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paradigm city
SUNY series in Global Modernity

Arif Dirlik, editor

 paradigm city
Space, Culture, and Capitalism in Hong Kong

Janet Ng
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany

2009 State University of New York Press, Albany

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written per-
mission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or
by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY

www.sunypress.edu

Production by Ryan Morris

Marketing by Anne M. Valentine

Library of Congress of Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ng, Janet.
Paradigm city : space, culture, and capitalism in Hong Kong / Janet Ng.
p. cm. (SUNY series in global modernity)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 9780791476659 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Hong Kong (China)Politics and government1997 2. Popular cultureChina
Hong Kong. 3. Hong Kong (China)Social conditions20th century. 4. Hong Kong
(China)HistoryTransfer of Sovereignty from Great Britain, 1997. I. Title.

JQ1539. 5 . A58N4 2009

951.2506dc22
2008005521

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 Contents

List of Illustrations vi
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1

one
World Suicide Capital 19

two
Walking Down Memory Lane: 43
On the Streets of the Hong Kong History Museums Paradigm City

three
Quality Citizens in Public Spaces 65

four
The World Emporium and the Mall City 89

five
Body Weight, Responsible Citizenship, and Womens Social Space 113

six
Repatriating from Globalization 139

Conclusion 163
Notes 167
Bibliography 187
Index 197

v
 Illustrations

Fig. 1.1: Bounce Back, Hong Kong! 37

Fig. 2.1: Murray House 53
Fig. 3.6: Protestors gathering in Victoria Park 70
Fig. 3.2: Victoria Park Rules 72
Fig. 3.3: Hong Kong Park 73
Fig. 3.4: Escalator to Hong Kong Park 74
Fig. 3.5: Escalator to Hong Kong Park through shopping mall 75
Fig. 3.6: The Lippo Center looms over Hong Kong Park 75
Fig. 3.7: Tai Ping Street Park 77
Fig. 3.8: Victoria Harbour Promenade 79
Fig. 3.9: Rules of Conduct 81
Fig. 3.10: More Rules 81
Fig. 4.1: Pedestrian Walkway in Central 94
Fig. 4.2: Harbour City Mall Complex 94
Fig. 5.1: Weight-loss mania 117
Fig. 6.1: Women Workers Cooperative 160
Fig. 6.2: Long Hair 164

vi
 Acknowledgments

As usual, there are many people to thank for the completion of a major
project. I am sure the following list is less than complete. I would like to
publicly acknowledge the institutions and colleagues who have inspired and
supported this project in material and uncountable ways. I thank the City
University of New York, PSC Awards for offering grant money for course
releases to enable me to write during the academic year and subvention
toward publication costs. I have beneted immensely as a fellow at the Center
for Place, Culture, and Politics at the Graduate Center, City University of
New York. In particular, I am grateful to Poyin Auyeung, Carmen Bellet,
Ashley Dawson, Efrat Eizenberg, Cheryl Fish, Anders Hansen, David Harvey,
Valerie Imbruce, Anru Lee, Paula Massood, Emily Pugh, Stephanie Sapiie,
Neil Smith, Bill Solecki, Ida Susser, and Stephan Tonnelat (in alphabetical
order). Our weekly discussion for a year was valuable to me, as are the
wonderful friends I made. A number of people slogged through parts of my
drafts, especially Dalia Kandiyoti, Ashley Dawson, and Setha Low, as well as
the various anonymous reviewers of my individual essays and the book
manuscript.
There are also a number of friends and colleagues with whom I am engaged
in different projects or whom I constantly bounced ideas off of: Anru Lee, Kate
Crehan, Samira Haj, Ida Susser, and Stephan Tonnelat. I am also grateful to
all my colleagues at the College of Staten Island, especially in the Department
of English, who have been challenging, supportive, and inspiring in many
different ways; many have become great friends. Our departmental secretaries,
Ann-Marie Franzese, Janet Sadowski, and Susan Chapman have been invalu-
able in the everyday life at work. I thank all my students, graduate and

vii
viii Acknowledgments

undergraduate, who have been indulgent and patient. Finally, I also owe much
thanks to the editors and staff at the State University of New York Press, espe-
cially Andrew Kenyon, Larin McLaughlin, and Ryan Morris, whose kind
assistance has made the collaboration a pleasure. I reserve my expression of
gratitude toward family members and intimates to more personal venues.
 Introduction

Hong Kong has a popular image internationally as a city of uncensored capi-

talism. Since 1992, Hong Kong has been ranked as the worlds most liberal
economy.1 The general public, pundits, and government ofcials celebrated
this conferral by the international community, regarding it as an afrmation of
Hong Kongs continuing progress along a universally approved path of capi-
talist success. When this annual report card came in January 2006 for Hong
Kongs performance in 2005, it was particularly reassuring as Hong Kong
slowly recovered from the seemingly endless economic, social, and political
nightmares that had plagued it since its return to Chinese sovereignty in 1997.2
Hong Kong is a complex place as a postcolonial city, a global city, a cultural
imperium (It had been the worlds second largest film and entertainment
exporter after Hollywood from the 1980s to 1990s, and is still an important
force in international media entertainment.),3 and a command and control
center of world capital.4 It is politically and economically dominated and
inuenced by other governments, especially China, but it also simultaneously
participates in an exploitative relationship with areas of the global South,
especially China.5 Hong Kong thus unsettles facile geopolitical binaries

A Note on Romanization: All the names and titles of works in this volume are
romanized according to a Hong Kong Cantonese pronunciation and conventional
(though not standardized) way of spelling, or the name holders preferred spelling.
The English translation of titles or putonghua romanization are italicized and
provided in parenthesis when necessary. The only exceptions are those whose
names in standard putonghua romanization have already had a broad recognition,
for example, the author, Sai Sai (Xi Xi).

1
2 Paradigm City

empire and subject, exploiter and exploitedcontaining tremendous contra-

dictions within one society. Most important of all, looming over the daily
consciousness of the people and all the daily operations of the city is the
presence of China as an extralegal superego that conditions the popular senti-
ments, social, and political rationality, as well as the material and political
reality of Hong Kong.
Despite the apparent afuence of the city, parts of Hong Kongs popula-
tion remain poor, most prominently the new immigrants from China, the legal
and illegal migrant laborers from elsewhere in Asia, and the aged. These popu-
lations that are otherwise powerless, nevertheless exert an indismissible
pressure within Hong Kong as their very existence is a constant irritant to the
bourgeois sensibility and undermines the middle-class myth that determines
the Hong Kong governments policy agenda as well as the dominant culture
of the city. The ofcial capitalist narrative is partly fostered by Deng Xiaopings
pledge to Hong Kong in 1984 to guarantee continued stability and prosperity
(anding fanrong). This promise works effectively as a psychological leash,
reining in Hong Kong peoples political aspirations in the name of social
peace.
The foundational principle of Mainland Chinas governance of Hong Kong
articulated in the slogan stability and prosperity (anding fanrong) emphasizes
Hong Kongs economic development while refuting the peoples right to poli-
tics. Accompanying this economism is the rhetoric of Chinese nationalism,
which is deployed to restrain local political expression and to safeguard
(market) stability. Beijing constantly reminds the people of Hong Kong that
social and political harmony is crucial to the continued status of Hong Kong as
an international financial center, its ability to attract global capital and to
continue its economic success. The market and the state meet in much of the
citys physical plan and organization, which enforce habits and practices that
undergird the citys bourgeois identity.
This commitment to free-market capitalism and bourgeois prosperity has
direct effects on the people, especially in terms of the experience of their
everyday life, and produces many structural inequities in society.6 The spatial
organization of the city, which includes the many different state devices of
ordering movements, and spatial usages, as well as behavior manipulation in
the built environment, shapes the experience and even consciousness of the
people. As far as these are manifested in the actual and conceptual spaces of
daily life, individual citizens in Hong Kong struggle for their right to the city
on a daily basis.7
 Introduction 3

In this volume, I focus on the period between the Handover in 1997 and the
end of the tenure of the rst chief executive (CE) of the Hong Kong Special
Administrative Region (HKSAR) in 2005. My discussion is twofold. I examine
the city space and the everyday life within it as a kind of text and discuss
how, through the design and ordering of the citys space and the daily general
practices that it supports, the state inculcates a particular civic aesthetic
among Hong Kongs population that corresponds to the capitalist as well as
nationalist ideologies. At the same time, I explore creative texts, such as lm,
literature, and art, as articulations of the urban imaginaries and the peoples
alternative visions. I use the state here to refer to the government of Hong
Kong under the inuence of the Beijing Central Government, or to the Beijing
Central Governments directed policies.
There are, of course, direct and conscious interventions against the manip-
ulations of the state. A number of grassroots or popular movements, from
labor cooperatives to alternative currency programs, help many circumvent the
existing capitalist and market logics that dictate livelihoods and manipulate
human relationships. This is not surprising given that some of these organi-
zations have been in existence for decades, advocating for the people under
Hong Kongs different political regimes.
While, I acknowledge the importance of these organized actions, I am
mostly interested in individual everyday practices, expressions, and creativity,
which are less prescriptive and less recognizable as acts of resistance.8 Under-
neath an otherwise perfectly ordered and planned concept city, in which all
deviance is suppressed, Michel de Certeau argues, there is always a counter
current of consciousness and existence: If in discourse the city serves as a
totalizing and almost mythical landmark for socioeconomic and political
strategies, urban life increasingly permits the re-emergence of the element that
the urbanistic project excluded. The language or power is in itself urbanizing
but the city is left prey to contradictory movements that counter-balance and
combine themselves outside the reach of panoptic power. 9 De Certeaus
theorization of individual everyday practices, captured by the metaphorical
individual walking in the city, as signicant political acts offers an important
theoretical opening here to examine the impact of individual lives on a place
as a political and ideological construction.10
The minor victories achieved or the aspirations embodied in individual
acts within the daily strictures of living in Hong Kong are signicant. In my
analysis, a built environment is often read for its metaphoric function. That
is, rather than to claim that these places and structures are designed to control
4 Paradigm City

and discipline the population, it is more accurate to think that they reect a
political and economic principle enforced by the city government for the
good of the people. The experience of this urban space shaped by such social,
political, and economic ideologies, as well as the imaginative and unpredictable
tactics of the peoples daily maneuvers, are in turn reected in many creative
and popular representations produced in Hong Kong. As Shohat and Stam
have said about lms, the different kinds of narratives created in a society are
not simply reective microcosms of historical process; they are also experien-
tial grids or templates through which history can be written and national
identity created.11 More than recording or accounting for Hong Kongs
cultural peculiarities within its historical and cultural contexts, I examine
how ideological and political limitations shape the peoples imagination, even
producing desires that, in turn, when expressed, ameliorate the particular
social and spatial environment.
Hong Kong culture at the end of the twentieth-century was variously
described as nostalgic, melancholic, and eeting.12 In addition, much was
made of Hong Kongs n de sicle postmodern condition and postcolonial
ethos in which the people were anxious, bewildered, and resigned about their
future.13 The decolonization experience of 1997 and the culture around the
new millennium under the new HKSAR government are thus reduced to
psychosocial phenomena. The problem with these readings of Hong Kongs
culture at the end of the twentieth century was the primacy they assign to
1997 as the ultimate dener of peoples consciousness. While it is true that
the sense of an end deeply colored the experience of Hong Kong at the end
of the rst millennium, taking a broader view on Hong Kong before and after
1997, one realizes that contemporary Hong Kong culture evolves through a
complicated path, rather than being a momentary, visceral response to the
Chinese takeover. China means more to Hong Kong people than a metaphor
of homeland. The political effect of China in Hong Kong is concrete. Its pres-
ence is palpable and insidious, inltrating into the spaces of the everyday life
of the common people. While many discussions of Hong Kong in terms of
postmodernity, nostalgia, and disappearance, capture the general aura
of the period, they rarely address the political and economic ideologies that
foster these emotional and phenomenal conditions. Hong Kong as a polity
becomes a fetishized space, detached from global political and economic
developments.
Similarly, spatial studies of Hong Kong that focus on particular material
sites, from shopping malls to public housing units, often create a ne portrait
 Introduction 5

of the Hong Kong society and its historical social development through the
transformation of spatial usages. However such studies rely on the assumption
of space as a given, a material inevitability, rather than as products of a partic-
ular set of political and economic rationale. 14 It is my argument that the
production of particular spatial structures, from private homes to designated
public space, is deeply conditioned by Hong Kongs relationship with China
and its self-perceived position in the world, as well as by the states commit-
ment to global capitalism. In other words, space is ideologized and political,
which can be deciphered through the cultural imagination from within it.
Hong Kongs governing ideology is apparent when its urban environment is
read alongside literary, lmic, or other forms of popular and artistic expressions.
Moreover, these texts also reveal individual or collective agency in creating the
daily living space, despite the state agenda, demonstrating Hong Kong peoples
self-reexivity within the global context. They also show how the people ques-
tion their place in the world and test the boundaries of their strictures,
transforming the place in which they live. A city, as Kristin Ross argues,
following Henri Lefebvre, is a social fact. More than a passive or abstract
container of our lives, city spaces are structures we help to create.15 All the
individual or collective efforts, organized or impulsive, spontaneous movements
and unorganized individual activism, recongure, humanize, and democratize
spaces inscribed by the programs of the state.16 These activities might not
amount to a political or social movement that will lead to immediate or system-
atic change; nevertheless, they have the potential for creating an alternative
consciousness or discourse that might become a precondition for gradual social
change. In this way, the production of space is a result of a dialectic between
governance and the everyday life of the governed.17 It is signicant, therefore,
that this imagination or discourse be documented and critically analyzed.
This volume is a reading of Hong Kongs creative texts against its material
environment in order to investigate the Hong Kong experience on a physical,
visceral, and emotional level. The kinds of space or the particular places I
have chosen to examine are primarily symbolic or paradigmatic. Each of
these kinds of space is discussed as a counterpoint to a literary, filmic, or
artistic text.
As primarily a literary scholar, I have relied a great deal on the labor of social
scientists whose data help me frame my discussion in a social materialist
context. If sociological or ethnographical and statistical studies document
popular phenomena and broad social trends, individual agencies, willful
expressivities of desire, and ickerings of individual aspirations are imprinted
6 Paradigm City

in creative texts. Some of the texts I study were selected for their popularity
and hence ability to represent the particular social ethos, mood, and senti-
ments at the time. However, representedness is as manipulable and
supercial as trends of tastes and fashion since mass desires can be generated
by the market or cultivated by the state. The less popular works, products of
the same milieu, also need to be accounted for: how they relate to the popular
sentiment, how they critique the general consciousness, and what kinds of
alternatives they embody or envision for the city. More importantly, they
indicate the spaces not reached by the pervasive forces of the state and the
market. If de Certeau argues that within the practice of the ordinary is a
science of the singular that confounds state manipulation of individuals, I
am interested in investigating the individual will within ordinariness that
makes it singular. An individual work, whether popular or rareed, represents
this will against the general political unconscious.
Social negotiations are complicated. It is not simply state versus the individual
or antagonism between classes, though both are still relevant ways of reading the
Hong Kong society. Often, the oppositions are much more nuanced, such as the
dominant ideology conicting with the common sense of daily life and the
spontaneity or randomness in individual everyday itinerary violating ideas of
propriety determined by class consciousness. The understanding of social strug-
gles thus requires attention to the eeting and the hidden, as well as the
documentation of visible activism and mass maneuvers. It is my hope to uncover
these ephemeral and the less apparent, against the phenomenal to illustrate the
multifarious, paradoxical, and sometimes chaotic cultural life of contemporary
Hong Kong.
Michel Foucault once commented that if social historians describe how
people act (in response to the dictates of state agenda with little consideration
for sentiments), humanities scholars focus on expressivity, imagination, or
how people feel (without examining the action on the ground).18 In this study,
I hope to demonstrate how social sentiments as well as the sociopolitical and
spatial technologies of the state are in dialogue or in tension with each other in
the creation of Hong Kongs contemporary milieu.

Repatriating the City

The Handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997 involved no actual large-scale

restructuring of the society that typied the experience of decolonization in
other areas of the world. Both the British and the Chinese governments
 Introduction 7

worked hard to guarantee peaceful continuity through the transition, so much

so that China promised a fty-year political status quo, sacricing its stated
socialist political principles in order to preserve Hong Kongs capitalist pros-
perity. This has resulted in a unique policy of one country, two systems (yige
liangzhi)capitalism within socialism. However, despite the Chinese Central
Partys seeming initial political sensitivity, it would seem that the principle of
one country has consistently overridden the idea of two systems.
Many have noted that previously, the Hong Kong person as a self-identity
was built on a deliberate denigration of Mainlanders in order to assert Hong
Kongs difference in superiority.19 The depiction of the Mainland Chinese as
coarse, uneducated, and unsophisticated was particularly popular in the mass
media in the late 1980s and 1990s.20 With the rapid development of Chinese
cities, such as Shanghai and Guangzhou in the South, Hong Kong has become
more and more peripheral in its position in Asias economic power hierarchy
and less and less signicant to the Chinese state. As China becomes increasingly
crucial to Hong Kongs survival in the twenty-rst century, both economically
and politically, Hong Kong people have had to revise their attitude toward the
Mainlanders.
The change in attitude among Hong Kong people toward China can also
be attributed to Chinas rigorous public relations efforts as well as blunt, even
belligerent, demands for patriotic love.21 Chinas campaign to reabsorb Hong
Kong has emphasized, not just the brute reality of its political dominance but
also arguments of familial bonds and cultural afnity. While the British insis-
tently referred to 1997 as the Handover of the territory, the Mainland
governments ofcial designation for this event is huigui (returning home).
This description of familial embrace was designed to soften the impact of this
political event. It was hoped that devotion to the idea of China-as-mother-
land would refocus Hong Kongs ambivalent loyalty. The familial metaphor
is obviously fraught and problematic.
The effects of the patriotic campaign is articulated in a study by Anthony
Fung, in which he measures how certain Chinese icons as indicators of
emotional identication or disidentication with the national were received
in the years just before and after the Return. An example in Fungs research
is the popular reception of the Great Wall of China as a cultural symbol in
Hong Kong through the years of transition, from the peak of the national
propaganda in 1996 and 1997 to a year after the Return in 1998. In 1996, the
Great Wall elicited a sense of pride among 77.9% of Hong Kongs popula-
tion in the study. In 1997, the percentage rose to 78.8%. By 1998, the gure fell
8 Paradigm City

to 74%. The sense of affection toward the image of the Great Wall changed
from 59.4% in 1996 to 56% in 1997, dropping to 50.3% in 1998 after the hype.22
Fungs study also shows that at the height of the 1997 propaganda, 32.1%
of the population considered themselves Chinese. This reects an almost
7% rise from the 25.7% in 1996, but it dropped almost 8% to a new low of
24.5% in 1998. A corresponding reversal is reected in the question of how
many considered themselves Hong Kong people.23 The percentage dropped
from 25.2% to 23.2% between 1996 and 1997 and then rose to a high of 28.8%
in 1998. Not surprisingly, as the uctuation in the gures demonstrate, Hong
Kong peoples sense of affiliation toward China rose in connection to the
excitement of the Return, and subsided afterward. This is to say Hong Kong
peoples sentiment toward China or Hong Kongs self-perceived Chineseness
is very much conditioned by state propaganda.
Regardless of whether one considers Chinas ideological campaigns
successful or not from these gures, they demonstrate how national sentiments
and cultural legitimacy are often expressed through, or even directed by, affec-
tive responses to iconic objects associated with a particular nation or culture.24
In others words, nationalist feelings can be reduced to attachments to things as
national symbols rather than to the nation itself. According to this bric-a-brac
brand of nationalism, it is not surprising that, in the same study, Fung
discovers that even at the height of Mainlands propaganda bombardment,
Hong Kong people did not respond very well to the political and militaristic
symbols, such as the national ag of China or the Great Hall of the People.
Popular sentiments for each of these did not go much beyond 20% and there
was a noticeable drop in 1998 after the Return hype died down. Response
toward the Peoples Liberation Army and the Chinese Public Security as
emblems of Chinas physical dominance over common people even reected
unease. Good feelings toward the latter did not reach beyond 2% or 3%. What
this indicates is the contradiction between feelings toward China as an
abstract cultural concept, and China as an actual, political entity. However,
the rubric of nationalism does not differentiate between sentimental responses
to general cultural concepts and loyalty toward a specic political state. Most
Hong Kong people nd it troubling that the Mainland government makes little
distinction between China as a nation and China as the Chinese Communist
Party, or the state, calling for unquestioned patriotic love for the latter as the
equivalence of the former.25
Beijings promise to Hong Kong of continuing stability and prosperity
comes with the hidden condition of sacricing political rights and freedom.
 Introduction 9

This unspoken clause of exchange was nally made evident when the HKSAR
government attempted to legislate Article 23, the antisubversion law, in
2003, after a couple of years of major controversy. (It was popularly believed
that if this law had been allowed to pass, it would endanger much of the
freedom Hong Kong people currently enjoy, including freedom of speech,
press, political organization, and religious belief.) This legislation attempt
was followed by Chinas party legal experts offering an ofcial interpreta-
tion of Hong Kongs Basic Law to rebuff the Hong Kong peoples demand for
universal suffrage in the election of the CE and Legislative Council (Hong
Kongs parliament) members in 2007 and 2008. This antidemocratic bullying
led to several major mass protests in 2003 and 2004. July 1, a public holiday
commemorating the ofcial day of Hong Kongs return to China in 1997, has
since become an unofcial day of protest. The demonstrations resulted in
Beijing ofcials more vociferous and direct demand for the institution of
patriotic education in Hong Kong.

Designing for Global Capitalism

From the HKSAR governments point of view, Hong Kongs success as a city is
demonstrated by the decisions of many international corporations to keep
their headquarters in Hong Kong or to set up new offices there after the
Handover. In 2000, Hong Kong was the host to over three thousand regional
headquarters and ofces of multinational corporations, more than any other
city in Asia. In the rst seven months of 2000, at least one new regional head-
quarters was set up in Hong Kong every week.26 The most high profile of
these is the Disney Corporations decision to extend its magic kingdom there.27
As Michelle Huang puts it, as Hong Kong continued to pursue its participation
in global capitalism after 1997, it went from being a British Empire Colony to
a Disney Kingdom Outpost.28
In the ofcial language of the Hong Kong government, the aim is to create
a super trade service platform for international businesses by providing
excellent transportation and telecommunication infrastructure, in order to
facilitate seamless and dependable movement of goods.29 In fact, the physical
state of the city, the efciency of the transit system, the transparency in busi-
ness practices, and the rule of law, are all cited as factors that make Hong
Kong a hospitable place for both tourists and international corporations. The
new Hong Kong International Airport opened for use in 2000 was designed to
facilitate and process, with utmost ease and speed, the huge volumes of visitors
10 Paradigm City

to the city.30 Since the airport is a crucial component of this internationaliza-

tion of Hong Kong, it is a priority of the Airport Authority Hong Kong to
maintain its ranking as the worlds most prestigious airport.31
The rapid transit systems such as the several underground and above-
ground railways and light rails, the pedestrian walkways built over streets with
high trafc density, high-speed escalators that transport people to the under-
ground trains or the yovers, arrows and railings directing pedestrian ow, all
serve to minimize friction among people in their daily interactions in order to
maximize productivity and prot.
The same kind of organizing and management is seen in every aspect of
life in Hong Kong to safeguard any unnecessary wastage of time or energy. It is
of interest to note that the newer satellite towns in the New Territories,
developed in the 1980s, after Hong Kongs economic takeoff, were particularly
inuenced by the theories of planners like Le Corbusier. Ideally, Hong Kongs
city space follows a trajectory of orderly and rational planning, where every
aspect of the individuals life and work is organized according to logical use
and efficiency.32 The new towns, with Shatin as a prime example, are built
around efficient mass transportation with residences surrounding a town
center where all public exchanges, such as shopping, entertainment, and
everyday transactions take place. Indeed, residential developments that to this
day follow this functional design provide great convenience and orderly living
to the Hong Kong people.
These efforts have proven effective. According to a 2004 survey of more
than a thousand European and U.S. expatriates in Asia by a consultancy rm
on political and economic risks, Hong Kong ranked second after Australia as
the safest and most stable place among fourteen Asian Pacic nations. The
same survey also listed Hong Kong as the third least corrupt city in Asia.33
Such a citation allows the Hong Kong government to advertise the difference
between Hong Kong and many other Asian cities, especially those in China,
as it competes for foreign investment.
However, Hong Kong people pay a price for the citys identity. The notion
of individual freedom under such a social schema is always heavily contextu-
alized by the individuals responsibility to uphold Hong Kongs international
image, so crucial to the capitalist agenda of the city. While the built environ-
ment is designed for the smoothest transaction of goods and capital, the
citizens are trained to be facilitators, if not direct participants, of such ventures.
The interest of the greater common goodthe economic prosperity and
stability of the citytakes precedence over individual will. Citizens have to be
 Introduction 11

worthy of the global city, to be lawful, efcient, and adaptive to the rhythm and
aesthetic of this global capitalism. A variety of government agencies and
programs, such as the Leisure and Cultural Services, the Food and Environ-
mental Hygiene Department, and the Housing Authority, function to manage
and organize the lives of the population, as well as to inculcate a set of values
among them, such as work ethic, hygiene, civility, and consumer etiquette,
prescribing appropriate behavior and comportment of Hong Kongs citizenry.
Similarly, the built environment articulated by awesome skyscrapers, and the
designated public spaces, such as parks, waterfront promenades, even streets,
are all structured to systematize or modify the peoples behavior and by which
to nurture civic virtue.
These efforts produce and support a paricular international image of Hong
Kong people as polite, disciplined, and professional.34 As such, civic rectitude
and aptitude replaces civil rights or democratic negotiations as the basis of
governance. This Hong Kong citizenship determined by such (bourgeois) stan-
dards of behavior implies a predominantly local-born and ethnically Chinese
membership.
Rhetorically, at least, the HKSAR government has pledged to bring pros-
perity to all levels of society, guaranteeing the bourgeois dream for all through
creating productive employment for all. The investment in the Hong Kong
Disneyland, which opened in 2005, for example, was justied by the potential
of creating tens of thousands of jobs and bringing development to underin-
habited land, thus creating new real estate value. It was also to revive the tourist
industry, which would simultaneously benet other businesses.
It is a paradox of capitalism, however, that a state cannot be sustained by
universal afuence, because it is necessary to have a reserve army of the under-
class to serve as cheap labor, in order to maintain viable competitiveness, to
provide basic services to free the middle class for more (economically) produc-
tive work, and to serve as a consumer base to avoid the adverse condition of
overproduction. 35 This paradox of late capitalism, which David Harvey
describes as a process of accumulation by dispossession is a tacit principle of
operation that underlies many of the contradictions of the HKSAR society.36
The surplus population is a stabilizing factor in a successful capitalist
economic system and is crucial in the continuing prosperity of the city.37 As a
result, the ideal capitalist state is necessarily built upon marginalizing certain
sectors of the society. Citizenship in the capitalist utopia is thus selective
and available only to those who meet certain criteria measuring cultural
competency and behavior propriety that is benecial to the growth of capital.38
12 Paradigm City

There is no doubt that both the British colonial and the present HKSAR
governments land development policies have destroyed natural communities,
local economies, and heritage architecture and culture in the territory.39 Both
have done much to undermine the social rights of its citizens, especially the
poorer segments, through legislatures that reect preferential considerations
for capitalist development and large corporations.40 However, both adminis-
trations have been successful to a large extent in harnessing public imagination
as well as the consensus and energies of different social classes in Hong Kong
to support the economic ideal and the bourgeois ideology. The Hong Kong
campaign of the Hong Kong Tourism Board from 2002 to 2004 with banners
all over the city announcing Hong Kong as Asias World City, demonstrates
the citys ambition and ethos.41 However, as Eric Kit-Wai Ma argues:

A citys identity does not happen naturally. It depends on the citys discovery
of a consciousness to create, amass and develop its local as well as global
positions. The citys identity does not solely belong to the corporations,
developers, or Hong Kongs CE, Mr. Tsang. A transnational capital that is
appropriate for its local conditions should be developed from a blueprint
based on the citys consciousness of its identity and the citizens sense of
belonging.42

Hong Kongs identity as a capital of international nance is certainly not pure

ideological invention.

Capitalism versus Nationalism

By denition, global capitalism transcends national borders (rather than just

crossing or even trespassing), generating a supraterritoriality with its own
logic, legality, and practice, making the idea of nation state obsolete. This can
adversely affect the lives of the people within its inuence, threatening existing
social and political values, including democracy.43 However, if global capi-
talism is Hong Kongs ideological standard, it, ironically, offers reprieve from
another form of state regime. It is Hong Kongs most important asset as a
world city, sometimes regarded deprecatorily, characterized not only by its
borderless capitalism but by the peoples lack of political and national senti-
ments and the absence of (national) culture, that becomes its best foil against
Chinas nationalist enclosure. This global city identity elevates Hong Kong
above the pass rubric of nation state. By all recognition, Hong Kongs iden-
tity is as an international city before it is a Chinese city.
 Introduction 13

Conversely, one might also assert that patriotism functions to restrain the
relentless capitalist development in Hong Kong. In fact, the different political
parties and factions in the government often align themselves with these respec-
tive ideological positions, using them to hold each other in check. This is most
interestingly demonstrated when Choy So-Yuk, a member of the pro-China
political party, the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of
Hong Kong (DAB), openly reprimanded the Hong Kong CE, Donald Tsang,
newly appointed in 2005 after the resignation of Tung Chee Hwa. In a radio
show in April 2005, Choy accused the dapper and bow-tied CE Tsang as a
product of the Hong Kong-British elite education, the British civil service
system, and a strong proponent of free market, of being a loyal supporter of the
British administration. She made her point by arguing that this was revealed
in his language, personal style, the way he treats people and issues, which results
in cultural gap and emotional distance between him and the patriotic forces.
Choy also said that in the eyes of some of the pro-Beijing camp, Donald Tsang
was arrogant and disrespectful of the patriotic values they have fought for and
paid dearly for in the last few decades.44 The nationalist factions were uncon-
vinced that the head of the new HKSAR government, with his cosmopolitan
style and politics, would have Chinas best interests in mind.
On the other side, in December 2004, a couple of senior citizens living in
one of Hong Kongs public housing estates, apparently with the support of a
liberal member of the Legislative Council, began a series of legal proceedings
to force the government Housing Authority to drop its plans to sell the shop-
ping malls and parking lots in the estates under its ownership to private
developers. These individuals claimed that the privatization of these spaces
would force up the commercial rents in the malls, resulting in increases in their
daily living expenses, as the rental burden would most certainly be passed on to
the consumers. When the individuals threatened to challenge this decision in
the courts, the Hong Kong government decided to drop the listing of the
worlds biggest real estate investment trust (REIT), the Link REIT, a US$3
billion property trust.45 Thus a major government land development initiative
was seemingly defeated, or at least temporarily thwarted, by the acts of private
citizens. Inuential business groups charged the Hong Kong government for
turning Hong Kong into the most communist place in China. Beijing
perceived this incidence as a failure of governance and a result of certain
political factions in Hong Kong deliberately fanning dissent and disorder.46
Politics in Hong Kong, as can be seen, are extremely complicated where align-
ment along conventional lines of right and left is concerned. Global space,
nationalist space, and living space are all created in complex tension with each
14 Paradigm City

other. While the different forces of nationalism and global economy are pitted
against one another, struggling for supremacy and dominance, local citizens
nevertheless manage to maneuver this relationship to eek out a living space that
is at least closer to their needs, and ultimately, creating spaces of hope.47
These different regimes of patriotism and capitalist development reveal
that the relationship between the people and the government in Hong Kong
is ambivalent and complex. They are often not in positions of clear opposi-
tion to each other. It is true that whether it was the British colonial
authorities or the present HKSAR administration, and whatever its stated
policy, the government has played a crucial part in mediating the seemingly
unstoppable advance of capitalism. Through its numerous and still rather
generous public and social welfare programs, Hong Kong is much more
socialist than many advanced capitalist, neoliberal governments. For
example, between 2003 and 2004, the Hong Kong government expended
HK$27.9 billion, or 10% of the total public expenditure on public estates,
which housed a third of the total population, and subsidized home owner-
ship of another 20%. 48 The public medical spending in the city where
universal coverage is guaranteed is one of the highest among developed
economies.49 Hong Kong also has one of the worlds most dedicated invest-
ments in public transportation.
It is an oversimplication to assume that the government has the power and
ability to fully implement a coherent policy and has total control over the
behavior, imagination, and social beliefs of the people. Even heavy-handed
economic maneuvers or political threats cannot always determine the social
and cultural agenda of a place.

Becoming Citizens

How is social ideology or public consent generated? Together with institutional

structures, fields of sentiments (public sensibilities, ideas of civility, and
emotive afnity) are constructed through state-funded or -sponsored institu-
tions. These state regimes constitute what Ann Laura Stoler refers to as
schooling of desires.50 Such operations mold a population that is ready and
willing to collaborate and cooperate with the dominant political and economic
programs of the state. Such obliging obedience demands a yielding of indi-
vidual rights for civic propriety, or personal fulllment for the state doctrine.
It denes the civic paradigm in Hong Kong.
Aside from the obvious venues such as museums and schools, articulations
of social and political values in Hong Kong are often manifested in the most
 Introduction 15

unexpected and mundane spaces in the city. Ofcially designated public spaces
that have elaborate schemes of organization and control worked into the land-
scaping and planning are important emblems of the governing ideology. For
example, in the urban parks, everything, every activity and every age group of
users, has a designated place. In these places, individuals are subjected to tran-
scriptions of actions that promote civic rectitude and public etiquette. These
schemas are both actual and metaphoric of how interior borders of the society
are drawnseparating those who belong from those who do not.
Equally signicant, is how the society develops the propensities for partic-
ular state technologies.51 In the well-known study undertaken by de Certeau,
Luce Giard, and Pierre Mayol, the authors explore the complicated notion of
citizenship. In the ethnographic analysis of the French neighborhood of
Lyons, the Croix-Rousse, the authors reveal the idea of community as one
based on established social codes and rules that guide individual actions and
behavior.52 The logic of these codes has historical, customary, and practical
bases, established upon shared experience and recognition of survival needs
balanced with collective good.
Individual lives are also profoundly shaped by the experience of being in
a particular space and subjected to the spatial codes within it. Individuals are
continually trained and conditioned by the codes of behavior and appear-
ances governing this space that define membership and belonging. To
become part of the collective requires education in individual behavior,
subtleties of language, movement and lifestyle, and even aesthetic judgments,
from taste in fashion, to music, to food, and so forth. Those who come later
must learn to t in.
Mayol also points out that individuals are consumers of public space in the
sense that this is where they operate, communicate, and relate to each other.
As such, in the study of public space, both the setting (the existing conditions)
and the staging (the actual shaping of the space through usage) are equally
important. In other words, rather than static and given, public space is a
construction site, a dynamic zone that evolves with the practice of the people (a
point that Henri Lefebvre also argues).53 It is in this sense that Mayol argues,
neighborhood is a dynamic notion requiring a progressive apprenticeship that
grows with the repetition of the dwellers bodys engagement in public space
until it exercises a sort of appropriation of this space.54
What the de Certeau, Giard, and Mayol project does not articulate are the
political or class ideologies behind the community codes. These community
codes are inherently conservativeto preserve the logics of practices and
values of the dominant group. Many scholars, from Etienne Balibar to Ann
16 Paradigm City

Laura Stoler, have examined the political nature of social codes that regulate
individual behavior within a community, demonstrating how such social
structures function to dene and preserve a bourgeois identity through iden-
tifying the internal others within this society. 55 Often the need for such
community conservation is put in the frame of public good. We will see in
chapter 3 of this volume how an individuals lack of attention to socially
acceptable behavior codes and etiquette can be seen as a lack of self-discipline
(zilu) by the dominant society, which will endanger the body politic. In Hong
Kong, such rhetoric of discipline is often aimed at the citys foreign work
force, new immigrants, and unruly young people, but as a social trend, it also
becomes a gendered disciplinary device manifested through the articulation of
womens bodily ideal, as I argue in chapter 5.
Antonio Gramsci proffers the idea that ordinary people and their mate-
rial conditions are in themselves revolutionary. Accordingly, the creation of
social alternatives, most of the time, is based on the preexisting practices and
common wisdom of the ordinary people.56 However, if this is the case, how
does one locate this consciousness or individual or collective will for change?
The individual itinerary is singular, unmappable, because unpredictable,
according to de Certeau. However, how much do the unorganized and
random drifts of daily creativity and adaptive behavior constitute resistance?
Differing from de Certeau, in my discussion, peregrination, whether a soli-
tary stroll through city parks or a purposeful walk through shopping malls,
is an inevitably social act. Mayol, like Georg Simmel, argues that the city
space is the site of daily interactions among people, whether in terms of busi-
ness, social, or psychological exchanges. Differing from Mayol, however,
Simmel sees such interactions as not merely formative but also as a basis of
civil society.57The more uniform the built sites of the city, the more uniform
are the individual experiences of the city, one can argue. This uniformity that
reects the state strategy of control and regulation can also become the basis
of communitarianism.
The work of de Certeau and colleagues detaches the particular individual or
community at issue from the specic political and economic conditions of
the larger social, or further, global context. The class aspect is an important
factor in the consideration of societal identity. To separate the individual
from his or her class belonging creates a sense of individualism without
agency.58 It is this missing political agency that prompted Kristin Rosss criti-
cism that de Certeaus description of individual effort is purely aesthetic.59
There is a vast political difference between an individual and a citizen. It is only
 Introduction 17

when the individual is situated within the various strata in society as a citizen
that his or her actions become socially meaningful.
These seemingly conicting and circular considerations about communi-
ties being transformative or conservative exactly capture the political reality
and alignment in Hong Kong. The interactions on the different levels of indi-
vidual situationcommunity, class, and nationare complicated and
contradictory. The government and the people variously stand on the same
side and opposing ends, depending on the issues. The daily common sense
in Hong Kong is not necessarily opposed to the operating ideology of free-
market capitalism. In fact, we will see that the middle-class imaginary is so
strong in most of Hong Kongs society that on the surface, at least, a hege-
monic social culture prescribes the activities, taste, and behavior of individual
citizens. In reality, the city and its political afliation are a lot more complex.
For example, while the majority of Hong Kong people are pledged to the
citys capitalist agenda in principle, most are vehemently opposed to the plans
for land reclamation around the Victoria Harbour, believing that it will
threaten the natural environment as well as the very symbol of Hong Kongs
identity. Similarly, the development plans for West Kowloon were resisted
when it became clear that it would mean giving the real estate to large devel-
opers at the expense of the use and enjoyment of the people.
In fact the competition between state rationalization and the citizens use
of space can often have unexpected results. Lefebvre argued that cities as living
spaces are produced through the uses of citizens in spite of state planning.60
In this frame, I argue that urbanism arises in a dialectical process that
harnesses both the creative and the destructive energies of the seemingly
unstoppable capitalist development, as well as the oppositional forces of domi-
nance and resistance. Hong Kongs city space is, as such, dynamic.
Hong Kongs capitalist culture and consumerism have often been used as a
proof of Hong Kong peoples lack of political consciousness and interest.
Despite its problems, de Certeaus work is signicant in acknowledging the
substance of this unconscious. It theorizes the effectiveness of the practices
of everyday life as a form of resistance, celebrating the street and other banal,
mundane locations of daily life as theaters of public dramas of
resistance.61Everyday practices, the tactile guile or stratagem (as opposed to
formal, political strategies) are able to elude ideological control and deect and
mitigate the powers and discourses that contain and control our environment
because they are unsigned, unreadable and unsymbolized.62 The inventive-
ness of the culture of the quotidian opens up social spaces, no matter how
18 Paradigm City

fragile and eeting. In Hong Kong, it is within the overarching cultural condi-
tions of capitalist ecology that we also discover effective demonstration of
individual will.
In our contemporary global climate of neoliberal economic restructuring
and rollbacks in civil rights, social welfare, and human rights, my impulse is
to write about the success and heroism of social resistance and mass move-
ments in a society, to show that social transformation and alternative societies
are possible, in fact, in progress. In the neoliberal strategies of state govern-
ments supported by powerful multinational corporations, where tentacles of
control seem to inltrate the very marrow of daily life, where is the site of resis-
tance? How is the resistance going to be organized? Tempted as one might be
to dramatize the power of the people, one realizes, surveying the current state
of things that social resistance is traveling along a rather different path. The
insidiousness of state ideology is countered by equally inadvertent random
and creative everyday practices, diffusing seepage into private life. The most
unforgiving and deliberate technique of control can be and is often
confounded by the most off-handed and casual creativity of everyday life.
As in the older form of imperialism (one that Hong Kong people are
familiar with) the new global free-market capitalism depends on the successful
manipulation of the cooperation of local populations. This makes the ventures
of the multinational corporations both globally hegemonic and locally fragile
because the aggregate population is a dynamic entity. A lesson from the de
Certeau, Mayol, and Giard project is how community identity and meaning are
drawn through practices of conveniences and oppositions: We are what you
are not. This denition, by negation, by construction of habits and custom, is
often easily disturbed by its own internal contradictions. Identity is in constant
ux, responding to momentary challenges, changes in external conditions, or
according to a tactical need. Therefore, when social transformation will come
is no longer the question. Changes are constantly occurring, invisibly but insis-
tently, through the everyday negotiations among people. Not only is the city
itself constantly changing and developing with ever-newer buildings and infra-
structure, the nature of the relationships and the force elds within are also
constantly mutating, allowing neither state nor people nor capital to sustain a
prolonged hegemony.
 one
World Suicide Capital

An excellent way of explaining the Hong Kong society in the rst few years of
its new status as HKSAR is through three movies that came out during the
watershed year of 2002 and 2003. Both the production and reception of these
lms capture the particular political wrangle between Hong Kong and China
and the culminating social anxieties within the Hong Kong society after the
Handover in 1997. The examination here of these lms in connection with
the major events of this year serves to introduce the political and social back-
ground and some of the issues of the society that frame my discussion in this
volume.
There was a minor earthquake in the Hong Kong lm world in the winter
between 2002 and 2003. The gradual decline of the Hong Kong movie industry
that began in the late 1990s had turned into a serious slump by the new millen-
nium.1 However, at the end of 2002 and the beginning of 2003, three lms in
particular, generated unusual excitement in the Hong Kong cinema and the
society at large. Infernal Affairs (Wujian dao), a lm by Andrew Lau and Andy
Mak, a major feature with a cast of Hong Kongs most prestigious actors, earned
over fty million HK dollars (about 6.2 million US) at the Hong Kong boxofce
alone and proceeded to break the boxofce records in different East and South
East Asian nations.2 It received numerous awards worldwide, including the
Hong Kong Film Critics Society Awards for Best Director and Best Picture. It
was nominated for twelve categories at the 2003 Taiwan Golden Horse Awards
and received ve of them, including Best Actor, Best Drama, and Best Director.

The chapter title comes from a headline in Asiaone, describing Hong Kong in April
2004 (http://newspaper.asia1.com.Sg).

