China & Inner Asia: Table of Contents
Organizer: Daisy Sheung-yuen Ng, Harvard University
Chair: Edward M. Gunn Jr., Cornell University
Discussant: Andrew F. Jones, University of Washington
How have the Chinese residents of Hong Kong imagined their heritage at a colonial remove from the motherland? How have these imaginations, in turn, been commodified and marketed via mass media and popular publishing? While recent scholarship has focused almost exclusively on the cultural anxieties prompted by Hong Kong’s post-colonial predicament in the decade leading up to the handover in 1997, this panel traces some of the complex ways in which popular fiction and film in Hong Kong have always "written home" since 1945.
A truism of the recent media coverage of the 1997 handover has been that it was only when the people of Hong Kong were faced with the imminent spectre of change—beginning with the signing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration in 1984—that the issue of local and national identities came to the fore. Yet the papers in this panel argue that the complex and often ambivalent process of negotiating identity alongside both China and Britain has been in motion throughout the post-war years. By paying closer attention to the relationship between art, politics, and everyday life in Hong Kong over the past five decades, these four papers variously explore how print media and film cultures have framed the themes of nostalgia, community, nationalism, and exile at several political-historical junctures.
One of the central preoccupations of post-war Hong Kong film and fiction has certainly been the colony’s fraught relationship with the Mainland—a relationship often configured as biopolitics, in which "nation" and "family" share a permeable boundary. "Writing home" is the common topic of these four papers, as all of them concern instances of imaginative home-"making" in the popular culture of Hong Kong. Chris Hamm considers the refractions of a sense of "home" in the specific guise of "new school" martial arts fiction, tracing how the popularity of serialized martial arts novels in Hong Kong and the "Greater China" area in the 1950s emerged as an expression of a diaspora community’s romantic visions of a heroic and distant Chinese past. Karen Chan similarly addresses the invention of "home" in serialized newspaper fiction of the 1950s, though her essay focuses on the local community of citizens and readers created through the active public consumption of popular serialized fiction, and suggests that a sense of Hong Kong identity was fostered in this manner as early as the 1950s. Daisy Ng problematizes the construct of "home" within the context of the nostalgia trend in the last decade, and her essay examines a series of kung-fu movie re-makes, questioning the implications of a nostalgia whose object is a distant, abstract China. Eileen Chow focuses on the pecularities of a 1990s Hong Kong fascinated with the material traces of 1930s Shanghai, and suggests that the claims made of an unbroken aesthetic legacy bespeaks of the willful re-making of an alternative "home" in a depoliticized past, and consequently, enables the creation of a radical new vision of the (erstwhile) colony’s future.
John Christopher Hamm, University of California, Berkeley
On January 17, 1954 White Crane master Chan Hak-foo and T’ai-chi ch’uan master Ng Kung-yee fought a match at a nightclub in Macau. The bout received intensive coverage from the Hong Kong media, and several days after the event the New Evening Post began serializing Liang Yusheng’s new martial arts novel, Lion and Tiger Vie in the Capital. Jin Yong’s first work, The Romance of Book and Sword, followed within a year. And thus, according to standard accounts, was born the "New School" of martial arts fiction, which swept Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the overseas Chinese communities from the mid-fifties through the mid-seventies, and in the eighties found an equally enthusiastic reception in the Chinese mainland.
Studies of this fiction have generally focused either on its connections with the longer tradition of Chinese martial arts fiction or on the artistic merits of individual works and authors. This paper represents an attempt to understand "New School" martial arts fiction within the context of its original production and circulation. It traces the connections between several key texts in the genre and contemporary parodies such as The Heroes of the Red Flower Society Raise a Ruckus in Hong Kong, the practices of serialized newspaper fiction, the media’s presentation of the Chan-Ng match, and the geographical and political givens of Chinese society in post-war Hong Kong. Seen from these perspectives, the martial romances of the fifties and sixties emerge as expressions of exile and nostalgia—visions of a heroic Chinese past that by their very nature bespeak a community’s sense of spatial, temporal, and cultural remove from the imagined universe within the fiction.
Karen K. L. Chan, Chinese University of Hong Kong
This paper addresses the production and consumption of serialized fiction in Hong Kong in the early 1950s in light of how the genre successfully creates, through specific textual maneuvers and strategies, a community of readers sharing an interest not only in the narrative itself, but also in a kind of togetherness generated through the process of anticipation, consumption, and discussion of the characters and development of the serialized story.
