore they are without a doubt different languages, not just different dialects.
-
2.
Cantonese did not derive from Mandarin, and is not some bastardized form of some pure Chinese language, even though Cantonese and Mandarin likely share a prehistoric mother tongue.
-
3.
Number of speakers and official status are not valid criteria for ranking languages/ dialects as superior or inferior to each other. (np., reproduced by permission from WESMCL)
WESMCL then integrates Max Weinreich’s quip “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.” Also see WESMCL’s related piece “China, Hong Kong and Cantonese: Dialect Dialectic” (2014) where he considers the ideological tenor of the Cantonese-as-dialect meme.
-
1.
- 19.
Blake exposes the double eschatology of Deng’s legendary slogan: “1997, the end of British colonial rule, 2046, the end of capitalism” (343).
- 20.
An instructive example of recent changes in the usage of the once categorically derogatory term gweilo is found in the trademarking of the eponymous Hong Kong craft beer. Quoting Ian Jebbet, Helen Dalley (2017) recounts the legal processes the cofounding expat couple undertook: “The trademark registry initially rejected the name Gweilo because of the word’s historical negative connotations” (np.). Over the next several months, Jebbet’s wife researched the term gweilo, discovering that it’s not necessarily derogatory “and that even members of LegCo and the Hong Kong Police Force” use “the term in public print” (np.). Jebbet, still a lawyer at the time, then formulated “a 70-page legal submission”; it won the approval of the “registry” (np.). The Gweilo beer tagline “a redefining beer” references the fact that usage of the term gweilo has evolved in the past three decades (np.).
- 21.
Ip Man (2008), Ip Man 2: Legend of the Grandmaster (2010), and Ip Man 3 (2015).
- 22.
So too do some English speakers use the term gweilo freely. Here’s a description of the term as it’s widely disseminated directly on Gwei·Lo Beer pint glasses: “(鬼佬) (ɡweɪləʊ), n., pl.-gweilos 1. lit Cantonese term meaning ‘ghost chap.’ 2. hist. Cantonese slang term used to describe barbarian hedonistic invaders of Canton in the 16th Century. 3. mod. Slang term used by many in first and third person to describe foreigners. 5. trademark Exceptional craft beer brewed in Hong Kong with talent, expertise and modesty. phrase A chilled and full-bodied gweilo can be surprisingly sophisticated.” Along with other slight changes, such as font size, comma usage, and capitalization, labels on Gwei·Lo IPA, Pale Ale, and WIT bottles carry an additional final phrase: “Cool and well-balanced, a gweilo is the epitome of refinement and good taste.”
- 23.
Yet it’s more than this. O’Sullivan shows this in his reflective piece on being an “out of the loop” gweilo professor in Hong Kong when he quotes from a student’s email about the lack of English media in the territory which begins: “I have recently become aware that people are virtually living in a parallel Hong Kong if they do not know Chinese/Cantonese” (139).
- 24.
In the essay “Is There a Text in This Class?” (1980) from his eponymous monograph, Fish expounds upon how we are always already “in a situation,” the very positioning that allows us to hear and interpret, or rather pre-hear and anticipate, the meaning of certain utterances based upon the contexts in which they occur (313). Because Fish’s students are his own, just like his colleagues are his colleagues, all of whom hear Fish repeat deconstructionist views like “there are no determinate meanings and the stability of the text is an illusion” (312), they are already his “victims,” already predisposed to “thinking within those circumstances” that affirm his “theoretical beliefs” (313).
- 25.
“This declining political interest,” Kavanagh writes (1995) about what we should see as the demonstrative “American subject,” “does not mean the system is not working; to the contrary, it is a sign that the system is working quite well … for more people more of the time through apparatuses of ideological interpellation/subjection” (313).
- 26.
Indigenize is a word the editors chose provocatively. In speaking of Wong Kar Wai’s My Blueberry Nights (2007), the lone English film in an oeuvre where the rare use of English “has been considered ‘quirky’ and a representation of the ‘globalness’ of Hong Kong cinema” (730), Olivia Khoo (2014) goes on to explain how the film like Gong Li’s “failed entry into English-language filmmaking with Memoirs of a Geisha … was relatively ignored upon its release” (731). Khoo surmises that this lack of commercial success, for “Western viewers and critics,” reveals “a loss of authenticity” (731). “For some Chinese audiences,” she explains, this type of filmic depiction “represents a ‘sell out,’ despite the spread, transformation and indigenization of English in the non-Western world” (731).
- 27.
Polley (2016, np).
- 28.
Botz-Bornstein (2008, 94–5). In Hong Kong (1997), Abbas makes a related point about Hong Kong’s “new” local internationalism: “Hong Kong Cantonese now is sprinkled with snatches of Mandarin, English, and barbarous sounding words and phrases—a hybrid language coming out of a hybrid space. It is by being local in this way that the new Hong Kong cinema is most international” (28).
- 29.