19
20 Paradigm City

It was named one of the years ten best foreign lms in the 2003 Tokyo Filmex.
It was featured at the New York Film Festival in 2004, as well as many other lm
festivals around the world. At the same time that the whirlwind of Infernal
Affairs was sweeping through Asia, Zhang Yimou, Mainland Chinas master
lmmaker, brought out his extravagantly produced historical epic Hero (Yingx-
iong).3 This lm was greatly anticipated, greeted with enormous excitement, and
was a boxofce triumph in China. It was touted as a major lm event and was
the ofcial entry to the Academy Awards in 2003. (It lost to Caroline Links
Nowhere in Africa in the best foreign-language lm category.) In the midst of
the fanfare of these major and expensive productions, was a small lm that
intrigued audiences and quietly garnered critical admiration within Hong Kong
and abroad. PTU is directed by Johnny To, a veteran director of many popular
gangster lms and romances. It was the opening feature of the 2003 Hong Kong
International Film Festival, included in the New York Film Festival; it received
awards at the Berlin International Film Festival, the Tokyo Filmex, and the
Melbourne International Film festival, among others.
Infernal Affairs, a genre lm about the contest of power between the Hong
Kong police and the Triad, was especially credited for having breathed much
needed new life into Hong Kongs seemingly moribund film industry. It
became the beacon for a new cinema after years of overproduction and stag-
nation. It was praised for the seriousness of its production and sophistication
of the script. Proving that audiences can be wooed back to the theaters with
quality, much hope was laid on its positive inuence on Hong Kongs cinema
culture in general. Though differing signicantly in narrative style and plot,
PTU shares a similar ethos with Infernal Affairs. These two intensely mono-
chromatic and solemn lms contrasted conspicuously with Zhang Yimous
vividly hued Hero. These three lms became the focal point of the lm world
in Hong Kong in 2003. Each of them evoked different reactions from audi-
ences, provoking unprecedented public attention and discussion. As Nestor
Garcia Canclini argues, [l]iterary, artistic and mass media discourse not only
documents a compensatory imagination, but also serves to record the citys
dramas, what is lost in the city and what is transformed.4 Invested in the
interest and debates generated by the lms are the hopes and apprehensions
of Hong Kong people toward their political future under China. In this way,
the discourse created by these films substitutes for the nonexistent public
venue for political discussions in Hong Kong. How is the audiences perception
of the respective reality of Hong Kong and Mainland China coded into the
images and hues in these lms? What politics inform the somberness of the
 World Suicide Capital 21

two Hong Kong lms? And what is so striking about Heros brilliance juxta-
posed to them? How does the audiences reception of these lms in the winter
of 2002 and 2003 echo their sense of the contemporary predicament?
Hero is based on a popular story about the historical rst emperor of China,
the Qin emperor. The historical Qin dynasty only spanned fteen years, from
221 BC to 206 BC, but the emperor is generally credited with laying the ground-
work for a centralized Chinese state and empire. The importance of the
emperors ability to regularize and standardize the Chinese writing system
and weights and measures to the ideology of a unied China is unchallenged
in Chinese political thought even today. In spite of this, in the standard
dynastic histories and popular fiction alike, representations of the Qin
emperor have been consistently focused on his tyranny, his brutal suppression
of dissent, and his persecution of intellectuals who held alternative views, puta-
tively burying many Confucian scholars alive and burning their books. He also
burdened the common people with heavy levies of physical labor to build
massive state projects, such as the completion of the Great Wall, along with
his grandiose mausoleum and underground army of tens of thousands of
terracotta soldiers. Regardless of the actual merit or demerit of his reign, the
historical construction of the Qin emperor is unequivocally as a fearsome and
hated despot.
Zhangs Hero is a ctionalized account of a plot to assassinate the emperor
to prevent the Qin states gradual swallowing up of all the other principalities
to achieve a single empire unied under his dictatorship. The central issue is
how Wuming, a swordsman, tries to gain proximity to the emperor in order to
kill him. The emperor previously made a promise that whoever killed any of
his three most feared enemies, all accomplished swordsmen, would be granted
bountiful gifts and an audience with him. With each enemy eliminated, the
emperor would increase the gifts and allow a closer approach to him, while
decreasing the number of guards around him as a show of trust. Wumings aim
was to prove that he had killed all three by bringing tokens of the slain enemies
as proofs so that he could get close to the emperor without his guards. Though
the emperor could not dispute what Wuming had accomplished, because of
incontrovertible proof, the suspicious emperor proffered his own version of
what actually happened. The film was thus made up of four segments
containing different versions of the story of how three of the Qin emperors
most feared enemies were killed.
According to Wuming, he exterminated the emperors enemies by stirring
up feelings of jealousy, mutual suspicion, and hatred among the originally loyal
22 Paradigm City

friends, leading to the self-destruction of the alliance. However, the Qin

emperor believed that, given the training and integrity of the trio, they would
not have come to such a sordid end. He postulated that they had deliberately
sacriced themselves so Wuming could approach him. He suspected that the
duel between Wuming and one of the assassins, Mingjian, witnessed by the
Qin army was staged and that Mingjian had allowed herself to be killed by
Wuming. In other words, the emperor had seen through the plot. However,
before he called his guards on Wuming, Wuming offered a detail that created
a surprising turn in the situation. Wuming revealed that Mingjian was still
alive. Because Wuming was a highly accurate swordsman, he was able to
control his sword and had only nicked her in the mock duel while she feigned
death. However, before their ght, she had to seriously injure her beloved,
Changkong, to prevent him from ghting Wuming to stop him from carrying
out his assassination of the emperor. This last detail delivered its intended
impact on the emperor. Wuming now sat within striking distance of the
emperor. Both realized that Wumings mission could be completed with one
swift blow. However, in the back and forth of the narrative between the Qin
emperor and himself, Wuming suddenly became enlightened as to why
Changkong had wanted to stop him from killing the emperor.
At the end of the lm and the end of his conversation with the emperor,
Wuming decided to give up his mission and yielded to the emperor. At the news
of Wumings submission, Mingjian killed Changkong in rage and then killed
herself in remorse. After a highly dramatic pause while the emperor struggled
to decide what to do, he nally allowed his palace guards to kill Wuming.
Changkong had tried to make Wuming understand before his mission that
killing the emperor would prolong the division and strife among the various
warring kingdoms. In the end, it would only aggravate and lengthen the
suffering of the common people. He knew, even if reluctantly, that the Qin
emperor was the only man powerful and masterful enough to unify China
and to end the incessant wars. It was a theory of peace above all else. Wuming,
through his long conversation with the emperor, was moved by the aura of
the emperors authority and power. He surrendered his life as the ultimate
acknowledgment of the legitimacy of the Qin rule. The Qin emperor was, in
turn, grateful to Wuming and Changkongs ability to truly understand him
that his persecution of other kingdoms was out of a desire to end all strife and
pacify the entire land by unifying it under his own grip. Wuming could easily
have killed the emperor, but yielded himself instead to death by a thousand
arrows from Qins formidable war machine.
 World Suicide Capital 23

The film was set in the great northern deserts of China, as austere and
desolate as they are magnificent, especially under the cinematographer
Christopher Doyles romantic camera gaze. From the scale of the production
to the expansiveness of the scenes, the director, Zhang Yimou, intends to
impress the audience with the immensity, awesomeness, solemnity, and
grandeur of the Chinese earth, asking the audience to imagine the one who
truly deserves to be the supreme sovereign of this land. In fact, the only
people on this mythical landscape are the magnicent heroes and heroines
who walk the land in their owing gowns like divinities. The design of the
characters is to deliberately highlight the actors unusual beauty and larger-
than-life quality. This world exists in a special time and space bracketed from
the mundane and is beyond the delement of humans and their messy soci-
eties. The movies heroic scale precludes the appearance of the common
people. In fact, the camera gaze seems to disdain the ordinary. The decision
of rulership naturally does not concern them. The audience, as the invisible
masses, can merely observe the process of the investiture of power outside of
the frame of action. They watch the faceless, ominous black troops of the
Qin army swarming the screen and becoming the final pacifiers of the
empire, while the heroes each yield to its advance.
The marching homogeneous and highly disciplined army embodies the
massication of people in which individual subjectivity is not allowed to exist.
If the assassins had attempted to assert individual will against the Qin hege-
mony at points during the lm, the ending of the lm is a at refutation of any
such effort. In the nal scene of the movie, the screen is swallowed up by banks
upon banks of the black troops, overwhelming the audience with their victory
cries in an ostentatious demonstration of state power.
The different segments of the film are the different versions of how the
assassins were killed by Wuming. Each of these segments has a dominant color
scheme. In the rst, in which all the characters appear in red, the assassins are
seen to have succumbed under their passions and romantic entanglements. In
the second segment in which they are clothed in green, their defeat is attributed
to their distrust and jealousy of each other. In contrast to these various colors,
the Qin emperor and his war machine appear in a uniform blackthreatening
and awful. Within this monumental presence of the state, individual colors
appear ckle, minute, and inconsequential. This contrast seems to articulate
the frivolity of individual expressiveness and desire against the doctrine of the
nation. Temperaments and personal sentiments of love, vendetta, jealousy, and
so forth, all have to be suppressed in order for individuals to fit into the
24 Paradigm City

machinery of the state. In the red segment of the lm, Mingjian engaged in
a passionate swordfight with Changkongs serving girl with the brilliant
autumn foliage swirling around them. This scene of whirring silks and ut-
tering leaves is spectacular. However, no matter how brilliant and creative the
individual dance is, it has no place in the order of the nation. In the final
segment, in the mourning colors of white, the hero and heroine die, voluntarily
or not, their personal will is sacriced for the greater common good.
The production of Hero coincides with an optimistic, powerful, and nation-
alistic China in the new millennium. Successfully admitted to the WTO in
2002, winning the sponsorship of the 2008 Olympic Games; the ascension of
the new technocrats in the Party, Wen Jiabao and Hu Jintao; the rapid
economic development in the cities; not to mention sending its rst astronaut
to space in 2004China was poised to assume the role as the next world
power. This national progress seems to justify individual sacrices. The disrup-
tion of rural livelihoods, the mass displacement of the urban poor, the
curtailment of legal recourse, and the suppression of individual expression,
especially of dissent, are all in the name of the cohesiveness of the nation and
the morale of the society. This expectation of individual sacrice is articu-
lated in Hero. No individual interest or aspiration can come before the unity
and good of the nation. Any state strategy, no matter how ruthless, can be justi-
ed as for the sake of national strength. The sweeping takes of Zhang Yimous
romanticism is a powerful expression of telluric nationalism.
The national narrative in Hero is reconstituted and mythologized in an
extremely seductive and beautiful manner, if heavily overlaid with nationalistic
aesthetic. The sacralization of Chinas first emperor as a national myth is
unmistakable through the fascistic referencesthe stark images of Qins
formidable and highly disciplined black army on the march, their blood-
curdling war chant, feng! (translated as hail in the subtitles), and the
glorication of absolute power of the supreme leader. Hero is a tacit afrma-
tion of the use of military force for the sake of order and unity at the expense
of individual will and lives. In interviews, the director, Zhang, insisted that he
merely wanted to make a popular lm and had no overt political intention. He
argued that, after a few years perhaps the main ideas of the movies would
be forgotten. All people might remember about it would be a few seconds of
images or perhaps the way certain characters look.5 The disingenuousness and
condescension implied in Zhangs words hardly bear commentary. In a cursory
survey of the web discussions of two major movie discussion sites, Wangyi
in China and Broadway in Hong Kong, Zhang Zhiwei points out that the
 World Suicide Capital 25

Hong Kong audience, even those who admired the visual beauty and technical
accomplishment of the lm, was mostly troubled by the reinterpretation of
the character of the historical tyrant. Of the more than one hundred
comments logged by Zhang in January 2003, a few weeks after the lms release,
only three supported the notion that the movie actually had an antiauthori-
tarian message. Zhang commented that the arguments for this alternative
reading were rather forced and unconvincing.6
Released around the same time as Hero during the Christmas season of 2002
was Infernal Affairs (Wujian Dao, a Buddhist term describing the journey
through the lowest level of hell of never-ceasing suffering). It boasts a solid cast
of award-winning actors, including Tony Leung and Andy Lau. Infused with
Buddhist overtones, the lm examines a complex network of people antago-
nistically bound to each other, conditioned by an inevitability out of their own
control. This strong suggestion of karmic bond and individual destiny makes
all the protagonists, on either side of the law, tragic heroes. Chan is an under-
cover police agent in the underworld, whose survival hinges upon his
convincing act as the underworld bosss most trusted man. Lau, on the other
hand, is a Triad agent within the police. The tragedy of both characters arises
from their desire to be good despite their assigned roles in life. Laus attempt
is facilitated by all the surface paraphernaliaa decent, middle-class lifestyle,
a loving companion, a tastefully decorated apartmentbut he knows deep at
heart he works for the forces of evil. Sharing the same fate, but on the oppo-
site side, Chan is deeply submerged in the underworld of crime, living among
thugs and nding it more and more difcult to maintain his identity though
he is a legitimate policeman. All the while, both attempt to normalize their
lives, trying to be sincere in their relationships with lovers and comrades, fully
aware of their own treachery. Both live lives that are limited to accrued surface
signiers without access to interior reality. Chan wants to return to his original
identity as a legitimate person in society. But that identity does not exist in
material reality, only in his memory and that of his immediate superior who
dies in the lm. (All his records have been erased to protect him from being
discovered.) Worried that he was becoming more and more schizophrenic
about himself, Chans supervisor sent him to a psychotherapist to help him
reach his internal depth to recover his identity. But signicantly, each time he
tries, he merely falls asleep on the therapists couch as if unable to rouse his
dormant true self. Lau, on the other hand, avoids probing the depths of his
interiority. His lover, a novelist, is unable to complete the portrait of her
fictional character, a police officer, based on him. Lau wishes he could be
26 Paradigm City

legitimized as a decent person and citizen. However, his actual and karmic ties
to his criminal origin cannot be simply severed or buried.
Mostly set in dark, brooding interiors or against massive modern concrete
architectural structures of the city of Hong Kong, Infernal Affairs is a stark
contrast to Hero with its expansive landscape. The claustrophobic and mono-
chromatic world of the former, in which all the characters, good or evil,
cop or robber, are dressed indistinguishably in black and white, is an ironic
commentary of a world where there is no simple distinction among people,
where nothing is black and white. Instead, making much use of mirror reec-
tions and gloomy illumination, the lm represents an illusory world of dim
lights and shadows, smoke and mirrors, secrets and lies. The protagonists on
both sides of the law have the gravitas and stature of heroes whose actions
appear to be of great consequence at specic moments. Ultimately, however,
individual identities are meaningless ciphers, to be manipulated, taken, given,
and substituted, totally dictated by external forces beyond individual control.
Personal struggles and actions placed within the complicated weave of cosmic
reality are actually futile and minute. This is the same whether one belongs to
the police or the underworld, good or evil. Individual choice or will is
merely an illusion as each persons life is shackled to a prescribed plot within
predetermined historical conditions.
Not only does this lm seriously question the Manichean divide between
good and evil that is the foundation of the crime thriller genre, it also
reassesses the notion of individuals as monadic entities with full control over
their lives and the choices they make. It questions the notion of individual
identity when one is karmicly conjoined to other lives and when ones story is
predetermined and overdetermined by other narratives. Needless to say, these
issues are deeply pertinent to Hong Kong people confronting their enforced
affiliation with China, with their identity articulated by Chinas present
agenda, especially under the doctrine of the nation. Is there a Hong Kong iden-
tity deeply buried beneath this nationalist narrative to be excavated or is Hong
Kong merely glass and steel and what their glossy surfaces reect?7
In Hero, the protagonists stoically acknowledge and yield to the powerful
state monolith in a reality where both might and hegemony are respected and
deemed the ultimate necessity, if not good, for the common people. In Infernal
Affairs, the control of ones daily life and individual identity is more insidious,
working through the individuals complicity and consent. It is an ambiguous
world of no absolutes that gives a semblance of individual choice and freedom,
but only within prearticulated perimeters. However, in contrast to Hero, the
 World Suicide Capital 27

protagonists in Infernal Affairs are unyielding in their struggle against their

destiny.
In a similar monochromatic moodiness of Infernal Affairs is another Hong
Kong film, PTU. A comparatively small-budget film by Johnny To, PTU
opened the Hong Kong Film Festival, which took place in the inopportune
month of April 2003, when the entire city was shrouded in gloom by the threat
of the SARS (the Sudden Acute Respiratory Syndrome) epidemic and the
suicide of arguably Hong Kongs most popular and iconic movie star of the
1990s, Leslie Cheung. PTU, in which Simon Yam, as a PTU (Police Tactical
Unit) captain, led a small cast, is an intense and minimalist lm. It initially
received limited popular attention in the theaters but gradually amassed wide
critical acclaim and popularity from both home and abroad. The whole narra-
tive takes place within a small district of the city in the duration of a few long
hours during a shift in a night patrol. The plot evolves around a police detec-
tives lost gun and involves three different departments within the Hong Kong
Policethe OCU (Organized Crime Unit), the PTU (Police Tactical Unit), and
the CID (Criminal Investigative Detectives). Determined not to let this inci-
dent mar his chances for a promotion, the Organized Crime detective who lost
his gun decided not to report it and asked his friend, the captain of a PTU divi-
sion, to assist him in recovering it before dawn. The search for the gun led the
PTU team through the dark streets of Tsimshatsui. In the mean time, a CID
detective investigating the case of a murdered gang boss suspected that the
detective who lost his gun was involved in the murder, because, through a
complicated mistake, the detective swapped his cell phone with the dead man.
The CID led her team, hot on the trail, through the same streets.
The suspenseful search for the lost gun was complicated by differences, rival-
ries, and distrust among the various police divisions. In the nal scene, two
bosses from rival gangs arrived on the scene to settle scores with each other over
the dead man in the CIDs case. On the trails of their different pursuits, the
different groups from the three departments converged on the same street. It so
happened that a group of heavily armed Mainland Chinese gangsters, who had
just come ashore to Hong Kong, were waiting for their contacts at the same site.
When all these parties met, a huge street battle erupted. The police units were
clearly aligned despite previous misgivings and grievances. When the criminals
were decimated, each captain of the different police units averted his or her
attention from each others foibles, leaving out in each of their ofcial reports
the offenses and mistakes that they had all accumulated over the course of the
eventful night.
28 Paradigm City

The action of the lm takes place in familiar streets with landmarks and
signs easily recognizable to the local audience. However, these streets in this
night are completely removed from the geography of everyday life. Nighttime
Tsimshatsui in the lm is deserted and oppressively silent. In this lm, the
usually heavily pedestrian city where the streets hop with life and are perpetu-
ally lit by neon becomes completely dark and empty except for the patrolling
police units and gang runners scampering through alleys like startled rats. This
is not a Hong Kong that belongs to the everyday, daylight reality of ordinary
people. Every member of the night belongs to either the police or the gangs.
However, one cannot be sure if these two are distinct opposites, much less if
they can be differentiated as good or evil. A police undercover agent
became a drug addict, caved into the pressure of his job. Ofcers cowered in
fright during operations. They use violent or bullying tactics toward small-
time gang runners. In their semimilitarized gear, the PTU are overlords of the
dark, imperiously patrolling their streets; they can be as ruthless as the gang
members they deal with.
PTU depicts a subterranean world beneath the everyday reality of Hong
Kong society, where the antagonistic forces contend with each other, sparking
the energy and tension that undergird the great metropolis. This lm is about
a particular signifying space stretched to its limitsa society in crisis. Such
times put to trial the boundaries of relationships in daylight transactions,
testing the loyalty among the members of each group and faithfulness among
friends and colleagues as each is asked to do things in times of difculty that
exceed the call of duty, even legality. PTU maps the psychological terrain of
Hong Kong as a society on the verge. Can the relationships and the social
structure survive under such stress? At what point will the tempest of this
underworld boil over to the daytime reality of Hong Kongs everyday life?
Like Infernal Affairs, PTU depicts a visually as well as metaphysically very
dark Hong Kong society. If Hero and Infernal Affairs respectively capture the
Mainland and Hong Kong political ideology and social ethos, PTU depicts the
clash of the values of the two places. However, it also reveals that Hong Kong
society itself is plagued by acrimony, contradictions, and discontent. Despite
their criminality, local Triads have their logic of operation as an alternative
organizational mode in society. Lest one romanticizes the loyalty and friend-
ship in the relationships between gang members in the underworld, one is
also led to see the enforcement of absolute hierarchy, violently maintained in
this world. It is certainly not a desirable alternative to that of the uniformed
brutality offered by the police. However, despite the occasional eruptions of
 World Suicide Capital 29

hostilities between the gangs and the police, there is a space in society for their
coexistence, even if within extremely tight strictures.
The Mainland gang as depicted briefly at the end of the film is unam-
biguously a foreign intrusion. The director expends no time to relate their
stories. Heavily armed and with little understanding of their environment,
the situation, or their opponents, they immediately opened re on everyone
upon arrival on the scene. The police departments, otherwise fractious,
became cohesive and aligned when confronting this external challenge. The
allegory of the relationship between Hong Kong and China is obvious here.
As bad as the Hong Kong social problems might be, here represented by
rampant gang activities, these gangs are part of the society and are part of
Hong Kongs problems that are to be resolved internally. The Mainlands
presence, whether culturally or politically, is perceived as a kind of invasion.
Through the metaphor of the gangsters, Chinas strategy of rule in Hong
Kong is represented as a combination of insensitive stampede, ignorant
aggressiveness, and ruthless rampage.
The differences among the police departments and between the Hong Kong
Triads are more a matter of class value than political difference. From the
demeanor, behavior, and clothing style, each member of the different depart-
ments is seen as a stock character of a particular social class. The detective of
the Organized Crime Unit who lost his gun is tough looking, heavy set,
disheveled, and rude. He constantly talks about mahjong games and cusses at
others, embodying all the stereotypes of a working-class person. The rened
CID detective in her impeccable suits and ofciousness affects the character-
istics of the elitist bureaucrats, often seen as effeminate and ineffectual. She
is bossy, and throws her rank around; she is cowardly and spineless and is
generally an unpleasant and depthless character. The heroes of the lm are
the members of the PTU, described in detail by Johnny To. They are tough, but
disciplined and orderly; they are dedicated in their mission to eliminate crim-
inals but do not hesitate to transcend the rigidity of fussy rules to help a
comrade in need. They are highly trained, skilled, and condent. They are
hardworking and never shrink from difculties. They are action heroes, but
they also have soul, expressed through their loyalty to friends and to their
members. They understand both the rules of the streets and the laws of the
city. They mediate between the OCU and the CID who are otherwise irrecon-
cilable in their antagonism toward each other. The PTU, in other words, are the
sensible, rational, mythical, middle-class professionals of Hong Kong, who
embody the true Hong Kong spirit.
30 Paradigm City

The director, Johnny To, uses various stereotypical gender characteristics to

represent these different sectors of the population. The OCU detectives hyper-
machismo and hubris (but total lack of judgment and composure when under
danger) contrast sharply with the CIDs effeminate, over-persnickety arrogance
but cowardice in actual action. If both of these are less than desirable, the PTU
once again captures the ideal gender representation. There are two separate
PTU divisions in the lm. One is headed by a male captain and the other by a
female. In the same uniform, neither evinces any obvious gender characteris-
tics. Both can be violent and ruthless toward their enemies, but tolerant,
understanding, and supportive to their comrades. In the lm, the two units
operate separately but converge seamlessly in a pincer movement in the nal
battle, ghting courageously and with uninching coolness. The PTU were the
heroes in the actual battle, while the other two groups either cowered or lost
their wits.
Through the adventures of the characters from the different police forces
as well as their enemies, the Hong Kong gangsters or the Mainland brigand,
all entangled in the case of the lost gun, the director narrates the way the
society confronts and ideally, as in the lmic world, eradicates its problem. If
Hong Kongs social world is rent by class and cultural tensions that can turn
explosive, like the surging violence of the Triads, the society ultimately pulls
together and overcomes its problems. The lm ends with the voices of the
captains of each department recording their reports of the nights events. If
these police reports can been seen as a kind of Hong Kong narrative, then the
recuperation of consensus in the reportingwhat should be kept out of the
records and what should be includedrepresents a triumph of unity at the
end. Each police group experiences the event through their different perspec-
tives, but all come to a fundamentally similar understanding of it. Although
class division is an issue, Hong Kong society, it is believed, will pull together
when confronted with problems, whether internal or external, under the lead-
ership of its hardworking and professional middle class. Reecting a rather
common sentiment in Hong Kong, the lm reafrms the ofcial ideology that,
because of the Hong Kong peoples rationality, professionalism, and unity, the
city will eventually be led out of its darkness. This is a pervasive understanding
of Hong Kongs core value that is considered crucial to the recovery of the
citys economic and social health, the two being seen as equated.8
In the coincidence of their release around the same time at the end of 2002
and the beginning of 2003, the three lms in Hong Kong interestingly capture
and reect the range of complicated emotions in a society plagued by many
 World Suicide Capital 31

troubles during this time. If Hero, as we have seen, is a particularly fitting

product of a China on the ascent in the world as an economic, political, and
military power, the two Hong Kong lms, Infernal Affairs and PTU reect the
society in crisis. The dark alterity of PTU or the counterfeit world in Infernal
Affairs are symptomatic of the schizophrenia in the everyday reality of the city.
The new HKSAR government that took over the administration of Hong
Kong after 1997, headed by the Beijing-appointed chief executive of Hong
Kong, Tung Chee Hwa, had proven to be extremely ineffectual and unpop-
ular. Hong Kong had not been able to recover from the 1997 Asian nancial
crisis before the situation was compounded by the U.S. post9/11 economic
slowdown. The governments various policies failed miserably to revive Hong
Kongs economy, exposing both the perceived ineptness of the new govern-
ment and its unresponsiveness to the needs of the people. The unemployment
rate between the months of May and July 2003, according to a study by
Lingnan University, reached a record high of 8.7%.9
In the midst of the nancial problems, in order to assuage the government
decit, the then-secretary of nance, Anthony Leung, proposed a draconian
budget policy that called for large cuts to many government services, increases
in taxes, and reduction in salaries for the 170,000 civil servants (about 3% of
the total population) in Hong Kong. In general, his unpopular economic
package asked for immense sacrice from the citizens of Hong Kong, which
resulted in great resentment.
At the same time, the society was split by the debate on Article 23, the
referendum on the antisubversion law to be introduced to the legislature. The
HKSAR government was under pressure from Beijing to push through this
unpopular legislation. Many believed that such legislation would threaten
free speech, freedom of political organization, and worst of all, it would allow
government control of the media. The then-secretary of security, Mrs. Regina
Lau Yips hard sell of the unpopular antisubversion law and her aggressive
rhetoric that many deemed arrogant and patronizing, added to the general
resentment toward the HKSAR government.
The gure of Mrs. Yip soon began to epitomize the entire Tung Chee Hwa
government and, to a certain extent, the proximity of Beijing in the everyday life
of Hong Kong. She embodied all that was feared about the new Chinese
regimeundemocratic oppressiveness cloaked in the guise of enlightened
paternalism. She soon became a cathartic gure toward whom all the anxiety
and hatred for the new regime was directed. Many Hong Kong people, especially
those who grew up under the British, are ambivalent about China. They iden-
32 Paradigm City

tify themselves according to an image of the modern free world with which they
associate the British, and they perceive China as a nation of backward, erratic,
and violent politics.10 The antisubversion law became an afrmation of their
worst fears about Chinese political encroachment. Mrs. Yip traveled from
district to district to try to convince Hong Kong people of the absolute sincerity
of the Hong Kong government in its attempt to respect individual rights while
also making sure national security was not compromised. Her efforts only
resulted in a year of contentions and heated debates among all sectors of the
society. The nal defeat of the referendum led to her resignation.
Zhang Yimous lm Hero opened in Hong Kong in this moment of polit-
ical impasse in December 2002. It immediately became the target of intense
scrutiny by the Hong Kong audience as a sign of the will of the Beijing central
government. This was in no small measure because of Zhang Yimous status
as the partys most acclaimed director. Not only has he brought international
attention to Chinese cinema since the late 1980s with lms such as the Red
Sorghum and Raising the Red Lantern, he has also faithfully and unapologeti-
cally projected an aesthetic portrait of China that avoids the politics and
social nuances of his contemporary world, adhering to the partys sanctioned
visions of Chinas past.11
This pretense of apoliticism in Zhangs lms was never more ironic than
when Hero became the rst lm ever to hold its premier in Beijings formidable
state monument, the Great Hall of the People. The Beijing governments regard
for this lm was only too clear to the Hong Kong people. As Zhangs rst
martial-arts movie set in ancient China, many critics have pointed out that this
was Zhangs attempt to rival the Taiwan national, Ang Lis international success,
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and also to ride the tide of interest in martial-
arts epics among the international audience Ang Lis lm created. Like Li, Zhang
relied on a mainly Hong Kong production crew and cast that have a great degree
of international renown in a calculation to attract attention outside of China.
For example, his cinematographer, Christopher Doyle, has won recognition for
his work with the Hong Kong director Wong Kar-Wai since the 1980s in such
lms as Chungking Express, Happy Together, and In the Mood for Love. Zhang
even uses Wong Kar-Wais favorite leads, Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung, the
celebrated screen lovers. The other cast members include Jet Li and Donnie Yen,
both Hollywoods favorite Hong Kong martial arts actors and director.
Whether by conscious calculation or coincidence, this particular cast and
crew composition managed to attract a lot of interest in Hong Kong. Because
they represent the crme de la crme of Hong Kongs international film
industry, their participation in this lm immediately rallied local attention
 World Suicide Capital 33

when most Mainland films, if shown in Hong Kong at all, languish at the
boxofce.
From a Hong Kong perspective, this movie inadvertently brought out many
difficult questions, especially given the timing of its release. What does
national unity at all cost mean in terms of Chinas policy in Hong Kong?
How does it translate into issues of human rights and individual freedom?
Ultimately, what is the relationship between this vision of the state and Chinas
urgent promotion of the antisubversion legislation in Hong Kong? The most
disturbing thing about Hero is not necessarily Zhangs fascist aesthetic or his
self-appointed role as Chinas Leni Reifenstahl, but the Beijing ofcials warm
approval of the lm, reecting their endorsement of the political ideology
within it. The popularity of this lm among the Mainland audience, despite
controversy, also attests to a popular support within China for Chinas aggres-
sive One Country policy, not just claiming sovereignty over former colonies
like Hong Kong and Macau, but also asserting historic rights over disputed
regions such as Xinjiang, Tibet, and Taiwan, ROC, in the name of national
unity.12 This kind of nationalist doctrine of unication is based on ethnic and
cultural fundamentalism and forceful suppression of differences and hetero-
doxy. There are good reasons for Hong Kong people to be anxious about the
Mainland audiences excitement over this lm and its ready embrace of a ques-
tionable and problematic reinterpretation of history.
The discourse of state tyranny in Hero and the notion of a single individual
who is both extralegal and wields absolute power create discomfort in Hong
Kong. To many Hong Kong people, it articulates a particular propensity
toward political hero worship in China. Zhang Yimous depiction of the Qin
emperor captures a particular nostalgia for the personal charisma and totali-
tarian rule of Chinas most recent monarch, Mao Zedong.13 To many, among
the postwar generation in Hong Kong, Mao connotes Chinas great famine in
the 1950s that resulted from the disastrous experiments of the Great Leap
Forward and the destruction of the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s and
1970s. Many recall images of the struggle sessions, and news of family members
succumbing to persecutions or committing suicide.14 The whole communist
experience seen from Hong Kong had none of the vision or exuberance of
political possibility of mass movements, only the zealousness of Mao worship
and the consequences of rabid nationalism.
Because of this, Hong Kong people are wary of heroes. Even a decision
in 2003 to dedicate in Hong Kong a memorial to Sun Yat-Sen, the early twen-
tieth-century revolutionary and Chinas first republican president after
bringing down the last dynasty, provoked concern. Although Sun spent his
34 Paradigm City

formative years and received his education in Hong Kong and is generally an
uncontroversial gure, this planned memorial prompted much discussion in
Hong Kong society and, particularly, objections from the well-known colum-
nist and lm critic Shek Kei. Pointing to the already overabundance of Sun
Yat-Sen memorials in Zhongshan (Suns hometown), China, and in Taiwan,
he admonished his readers: The era of hero-worship is over. As true revo-
lutionaries, we must oppose this kind of superstitious hero-worship. I recall
the story celebrating Sun Yat-Sen himself smashing idols [in temples] when
he was a child.15 For Shek Kei, the propensity for hero worship in popular
historical narratives contradicts the spirit of rationality and the principles of
the rule of law that Hong Kong residents see as identifying them as part of
the modern world and as distinct from China.16
Hong Kong peoples fear of Communist China had been ameliorated in
the beginning of the 1980s as China gradually shifted to a market economy
under Deng Xiaoping and opened up its borders to Hong Kong people, many
of whom were able to visit their families for the first time since the 1950s.
However, the brutal military suppression of the 1989 Tiananmen prodemoc-
racy movement, in which scores of young college students and their supporters
were killed by Chinas military, sent shock waves to Hong Kong that reversed
much of the trust. Zhang Yimous image of the Qin emperor resonated power-
fully in Hong Kong because it captures lmicly Chinas capacity for violence
when the authority of the state is challenged. Though Zhang argued that he
had no intention of celebrating militarism, many see it as an inevitable part of
the Chinese Communist Partys absolutism.
Hong Kongs fear of Chinas state violence can be seen from the peoples
attitude toward various martial symbols of the Chinese state, such as the Public
Security and the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA). Even at the height of Chinas
massive public relations campaign around 1997 to court Hong Kong peoples
loyalty and trust, and despite a general surge in nationalist feelings among
Hong Kong people toward China around that time, these government organs,
ostensibly in the service of the people (wei renmin fuwu), were still regarded
with distain and distrust.17 The Mainland government had to issue many
reassurances to the Hong Kong people that the PLA sent to replace the
outgoing British forces in Hong Kong would not interfere with the Hong Kong
society. It is hard not to make a visual connection between the awesome images
of the Qin emperors massive war machines and the banks of PLA entering
the territory of Hong Kong on July 1, 1997.18
Both Infernal Affairs and PTU depict a world of shadowy nocturnal
cityscape. The battles of the various groups of the subterranean world,
 World Suicide Capital 35

however, never contaminate the daytime world of the regular citizens of the
city. More than Infernal Affairs, PTU maps a terrain of alterity, a signifying
space that is the negative space of the citythe psychological underside of
daytime quotidian familiarity. What is the relationship between the subcon-
scious reality of PTU or the secret lives of the individuals of Infernal Affairs
and the everyday metropolis? How do both lms recuperate the narrative of
Hong Kong against its extravagant representation in the government branding
campaigns as Asias World City?19
Hong Kong was shrouded by sadness, anxiety, and discontent between 2002
and 2003. First, in the world of pop culture, the Hong Kong society was shocked
and bereaved by the deaths of two of its most prominent, iconic, and beloved
performers, Roman Tam in November 2002 and Leslie Cheung in April 2003.
2003 then ended with the death of another popular singer and actress, Anita
Mui, in December. The lives of these popular idols and their particular endings
came to be seen as highly symbolic of the Hong Kong story. Romans songs
resounded almost nightly on television and were a ubiquitous part of the
everyday life of Hong Kong during the decade of its economic takeoff. In the
1970s and 1980s, Romans ornate costumes and extravagant performance style
coincided with the ebullience of the time and the amboyance of, increasingly,
a nouveau riche society. He embodied the aspirations and optimism of a whole
generation, whose formative years spanned the decade. His decline in health in
the late 1990s also coincided with the downward spiral in Hong Kongs
economy, beginning with the Asian crisis in 1997, the year of Hong Kongs return
to China, and hitting rock bottom by the rst half of 2003.
If Roman represents the native product of the 1970s, whose image was
extravagant if a bit kitsch, a working-class success story through hardscrabble,
Leslie Cheung epitomizes the 1980s and 1990s generation. Best known to the
international audience as the female impersonator in Chen Kaiges Farewell My
Concubine and Wong Kar-Wais leading man in Days of Being Wild, Ashes of
Time, and Happy Together, Leslie, typical of his generation, strongly identied
with European renement. He studied in the UK, spoke uent English, and
affected a mannered, languid grace. He was Hong Kongs rst and only openly
homosexual actor, a fact that seemed to accentuate the melancholy and deca-
dence in his androgynous beauty. His public persona embodied his prosperous
generations n de sicle ennui, their reality constantly dominated by a tragic
sense of ending marked by Hong Kongs Handover to Chinese sovereignty. Of
course, British Hong Kong ended in 1997, but peoples clinging attachment to
the colonial aura in Hong Kong only became irrevocably and rudely severed
when Leslie leaped to his death on Aprils Fools Day, 2003, from the twenty-rst
36 Paradigm City

oor of the Hong Kong Mandarin Hotel, itself, an extravagant symbol of high
colonial culture in Hong Kong.
The mourning was barely over when another superstar, Anita Mui,
succumbed to cancer, initiating another bout of melancholia. She was publicly
dubbed Hong Kongs daughter because of her rags-to-riches story that many
see as representative of Hong Kongs historical experience. Her earthy person-
ality, her sense of righteousness, and her diligence and true talent that helped
her rise to superstardom despite her very humble background, were also seen
as quintessential qualities of Hong Kong and, as such, she was deemed a
personification of the Hong Kong Spirit. With the extinguishing of the
brightest stars in the entertainment world, the era of prosperity and exuber-
ance had come to a resolute end.
The despair and discontent of Hong Kong people were endemic by 2002
and 2003. In this year the city was saddened by a spate of suicides, from
college students who could not see a viable future, to owners of failed busi-
nesses saddled with immense debt. In 2002, there was a total of 1,100
self-inicted deaths, which means 15 suicides per 100,000 people. It accounts
for 3% of the citys death rate that year.20 By 2003, Hong Kong was dubbed
the suicide city, and had one of the highest suicide rates in the developed
world, at 16.4 per 100,000 people. It has been reported that the major cause
of suicide in Hong Kong was nancial troubles, which accounted for 24.7%
of the total suicides. 34% of those who committed suicide were men between
the ages of forty and fifty-nine. Half of the suicide victims were unem-
ployed.21 The most chosen forms of death were jumping from tall buildings
and asphyxiation by burning charcoal at home. Because the collective mental
prostration had become so dire by the beginning of 2003, the Good Samar-
itans began publishing inspirational messages and their hotline number on
the bags of charcoal sold in supermarkets.
The government was accused of being unresponsive or uncaring with its
relentless rhetoric of optimism and continued to alienate the population with
its policies. However, if this discourse of cheer was ineffectual in alleviating
immediate human problems, it was nevertheless necessary in nurturing the
long-term condence of capital. That is to say, for Hong Kong to continue to
accommodate capitalism by providing a safe, orderly, and positive environ-
ment that nurtures business, all the pathos of the Hong Kong society would
have to be driven underground. This subterranean unsettlement is reected
in the divided worlds in both PTU and Infernal Affairs (g. 1.1, Bounce Back,
Hong Kong!).
 World Suicide Capital 37

Fig. 1.1: Bounce Back, Hong Kong!

In the difficult days of early 2003, many buses and mini buses in Hong Kong
had slogans to inspire and encourage painted on them. This one says, Fallen
behind? We will catch up soon! There is an English version that says, Bounce
Back, Hong Kong!

In the spring of 2003, societal ennui was spreading like an infection. People
were frustrated that the government seemed not to hear the opposing voices to
Article 23. The chief government ofcials, the chief executive, as well as the
pro-China DAB Party (Democratic Alliance for the Betterment of Hong
Kong), became increasingly unpopular. In February, the secretary for home
affairs, Dr. Patrick Ho, as in the territorys old Chinese New Years custom, went
to Chegong Temple to divine Hong Kongs fortune for the year. Much to the
citys collective horror, he received a double negative divinationa prediction
of a very bad year for Hong Kong. This incident was criticized as an excep-
tional government public relations blunder, yet another proof of the
incompetence of the government. However, no amount of embarrassed
laughing off of this as a silly old custom could disperse the ominous mood it
created in the city.
As gloom spread like a miasma over the city, the repressed pathos erupted
metaphorically and literally in the worst epidemic in the territorys recent
history. The SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) outbreak that ravaged
38 Paradigm City

Hong Kong at the beginning of March 2003 brought the city to its knees,
infecting over a thousand and killing 299 people, including doctors and
medical personnel on the frontline. By the time everything blew over in May,
the SARS epidemic had left the Hong Kong economy, which relies heavily on
tourism and its related industries, such as food and entertainment, completely
prostrate.
The promise of capitalism was unrealized and the incentive to serve its
cause dissipated. When the government tried to refocus on the issue of Article
23 after the epidemic subsided, the people erupted. The anti-Article 23 and
antigovernment demonstration on July 1, 2003, was one of the largest protests
in the territory, second to the 1989 prodemocracy demonstration in support
of the Chinese students in Tiananmen. Both the Hong Kong and Beijing
governments were alarmed at the size of the event in which ve hundred thou-
sand (of a population of six and a half million) people participated. The
protest resulted in the resignation of two top ofcials, the unpopular secretary
of security, Regina Lau Yip, and the secretary of nance, Anthony Leung. The
government postponed the legislation indenitely and Beijing accelerated an
economic bale-out package for Hong Kong in order to pacify the people, all the
while admonishing the Hong Kong people that unity and stability were crucial
to reviving the economy.22
The Hong Kong people were understandably proud of the outcome of July
1, believing they had successfully pressured the government to return gover-
nance to the people (huanzheng yumin). Mainland politicians, however,
favored the phrase fanzhong luangang (rebelling against China, creating
turmoil for Hong Kong), cautioning Hong Kong against being overly tolerant
of dissent. This phrase is an adaptation of an idiomatic expression in historical
narratives used to describe rebellion against a legitimate dynasty.23 This kind
of dynastic reference is particularly redolent with Zhang Yimous reinterpre-
tation of the Qin emperor in Hero. Not only does it bring to focus the
pretensions of absolutism of Chinas central government, it also directs our
attention to the military might behind this will to rule. Soon after the July 1
protests, a cartoon in the Ming Pao Daily shows two women celebrating the
success of the July 1 protest. One said that she was proud of the orderliness and
discipline displayed by the demonstrators. The other said she was even more
delighted at the restraint of the PLA.24 Despite the general exuberance about
the demonstrations, many in Hong Kong were also keenly aware of the possi-
bility that the Mainland government could have reacted with the same violent
intolerance of 1989.
 World Suicide Capital 39

Hong Kong politicians, Beijing ofcials, and the common people in Hong
Kong alike, watched anxiously to see in which direction the momentum of this
demonstration would propel the city politically. Beijing ofcials continuously
harped on the importance of the spirit of nationalism and patriotism. Some
Hong Kong writers and commentators urged the people to ride the tide of
democratic victory to demand for more electoral rights. Pro-Beijing politicians
counseled restraint.25 On November 23, 2003, the rst public election since
the demonstration, the District Council election, proved momentous. In a city
where political apathy was taken for granted, an unprecedented 44% of the
eligible population turned out for the vote.26 The result was a massive defeat of
the pro-China, pro-Article 23, DAB (Democratic Alliance for Betterment of
Hong Kong), which lost twenty-one seats to the opposition Liberal Party. This
major defeat for the DAB, despite the generous economic package China
offered Hong Kong and despite the gradual recovery of the economy of the
city, led to the resignation of DABs party leader. Capitalist prosperity and all
its promises no longer seemed sufcient to restrain the political desire of the
people.
In the face of the increasingly more vociferous demand for a democrati-
cally elected chief executive and Legislative Council members in the 2007 and
2008 election, China nally made its rst retaliatory response on December
4, 2003, through its official mouthpiece, the New China News Agency
(Xinhua). In an essay, four prominent Communist Party legal experts who
participated as members of the Chinese Communist Party in the drafting of
the HKSAR Basic Law before 1997 jointly refuted the idea that the electoral
agenda could be determined by the Hong Kong electorate, claiming that it
was an erroneous interpretation of the Hong Kong Basic Law.27 This is to say,
until the Central Peoples Government (CPG) gives its permission, Hong
Kong will not have a democratically elected government body. The legal
experts emphasized that any attempt to change the current appointment
system would be a violation of Chinas One Country principle. The inten-
tion of this piece from the Beijing governments most authoritative
mouthpiece was no doubt a not-so-gentle reminder of Chinas limited toler-
ance for political disobedience in Hong Kong.
This piece sparked immense public resentment in Hong Kong. The four
legal experts became immediate targets of local satire. They were dubbed the
Four Protectors of the (Buddhist) Law, or the Four Divine Monks, after char-
acters from popular knight-errant novels, representing inexible orthodoxy.
The discussion over legislative procedures raged into early 2004, with the
40 Paradigm City

Mainland experts becoming more hostile and aggressive in their demeanor and
rhetoric. Faced with Hong Kongs own legal experts sharp rebuttal and deri-
sion (mostly from the uncompromising Democratic Party), one of the
protectors, Xiao Weiyun, delivered a erce reprimand at a preliminary study
and discussion session organized by the Task Force for Political Reform,
announcing that Beijing not only had the right to interfere with Hong Kongs
legislation reform but will definitely interfere/control to the end (guan
daodi).28 All this happened in the midst of Taiwans presidential election and
the Taiwan president, Chen Shui-Pians controversial proposal for a refer-
endum on policy issues. The proposal was perceived by the Central Peoples
Government in Beijing as Taiwans challenge to Chinas One Country policy.
Taiwans insubordination and now Hong Kongs obstreperousness and
Beijings more and more bellicose response ofcially or unofcially through
its various mouthpieces realized Heros premise. If Zhang Yimous lm is an
accurate measure of Beijings political trajectory, then it is clear that this kind
of separatism will not be tolerated. In Zhangs lm, for the sake of peace and
livelihood of the common people (read stability and prosperity in Beijings
contemporary political rhetoric for its policy toward Hong Kong), the ulti-
mate heroic deed is to sacrice individual aspirations and independence. This
heroism will be expected of Hong Kongs people, Taiwans people, and in
truth all the peoples of Chinas various disputed territories. This suppression
and renouncement of the self is perhaps the wujiandao (path of eternal
suffering) described in Infernal Affairs.
If, in Zhangs lmic vision, legitimacy of power is built upon the authority
and inviolability of order, both Infernal Affairs and PTU reect a much less
sanguine acceptance of power, both its inevitability and its legitimacy. If the
filmic representations of Infernal Affairs and PTU reflect the Hong Kong
society in 2003, they articulate an acknowledgment of the contemporaneous
existence of different worlds. They articulate an acceptance of a reality that is
layered and ambivalent, with opposing forces in constant negotiation and
balance. The Hong Kong society described in these films is one divided
according to class and ranks and exclusivity of positions and affiliations.
People speak in coded languages with one another, identifying belonging. In
Infernal Affairs, the undercover policeman, Chan, communicates with his supe-
rior through tapping out messages in Morse Code on his cell phone. The police
language in PTU, full of acronyms, shorthand, and standard command
phrases, differs from the everyday vernacular of the common citizens. Simi-
larly, the gangsters crude and violent colloquialisms form their own dialect
 World Suicide Capital 41

that denes membership in their organization. These different segments of

society have their own logic of organization even if it is simply a logic of coer-
cion and conformism.
Unlike Hero, which upholds hegemony, the power structure in the
nocturnal world of PTU is constantly disturbed and challenged. The gun is an
emblem of police authority and the power of the state. The lost gun in PTU
unsettles the particular power conguration in the city and is the propelling
element in the entire night of activities. By the end of the night all that had
been thrown up in the air realigned and resettled, and the relationships of
power were slightly altered. Thus this world has its own rationality and
stability within its volatility. Both Infernal Affairs and PTU reect a society in
which power is constantly contested. Both the police and the gangs have to
struggle to maintain their hold in society. Order is a fragile construction
through intense negotiations and symbiosis among the different contenders of
power. The power of the police is never absolute, but neither is that of the
underworld. In this way a strange democracy ensues. Hegemonic control is
both impossible and undesirable.
By the end of 2003, most people had forgotten about Zhang Yimous lm
Hero, as it seemed more and more removed from the sensibility of the Hong
Kong society. However, the sequel of Infernal Affairs was successful in
sustaining the excitement created by the rst movie. The third and nal sequel
broke the opening-day records when it premiered on December 12, 2003,
opening in one hundred cinemas simultaneously and earning thirty million
Hong Kong dollars in a single day, creating another climax in the lm industry.
PTU gained more and more attention in its itinerary in the international lm
festival circuit and continued to be celebrated as a rare bloom in a hyper-
commercialized industry, quietly revolutionizing how Hong Kong people
perceive and talk about their reality.
These lms reect and record a particular social and political imagination
of Hong Kong people in the year between 2002 and 2003, through the fth-year
mark of Hong Kongs return to China. Although not much of an anniversary,
it is, in the minds of many Hong Kong people, a watershed. In the beginning
of the new regime, under the Beijing controlled HKSAR government, many
people took a passive wait-and-see attitude. By the end of 2003, most nally
came to realize the irretrievable end of the old era and understood the impor-
tance of asserting self-determination over the future of their society and their
city. Cathected on these films are the vacillations and confusions of the
previous ve years, and the aspirations and a renewed sense of determination
42 Paradigm City

toward the future despite all odds, despite an overdetermined premise for
Hong Kongs story.
Critics have pointed out that both PTU and Infernal Affairs differ from
conventional crime movies in their lack of the usual action and violence that
are the main selling points of the genre. Indeed, the quiet intensity of both
lms maps a topology of Hong Kong society that is laden with unspoken and
unexpressed anxiety and trauma. In contrast, the historical epic Hero is a
grandiose expression of telluric nationalism. The Hong Kong peoples tenta-
tiveness toward the Mainland monolith, their gloomy awareness of the
passivity of their position vis--vis national politics, and their reserved opti-
mism for nal justice, are all written into the boxofce contest between Hero
and Infernal Affairs during the dark days of 2002 and 2003.
 two
Walking Down Memory Lane
On the Streets of the Hong Kong History Museums Paradigm City