The increasing importance of serialized fiction in the post-war period may be related historically to the attempts of Hong Kong residents to construct, articulate and produce a sense of what it means to be "Hong Kong citizens." Specifically, I examine the way in which newspaper columnists, most of whom had fled turmoil in the mainland to come to Hong Kong, project new patterns of social life through their reproduction and representation of the local community. These representations, then, provide new discursive frames through which readers conceptualize their relation to "home." "Hong Kong identity" has been a topic of great concern in recent years and many scholars have suggested that a self-conscious sense of "Hong Kong culture" began to emerge only in the 1960s. This examination of newspaper fiction suggests an alternative interpretation: that a sense of community has been enacted since the early 1950s by way of reader participation in this genre of print culture. The serial Jing Ji La Ri Ji (The Diary of Agent La) by Jing Ji La (San-su) published in New Life Evening Post from 1947 to 1954 will be used to illustrate the generic as well as the discursive construction of a local cultural identity in the post-war period.
Daisy Sheung-yuen Ng, Harvard University
In my presentation I will look at the 1990s re-makes (the Once Upon A Time in China series) of Huang Feihong’s Cantonese kung-fu movies of the 40s and 50s, and examine the peculiar role nationalism plays in these re-makes. The re-makes of the once popular Huang Feihong series may be seen as another instance of commercialization of nostalgia in Hong Kong within the last decade. A comparison of the re-makes with the original series raises interesting questions concerning the nature of Hong Kong’s nostalgia and its relationship to nationalism. The fact that Huang Feihong was an actual Guangdong hero and that the original movies featuring his deeds were local, Cantonese productions seems to place the re-makes within the context of the recent trend of valorizing local (Hong Kong) culture over national (Chinese) culture. Yet the fact that the 90s Huang Feihong has been transformed from a local hero into a national hero points to a nostalgia imbued with a nationalism whose object is a distant, abstract China. I believe the re-makes are acute manifestations of Hong Kong people’s complex feelings towards the mainland and the Handover. It seems to me that in this very popular series the relationship between nostalgia and nationalism is neither simply antagonistic nor purely complicit. I tend towards seeing the re-makes as an instance in which nostalgia, a potentially subversive strategy, is all too easily co-opted by the ideology of nationalism and values of the market economy.
Eileen Cheng-yin Chow, Stanford University
From a deluxe 3-CD reissue of ballads by 1930s songstresses ("Night Shanghai") to the recently opened "Shanghai Tang," a retro-chic emporium of Chinese clothing and collectibles, Hong Kong consumer culture in the 1990s has been marked by a huaijiu, or nostalgia craze. Yet what is notable about this recent huaijiu impulse in Hong Kong is its particular object of fascination—Shanghai of the 1930s and 40s, specifically as imagined in a movie-set spectacle of colonial splendour and decadence.
We might speculate over what an erstwhile Shanghai represents in the cultural imaginary of present-day Hong Kong, and whether anxieties over "Chinese" identity in the face of cosmopolitanism, collaboration, and colonialism might resonate for the residents of these two hybrid spaces. Yet the tale of these two cities begins earlier—in a shared cinematic past. While Shanghai was the first and undisputed center of the Chinese film industry, as early as 1909 Hong Kong emerged as the second major site for Chinese film production. Furthermore, Hong Kong was the destination for several waves of mass migration of Shanghai film talent in the 1930s and 40s, and Shanghainese directors effectively took over the Mandarin film industry in Hong Kong in the 1950s.
While on one hand the 1990s filmic, pop cultural and consumer references to 1930s Shanghai certainly gesture to this long-standing partnership and exchange, I argue in this paper that, in other ways, the contemporary fetishization of a visually spectacular "period" Shanghai is a way of circumventing the ongoing material realities of the Hong Kong/Shanghai (as well as the larger Hong Kong/Mainland) relationship, exchanging it for a "filmic" one that positions Hong Kong as the official inheritor of pre-Communist Chinese cosmopolitanism, and importantly, as the legitimate heir of Chinese entertainment cinema. In the second half of this paper I will anchor my arguments on the symbiotic relationship between Hong Kong and Shanghai with a discussion of Stanley Kwan’s ambitious "biopic" (Center Stage, 1991) of famous 1930s actress Ruan Lingyu, examining the ways in which that film makes fascinating and complex claims to the inheritance of Chinese cinema, to the shared cultural past, and to an alternative legacy of envisioning China.