Khoo (2014, 736). The wordplay of Khoo’s title is clever and fitting: “Wong Kawaii.” The Cantonese given name Kar Wai is nearly homonymous with the duo-syllabic Japanese term kawaii (not to be rhymed with the trisyllabic Hawaii) and simply translates to “cute” in English. In Wong’s directorial oeuvre, the kawaii is most obvious in the second half of Chungking Express (1994) when the character Faye (played by Faye Wong) surreptitiously cleans and colonizes with replacement objects of her choosing (tropical fish, flip-flops, canned food labels, fluffy towels, stuffed animals) the Central-Mid-Levels apartment of Cop 663 (played by Tony Leung), a late 20-something police officer whose large, labyrinthine, old flat contains a bizarre
(to non Hongkongers)amount of stuffed animals, small and overlarge. The first of Chungking Express’ two interrelated stories also mainly concerns “the affairs of” and “not an affair between” a mysterious woman and a cop who regularly frequents the “Midnight Express,” which is a kebab, pizza, and fish and chips joint, owned, and operated by a Cantonese local whose kitchen staff speak Urdu, in or around Tsim Sha Tsui’s Chungking Mansions, a 1961 complex now officially housing over 4000 mostly ethnic minority residents, and locally famous for its downtrodden wonder—cheap Indian subcontinent restaurants, hidden Nigerian eateries, foreign exchange kiosks, gray-market electronics, made-to-order clothing, flophouses, narcotics, sickness, lust, dust…thus, in part, the film title Cung Hing Sam Lam, which literally translates to “Chung King Jungle.” - 30.
Both in reference to the glocal, or the superimposition of the global into the local, and to the blonde wig in Chungking Express, a wig Lin’s character discards once she murders her “Western” boss, it’s useful to highlight that “In a society where Western styles, language, and attitudes mix with Chinese equivalents, the traditional notions of otherness are not guaranteed” (see Gleason et al. 2002, 305). Thus the complex (re)configurations Wong’s work invites.
- 31.
Abbas 1997b, 35; the phrase that Martin Scorsese’s eponymous film Mean Streets (1973) made famous.
- 32.
Mazierska and Rascaroli (2000/2001) also note this. They point out that “Wong Kar-Wai’s films also feature an abundance of watches, clocks, and calendars, not only as part of the design but also as important elements of the narrative and symbolism of his films” (3).
- 33.
See p. 6.
- 34.
This is located in the final sentence of the final note (17), 1999, 45.
- 35.
See “2011 Population Census and Statistics Dept. Hong Kong Special Admin. Region,” 46.
- 36.
1997b, 2.
- 37.
The selection of the word “back” should resonate with anyone or “other” familiar, through personal experience or online witnessing, with the nationalist tenor of accusations modeled on the racist epithet “Go back to your country!”
- 38.
Citing Stephen Teo’s Wong Kar Wai: Auteur of Time (2005), Yi Wei Chew explains how the director “is deliberately known by his Cantonese name Wong Kar Wai, rather than the Chinese Hanyu Pinyin [name] Wang Jia Wei—with the former now a global brand of repute” (52). Yi then quotes Teo directly: “How do we [in this vein] understand Wong as a Hong Kong filmmaker? How do we reconcile Wong’s global standing with his local roots?” (52).
- 39.
- 40.
See p. 51. Chew continues with a reference to Abbas, who, in 1997a, states that Wong’s “Every film then is a fragment, incomplete in itself; a return to a site whose features have been glimpsed before, but only partially.” See also Botz-Bornstein, 102, Nestler (2012, 590), and Mazierska and Rascaroli, 16–18.
- 41.
In his review of Peter Brunette’s 2005 book Wong Kar-wai, Hunter Vaughan (2009) stresses that in “In the Mood for Love one finds a particular break with his past films, a certain maturity that expresses itself in terms of rhythm and silence” (78).
- 42.
Though undeveloped in the film, the period is remembered for three days of riots following protests against the British colonial government’s hiking of the Star Ferry fare, the key pedestrian link between Hong Kong Island and the Kowloon Peninsula.
- 43.
All (ideologically telling) words in quotation marks are appropriated directly from the distinctive terminologies used in the quoted quinquennial surveys. Tildes (~) indicate discrepancies and/or approximations between data reiterated in subsequent and/or alternately titled corresponding censuses.
- 44.
Chow (2002) offers this reading of In the Mood for Love and Wong Kar Wai’s suggestive exposure of its undercurrents: “If we take Wong Kar-wei’s suggestion that the little boy in Su [Li-zhen]’s apartment at the end of the film might be the offspring of her relationship with Zhou [Chow in Cantonese], then Wong’s film, too, may be called ‘my father and mother’” (642). She complicates this interpretation in the fourth of her “Notes”: “In an interview conducted in New York, Wong is reported to have said: ‘The child we see with Maggie Cheung may be Tony Leung’s, or may be not.’ Ming Pao Daily News (North American edition, 4 October 2000, A3; my translation from the Chinese” (653)).
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———. Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1997.
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Polley, J.S. (2018). “I Didn’t Think We’d Be Like Them”; or, Wong Kar Wai, Hongkonger. In: Polley, J., Poon, V., Wee, LH. (eds) Cultural Conflict in Hong Kong. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7766-1_13
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