City streets are the major sites of different kinds of civic drama that contribute
to a citys collective identity and memory. As a result, activities on city streets,
whether daily commuting, commerce, or political activism receive elaborate
attention from the state. Even celebratory events authorized by the state, from
street fairs to festival parades that constantly occupy the street space, are part
of the state disciplinary regime. In Hong Kong, ofcers from different govern-
mental departments are constantly clearing the streets of unlicensed street
vendors, ticketing litter bugs, or controlling massive ows of people, espe-
cially during holidays. Streets are not merely thoroughfares and passageways
but, concurrently, symbols of free movement and control and hence, the locus
of state power.
Henri Lefebvre argues that state-approved street events, such as parades,
festival celebrations, and processions, in effect, caricaturize public use of
streets and are forms of state appropriation and reappropriation of space;
whereas true appropriation characteristic of effective demonstrations is chal-
lenged by the forces of repression, which demand silence and forgetfulness.1
Much of Lefebvres writing describes the French society at the decline of the
French empire when many of the strategies tried out and perfected in the
colonies were repatriated and used on its own population in the metropole.
However, the new form of colonial strategies in France, as in contemporary
Hong Kong, is more the abstract power of capitalist economy than the concrete
power of the military. This power is equally spatially manifested and it inl-
trates the everyday life of the citizens. Lefebvre refers to such state strategies
as colonization of the everyday. 2 It is in such a view that the spaces of
everyday life, especially the streets where citizens negotiate their daily itiner-

43
44 Paradigm City

aries, become sites of contestation and negotiation. As such, Lefebvre argues

that the streets harbor revolutionary potential:

[R]evolutionary events generally take place in the street. Doesnt this show
that the disorder of the street engenders another kind of order? The urban
space of the street is a place for talk, given over as much to the exchange of
words and signs as it is to the exchange of things. A place where speech
becomes writing. A place where speech can become savage and, by
escaping the rules and institutions, inscribe itself on walls.3

There has been much scholarship regarding the political possibility of the
interchanges among ordinary people on the streets.4 The conservatism of the
state, to maintain status quo, is often in direct contradiction to the dynamism
of the everyday exchanges in the streets that are random and unpredictable.5
It is not surprising that there are measures of differing nature and degrees of
severity to legislate individual behavior, regulate exchanges and interactions
among people, and to delimit everyday practices on the streets. In Hong Kong,
these strategies also function to cull the collective memory of the experiences
of the streets and shape the Hong Kong identity.
A symbolic manifestation of the institution of the state is the Hong Kong
History Museum. It presents an important metaphor of and a window into the
process of state spatial and ideological manipulation. The museum is a simu-
lation of the city of Hong Kong, creating within the expansive exhibition halls
a veritable city in miniature. The replication of city streets in the museum is
particularly signicant given the historical anxiety of the Hong Kong govern-
ment regarding the civic potentials of such public spaces. The feel-good
nostalgia generated in the experience of walking through the galleries of the
museum is harnessed into the service of the state. However, despite the
seeming effectiveness of such strategies, viewing the interactions between the
state and its population historically, it is also obvious that the peace processed
out of ideological manipulation of the people is fragile and the state never
succeeds in permanently maintaining status quo. Ultimately individuals trans-
form their atomized strength into collective power, thus transforming the
space in which they are inscribed. In this chapter, I examine this symbolic
space of the museum, which captures the tension between state control of city
streets and individual exercises of daily lifethe civic drama that forms the
collective memory in this paradigm city.
The Hong Kong History Museum reopened on August 30, 2001, after much
 Walking Down Memory Lane 45

anticipation. The original museum housed in Kowloon Park closed in 1995

and the exhibition was suspended for ve years while facilities were being
built in the new location in East Tsimshatsui for the much-expanded perma-
nent exhibition, The Story of Hong Kong. The new Hong Kong History
Museum functions as the HKSAR governments ofcial historical archive and
also symbolically pronounces the end of the British era and the beginning of
Chinese sovereignty over Hong Kong. More than emblematic of the authority
and legitimacy of the new regime, the museum is an apparatus to inscribe a
specic political ideology for the new Hong Kong. Even the spatial trajectory
in the organization of the Hong Kong Story seems to parallel remarkably
the Hong Kong governments strategy in organizing the city and the lives of
the citizens. In this sense, the new museum contains a blueprint of the
governing ideology of the city.
As has been pointed out on numerous occasions, 1997 demarcates Hong
Kongs exit from British colonial control only to enter into another stage of
colonialism under China.6 Many people feared Hong Kong would be
subsumed by the Chinese cultural hegemony. This was not without basis.
Toward the end of Hong Kongs British era, Chinas ambition to reinscribe
Hong Kong within the Chinese national narrative, geographically or ideologi-
cally, was overt. There was a veritable industry of Hong Kong studies in China
under the ofcial sponsorship of different Mainland Chinese academic and
political institutions.7 In these writings, Hong Kongs history, society, and
culture are articulated within the Chinese national agenda and thus local expe-
rience and culture are elided, erased, or reconstructed.8
At the same time, the physical form of Hong Kong as a city is constantly
changing at high speed in the citys unceasing pursuit of global capitalist devel-
opment, so much so that Akbar Abbas describes the condition of the city as
having always already disappeareddeja disparu.9 This contributes to a situ-
ation ripe for the culture of musealization, which Andreas Huyssen argues, is
a means against obsolescence and disappearance, to counter our deep anxiety
about the speed of change and the ever-shrinking horizons of time and
space.10 In Hong Kong, the fear of cultural as well as historical obsolescence
created a societal nostalgia and a desire for history in the late 1990s, gener-
ating an eforescence of private memoirs, personal reminiscences, and old
picture books, as well as a general boom in the heritage and memory indus-
tries, which culminated in the building of several museums.11 If securing
ones past is a way of securing ones self-determination for the future,12 the
sense of nostalgia that gripped Hong Kong at the end of the twentieth century
46 Paradigm City

was directly related to the peoples sense of anxiety regarding their future
under the new Beijing regime, as well as where the breakneck global capitalist
development will lead them.
It is not surprising that a state-funded history museum should be in the
service of the state in inculcating certain ideology. However, the Hong Kong
History Museum is much more complicated than its overt premise. It has to
fulll Mainland Chinas nationalist demands, local historical identity, civic
agenda, as well as general public sentiment. As a result, the museum caters to
a societal imaginary of a certain feeling of Hong Kong-ness amid the great
changes of the era, as it offers an important venue for the acculturation
program of the Beijing government.

The Sinicizing of Hong Kongs History

It is to be expected that there would be differences in the narrations of Hong

Kongs history between the British-Hong Kong government and the HKSAR
government. There is much continuity between the former history museum,
which was originally set up in 1975 under the Urban Council of the British
Hong Kong government, and the present Hong Kong History Museum, built
by the transitional government. The new museums chief curator, Joseph Ting,
also asserts that the new exhibition is a culmination of twenty-six years of
research. However, this statement inadvertently places the authority of the
present museum above the old. The new exhibition is an end of term report
to the public, offering a corrected version of history.
The museum was moved to the new building in 1998. The new building
displays a bland monumentality and modernist facelessness. It is an interesting
contrast to the other municipal museum, the Hong Kong Heritage Museum,
which was built by the HKSAR Regional Council, opened in 2000, in an impe-
rial palace style, with Chinese splendid roofs and sweeping, upturned eaves.
The British legacy in the former and the Chinese assertion in the latter, in terms
of architectural design, are obvious. Opened to the public in 2001, the new
History Museum, occupies 7,000 square meters of oor space. The presentation
of The Story of Hong Kong makes extensive use of dioramas, life-size replicas,
multimedia presentations, and special audio-visual and lighting effects,aiming
to present the story in a life-like manner.13 The exhibition is arranged in a
series of open galleries that lead from one to another in a single direction,
presenting a linear and chronological projection of Hong Kongs story. The rst
oor, where one enters the exhibition, is dedicated to Hong Kongs premodern
 Walking Down Memory Lane 47

history as well as native and folk culture, here presented as Hong Kongs
Chinese heritage. As one enters the second oor, after becoming well
acquainted with the essential and cultural connections between Hong Kong and
China, one enters the realm of the colonial era, from the late nineteenth century
to 1997. This part of the exhibition is accessible only by a long escalator ride at
the end of the rst-oor exhibition. In other words, physically and metaphori-
cally, there is a rupture between Hong Kongs historical experience and its
Sinitic culture that is timeless and foundational. The order of the narrative in
the museum cannot be reversed. One cannot double back and exit from where
one enters. In fact, there are ushers directing the visitor ow between the two
oors, encouraging a single momentum in one direction through the museum
journey.
The size of the exhibition on the rst oor, Hong Kongs pre-British era
the Devonian and the Neolithic periods and the Chinese dynastic eras, from
Qin-Han to Qing (ca. 220 BC to ca. 1900)is substantially larger than the
version in the old History Museum. There are massive displays on Hong
Kongs prehistoric and early settlers to emphasize the genealogical unity
between Hong Kong and China. In addition to the diorama of prehistoric men
and women in their natural habitat that was also featured in the old museum,
there are reproductions of rock carvings and steles found on the offshore
islands of Hong Kong that can be traced to the early Chinese dynastic periods.
The new museum also has case upon case of pottery shards and chinaware.
These archeological fragments mostly demonstrate a pottery style that
connects the native culture of Hong Kong to ancient Mainland pottery
cultures. They are the innumerable material proofs of the busy and unceasing
commerce and exchanges between the Mainland and Hong Kong throughout
history.
Similarly, the ethnographic section in the exhibition is greatly expanded to
present in great detail the different tribal groups that have settled since the
Tang dynasty (ca. 600 AD) around what is eventually called the New Territories
of Hong Kong. The new displays retain some of the old museums re-creation
of the typical dwellings of the Hoklo, Hakka, and Tanka peoples. Visitors can
enter and explore these various model habitats, whether a farmhouse or a junk
dwelling in a shing village. Sound recordings of market calls in the villages,
sea waves, and sher songs accompany the displays. There are exhibits of the
everyday paraphernalia and costumes of the different groups. Audio record-
ings of wedding music, ceremonial rites, and other general noises of festive
crowds are added to the replicas of temples and streets of a Hoklo village.
48 Paradigm City

Added to this British anthropology are videos of some of these rites performed
today, emphasizing the still vibrant native cultures. Together, they present a
contrasting narrative to the historical tale that children learned from school-
books under the colonial governmentthat Hong Kong was a mostly
uninhabited, barren piece of rock, with scattered villages and insignicant
native cultures when the British rst came.
Both the archeological and the ethnographic sections aim to highlight the
continuous presence of China in Hong Kong and the close relationship between
the greater Han culture and the native one in Hong Kong. The museum texts
explain at length the connections between these two places:

The people who inhabited South China from prehistoric times were the
Nanyue people. From the Qin and Han dynasties, however, the Han people
of Central China migrated south, bringing with them advanced culture and
technology. With Dayuling Pass (one of the Five Ridges just north of
present-day Guangdong Province) being opened up in the Tang dynasty and
the Pearl River Delta being developed in the Song dynasty, migrants multi-
plied in numbers. These periods saw signicant development in the South
China region, with Hong Kong keeping the same pace as the Pearl River
Delta. It was in the Song dynasty that the Tang clan settled in the New Terri-
tories, followed by more clans in the Ming and Qing dynasties. Immigration
gave Hong Kongs economy a signicant boost.14

The discovery of the material and cultural links between Mainland China
and Hong Kong becomes the subject of a separate exhibition. A whole gallery
in the museum is dedicated to the history of archeology in Hong Kong, culmi-
nating in a detailed documentation of the discovery of a Han dynasty (ca 300
AD) tomb in Kowloon City in the early 1960s. The archeologists are celebrated
as cultural heroes who helped reconnect the historical and cultural ties
between Hong Kong and China.
The major focus of this oor of the exhibition seems to be the assertion of
Hong Kongs ethnic heritage and pre-British culture. The aim is to reinstate
Hong Kong as a historic site, contradicting the British claim of its insigni-
cance prior to their investment in the territory. In this way, a full quarter of the
museum space is dedicated to the laborious reconstruction of Hong Kongs
connection to the greater Han culture of China and to the incorporation of
Hong Kongs past into Chinas national history. Even the paraphernalia of the
daily lives of farmers and shing folks, the bowls and furniture, clothes and
 Walking Down Memory Lane 49

footwear become a part of this assertion of Chinese national identity. Previ-

ously scattered around different institutions under the British government, the
archeological artifacts have now been hauled out and displayed in toto, seem-
ingly to justify Chinas reclaiming of Hong Kong. Frankly, most of these
ancient fragments of life are of dubious aesthetic or even historical value and
this particular segment of the exhibition is extraordinarily tedious. However,
they are ideologically important to the new Hong Kong. The exhibition
provides a visible, discursively constructed connection between Hong Kong
and China, proving that despite the 150 years of British colonization, Hong
Kong is unequivocally, intrinsically Chinese.
The exhibition on the second oor focuses on Hong Kongs economic life
and development during the colonial era. There are large-scale replications
and original structures of the places of daily life in the city from the early
decades of the twentieth centurya teahouse, a grocery store, an original
herbal medicine store front, an original HSBC bank counter, among others. An
old steam-powered train engine and a rickshaw represent the modes of trans-
portation at the time. From the last half of the century, there are reproductions
of a local-style diner, a cinema, an interior of a unit from the earliest phase of
the public housing estate, and so forth. All these displays reect the different
aspects of life in Hong Kong, from habitation and transportation to consump-
tion and entertainment. Some of these places still exist in similar forms and are
still part of the daily life in Hong Kong.
The last section of The Story of Hong Kong is on the different phases of
Hong Kongs economic development, from the 1950s cottage industries to the
development of the service and nancial sectors in the 1980s and 1990s, when
Hong Kong, as one of the Four Little Dragons of East Asia, contended to
become a world nancial center. Much of the presentation of this segment cele-
brates the physical plan of the city, its architecture and cityscape.
Following the initial establishing of origins and lineage, the tale of Hong
Kong follows a predictable teleology of developmentthe evolution from a
remote shing village into an international metropolis. Similar to the old colo-
nial museum that presented a typical colonialist epic of Hong Kong, a Hong
Kong Bildungsroman is invented in this exhibition.15

Politics of Nostalgia

The narrative emphasis on the object culture of the new Hong Kong History
Museum in some ways follows a current museal practice that seeks to return
50 Paradigm City

signicance to the mundane. The staging of the everyday life treats objects, not
as curiosities or historical bric-a-bracs, but object lessons of history placed
within a particular chronotope.16 However, the Hong Kong History Museum
differs from many contemporary history museums in the way that museum-
goers are situated in relationship to the museal narrative. The Museum of the
City of New York, funded by the New York City municipal government, for
example, recreates interior spaces with real antiques to illustrate the furnishing
styles of particular periods. Mannequins are used, dressed up in period
fashion, not so much to simulate real life as to present a tableau of history.
Often, small objects of daily use are set in separate display cases. These tableaus
are usually roped off and visitors view them with a kind of temporal discon-
nect. The New York Historical Society does not attempt to re-create
mise-en-scnes at all. Their collections of furniture and everyday parapher-
nalia are displayed and stored behind multileveled glass cases stacked together
without hierarchy. In these museum displays, there is a very obvious physical
division, through the glass cases and roped-off rooms occupied by
mannequins, between the contemporary reality and the past depicted.
In The Story of Hong Kong, however, very little differentiation is made
between the city of the past and that of the present world. Rather than the inte-
rior being occupied by mannequins, the visitor is encouraged to walk through,
to look at the items on display closely, and to experience the space and imagine
oneself as a subject living within the space and time of the articial environ-
ment. It is a process of acclimation; one goes to the museum to recuperate the
true Hong Kong experience that one had somehow missed while busily
living.
Michel de Certeau argues that the individual walk is mercurial and unpre-
dictable and, as such, it is resistant to narrativization and analysis and thus
can slip through the control of the state. Individual recollections of everyday
life, in the same way, elude state narrative, because: Memory is a sort of anti-
museum: it is not localizable.17 However, a project such as the Hong Kong
History Museum is effective in harnessing and appropriating this theoretically
nonmanipulable individual memory as the object of programmatic manage-
ment, precisely by capturing the experience of walking. In the museum, the
reproduction of old Hong Kong is so complete, so realistic, and so close to the
individual experience that walking through the museum is indeed a trip down
memory lane. However, this memory is carefully airbrushed as it is channeled
through the museum halls. Walking through the exhibitions evokes nostalgia
and longing, but for an idealized space, which substitutes as the true past.
 Walking Down Memory Lane 51

In truth, walking through the tableaus or stage sets, one becomes inad-
vertently a participant in the scene constructed. The direct immersion into a
narrative creates an instant experience. The museum thus substitutes histor-
ical fantasy and imagination for historical memory. Thus a collective historical
experience is created anew through the museum experience. This imaginary
history is, of course, an ofcial, sanctioned version of the past. In this way, a
normative experience of the past is reproduced among the visitors.
The focus on material objects and collectibles in presenting Hong Kongs
history also has an important function in the ideological program of the
museum. The brand of museal realism or nostalgic realism achieved by
commodities and emblems associated with the everyday life capitalizes on
desire. In this way, the objects become detached from their original function or
political or social signicance. They become auratic, or recalling only senti-
ments of unfulllment and unreturnability.18 Because of this created sense
of yearning, these objects become fetishized. They attain, in turn, desirability
and value because they are raried in their status as collectible objects in the
museum, fueling fetishistic desire and nostalgia. In this reciprocal process,
nostalgia is a fetishism of a likely world of the past that one never experi-
enced.19 Melancholia is the result of the ironic knowledge that the aspects of
the past to which one is attached belong to an imagined reality. Susan Stewart
thus describes nostalgia as by nature melancholic, because, it is the repetition
that mourns the inauthenticity of all repetition.20
Since this nostalgia is mediated through objects of desire, one relates to the
past through attachments to objects.21 The structural role of disappointment
of the museum experience, of indulging in unfulllment, is crucial to the
creation of attachment to an idealized past. Hong Kong peoples continued
interest in the past, perhaps even in China as a heritage past, is no more than
what one desires from Yue Hua Chinese Products, the Mainland China govern-
ment-sponsored national product emporium, where one can nd a notion of
China in a much more benign, embraceable, even desirable formne handi-
crafts, exotic kitsch, and traditional goods such as silks, porcelains, and
gemsthings for which China is historically supposed to be known. In turn,
Hong Kongs own history, understood often as a history of manufactured goods,
exemplies it as a capitalist emporium par excellence, where notions of past
can be reduced to an accumulation of objects and spectacles.22 In this way, the
understanding of and, as such, access to the past in Hong Kong is always medi-
ated by the capitalist market ideology of desire. This museum narrative reduces
52 Paradigm City

public history to consumerist attachment to objects, effectively diffusing the

political meanings in collective experiences.
The museums display thus turns the Hong Kong peoples relationship to
the past into a consumer fantasy, sanitized of any political meaning. This coin-
cides with the administrative principle of the HKSAR government (See my
elaboration of this in chapter 4). It corresponds to the Beijing governments
ofcial designation of Hong Kong as a commercial and consumer center, to
play the part, among other major Chinese cities marked for economic devel-
opment, of the supercial, frivolous and most of all, apolitical consumer and
nancial center. Deng Xiaopings infamous assurance that the dances and the
horseraces would continue (wu zhaotiao, ma zhaopao) in Hong Kong after
1997 and Beijings promise of continued exuberance and prosperity thereafter,
are a double-edged sword to ensure that Hong Kong will never become more
than an apolitical, albeit glittering city, much like the pearl of the orient that
ornamented the old British crown.

The Culture of Nostalgia and the State Doctrine of Capitalism

The aestheticization and thus de-politicization of the Hong Kong society,

which was the general dedicated public policy under the British Hong Kong
government, is now continued by the HKSAR government.23 The strategy of
systematic denaturing of history and politics in Hong Kong is carried out on
numerous levels in society. Particularly revealing are the historic preservation
projects of which the reconstruction of the Murray House is a prime example.
The historic 1860s colonial-style Murray House was once a colonial adminis-
trative building. It was taken over by the Japanese and turned into a prison and
interrogation center where hundreds died under torture during the Japanese
occupation from 1943 to 1945. It was returned to the British-Hong Kong
government after World War II. When the Hong Kong government decided to
redevelop the harborfront district of Admiralty on Hong Kong Island in 1982,
the old administrative building had to make way. The building was taken down
brick by brick, each carefully numbered, packaged, and put into storage. In the
year 2000, when the district of Stanley was redeveloped as a tourist destination,
the entire ensemble was transported to the new site to be recomposed. The
new Murray House, complete with its historic blemishes and stains, is now
open to the public, occupied by restaurants and walking galleries.24 This post-
modern gesture, with its collision of the different strata of history and
functions, transformed the building into a commercial enterprise, ultimately
releasing it from its historical weight (g. 2.1 Murray House).
 Walking Down Memory Lane 53

Fig. 2.1: Murray House

The historic Murray House was moved pillar by pillar from Admiralty to Stanley.

Although it is arguable that this kind of historic preservation and adaptation

is more an inevitable late-capitalist commodication of history than an ideo-
logical move by the state, put within the framework of the museum project, it
can be asserted that the capitalist compulsion is a committed effort by the state
to inuence the nature of Hong Kongs relationship with the past.25 In fact, the
rst Hong Kong History Museum, established in 1975, was a direct product of
the British Hong Kong governments general political/cultural policy at the
time, which also resulted in the Antiquities and Monuments Ordinance that
organizes historical redevelopment, including the Murray House project. More-
over, the successful transformation of Murray House from a historical site into
a commercial and touristic site is an example of the sanitization of history
through preservation, in the service of the state doctrine of capitalist
consumerism in Hong Kong.
Hong Kong people are well familiar with this partnership between the state
and the capitalist agenda. An exhibition of Hong Kongs industrial designs at
the Hong Kong Arts Centre in 1995, curated by Matthew Turner, traced to the
1960s the British governments deliberate construction of a Hong Kong identity
as a capitalist haven, inhabited by a cosmopolitan (that is, not nationalistic),
peaceful, and hard-working population.26 The title of Turners exhibition,
54 Paradigm City

Hong Kong Sixties: Designing Identity, reects the curatorial teams under-
standing of the relationship between industrial design in Hong Kong and Hong
Kongs self-perception and identity.27 The curatorial teams analysis suggests
that Hong Kongs identity was shaped through images designed according to
state directives, couched in terms of commercial and economic considerations.
The designs of this period not only created new products but also a particular
international image of Hong Kong, from Suzie Wong to the Chinese sailing junk
in the Victoria Harbourthe East-meets-West motif, particularly high-
lighting the accessibility of this East compared to the Mainland Chinas
unapproachable version.28
Not only does this make evident the collusion between economic develop-
ment and state ideology, Turner also points out that this cultivation of a
distinct Hong Kong identity is a direct result of a government initiative in the
late 1960s and 1970s. The riots of 1967 and 1968 and the series of public demon-
strations and general social unrest in the early 1970s were interpreted by the
government as the result of an overidentication with China and instigated
by leftist elements in Hong Kong in sympathy with the Cultural Revolution.
Also, in 1973, China made an assertion to the United Nations of its rightful
ownership of Hong Kong and of its intention to reclaim Hong Kong at some
unspecied future time. This threat from China prompted the British colo-
nial government to unfurl a massive public-relations campaign to court the
citizens loyalty and sense of belonging, in order to discourage emotional or
actual associations with Mainland China. Regardless of how Hong Kongs
image was self-fashioned or imposed, whether under political coercion or
commercial consideration, Turner reveals the inherent connection between a
seeming ontological category and the pragmatic considerations of political
control and capitalist operations. In this respect, Turners project at the Hong
Kong Arts Centre could well have been a critique of the Hong Kong History
Museum.
The massive ideological or civilizing programs under the British colonial
government in Hong Kong that resulted in the rst incarnation of the Hong
Kong History Museum came at the end of the turbulent period of the 1960s.
Despite their association with communist activities in Hong Kong, the Storms
of May in 1967 and 1968 were also expressions of the peoples desire to democ-
ratize the street and to pry loose the right to speech from the authority of the
colonial state. It was an attempt to regain self-determination over daily affairs,
such as reasonable working conditions, use of native tongue in official
exchanges, and affordable mass transportation. 29 However, the threat of
 Walking Down Memory Lane 55

communist inltration, an all-out class war, general anarchy, and the death of
innocent civilians stagnated businesses and alienated the colonys bourgeoisie.
In the end, through heavy police suppression, the streets were once again under
the control of the state, which, in the perception of many people, was by
comparison a more reasonable manager of public space. Despite the mecha-
nisms of control, the state produced a level of order and calm that at least
assured a rational, livable environment that allowed commerce to continue.30
This lure of stability and prosperity is an important ideology with which the
new Chinese-Hong Kong government also buys obedience and cooperation
from its population. This obedience is being repeatedly cultivated as Hong
Kong people are more and more lulled by the promise of continuous personal
afuence through increased capitalist opportunities.

The Bourgeois Utopia

The History Museum celebrates a history of successful economic development

and the social and work ethics that support it. The highly clichd rags to
riches teleology, the mythology of social cohesion and unied goals create a
picture of Hong Kong as a kind of utopiaa capitalist utopia. The museum
display attens out social disparity in the sense that in the museum the social
space, private or public, that is usually codied and segregated by class and
social groups, is now open to all. Places like village houses of the Hakka, junks
of the Tanka, and government ats of the urban poor that are in reality mostly
visited and inhabited only by the working class and the economically
oppressed, are here shared by everyone. One of the displays is a rendition of a
unit from an early phase of Hong Kongs much lauded public housing
program. Completely furnished with everyday objects, from a fully dressed bed
to a hot-water thermos, it becomes an almost cozy and desirable space. Left out
of this sanitized space is all the problems related to poverty and crowding,
including poor hygiene, family violence, and crime. But also left out is the
sense of grassroots community, neighborliness, and camaraderie that arise in
the housing estates.31 The assumed audience of this exhibition is Hong Kongs
mythical middle class who most identify with and benet from Hong Kongs
image as a capitalist city and the corresponding ideology of stability and pros-
perity. In this democratized environment where class issues do not exist, they
can gaze on the spaces of poverty without the usual class guilt and discomfort.
For those who grew up in these estates, poverty and social oppression are
conditions of the past. Nostalgia overtakes all feelings of oppression or memo-
56 Paradigm City

ries of injustice. The fact that the Tankas are driven out of existence notwith-
standing, in the replicas of their villages and junk dwellings, the common
conditions of the social underclass are here represented as quaint or merely
ethnic.32 Also unseen in this utopian space are the many subaltern ethnic
groups that work in Hong Kong as manual laborers, or long-term guest
workers, or even residents, who are never accepted into the mainstream society,
such as the Filipinos, the Nepalese, and the Indonesians, just to name a few.
The nal presentation of the museum is a slide show of news images of
Hong Kongs major events in the twentieth century. The accompanying
music to this account of the last decades of the century is a medley of
popular television theme songs from the late 1970s. Given the cultural impor-
tance and popularity of television soap operas during this era and their
affective inuence on the Hong Kong people, as well as nurturing of Hong
Kongs identity and social value, these seem suitable in the museums presen-
tation.33 However, one wonders about the ideological intention in reevoking
this bygone spirit through this music. Here is an example of the lyrics from
the song Fendou (lit: Struggle for Success) written by Joseph Koo and sung
by Jenny, used in the video presentation:

Holding hands together, radiating a thousand points of heat, a thousand

points of light; \ lighting up my love, shining your way forward, \ I will
thrash the brambles and blaze a trail, breaking through the obstacles before
us, offering up all my love, offering up my all.

The Story of Hong Kong has an obvious moral at the end, of triumph
over adversity as the result of the Hong Kong peoples diligence, ingenuity,
and endurance, and of course, the efciency of the Hong Kong government.
The use of these songs in the museum, especially as the backdrop to Hong
Kongs development tale, makes them anthems of sorts for the city, glorifying
and canonizing a certain value and attitude that would be the Hong Kong
spirit.
The world within the history museum celebrates a homogenous experi-
ence of Hong Kong, a city unified by common goals and aspiration. The
ending of the Hong Kong story is triumphal and celebratory. The ideological
burden of this ideal society dominates the imagination of the Hong Kong
people; it is the home that Hong Kong people are continually pursuing and
continually failing to attain, but its seeming immanent possibility becomes
the ideological leash that manipulates popular sentiment and conditions the
 Walking Down Memory Lane 57

behavior of the people. The concept of Hong Kong is my home first

appeared in the late 1970s and the 1980s as a public slogan, corresponded with
other civic programs such as the Clean Hong Kong Campaign and the Cour-
tesy Campaign to educate civic propriety and values.34 This articulation of
citizenship was again important after a decade of migration and emigration
of the 1990s. The brain-drain, in which a large segment of the middle and
professional classes in Hong Kong fled abroad in the face of the Mainland
takeover deprived Hong Kong of an important nativeborn and educated work-
force, as well as a middle-class bulwark. At the same time, the influx of
immigrants from Mainland China threatened the existing social fabric. By the
end of the 1990s, a quick acculturation of Hong Kong-ness seemed crucial for
social stability and political viability.
The artificial environment in the museum is a reinforcement of Hong
Kongs capitalist ideology, that prosperity is available to everyone. Stability
is crucial to the continued functioning of capital and marketssocial order
becomes the civic value. It stands to reason that the History Museum also has
a substantial educational component.35 As all ofcial historical accounts, the
museum effectively promotes a uniformity of experience by manipulating
memory and appropriating everyday experiences, thus producing governable
homogeneity among the citizenry. The exhibition corrals a collective remem-
brance of Hong Kongs past as a cohesive society. The poor envision being
borne along by this development tale while waiting for their turn to become
rich, while the wealthy share a sense of participation in the economic struggle
of Hong Kong. Both identify with the telos of the Hong Kong Bildungsroman
that provides epistemological cohesion to the society. The belief in the neces-
sity for order and social control blinds many, especially among the bourgeoisie
and the aspiring middle class, to the inherent oppressiveness of this ideology.

Control of the City Streets

Museum spaces are often highly controlled and rationalized in which even
interchanges among visitors are reduced to the minimum. The one-way trans-
mission of information, from the recordings of the guided tours to the lectures
of the docents and the printed information on the display, monopolizes our
attention and disrupts our relationship with our companions. Guards are
posted around the galleries to police against erratic and obstreperous behavior
and movements, sometimes even to hush overly rowdy visitors. This is certainly
the case at the Hong Kong History Museum. Visitors are both the audience for
58 Paradigm City

the tale of Hong Kong and part of the story as they become the street life, popu-
lating the staged drama of the tale of development. However, though they
wander through the replicas of the normally lively and exuberant places, going
in and out of these elaborate sets of streets, stores, homes, and temples, acting
as the public of the staged tableau, normal civic activities are unavailable to
them. These activities of urban relationships and communication, from
exchanges of money and goods between street sellers and shoppers to common
civilities and greetings among strangers and acquaintances, are missing in these
articial public spaces. The museum is only a caricature of the city of Hong
Kong, in which the apparent interactions and relationships among the visitors
merely mimic the normal activities of the public on the actual streets outside,
while eliminating the democratic potential of the streets and the rebellious
possibility of the individuals daily spontaneous theatricalities.36
In this way, the museum exhibition is like a themepark ride, with one
colorful tableau after another as one passes through the galleries presenting
lulling illusions and evoking sentimentalism and longing among the local
viewers. It creates fantasies of happy daily life while containing the discontent
of the people. Similar to other historic preservation projects around the city,
these state-sponsored memory institutions turn historical experience into
fetishized objects and, as a result, successfully divest the sites of any political
memory and meaning. Individual everyday life is immaculately staged, gener-
ating a kind of materialist epistemology that is solely about fullling individual
yearning. This is a process of instilling forgetfulness or denaturing history into
mere aesthetic objects of desire or monuments.37 In the progression through
the course laid out in the museums hyperreal halls, one learns to forget
history and exits as an acculturated citizen.38
If Lefebvre is correct in arguing that public streets, the sites of seemingly
innocuous everyday life, are full of revolutionary potential, it is little wonder
that to demonstrate control of the streets is of such a political priority to a state
government. The 1997 Handover ceremonies, for example, included a
protracted, televised procession of the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army into
Hong Kong, demonstrating very clearly who was in charge of the streets of
Hong Kong. The use of the streets, whether on the daily level of individual
exchanges or violent protests of rebel groups, is a contest over who owns the
normative right to dene legitimate usages and activities. Crowds that occupy
a specic space of a certain size can change the nature of space or render it
unavailable for the assigned, normative activities. (See chapter 3 in regard to
the Filipino domestic workers and their Sunday street parties, for example).
 Walking Down Memory Lane 59

Illegal street venders that the Hong Kong authorities are forever trying to
restrain frequently turn a sterile thoroughfare into a busy marketplace. A
demonstration that occupies a street prevents normal transportation or
regular commerce to take place there, causing disruption of regular transac-
tions. For a capitalist economy such as Hong Kongs, the effects are constantly
calculated in terms of the loss of monies.
In the Storms of May of 1967 and 1968, actual violence or the threat of
violence had signicant impact on the daily life of the people of Hong Kong.
Although the government was successful in curtailing further disruptions of
similar scale in the colony, popular movements and protests have never
stopped. However, a certain cautiousness or wariness regarding class issues has
since colored Hong Kong peoples attitude toward public protests.
The July 1, 2003 mass march against Article 23, the antisubversion legisla-
tion, for example, though attesting to the power of the people, was turned
into a testament of the superiority of Hong Kongs dominant bourgeois
culture. The media reporting of the demonstration made much of the good
behavior and high quality of Hong Kongs citizenry, emphasizing on the
middle-class composition of the demonstrators. The headlines of Ming Pao
Daily, for example, declared: 60% of the July 1 demonstrators have college
education, quoting the results from surveys conducted by the University of
Hong Kong and the Chinese University of Hong Kong of 1127 people at the
demonstration. However, the statistics actually reveal a complicated composi-
tion behind Hong Kongs middle-class-ness. Among the demonstrators,
40.1% held professional or semiprofessional occupations. The rest, 60%, were
made up of 3.3% housewives, 4.1% manual workers, 4.5% laid-off or retired,
9.1% others, 17.5% ofce workers and those employed in the service industry,
and 20.9% students.39 Hong Kong no longer has a viable manufacturing
industry. The working class is no longer the traditional blue collar. It is
possible to see that minus the 20% who were studentsconventionally the
most radicalized group40% of the demonstrators interviewed belonged to
the popular classes. In Hong Kong, as in most of the developed world, college
degrees have been so devalued in recent years that they no longer guarantee
automatic entry to the bourgeoisie. While this focus on the quality of the
people dispelled any notion of class as a premise of social discontent and gave
gravity to the political action by diminishing any association with unruly street
mobs, it also inadvertently signaled the fact that the middle-class dream was
broken. The very middle class that was the ideological backbone of Hong Kong
was now rising up in discontent.
60 Paradigm City

The survey also signicantly points out that while 89.8% of the people came
out to protest against the antisubversion legislation, 91.9% named their cause as
dissatisfaction with the Hong Kong government and its ineffectual economic
policies, which they felt had led to unprecedented unemployment and poverty
levels in the territory. Beyond issues of press freedom, free speech, and human
rights that were perceived to be threatened by the antisubversion legislation, the
main reason for the demonstration was Hong Kongs depressed economy. If the
middle class was unraveling, the basis of Hong Kongs social consensus was at
risk. What this July 1 demonstration also revealed was how social order precar-
iously sustained by the veneer of a common dream is easily ruptured.
The occupation of the street was to demand for a government that is
accountable to the Hong Kong people and not to Beijing. Of course, both
Beijing and the Hong Kong government were quick to point out that the fact
that the people could take to the street was in itself an indication of Hong
Kongs incomparable political freedom. However, this demonstration is not
merely a result of the indulgence of the government. In fact, the government
was totally caught off guard by the unanticipated enormity of the protest.
Despite being in a position of power, the authorities could only watch help-
lessly, pushed to a position of passivity. In this sense there is truth in de
Certeaus argument that it is the randomness and unmappableness of indi-
vidual action that often incapacitates state measures and plans. As this
unprecedented political event showed, it is the sum of such individual actions
and the collective unmappableness of the masses that defeated the orga-
nized and, as such, inexible measures of state machines.
In the aftermath of the July 1 demonstration, the state propaganda machine
worked furiously to repair and bolster the middle-class myth, employing a
language that deliberately invoked bourgeois sentiments. Beijing attempted to
describe the demonstration as a British-American imperialist conspiracy. When
that could not be substantiated, it characterized the demonstration as willful
and intemperate, instigated by those who would threaten Hong Kongs
economic and political stability and destroy the city. This rhetoric aimed
straight at the fears of Hong Kongs middle class. Without doubt Beijing equates
dissent with outright rebellion as is implied in their constant use of the shop-
worn term luan (chaos), which, in Chinese historical narratives, is often used
to refer to peasant uprisings or rebellions and employed by the PRC government
to justify police or even military action against the public, as in the 1989
Tiananmen Massacre. Vilifying civic dissent, Beijing ofcials warned about the
danger of Hong Kong descending into chaos (luan) and accused Hong Kong
 Walking Down Memory Lane 61

people for being spoiled and impulsivetaking to the streets at the slightest
whim. The deputy secretary for the Beijing Liaison Ofce (Zhonglian ban) in
Hong Kong, Cui Zhekai, publicly admonished Hong Kong regarding the impor-
tance of stability to Hong Kongs prosperity, hyperbolically equating the mass
demonstration to the mobs of Chinas Cultural Revolution:

People were protesting in the streets all day, criticizing this person, struggling
against that one. In the end the entire economy was on the verge of collapse.
People suffered unspeakable hardship. The memory of the catastrophe is
unbearable. . . . Our comrade Deng Xiaopings conclusion of the heavy
historical lesson learned in the ten years of Cultural Revolution made a
deep impression. He pointed out that stability was above everything. He
emphasized the importance of the stability and unity of the nation so we
could focus all our energy on economic development. In the last ten years,
the positive and negative experiences of our nation have taught us that we
need to attend to the stability of the Hong Kong society as if we were
protecting our own eyes.40

In the months following the demonstration, Mainland Chinese ofcials

seized every opportunity to reprove the actions of the Hong Kong people as a
parent scolding an obstreperous child. On September 4, 2003, the deputy
director of the Hong Kong Macau Affairs Ofce of the State Department, Xu
Ze, urged the HKSAR government to increase their efforts in education,
believing that the opposition to the antisubversion legislation is a result of the
Hong Kong peoples lack of nationalistic sentiment: The return (huigui) of
hearts has to begin with teaching the people the idea of nationalism.41 Despite
the threat of increased ideological control after July 1, Beijing also granted a
whole series of special economic privileges to Hong Kong under the Closer
Economic Partnership Arrangement (CEPA), Chinas rst free-trade agree-
ment, which aims to boost Hong Kongs agging economy.42 This was followed
by a new, easily obtained visa arrangement, allowing Mainlanders from certain
major cities to visit Hong Kong as individual tourists. This has attracted tens
of thousands of visitors to Hong Kong each day, bringing a major windfall to
the tourist businesses, retailers, and other service sectors in Hong Kong. This
trade-benet package from Beijing, which had been in negotiation for some
time, was solidied in September 2003, two months after the mass demonstra-
tion. These conciliatory gestures and the generous economic aid from Beijing
were obviously aimed at pacifying Hong Kongs bourgeoisie, strengthening the
62 Paradigm City

capitalist ideology, buying back Hong Kong peoples sense of loyalty to China,
and thus stymieing further social dissent.

Breaking the Mold

As we have seen, the prescribed space of the museum fosters a passive recep-
tion of a particular narrative of Hong Kong, which alienates the visitors from
the quotidian. They see aspects of their daily life objectied and fetishized in
the displays. They are informed about their life stories as a historic fait
accompli. In order to break away from this passivity, individuals have to recon-
nect the contemporaneousness between their everyday life and historys
realization; also, to recover the heterogeneous social fabric that marks the
reality of living in Hong Kong.
Writing on how the U.S. First Amendment law often privileges the rights of
specic classes of people while excluding the undesirables in society, Don
Mitchell points out the necessity of continually keeping alive the negotiations
on issues of citizens rights. He argues that it is important, as Raymond
Williams says, for people to go again to Hyde Parkto constantly meet and
speak in public spaces, not only for some particular issue, but also to claim again
and again the right to meet and speak in public.43 The interactions of people
and different classes ultimately break down the social homogeneity carefully
constructed in the ofcial rhetoric. The July 1, 2003, demonstration denitely
disrupts the prevalent social discourse. Subsequent demonstrations of the
various labor unions and interest groups also dispel much of the myth about
the dangers of class differences. Political movements provide a venue for the
intermingling of people, which results in the recovering of speech, commerce,
and interchanges; that is, recovering the activities of the streets. In this way, mass
demonstrations are also one of the many random aspects of the everyday life in
the streets as decided by the people. From the disorder of the crowds comes the
seeds of change, argued Lefebvre, revealing the ssures inherent in any ofcially
constructed discourse, breaking up the constructed status quo.
The state memory of the explosiveness of the 1967 and 1968 riots has had
lasting effects on the institutional behavior of the Hong Kong government in
terms of redening public security legislation, but it also resulted in creating a
more participatory and responsive government. In this regard, 1967 was a
crucial event in the long road of democratizing Hong Kong. The million-
people demonstration in 1989 against Beijings violent suppression of the
Tiananmen Democracy Movement was perhaps tacitly encouraged by the
 Walking Down Memory Lane 63

British colonial government. However, the lessons of mass demonstration

and the experience of the sheer power of collectivity, of physical bodies occu-
pying the major arteries of the central business district and government ofces,
are unforgettable to many. In fact the July 1, 2003, demonstration is constantly
spoken of in connection with the 1989 precedent. In turn, the July 1 demon-
stration was considered a dening moment for the current generation and
would have signicant inuence in the notion of civil rights in the immediate
future. In fact, it created a new civic culture, spawning several mass demon-
strations in the subsequent years. 2003 could not have happened without the
experience of 1989, which in turn could not have happened without previous
activism. A Hong Kong history that includes the diversity of voices from the
different classes and different communities is crucial, because the accumulated
legacies of all the past activism continually fuel resistance whether 1967, 1972,
1989, or 2003.
The contest and negotiation between the state and the people are necessarily
continuous and on going. Each generation has their formative event, each
inheriting from the experience of their predecessors. Public memory is persis-
tent and an important counterbalance to the states historical projects. Just as
the people need to learn the process of political expression through the accu-
mulated experience of the past, the government also needs to be trained by
continuous challenges from the grassroots to understand the value of negoti-
ation and be vigilant to the voices of the people. As a result, a public space,
once forged, cannot easily be repossessed by the state.
The streets around the central Hong Kong government might be monu-
ments to the colonial powers past and present, but time and again their
symbolism is worn away by their actual function. They have become, in recent
years, also a space for political expression, an autonomous space, even if
temporary, where the desire of the people is made visible. The reclamation of
everyday life and its narrative from its repression in public memory is contin-
uous throughout the history of Hong Kong. A real decolonization of Hong
Kong should be accompanied by a decolonization of Hong Kongs narrative.
Events that are relegated to the honoric but purely aesthetic role of historical
nostalgia or nationalist fetish should be released back to the public memory.
Every time there is a massive demonstration, the power of the government
reverses a step backward; whereas the power of the people advances a step
forward. The state and the citizens form a perpetual dialectic, demonstrating
the importance of [going] again to Hyde Park, to exert the citizens full rights
for the streets of their daily lives, again and again.
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 three
Quality Citizens in Public Spaces

Parks, as ofcially designated public spaces, have a fraught history in Hong

Kong as exclusionary spaces, whether symbolizing the racial inequity of high
colonialism in the early twentieth century or bourgeois values in contempo-
rary society. The urban parks today are spaces reserved for play and recreation
that ostensibly contribute to a healthful lifestyle and provide release from the
constraints of work and daily cares. However, lacking public squares or other
large open urban spaces in Hong Kong, large urban parks also often become
venues for social and political gatherings. As public spaces, parks are meant to
be open to everyone, but as they have become more and more a part of Hong
Kongs urban image and are popular tourist destinations, they have also
become more and more spaces of careful government management. As a
result, municipal parks in Hong Kong, scattered around the high-density
areas of the city, are tightly regimented spaces. The numerous interdictions
and rules that one nds posted in these parks make it clear that the availability
of these spaces for the citizens leisure activities is a reection of the states
indulgence; it is a privilege, and not a citizens natural right.
Although Hong Kong has numerous natural reserves and country parks
(which deserve separate analysis), urban municipal parks, limited by space and
located within a highly built-up metropolis, are not the wilds where one
escapes urban life. They are the designated play spaces that reflect careful
attention on rationality and order, whether in the traditional Chinese
Jiangnan style with the requisite gazebos, rock gardens, and fishponds, or
generic playgrounds. This kind of spatial planning embeds a notion of a
particular kind of lifestyle and reects a particular kind of social value. The
users of the space are expected to subscribe to the social standards entailed. In

65
66 Paradigm City

fact, paradoxically, since parks are supposed to be open to everyone, one enters
on contract, only on condition that one recognizes such principles and abides
by the behavioral code.
The everyday life in Hong Kong is often ordered and designed according to
the capitalist ideology, especially the market logic of real estate. The endless
construction, absorption of land by large developers, and neighborhood
renewal projects create a constant experience of estrangement. As the urban
parks are places of childhood play and idyllic leisure activities, they capture
sentiments of collective and neighborhood experiences. Parks become natural
sites of assertion of community longing. Such assertions often focus on the
minutiae of everyday life, and often result in creating a tighter communal
solidarity than existed, even producing community where none existed.
At the same time, as the only obvious open spaces that allow congregation
of large numbers of people, parks also become the natural venues for mass
social and political activities. In this sense, these spaces open up possibilities
for individual and collective creativity as political opposition. Because of the
contradictory nature of such spaces, they have strategic and political potential,
despite their association with activities of leisure.
The parks, as a result, are carefully managed and excessively designed.1
They illustrate what de Certeau would describe as panorama cities. The
space within these parks is rendered completely rational, transparent, and
readable, expressing in full the governing ideology of the Hong Kong SAR
government. However, de Certeaus description of such perfect cities is
precisely to argue against their viability, pointing out that panorama cities
remain only an operational concept. In reality, no matter how regimented or
organized, de Certeau argues, total transparency of urban space is confounded
by the unpredictability of everyday individual itineraries.2 Individual footsteps
are untraceable and unmappable. They slowly transform the space they tread,
as individuals are themselves transformed by the space. In this way, spatial
development is a dialectic between the seemingly static physical conditions
and the dynamic user habitsan idea that resonates through the writings of
Lefebvre as well. The peoples natural usage of space often contradicts the
spaces ideological function. The parks are as such, not just metaphors but
microsites of the negotiations between the citizens use of space and the states
planning. As such, these organized spaces in Hong Kong reproduce and reect
the complex power relationship between the citizens and the government. In
these pseudo public spaces one can see most clearly the process of the creation
 Quality Citizens in Public Spaces 67

of citizenship on the one hand and the peoples assertion of their right to the
city on the other.3

Paradigm City

The Beijing Central Governments promise to Hong Kong after 1997, repeated
like a mantra, stability and prosperity (anding fanrong), becomes not only a
guiding principle of the social and economic policy of the HKSAR govern-
ment; it is also Beijings ideological leash on the Hong Kong society. In other
words, this capitalist pursuit is both a compulsion within the Hong Kong bour-
geoisie as well as the strategy of the state to gain support and allegiance of the
Hong Kong people. Both are concerned with the maintenance of an orderly
and disciplined society.
On the necessity of social control in public space, Robert C. Ellicksons
argument is convincing. He points out that public spaces as open-access land
are important for the fulllment of democratic ideals: For a romantic, the
ideal is to have some spaces that replicate the Hellenic agora or the Roman
Forum. A liberal society that aspires to ensure equality of opportunity and
universal political participation must presumptively entitle every individuals
[sic], even the humblest, to enter all transportation corridors and open-access
public spaces.4 Furthermore, it is not enough that individuals have access but
that everyone should feel comfortable within them, which necessitates certain
rules of behavior to prevent abuse of these spaces. The originally informal
norms of public etiquette become slowly codied into regulations. Ellickson
explains that these rules are not unlike the use of Roberts Rules of Order in
meetings to help guarantee equal right to expression. While it is true that
rules and codes of behavior protect equal access, what Ellickson does not
consider in his argument is how they are often based on norms of public
etiquettes that are in turn, class dened. In Hong Kong, especially, rules of
behavior are often informed by the values of exclusivity of the dominant bour-
geoisie.
On approach to any urban park in Hong Kong, one is confronted by a ubiq-
uitous list of rules. One enters the park with the understanding of the
protocols of use of this space. Ones behavior within such spaces of leisure is
thereby conditioned by a dened idea of correctness and propriety. Although
built on the premise of providing physical and mental respite, for the leisure
and health of the citizens, urban parks are places with many rules that restrain
and deny many of the needs and expressions of the physical body.
68 Paradigm City

Lefebvre has argued that leisure is a device of capitalist control over the
working masses, as leisure activities are turned into an industry that serves the
purposes of capitalism.5 Extending from this argument, it is only logical that
the spaces for such activities must also be ordered according to an idea of
proper use that would promote capitalist growth. Hong Kongs park space is
organized according to the aesthetic of capitalism and of the bourgeoisie. By
entering the parks and abiding by the behavioral expectations within this
space, one acquires a status of belonging, or enters into a kind of citizenship
dened purely by social propriety rather than collective memory, action, or
even historical community. This behavioral consensus in turn becomes the
basis of exclusion of those who do not t in. Examining this kind of seemingly
innocuous behavioral management in public spaces in U.S. cities, Don
Mitchell argues that it actually has extremely oppressive and discriminatory
social implications. He points out that these laws of consent are in actuality
an annihilation of space by law. These laws are implemented to take away
specic kinds of individual rights in spaces that are deemed public.6 They priv-
ilege the habits and usages of the propertied class and target the
nonpropertied, especially the homeless, with the aim of limiting their access to
public space. To those whose primary civil rightsthat is, the right to
privacyis unavailable to them (privacy to carry out personal functions such
as bathing, urinating, defecating, even eating and resting), forbidding such
activities in public spaces is tantamount to depriving them of their basic
humanity.7 Thus, Mitchell argues, these nuisance laws that impose a certain
standard of behavior that are seemingly reasonable and benign actually delib-
erately criminalize poverty and homelessness. Since desirability is class
based, citizenship is, in short, a class criterion. These laws result in the revoca-
tion of citizenship of the undesirable members of society. Though lacking
the racial factor that underlies this kind of social control in the United States,
Hong Kongs capitalist logic is equally effective in controlling individual
expressions in public space. This is, in fact, a form of privatization of public
space.
Privatization of space is an unstoppable reality in Hong Kong. Shopping
malls have become de facto public spaces.8 Natural street life has been
routinely coerced into the sanitized and organized pathways inside malls and
arcades, turning spaces otherwise open to all into places of exclusive citizen-
ship. (I describe this in further detail in chapter 4.) Such privatization of
space ultimately reduces the venues for democratic expressions and political
activities of the people, as Ellickson argues.
 Quality Citizens in Public Spaces 69

If parks and other similar public recreational spaces are idealized as places
of leisure and freedom, where one is unshackled from quotidian responsibili-
ties and mundane rules of behavior one might argue that Hong Kongs major
urban parks reect a particular kind of utopian ideal. However, utopia is, iron-
ically, where not only daily strife would end but politics would also
ceaseforeclosedas Fredric Jameson points out.9

The Victoria Park

The Victoria Park, a typical municipal park, occupies an important page in

the colonys political history. A bronze statue at the entrance of the eponymous
queen at once commemorates the British Empire at the height of its power and
the British governments self-representation of enlightened paternalism in its
rule over the colony. It is therefore not without irony that Victoria Park has
become a major site of political activities in Hong Kong where most large-scale
political protests and demonstrations take place. Its political role as a symbol
of civil society is equal to, if not more important than its intended function as
a leisure spot for the people.
The most violent protests and repressions took place there during the
summers of 1967 and 1968. (See chapter 2.) Even today, all the major demon-
strations and political marches in Hong Kong take place in or commence
from Victoria Park.10 The annual June 4 commemoration for the failed democ-
racy movement and the subsequent massacre in China in 1989 takes place
there, for example. The ve-hundred-thousand-people-march on July 1, 2003,
to protest the legislation of the antisubversion law (Article 23), of course, also
commenced from Victoria Park. Extending its image as Hong Kongs Hyde
Park, the publicly funded RTHK (Radio Television Hong Kong) sponsors a
weekly political forum there where councilors, politicians, government of-
cials, social representatives, and the public hold debates over policy issues.
These meetings on Sunday mornings are often attended by, among others, a
group of highly opinionated and vociferous elderly supporters of the Chinese
Communist Party who have been exasperatingly referred to as the wai-yun
ah-bahk (the geezers of Victoria Park). The proceedings are televised simul-
taneously to audiences at home and rebroadcast in various radio and television
stations, as well as over the Internet. The intent of such a program needs little
elaboration. A government sympathizer might consider it a way for the policy
makers to communicate with the people. A cynic might consider it a safety
valve to channel possible discontent or, perhaps, a mere government public
70 Paradigm City

relations ploy. More likely, it is a combination of all of these. Regardless of the

purpose and effect of such a gesture, the status of Victoria Park, acknowl-
edged by both the government and the population as a symbol of Hong Kongs
culture of free speech (hard won by the 1960s and 1970s protesters) and a site
of civic activism, is irreplaceable (g. 3.1. Protesters gathering in Victoria Park).
Being such a civic symbol, it is perhaps not surprising that Victoria Park also
receives the most focused attention from the Department of Leisure and
Cultural Services, the ofcial body that oversees the parks and other leisure
facilities and programs. Every year, the park is the site of different major festiv-
ities sponsored or organized by a variety of government agencies, from arts
and crafts fairs, outdoor concerts, and international sports championships to
festival carnivals and holiday celebrations.
After riots and civil unrest rocked Hong Kong in the Storms of May, in
1967 and 1968, led mostly by young union workers and university students, the
British Hong Kong government began promoting a series of festivities and

Fig. 3.1: Protestors gathering in Victoria Park

The July 1, 2004 demonstration to demand for the resignation of the then Hong
Kong CE, Tung Chee Hwa and for universal suffrage gathered at the Victoria Park.
The banner reads, Love Hong Kong; Love Democracy.
 Quality Citizens in Public Spaces 71

leisure programs to divert the peoples attention from political issues, to direct
the perceived destructive youthful energy, and to court loyalty from the people.
Massive public dance parties, parades, and fireworks were the standard
programs of the annual Hong Kong Festivals in the 1970s.11 Victoria Park, a site
of serious confrontations between protestors and government forces was
turned into a major venue for the celebrations in an attempt to change the
image of the park. It is true that throughout the late 1970s and all through the
1980s and 1990s (with the exception of 1989 and subsequent June 4 commem-
orations, which are not against the colonial government), major political
activities in the park were few and far between. However, all through the park
are signs of the governments attempt to contain the users historical memory
of this space. As one enters from the front entrance of the park, one is imme-
diately confronted by a litany of park rules printed on two separate boards,
listing twelve different items in pictorial symbols and in writing. Every park
in Hong Kong has similar rules for individual conduct. However, no other
parks list is quite as extensive. These include universal interdictions of unruly
behavior, such as, No Spitting, and No Loud Radio Playing. But some
reflect real micromanagement and behavior control, such as No Picking
Flowers, No Lying on Benches, and No Playing of Remote Control Cars
(g. 3.2. Victoria Park Rules).
In view of a massive relandscaping of the park undertaken by the new
HKSAR government in the new millennium, these park rules seem especially
indicative of the governments intent to transform and defuse this space. The
newly overhauled park is beautifully organized, reecting a new denition of
use: physical activities for the sake of physical health. The landscaping reveals a
careful consideration of local health practices and caters to the exercise needs of
all ages. There is a pebble path and exercise area for senior citizens, surrounded
by a carefully cultivated and well-manicured garden. As a form of reexology,
walking on these paths paved with pebbles to simulate a dry riverbed is a health
trend among the elderly in Hong Kong. For the more youthful and rigorous,
there is a jogging trail that winds along the perimeter of the park, complete with
outdoor equipment for interval training, such as parallel bars, sit-up benches,
balance beams, and even step machines. For children, there are the usual play-
ground facilities like swings and slides. There is a large, neatly bordered lawn for
those who wish to sit or picnic on the grass, but each specic sport has its
assigned area. The soccer elds, basketball and tennis courts, and swimming
pools are at different designated areas. The ramblers are guided around the park
through the many manicured gardens along paved paths. There is also a pond
72 Paradigm City

Fig. 3.2: Victoria Park Rules

Read before you enter the Victoria Park.

built specically for electric model boats. These installations and equipments
keep the visitors constantly occupied and constantly directed along in the park,
which is immaculately maintained by a large team of gardeners and park
managers and security patrol.

The Hong Kong Park

Perhaps no other park articulates more accurately Hong Kongs capitalist

agenda and governing principals than the Hong Kong Park that opened in 1991,
when Hong Kongs economic boom was at its zenith. Converted from a British
military compound in the exclusive Mid-Levels on Hong Kong Island, it is
another carefully landscaped, organized, and cultivated oasis in the middle of
the concrete jungle. The devotion of a large tract of public land of prime real
estate value in Hong Kongs busiest central business district and central
government to public leisure seems to be an act of immense generosity by the
British Hong Kong government. The Hong Kong Park certainly provides an
important breathing space for the people working in the area. As a kind of
urban wonder, it has also become a ubiquitous tourist site. From its history as
 Quality Citizens in Public Spaces 73

a British military compound to its present existence as a municipal park with

the most symbolic of its architecture still extantthe Flagstaff House, the
former residence of the British military commander, which has now been
turned into the Museum of Tea Warethe park retains the aura of the state,
albeit one that is benign and full of good will (g. 3.3. Hong Kong Park).
The Hong Kong Park, built in the middle of Hong Kongs busy nancial
district, is encircled and brimmed by the most spectacular of Hong Kongs
capitalist landmarks. I.M. Peis Bank of China Tower, Sir Norman Fosters
Hong Kong Shanghai Bank, and the Lippo Centre, among others, loom over its
horizon. The park itself sits atop a hill accessible by a long escalator ride
inside the Pacic Place Shopping Centre that houses high-end retail stores
and designer boutiques. On the other side of the escalator is a government
office complex, linked to the shopping center by a pedestrian bridge. This
metaphoric coincidence is too suggestive to ignore. The Hong Kong Park as a
microcosmic capitalist utopia is supported from the foothills by the twin
pillars of power in Hong Kongglobal consumption and state administrative
headquarters. In the space of the park, the associations of leisure with the

Fig. 3.3: Hong Kong Park

Hong Kong Park, ringed by tall buildings of the Central Business District.
74 Paradigm City

market economy and state ideology become seamless (fig. 3.4 Escalator to
Hong Kong Park; fig. 3.5 Escalator to Hong Kong Park through shopping
mall; g. 3.6 The Lippo Centre looms over the Hong Kong Park.)
The park is beautifully appointed and landscaped with many of the classical
Chinese garden motifs, such as an articial lake where carp and other orna-
mental shes are kept, the requisite water fountain, a huge aviary, a tai-chi
corridor, childrens playground, and so forth. There are many photogenic
corners specially marked for photographers. Through such careful, even
considerate planning, the Hong Kong Park is a very pleasant place of respite
in the midst of the oppressive pace of both human and vehicular trafc in
that area. In general, this is a park packed full of charm that particularly
appeals to the idea of leisure as a genteel past-time of tempered activities,
such as admiring owers and birds and rambling through gardens and ponds.
The different attractive destinations located at fair intervals from each other
encourage promenading. However, while there are plenty of benches for sitting
and resting, the rough and tumble activities of play and ballgames are not

Fig. 3.4: Escalator

to Hong Kong Park
The Hong Kong Park sits
atop a shopping mall
and a government ofce
building. It is accessed
by a long escalator from
the mall.
 Quality Citizens in Public Spaces 75

Fig. 3.5: Escalator to Hong Kong Park through shopping mall

Escalator to the Hong Kong Park (bottom left)through the high-end shopping
mall, Pacic Place. The walkway in the background leads to the Admiralty govern-
ment ofce complex.

Fig. 3.6: The Lippo Centre looms over Hong Kong Park
Symbols of powerThe Lippo Centre looms over the Tea Ware museum, the old
British military commander residence inside Hong Kong Park.
76 Paradigm City

accommodated. There are not even lawns for picnics or sunbathing. In other
words, this is a space devoted to aesthetic experiences that are divorced from all
physical assertions and noises and unpleasant manners of the masses (of
course, spitting, hawking, and blasting of radios are seriously prohibited). This
park, as the local designer and commentator, Mathias Woo, pointed out, is
another of Hong Kongs excessively designed spaces:

It ironically erases the avor of a park. It is like an amusement park with

pavements and buildings everywhere. There is not much greenery; but the
Tea Ware Museum in the park is much more low key, though it is a high-
prole kind of low key.12

In a study of the Tak Wah Park in Tsuen Wan, a working-class district,

Kwok Yan-Chi Jackie and Ng Chit-Hang point out similar inappropriateness
in the design. Like many Chinese-style parks all over the urban areas in Hong
Kong, the Tak Wah Park is built according to the utopian principles of the
classical Jiangnan-style gardens. The Jiangnan style, mostly applied to private
garden designs, embodies a philosophical principle of great harmony
between humans and nature, and between the opposing forces of the
universe, articulating the dominant ideals as well as the taste and lifestyle of
the political and economic elites in dynastic China up to the early twentieth
century.13 Kwok and Ng question the suitability of this kind of park archi-
tecture and topography for the late twentieth-century urban Hong Kong.
Along the lines of Lefebvres argument of leisure as a capitalist tool of control
of the laboring class, they question the intention behind the development
of this particular recreational space intended for gentlemanly pursuits for
the grassroots population in the working-class neighborhood of Tsuen Wan.
It would seem that more than merely a leisure space, the design of the park
reveals a state regime of management (g. 3.7. Tai Ping St. Park):

The Hong Kong government, having the ambition to create the identity of
Hong Kong, continues to build theme parks for the citizens of Hong Kong.
Such projects show the intention to inscribe diverse daily activities of people
into the frame of an articial expression of space and to turn the park into a
stage. The users, once entered onto the stage, are expected to perform
certain acts indicatedly [sic] the spatial background. But it is always in vain,
unless there is a system of surveillance available to guide the acts of the
users or guard against unwanted behavior.14
 Quality Citizens in Public Spaces 77

Like Tak Wah Park, there is no doubt the Hong Kong Park and Victoria Park
provide reprieve amid the citys high-powered work environment. However,
they are more like theme parks in their designs, with designated activities in
different areas in a very restricted sense of what recreation means and how
each physical activity should be carried out. Even with the articially created
free speech corner of the Victoria Park, this kind of park design only alters
a place into a supercial scene.15
Urban parks in Hong Kong reflect the agenda and anxiety of both the
British colonial government and the new HKSAR government. The ideal of the
designs and landscaping of these municipal parks is not to return to the
untrammeled natural world in which one recovers from the spiritual contam-
ination of urban life, as the ideal of English gardens, but an afrmation of the
triumph of urbanism and social order over human inclination toward chaos
and unruliness. It also provides a well-maintained topography of containment
and socialization for the citizens. In other words, these city parks reect order
and cleanliness as the ofcial aesthetic of the city of Hong Kong.

Fig. 3.7: Tai Ping Street Park

A small park in the working class neighborhood of Sheungwan designed in the
traditional Jiangnan style.
78 Paradigm City

More so than regular streets as routes of daily movement and transit,

public recreational spaces in Hong Kong are in many ways paradigmatic
spaces conceptualized according to particular notions of order and prosperity
that are measured according to the volume of international business in the
city. In truth, the authorities are not imposing any unreasonable constraints
on the individual. The landscaping and planning reect careful considera-
tion of the park as a heterogeneous space of varied activities for different age
groups. However, this regulation of the use of space and individual behavior
curtails other extraordinary or creative uses of these spaces. The enjoyment
of parks for the relief of the cares of the everyday is a social right that, iron-
ically, predicates on restrictions of personal behavior, whether movement
or speech. As Mitchell argues, this kind of urban public space planned
according to the dictates of comfort and order rather than those of political
struggle, contains only the signs of public and social contact and not actual
social exchange.16 Democratic rights in such spaces are no more than an illu-
sion. This exchange of civil rights for social privileges as the condition for
prosperity and stability is familiar to most Hong Kong residents in its history
of nondemocratic governments, rst the British and now the Chinese.

Social Order and Quality of Citizens

The lawfulness and cleanliness of the city are the two primary indicators of the
quality of the citizens of the city. It is no wonder that a social uproar ensued
after New Years Eve in 2002 when New Years revelers trashed the Kowloon
waterfront promenade along the Victoria Harbour, another popular recre-
ational public space. The waterfront promenade is a ubiquitous tourist
destination and the very symbol of Hong Kongs international status with a
view dominated by a skyline formed by the silhouettes of Hong Kongs blue-
chip architecture: the I.M. Pei Bank of China Tower, Norman Foster HSBC
headquarters, the Cheung Kong Centre, and so forth. After a night of youthful
New Years orgy, the promenade was buried in garbage and monuments were
defaced by grafti. This was just a week after Christmas Eve when another
such unruly celebration also left an unsightly mess (g. 3.8 Victoria Harbour
Promenade).
The news media created much sensation about the riotousness of the party
crowds, provoking great concern from government ofcials and citizens alike.
Academic experts and psychologists were invited on television shows to
expound on the youth problem in Hong Kong.17 The cleaning staff on site
 Quality Citizens in Public Spaces 79

was interviewed about the mess that confronted them and commentators
gave vent, on their behalf, to the immensity of their task and the long hours
they had to labor to put the place back in order. There was a chorus of social
lament on how all this was symptomatic of the declining civility in Hong Kong,
of the eroding sense of civic responsibility, and the disappearing sentiment of
community. The wife of the then HKSAR chief executive, Tung Chee Hwa,
appeared on television, leading a group of volunteers to pick up garbage on the
promenade. When interviewed, Mrs. Tung remonstrated with great vehe-
mence, Hong Kong cannot go down the drain! Hong Kong cannot go down
the drain!
Mrs. Tungs outburst might be puzzling to any foreign observer. A television
reporter interviewing a European tourist asked what she thought of the huge
mess left from the New Years Eve celebration. The bemused tourist, clearly not
understanding the point of the question, answered that it was usually much
worse in Paris and New York. Though opaque to the outside observer, the equa-
tion of disorderliness and lthiness with Hong Kongs economic going down
the drain is, however, apparent to its residents. Mrs. Tungs demonstration of

Fig. 3.8: Victoria Harbour Promenade

Victoria Harbour Promenade from the Kowloon side, looking out at the blue chip
architecturethe symbols of global capitalism.
80 Paradigm City

civic uprightness, picking up garbage in the waterfront park, and the tremen-
dous social concern from all parties over these events, illustrate how deeply
economic ideology is infused into the social consciousness in the city.
Perhaps it is true that the New Years orgy and the trashing of the Cultural
Centre and the waterfront promenade were effects of Hong Kongs depressed
economy and the resultant disenfranchising of many young people. If the
behavior was a public demonstration of frustration and discontent, it was at
best a symbolic opposition rather than real political action. However, it
provoked a disproportionately vehement response from society at large. The
ideology of discipline and orderliness is so entrenched within the cognitive and
affective sense of identity among Hong Kongs citizens that any threat to it, no
matter what the cause, would provoke a social clamor to suppress it. The
waterfront is certainly an iconic symbol of the city of Hong Kong, dominated
by the impressive skyline of international capital. The collective sense of
ownership toward this piece of real estate is so erce in Hong Kongs bourgeois
society that the unruliness of the young people was seen as an attempt to storm
the citadel of capitalism. The anxious response from the authorities toward the
New Years party gives us a hint of how such a seemingly random and playful
event can provoke a sense of crisis in governance. This kind of ludic even if
spontaneous gathering exposes the intolerance of state regimes, which, as in
the case of the parks, presents itself in benign form, as indulgent, protective, or
nurturing. (g. 3.9. Rules of Conduct; g. 3.10. More Rules).
Cleanliness, order, and civility are crucial to Hong Kongs operation and
economic survival, as well as its international image. The behavioral aptitude
and compliance of the people become a measure of the economic performance
of Hong Kong and vice versa. Thus, from Beijings standpoint, Hong Kongs
economic troubles since the 1997 Return must also be an implicit indication
of Hong Kong peoples insubordination, which justied a stronger hand of the
state in disciplining the city. This progression of logic was ominously realized
in the attempt of the HKSAR government to legislate the antisubversion law
(Article 23) in 2003 and Beijings summary rejection of Hong Kong peoples
demand for universal suffrage for the 2007 and 2008 election of the CE and
members of the policy-making body, the Legislative Council.

Other Users

The major users of Hong Kongs urban public spaces on the weekends, espe-
cially Sundays, are the South East Asian household workers and manual
laborers, primarily Filipinas who numbered over 200,000 in 2002, working in
Fig. 3.9: Rules of Conduct
Preparing for New Years Eve Party, banners are hung around the Victoria Harbour
Promenade to remind one not to deface the public space.

Fig. 3.10: More Rules

Also at the Victoria Harbour Promenade before New Years Eve.
82 Paradigm City

1.4 million households.18 Legally entitled to a day off every Sunday, these
foreign workers in Hong Kong go in large groups to the urban parks and
other public spaces where they attend organized outdoor religious services,
prayer meetings, picnics, parties, and performances. These can be small groups
of close friends or large gatherings of village associations. To cater to the large
numbers of such weekend gatherings, many different forms of businesses,
formal and informal, have sprung up, selling home-cooked food, beauty
potions, and used clothing, and offering personal services like letter writing
and grooming.19 These activities turn the normally sterile spaces into lively
bazaars and street parties.
The oldest and most symbolic of these Sunday gatherings is the one located
in Statue Square Garden, a small park outside of the administrative headquar-
ters of the HKSAR government. Spreading out newspapers, collapsed
cardboard boxes or plastic sheets, and wares for sale, the Filipino community
completely takes over the garden. Year after year, as the numbers grow, they
expand to the nearby thoroughfares, occupying the exits and entrances of
pedestrian subways and yovers, squatting under building awnings and shel-
tered walkways. The government eventually closed down some of the streets to
traffic on Sundays. This is Hong Kongs Central Business District (CBD),
which during the week is the epicenter of nance and politics, surrounded
not only by the law courts but the symbols of high colonial culture and nan-
cial authority, from the Mandarin Hotel to the monumental bank buildings.
The Sunday subaltern gatherings use the space left over from the weekday
legitimate activities of money and power. Not only do the Filipinas ignore all
interdictions against loitering, sitting on streets, and blasting of radios in
public spaces, but also blatantly disregard all rules of public behavior.20
Private or even intimate acts are performed on the streets, bringing other-
wise personal activities such as grooming, trying on clothes, or physical
intimacy to public sight. In fact the passerby often gets a distinct feeling of tres-
passing a private function while walking through these areas. The pedestrians
unease arises from witnessing activities that one should not be seeing, even
though it should be the performers discomfort to reveal publicly such private
acts. In these situations, it is very unclear who the outsiders of this society
is. This reversal of spatial and public power is a result of asserting private and
everyday functions in the space of economic and political authority. If, as
Judith Butler has argued before, there is subversion within the performativity
of ones deliberate, if banal, acts of daily life, one can see how these intimate
gestures of the users of space render the powers of governance irrelevant.21
 Quality Citizens in Public Spaces 83

These everyday performances in public space, at least in this case, are

symbolic assertions of citizenship, or some kind of participation in society. We
recall Mitchells argument that when laws prohibit private activities in public
space, such as urinating, sleeping, or bathing, it really is to criminalize the right
to be human of a segment of the cities residentsthe homeless.22 The inter-
diction against their daily essential functions in public effectively forecloses
their right to exist. In truth, Etienne Balibar points out that human rights are
only guaranteed for those who already enjoy the rights of citizenship, of being
legally recognized as a participant within the polity in which they live.23
Participatoriness is key here. Though legal in their status as workers in
Hong Kong, the Filipinas have very few rights. Their only protection against
abuse and exploitation by employers is through the lobby of certain NGOs that
work on their behalf, such as the Bicol Migrant Workers Hong Kong, the
Mission of Filipino Migrant Workers (HK) Society, and the Philippines
Alliance. Despite their large numbers, they are often seen and not heard in
Hong Kong society, or if they are heard about, it is often through unattering
news reports as legal offenders, stealing from their employers, abusing their
children, or as victims of atrocious mistreatment by employers.
Seen in this context, the activities in the Sunday gatherings are politically
signicant. Gathered together in great numbers, they can easily be organized
or can easily organize themselves into political interest groups. These groups
have in the past, lobbied successfully for legislation of fair labor laws to protect
their rights. They have formed watchdog groups to provide protection and
legal support for those involved in lawsuits with their employers. Together, in
their sheer number, they annul the nuisance laws, easily taking over signi-
cant public space in Hong Kong. Engaging in otherwise intimate activities,
they assert their claim of the place through privatizing it. It is in this way that
the urban parks and public squares have been effectively turned into true
public space where a true civil society can develop.
The monuments and statues around the area display the authority of the
government as well as the power of international capital. They also embody
the states bourgeois ideology and the lifestyle it promotes, which is the
primary reason the Filipino women are in Hong Kong in the rst place. The
mass gatherings of the migrant workers, however, are a temporary if joyous
refutation of their position of social subjugation in Hong Kong society. In
this way, once a week at least, the seat of the HKSAR government is given over
to the citys subalterns. Here, one sees the emergence of a social space through
need, use, and relationships. These congregations demonstrate Lefebvres
84 Paradigm City

understanding of the transformation of space through the biological (literally

bodies in space) of how space is used and molded by the physical presence of
people in their daily lives.24
Although, this kind of fting cannot be qualied as a political movement, a
community that had been marginalized now gains visibility and is able to
assert their belonging in a society in which they are crucial in facilitating the
bourgeois dream of many. Their spontaneous activities were initially regarded
as nuisances by local residents who found their presence and behavior at odds
with the local sensibilities of order and tidiness. However, out of resignation,
Hong Kong people relent these spaces to them. What this demonstrates is not
only that political action should be tightly associated with quotidian use, but
also, the accumulated efforts of individuals as communities produce a trans-
formative effect. A public square or park, rather than being just a supercial
and symbolic space as a result of urban planning, is redeemed and becomes a
truly public space. This is a political act.

Reclaiming the City

The same way that the Filipino community turns the most symbolically
oppressive space into a place of belonging, particular congurations of rela-
tionships and eccentric usages of space make a place home. Home is
determined by how citizens think about their city in connection with the
needs and demands of their minds and bodies. The homely place is, as such, a
result of social production and democratic invention. Reclamation of space
from state manipulation is performed through the everyday functions and
relationshipsthat is, in Lefebvres vocabulary, from symbolic to actual use.
The struggle for the right of space in the city of Hong Kong takes place on
many different levels, from the formal and always overheated real estate market
to people jostling against each other on busy streets, to nding a square foot
of standing room on rush-hour trains. However, claiming the city as a citizen
is not just about having ownership of a specic piece of real estate, though that
is important, but a sense of collective belonging and feeling of home toward a
place. In the fast morphing cityscape of Hong Kong and in the unwavering
drive toward capitalist development and consumerism, this notion of collec-
tive space is hard to identify even if it is already inadvertently experienced in
the everyday life of the citizens.
It is de Certeaus argument that individuals everyday itineraries poeticize
the spaces of their activities. However, immersed in their everyday lives, people
 Quality Citizens in Public Spaces 85

are not always conscious of their imprint in space. A curatorial project by the
artist Anothermountainman (Stanley Wong) is an attempt, not so much to
produce public space but to refabricate the extant social and cultural marks
to produce consciousness of such spatial belonging. One of Wongs more well-
known artistic endeavors over the past ten years is his photographs of the use
of the durable, all-purpose, made-in-Hong Kong, red-white-blue polyeth-
ylene material around the city, in construction sites, as store canopies, made
into carrying bags, and so forth.25 So commonly seen all over the city, this
material has become iconic in Hong Kong. Almost everyone who has lived in
the city in the 1970s and 1980s, even to the 1990s, will remember the huge bags
of provisions and appliances Hong Kong people hauled on the KCR (Kowloon-
Canton Railway) to bring to their relatives in China. It has an inerasable
association for most Hong Kong people of hometown in China and of the
hardscrabble at the time. However, because of the durability and strength of
the material, it is also a metaphor for endurance and triumph over hardship.
This, according to Stanley Wong, is the signature material of Hong Kong
because it represents the core value and the spirit of Hong Kong.26
The formal induction of Wongs work into official venues such as the
Hong Kong Heritage Museum, or as an ofcial entry of the Fifty-rst Inter-
national Art Exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 2005 obviously has much
to do with the fact that Wongs artistic values coincide with the official
ideology of Hong Kong. However, he has been taking photographs of
random street scenes, capturing the sightings of redwhiteblue since 1993,
when the Hong Kong society was undergoing a particular social crisis. In the
aftermath of the Tiananmen Massacre of 1989, many in Hong Kong lost their
confidence in Mainland China, which resulted in a huge emigration tide.
When Wong set out to capture the core value of Hong Kong, to dene the
idea of home, it was because the notion of home was in crisis. It is more
than a coincidence that his work was considered of particular representa-
tional value in the new millennium. In the 2004 Hong Kong Heritage
Museum exhibition, his function was as both an artist and a curator, commis-
sioning, collecting, and compiling the works of a large group of artists and
designers (both commercial and ne artists) who were asked to work under
this theme of redwhiteblue. Many of these artists, most notably Alan Chan,
are renowned for their commercial and commodity designs. The crossover
between fine arts and commercial arts in this project is intentional and
obvious. Alan Chans Louis-Vuitton-esque shoulder bag made with the
redwhiteblue material pokes fun at the brand name and logo obsession in
86 Paradigm City

Hong Kongs consumer culture, while asserting the competitive value of local
creation vis--vis imported luxury goods.
Crossover has become a major theme in Hong Kong arts and design in
recent years. Wongs project, which he began in 1993, to capture the
redwhiteblue throughout the city in its various functions, is an obvious
example of this crossing over. In Wongs gaze, a local object of everyday func-
tionality transcends its banality and lowly status to become an icon. The
commonness and availability of this icon to everyone in the city, in their
homes and in their daily pursuits and activities is signicant. The use of the
material in Wongs work turns masses of strangers into a community through
their recognition of a singular emblem. Through recognition, identication,
and the feelings of afliation evoked by the redwhiteblue, stories of collec-
tive past are recalled. The artist simply records, accumulates, and edits these
imaginaries into a common narrative of Hong Kong in his photographs. In
fact, this is what he attempted to accomplish in the rewhiteblue exhibition
at the Heritage Museum. Aside from commissioning works from Hong
Kongs top designers and artists, Wong also solicited works from school chil-
dren, asking them to use the same material to design images that represent
their version of Hong Kong.
Because redwhiteblue is an almost unavoidable sight in Hong Kong,
Wongs work not only results in a heightened sensitivity among the citizens
of the signs in their environment, but also makes them interpreters of their
environment and not just passive spectators. This process of seeing, recog-
nition, and interpretation turns the spectacles of the city into a meaningful
discourse of collective experience and history. This recognition of spatial
meaning transforms an otherwise impersonal cityscape into a public sphere
of collective identication and mutual understanding. These redwhiteblue
paraphernalia in the city therefore insert the mark of community in the
seeming relentless capitalist development and commercialism.
Whether it is Stanley Wongs works or the deant usages by the Filipino
community, they point the way to how a space dominated by abstract forces
of power can be reclaimed by actual, productive, social relationships and
community activities. Within public spaces is embedded an idealistic possi-
bility of an egalitarian and democratic society. However, this utopia needs to
be reenvisioned, not as an end of politics, as in Jamesons critique of utopian
ideals, but as an agora, in Ellicksons explanation, where the basis of society is
uid, allowing continuous change and evolution through democratic discus-
sions and uses of the people.
 Quality Citizens in Public Spaces 87

Ideology does not produce social space, despite the states propensity to
preach. On the contrary, it is the productive relationships within social space
that produce ideology. Here is the crux on which many in Hong Kong rest their
hope in their political participationthat Hong Kong is to be dened by the
users or inhabitants and their relationship with each other in their different
uses of the space and not through legislation by the state of what can or cannot
be articulated, or what can or cannot be done. As Lefebvre points out, The
transformation of society presupposes a collective ownership and manage-
ment of space founded on the permanent participation of the interested
parties, with their multiple, varied and even contradictory interests.27 The
only possible way of altering the operation of the centralized state is to recog-
nize the pluralism in society.28

Conclusion

Despite the excitement over the success of the people power demonstrated by
the July 1, 2003, march (as mentioned in the previous chapter), what was most
highlighted about this event in the local media was the impressive orderliness
of the crowd. Critics and experts were eager to comment on how this reected
the superior quality of the citizens of Hong Kong. The media made a point of
interviewing the US and UK ambassadors in Hong Kong about the incident for
assurance that the citys international image was not tarnished by this outpour
of mass sentiment.29 A local newspaper columnist sarcastically commented
that these annual peaceful and orderly demonstrations in Hong Kong, which
everyone is so proud of, could be turned into another spectacle for tourists or
another selling point by the government about Hong Kong.30
On December 26, 2003, one year after a particularly rowdy Christmas
carnival that resulted in the defacing of the Tsimshatsui waterfront promenade,
Ming Pao Daily reported that compared to the 13 kilotons of garbage collected
on the same site a year ago, there were only 2.4 kilotons, an 80% reduction. The
walls and trees and public sculptures were intact and clean. An eighty-year-old
morning exerciser interviewed claimed that it was the cleanest Christmas
celebration he had seen in ten years. A cleaning staff also commented that
while it took him half a day to clean up the mess the previous year, it only
took three hours this time. A Legislative Council member analyzed that after
the July 1 demonstration and the November district council election in 2003
(which saw an unprecedented voter participation, resulting in the unseating
of a large number of pro-Mainland councilors in the Legislative Council) most
88 Paradigm City

young people had developed a stronger sense of responsibility toward society

and, naturally, no longer engaged in destructive behavior.31
How should one assess this new behavior of the youths? Have they been
successfully acculturated or did the participatory politics in the past year turn
a capitalist space into a real public space that affords a sense of collective
ownership and inspires responsible behavior?
An upshot of the huge ado about the 2002 Christmas and New Years orgy,
was that the media had been assiduous in its reporting of the tonnage of
garbage and the condition of the public spaces after each major holiday, not
just at the waterfront promenade but other major sites of celebration,
including the Victoria Park. The populations tidiness and civility (or the lack
thereof), have become an unspoken and unofcial measure of social perfor-
mance. These reports have become a way Hong Kong society monitors itself
and strives at self-restraint, indicating the internalization of the social ideology.
It can clearly be seen from such media intervention in Hong Kongs spatial
usage how the contest of space is very much a discursive contest: Who owns
the dominant discourse about this space? How does this discourse become
a part of the everyday ideology of the city? The answers to these questions
depend on ones political stance, illustrating how perceptions of space are
as much about the physicality of it as about ones social position and relation-
ship to it. It is as such that cultural and intellectual interventions like Stanley
Wongs are as important as mass demonstrations, from the Filipino domestic
workers recreation to the general Hong Kong public refusing a particular
repugnant legislation. These challenges to the ofcial zoning and organiza-
tion of space might be deliberate, subconscious, or passive. However, their
combined effect proves that the collective body and the biological and phys-
ical usages of bodies in space arbitrate the most intentional state planning
and manipulation of space.
 four
The World Emporium and the Mall City

Consumerism represents a particularly facile aspect of urban culture that

supposedly lacks depth and seriousness. However, consumerism in Hong Kong
is deeply associated with its international image and self-identity, through
which people in Hong Kong dene a common historical experience.1 Even
without the states promotion, every Hong Kong citizen understands the
importance of consumption to the identity of the city, indeed, the survival of
Hong Kong as a polity. Hong Kongs historical role was as an entr-pt and a
free port that facilitated the movement of goods between China and the rest
of the noncommunist world in the 1950s and 1960s. Since the 1980s, Hong
Kong also operates one of the worlds largest container cargo terminals and
logistics and processing center.2 The resultant accumulation, circulation, and
availability of goods in the city have earned it the status of a shoppers
paradise and the worlds emporium.3 Such designations reveal that while
Hong Kong is despised for its shallow materialism, blatant consumerism, and
lack of historical culture, it is also admired as a true capitalist holdout in a
region that saw much communist insurgence and victory in the middle of the
twentieth century. In fact, Hong Kong, once known as the Berlin of the East,
was developed to be a buttress against communist China.4 Now that China
has embraced free-market economy and consumer ideals, Hong Kong becomes
the mainlanders shopping mall.
What is the impact of living within a monolithic discourse of con-
sumerism and nationalism that renders the city a vessel for market
development and political posturing? How does the need of the state and
consumer capitalism, in the use of space, conict with the needs of the indi-
vidual and community? What are the survival strategies in a society in which

89
90 Paradigm City

human relationships are often quantied and dened through practices of

consumption? Chan Wais popular fictions of the late 1990s illustrate the
imaginary, the aspirations, and the sense of identity of the people living
within the conditions of such consumer practices and state ideology.
Commodities contribute to the integrative and communicative ratio-
nality of a society, Nestor Garcia Canclini argues. 5 Luxury consumer goods,
for example, are symbols of the upper class. By ensuring the scarcity of
[certain] commodities and the impossibility that others should have them,
these items cement and solidify class status and social structures.6 In her
study of the case in South Korea, Laura Nelson demonstrates that not only
can consumption habits be manipulated to promote and articulate class iden-
tity within a society, but the control of such habits is also a way to strengthen
the national agenda and discipline the population whenever individual habits
or desires become out of hand. Nelson demonstrates how women, who have
especially been identied as agents of consumption, become the target of the
Korean state ideological program. Women were assigned the blame for South
Koreas political and economic troubles in the 1980s, for example, by endan-
gering the nation and national identity through their excessive desires for
foreign goods.7 However, South Koreas well-trained women consumers can
also be deployed to support national projects. By exercising consumer discre-
tion, abstaining from imported goods and foreign vacations, and supporting
national products, they dutifully fulll their roles in promoting national well-
being.

Consuming for the Love of Hong Kong

Consumption as a means of facilitating state programs was also borne out in

Hong Kong in 2003 when Hong Kong was recovering from three months of
SARS epidemic. When foreign tourists stopped arriving, Hong Kongs largely
service and retail economy, weakened since the Asian Crisis in 1997, bottomed
out. Faced with the widespread disaffectedness of the people who perceived the
city government as ineffectual and impotent in the face of the many social
and economic problems, the government rigorously promoted an I Love
Hong Kong campaign that championed local consumerism as an act of civic
responsibility.8 People were encouraged to go out and buy things and eat in
restaurants in order to save Hong Kongs economy, but most of all, to
reestablish the social fabric that had started to fray at the edges in the
numerous crises of the new millennium.
 The World Emporium and the Mall City 91

The Beijing government, sensitive to the rising frustration and discontent

of the Hong Kong people toward the HKSAR government, opened Hong
Kongs borders to Mainland Chinese tourists from many different regions
in China at the end of 2003, immediately attracting tens of thousands to visit
and consume in Hong Kong. In 2004, the Hong Kong Tourism Board initi-
ated the rst annual Shopping Festival from June to August to further Hong
Kongs image as a shoppers paradise. All these measures resulted in an infu-
sion of much needed tourist cash, staving off further discontent in Hong
Kong. The equation between consumption and political control is never
clearer.9
In Hong Kong, the immense physical compression in the dense city and the
channeled individual itinerary along shopping routes decorated with neon
spectacles, colorful shop windows, and billboard images, create urgency in the
individuals relationship to consumer goods. These daily conduitsthe walk-
ways and arcades that crisscross through the entire cityprovide a venue in
which the people of Hong Kong take in their daily lessons learning to
consume.10
Consumption as forms of expression of both conformity to and individu-
ality from the dominant social aesthetic, as many sociologists have pointed out,
is a complex expression of social and personal negotiations. Consumerism, as
we have seen, serves the purpose of the state. However, unmanaged, it can
also lead to social fragmentation. In an environment of endless commercial
manipulation through advertisements everywhere in the city, shopping in a
particular way may be an indirect, if deliberate, strategy, through which
consumers assert their sense of individual choice. This point is argued by
Annie Hau-Nung Chan in her ethnographical work, Shopping for Fashion in
Hong Kong, in which she follows her informants around on their shopping
tours, each presenting cogent and elaborate rationale over their particular
choices of clothing items, asserting individuality and subjectivity in their selec-
tion and not mere blind pursuit of trends.11 The sense of personal control is
important to the shopper who constantly negotiates between the fashion or the
norm and the expressiveness of individuality and desire. It is this aspect of
consumption that Nelsons work explores, pointing out the political potential
of such individual assertion, including endangerment of social consensus and
cohesion. Along the same vein, Mary Douglas also argues how bourgeois
consumption is fundamentally selsh and antisocial, directing what are poten-
tially socially benecial resources to private use.12 This explains why consumers
and consumption habits are monitored closely by the state, directing
92 Paradigm City

individual desires into demands and socially regulated acts in order to foster
political order.13
However, if citizens political participation is restricted to supporting the
economy through consumption or expressing their desires through
consumerism, despite the array of spectacular possibilities in the vast empo-
rium of Hong Kongs capitalist society, consumption as culture, in fact,
demonstrates not the availability of individual choice but precisely its lack.
The growth of consumerism reveals a corresponding constriction of political
space. If Hong Kongs capitalist culture and consumerism have often been used
as proof of Hong Kong peoples lack of political consciousness and political
passivity, these have been calculatedly fostered by the Beijing-dominated
HKSAR government.
The city is planned around shopping and tourism, as Lui Tai-Lok shows
in his study of the malling of Hong Kong. The construction of the once
exclusive Ocean Terminal mall as the worlds largest shopping mall in the
1960s was for the convenience of tourists who arrived in Hong Kong in ocean
liners. The mall was to provide a clean, orderly, and exclusive shopping arena
for wealthy tourists, so they would not have to go to the local shopping
venues of messy street markets and chaotic small grocery stores. The mall
was occupied by stores that sold luxury and high-ticketed goods that few
locals could afford at that time. The gradual expansion and popularization
of the mall, however, played an important role in slowly nurturing local
material desire, taste, and shopping habit. The Ocean Terminal mall (now
part of the Harbour City mall complex) thus played an important role in the
acculturation of a whole new generation of consumers, especially as Hong
Kongs economic conditions continued to improve. By the late 1970s, malls
all over the city were built and frequented equally by locals and tourists.14
In Hong Kong today, shopping malls and arcades are ubiquitous. Every
underground Mass Transit Railway (MTR) stop leads into a mall or an
arcade. The MTR stations are themselves small-scale malls with convenience
stores, bakeries, sometimes even boutiques, banks, and bookstores.
Commuters usually have to go through walkways and yovers that take them
directly into a mall or a shopping arcade before they can exit onto the street.
Often the malls also function as extensive networks of throughways in the
city, connecting one place to another. They provide welcome air-condi-
tioned passages in the city where one can walk around without being
subjected to air pollution, trafc, and the elements, especially when summer
temperatures regularly rise to a humid 32 C in Hong Kongs subtropical
 The World Emporium and the Mall City 93

climate. For example, one can walk from Central all the way to Sheung Wan,
an adjacent district, on foot bridges that lead in and out of several malls,
including the gigantic, luxury shopping center in the IFC (International
Financial Centre) towers.15 Similarly, large office buildings often have
arcades on the ground oor that connect with another building or lead to
another street. Pedestrians are encouraged to walk through them to reach
their destinations. Every satellite town or housing estate, public or private,
is provided with extensive shopping complexes.16 In this way, whether it is
ones intention to spend money, whether there is an actual need or not,
one participates every day in the pleasurable worlds of consumer materi-
alism and spectacles, to the point where actual or window shopping
becomes part of the everyday regime (fig. 4.1. Pedestrian walkway in
Central; g. 4.2 Harbour City Mall Complex).
These malls, arcades, and walkways that form a superstructure over the
city or a network underground shape the episteme of the city. Walking and
shopping in these venues become equally incorporated into ones work life
and leisure time. Citizens jokingly refer to shopping as their favorite sport
in Hong Kong.17 However, frivolities aside, gures of retail volume illustrate
the seriousness of this activity there. In 2001, in a city with a population of
6.7 million, there were about 40,000 retail businesses, for example, which
represented 23.4 percent of the total number of commercial establishments,
defined as wholesale, retail, and import/export trades, restaurants and
hotels industries. Its total value of goods for sale represented almost 8
percent of the total industry that generated USD180 billion that year. This
amounts to USD2800 a year per consumer in Hong Kong. There were 10,334
apparel, accessories, and shoes stores in Hong Kongs one thousand square
kilometers of land, generating USD20 billion in sales, which meant over
USD300 per consumer in the economically troubled year of 2001.18
Square foot by square foot, Hong Kong generates the largest sales gure on
luxury-brand fashion and accessories in Asia. The Asian market in turn occu-
pies 40 percent of the worlds total sales of luxury-brand items.19 Hong Kong
is an important base for many European and American designer fashion
houses, such that in December 2004 the Luxury 2004 conference, titled Lure
of Asia, organized by the International Herald Tribune and attended by repre-
sentatives of the worlds most inuential fashion houses, CEOs and designers
of fashion business empires, was held for the rst time, not in Paris, which
hosted the previous three years, but in Hong Kong.20 This not only shows the
growing importance of the Asian market in the high-fashion business, of
94 Paradigm City

Fig. 4.1: Pedestrian Walkway in Central

One of the many walkways in Central that connects between buildings and malls.

Fig. 4.2: Harbour City Mall Complex

Canton Road is lined with luxury goods boutiques of the mega mall that comprises
of several buildings linked together through walkways: The Ocean Terminal,
Ocean Centre, Marco Polo Hotel and Arcade, Gateway Arcade and Harbour City.
Called the Harbour City Complex, it is the largest shopping complex in Asia, with
700 stores and 500 restaurants.
 The World Emporium and the Mall City 95

which Hong Kong occupies an important share, but also the importance of
Hong Kong as a command and control center for many of these luxury goods
companies poised to conquer the putatively even more lucrative Mainland
China market. In fact, as the host of this forum, Hong Kong has established
its international status as a luxury goods retail center.
Lefebvre once argued that there is a direct equation between the culture of
leisure and the capitalist economy, in which leisure is a device of capitalist
control over the working masses.21 The activities associated with the culture
of consumption, from seeing movies, and walking around in the malls to shop-
ping, certainly bear out his argument of how different industries of leisure are
developed to serve the purposes of capitalism.22 In Hong Kong, the city space
captivates and channels the maximum number of people along passages that
lead them past rows upon rows of stores with high efficiency. Citizen-
consumers are acculturated in their everyday lives, moving about the plant of
the city, where ones sensory perception is continuously mediated by the
commodity culture marked by desire and creation of desire. The residents of
this mall city relate to each other through transactions of objectsthey see
each other through objects and speak through objects. This collection of
objects, in turn, denes an epistemic community that is Hong Kong. We will
see in the following, through the works of Chan Wai, how the experience of the
city, as well as the relationships among people, are mediated by this consumer
culture.

Commodity and the Hong Kong Identity

The importance of this phenomenon of commodity culture to the denition

of individual experience and to the articulation of local identity is apparent in
the way many Hong Kong people think about and narrate their Hong Kong
stories. In chapter 2, I mentioned that there was an efflorescence in the
memory industry just before 1997. It resulted in numerous volumes of
personal reminiscences, collective impressions, photo essays, and albums of old
pictures of Hong Kong. These works memorialize Hong Kongs way of life
through consumer goods, from fashion to foods to toys. A few examples of
such compilations include the anthology, This Is How We Grew Up, a project
sponsored by the newspaper group Ming Pao Daily, which collected writings
from famous writers as well as selections from open submissions.23 Old
Pictures of Hong Kong is a series that bring together written impressions of
well-known writers accompanied by photographs that capture an era or a
96 Paradigm City

cultural moment.24 The photographs are often from personal albums of the
writers and not ofcial or media archives, exemplifying the everydayness and
commonness of the experiences they have chosen to narrate. Many of these
pictures are selected to show the fashion, appliances, famous stores, popular
restaurants, and other establishments iconic of the reminiscing generation.
One photograph, for example, shows the author as a small child in his parents
modest apartment. The author was careful to point out the centrality of the
television set and the refrigerator in the phonograph, the particular objects of
desire at the time.25 Hong Kong 101 is another such nostalgic compilation of
photographs and essays. The editors stated that it was their mission to provide
a comprehensive presentation as well as commentary on all things cool in the
Hong Kong mass culture since the early 1960s.26 Some of the items collected
include the cheap, white, Chinese-made canvas shoes that every child wore in
the 1960s and 1970s, some iconic tin or plastic toys of the era, the local break-
fast and tea-time favorite, a thickly buttered rocky bun, as well as popular
television or music idols of the different decades. The importance of
commodity culture to Hong Kongs self-identity and historical perception that
is reflected in these popular publications received legitimization from the
cultural establishment when a major Hong Kong design retrospective exhibi-
tion was presented at the Hong Kong Arts Centre in 1995.27 The exhibition
was aptly titled Design/Identity, directly relating Hong Kongs industrial
design of consumer goods to the articulation of local identity (see chapter 2.)
The Hong Kong Heritage Museum also organized a small-scale exhibition on
Hong Kong food culture in 2003.28 Similarly, the narrative of Hong Kong
history since 1949 in the Hong Kong History Museum is through a display of
Hong Kongs manufactured objects (see chapter 2.)
In May 1998, Chan Wai, a new writer with little previous publishing experi-
ence and without having won any major prizes, burst onto the literary scene
with her novel, Sahpheung Kei (Shixiang ji, The Records of Sahpheung).
Published during the height of Hong Kongs societal nostalgia and accurately
locating Hong Kong peoples identication with the culture of consumption,
this novel brought her to immediate literary stardom and established her
career as one of the most popular writers in Hong Kong. By April 1999, the
novel had already gone into its third printing. The Records is a novelistic
attempt at organizing and narrating a history of Hong Kong and Hong Kongs
everyday experience from the early 1950s to 1997 through the consumer indus-
tries and their products. This history of Hong Kong is narrated by a child,
Sahpheung, the youngest of the ten children of the allegorical Leen family,
 The World Emporium and the Mall City 97

through her observation of her familys fortune in the history of Hong Kongs
industrial development through time. Chans work not only delineates the
embeddedness of objects in the daily lives and relationships among people but,
more importantly, how our consciousness, subconscious, and memories are
formed around consumer objects, because these objects are the intermediary
of our experience of the world. In this way, we are truly, as Canclini describes,
communities dened by commodities.
In Chans work, the emphasis on the thingness of experience and the
objectication of relationships underlies individual expression and identi-
cation. The names of the ten children in the fictional family all represent
some manner of cultural or commodity consumption, from famous stores to
brand names of consumer goods in Hong Kong. For example, Seihoi (Four
Seas), the name of the fourth son, reminds one of an old, well-known silk and
brocade store. The second child, Seungfung (lit: Chance Meeting) is a common
name for restaurants. The sixth child, Lukhup (Six Together) shares the same
Chinese name with Hong Kongs Lottery game, Mark Six. The Seventh child,
Tsahthei, is the Chinese rendition of the soft drink Seven-Up. The Eighth
Child, Baahtbou (Eight Treasures), is the name of a famous Chinese dessert or,
generally, meaning full of treasures.
In the same way, important events or phenomena, cultural or historical,
are memorialized and embodied by the births of each of the ten children. For
example, the third child, Saahmdo, was born in 1953, the day after the corona-
tion of Queen Elizabeth II. Saahmdos birth was marked by parades and
festivities on Nathan Road in celebration of this event. The summer of 1963
was the summer of a severe drought in Hong Kong, when water was supplied
only once every four days. This year was commemorated in Chans narrative
by the birth of the sixth child, Lukhup. On July 17, 1964, when the screen idol
Lin Dai committed suicide, Mrs. Leen was shocked into labor by the news and
the seventh child, Tsahthei, was born a day later. This equation between births
and media events reveals the interlocking relationship between the material
culture and private lives.
The Records of Sahpheung traces Hong Kongs material history by following
the development of the major industries from the early 1950s to 1997, through
the different enterprises of the Leen family, from small-scale cottage industry,
to manufacturing, to transportation, to service, and to entertainment.
However, Chans interest in Hong Kongs economic development is purely
supercial, only in order to establish a mise-en-scne. Despite her reference to
the different stages of Hong Kongs industries, the subject of her narrative is
98 Paradigm City

not industrial and economic development, which dominates conventional

histories of Hong Kong, but the consumers at the other end, their everyday
experiences and relationships captured through their use of the products of
the industries.
The novel provides a detailed historical catalogue of Hong Kongs devel-
oping consumption habits and commodities of everyday life. Each object
Chan mentions is iconic of an era. For example, the change from using metal
water buckets to plastic ones captures how local industries evolved from scrap
metal to plastic in the 1960s, but also immediately evokes the everyday life of
the 1950s and 1960s, during the years of water shortage. Chan also makes
references to the early handicraft trade of embroidery and beading in the late
1960s, which led to the beginning of the formal apparels industry in the 1970s.
On an individual level, these changes reect an important aspect of social
development important for women. For many, it marked the move from
the home, where they did craft work to subsidize household income, to
becoming engines of Hong Kongs industrial development as they were
recruited en masse to the newly established factories. Gradually becoming a
skilled labor force, they produced highly valued apparel and electronic
consumer goods.29 The progress of the electronic industry and the growing
afuence of the Hong Kong society are articulated through the ninth child
of the Leen family, who, born in afuent times, owned all the various gener-
ations of music appliances from his childhood to adulthood, beginning with
a transistor radio, then a boom box, then a Walkman, and nally, a Discman,
witnessing through his consumption, the development of the electronic
industry. Similarly, the second child Seungfungs possession of the various
generations of telecommunication gadgets, from a beeper to the cordless
phone to the various generations of cell phones, not only illustrates how
consumer technology intersects with historical development but, as ubiqui-
tous accessories of every working person in Hong Kongs high-pressured
lifestyle, the social and economic conditions there as well. The change in
fashion and commodity trends reected in the consumption of the different
members of the Leen family reveals how individual lifestyle is completely
intertwined with the economic and social changes of the city. Conversely, the
technological developments in consumer products deeply mark the indi-
vidual experiences of reality through time. Chans work traces the sense of
collectivity created by the common commodity experience of the citizens,
which in turn contributes to the sense of Hong Kongness, substantiating
Canclinis argument that consumerism denes citizenship.
 The World Emporium and the Mall City 99

However, Chan also reveals to us some of the human costs of living in a

society so mediated by experiences of material possession and consumption
as symbols of social experience. We have already seen how names of indi-
viduals and hence their identities are often direct references to consumer
goods or events. Chan describes this impact in more detail through the third
Leen girl, Saahmdo, who is obsessed with the popular media, to the point
where her self-expression and even life plot are usurped by the entertainment
industry. Because of her voracious appetite for pop culture, her entire exis-
tence is formed in idiomatic relationship to television commercials, pop
songs, tabloids, and lms. She can speak only through titles and lines from
lms and television shows, quoting from familiar characters or popular song
lyrics. The major events in Hong Kongs entertainment history are milestones
in Saahmdos personal narrative, as her story is inscribed within this media
history. She remembers her first detention in school because it was the
momentous day of the nal to the extremely popular television series, King
of Kings. At age eighteen, she tried to register for the Miss Hong Kong beauty
pageant, an accelerated means for young women to break into the enter-
tainment business. Her rst boyfriend was a television director whom she
met at the registration. Later in life, she discovered her husbands affair with
a starlet through the tabloids. The popular media interpolates her percep-
tion of the world, conditions her internal understanding of herself, and
inuences her relationship with people around her. She is unable to act or
speak unless the contents or lines have already been scripted or uttered by
some characters in the celluloid world.30 Her life seems to follow the hack-
neyed plot of a soap opera. She is totally entrapped within the world
generated by mass media. Her whole being is a clich; her own intellect and
sense of self remains underdeveloped and finally withers away. When the
narrator became old enough to contemplate her sisters life, she was stunned
by what had happened over the years:

At this moment, I suddenly realized that in these many years, Saahmdo had
slowly, imperceptibly moved, folded and pushed herself into a tall, narrow
and straight glass jar. She diligently maintained her motionlessness, till she
became a human specimen.
This had happened within our purview; however it was impossible to tell
when it began. When we looked up again, the woman in the bottle had
already turned into a precious and fragile specimen. It was like magic. We
havent had time even to applaud before the spotlights were dimmed, and the
100 Paradigm City

curtains were lowered. In surprise, the audience could only le out of the
theater.
Saahmdo, the formaldehyde that preserved you, made you pale. You
have become faded in the sunlight, like an unpublished scroll of poems.
Saahmdo, I wish I could hold you up to show the world.31

Chans work contains within it an emporium of Hong Kongs society, lled

with wares and objects in great array and riotous abundance, revealing how
personal experiences are spun out of spectacles and commodity trends of the
city. However, within this pursuit of the bric-a-brac, there is a vacuity. In this
narrow, conning display case of life, social life is dened only by narcissistic
needs. In the same way, the world is seen through the distorted and myopic
container of ones live. For example, 1963 was memorialized because it marks
the death of the local movie star Lin Dai. However, the death of the U.S. pres-
ident, John F. Kennedy, a world political event with serious historical
consequences, made no impression on the consciousness and emotional life
of this consumer group. Citizenship in the society constructed by Chan is
dened merely by consumption, an unproductive activity that neither gives
the people agency over the creation of their world nor participation in world
history. The alienation as a result of such commodity fetishism, in Marxist
terms, occurs not only as a result of the separation between the process of
production and the goods produced, but also because the accumulation of
commodities actually occludes social relationship and human affects, as in
Saahmdos case.

Citizenship Rights in the Consumer Society

The Hong Kong identity through this kind of ownership narrative reects an
underlying bourgeois value that perceives material affluence as a form of
progress and wealth. This is consistent with an all-pervasive ofcial and unof-
ficial political ideology and social ethos in Hong Kong under the HKSAR
government that valorize Prosperity and Stability (fanrong wending) above
all else. Economic success is an indicator of social success. In short, citizen-
ship and participation in this bourgeois society is measured by wealth and
possession; citizens status is evaluated according to accumulated material
symbols of wealth. If Mary Douglas is correct in arguing that bourgeois
consumption is dened by decisions in favor of the individual at the expense
of community, this commodity culture results in further atomizing the indi-
 The World Emporium and the Mall City 101

vidual from social life. 32 This kind of competitive consumerism tears down
community and solidies class differences.
Chans writing seems to afrm the dominant ideology of consumer capi-
talism in Hong Kong society. However, it is equally arguable that it is
precisely her effort to attach human faces to her history of objectsmaking
objects relevant to human lives through her charactersthat she attempts to
humanize this object-obsessed society. Her characters are unable to refute
the powerful commodity manipulation, but they nevertheless nd spaces of
redemption within it. Chans work alongside the concurrent phenomenon of
mass nostalgia and the innumerable volumes of picture albums and memoirs
that collect the images and paraphernalia of old Hong Kong also reveals a
general desire and effort in society to transcend the tyranny of objects by
making objects symbols of community rather than as emblems of individual
status. This gesture of collecting is to compose a commonality in Hong
Kongs social experience on the most basic level of everyday life, establishing
a sense of collectivity and belonging among the people. How does this
rethinking of objects become a way to rethink collectivity, or as Bill Brown
asks, How does the effort to rethink things become an effort to [re]institute
society?33
These histories of desire and possession, to which the anthologies and
Chans Records belong, have the effect of reifying memories and sentiments
into common objects, making the eeting and abstract palpable and concrete.
As far as visual or sensual objects are evocative or auratic (in Walter Benjamins
terms) in that each encapsulates an entire historical period or personal world,
even things as simple and mundane as candies or a lunchbox are placed in
these narratives to inspire innite fantasies beyond their actual thingness. But
it is also precisely this entrusting of the narrative of Hong Kong to common
and humble objects that democratizes ownership of this story. John Treat
argues that consumer culture is without xed center or hierarchy. It contains
diverse classes and subcultures, discourse and negotiations that circulate
liberally with equal claim to legitimacy. It is, in this sense at least, egalitarian
and democratic.34
In this way, the history of Hong Kong can literally be held in the hands of its
citizens. This knowledge of Hong Kong based on objects is necessarily hetero-
geneous, because each individual has a unique relationship to different objects
and has different stories and experiences relating to their unique and different
uses of the objects. The user of the object becomes the subject of this history.
A history based on an assemblage and individual ownership of historical
102 Paradigm City

objects returns historical agency to the people who can literally make the world
their own.
In a place lacking huge public squares and open spaces, developments of
malls further privatize and thus reduce civic space, as many scholars have
pointed out. However, the case in Hong Kong is slightly different from that in
U.S. cities, for example, on which some of the important theories about malls
are based.35 In his discussion of the malling of Hong Kong, Lui points out
while the development and popularization of malls naturally support and
foster the culture of shopping, the malls inadvertently open up a form of
public culture and public space not anticipated. The appearance of cafes in the
arcades, for example, opens up a space for young intellectuals in the late 1960s
to sit for long periods of time, to read books, exchange ideas and aspirations.
The creation of such spaces of consumption helps foster relationships and
alliances that directly and indirectly contribute to the cultural and political
movements of the late 1960s and 1970s. In particular, Caf do Brasil in the
Ocean Terminal mall, served as the home base for many of the young intellec-
tuals at the time. The generation that grew up with the opening of these new
public spaces became critical participants in Hong Kongs cultural history,
whose legacies are still evident today. The editors of the iconic City Magazine
(Hou Oi), for example, met each other at the cafe. 36 The magazine became an
important iconoclastic voice in the struggle for social justice in the 1970s. From
the 1980s to the present, it has been variously, a venue for alternative cultures
and introduction of European and North American cultures, nurturing the
intellectual and aesthetic values of the postwar, nativeborn generation in Hong
Kong. Despite the relentless commercial culture that creates a superficial
society, despite Hong Kongs everyday life being so inscribed in capitalist
space and individual peregrination so manipulated in the capitalist ecology,
alternative paths manage to ourish.

Nurturing Belonging

Chans later work Sound and Taste (1998) investigates how individual
consumers fulll collective aspirations.37 The novella Taste, in the volume,
which is conceptually similar to Sahpheungs Records, can be read as its supple-
ment. In Taste, Chan demonstrates the same ambition to record Hong Kongs
history through the contents of everyday life. In this work, the object of
consumption is food, articulating a Hong Kong experience that is on an even
more minute and personal scale. This smallness of scale allows Chan to
describe, at close range, the affective quality of everyday life in Hong Kong.
 The World Emporium and the Mall City 103

Its allegorical signication aside, Chans Taste is also a part of the trend
of writing histories of objects during the last years of the twentieth century.
It is a gastronomical catalogue and guide to Hong Kong, collecting and docu-
menting the specic Hong Kong food customs through the different periods.
The table of contents is a veritable menu of Hong Kongs everyday food:
chapter 1, Campbells Vegetable Soup; chapter 2, Cantonese Roast Meats over
Rice; chapter 23, Vitasoy Milk; chapter 26, Curried Fishballs; chapter 28,
Smarties; chapter 42, Red Bean Popsicle; and so forth. This grocery list of
sixty of Hong Kongs most common and favorite daily foods is a kind of
phenomenology of Hong Kongs desire. The items range from the most
extravagant banquet foods of roast suckling pig and sharks n soup, to such
childish delights as Smarties and Malteesers, to the everyday staples of busy
households of Campbells Soup and instant noodle. The extremes in Chans
list capture the amboyant consumption habits of Hong Kong people on the
one hand, but also reect, on the other, the oppressive franticness of the daily
life of many who resort to prefabricated dinners from a can or a box. In
between are childhood snacks and comfort foods and the uniquely Hong
Kong treats, such as egg custard tarts and shball noodles from local diners.
Food stories are popular internationally, perhaps because food is suste-
nance and is an accessible and universal metaphor for daily life. On the
simplest level, Chans story, Taste, is a variation on a rather popular genre.
On a political level, Chans description of food consumption and the effects
and sentiments associated with different kinds of food is a way to elucidate
an emotional aspect of daily life in Hong Kong under historical and social
pressures that are often inarticulable. Chans novella published in 1998, one
year after Hong Kongs Handover to Mainland China, contains a direct
analogy to Hong Kongs political situation. The names of Chans characters
have unmistakable allegorical signicance, pointing toward the broader social
and sensual experiences of living in Hong Kong under the control of an often
bellicose Mainland China. The first two children of the Mok family are
named Yahtsaan and Yisau, which literally mean One Mountain and Two
(natural) Beauties (the city of Hong Kong is made up of two main parts,
the Kowloon Peninsular and Hong Kong Island). These names also evoke
Hong Kongs situation as a Chinese Special Administrative Region after 1997,
represented by the slogan yiguo liangzhi (One country, two systems), refer-
ring to the maintenance of Hong Kongs capitalist economy within a
communist system. The third and the fourth Mok children, Candy
(Tiimtiim) and Cocoa (Hohhoh), are the two major avors of lifesweet-
ness and bitterness.
104 Paradigm City

The experiences of the Mok family mirror Hong Kongs condition at the
end of the colonial era. The novella includes, in the middle, a twelve-course
New Years dinner. A television crew lmed its step-by-step preparation by the
two sisters, Candy and Yisau. This family dinner, wonderfully abundant and
elaborate, was attended by all the family members, but each of them was disin-
terested, preoccupied, and unhappy, haunted by their private unfulllments
and anxieties. This parallels another extravagant festivity, equally ambivalently
and reluctantly celebratedthe billion-dollar extravaganza the Hong Kong
government put on for the Handover ceremony on July 1, 1997, eagerly docu-
mented by the international press.
The Beijing and HKSARs ofcial rhetoric of optimism, persistent cheer-
fulness, and strenuous display of normalcy while under the relentless camera
scrutiny of the international media barely veiled Hong Kong peoples
simmering anxiety about their future. In the novella, the unhappy Mok family
was continuously under the inquisitive gaze of two television cameramen, sent
to the Mok household to record Mrs. Moks and later, her two daughters
cooking demonstrations for a television program. Mrs. Mok is a famous tele-
vision cooking instructor. The family and the television crewmembers
consumed the elaborate meals prepared for the television program after each
show. The abundance, the apparent festiveness, the activity of eating, were all
part of an unremitting charade of normalcy in the Mok family that barely
masks the substratum of alienation, anxiety, and dysfunctionality. If optimism
and normalcy were the ofcial ideology of the new Hong Kong under China,
Chans portrayal of family meals demonstrates precisely the pathology and
oppressiveness behind this normalcy.
On a personal level, through the experiences of food, Chan describes family
relationships between a husband and a wife, a mother and her daughters,
sisters, and their relationship with men. Chans work narrates a typical tale of
urban alienation, of estrangement among people. Her characters are plagued
by inarticulation and inability to connect with others. Each family member
harbors inerrable feelings of unrequited love, unfullled aspirations, anger, or
frustration toward each other. The mother, Mrs. Mok, is so obese that she
never leaves the family apartment. The father, Mr. Mok, estranged from his
wife, never comes home for dinner, but eagerly savors the delicious food that
his wife saves for him in thermoses every night. The selsh oldest son, Yaht-
saan, is married and only comes home with his equally spoiled wife for dinners
and to be waited on. The youngest son, Cocoa, never speaks during meals.
Candy, unable to resist her mother, grows fatter everyday from Mrs. Moks
 The World Emporium and the Mall City 105

misplaced and suffocating indulgence. She finally moved out in order to

undergo a weight-loss odyssey, yet could not let her mother know why. Yisau,
the neglected second child, aspires to become a culinary expert like her mother
but did not dare tell her. The family members are avid but inattentive
consumers of food, while Mrs. Mok, morbidly obese and depressed, barely
fullls her function in the household, but through her elaborate cooking, she
smothers all their unhappiness and unfulllment with food.
Food is directly connected to the emotional life of the consumers and
directly related to desire and desirability, transcending the simple binary logic
of the consumer economy of object and desire. Candys desirability as a
woman and her unfullled dreams and hunger for particular taste and avor
of food intertwine into a complex emotionality. When Candy was feeling
depressed about being dumped by her boyfriend, she wandered to his neigh-
borhood, hoping to catch a glimpse of him. She absentmindedly collided with
a small child, causing him to spill his tube of Smarties. The sight of the pretty,
colorful candies, a childhood favorite, scattered all over the pavement, becomes
also a metaphorical release of her bottled up emotions, helping her let go of
her unrequited love.
Chan uses food to articulate the daily and emotional life of Hong Kong
people. Malteezers and Smarties conjure childhood memories. Malt biscuits
and red bean soup evoke societal nostalgia for a different era. Egg custard
tarts and fishball noodle soup are reassuring of everyday normalcy. The
unconscious logic of individual feelings and social relationships are articulated
and negotiated through foodthe desiring, offering, and sharing. In this way,
Chans work not only serves to dene culturally and socially what Hong Kong
is on a visceral level, but also provides a taxonomy of personal desire within the
state ideology of consumer capitalism.

Food Culture in Hong Kong

Aside from serving as a record of Hong Kongs popular food, the novella
Taste is also a kind of cooking manual, lled with all kinds of practical infor-
mation about food, including special tips for shopping, handling, and
preparation. In this way, Chans work participates in one of the most popular
book trends in Hong Kong. In the 2003 Hong Kongs Bestsellers List, of the fty
long-term bestsellers, fifteen are books on food and drinks. Together with
cookbooks these gastronomica are the largest category on the Hong
Kong popular list.38 Besides publishing, food programs abound on Hong Kong
106 Paradigm City

television. Both the broadcast networks, TVB (Television Broadcasting

Company) and Asia TV, have had for decades erce competitions with each
other in their afternoon variety shows that target housewives. For years, the
two broadcast channels each have under contract famous cooking instructors
and chefs from renowned restaurants to demonstrate cooking and discuss culi-
nary issues and consumption of foods in general. There are documentaries
on special foods from different cuisines around the world. Large segments of
popular travel programs focus on descriptions of native cuisine and exotic
foods of other regions of the world. The new food channel and programs on
cable television continue to fuel the growth of interest in food consumption
in Hong Kong. Many local magazines are dedicated to this subject, such as
Food Culture (yuhmsik manfa) and Shuangru on Food (Sheungyu tam sik).
Popular magazines, from Ming Pao Weekly to East Touch, regularly offer restau-
rant guides and recipes. In 2001, there were 11,553 restaurants registered in
Hong Kong, serving a population of 6.7 million. The restaurant industry
employed over 200,000 people (3 percent of the population).39 This was during
a year of continuing economic recession, when many restaurants went out of
business. One can only imagine the importance of the food industry at Hong
Kongs height of economic prosperity. In fact Hong Kong people like to refer
to the city as a gastronomic paradise (yumsik teen tong) where one can nd
the best cuisines from all over the world. Chans work about food and televi-
sion cooking hosts taps into this most familiar visceral space and imagination
of the Hong Kong society.
Within this food culture of Hong Kong, Mrs. (Sally Yam) Fong is some-
what of a phenomenon. She has been teaching cooking on television for
decades and has authored several dozen cookbooks. More than a household
name, she is a cultural icon in Hong Kong. Unlike many of her well-known
counterparts either in Hong Kong or elsewhere, Mrs. Fongs main audience is
not gourmands or people who cook for entertainment or pleasure. Her
programs are also not about lifestyle. The majority of her cookbooks and her
TV programs aim at modest everyday cooks and thrifty housewives. The books
are often small cheap paperbacks. Her dishes are simple and economical to
make. They are conventional, requiring ordinary and seasonal ingredients, and
are suitable for busy households. In fact, it is probably her attentiveness to the
overextended family cooks on a tight budget that makes her a household
favorite. Always in touch with life in Hong Kong and always practical in her
approach, a few years before 1997 she even began a course on simple putonghua
through cooking on TV.
 The World Emporium and the Mall City 107

Unlike some of her North American or European counterparts (Martha

Stewart comes to mind), Mrs. Fong and her media enterprise are not about
inventing a middle-class domestic fantasy or dening tasteful living. Her
shows are geared toward the money-and-time-conscious housewives or
working mothers. Judging by the commercials that sponsor her shows, one can
even assume that her audience base is predominantly women from lower-
income households. Unlike Martha Stewart who is a logo and a brand name,
and a ubiquitous icon in American suburban life, Mrs. Fongs image is very
much as a regular individual attuned to the oppressive pace and strictures of
urban life in Hong Kong. She is preferred over other cooking hosts because of
her low-key, perhaps even bashful personality and plainness in appearance.
Unlike a typical television host, she seems introverted, of few words and
though accomplished in her cooking skills, she was almost awkward in front of
the camera. She always wore modest and casual outts underneath colorful
aprons, supporting an image of a busy woman who is ready to move on to her
next task when the apron comes off. She offers neither promise nor preten-
sion of domestic glamour or attainable perfection as the Martha Stewart
principle, but acknowledges the difculties and aws in life. Her issues are not
matching curtains and bedspreads, nor even projecting abundance and felicity
in an extravagant family meal. Her cooking shows are never more than ten or
fteen minutes long to emphasize the simplicity of her meals. She always intro-
duces or concludes her cooking demonstration by commenting on how a
particular dish would be appetizing on hot, sultry days or comforting on
wintry days or how it would appeal to a willful child or suitable for frail, old
people, or how it was nutritious, easy, and economical. Casual as these remarks
might be, they reveal the premise of her show, which is about extending care to
others in the family, especially under less than perfect conditions, while
acknowledging the difculties of the task. Her show demonstrates an empa-
thetic understanding of the trials of everyday life and proposes a modest
attempt in their relief. More importantly, cooking shows like hers establish, in
Canclinis words, an aesthetic foundation of communities, because they
motivate a collective sensibility based on the value of pragmatic survival
through mutual care expressed through food.40

Sharing of Food

It is interesting to read Chans work Taste in tandem with the phenomenon of

Mrs. Fong and the social ethos she represents. In the novella, when Mrs. Mok
108 Paradigm City

suddenly succumbed to a stroke and was admitted to hospital, the two sisters,
Candy and Yisau, took on the responsibility of the familys food production and
continued the cooking program in their mothers name. It is through Chans
elaborate description of their cooking, step by step, that readers also learn
cooking and shopping tips, just as one might from Mrs. Fongs program. In a
way similar to Mrs. Fongs show, which is ostensibly about domestic and private
life but has a strong social valence, the activities of the Mok sisters in Chans
novella also have a social trajectory.
More than dening and expressing sentiments, food is a means of altering
perspectives and attitudes. Candys and Yisaus cooking instructions help one
appreciate, not just the primary tastes of food, but the subtle savor of discor-
dant combinations, such as the tartness and bite of a whole orange cooked
with sticky sweet beans. They also teach strategies for dealing with the unpalat-
able, such as using salt to take out the bitterness of a bitter gourd. If food is
the sensory equivalence of the everyday, the Mok sisters instructions on
cooking are creative solutions to the obstacles and unpleasantness in life, aimed
at transforming ways of thinking, changing the inevitable, making tolerable the
unsavory, and teaching inventiveness to imagine an alternative reality.
Food is the centerpiece in the Mok family. Because the serving of food is
fundamentally about extending care and expressing affection to others, the
sisters efforts, like Mrs. Fongs, offer a modicum of comfort and cheer in Hong
Kongs fast-paced and alienating society, improving the quality and connection
among people, even if only modestly. However, as long as the family members
remain passive consumers, atomized in their taste and in their daily eating
habits, the family remains fragmented and members isolated in their indi-
vidual secrets and pains.
It makes sense that as Chan uses a story of food to elucidate the situation
of social alienation and political anxiety in Hong Kong, she offers metaphor-
ical consolation and healing through her characters in replication of Mrs.
Fongs project. It is not farfetched to describe the cooks activities as socially
performative and transformative in that they are means to establish connec-
tions with others.
It is through the visceral consumption of food that the characters commu-
nicate their feelings to others most effectively. For example, Candy plopped a
large, salted plum in her mouth as she watched her mother, unconscious from
a stroke, being pushed into the hospital on a gurney. The extreme saltiness and
tartness of the preserved plum caused her to pucker and tear. The others
watching her also empathetically cringed and salivated. Candys complicated
 The World Emporium and the Mall City 109

feelings of anxiety, guilt, and sadness are thus effectively cathected and
communicated to others in an act that transcends individual consumption.
The sensuousness of the ingestion and the tastes of food make eating a
language of the inerrable in its ability to convey complex emotions. This
episode of the salted plum is also the watershed in the story in which everyone
began to realize his or her connectedness to each other.
The process of rebuilding the family began when Candy and Yisau started
to cook together. From here on, the story also turns from the process of
consumption to the process of production. The shopping, the preparation, the
frustration and difculty of the entire enterprise of cooking the meals become
the focus. It is this process that transforms an individual from a passive and
narcissistic consumer to an active shaper of his or her condition according to
his or her desire. It is in this process of creation that one is afforded the power
to reimagine ones place within the constraints of everyday structure.
At the end of the story, communication is reestablished among the family
members. The unexpressed regrets and guilt are conveyed through their reap-
preciation of the food they partake with each other. Meals no longer are mere
obligations, but are opportunities to share individual feelings, even silent ones.
The mundane and private activities of Chans characters are ultimately
outwardly oriented and social. In this way, they are metaphorical of the perfor-
mativity and politics of everyday life. This realm of the everyday, despite its
personal location, is communicable and communal.
As an outward symbol of a particular lifestyle, trendy commodities are
readily embraced in a society like Hong Kong. The focus on objects has always
been read as an inevitability of Hong Kongs consumer culture and supercial
materialism. Though these characterizations cannot be denied, this materi-
alism is, however, also revealing of an effort to redefine a tactile world of
community and human connections amid the sense of the atrophying reality
and vacuity of contemporary life.

The Value of Transience

Chans works map the epistemological space or the structures of feeling of

Hong Kong society through recording private consumption. 41 These
consumption sites are social centers, where everyday activities and local iden-
tity fuse. They return tactile and visceral experiences and thus the contextual
reality of communities to the everyday spaces that have been made abstract by
the relentless malling of Hong Kongs city space. The effectiveness of
110 Paradigm City

narrating a local experience and a local belonging through listing of consumer

products, as in both of Chans works discussed here, and the numerous picture
books and memoirs, is that these things are auratic and steeped in history
and politics, whether they are the plastic buckets in the 1960s, used during
water shortage, or the Hong Kong diner staple, black tea with condensed milk.
As Hong Kong enters another kind of political dependency, the commodity list
Chan provides is an attempt to create a distinct Hong Kong local avor and
identity. This identity allows general participation but cannot be colonized
because the objects of everyday life, especially the gustatory, are both intensely
private and social and, as yet, outside of political determination. The food list
in Chans Taste and the list of consumer objects in Records present a kind of
checklist of Hong Kongs social membership. Rey Chow has argued that our
cultural and social identity is a sum of the objects we accumulate around us.42
Chans writings memorialize particular practices and things of the everyday life
that create a local sentiment and identication. These are visceral responses
to specic social and political conditions. Presumably, this list is immediately
meaningful to those who have lived in Hong Kong for an extended period of
time. In fact, it is likely the nuances and references in Chans works are incom-
municable to someone who has not lived in Hong Kong.
This general desire to distinguish a Hong Kong identity through taste,
possession, and consumption behavior that we see in Chans works reects a
defensiveness against the hegemonic discourse of Chinese nationalism
historic culture, traditional heritage, ethnic lineage, or national essencethe
universal, the unchanging, and the permanent qualities. Chans capturing of
the culture of ephemera in her work presents an interesting counternarrative
of Hong Kong, not written according to the conventional measure of the
historical values of things according to their timelessness, but from the lifetime
of disposable consumer objects. Everyday objects in these works are valued,
precisely, for their properties of fleetingness and limited relevance to the
particular daily rituals of a particular place and time. The focus on the
everyday invests Hong Kongs self-narration within the ephemeral and the
specically local and the locally meaningful. This restless pursuit of the new
and the eeting, ironically, diffuses the potency of the static state discourse and
its inltration into the everyday life. The interchangeability and disposability
of trendy objects make them desirable because they surpass older things and,
in turn, are replaced by newer ones. This self-destructive course of consumer
culture, subjected to the fashion and taste of the day, is its demise as well as
fundamental value.
 The World Emporium and the Mall City 111

Chans works are among a general wave of discursive efforts of the period to
displace the overdetermined narrative of 1997, which has turned Hong Kong
people and Hong Kong as a place into mere symbols of Chinese national pride.
In such overwhelming chauvinism, Hong Kong recedes into invisibility. The
focus on the everyday life and its objects is a strategy of returning signs to
material reality, and returning history to the Hong Kong people. It returns a
sense of the materiality of everydayness and community to the abstract space
in post-1997 Hong Kong.
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 five
Body Weight, Responsible Citizenship,
and Womens Social Space

We have already seen how consumption as a way of life and citizens as

consumers are complementary to Hong Kongs society and political ideology.
In this chapter, I take a closer look at the gender implication of this consumer
economy, especially through the new weight-loss and beauty industries.
What is the relationship between body weight, capitalism (state ideology),
and social space? The simple answer to this question lies in the following factoid:
In 2000, commercial airplanes consumed an extra 350 million gallons of jet fuel
because of an average ten-pound increase in the body weight of their passen-
gers. This weight increase per customer in the past decade had cost the
American airline industry in the new millennium $275 million a year.1
However, the equation between women, bodyweight, and their sense of self-
positioning in society involves complex economical and political factors. The
prolic newspaper columnist and lm critic Shek Kei pointed out that the image
of fat people in Hong Kongs media had always been a positive one before the
1980s. They were considered cheerful and happy-go-lucky souls who also
brought joy to those around them.2 One of Hong Kongs favorite comedians,
Lydia Shum (Din-Ha, 19452008), who started making movies in the 1950s as a
girl star and worked in television till her death, had been affectionately called
Fei-Fei (Fatty) and Hoi Suhm Guo (lit: happy-nutHong Kong name for
pistachios). Shum was very much a symbol of contentment in the new mille-
nium. However, perhaps because of the social and economic trials of the several
years after Hong Kongs Handover, or perhaps it was just a matter of age, Shums
image had become more matriarchal and authoritative than cheery.
Lydia Shums daughter, Joyce Cheng, who was considered chubby and cute
as a child, was, by the 2000s, regarded as a pathetically overweight teenager.

113
114 Paradigm City

Gossip columns descriptions of the indulgent but overbearing mother feeding

her daughter sharks fin, abalone, and other delicacies every morning for
breakfast, have become the stuff of Hong Kongs urban legend. At sixteen in
2003, Shums obese daughter provoked more pity than amusement. Fat people
are now no longer considered so funny, but often suffer derision as many of the
societys crises and anxiety are cathected on them. Overweight women suffer
doubly, since women are also assigned much of the burden, psychological and
actual, in maintaining the well-being of the consumer economy, as we have
seen in the last chapter. The phenomenon of Joyce Cheng, who became the
most notorious celebrity and the weight-loss industrys poster girl in 2004,
reveals the workings of this social logic. The inspiring story of Joyces weight
loss can also be read as a tale of capitalist promise transcribed onto the expe-
rience of the feminine body. In the rst section of this chapter, I will examine
the issue of womens body weight, the beauty industry, and its relationship
with Hong Kongs political and economic conditions. I will begin by exam-
ining womens physical role in the capitalist conditions. This is embodied by
the gure of Joyce, her weight issue, and the general fervor for weight loss and
aesthetic self-denition in the Hong Kong society. In the second section, I look
at other creative representations of womens body, examining in particular
the independent lm Ho Yuk (Lets Love Hong Kong, 2002), written and directed
by the female director, Yau Ching. Through this lm, I explore the issue of
womens social space in Hong Kongs economic climate.

The New Feminine Shape and the New Economic Conditions

As we have seen in chapter 1, 20022003 was a watershed year for Hong Kong
for many reasons: the unexpected deaths of four major superpop idols who
embodied Hong Kongs golden era, the SARS epidemic, the economic slump,
and the July 1 mass demonstration that defeated the reviled Article 23 (the
Antisubversion Act). One year later, on July 1 2004, there was another anniver-
sary march, reflecting Hong Kong peoples continued sense of political
disenfranchisement. Exacerbating the mood of discontent and even anger
was the perceived Beijing intervention in local democratic movements with
its summary rejection of Hong Kong peoples demand for universal suffrage,
as well as the gradually narrowing space for free speech. Within this year too,
many important ofcials of the chief executives cabinet had had to resign
under public pressure over their poor performances. Hoping to temper Hong
Kong peoples disaffection, Chinas central government in Beijing approved
 Womens Social Space 115

package after package of economic privileges for Hong Kong. The CEPA
(Closer Economic Partnership Agreement) benets Hong Kong businesses and
industries by opening up South China to investors. The loosening of indi-
vidual travel restrictions encourages massive numbers of Mainland tourists to
the city, bolstering the retail and hospitality industries left agging from the
SARS epidemic. While many attempted to maintain their political bearings
and values amid all the twists and turns in the debates and negotiations in
Hong Kong politics, the dizzying crowds of tourists, and the economic roller
coaster, the most memorable icon of these couple of years was Lydia Shum s
daughter, Joyce Cheng. The story of her struggle with body weight stood out
amid the economic, social, and political turmoil of the year. Joyces story
became a parable or an embodied articulation of some basic principles of life
in Hong Kong that caught the imagination of many.
At the end of the summer of 2003, when Hong Kong was still reeling from
its recent battle with the SARS epidemic and jubilant about the defeat of
Article 23, Joyce, weighing 103 kilos then, announced that she was going to
embark on a weightloss program with the help of Chueng Yuk-Shan, the
doyenne of Hong Kongs beauty and slimming industry.3 The media guessed
immediately that this was another advertising gimmick for Cheungs company.
Both parties, however, denied that there was any commercial transaction.
Cheung said she was merely trying to help a determined young girl to fulll her
dreams. Joyce returned to Canada at the end of her summer vacation to begin
her diet and beauty regime. Except for the occasional fuzzy snapshots captured
by paparazzi, most Hong Kong people were not privy to her progress until a
year later, in July 2004, when she returned to Hong Kong on summer vaca-
tion, to unveil her new body. Forty kilos lighter, Joyce instantaneously became
the most newsworthy celebrity, her image adorning almost every single cover
of local gossip and entertainment news magazines. It turns out that she had
been working on a book documenting her weight-loss odyssey during the
year as well. The book became the hottest selling item at the Hong Kong Book
Expothe worlds largest annual Chinese-language books expothat opened
that month. She was there to sign copies and to receive her many admiring
fans. All fteen thousand copies of the initial printing of her book were sold
out within a week of its publication.
Weight loss is a huge industry in Hong Kong. Movie and television stars
are paid tens of thousands of dollars to be spokespersons for different beauty
and tness companies. Dozens of aging movie actresses and minor starlets
have jumpstarted their moribund careers by demonstrating their miraculous
116 Paradigm City

transformation using these products. Celebrity mothers demonstrate how

one does not have to sacrice beauty and sex appeal for childbirth. Giant bill-
boards of a fty-something actress in a bikini were the talk of the town. No
amount of public warning from the medical establishment of their possible
harm to health has been able to quell the public enthusiasm for the instan-
taneous weight-loss programs. Even reports from the normally respected,
trusted, and influential Hong Kong Consumer Council on the lack of
evidence of the effectiveness of these products had been unable to dissuade
women from their belief in the efcacy of these products and regimes.
Women participate in great frenzy in the weight-loss programs whether
they are overweight or not. In fact, a study by the Hong Kong Department of
Health, the Public Health and Epidemiology Report, published in September
2004, discovered that 15.8% of the female population in Hong Kong was below
normal weight calculated according to BMI (Body Mass Index) standards.4
This means, one in every six women in Hong Kong was underweight. The situ-
ation among women between the ages of twenty and twenty-four was
particularly serious with 38% of these women underweight. Among these
underweight women, only 12.1% acknowledged their weight problem, while
66.7% of them did not think of themselves as underweight at all.
Of course, even without the Handover of Hong Kong to China, the body-
beauty industry would still boom and excite; but this driving, almost
masochistic fervor to alter oneself is especially, if not completely, a postmil-
lennial phenomenon. These public body spectacles of physical transformation
and all the stories that come with this experience capture the imagination of
many women in Hong Kong because they embody fantasies, conscious or
unconscious, of how unfullled potentials and unexpressed desires, buried just
below the surface, are awaiting to be uncovered.
The marketing of weight-loss products is often through a particular
celebrity icon whose very person embodies a story. Infomercials incorporate
personal testimonies of participants of weight-loss programs, their struggles
with weight, their problems in life brought about by their weight, and their
new lives after their physical transformation. The failure to govern the body is
related directly to failures in life, from professional to romantic, these usually
being conated. In this sense, the beauty industry is, in reality, not just selling
a beauty product, but a complete life plot as well. Joyces weight-loss diary ts
directly into this strategy of marketing of personal stories. It is not just about
losing weight, but life transformation, of how a heavy or unsuccessful and
unhappy woman nally reveals to the world her true glory and unrecognized
 Womens Social Space 117

potential, to be publicly adored. Joyces celebration by so many people who

vicariously shared her success, turning from duckling to swan, shows that
what is important is not merely the number of kilos she lost or how, but the
story of triumph over adversity through hard work. Through her, the founda-
tional myth of Hong Kong has once again been proven true (fig. 5.1.
Weight-loss mania).
The reliance on celebrity narratives or personalities to inspire lifestyle
consumerism, such as the Joyce phenomenon, creates a curious kind of collec-
tivity. Joyces weight-loss saga created a following of fans.5 Many different
beauty and tness companies depend on fan effects surrounding the celebrity
spokespersons to generate attention and excitement for the products.
According to William Kelly, fans activities are a kind of agitated consump-
tion.6 The peculiarity of this kind of consumption is that it involves
performance or production. There is no passive consumer. The weight-loss
groups, at least those organized through the infomercials, like fan clubs, create
a community of shared concern and commitment.7 Those who watch the
weight-loss infomercials or pursue Joyces story are not unaware of the arti-

Fig. 5.1: Weight-loss mania

A stall at the Hong Kong products expo in 2004 advertising with Joyce Cheng as the
poster girl, modeling her new body.
118 Paradigm City

cially constructed or induced camaraderie. Ironically, as Daniel Miller points

out, in fan culture, to be a consumer is to possess consciousness that one is
living through objects and images not of ones creation. That is to say, the
belief that thinness and beauty are the solution to all ones problems is what
consumers consciously and deliberately buy into despite their awareness of its
fallacy. Borrowing Millers logic, one might explain that [c]onsumption then
may not be about choice, but rather the sense that we have no choice.8
However the lack of choice is understood in Hong Kong, whether it is the
loss of autonomy as individuals are thrust along the inevitable trajectory of
history, or the lack of individual political power in the increasingly constricting
civil space, it is compensated by a rigorous culture of consumption as a way of
exercising individual choices. As seen in the idea of shopping out of love after
SARS in the last chapter, there is a social ethos that political impotence is easier
to accept if the economy is vibrant, and exercising consumer choices are a way
of, if not changing, at least dening the social or cultural landscape.9
In a survey conducted among two thousand women by the Hong Kong
YWCA in 2004, women between the ages of thirty and fty-four gave themselves
an average 6.4 points out of 10 in the assessment of their physical shape. Most
of these women had a BMI between 21.23 and 22.43, well within the normal
BMI of 18.5 to 22.9. Among these two thousand women interviewed, about
20% had used various diet drugs and 36% of them had tried losing weight. On
average, these women spent 18.4% of their monthly income or HKD1212.4
(about USD155) on beauty products, including HKD345.3 (about USD45) on
weight-loss products and HKD867.1 (about USD105) on facial products.10
Special spas and clinics provide services for body contouring, body-fat elim-
ination, breast enlargement, and detoxication of the body system through
nonsurgical procedures. They also treat various complexion problems.
Laser beams of different velocity promise to erase age spots, freckles, and wrin-
kles. Chemical peel and dermabrasion procedures correct skin dullness,
eliminate blemishes, and lighten skin tone. Numerous over-the-counter
supplements and tonics in pharmacies promise slimness and youthfulness.
There are pills and creams for breast enlargement, cellulite elimination, and
purging of water retention. Cosmetic companies push their various creams
and powders to control skin oil and sweat, brighten dark circles under eyes,
bring rosy-ness to sallow cheeks and lift sagging and wrinkled skin. Hair-
product companies draw womens attention to their thin hair, flakiness,
dullness, tangling, and graying. Women are accosted multiple times everyday
about their physical aws by the relentless and deafening sales pitches around
 Womens Social Space 119

the city, blaring or ashing on the mass media, on billboards, on neon signs,
and plasma screens everywhere.11 Not one thing about a womans natural body
is good or beautiful or even acceptable without some medical or chemical
intervention. Nowhere is the direct relationship between the violence of capi-
talist strategies and its claim on womens bodies more apparent than this
hysteria over the state of womens appearance in the city.
This is not to suggest that capitalisms assault on Hong Kong women was a
new phenomenon. At the height of Hong Kongs societal afuence in the late
1980s to the mid-1990s, most of the interest in womens appearance seemed
to be focused on the accumulation of brandname apparels and accessories.
Owning brandname items was a class assertion. In the new era, through tech-
nology, one can alter ones physical form and change what one would have, at
one point, considered inevitable conditions or processes of nature. Perhaps
one could even claim that there is a new democratization of beauty.
However, this democratization is concurrently bound to the commodity
culture and the market economy that condition individual desires and affects
toward ones body. Joyces body is disciplined according to an aesthetic ideal
largely promoted by the forces of the beauty industry. In other words, this
notion of correct physicality is very much a creation of capitalist aesthetics.
The citizens are made over according to the terms of market ideal. This
market-ideal becomes a symbolic law that regulates consumer consciousness
and behavior, turning them into ideal consumer-citizens.
The success of the beauty industry in Hong Kong creates a signicant tool
for regulating bodies and disciplining womens habits and behavior. Through
these chemical mediations, the female body is shaped according to a market
standard and the social demands of capitalism.

Shaping up Citizens

In the previous chapter, I argue that there is a direct equation between being a
good Hong Kong citizen and being a good consumer, since consumption is
more than individual participation, but is a state project of survival.12 As the
I love Hong Kong shopping campaign shows, so intricate is the link between
individuals daily life and the economic system that ones action has private as
well as public implications and ones citizenship shifts between ones private
and public roles. As a civic duty, it might be said that consumption has come
under careful state directives. If the Beijing Central Government has so far
been unable to inspire nationalistic sentiments in Hong Kong, the cultivation
120 Paradigm City

of shared social values and codes among people through consumption is an

important by-product of the consumer economy. As Canclini argues,
commodities and consumption [serve] to give political order to each society.
Consumption is a process in which desires are converted into demands and
socially regulated acts.13
In Hong Kong, consumption as a collective project toward prosperity
creates a collective identity as it promises the continuing status of Hong Kong
as a cosmopolitan and international city. While commodities sustain the
biological and symbolic needs of the people, the marketplace is where socio-
cultural interactions take place, providing a context where people might
encounter one another.14 Insofar as symbolic, juridical, and political decisions
organize consumption in Hong Kong and insofar as consumption intersects
the public and the private in everyday life, consumption is the foundation of
citizenship.
If Nelson is correct in her study of consumer culture in South Korea,
arguing that consumer practices and consumer images have become distinctly
gendered, and these gendered images feed back into the denition and alloca-
tion of social and political roles and responsibility,15 the questions here are
what role do Hong Kong women play in this new economy and how are they
gendered in this new economy based on luxury consumption?
It would not be far off the mark to claim that Hong Kong women lead the
consumer market in Hong Kong and internationally. Hong Kong womens
importance in the consumer economy lies, not only in their consumption
power, but also in their role as trendsetters and vanguards of markets, leading
consumption habits in East and South East Asia and particularly in China
and among the large Asian diasporic communities in North America. They
thus have an important function in facilitating the opening up of markets.
This has a lot to do with the powerful inuence of Hong Kongs entertain-
ment industry in these regions. Many products are tried out and established
in Hong Kong before their launch in South East Asia and Mainland China.
The recent weight-loss and beauty fervor, for example, has spread to the
coastal cities of China from Hong Kong. Many Hong Kong businesses are
opening branches of their spas and treatment centers in China. This is the
reason why, as I mentioned in the previous chapter, major international
fashion houses set up headquarters in Hong Kong for their long-range devel-
opment in Asia. From this perspective, Hong Kong, womens contribution to
market development and the economy of Hong Kong as well as worldwide,
is remarkable.
 Womens Social Space 121

However, because of this crucial role in the consumer economy, it is also

necessary that Hong Kong women, whatever their achievements, maintain
appropriate, market-approved feminine images and habits. That is, women
have to look feminine and want to look feminine so that they consume
according to their designation, so that they can support the mainstream
market. This creates a strictly dimorphic and heterosexual culture in which
women look and behave a certain way and men, another. This behavioral
conditioning according to a heterosexual norm renders invisible certain
groups, especially the lesbian population. (I will return to this issue in the
second half of the chapter.)
The popular image of the female citizen of Hong Kong generated through
various commercial and government venues is ubiquitously that of a middle-
or upper-middle class professional woman somewhere in her thirties. She is
ferociously achieving and exceedingly discerning. In the immensely popular
1999 movie Needing You, directed by Johnny To and Wai Ka-Fai, a simple ofce
romance with a typical Pygmalion twist, for example, a midlevel OL16 in her
late twenties or early thirties, who had been dumped by her boyfriend and over-
looked by other men because of her shyness and physical awkwardness, is
made over by her playboy boss. He falls in love with his project after uncov-
ering her inherent loveliness. After much misunderstanding and missed
opportunities, they nally end up together. Before the discovery of her potential
sexual power, the heroine embodies a stereotype of Hong Kong women
professional, highly trained, efcient, nancially independent, overly sober,
serious and lacking in sexual desirability. Despite the happy ending, the lm
presents a rather condescending view of Hong Kong women. However, judging
by the box ofce success of this lm and its popularity among woman viewers,
it probably captures a degree of reality in Hong Kong womens self-perception.
The image of Hong Kong women as capable, professional, and economically
powerful is corroborated by social gures. While many sociologists have noted
that women are usually more vulnerable in terms of their employment oppor-
tunities during economic downturns, this situation is the reverse in Hong
Kong.17 In a 2004 Hong Kong census publication on gender issues, it is
reported that at the height of Hong Kongs economic troubles in 2003, while
the male unemployment rate rose to an all-time high of 9.35%, womens was
6.2%. While male self-employment figures dropped 6%, the number of
women entrepreneurs rose 2% from the previous year to 8.2% (28,500
persons). On average, women professionals were paid the same salaries as their
male counterparts. Though the number of female full-time homemakers still
122 Paradigm City

reigned high with 67,550 persons, the number of male full-time homemakers
rose 25% from 2002, from 9700 to 12,200 persons. This was out of a population
of about 6.7 million. 18
There was also an increase in university enrollment among women in 2003.
Woman students made up 55.1% of the total university student body. Over
70% of the students of the humanities departments were women. However,
even in professional schools and science programs, such as medical, dental, and
physician assistants, woman students made up 63.3% of the total student body.
In the sciences, which had always boasted a male majority, the percentage of
male students dropped from 65% in 1996 to 61% in 2003.19 All these gures
might indicate an adjustment or disturbance in the gender power balance in
favor of women by the end of the rst millennium.
However, if the statistics were accurate representations of reality, womens
social ascension in this period also corresponded with Hong Kong women, as
a collective body, gradually losing their previous feminine desirability, that is,
their status as women. In other words, the lm Needing You was quite on the
mark in its representation of the societal view of professional women. In
2003, there were only 939 men to every thousand women in Hong Kong. It is
expected that by 2033, for every thousand women in Hong Kong, there will
only be 698 men.20 This situation of gender disproportion is aggravated by
the fact that the majority of migrant laborers in Hong Kong are women. In
the state of such unfavorable gender ratio, what is more troubling for many
Hong Kong women is the perceived competition from their Mainland coun-
terparts. Their endangered position, as popularly perceived, is captured in
Chan Kwun-Chungs novella Nothing Ever Happened (1999).21 The narrator,
an arrogant but successful Hong Kong businessman, makes a comparison
between Hong Kong and Mainland women:

I was pleasantly surprised by this kind of Mainland women. They are truly
determined and able to hold up half the sky in China. They are open,
adaptive, and fearless and will actively pursue their happiness. They have
long ago broken the stereotype of women. This is the stage to which Main-
land women have been able to progress. Pity the Hong Kong women who are
still lost in their dreams. Hong Kong women are independent and have
their own opinions about things. They are straightforward in speech. They
give all at work. They are androgynous. They are trendy in appearance, but
when it comes to sex, they are very conservative. Many probably lack proper
sexual nourishment for long stretches of time. They retain idealism about
 Womens Social Space 123

men. They fantasize about men being faithful to them. They are intolerant
of men having more than one sexual partner at a time. Thats why Hong
Kong women are destined to be disappointed. They are destined to lack
competitiveness.22

Hundreds of thousands of Hong Kong married men have established

secondary households or extramarital domestic alliances in China. By 1997, it
was estimated that 300,000 men (especially working-class men) have such
secondary households in China.23 In 2003, 17,686 Hong Kong men married
women from Mainland China, constituting 45% of the total number of Hong
Kong men getting married that year. 24 In an interview, Mr. Wong, one of
these men who met his wife in China, said that Hong Kong women were great,
but their demands and expectations of daily life were very high, creating
immense pressure for men. In contrast, Mainland women were simpler.25
Competition with Mainland women is alluded to as a factor of Hong Kong
womens lack of suitors. Carolyn Cartier pointed out that the stereotypical
Mainland woman had already been considered an immense threat to family
organization and much resented by Hong Kong (and Taiwan) women.26 The
fact that there is an annual inux of Mainland women to Hong Kong on visi-
tors visas or illegally to work as prostitutes does not help their image among
Hong Kong women as their sexual rivals. (In 2004, 15,727 Mainland women
who went to Hong Kong either through visitor visas or illegally were appre-
hended and deported for prostitution.)27
The gain in importance in the public and economic arena means for Hong
Kong women a corresponding loss of sexual power, expressed more directly as
a loss of domestic, or even feminine, status as women. The effect of the census
gures is less celebratory of the achievement of women than threatening and
disciplining.
The same census document that celebrates the entrepreneurial achieve-
ments of women also contains negative information about Hong Kong
womens low reproductive rate and decreasing chances of marriage. According
to the Hong Kong Census Bureau gures, Hong Kongs birth rate is 925 per
ten thousand woman of childbearing age in 2003, the lowest among the
advanced capitalist nations, including Japan, England, and the United States,
with their respective gures of 1,320, 1,670, and 2,080 per ten thousand. Maria
Milagros Lpez argues that there is an undeniable connection between repro-
duction in women and womens economic performance in a capitalist
economy. She points out that in the politics of reproduction the constraint in
124 Paradigm City

childbearing among women could be read as an internalization of the capitalist

strategy of permanent job readiness, whether spatially or temporally.28
Hong Kong women are caught in a strong social ambivalence toward their
high economic productivity and low reproductive capability. They are both
necessary and resented. Regardless of what the actual causes are for womens
low incentive to bear children in Hong Kong, it is socially understood, as
evidenced in how this gure is reported in Ming Pao Daily, one of Hong Kongs
most respected newspapers, as an indicator of the undesirability of Hong Kong
women as spouses and mothers. The more economically productive they are,
the more irrelevant they are as women. In fact, all the maternal chores and
customary work of a wife are often loaded upon the less educated and less
skilled new immigrant women from Mainland China who go to Hong Kong
via marriage visas, or outsourced to nannies and domestic workers, as even
sex is outsourced to women from China, Thailand, and other poorer nations
who survive as sex workers in Hong Kong. In other words, Hong Kong women
have become dispensable as women, dened according to very crude social
measures of womanhood. Bodily perfection as a new social demand on
women preys on their vulnerability as women. As they lose hold of the
domestic realm, that traditional province of womanhood, women look for
other ways to reassert their femininity.
The fact that more and more Hong Kong men are nding domestic and
sexual solace among foreign women is a complex issue. It speaks to the by and
large still signicant economic difference between Hong Kong women and
Mainland women. Even in their most selfish perspectives, no Hong Kong
woman can ignore many of these Mainland womens extremely compromised
and exploited conditions as companions, or worse, as prostitutes in Hong
Kong. Even as legal wives, because these marriages are often out of economic
and other pragmatic considerations rather than romantic compulsions, these
women are particularly vulnerable to abuses by their husbands.29
The deliberate body modication of Hong Kong women directly relates to
the anxiety of Hong Kong women over sexual or feminine desirability. This
relies on the constructed difference between them and other women, econom-
ically, culturally and aesthetically. Hong Kong women have to be more of
everything than their Mainland counterpartsmore fashionable, more profes-
sional, more educated, wealthier, prettier, slimmer, and so forth. To be thin
means to be wanted, not so much desired as a sexual object, but in demand as
a successful professional. It means being busy, occupied, wealthy, and hence,
wanted. Whereas being fat is everything opposite. Of course, this kind of
 Womens Social Space 125

application of moral values on body weight and physical aesthetics is nothing

new. However, in Hong Kong, this kind of judgment of and by women of
themselves is also fueled by a need to differentiate themselves aesthetically, that
is, culturally and economically, from Mainland women. To be extremely thin
is to give up on sensuality and sensuousness and all the values associated with
it, such as slothfulness, coarseness, and sexual promiscuity that are often asso-
ciated with Mainland women.

Citizen Joyce

There is a parallel between the situation of Hong Kong women in regard to

Mainland women, and the situation of Hong Kong vis--vis Mainland cities.
As many Chinese cities have developed rapidly in the last decade, especially
Shanghai and those of the Pearl River Delta, which are now the targeted zones
for development, Hong Kongs position and international status as the most
important city in southern China are slowly being eroded. This resulted in
Hong Kongs desperate attempt to revive its tourist industry and to develop
ever faster, more efcient and newer infrastructure and facilities to make it
more attractive and competitive as a city.30 This often meant correspondingly
reducing resources in other public services. Already, after the 1997 Asian
economic crisis, as in many other Asian nations, Hong Kongs government
attempted to impose a strict structural adjustment program, which called for
the rolling back of government services, reduction of the number of civil
servants, raises in public service fees, and cutbacks in welfare.
Metaphorically, at least, the much-streamlined female population in Hong
Kong was aesthetically in line with the HKSAR governments new leaner and
meaner public programs. As such, women and womens bodies are deeply, if
subconsciously, in correspondence with the economic and political reality of
Hong Kong. It is for this reason that Joyces weight-loss miracle fueled citywide
attention. This story is a familiar personal tale made public.
Joyces weight problem was frequently assumed in the press to be a result of
her childhood unhappiness as the offspring of divorced television celebrities.
She grew up with an overbearing mother who compensated for her daughters
loss of a father with extraordinary material indulgence. Her miraculous
seventy-pound weight loss is regarded as an impressive act of determination
and willpower unusual in a young woman. Joyces story resonated with the
collective experience in Hong Kong, constructed or real. The metaphoric
representation of Hong Kong as an offspring of powerful but, nally, divorced
126 Paradigm City

parentsChina and Britainis trite but persistent.31 In this narrative, just as

Joyce had been bloated on rich food and delicacies, Hong Kong grew up under
the domineering inuence of an oversized mother China after the gradual
withdrawal of the father figure (Great Britain) and develops all kinds of
complexes about its identity while reveling in its material abundance. The fact
that Joyces story had a good ending, which corresponded to the rebound of
Hong Kongs economy, made her an even more popular icon.
However, paralleling so well with Hong Kongs economic situation, Joyces
story had a cathartic effect for Hong Kong people, which was an unexpected
boon for the state ideology machine. Beauty and femininity are often totally
antipathetic to politics. The beautiful body is often the apolitical body. Joyces
phenomenon that illustrates the hysteria over fatness and the general xa-
tion on the body also reveals how political discontent had been redirected
to individual dissatisfaction with the self. Womens bodies act as lters that
separate out political desire from daily desire. Women thus absorb a lot of
the social resentment with their bodies. In other words, the discipline of
Joyce in her weight-loss program is part of the biopolitics in the capitalist
ideology of Hong Kong society.
If Joyce is a symbol of Hong Kong, her new silhouette reects the post-
1997, neoliberal city and the triumph of the free-market economy. This
triumph of the market over consumers rights can be seen in the diminishing
authority of the once all-powerful Hong Kong Consumer Council. What was
most talked about in Joyces experience were not the usual celebrity para-
phernalia such as fancy fashion, personal charisma, style, unusual beauty, or
talent. It was the narrative of weight loss enhanced by her family melodrama.
The most significant part of this saga is that, at the success of Joyces
makeover, she regained her fathers approval and attention. She appeared on
television with both her divorced parents together, as a family. It was reported
that her father had proudly reclaimed his estranged daughter, praising her
beauty and achievement publicly; the mother moved into the background,
admitting her overindulgence and pledging her support for her daughters
continued struggle with her weight. One can read innite meaning into the
drama of this most famous family of the season. As a political metaphor, the
retreating mother and the increasingly prominent father, parallel the
declining inuence of the pro-China political faction in Hong Kong and the
return of the old British-trained bureaucrats, as superficially reflected in
the resignation of Tung Chee Hwa and the naming of the new CE, Donald
Tsang. However, most importantly, Joyces story illustrates the restoration of
 Womens Social Space 127

normativity on all levelsaesthetic ideal, heterosexual family ideal, and ulti-

mately, paternal authority.
The new prosperity had been literally generated and shaped through
womens bodies, revealing the importance of women in Hong Kong society
and their succumbing to patriarchal norms and social roles, just as Hong Kong
as a city succumbs to the logic of the monolith of Chinese political ideology.
Embedded in the fans embrace of Joyce is womens contradictory celebration
of their economic power and lament for the physical exaction of success. This
sacrifice is equivalent to the cost of the citys body politic in its quest for
stability and prosperity.

Womens Social Space

In the primacy of capitalist transactions in the daily life in Hong Kong, where
is womens social space, especially when they are increasingly marginalized in
the domestic sphere? How do they deal with the assault on their physical beings
under the aesthetic criteria of capitalist consumerism? At the turn of the new
millennium, there are a number of oral histories or collected writings of and
by women of different age groups to document their daily lives, sexuality, and
aspirations.32 The increased interest in ordinary women is a subtle indication
of an unvoiced crisis of womanhood. Yau Chings Ho Yuk (English title: Lets
Love Hong Kong), which literally means, restless, is a lmic expression of this
sense of crisis of femaleness in Hong Kong. As we have seen, there is a deep
connection between capitalist economic strategies and the market claims on
womens bodies, whether it is for work readiness or to reflect capitalist
aesthetics. Womens bodies are medically, chemically and surgically condi-
tioned in this feverish trend of body altering. Hong Kong women seem to have
internalized the global economic trend for a streamlined government. In
these terms, thinness is an embodied statement of the obedience of the female
citizens. Those who attempt to escape the capitalistic disciplinary force elds,
such as the protagonists of the lm Ho Yuk, are ostracized and alienated. This
lm is regarded as Hong Kongs rst lesbian feature lm, because the three
main characters, Chan Kwokchan, Zero, and Nicole, are lesbians or express
attraction to other female bodies.
Lesbians are considered deviants in Hong Kong societys heterosexual
reproductive normativity. If, as we have seen, heterosexual women have liter-
ally been carved to t into a tightly pregured social space, this issue of space
is magnied for lesbians. Unlike gay men, who, for better or worse, have been
128 Paradigm City

subjects of numerous lms or literary works, lesbians are invisible in Hong

Kong. However, this condition of invisibility, though much more exaggerated,
is not dissimilar in form to that of the childless, unmarried women or women
whose domestic roles have been outsourced. These women are a nonexistent
social group, no matter what their economic contribution to Hong Kong,
because they have no specic role within the heterosexual domestic domain.
They have economic power without social space. They cannot be articulated
through traditional domestic discourse and are, therefore, homeless. Seen in
this way, lesbians are female hyperboles. Not to diminish its importance as a
lm about lesbian issues, Ho Yuk, with its exaggerated descriptions of social
conditions and the lesbian protagonists, is also a lm about the situation of
Hong Kong women in general, but amplied.
Situated in an unspecied near future when real employment and housing
become impossibilities, Ho Yuk presents a dark and pessimistic projection of
post-1997 Hong Kong. The city, as opposed to the usual representation as a
gleaming, ultramodern metropolis, is depicted as dilapidated, gloomy, and
bizarre. Of the characters, Chan Kwokchan functions as a fulcrum that animates
the other two, Zero and Nicole. Kwokchan (Guocan), whose name literally
means [Chinese] national product, is a model for an erotic website. She strikes
provocative poses and masquerades in wigs, hats, and suggestive feminine
costumes. Her work identity is so covert that not even her mother knows what
she does. Kwokchan and her parents live in a tiny government one-room at
where there is absolutely no privacy and no personal space. Despite her colorful
virtual appearances on the web, which are playful and provocative, in reality she
is wan, melancholic, and withdrawn.
In real life, Kwokchan is also androgynous in appearance: Her hair is short
like a mans and she wears clothes that totally disguise her female body. It is
ironic that Kwokchan should become an erotic icon. She leads a very schizo-
phrenic life. Though her existence in the mainstream society is invisible,
clandestine, and removed from others, it is her sensuality and sexuality that
connect her, esh and body, to others, albeit virtually. In this alternate reality,
Kwokchan is amboyant, multifaceted, and welcoming. She is as palpable in
this medium as she is ungraspable in real life; her virtual existence is as expan-
sive as her real life is limited. Her two personalities, the physical and the
virtual, are irreconcilable. These two levels of simultaneous existence
confound the other two women, Nicole and Zero, who are attracted to her
image, either on the Internet or in person.
 Womens Social Space 129

The political metaphors surrounding Kwokchan in this lm are elaborate.

Kwokchan, as her name implies, is a melancholic representation of a Hong Kong
person who lives with the burden of the nation. By the mere fact that she lives
in Hong Kong, she is expected to embrace a certain Chinese identity when
nowhere in her life is this identity relevant, except, ironically, when she puts on
her China doll lingerie and wig for her website masquerade. One feels the
oppressiveness of this burden as Kwokchan carries herself wearily and cheer-
lessly through her daily routine. Her only hobby is to view apartments listed for
sale, looking for the dream home that she will probably never be able to afford
to own. If her mother, an overweight and somewhat coarse and domestically
inclined woman, is the metaphorical motherland, Kwokchan is totally discon-
nected from her. Her father, the metaphorical England, is barely present in the
lm (shades of Joyce). Kwokchan ts uneasily into the inherited world of her
parents.
Kwokchans mother, a fat, sensuous woman, is constantly preparing and
eating food. Though obviously she cares about Kwokchan, she does not seem
to have any sense of her daughter at all. Kwokchans father, whose presence in
the lm is barely more than an inarticulate, lumbering animal in the at, seems
totally detached from her, as she is to him. In fact, though not hostile to each
other, they barely notice each other at all. The huddle of a at that they share
together is no more than a place where Kwokchan sleeps restlessly at night,
occupying a bed space on the upper level of a bunk bed.
If Kwokchans mother is the archetypical housewife, Kwokchan is exactly her
opposite. While the mother is rigorous and substantial and comfortably
ensconced in her domestic environment, Kwokchan is wraithlike, withdrawn,
and is ill at ease at home. Kwokchan notices and compares her mothers snug-
ness in her space with her own discomfort. At one point in the lm, she watched
admiringly the way her mother ate her food with sensual relish, but when her
mother offered her some, Kwokchan had no appetite. Unlike her mothers
robustness, Kwokchan constantly complains of a headache or lack of appetite.
Her mothers world is grounded and completely limited to the little at, espe-
cially the kitchen where she is constantly preparing food. However, Kwokchans
world is outside where she roams restlessly like a spirit in search of nal peace.
We never see Kwokchan relaxing at home. We never even see her sitting down
at home. She complains to her mother that the world seems to move nonstop
around her, perhaps implying her frustration at being unable to nd a foothold
in this fast-paced world that is always eluding her.
130 Paradigm City

Kwokchans desire to be home can be seen in many ways. Her mother,

obviously noticing her daughters pallor and unease at home, tried to anchor
her down with substantial domestic tasks. She tried to teach Kwokchan how
to make radish cakes, explaining that this was a traditional dish that Kwokchan
should know how to make, implying Kwokchans inherent domestic role and
even national responsibility in procreation and continuation of the family. She
took Kwokchans hands and immersed them into the massive bowl of sticky
mixture, teaching her how to grab, knead, feel the texture, and work the dough.
The sensuality of handling the dough reects the mothers substantial immer-
sion in life. However, despite having her hands held by her mother as they
mixed the dough together, Kwokchan appeared forced and distracted.
Kwokchan does not necessarily resist such domesticity. In fact she admires
her mothers dedication to it and feels sad that she cannot participate fully in
it. In one of the nal scenes of the movie, Kwokchan climbs down from the
bunk bed that she shares with her mother to lie down next to her. By taking
hold of the voluminousness of her mother, Kwokchan hopes to embrace life
fully and physically. Her unhappiness changes to contentment as she cuddles
with her mother, revealing her yearning to embrace fully the corporeality of
this life.
One of the characters attracted to Kwokchans virtual performance is
Nicole, a successful executive who lives alone in a large empty house furnished
with multiple television and computer screens. Nicole spends a lot of time in
a pub where she has supercial conversations with a few gay male friends and
expatriates. At home, she spends her time accessing Kwokchans pornographic
websites and masturbating to her image. At the end of the lm, she encounters
the real Kwokchan on the street, who, typically, ignores her approaches.
Zero, the third character is on the opposite end of the social spectrum from
Nicole. She squats in an abandoned cinema, occupying one of the seats there
with many others. She literally lives shoulder-to-shoulder with her neighbors
in the theater, climbing over many people to get to her seat every night. Never-
theless, crowdedness and proximity among people do not translate to real
relationship and intimacy, which seems only to exist in the virtual reality or
imagination. Zero spies Kwokchans image on her neighbors computer screen.
Before this discovery of Kwokchans work identity, she had met her by chance
while working as a real estate agent, showing an apartment to a client, while
Kwokchan was being shown the same apartment by another agent. After the
initial meeting, intrigued by her, Zero started following her.
 Womens Social Space 131

For whatever reason, political, social, or biological, these three characters

have chosen not to participate in Hong Kongs mainstream heterosexual social
organization. Zeros homelessness, Kwokchans lack of personal space, and
Nicoles unease in her house (to the point of hiring a Feng Shui master to
evaluate her space), all articulate the condition of being out of place for
unconventional women in Hong Kongs society. They weave in and out of
the society silently and unnoticeably. None of the three women in the lm
leaves any mark in the world around them. Their clandestine identity, the
secret life, the uneasiness and homelessness describe the situation of lesbian life
in Hong Kong. The intense loneliness of all three characters dominates the
atmosphere of the entire lm.
The irony of the consumer economy, as we have seen in the previous
section, is that women disguise themselves according to a particular norm of
femininity in order to be seen. It is only when she is also recognized socially as
a woman that she becomes of value in this economy. This is most exemplied
by Kwokchans situation. The virtual version of herself in her work life relies
totally on her physical charms and sensuality. She is a commodity in Hong
Kongs marketplace where her value is determined by her ability to masquerade
the feminine.
Kwokchan does have a sensuous side and a sexual life. She regularly seeks
the services of a sex worker. However, despite their genuine affection for each
other, Kwokchan insists on paying her even when the woman tries to refuse
payment. Their relationship can never be normalized; it can never go beyond
the hotel rooms. However, by insisting on paying for sexual service, Kwokchan
regularizes her own relationship with the world. She turns from being a sex
commodity to becoming a consumer. Instead of being an object of other
peoples fantasy, she attains subject status by owning a fantasy. This is probably
the reason why she resists Zero and Nicoles approaches. To give in to them is
to return to her role as an object. While as a lesbian or a virtual erotic model
her existence has no weight and reality, Kwokchans act of sexual consump-
tion substantiates her being.
In this way, we can also understand Nicoles need to be a sex consumer by
her constantly accessing Kwokchans image on the website. Nicole is a Chinese
from abroad settling in Hong Kong for her work. She is equally uent speaking
to her friends in English or speaking to a Feng Shui master in a northern
Chinese dialect, but not Cantonese that is commonly spoken in Hong Kong.
Nicoles success in the business world does not bring her social acceptance.
Suspended in different pasts and cultures, she seems to have trouble settling
132 Paradigm City

comfortably into the Hong Kong society. Not being able to immerse herself
into the everyday life of the city, she surrounds herself in her empty house with
images of artificial intimacy brought to her through multiple screens and
monitors.
As an act of consumption, Nicole exerts utmost control over her choice of
goods. Her masturbation also afrms her own substantiality and corporeality
in a society that does not love or even notice lesbians and other unmarried
women. The Feng Shui master Nicole hires to evaluate her space tells her
that the numerous monitors in the living room affect the chi of her place.
Through their conversation, they discover that they have family from the
same part of China and can speak the same dialect. Like Kwokchans mother
who extends a family embrace to Kwokchan through teaching her how to
cook a traditional dish, the Feng Shui master attempts to bridge Nicoles
detachment from society through afrming their common ancestral roots,
without knowing that familial order is precisely that which alienates both
Nicole and Kwokchan from society.
Nicoles vicarious living through the virtual images reected on her moni-
tors and screens compensates for her lack of real relationships beyond a few
equally alienated drinking friends at the pub and her business associates.
Because of her sense of disconnectedness from mainstream society, her house
is not a home and is not the space where she feels comfortable. It is only a vessel
for her fantasies when she spends her time in pursuit of a virtual life. At the end
of the movie, when she chances upon Kwokchan on the street, she tries to recon-
cile her dichotomized world by making the real Kwokchan correspond to her
virtual idol. By refusing her advance, Kwokchan denies Nicole a way home.
In contrast to Nicoles brooding alienation, Zero is a happy-go-lucky young
woman who engages in a series of odd jobs in the lm. Zero owns nothing, but
what she carries on her back in a backpack. She has no obvious family or
friends or any kind of human bonds and leads a starkly existential life. Every
evening, she returns home to her seat in an abandoned cinema to read her
mail, go through her few personal effects, and read the newspaper for new
jobs for the following day. There seem to be a few dogs and cats she feeds when
she comes home to the cinema. One is not sure whether these are her pets
or are merely fellow lodgers there. Zero develops a fascination for Kwokchan
and follows her around. However, her most concrete moments with Kwokchan
are always when they pass each other, each on their way to somewhere else. As
a real estate agent, Zero passes through spaces that will eventually become
someone elses homes. She changes jobs all the time and is constantly in transit.
 Womens Social Space 133

In her different jobs, she facilitates exchanges of commodities from one side
to another. She chases after a cipher of a woman whose most physical and
expressive moments are virtual. Zero owns nothing, while things and people
ow by or through her without stopping.
Like the others, Zero is rejected by society. Her situation seems the direst
among the three. Her living condition is appalling. She is completely alone and,
not having any stable employment, her livelihood is precarious. However,
among the three, Zero is paradoxically, the least affected by her lack of home or
security and most able to retain some sense of equanimity. The scene in which
Zero rst meets Kwokchan illustrates the difference between them. When they
meet in an apartment being shown to prospective buyers, Zero is acting as a real
estate agent for someone while Kwokchan is the client of another agent. Their
opposite attitudes toward life are clearly displayed in their respective alignment
in this transaction. Kwokchan needs to derive her subjectivity from ownership.
Just as she insists on paying the prostitute as an assertion of her power to
possess, she desires to own her home. However, as she stands on the verandah
of the apartment, watching the pedestrians hurrying by below, her detachment
from the world around her, her inability to own a space, and ultimately her
inability to gain a foothold in this world become all too apparent.
Zero, however, asserts her subjecthood through her actions. She participates
in the economic and social transactions around her not through what she owns
and what she has to sell but as an agent. Though not any more accepted by the
society, she nevertheless keeps apace with it. She goes out on the verandah to
check out Kwokchan and tries to engage her. She stands next to Kwokchan to
look at the trafc below, but in the next scene we see her walking in the streets,
immersed in life below as Kwokchan remains above, looking on. Zero is never
a bystander; though not often successful, she initiates action. She is constantly
on the move, constantly looking for the next job, whether it is selling real estate
or erotic paraphernalia. She moves goods around and is the agent of sales.
She is the ho yuk character in the lmconstantly moving about or circu-
lating things. Though without job security or real social success, she also does
not become a commodity or an object of fantasy. Unlike Nicole, she was
attracted to Kwokchan before discovering Kwokchans erotic avatar. She is
attracted to Kwokchans real, corporeal self, though she is also later intrigued
if saddened by the images she discovers on the computer screen. More than
Kwokchan, who is the source of illusion, Zero has a grasp of what is real and
what is fantasy, and is able to reconcile the invisible reality with the supercial
imagistic existence of their world.
134 Paradigm City

The character, Zero, is an important demonstration of how one overcomes

Hong Kongs coercive and punishing urban conditions. Of the three characters
in the lm, we are most privy to aspects of Zeros daily life. We see the oppres-
siveness and the shabbiness of her living space, but we also see how in her
continual movement she makes irrelevant the concern over spatial restrictions.
We see her lonesomenesswithout home and without family. However, we also
see how she refuses to accept her ostracism. By feeding and caring for stray
animals, she demonstrates clearly her difference from pitiful abandoned
animals. She is not a victim of society because she takes care of its victims. Her
assertion of subjectivity and control over her situation is nowhere clearer than
this subtle act of kindness in the lm. She is also the only one among the three
characters who is willing to initiate communication with anyone, whether a
potential customer or someone she likes, like Kwokchan.
Zero makes her way through life with a lightness that eludes Kwokchan and
Nicole. She seems to be happy with very little and seems happy to do anything
to make a living. She is able to thrive in a place that confounds all others. In
incessantly moving in the lm, she cares little about home; she cares even less
for stability, not to mention prosperity. If there is a lesson in this lm for
Hong Kong and especially for Hong Kong women trying to survive in an
image-driven world, it is embedded in Zeros character.

Home as Commodity

Ho Yuk interrogates the category of women and the idea of belonging or home
and their mutual inference. In this lm, the director, Yau Ching denaturalizes
our daily lives, making it strange and unfamiliar in order to expose the absur-
dity and the cruelty of our social conditions, especially the oppression of
nonconforming women.
On a broader scale the notion of home and belonging is a particularly sensi-
tive and suggestive issue for many in Hong Kong. Physical space is a major
commodity there, driven by the insatiable real estate market. More than simply
a container of human life and its related activities, real estate is an ultimate
object of desire. Everyones lives are conditioned and controlled, even
inscribed by the real estate market and the idea of home as a commodity in
Hong Kong.
Chandra Mohanty has once lamented her condition of alienation as a
woman of color in the United States. Pointing out that the stability of
 Womens Social Space 135

home as an inherited space is not available to people like her, an immigrant

woman, Mohanty argues for the necessity of women to invent a strategic
space that transcends this normative inherited home. She defines this
strategic space as imaginatively created by women themselves through
political solidarity to produce a sense of family. 33 Through the character,
Zero, Yau Ching refuses outright the idea of home as traditional space or even
inherited space. The symbolic burden of the notion of home that
Kwokchan carries in her name, national product, is so crippling that she is
incapable of comfortable adjustment in society. Similarly, not even the Feng
Shui masters offer of national or local connection could restore Nicoles
sense of home. In fact, these only serve to remind them of how impossible
home dened in such patriarchal terms is to them. Zeros total lack of family
or any kind of conventional anchor, or even a stable shelter, results in her
kinetic movement. It is also this movement that helps Zero escape both
Kwokchans and Nicoles sense of unsettledness, because Zero is the agency
of her own unsettledness, not the one being left out of things. In the last
scene of the movie, when Nicole nally meets the real Kwokchan, the two
of them stand on a street corner, as an inarticulate inhibition prevents Nicole
from approaching Kwokchan and Kwokchans habitual unresponsiveness
leaves her standing there passively as well. While the city rushes past them,
they are paralyzed by some unknown force and cannot take control of their
situation to break out of their voicelessness and isolation.
Zeros freedom and uidity is a result of her nonparticipation in the norma-
tive capitalist value system in society. Her lack of possession and her lack of
desire for possessions are important clues to her transcendence from it. She
participates in the market economy only as far as she needs to survive while
being totally cynical about and distanced from it. She would sell anything from
real estate to sex toys with the same enthusiasm and playfulness, just to make
enough to eat and to feed her animals. She will work to survive, but not be
trapped in the system of capitalist exchange and speculation that seem to
surround Nicoles life and condition Kwokchans dream of home ownership.
Within the lm, there are several clips of a documentary lm about giraffes
that intercut the main narrative. We hear the voice of the narrator of the docu-
mentary asking rhetorically why giraffes nd their sustenance in high places.
The voice answers that it is because shorter animals are not able to compete
with them for food. Yau Ching shows us that Zero has a fondness for giraffes.
She cuts out pictures of them to stick in her scrapbook at night in her theater
136 Paradigm City

seat. Like giraffes, Zero is above the busy scampering for what is deemed valu-
able in Hong Kong society, real estate titles, above all. Hong Kong people slave
for their ideas of home in the form of real estate and the requisite human orga-
nization within the walls of their homesheterosexual marriage and family.
Their pursuit of such social success entraps them in rigid and disciplined
economic behavior. It is this notion of home where women are most suscep-
tible to the violence of capitalist strategies and the biopolitics of the state.
Kwokchans feminine masquerade as a means of survival shows that this site
called home is where women are turned into commodities and feminized
beyond their biological female conditions.
In the snippets of the documentary lm on giraffes, we see the animals
natural grace as they move around in their habitats, feeding on leaves on tree-
tops and nuzzling each other. We see Zeros similar grace as she negotiates the
daily life in the city. It is Zeros naturalness and ease that provides a clue to her
strategies of overcoming the capitalist regime. She is the only one in the lm
who truly attends to daily living. Her fundamental connectedness to living,
despite her complete lack of conventional habitual paraphernalia of living, and
her concentration on the efforts of daily life, as strange as her daily life might
seem to others, help her compose her space as truly a strategic space.
We have seen how the desire for a place entraps Kwokchan and Nicole.
Zeros strategic space is not located in a specic place. Zeros space transcends
the hereditary notion of home. It thus transcends the domestic. Her notion
of home is dened broadly; it is inclusive of beings and people. Her activities,
like feeding stray animals or following Kwokchan, include even those that do
not have exchange value. Because she operates outside the exchange system of
capitalist relationships, she is both autonomous and connected to others in a
deep sense.
By way of conclusion, I return briey to the issue of body image and the
phenomenon of Joyce in the Hong Kong society. There is a certain parallel
between Joyce and Kwokchan. Both achieve social approval and love (though
of a different sort) through the images they project. However, the exchange for
this social success is a complete commodication of their femininity, even
corporeality, modied according to the normative social imagination. They
become, in this process, a cipher, or in Joyces case, a brandname, totally
disconnected from their own self-meaning. They become participants in the
system of capitalist relationships in which they no longer represent them-
selves but are commodities. In this way, they are cut loose from communal
 Womens Social Space 137

relationship with families and friends, which used to dene them as persons.
They become homeless.
Likewise, Hong Kong women, bear the burden of the city branded as an
international financial center. Hong Kong women are always depicted as
professional, efcient, educated, stylish, and, of course, slim. They are embod-
iments of the city itself, standing in for capitalist success and capitalist
aesthetics. With their role as Hong Kongs capitalist city logo, it is no wonder
that Hong Kong women equate extreme body modification with their
economic ascension.
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 six
Repatriating from Globalization

In the previous chapters, I discussed the Hong Kong governments dedicated

effort in creating Hong Kongs image as a global capitalist city. The logo Asias
World City as the citys ofcial branding was formally deployed in 2001.1 The
effect of such globalism is most obvious in the various forms of Hong Kong
popular culture, especially music and movies. Hong Kongs entertainment
industry has in turn made an important contribution to Hong Kongs global
status through its aggressive opening of overseas markets, chiey in East and
South East Asia and joint productions with companies in different nations.
The adjustment to the needs and tastes of a broader, international audience has
resulted in Hong Kong cultures particularly extroverted character right before
and after the Return to China.
In this chapter, I will continue my discussion of Hong Kongs capitalist
space and daily life and also examine the aspirations and creative responses of
the people and how they build their sense of home and belonging amid the
unceasing pursuit of globalization. In the rst section of this chapter, I identify
broad trends in popular media culture, music, and lm under the regime of
global markets. In the second section I will focus my discussion on the 2003
novel The Girl Who Met a Sea Lion in 1997, from a new literary voice, Ho Ka-
Wai, which I believe, captures the feelings of individuals in Hong Kongs social
and economic environment. The novel records a young womans experience of
her life abroad in Australia, then her painful attempt to readjust to the frantic
life of Hong Kong after her return. In the last section, following the resolution
of the novel of how the protagonist overcomes her alienation and rebuilds her
sense of community, I examine the direct actions from a few local communi-
ties to domesticate the capitalist space of Hong Kong.

139
140 Paradigm City

Redevelopment

The skyline of Hong Kong is dominated by the monuments of international

capitala spectacular sampling of the work of international blue-chip archi-
tects. Given the number of landmark buildings in Hong Kong designed by
Norman Foster, from the HSBC headquarters, to the new Hong Kong Interna-
tional airport, to the controversial proposed cultural complex in West
Kowloon, a local commentator ironically referred to Hong Kong as the Sir
Norman Foster town. The Hong Kong government is committed to main-
taining a city that provides accessibility and efficient services to foster
continued ow of international investment in the territory.
The investment in the citys infrastructure and physical appearance, from
building of mass transit systems, to reappointing of parks and planting of
gardens, to civic campaigns of courtesy and cleanliness, all of which I discussed
in the previous chaptersis part of the articulated and unarticulated agenda to
attract foreign capital, and businesses, as well as tourists. More and more, since
the late 1990s, Hong Kong has also been asserting itself, in tandem with all this
ofcial and unofcial policy, as a center for international arts and culture. For
example, the annual Hong Kong Arts Festivals boasts programs of world-class
artists and troupes from Europe and America. The Asian Arts Festivals, on the
other hand, showcase equally prominent performers and groups from East and
South East Asian nations. Hong Kong perceives itself as particularly well posi-
tioned to host these events, turning into an advantage what used to be
considered its embarrassing cultural hybridity and lack of national culture.
The ambitious West Kowloon development proposal is part of this incessant
drive to place Hong Kong on the global stage as Asias World City. This West
Kowloon project, an arts complex to be built on a newly reclaimed territory,
has, however, been stalled because it has been the site of bitter contention. It
has been so fought over despite the stated purpose of the development, which
is to offer a venue for leisure activities and enhance the cultural life of the
local population, perhaps because the governments notion of culture and
leisure is at odds with the local needs and imagination.2 At the same time, the
surrounding area of prime real estate is developers paradise. The headline of
a Ming Pao Daily report succinctly summarized the real issues at stake in the
development of West Kowloon, using the hyperbolic language of warfare in
Chinese historical narratives: To conquer West Kowloon is to conquer the
empire.3 Again, this is a case of the competition for space between big busi-
nesses and individual citizens.
 Repatriating from Globalization 141

Such developments to advance global capitalism and the international

image of the city rarely take into serious consideration the daily needs of Hong
Kongs residents. The contradictions between citizens and large corporations
in their uses of space are often substantial. When the Wan Chai historic district
was slated for redevelopment, part of the proposed plan was to close down the
street market where the local people do their daily shopping. In his study of
Hong Kong street culture, Lui Tai-Lok points out that street markets are
important social venues that support community culture and relationships. 4
Sometimes, as in the case of the North Point, Chun Yeung market, the neigh-
borhood identity hinges on the daily interchanges among the residents there.5
Similarly the redevelopment of Temple Street, the renowned nightclub of the
working class, threatens the social ecology made up of informal theater or
opera performers, street musicians, snake oil sellers, sex workers, and other
providers of exotic services.6
The city space is more and more taken over by large corporations, while
the space of individual daily life continues to contract. In chapter 3, we have
seen how this privatization of public space is a way of limiting access of unde-
sirable social classes whose habits are unsightly, according to an unspoken
international capitalist aesthetic.7 The elimination of street markets, which can
be chaotic, dirty, and noisy, is a case in point. These development projects
result in the reduction of space for social gatherings, but also signicantly, for
political negotiations.
Akbar Abbas describes Hong Kong as an exorbitant contemporary city in
its competition to become more spectacular than others. However, the accu-
mulation of visual logosthe super landmarks created by brandname
architectsonly results in making the city more invisible than ever as it looks
like every other major city in the world. Abbas uses his discussion of Hong
Kong through the two lms, In the Mood for Love, directed by Wong Kar-Wai,
and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, by Ang Li, to reveal the sense of boredom,
ennui, and forever postponement of desire in contemporary Hong Kong.8
The competition to be a global city takes its toll on the local population.

Globalizing Hong Kong Culture

The pursuit of the global market is most obvious in the development of

popular culture in Hong Kong. In many ways, popular media is the engine of
Hong Kongs global advance. The emergence of Hong Kong as a center of
popular culture in Asia began in the 1970s, led by the rise of local television
142 Paradigm City

production. According to Ng Fong, the period between 1978 and 1984 was the
golden age of Hong Kong television, when Hong Kong was the largest exporter
of television shows in the world.9 Locally, many dramatic series, especially
those created by the Television Broadcasting Company (TVB) such as
Shanghai Tan, King of Kings (Qian huang zhi huang), and The Strongman (qian-
gren), were able to captivate up to 70% of the entire population of Hong Kong
every night.10 Television stars became part of the family as they made their
nightly appearance in individual homes.11 People rushed home from school
and work to catch the nightly unfolding dramas. We saw Chan Wais rendi-
tion of this phenomenon in The Records of Sahpheung in chapter 4. The
famous RTHK (Radio and Television Hong Kong)12 series Under the Lion
Rock was initially a dramatized, informational, and outreach program for the
government, which later evolved into an inuential social realist drama about
the everyday struggles and joys of a particular working-class community in
Hong Kong. It became iconic of the times. Lion Rock, a lion-shaped peak of
the Kowloon mountain range that looms over the peninsula, became the
symbol of Hong Kong society, especially in the hardscrabble days in the begin-
ning of Hong Kongs industrialization.
So deeply imprinted into the popular consciousness is the television culture
of this period that some of the theme songs of the shows still resonate strongly
thirty years later. When Hong Kong was in the grips of economic recession and
political discontent in 2002, the theme song of Under the Lion Rock was
invoked by the then secretary of nance, Anthony Leung, to encourage the
population to hunker down and look to the future for better days, as well as to
prepare for immediate sacrice as he dealt out different government rollback
plans. The song struck such a chord that when the original singer of the song,
Roman Tam, died of liver cancer in the winter of 2002, it signaled the begin-
ning of a period of near societal mental prostration (see chapter 1).
These television songs have more signicance than their apparent content.
Their importance lies in the fact that they were sung in Cantonese, the ofcial
and main dialect spoken in Hong Kong. They were part of the nascent
Cantonese pop culture from Hong Kong that broke like a tidal wave over East
and South East Asia in the 1970s and 1980s, including Mainland China.
Cantonese became a hip dialect, imitated by Chinese communities all over
the world, supplanting the importance of the Mandarin culture associated
with the national culture of China, whether PRC or ROC, the major claimants
to Chinese cultural authenticity. This is to say, in the late 1970s, Hong Kong
slowly emerged as the center of an alternative Chinese culture.
 Repatriating from Globalization 143

Among Hong Kongs performers of the 1970s, Sam Hui, regarded as Hong
Kongs native son, is considered the rst to establish Cantopop as the ofcial
local popular genre, targeting, particularly, the working-class audience (unlike
other young singers at the time who sang exclusively in English or
Mandarin).13 Chinese pop music was associated with nightclub singers and
bawdy audiences, while English-language popular music, with high school and
college students. Sam Hui was a University of Hong Kong graduate, no mean
feat at a time before the nine-year free education system and when there were
only two universities and entrance exams were extremely competitive.
However, he eschewed the elitism of the cultural industry, and together with
his two brothers, the Hui brothers, spearheaded a working-class culture
through their lms and music. Their collaboration in movies created classics
such as The Private Eyes (Buungun Baahtleung, banjin baliang) series. Their
most successful lms are about everyday, unremarkable working people. They
base their jokes on mundane situations, using props from familiar surround-
ings. 14 Though considered vulgar and crass by some, they were wildly
successful and dened a whole era of Hong Kong cinema in the late 1970s and
1980s, characterized by a certain raucous local, scatological, and slapstick
humor and the use of colloquialisms.
Sam Hui popularized Cantonese singing to the point where no self-
respecting Hong Kong pop musician could sustain a career performing
exclusively English or Mandarin songs. The rise of a local ethos, local
language, and creativity was the beginning of a local Hong Kong identity as
distinguished from that of China or Britain, which coincided with Hong
Kongs economic take-off in the late 1970s. 15 Sam Huis success was so
phenomenal and long lasting that he was graced by the title of the God of
Songs in Hong Kong. The international triumph of Cantonese lms, since
Hui, produced such mega stars as Chow Yun Fat and Leslie Cheung, and later,
Andy Lau, Maggie Cheung, and Tony Leung, and secured the Hong Kong
cultural industrys dominance in Asia during the 1980s and 1990s. It is no
surprise that the so-called Hollywood of the East, became the second largest
exporter of movies in the world after the United States, till the industrys
decline in the beginning of the new millennium.16
However, there is a cost to this gradual internationalization of Hong Kongs
popular culture industry. As budgets for production became bigger and bigger
and directors were more and more aware of their international market, the
subject matter, humor, and references in their lms also became less local. There
were fewer and fewer lms about Hong Kong people and Hong Kong situations.
144 Paradigm City

They became more and more reliant on international idioms and universal
aesthetic. Many of Hong Kongs veteran directors like Ronny Yu and John Woo
were recruited by Hollywood studios and simply left the Hong Kong lm
industry. We see the trend of internationalization in the works of many Hong
Kong directors in the 1990s, from Jackie Chan to Wong Kar-Wai. Jackie Chans
earlier movies, such as the Police Story series, were squarely located in Hong
Kong, dealing with society and crime in the city. As he began casting his eyes
toward the American market, he began making lms like Who Am I (dir. Benny
Chan, 1998) and The Medallion (dir. Gordon Chan, 2003), in which the setting
for his movies slowly migrated from Hong Kong to different locales around the
world, from the United States to Italy to Morocco. His hero turned from being
a Hong Kong policeman to becoming a member of the Interpol, busting inter-
national crime rings. Similarly, Wong Kar-Wais rst breakthrough lm, As Tears
Go By (Mongkok Carmen) (1988), is about triad members in Hong Kong, in
which Mongkok, a working-class district and gangland, is a strong local refer-
ence. Wongs lms slowly retreated from contemporary Hong Kongs social
reality into nostalgic imaginary, from Days of Being Wild to In the Mood for Love
(2000); to postmodern fragmentation in Chungking Express (1994); to temporal
sojourning in 2046 (2004). Though much appreciated by the international audi-
ence for his lms beauty and style, Wongs works rarely have boxofce success
in Hong Kong. Though these directors have become successful in the interna-
tional lm circuit, their creations are not often well supported by the local
viewers.
This tendency of Hong Kong films to be detached from the Hong Kong
society as a commercial consideration or to appeal to a broader audience or
critics in the film festival circuits became even more pronounced with the
opening of the China market. Because of Chinas protectionist policies, it was
not till 2004, as a result of CEPA (Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement),
that coproduction lms with rigidly apportioned Hong Kong to Chinese cast
and staff ratio could be shown without the usual red tape and restrictions.
However, lms shown in China continue to face strict censorship, which has
determined their content, subject matter, and even plot denouement. Since the
enormous Mainland market is vital to the continued viability of Hong Kong
cinema, a signicant number of Hong Kong lms have either been coproduc-
tions or have plots and contents tailored to the Chinese government standard
and audience taste. Not only does this kind of collaboration dilute the unique
characteristics of Hong Kong lms, it also means taking out local issues or
subjects from the plots.17
 Repatriating from Globalization 145

Similarly, pop singers with their eyes on the Mainland market have started
to sing in Mandarin as well. Some singers opt to produce two different
versions of their songs, one for the Mandarin-speaking market (which also
include Taiwan, Singapore, and Malaysia), the other for the local, Cantonese
audience. They do not simply switch between dialects; the lyrics of these
songs are often totally different in order to speak to audiences in different
areas of Asia. Sometimes even their personal images had to be adjusted. Kelly
Chan, one of the most successful singers to cross over to the pan-Asian
market, especially the Mainland market, was the target of some sneer in the
Hong Kong press when she began appearing with her hair in bows and
wearing elaborate and decorative short dresses in the early 2000s. Her
manager retorted that that was what appealed to the Mainland audience. No
one questioned the economic shrewdness behind her image change.
The globalizing of Hong Kongs culture is an unquestioned economic
strategy. If Hong Kong has been criticized for its lack of culture before (that
is, Chinese national culture), now it is precisely this non-Chinese cosmo-
politanism so rigorously pursued that attracts Mainland tourists. Saturated
with their own nationalism, they come to look at this bastard child. However,
as Hong Kong popular culture has become completely geared toward external
markets, and as the city itself has become more and more adapted for visitors,
what happened to local expression and local representation? In the late 1990s,
Hong Kongs music and lm industries began to experience a drastic down-
turn. Many artists simply abandoned the local market and traveled to China to
make television shows or movies there. Many became rich and famous in
Mainland China but totally forgotten in their home base. Quite a number of
Hong Kong industry people blame rampant pirating and illegal downloading
of media in China for destroying the entertainment industries in Hong Kong.
Although it might be true that pirating affects total sales, one wonders if the
bigger issue is disaffection among the Hong Kong audience, because these lms
and songs no longer speak to them.

Turning Inward

In the previous chapters, I have described the nationalist program the

Beijing government had constantly tried to impose on Hong Kong since the
Handover in 1997. This became an urgent project after the mass demonstra-
tion of July 1, 2003. This hard sell of nationalism in Hong Kong has variously
been countered by irony, sarcasm, and derision in newspaper essays and
146 Paradigm City

comic strips by local commentators (see chapter 2). As Hong Kong continued
to be plagued by economic difculties and a high unemployment rate in the
early 2000s, not to mention the various actual or threats of epidemics, such
as the SARS, H5N1 Avian u, and dengue fever or the smog and acid rain that
were constantly blowing over from Mainland China, Vietnam, and other
places, the public became more and more uncertain about the benefits of
relentless globalization. As we have seen in chapter 1, between 2002 and 2003
there was a gradual withdrawal, at least emotionally, among some Hong Kong
people from this international trajectory. This was clearly demonstrated
during the SARS epidemic. When the inhabitants of the residential complex
the Amoy Gardens were moved from their apartments to a quarantine camp,
they became a metaphor of the city of Hong Kong itself. Tourists and busi-
ness people stopped coming and Hong Kong people were shunned overseas.
The Special Olympics in Ireland attempted to block Hong Kong athletes from
going to compete in the games. The Swiss watch expo and the U.S. jewelers
convention barred Hong Kong representatives from attending.18 Rejected,
betrayed, and abandoned by the world community and marooned in collec-
tive sadness, there was a rapid disillusionment with internationalism and a
decided societal inward turn.
This focusing inward expressed itself in the formation of many mutual aid
efforts and community-based activism during this period. The residents of
Amoy Gardens were quick to organize their own self-help units, such as coop-
eratives for childcare, activity groups, and clean-up teams. The entire city
rallied in solidarity behind the residents and the patients and frontline medical
personnel shut in hospitals, overwhelming them with well wishes, small gifts,
and treats, as well as daily supplies. Much was made of this new sense of
home and the spirit of community in the media.
Hong Kongs theme song in that difcult year of 2003 was Joey Yungs Pride
in Your Eyes, a song sung in Cantonese interspersed with English phrases. It
swept up numerous prizes in award ceremonies sponsored by various radio
and television stations based on sales gures, frequency of broadcast requests,
and karaoke requests, as well as popular votes. It launched Joey from a second-
to rst-tier popular singer in Hong Kong. The sweetness of Joeys voice not
withstanding, the song lyrics speak volumes about the general societal aspira-
tions and capture the spirit of mutual support at the time:

Pride in your eyesrewrite the story of the second half of my life, nding in
your eyes the condence that I had lost; it is then that I understand how one
 Repatriating from Globalization 147

who is loved can live with such courage. I am fortunate that your eyes light
the way for my journey in the clouds.
See me y; Im proud to y up high; not because of the air current, but
because of your love. Believe me I can y; Im singing in the sky; as if I were a
fairy tale, I create more happiness because of you. Pride in your eyes; sparkle
for me as in the beginning; only you understand me mostmore than even
myself. I will work hard so you can be even prouder. It no longer matters
who despises me; no one can stop me now. I hope for the day when I can
hold you in my embrace and proudly tell the world that I had sailed on your
wind: Let me y; Im proud to y up high; not because of the air current, but
because of your love. Believe me I can y; Im singing in the sky. If love is a
miracle, I am happy to create this miracle with youAll because of your
love. (Original English phrases in italics)19

It takes little analysis to understand why this song had such an appeal in
the difficult days of 2003. The message of mutual encouragement and
ultimate triumph through hard work resonated deeper and broader than the
usual saccharine love songs of the young pop idols. The tune of this song
became so well known and entrenched in the popular imagination that it was
coopted and sung by an interest group at the July 1 demonstration with alter-
native, politicized lyrics superimposed over it.20
Joeys song was part of a more and more obvious trend in the 2000s. The
deaths of the superstars Roman Tam (2002), Anita Mui (2003), Leslie Cheung
(2003), and the godfather of Cantopop lyricist James Wong (2004), brought
about a strong sense of the passage of Cantopop cultures prime associated
with Hong Kongs golden age in the 1980s and 1990s. It also invoked anxiety
about the continued existence of the local Hong Kong culture and identity,
creating the nostalgia for closeness and communitarianism in society that they
represent. This is reected in the return to a local emphasis in the entertain-
ment scene in the early 2000s. There was, at the end of 2003, a small revival of
Hong Kong cinema, as we have seen, led by the huge success of Infernal Affairs
and its sequel and prequel. (See chapter 1 for a discussion of this lm.) These
lms are unambiguously about Hong Kong, shot on location in Hong Kong,
and are about the Hong Kong society. Its success in Asia revived the status and
condence in Cantopop culture to a certain extent. This series (at least the rst
two of the trilogy) is neither a coproduction with China nor does it employ any
Mainland actor or crew. There are, as a result, two different endings, one for
the Hong Kong audience and one for Mainland China (and Malaysia). PTU
148 Paradigm City

(2003), another lm discussed in chapter 1, and Breaking News (2004), both by

Johnny To, have the same Hong Kong focus. But we even see a return of the
riotous local humor in a number of lms, such as Dragon Reloaded 2003 and
Men Suddenly in Black (2003). These lms did extremely well at the boxof-
ce, reversing a trend of dismal cinema attendance.
In terms of the music industry, 2003 and 2004 brought the return of a
number of 1980s Cantopop superstars, now mostly in their late forties and fties
but with surprising appeal. Most of them had retired in the early 1990s with the
rise of youth idols superpackaged for international taste. The most dramatic
was Sam Huis return in summer 2004 after a hiatus of more than a decade.
Sam Huis return was rumored for a while and impatiently anticipated once
it was formally announced. Beginning in May and ending in August 2004, he
gave thirty-eight concerts, titled Keep on Smiling. It was estimated that ve
hundred thousand people attended his concerts. Sam hoped that his perfor-
mances could cheer Hong Kong people up after a very difcult year with a
record suicide rate. The publicity build-up for the return of the God of
Songs, the exorbitant media hype and general excitement made the event,
indeed, seem like a divine dispensation to Hong Kong. One of the many
costumes of his sold-out concert series during the summer was a suit made of
the red, white, and blue polyethylene weave of the notoriously durable hauling
bags, the same material used by the local artist Stanley Wong discussed in
chapter 3. The metaphoric possibilities of this polyethylene material are limit-
less, representing local pride and value for the simple, hardworking, resilient
common personthe mythical protagonists of Hong Kongs story of success
in the 1970s. These values were now once again conjured to help Hong Kong
overcome the troubles of the 2000s.
If the first Sam Hui phenomenon in the 1970s marked the rise of local
culture, the excitement around his return to the stage indicated a return to the
local in Hong Kong culture after more than a decade of rushing toward
becoming a world city. Sams concerts, unlike those of the current superstars
that regularly expend millions of Hong Kong dollars on extravagant spectacles,
from fashion to stage gimmicks to dancers, were deliberately understated to
evoke sentiments of old times, when Hong Kong was a smaller, perhaps more
intimate town.
A few months later, Anthony Wong, one of the most iconoclastic and polit-
ical popular singers in Hong Kong, who started his career as the popular duo
the Tat Ming Pair with Lau Yi Tat in 1984, issued a new CD with his new
production group People Mountain People Sea in 2004. This new collection
 Repatriating from Globalization 149

titled Song of Tomorrow (Mingri zhige) contains almost all covers of memorable
television songs from the 1980s, rearranged and updated.21 Wong narrates
Hong Kongs twentieth-century history in this album through music, while
also using it as a portent of Hong Kongs future. He arranges this collection of
eleven songs in thematic order so that together they compose a montage of
Hong Kongs recent history. Removed from their original association with
specic television programs, these songs are used by Wong to articulate Hong
Kongs society as it went through rapid development from the 1970s to the
present. However, his evocation of Hong Kong history is very different from
the nostalgia in Chan Wais writings that we saw in chapter 4. Using music to
recreate the ethos that accompanied Hong Kongs economic development,
Wong also tries to inspire the courage to move forward. For example, the
opening song, Rainbow in His Pen, embodies the sentiment at the begin-
ning of Hong Kongs economic takeoff through the words of an artist. It
reects the aspiration and the sense of possibility despite immediate hardships:

My faith never wavers. Even though I might be poor now, the layers of obsta-
cles ahead cannot extinguish my passion. My heartI do not want to be
toyed with; my painI have no way to speak of it now; but my devotion and
my determination will move the heavens.22

The determination, diligence, and the belief in future success are deeply
ingrained in the psyche of Hong Kong people as part of the myth behind Hong
Kongs can-do spirit.23 Songs number four and ve in the CD, from the televi-
sion series Fengyun (The Tempest) and Shanghai Tan (Shanghai Bay), reect the
transformation of society in the process of development, both in terms of the
landscape and the relationships among people. The Tempest, in light of
Wongs social politics, could be a lament about the environmental cost, but it
can also be a celebration of the endurance of love and human relationships
despite lifes vicissitudes in the rapidly developing city:

The green mountain used to be my companion. I chased the white clouds

in front of me. The blue sea was my hearts delight; I spent my childhood in
the wind. Who made the mountains change color, to look so vulgar? And
who made the ocean change, that its turbid waves reach the sky? In the wind,
we are still madly devoted to each other; we havent let the gathering clouds
ruin our pledge. Even though the sea might dry up and the mountains
collapse, our promise will never change.24
150 Paradigm City

Originally about war, this song is now used to describe the mercurial
changes in the urban and social landscape. The hatred and alienation accu-
mulated through the various struggles and contests in society as a result of
the economic development are captured in the next few songs of the CD.
Most of these were written originally for gangster or knight errant dramas.
Here, the flashes of swords or guns in the vendettas of the underworld
become veiled references to the aggressive competitiveness of the capitalist
society. However, through it all is an assurance that loyalty, friendship, and
humanity will prevail.
The collection makes an interesting turn at song number ten, also the title
song of the CD Song of Tomorrow (Mingri zhige). What makes this song
an important transition is the fact that it is the only one sung in Mandarin
in this collection. In terms of the historical teleology constructed in the song
order of the collection, the mandarin language immediately suggests China
and thus hints at the approaching 1997. The prelude to the song begins with
a musical phrase that is identifiable as the first four notes of the British
national anthem. Structurally, these four notes in Wongs new arrangement
have no relationship to the melody of the song. Read together with this
musical reference, the lyrics capture the immense societal anxiety for the
future as well as the sadness of separation among friends and families during
the emigration tide of the 1990s when many people left Hong Kong to escape
the prospective Chinese rule:

I want you to sing for tomorrow. In tears, I make an earnest wish. Im going;
Im going. The owers will still be as sweet tomorrow. I will be gone; I will be
gone. The sun will still be as bright tomorrow. You and I will sing for
tomorrow. In tears, I make an earnest wish. We will part; we will part.
Tomorrows wine you will drink on your own. We will part; we will part.
Tomorrows song, you will sing on your own. It will be hard for us to meet
again tomorrow; I ask the heavens why this grief. I place in my heart every
line from our murmurs of the pillow. In tomorrows sunlight, I will sing
aloud and look forward. Tomorrow, tomorrow, we will see each other in our
dreams.
I want you to sing for tomorrow. I leave behind me this piece of writing
in cheer. Forget all; forget all. Tomorrow will no longer be sad. Remember,
remember, tomorrow is lled with hope. Remember, remember, tomorrow
is lled with hope.25
 Repatriating from Globalization 151

The singer of this song encourages the listener to face the future bravely,
while also trying to convince him or herself to do the same. Despite or because
of the insistence that the world will still be the same tomorrow, the sadness and
anxiety about the future is poignant. This is a song of separation between
friends or lovers; but broadly, it is also a last love song of Hong Kong to Britain
or vice versa. The four notes that begin the song bring it to an end, fading away.
After this melancholic farewell to old relationships as well as a known
lifestyle, the entire CD concludes with the aforementioned Under the Lion
Rock, that had become the theme song of the era:

In our lives there is happiness, but unavoidably, there are also tears. When we
meet each other under the Lion Rock, there are usually more laughs than
sighs. Human lives are unavoidably full of obstacles. It is hard not to have
any worries. Since we are all in the same boat under the Lion Rock, we
should help each other along. Get rid of differences and seek cooperation.
Release our enmity for each other and pursue our dreams together. Travelers
on the same boat, we pledge to follow each other, without fear and without
trepidation.
We nd ourselves at the limit of the ocean, the edge of the sky; we hold
hands to level the rocky path. Together, we use our hard work and diligence
to create the legend of Hong Kong.26

As pointed out previously (chapter 2), television programs and songs such
as Under the Lion Rock were effective in fostering a sense of belonging and
commitment in society after the riots of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Emphasis on collectivity, mutual help, and diligence in building a harmo-
nious society was promoted by the British-Hong Kong government in the
1970s to distract the populace from their dissatisfaction toward the govern-
ment because of corruption and lack of social services. The fact that this song
was evoked by a public ofcial again in 2002 was a sure sign of the resurgence
of public discontent in Hong Kong. In its pursuit of parity with the rest of
the developed world, Hong Kongs government was slowly abandoning the
liberal social policies developed in the 1980s. Nevertheless, the fact that this
song resonated so deeply in the early 2000s also revealed the yearning for
closeness among people in a city that had become less and less concerned
with local needs as it became more and more hospitable to international visi-
tors and capital.
152 Paradigm City

Hither, Thither

The title of Ho Ka-Wais new collection of stories, The Girl Who Met a Sea
Lion in 1997 (Cosmo Books, 2003), might not be immediately descriptive of
the social situation around the time of its writing and publication. However,
the surprise, the attraction, and yet the unease in the encounter between these
two land and sea creatures in the title capture the condition of an individual
feeling out of synchrony with her environmenta condition that typies the
Hong Kong experience in this period of sojourning and globalization. Ho is
a new literary voice in the 2000s; she has received several awards for her short
pieces, some of which are included in this volume, which is her rst book-
length work. The stories in this collection are all united in a vaguely
semiautobiographical framework. They are all about the experience of the
character, Ah Mahn, who migrated to New Zealand with her family in the
1990s. She went to university there, but Hong Kong was still a sort of home
base. The rst half of the book contains stories about her relationships with
lovers and friends or those ambiguously in between while she was in univer-
sity. The second half of the book contains pieces about her experience back in
Hong Kong after she graduated, trying to survive the work culture there.
Although the theme of the book is primarily about the narrators relationships
with the people around her, her connections to them are often barely
disguised extensions of her feelings of home and belonging. When she was in
New Zealand, she was deeply entangled in a complex triangle with two other
people from Hong Kong, attracted by the sense of familiarity about them.
While she was in Hong Kong, she yearned for her estranged lover, a New
Zealander.
The title story of the volume, The Girl Who Met a Sea Lion in 1997, is
about the relationship between Ah Mahn and Dick, her lover, a New Zealander
of European descent, or the sea lion in the title. This relationship also
becomes the fulcrum from which all the other stories evolve. Ah Mahn was
studying economics at the university where Dick was a lecturer. The entire
relationship, from its ambiguous beginning and end to the emotional and
psychological negotiations in between, is conveyed through email exchanges
between these two characters.
The major differences in the problematic relationship between Ah Mahn
and Dick can be interpreted as cultural.27 However, this cultural difference
has nothing to do with the respective ethnicities of Ah Mahn and Dick. Rather,
it is caused by their respective sense of space. Ah Mahn continuously looks for
 Repatriating from Globalization 153

gravity and permanence in a relationship, while Dicks attitude toward

relationship is lighthearted and noncommittal. Ah Mahn is a peripatetic
sojourner from Hong Kong, a small place, the political situation of which has
always seemed transient and changing. Dick is a New Zealander who is at ease
and secure in his expansive land and stable sense of belonging. The huge
contradiction between these places was shocking to Ah Mahn when she tried
to adjust to Hong Kong after years in New Zealand:

I think about how scores of people pushed onto an underground train with
each person only occupying a space so tiny that one could barely t ones feet
in. Our bodies intertwine with anothers; we breathe with difficulty on
strangers faces. I felt suffocated. I had originally owned a large piece of
the brilliant sky and a bungalow surrounded by green trees. There were
dances on the streets; at night, one could gaze at the stars in the sky at leisure.
But I had chosen to come back, to force myself into this crowd. Everyday, I
rush for the train or for the bus; I wait for tables in restaurants with people
I dont know. I have to do everything faster than everybody else, to achieve
more than everybody else.28

New Zealand and Hong Kong are the loci of Ah Mahns contradictory
desires. If one can broadly say that New Zealand represents the emotive and
the natural way of being for Ah Mahn, Hong Kong is where she is expected
to be rational, repressed, contorted, and highly productive. Ah Mahn left New
Zealand to escape her failing relationship with Dick. She felt that in Hong
Kong she could use her training as an economist and regulate her emotions
through the rigid rhythm of her work. However, in Hong Kong she found
her work oppressive and her life becoming more and more mechanical and
stressful as she tried to meet the daily demands of her clients and her super-
visor. She also found the Hong Kong she returned to after her studies in
New Zealand a different city that looks like an old acquaintance, but whose
appearance has completely changed.29 The estrangement even occurred
within her family:

With unspoken agreement, my brother and I became similarly cautious

about our independent lives in this space where it was impossible to avoid
each other. I heard that when we were little, I was my big brothers favorite.
But now, we are distanced to this degree. I feel very sad my younger
brother and sister have already moved away. My big brother is so close by, yet
154 Paradigm City

seems to be in a different world from me. My parents are in another place,

even though their traces are so close to me. And where is he?30

Complaining about her loneliness and the distance she felt among people in
Hong Kong, clinging to the memories and pining for communications from
Dick to nurse her flagging spirit, she lamented, My home is in a faraway
kingdom. In this city where I work, there is so much wealth that one gets lost
in it.31
Ah Mahn yearns to return to New Zealand, but she knows that she has
been contaminated by Hong Kongs urbanity. Ho describes an imaginary
dialogue Ah Mahn had with the subway train she took to work every day:
The train shook its head: You already belong here. Look at you! From the top
of your head to the bottom of your feet, there is not a place where you do not
look like a typical Hong Kong office lady. Where is your home? Here or
there? Is it about your heart or is it about a place?32 Ah Mahn herself knew
that she belonged to neither world: It is only a little after eight. There are
already a lot of people on the street. Those who are rushing to work hurried by
along their disorderly paths. When I return to the other shore, my life will be
a simple one, without this kind of hardship and without this kind of extrava-
gance. At that time, will I miss the accelerated pace and the strong urbaneness
of this place? Will I?33
One quickly discovers that the location of home in this work is very
ambiguous. It is always beyond Ah Mahns reach because it is not connected
to a specific place. Ho sometimes refers to going back to New Zealand as
returning home. Sometimes, she refers to going to Hong Kong as a return.
The inconsistency in her writing not only reveals her ambivalence for either
way of life represented by these two places, but also the elusiveness of the
feeling of home. If the crowds of Hong Kong aggravate ones experience of
distance among people, the spaciousness of New Zealand seems to highlight
the claustrophobic human relationships that tether people together. Hos
description of Ah Mahns life in New Zealand is all about incredibly painful
human entanglementsmiscommunication and betrayals between lovers, and
ambiguous, semiincestuous relationships among friends. Ah Mahns status as
a exible citizen of the world and her cosmopolitanism only contribute to
her sense of alienation from both Hong Kong and New Zealand.34 Ah Mahns
schizophrenia articulates the paradox of the Hong Kong societythe ambi-
tious pursuit of globalization and the disaffectedness and alienation from what
this pursuit has created.
 Repatriating from Globalization 155

Another Space

In the end, Ah Mahn resigned from her job and decided to leave Hong Kong.
However, it was not to New Zealand that she went. She joined a tour to the
Pamirs in Xinjiang, the pristine border area of China. Ho describes the Pamirs
as a place where the rushing rivers and mountain air are so pure they seem to
have been distilled. It is clear that Ah Mahns journey is one of spiritual puri-
cation. Since she could not return home to either New Zealand or Hong
Kong, the only solution to her dilemma is to readjust her vision and relearn
survival strategies to start anew. The journey is literally a boot camp, which
demands immense physical exertion. Ah Mahn receives training in physical
endurance as well as mental stamina and attitude. In fact, her guide, a tall,
strong man with shaven head, is called coach.
When she was feeling very alienated in the materialistic society of Hong
Kong, Ah Mahn had lamented, Human beings are inherently independent
individuals. You carry your baggage. I carry mine. Neither is able to put it
down. 35 During this journey, Ah Mahn learned a different lesson about
human relationships. On their return trip, the group encountered bad
weather. The rain caused mudslides and rolling boulders. The group
constantly had to race to cross critical points before the roads or bridges were
washed away. Several times, they had to wade across torrents hanging onto
ropes, jump across swirling mud pools, or clamber along narrow mountain
paths with sheer drops. During the difficult journey, the members of the
group helped each other with their bags. At the end of the trip, at a particu-
larly difcult crossing, each person was asked to rid themselves of as much
excess baggage as possible. Ah Mahn decided to toss the diary she had been
keeping throughout the journey. This gesture of releasing her psychological
burden and her emergence from her self-centeredness are part of the exer-
cise of this journey for her.
Through their various dangerous experiences, the members of the tour
group developed closeness, honesty and trust for each other, admitting weak-
ness and exhibiting strength by turn. Ah Mahn learned to rely on her
teammates, as she also became a source of strength for others. Such func-
tional communitarianism is very different from the relationships based on
emotional reliance and insecurity she developed in New Zealand.
Placing Hos work in the context of Hong Kong in the late 1990s to the
early 2000s, it can be read as a record of the citys rapid urban development,
cosmopolitan pursuits and their toll on individuals. In Hos work, Ah Mahns
156 Paradigm City

sense of loss of who she was, where she belonged, and how to ground herself
in a society of disappearance reect the general experience of homeless-
ness and bereavement of self that I described earlier.36 Many in Hong Kong,
like Ah Mahn, experienced separation of family and friends as many went
to different parts of the world to work, study, or seek foreign passports. Like
Ah Mahn, many returned to Hong Kong to nd an estranged home. The city
is no longer familiar, not only because of Beijings attempts to Sinicize it,
though this is undoubtedly a cause, but also because the city has embarked
on a relentless pursuit of development at such a breakneck speed that resi-
dents literally feel the ground below them shift as they walk.
Ah Mahn as a transnational citizen reects the confusion of an individual
in our contemporary world, especially in Hong Kong, where there is constant
stress on the adaptability of its citizens to the demands of global capital.37 Ah
Mahn had unsuccessfully tried to base too much of her sense of self in partic-
ular places, whether expansive and comfortable (as in New Zealand) or
crowded and frenzied (as in Hong Kong), while understanding too little of the
human space between people.
The ending of Hos writings in a third spaceoutside of Hong Kong and
New Zealandis significant. Where is this third space in ones everyday
reality? The experience in the Pamirs is characterized by an active engage-
ment with the environment together with all its problemsan experience
marked by cooperation and effort from every member in the group. In fact,
no one individual could have survived the journey by him or herself. The
ending of this adventure is a refutation of Ah Mahns claustrophobic mental
world, plagued by solipsism. Ah Mahn discovered that the diary she had
tossed away was actually in the safekeeping of one of the members of the
group who told her the story of the torrents must be continued, because, it
is now more than merely a personal record. 38 It is a story of collective expe-
rience and courage.
This third space of Hong Kong, as Ho reveals in her writing, is dened
through collective effort in overcoming obstacles and the camaraderie created
through common hardships. Ah Mahns experience in the Pamirs helps her
return home to Hong Kong. Home is, thus, dened by continuous action
and activism. It is about articulating an alternative narrative in the overriding
structure and discourse of international capitalism and Chinese nationalism.
In this sense, Ah Mahn needs to continue her writing about the torrents,
because it is a story of collective struggle and collective homecoming.
 Repatriating from Globalization 157

Third Space in Hong Kong

Such communitarianism blossomed in Hong Kong society during the social

and economic crisis in the early 2000s, and especially during the SARS
epidemic. As the government continued to roll back its social services, it
became evident that community actions were more effective and more crucial
to many peoples survival. These organizing efforts in the shadows of the huge
corporate headquarters create viable alternatives to the capitalist system of
transactions that determines social relationships as well. Often, they compete
for space for their respective activities.
The years between the late 1990s and early 2000s saw the development of
many effective neighborhood movements and organizations. The most well
known and apparently successful is the alternative currency program set up
by a community of people in the district of Wan Chai. This collective has
been the subject of scholarly investigations, television documentaries, and
newspaper articles because it was effective in addressing both the material and
psychological needs of the people during a particularly bleak period in Hong
Kong. It helped provide for the daily needs, relieved demoralization, and
revived the ideal of community for which many in Hong Kong had grown
nostalgic. Studying their experiments, Hui Po-keung argues that such efforts
provide viable and effective alternatives to the seemingly undefeatable and irre-
versible neoliberal, free-market capitalism.39
This community collective employs many different alternative currency
strategies that have already been developed by many different organizations
around the world, such as the LETS (Local Exchange and Trading System)
and the Ithaca-HOURS. LETS, a system developed by a Canadian, Michael
Linton, is popular in Western Europe, North America, Australia, and New
Zealand. It is estimated that there are fifteen hundred LETS organization
worldwide. HOURS is another similar alternative currency system developed
by Paul Grover in 1991 in Ithaca, New York. These alternative systems are large
in scale, and some of them have memberships of thousands.40
In Hong Kong, such forms of time-dollar programs or mutual aid orga-
nizations are usually established in a local district or a housing estate or labor
community. They are set up at the instigation of a local social service orga-
nization or community center like the Caritas, or labor organizations, such
as the Hong Kong Women Centre and the Catholic Labour Association. In
such programs, local residents provide services for each other on an
158 Paradigm City

exchange basis. A typical organization issues coupons with which residents

redeem services from others. Each of these coupons is good for a kind of
service for a certain amount of time, usually, one hour. Different kinds of
work are valued at the same rate. For example, one hour of legal service is
equivalent to one hour of cleaning or babysitting or carpentry service. Some-
times, the exchange rate is democratically negotiated by the organization to
ensure fairness.41
This kind of alternative currency system helps people who are not formally
employed to utilize their skills in a respectful way in exchange for services and
goods that they could not otherwise afford, such as piano lessons or tutoring
for their children, legal or computer services. Many unemployed or underem-
ployed but able-bodied people in Hong Kong consider welfare shameful and
demoralizing. These kinds of community organization offer a way to dignify
the talents and skills of those cast off by the capitalist economy. Of course,
professionals such as medical doctors or lawyers suffer less from unemploy-
ment caused by the deindustrialized economy. As a result, medical or legal
services might not be available for exchange unless doctors and lawyers set
aside some time within their workdays. Many professionals who choose to
participate in such community organizations believe they receive more in
terms of relationships than simply services for which they can well pay with
actual cash.
An important condition in ones participation in all these programs,
including the alternative currency programs and the cooperatives, is that one
cannot merely receive services or merely render services, as they are clearly not
charities. There has to be exchange or collaboration. Unlike the usual capitalist
transactions that reduce things and dehumanize people into abstract monetary
value, in these community collectives there is a face attached to every exchange.
As a result, relationships are forged and reinforced with every transaction.
Service providers do not work for those requesting services. There is no social
hierarchy among the different professions, because all services are remunerated
at the same rate. Every decision in these groups is democratically made.
Many workers cooperatives were also formed or strengthened during this
time. For example, the Hong Kong Womens Manual Labour Association in
cooperation with the students at the Chinese University of Hong Kong formed
a workers cooperative that owns and runs the school cafeteria at the university.
This project, which began in 2000, received nancial support and physical help
from many faculty members and students at the university. The students
lobbied school ofcials to accept the business bid from the workers coopera-
 Repatriating from Globalization 159

tive instead of big corporations and solicited donations from the university
community to help nance the bid to start up the business. The cooperative
members were former women factory workers, laid off from their previous
employment. The movement has spread to the campuses of two other univer-
sities, the Lingnan University and the City University of Hong Kong where
cooperatives operate other kinds of businesses serving the students.
Developing a different and more responsible habit of consumption is
precisely the point of the cooperatives at the universities. Students and faculty
line up for the lunches provided by the cooperatives rather than buy fast food
from chains, because they want to support businesses that treat their
employees equitably. The existence of these cooperatives challenges the
unquestioned acceptance of exploiting workers as business as usual. In other
words, these organizations defy relational conventions in a society operating
under the principles of the market economy that are the basis of inequality
among people. They offer a paradigm for another kind of social organization.
Cooperatives such as these have more benefits than the obvious in
providing employment opportunities to laid-off factory workers who are the
main victims of Hong Kongs economic restructuring. They offer retraining in
other kinds of livelihood as well as an instantaneous community for moral
support during difficult times. The women involved in these cooperatives
explained that they derived a great sense of satisfaction in knowing that they
might be of help to others in their situation since these organizations usually
branch out into other services as they become bigger. They also feel gratied at
the thought that they are serving the student community through their work.
The students, on the other hand, learned their rst lessons in issues of social
and economic justice through working with these cooperatives, as well as
honed their skills in grassroots organizing. Some of these students became
full-time activists after their graduation from university.42
Another similar kind of workers cooperative is operated by the Employers
and Workers Relations Association, a union organization established in 1993
initially to help deal with the mass layoff as a result of the apparel industry
moving north to China. Aside from providing legal support, the unions most
important function at the time was to offer retraining to laid-off women
workers, especially in Chinese typing, with very limited success. In 2001, it
organized the Women Workers Cooperative and started a thrift store. It has
since become one of the most successful of these cooperatives. By the end of
2003, the organization decided to diversify its business by opening a grocery
store as well.
160 Paradigm City

These cooperative businesses, though small in scale, can pose some chal-
lenge to huge corporations. The grocery store of the Women Workers
Cooperative is a step in breaking the monopoly of the two most powerful
supermarket chains in Hong Kong, Welcome and Parkn Shop. It offers alter-
native consumer products at competitive rates, attracting many consumers
away from the chains in the neighborhood. By breaking up the market control
of a couple of huge corporations, it helps dispel these corporations manipu-
lation of consumer taste and need through controlling commodity choices and
lifestyle options. When Stuart Hall argued that individual consumers have the
potential to change the social landscape, he perhaps did not foresee the effect
of this alternative collective consumer movement.43
Aside from the camaraderie and mutual support the members and
employees derive from working together, through its membership of six thou-
sand, the Woman Workers Cooperative also became a viable political pressure
group. During the July 1, 2003, demonstration against Article 23 and the New

Fig. 6.1: Women Workers Cooperative

Banners of the Womens Workers Union at the July 1 2004 mass demonstration,
demanding for universal suffrage.
 Repatriating from Globalization 161

Years Day 2004 labor demonstration, the association and its members decided
to close up shop to participate in the historic events.44
Individuals in their daily lives seem no match for huge multinational corpo-
rations in the competition for social space. However, many local residents in
Hong Kong discover that embedded in their daily struggle for survival are the
many seeds of grassroots political and social change. Most cooperatives and
mutual aid programs, as demonstrated by the Women Workers Cooperative,
form natural interest groups. Many participants of these groups who used to
be isolated in their individualized daily struggle now discover themselves part
of a movement. Empowered and radicalized, many take their political
commitment farther in different forms of political activism (g. 6.1. Women
Workers Cooperative banners).
This page intentionally left blank.
 Conclusion

The usurpation of social space by the forces of capital threatens communities

and neighborhoods. Ironically, it is when traditional public spaces become
privatized and constricted that aspects of private life become of necessity
politicized, even becoming public movements. In the intense drive toward
internationalism and global capitalism, when the very streets that used to
contain the customs and behavior of local daily life are turned into spaces for
tourists and businesses, sanitized and organized according to a standardized
aesthetic, local organizing and political activism are pushed to the arena of
daily life. There is a shift from a spatial mode of community life to a more
pervasive and more wholesome community mentality that begins from indi-
vidual life. In this sense, the social movements, since they involve the actual
everyday habits of the members of the community, are holistic.
The successes of all the various grassroots organizations and labor move-
ments in 2003 create a radicalized population. The gradual rise of
consciousness of social and economic justice through these programs is not
insignicant in contributing to social change. Perhaps it was an indication of
things to come when Leung Kwok Hung, the well-known grassroots dissident,
was voted into the Legislative Council (Legco) as a political representative with
sixty-thousand votes in the general election of councilors in 2004. Nicknamed
Long Hair because of his unkempt shoulder-length hair, he deed the elitist
dress code and etiquette of the Legco by insisting on wearing his uniform of
Che Guevara t-shirts to the meetings despite open reprimands by the chair-
person of the council. At the swear-in ceremony, he insisted on pledging his
allegiance to the people, rather than to the Chinese Communist Party,
creating immense political embarrassment for the HKSAR government.1 For

163
164 Paradigm City

his obstreperous behavior, he had been publicly dis-invited to Beijing by the

central government. However, the general population adored Long Hair. It was
reported that the night before the election there was not one Che Guevara t-
shirt to be found in stores in Hong Kong, because there had been a run on
them by his supporters. Analysts pointed out that Long Hair had raised young
peoples political interest and participation. The reverse is also true: Long
Hair was embraced by the population because it was ready for a grassroots
hero in 2004 (g. 6.2. Long Hair).
In December 2004, there was a proposal to raze the residential buildings in
a rather new development, the Hunghom Peninsular, in order to build larger
buildings to increase the number of saleable square footage. The developer,
Sun Hungkee, however, yielded to public pressure and backed off from the
plans. In another case, an elderly woman held up the Link REITs bid to priva-
tize shopping malls in public housing estates through a lawsuit, claiming that
it would push up retail rents and, by extension, consumer burden (see intro-

Fig. 6.2: Long Hair

Grassroots hero, Long Hair, rallying the crowds at the July 1 2004 mass demon-
stration. The placate reads, End tyranny; return governance to the people.
 Conclusion 165

duction). At an economic forum on December 13, 2004, the chairman of the

Hang Lung Group, Ronnie Chan, enraged by how development events had
been stopped by public opinion, accused the politicians, especially the demo-
crats in the Legislative Council, for being only concerned with wealth
distribution and not caring about wealth creation, and that they were turning
Hong Kong into the most communist place in China.2 Ronnie Chan typically
argued that this kind of willfulness would deter investors and would adversely
affect Hong Kongs economy. Cynically, Shih Wing-Ching, the chairman of
Centaline (Holdings) Company, commented that businesses have no advocates
at the Legco, that they should re the Liberal Party (the supposedly probusi-
ness) councilors because they had openly helped public housing residents ght
to overturn the Housing Authoritys plan to increase rent. He suggested that
the business league should use ten billion dollars to rent a party to advocate
for businesses rights.
In an English editorial, Ming Pao Daily analyzed the public actions in the
new millennium, from the defeat of Article 23, the West Kowloon Cultural
complex debacle, the halting of the Hunghom Peninsular development plans,
to the Link REIT lawsuits. These are only a few of the more successful local
actions. There were also organized protests against further plans of land recla-
mation in the Victoria Harbour, demand for public ofcial accountability,
and so on. Finally, in 2005, the unpopular China-appointed CE for the HKSAR
government, Tung Chee Hwa, resigned. Quoting Lau Siu-Kai, who headed the
Central Policy Unit, a government think-tank, the Ming Pao Daily analysis
pointed out that rather than to view these events as a crisis of governance, it
was more accurate to see them as a result of the growth of civil society and a
rejection of the colonial style, executive-led government. The title of the edito-
rial piece Surge in People Power perhaps best describes the feeling of
collective empowerment at the end of the tenure of HKSARs rst CE.
There is no question that many in Hong Kong deeply believe in the ideal
of Stability and Prosperity and that one leads to the other. This is the
reason that I focus narrowly in this book on a few years after 2000, when
the free-market economy failed expectations. My study of the textual and
artistic culture is to decipher the popular desire that is not evident through
statistics and factual data. My aim is to bring out the contradictions in a capi-
talist society, where personal fulllment and economic progress, in spite of
what is apparent or expected, are often at odds. My use of Michel de
Certeaus theory of the everyday is to underline the idea of inadvertent rather
than organized resistance and ambivalence toward, rather than outright
166 Paradigm City

rejection of the dominant ideology. Personal activisms such as those I

discussed should be contextualized within the particularly difcult years of
the new millennium. However, as I have argued before, public space, once
opened, is very hard to be reenclosed. What happened in these few years of
Hong Kong would have indelible inuence in the political negotiations in its
immediate future.
The articulation of a Hong Kong identity has been a preoccupation among
local intellectuals since the end of the colonial period. Regardless of whether
a conclusive denition is possible, there is no doubt that the experience of the
rst ve years of the HKSAR period was formative. In addition to the ofcial
branding as Asias nancial headquarters and a world city, the citizens have
made sure that written into this descriptive is their will for political expres-
sion and democratic governance. The experiences of these five years have
made sure that within capitalist space, there will also be spaces of hope.
 Notes

Introduction

1. Wall Street Journal, January, 4, 2006.

2. An overwhelming mood of celebration when Hong Kong was granted this
title for yet another year can be seen in the editorials of all the major newspa-
pers in Hong Kong on January 4, 2006, from the respected and generally
politically liberal Ming Pao Daily, to the sensationalist Dong Fong (The
Orient), to the conservative and right-leaning Singdou, and all those in
between.
3. Bollywood might have always exceeded Hong Kong in the volume of its lm
production. However, in terms of export value, it consistently lagged behind.
Despite the decrease in the volume of output of Hong Kong lms in recent
years, their inuence in world popular culture is still considerable in terms of
their substantive contribution.
4. Frederic Dannen and Barry Long, Hong Kong Babylon: The Insiders Guide to
the Hollywood of the East (New York: Miramax, 1997).
5. Lii Ding-Tzann, A Colonized Empire: Reections on the Expansion of Hong
Kong Films in Asian Countries. Also, Law Wing-Sang, Managerializing
Colonialism in Hong Kong. K. H. Chen. ed., Trajectories: Inter-Asia Cultural
Studies. New York and London: Routledge, 1998, 12241. See also, the section,
Northward Bound Imagination, in Stephen C. K. Chan. ed., Cultural Imag-
inary and Ideology: Contemporary Hong Kong Culture and Politics Review
(Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1997), 3184.
6. For a discussion of the free-market capitalism as the ideological norm
propelled by the mass media, see Hui Po-Keung, Word Use And Translation:
The Spread of the Ideology of Free Economy in Hong Kong, in What Capi-
talism Is Not (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 2002), 10726.
7. Don Mitchell, The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public
Space (London, New York: Guilford, 2003). Phrase originally from Henri
Lefebvre.

167
168 Notes to Introduction

8. Michel de Certeau, Walking in the City, The Practice of Everyday Life

(Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 91110.
9. De Certeau, Walking in the City, 95.
10. De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1988).
11. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, From the Imperial Family to the Transnational
Imaginary: Media Spectatorship in the Age of Globalization, in Global/Local,
ed, Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake (Durham: Duke University Press,
1996), 154.
12. Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Nuala Rooney, At Home
with Density (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2003); Kwok Yan-Chi
Jackie, ed., The Production of Space in Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Crabs, 1998).
Woo Yun-Wai Matthias, Hong Kong Style (Hong Kong: CUP, 2005); Gordon
Mathews and Lui Tai-Lok , Consuming Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Hong Kong
University Press, 2001); Huang Tsung-Yi Michelle, Walking between Slums and
Skyscrapers: Illusions of Open Space in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai (Hong
Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004).
13. Lok Fung, City at the Fin de Sicle: Hong Kong Popular Culture (Hong Kong:
Oxford University Press, 1995). Also, Leung Ping-Kwan, Hong Kong Culture
and Literature (Hong Kong: Youth Literary Bookstore,1996); Hong Kong
Popular Culture (Hong Kong: Joint Publishing, 1993).
14. Gordon Mathews and Lui Tai-Lok, eds., Consuming Hong Kong (Hong Kong:
Hong Kong University Press, 2001).
15. Kristin Ross, The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 8.
16. Kwok Yan-Chi Jackie, ed., The Production of Space in Hong Kong.
17. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (London: Blackwell, 2003).
18. Rux Martin, Truth, Power, Self: An Interview with Michel Foucault, in Tech-
nologies on the Self, ed., Martin, Gutman, and Hutton (Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 1988), 914.
19. Eric Kit-Wai Ma, Hong Kongs Self-Awareness as City, Ming Pao Daily April
3, 2005, B11, U.S., East Coast edition. See also Television and Cultural Identity
(Hong Kong: Breakthrough, 1996).
20. Television and Cultural Identity. For example, Stephen Chows lampoon in
From Beijing with Love (1994) and Her Fatal Ways (lit: Youre Great, Cousin!)
(1989) by writer and director, Alfred Cheung (Zhang Tingjian).
21. For an interesting discussion of the complex state of patriotism among Hong
Kong people through the response to a propaganda music video broadcast in
Hong Kong in 2004 during the October 1 national holiday, see Eric Kit-Wai
Ma and Chow Pui Has Aiguo zhengzhi shencha (An Examination of the Poli-
tics of Patriotism) (Hong Kong: Subculture Studio, 2005).
22. Anthony Fung, What Makes the Local? A Brief Consideration of the Rejuve-
nation of Hong Kong Identity, Cultural Studies 15 (3/4) (2001): 591601.
23. Ibid.
 Notes to Introduction 169

24. Rey Chow, Fateful Attachment: On Collecting, Fidelity, and Lao She, Critical
Inquiry (Autumn 2001): 286394.
25. Eric Kit Wai Ma and Chow Pui Ha, An Examination of the Politics of Patrio-
tism (Hong Kong: Subculture, 2005).
26. Keynote address by Peter Woo, Chairman of the Hong Kong Trade Develop-
ment Council, March 26, 2001 (http://www. tdctrade. com/tdcnews).
27. Ibid.
28. It is Michelle Tsung-Yi Huangs point to discuss how the physical plan of the
city of Hong Kong itself is dominated by this ideology of global capitalism,
which competes for space with the people. The discussions of the new airport
as well as Hong Kong Disney are dealt with in great detail in her study in
Hong Kong: A Nodal Point of Dual Compression from British Empire
Colony to Disney Kingdom Outpost, Walking between Slums and Skyscrapers:
Illusions of Open Space in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai (Hong Kong:
Hong Kong University Press, 2004), 1530.
29. Keynote address of Peter Woo, chairman of the Hong Kong Trade Develop-
ment Council, March 26, 2001 (http://www.tdctrade.com/tdcnews).
30. In 2004, 24. 2 million air travelers were processed by the Hong Kong Immi-
gration Department. In 2005, the number increased to 26.0 million. The
department achieved 92% success rate in clearing travelers within fteen
minutes in immigration procedures (http://www.immd.gov.hk).
31. The mission statement of the Airport Authority Hong Kong reads as follows:
Airport Authority Hong Kong (AA) is a statutory body that holds a mandate
to maximise the value of Hong Kong International Airport (HKIA) for the
benet of the territorys prosperity. Wholly owned by the Government of the
Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR), AA was established in
1995 to operate and maintain HKIA, with an emphasis on enhancing Hong
Kongs status as a major centre of international and regional aviation
http://www.hongkongairport.com/eng/aboutus/prole.html. For ve consec-
utive years since its opening, Hong Kong International Airport has been
named best airport worldwide in passenger surveys, receiving the Gold Award
in the World Airport Awards (http://www.airlinequality.com).
32. Michael Siu-Kin Wai, To Put in Order: The Ideas of Le Corbusier on Urban
Planning, in The Production of Space in Hong Kong, ed. Yan-Chi Jackie Kwok
(Hong Kong: Crabs, 1998), 5077.
33. Asia Pacic Management Forum, April 25, 2002 (http://www.apmforum.
Com).
34. See the mission statement of the government agency, Civics Education
Committee. (http://www.cpce.gov.hk).
35. Frederic Jameson, Politics of Utopia, New Left Review 25 (2004): 3556: 38.
36. Harvey describes this process in many of his works; most recently, it is devel-
oped in The New Imperialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003) and
A Brief History of Neo-Liberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
37. Terminology of Mike Davis in Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2006).
38. Frederic Jameson, Politics of Utopia.
39. Hung Hou-Fung, Thousand Years of Oppression, Thousand Years of Resis-
170 Notes to Introduction

tance: The Tankas before and after Colonialism, in Civic Culture and Political
Discourse in Postwar Hong Kong, ed. Law Wing-Sang (Hong Kong: Oxford
University Press, 1997), 11340.
40. The Link REIT incident in 2004, in which the Hong Kong Housing Authority
attempts to sell the malls and car parks of the housing estates in its ownership
to private developers is seen by some as a typical strategy of privatization in
Hong Kong that sacrices the rights of the poor in order to promote develop-
ment. I describe this further in a later section of this chapter.
41. www.brandhk.gov.hk
42. Eric Kit-Wai Ma, Hong Kongs Self-Awareness.
43. Jan Aart Scholte, Global Capitalism and the State, International Affairs 73, 3
(July 1997): 42752.
44. Quoted from Ming Pao Daily, April 4, 2005, B14, U.S., East Coast edition.
Tsangs Colonial Past May Stall His Political Rise, The Hong Kong Standard,
April 4, 2005.
45. H. K. Govt Drops Planned REIT Listing Amid Legal Uncertainty, Japan
Economic Newswire, December 20, 2004; Link Collapses, The Hong Kong
Standard, December 20, 2004.
46. Ming Pao Daily, December 14, 2004, B14, U.S. East Coast edition.
47. David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 2000).
48. According to the Hong Kong Yearbook 2003: The year of 2003 marked the
ftieth year of public housing development in Hong Kong. About one-third
of the population in Hong Kong now lives in public rental housing with
another 20 percent in subsidised home ownership ats. The total housing
stock in Hong Kong in December amounted to 2,363,410 ats, comprising
689,450 public rental housing (PRH) ats, 394,630 subsidised home owner-
ship ats and 1,279,330 ats in the private sector. The revised estimate of
public expenditure on housing in 200304 was $27.9 billion and reached 10
percent of total public expenditure
(http://www.yearbook.gov.hk/2003/english/chapter11/11_00.html). See also,
Nuala Rooney, At Home with Density (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University
Press, 2003).
49. 13% of The Hong Kong government total recurrent expenditure is allocated
for the public hospital system. Landscape on Health-care Services in Hong
Kong, discussion paper of the Health and Medical Development Advisory
Committee, March 15, 2005 (http://www. hwfb. gov. hk/hmdac/English).
50. Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucaults History of Sexu-
ality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995).
51. Michel Foucault readjusted our perspective in calling attention to how social
groups create the conditions for particular regimes of state discipline. See
History of Sexuality, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage, 1990).
52. Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard, and Pierre Mayol, The Practice of Everyday
Life, vol. 2: Living and Cooking, trans. Timothy J. Tomasik (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 1011.
 Notes to Chapter One 171

53. Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

Press, 2003).
54. De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, vol. 2, 11.
55. Etienne Balibar, We, the Citizens of Europe? Reections on Transnational Citi-
zenship (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Ann Laura Stoler,
Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American
History and (Post) Colonial Studies, Journal of American History (2001)
(http://www.historycooperative.press.uiuc.edu).
56. Anne Showstack Sassoon, Introduction: The Personal and the Intellectual,
Fragments and Order, International Trends and National Specicities, in
Sassoon, ed., Women and the State (London: Hutchinson, 1987), 1342.
57. Georg Simmel, The Metropolis and Mental Life, in Metropolis: Center and
Symbol of Our Times, ed. P. Kasinitz (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), 3045.
58. Ibid.
59. Kristin Ross examines the essential difference between de Certeaus notion of
the street and that of Althussers. She argues that while the street for the
former is a metonym for the people and symbolizes resistance, for the latter,
it is a site of our subjection by the state, which is all-pervasive, basing her
discussion on the famous anecdote Althusser relates about how one turns at
the voice of a policeman on the street. Kristin Ross, Streetwise: The French
Invention of Everyday Life, Parallax 2 (1996): 6776. See Michel de Certeau,
Walking in the City in The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1984), 91110.
60. Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution.
61. Kristin Ross, Streetwise: The French Invention of Everyday Life, Parallax 2
(1996): 6776. See Michel de Certeau, Walking in the City in The Practice of
Everyday Life (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984),
91110.
62. Michael Sheringham, Attending to the Everyday: Blanchot, Lefebvre,
Certeau, Perce, French Studies 54, 2 (2000): 18799.

Chapter One. World Suicide Capital

1. In 2002, Hong Kong produced only 67 feature movies (not for television),
down from 133 in the already depressed year of 2001. BBC January 3, 2003
(http://www.news.bbc.co.uk).
2. Compare this to the combined 46 million Hong Kong dollars boxofce earn-
ings of the international blockbuster Lord of the Rings, parts one and two
combined. Figures quoted from Ming Pao Weekly, December 7, 2003, U.S.,
East Coast edition. The rights for this lm were acquired by Brad Pitts Plan B
Entertainment in 2003 and remade as The Departed, directed by Martin
Scorsese.
3. This is Hong Kong-Mainland coproduction.
4. Nestor Garcia Canclini, Consumers and Citizens: Globalization and Multi-
172 Notes to Chapter One

cultural Conicts, trans. George Ydice (Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 2003), 65.
5. Quoted and translated from Zhang Zhiwei, Propagating Tyranny or Against
Tyranny? The Political Reading of Hero, in Ming Pao Daily, January 18, 2003,
Section C, U.S. East Coast edition.
6. Ibid.
7. Right before and after 1997, there was almost an urgency in Hong Kong to
articulate or discover a Hong Kong identity, resulting in an industry of
Hong Kong studies, ctionalized history, personal memoirs, and collective
accounts. See for example, the series of seven volumes of Hong Kong Cultural
Studies published by Oxford University Press, one of which, Stephen C. K.
Chan, ed., Identity and Public Culture (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press,
1997), focuses on identity issues. Personal accounts and memoirs include the
series Hong Kong Old Pictures (Hong Kong: Cosmo, 1999) and This Is How We
Grew Up (Hong Kong: Mingpao, 1997). Xi Xis ctional history of Hong
Kong, Feizan (Flying Carpet) (Taipei: Hung-fan, 1996). In his futuristic collec-
tion, Visible Cities, the ction writer Dung Kai-Cheung describes the process
of an archeological expedition in some future age to uncover the historical
truth of Hong Kong after the city was submerged and disappeared after the
end of the twentieth century. This reects an obvious anxiety of the disap-
pearance of a true Hong Kong after the turnover of its sovereignty to China
after 1997 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Arts Centre, 1998).
8. The idea of a Hong Kong core value or the Hong Kong spirit has been
hotly debated since 2003 and 2004 and the various social and political events
of these years, which I will describe later. The iconic City Magazine held a
forum attended by some of the more well-known Hong Kong cultural critics
and academics to identify the Hong Kong Spirit (on December 20, 2005, in
another Hong Kong institution, the Chui Wah Diner, the three-story Hong
Kong-style diner in Central). City Magazine 352 (2006): 17475.
9. Quoted from Ming Pao Daily, October 2, 2003, Section B, U.S. East Coast
edition.
10. Lo Wing-Sang points out that the peculiarity of Hong Kong politics is only
possible in a place with immense hostility toward notions of native soil. This
is because the imaginary of native soil is often ineluctably equated with the
backwardness and erratic politics of China. In Hong Kong this powerful anti-
native notion is very deep-seated. See Law Wing-Sang, Transforming Colo-
nialism through Managerialism, in Whose City: Civic Culture and Political
Discourse in Postwar Hong Kong, ed. Law Wing-Sang (Hong Kong: Oxford
University Press, 1997), 79.
11. One of Chinas fth generation lm directors, a generation characterized by
their reaction against the hyperpoliticized social realist style since 1949 and
then the Sample Drama of the Cultural Revolution, Zhangs lms are
known for the extravagant romantic depiction of a China that emphasis more
on surface cinematic beauty than realism. See Rey Chow, The Force of
Surfaces: Deance in Zhang Yimous Films, Primitive Passions: Visuality,
Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1995), 14272.
 Notes to Chapter One 173

12. Hero has earned more than two billion Hong Kong dollars at the boxofce.
However as commentator Guo Qiancheng points out, most of this is created
by the Mainland boxofce. Ming Pao Daily, January 16, 2004, Section C, Hong
Kong edition.
13. Michael Dutton, ed., Stories of the Fetish: Tales of Chairman Mao, Streetlife
China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 23871.
14. Rey Chow writes about this episode in Introduction, Writing Diaspora:
Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies (Indianapolis:
University of Indiana Press, 1993), 126.
15. Ming Pao Daily, November 17, 2003, Section C, U.S. East Coast edition.
16. Law Wing-Sang.
17. Anthony Fung in What Makes the Local? A Brief Consideration of the Reju-
venation of Hong Kong Identity, records the changing perception toward
various national icons from 1996 to 1998. Toward the symbols of the state, the
Peoples Liberation Army, only 10.0% felt a sense of pride toward it in 1996,
while 30.3% of the population felt a sense of unease toward it. In 1997 and
1998, the numbers read 10.9% and 9.3%. More relevant on an everyday level,
the public security of China was regarded with a sense of pride by 3.0%, 2.7%
and 4.4% in the three years. But those who felt a sense of unease numbered
38.9%, 24.8% and 19.7%. Hong Kong peoples fear of Chinas state apparatus
signicantly decreased as Chinas pledge of One country two systems and
Hong Kong governed by Hong Kong people was realized, but not elimi-
nated (Cultural Studies 15 (2001): 599).
18. The ominousness of the PLA entering Hong Kong is documented with great
poignancy by the lm director Fruit Chan. The footage is incorporated in his
lm The Longest Summer (1998).
19. http://www.brandhk.gov.hk
20. The Hong Kong Medical Journal (December 2003)
http://www.hkmj.org/resources/digest0312.html. Also, study of the University
of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Jockey Club Center for Suicide Research and
Prevention (http://csrp1.hku.hk/index.php).
21. Quoted from Asiaone (http://newspaper.asia1.com.sg).
22. Under the CEPA (Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement), which was
described as offering a much better deal than Chinas WTO commitments,
Hong Kong enjoys preferential access to Chinas market as it moves toward
greater liberalization. It guarantees zero tariff privilege for exports from
Hong Kong to China, freer market excess of eighteen service sectors, 1005
ownerships of Chinese ventures. The Hong Kong Trade Development
Council boasts that it will make Hong Kong the simplest and most protable
route into China. See Hong Kong Trade Development Council ofcial
website (http://www.TDC.COM).
23. See, for example, the admonishment of Cui Zhekai, deputy director of the
Hong Kong Ofce of Chinese Affairs. Ming Pao Daily, August 7, 2003, Section
B, U.S. East Coast edition.
24. Comic strip, Muhn Dou dai (Getting to the bottom), drawn by Wong King-
174 Notes to Chapter Two

chai and written by Lee Chat. Ming Pao Daily, July 2, 2003, Section C, U.S.
East Coast edition.
25. For example, Cui Zhekai, the deputy director of the Hong Kong Ofce of
Chinese Affairs (Zhonglian ban), publicly admonished Hong Kong people
about the importance of stability, hyperbolically equating the mass demon-
stration to the mobs of Chinas Cultural Revolution. The deputy director of
the Ofce of Hong Kong-Macau Affairs of the State Department, Xu Ze,
urged the SAR government to increase their efforts in education to nurture
nationalistic sentiment in Hong Kong (Ming Pao Daily, August 7, 2003, and
September 5, 2003, Section B, U.S. East Coast edition). In response, the
famous commentator and writer Tou Kit (Tao Jie), in an essay New Govern-
ment, New Hong Kong, wrote, We have demonstrated; Article 23 has been
postponed; What next? (original in English.) The next step is to force Old
Tung to vacate, and for direct election of the Chief Executive, Ming Pao
Daily, July 7, 2003, Section B, U.S. East Coast edition.
26. Joseph Y. S. Cheng, The 2003 Council Election in Hong Kong, Asian Survey
44, 5 (2004): 73454.
27. Six-monthly Report on Hong Kong: JulyDecember 2003. Presented to
Parliament by the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs
by Command of Her Majesty (February 7, 2004)
(http://www.fco.gov.uk/Files/Kle). Also, Commission staff working docu-
ment: Hong Kong report. From the Commission to the Council and the
European Parliament: HKSAR Annual Report
(http://www.delhkg.cec.eu.int/en/EUHKReporto4.dec).
28. Reported in Ming Pao Daily, January 17, 2004, Section A, Hong Kong edition.

Chapter Two. Walking Down Memory Lane

1. Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

Press, 2003), 21.
2. See Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of
French Culture (London, California: MIT Press, 1995).
3. Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2003), 19.
4. Ibid.
5. Chantal Mouffe, Democratic Citizenship and Political Community. Dimen-
sions in Radical Democracy: Pluralism, Citizenship, Community (London:
Verso, 1992), 22958.
6. This idea of Hong Kongs recolonization by China is a stance held by various
scholars in the early 1990s, most notably, Rey Chows, Writing Diaspora:
Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1993). Scholarship in the late 1990s tends to compli-
cate this idea by pointing out that because Hong Kong is a powerful cultural
and economic inuence in China, one can also perceive Hong Kongs
relationship with China as conquering north (beijin), thus reversing the
power hierarchy between the two. See the series of essays on the beijin imag-
 Notes to Chapter Two 175

inary in Stephen C. K. Chan, ed., Cultural Imaginary and Ideology: Contem-

porary Hong Kong Culture and Politics Review (Hong Kong: Oxford University
Press, 1997). As Hong Kongs economic situation weakens since the Asian
nancial crisis in 1997 and Chinas entry into the World Trade Organization
in 2002, this relationship needs to be once again reevaluated.
7. Wong Wang-Chi, Stephen C. K Chan, and Li Siu-Leung, Hong Kong Un-
Imagined: History, Culture and the Future (Taipei: Rye Field, 1997), 95132.
8. Ibid. See also, Esther M. K. Cheung, The Hi/Stories of Hong Kong, Cultural
Studies 15 (3/4) (2001): 56490.
9. Akbar Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
10. Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia, Public Culture 12
(1) (2000): 2138.
11. John Ngnuyet Erni, Like a Postcolonial Culture: Hong Kong Re-Imagined,
Cultural Studies 15 (3/4) (2001): 389418. Written as an introduction to a
special issue on Hong Kong culture, Erni explains: We took heed of the
enduring lesson learned during the transitional period leading to decoloniza-
tion (19841997) that in order to have a future, Hong Kong must desire
history. Wanting our own history has been a political act at that time, for it
disrupted attempts of historical erasure and rewriting by the departing colo-
nialists and by the southward nationalist historians (392).
12. Michael Kanmen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition
in American Culture (New York: Vintage, 1993).
13. http://www. lcsd. gov. hk/CE/Museum/History
14. Ibid.
15. Esther M. K. Cheung, The Hi/Stories of Hong Kong, Cultural Studies 15
(3/4) (2001): 56490: 564.
16. See Bill Brown, Regional Artifacts (The Life of Things in the Work of Sarah
Orne Jewett), American Literary History (2000): 195.
17. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, Los Angeles,
London: University of California Press, 1988), 108.
18. John Frow quotes from Robert Hewison, who applies the Benjaminian
concept to contemporary Britain: From the perspectives of everyday life, the
unique heritage object has aura, and in this respect that national heritage
seems to have a persistent connection with earlier traditions of bourgeois
culturea connection which may even be especially strong as the modern
past reaches out to include not masterpieces but the modest objects of
bygone everyday life in its repertoire, Time and Commodity Culture, 253.
19. See Rey Chow, Fateful Attachments: On Collecting, Fidelity, and Lao She,
Critical Inquiry (Autumn 2001): 286394.
20. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the
Souvenir, The Collection (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1984), 23.
21. In her discussion of the issue of antique collection in the short story Lian
(Attachment), by Lao She, Rey Chow explores the issue of individual subjec-
tion and how ones cultural belonging, class, and even national identity are
dened according to ones possessions. Chow points out, History appears in
176 Notes to Chapter Two

the form of culturethe cherished collectibles that supposedly, enhance

peoples sense of their own renement. Remarkably, Lao She depicts
changing attitudes toward history by way of changing attitudes toward
collecting and thereby incidentally introduces the issue of class understood
in cultural, rather than economic terms. National identity can be interpreted
as a form of desire sublimated through acquisitions and possessions of such
historical symbols as antiques. Rey Chow, Fateful Attachments: On
Collecting, Fidelity, and Lao She, Critical Inquiry (2001): 290.
22. See Akbar Abbas, The Last Emporium: Verse and Cultural Space, City at the
End of Time (Hong Kong: Twilight, 1992), 319.
23. Mathew Turner and Irene Ngan, eds., Hong Kong Sixties: Designing Identity
(Hong Kong: Hong Kong Arts Centre, 1995).
24. Li Zhaoxing (Bono Lee), Hong Kong Postmodern (Hong Kong: Zinanzjen
jituan, 2002), 3637.
25. In fact, some would argue that global capitalist economy is directly related to
the growth of heritage industries. Joe Moran points out that the fetish of
childhood objects and the sustaining myths of childhood that dominate the
heritage industry in contemporary Britain, for example, reect the anxieties
about the effects of recent economic and social changes on both adults and
children, even if the solutions it offers are necessarily individualistic and
backward-looking. Childhood and Nostalgia in Contemporary Culture,
European Journal of Cultural Studies 5 (2002): 55173: 171.
26. The exhibition was produced by the Hong Kong Museum of History exhibi-
tion director, Oscar Ching-bin Ho.
27. See the accompanying publications. Mathew Turner and Irene Ngan, Hong
Kong Sixties: Designing Identity.
28. What is this international image? According to Hong Kong Arts Centre
director Oscar Ho on the image constructed during this period: Occasionally
East meets West is used to dene Hong Kong culture, mainly for promoting
tourism. Situated between the two powerful cultures, the Chinese and the
British, Hong Kong does have difculty in standing on her own. East meets
West is convenient and supercial enough for Hong Kong. If our father is
British and our mother, Chinese, who are we? Would that East meets West
adequately explain the complexity of our culture? Culture is not something
that one can clearly outline, but it does not require too much observation to
see the distinctiveness of Hong Kong culture. Ho, People with No Faces, in
Hong Kong Sixties: Designing Identity, by Mathew Turner and Irene Ngan, xii.
29. Steve Tsang, A Modern History of Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Hong Kong
University Press, 2004). See also, Elsie Tu, Colonial Hong Kong in the Eyes of
Elsie Tu (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2003).
30. Steve Tsang, A History of Modern Hong Kong.
31. There are many memoirs and short pieces that touch on the issue of the sense
of community and self-help among neighbors among the public estate
dwellers. For example, Tsin Wai-Yi, The Days of Matchbox Houses, in
Leung Wai-Ling et al., eds., Come in for Tea: Self-narrative of a Group of
University Students (Hong Kong: Subculture, 1996), 712. There are also
 Notes to Chapter Two 177

studies about how redevelopment of aging housing estates upsets communi-

ties that have existed around them. See Kwok Yan-Chi Jackie, and Siu Kin-
Wai Michael, The Hidden Rhythm of Life: A Study of the Elderly Estate in
Hong Kong and the Experience of Life, in Kwok Yan-Chi Jackie, ed., The
Production of Space in Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Crabs, 1998), 10221.
32. Hung Hou-Fung, Thousand Years of Oppression, Thousand Years of Resis-
tance: The Tankas Before and After Colonialism, in Law Wing-Sang. ed.,
Civic Culture and Political Discourse in Postwar Hong Kong (Hong Kong:
Oxford University Press, 1997) 11340.
33. Eric Kit-Wai Ma. Television and Cultural Identity (Hong Kong: Breakthrough,
1996); Ma, Culture Politics and Television in Hong Kong (London and New
York: Routledge, 1999); Ng Fong, The History of HK Television (Hong Kong:
Subculture, 2003).
34. Pleasant environment, Clean Hong Kong History
(http://www.fehd.gov.hk/pleasant_environment/chk).
35. The museum operates in close association with the Hong Kong Institute of
Education to develop programs for school-age children. They jointly produce
a learning kit from the exhibition, which includes traveling display boards,
slides, and a video collection for lending out to schools. They sponsor annual
interschool competitions that give prizes for study projects on Hong Kong
history and culture. As a state project, the museum also offers wide accessi-
bility to the general public. It is free to school children. But even for the
general public, the cost is only ten Hong Kong dollars per person, which
amounts to about one dollar and twenty cents in U.S. currency. Moreover,
admission to the museum is free to the public every Wednesday.
36. There is a large amount of theoretical discussion on the importance of civic
interactions among people in the democratizing of public space. According
to Raymond Williams, for example, these spaces are the place where new
social and economic and cultural relationships, beyond both city and nation
in their older senses, were beginning to be framed, thus it nurtures the
democratic and revolutionary potential of the masses and the multitude (44).
Raymond Williams, Metropolitan Perception and the Emergence of
Modernism in The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformist
(London: Verso, 1989), 3747.
Also, Chantal Mouffe writes that the natural process of democracy is predi-
cated on difference, divisions, exclusions, and contestation that are naturally
present in such places. See Democratic Citizenship and Political Commu-
nity, in Dimensions in Radical Democracy: Pluralism, Citizenship, Community
(London: Verso, 1992), 22958.
37. Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia
(New York and London: Routledge, 1995).
38. Umberto Eco, Travel in Hyperreality (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990).
39. Ming Pao Daily, July 7, 2003, Section B, Hong Kong edition.
40. Quoted and translated from Ming Pao Daily, August 7, 2003, Section B, Hong
Kong edition.
178 Notes to Chapter Three

41. Quoted and translated from Ming Pao Daily, September 5, 2003, Section B,
Hong Kong edition.
42. Under the CEPA, which was described as offering a much better deal than
Chinas WTO commitments, Hong Kong enjoys preferential access to Chinas
market as it moves toward more and more liberalization. It guarantees zero
tariff privilege for exports from Hong Kong to China, freer market excess of
eighteen service sectors, 1005 ownerships of Chinese ventures. The Hong
Kong Trade Development Council boasts that this will make Hong Kong the
simplest and most protable route into China. See Hong Kong Trade Devel-
opment Council ofcial website (http://w.w.w.TDC.COM).
43. Don Mitchell, The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public
Space (New York, London: Guilford, 2003), 50.

Chapter Three. Quality Citizens in Public Spaces

1. Architectural critic Matthias Yun-Wai Woo made such criticism of Hong

Kong parks in his book Hong Kong Style. Matthias Yun-Wai Woo, Hong Kong
Style (Hong Kong: CUP, 2005).
2. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1988), 97.
3. Henri Lefebvre, The Right to the City, in Writing on Cities, ed. and trans. E.
Kofman and E. Lebas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 63181.
4. Robert C. Ellickson, Controlling Chronic Misconduct of City Spaces: Of
Panhandlers, Skid Rows, and Public-Space Zoning, The Yale Law Journal 105
(1996): 11651248: 1167.
5. Henri Lefebvre, Work and Leisure in Everyday Life, in Critique of Everyday
Life, trans. John Moore (London: Verso, 1991), 2942.
6. Don Mitchell, The Annihilation of Space by Law: The Roots and Implica-
tions of Anti-homeless Laws in the United States, The Right to the City: Social
Justice and the Fight for Public Space (New York: Guilford, 2003), 7.
7. Ibid.
8. Mathias Yun-Wai Woo, Hong Kong Style (Hong Kong: CUP, 2005): 70.
9. Jameson, Politics of Utopia, New Left Review 25 (2004): 3556: 42.
10. For a brief rundown of Hong Kongs social movements and mass protests, see
Lui Tai-Lok and Stephen Wing-Kai Chiu, Changing Political Opportunities
and the Shaping of Collective Action: Social Movement in Hong Kong, in
Sing Ming ed., Hong Kong Government and Politics (Hong Kong: Oxford
University Press, 2003), 503504.
11. See Matthew Turner and Irene Ngan eds., Hong Kong Sixties: Designing Iden-
tity (Hong Kong: The Hong Kong Arts Centre, 1995).
12. Woo, Hong Kong Style, 40.
13. Kwok Yan-Chi Jackie and Ng Chit-Hang Ken, The Analysis of the Design of
Tsuen Wan Tak Wah Park, ed. Kwok Yan-Chi Jackie, The Production of Space
in Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Crabs, 1998).
 Notes to Chapter Three 179

14. Kwok and Ng, 165.

15. Ibid.
16. Don Mitchell, The End of Public Space? Peoples Park, the Public, and the
Right to the City, The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public
Space, 140.
17. Unruly and rebellious behavior of young people in Hong Kong is often
regarded with great concern. Lui Chi-Wai argues that youth is a constructed
social category. Their actions are constantly seen as problems rather than
social protests. See Lui Chi-Wai, Modernity, Social Control and Hong Kongs
Youth Problem 19451979, in Reading Hong Kong Popular Cultures 19702000,
ed. Ng Jun Hung and Cheung Chi-Wai (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press,
2002).
18. Amy Sim, Organizing Discontent: NGOs for South East Asian Migrant
Workers in Hong Kong, Working Papers Series 18 (2002), the South East Asian
Research Center, City University of Hong Kong (www. cityu.edu.hk/sarc/
wp18_02_sim.pdf).
19. Nicole Constable, Sexuality and Discipline among Filipina Domestic
Workers in Hong Kong, in Gendering Hong Kong, ed. Anita Kit-Wa Chan and
Wong Wai-Ling (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 2004), 492519.
20. Ohashi Kenichi, Gatherings of Filipino SquareFilipino Domestic Workers
in Central, in City ContactObservations of Hong Kong Street Culture, ed.,
Lui Tai-Lok and Ohashi Kenichi (Hong Kong: Commercial Press, 1992),
17397.
21. Judith Butler, Gender Is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and Subver-
sion, in Film Theory: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies, ed.,
Philip Simpson, Karen J. Shepherdson, and Andrew Utterson (London:
Taylor and Francis, 2004), 24966.
22. Don Mitchell, The Annihilation of Space by Law: The Roots and Implica-
tions of Anti-homeless Laws in the United States.
23. Referring to Hannah Arendts argument that human rights is the foundation
of political rights, Etienne Balibar believes that, in our world today, this is
often reversed. Human rights are a privilege of citizenship, granted or
protected at the indulgence of state governments. Articial borders that
render illegal or expel many world sojourners from formal membership of
different nations leave them without any basic rights and protection. Etienne
Balibar, We, the People of Europe? Reections on Transnational Citizenship
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
24. Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World (New Brunswick: Transac-
tion, 1984), 205.
25. http://www.anothermountainman.com/
26. Stanley Wong, exhibition pamphlet of Building Hong Kong Redwhiteblue,
Exhibition Series 4 (17/11/200418/4/2005), the Hong Kong Heritage Museum.
27. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 422.
28. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 382.
29. Ming Pao Daily, July 2, 2003, Section B, U.S. East Coast edition.
180 Notes to Chapter Four

30. Kiu Ching Wah, July 1 Demonstration as Selling Point, Ming Pao Daily,
October 31, 2004, Section C, U.S. East Coast edition.
31. Ming Pao Daily, December 26, 2003, Section B, U.S. East Coast edition.

Chapter Four. The World Emporium and the Mall City

1. Gordon Mathews and Lui Tai-Lok, ed. Introduction, Consuming Hong Kong
(Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2001), 122.
2. Peter Woo, Chairman of Hong Kong Trade and Economic Council Keynote
Address, March 26, 2001, http://www.tdctrade.com/tdcnews.
3. Appellation of Hong Kong used by many. See Ackbar Abbas, The Last
Emporium: Verse and Cultural Space, in City at the End of Time (Hong
Kong: Twilight, 1992), 319.
5. Ibid.
6. Nestor Garcia Canclini, trans. Goerge Ydice, Consumers and Citizens: Glob-
alization and Multicultural Conicts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2003), 42.
7. Ibid., 40.
8. Laura C. Nelson, Measured Excess: Status, Gender, and Consumer Nationalism
in South Korea (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).
9. Pricewaterhouse Coopers Retail and Consumer Growth Dynamics from New
Delhi to New Zealand, Hong Kong Country Report 2003/2004, 11
(http://Pwchk.com/webmedia/doc).
10. It is estimated that in the rst two weeks of July the city attracted 1.6 million
visitors from China, generating about HK Dollars 9 billion for the city. The
Financial Times, July 10, 2004.
11. Rudi Laermans, Learning to Consume: Early Department Stores and the
Shaping of Modern Consumer Culture 18601914, in Theory Culture and
Society (1993): 10: 79102. See also Yau Jen, The Order of Life in Mutsukoshi
Department Store, in Reading Hong Kong Popular Cultures, 19702000, ed.
Ng Jun-Hong and Cheung Chi-Wai (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press,
2002), 34243.
12. Annie Hau-Nung Chan, Shopping for Fashion in Hong Kong, in Consuming
Hong Kong, ed. Gordon Mathews and Lui Tai-Lok (Hong Kong: Hong Kong
University Press, 2001), 14172.
13. Mary Douglas, The Consumer Revolt, Thought Styles: Critical Essays on
Good Taste, ed. Mary Douglas (New York: Sage, 1996), 10625.
14. Canclini, 42.
15. Lui Tai-Lok, The Malling of Hong Kong, in Consuming Hong Kong, 2346.
16. Matthias Yun-Wai Woo, The World of Flyovers, in Hong Kong Style (Hong
Kong: CUP, 2005), pp. 5459.
17. Matthias Yun-Wai Woo, Hong Kong Is a Super Mall, Hong Kong Style, 6971.
Tse Ou-Sheung, ed., Wandering through the Malls of Hong Kong. Hong
Kong Love Letter (Hong Kong: Subculture, 1999), 17391.
18. Tai-Lok Lui.
 Notes to Chapter Four 181

19. Census and Statistics Department, Hong Kong Administrative Region, The
Peoples Republic of China: Hong Kong Annual Digest of Statistics, 2003 edition,
79.
20. Hong Kong Economic and Trade Council, December 2004 issue
(http://www.hketo.Ca). See also CEs Speech at Luxury 2004: The Lure of
Asia Conference (http://www. infohk/gia/general/200412/01/1201109.html).
21. Henri Lefebvre, Work and Leisure in Everyday Life, in Critique of Everyday
Life, trans. John Moore (London: Verso, 1991), 2942.
22. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith
(London: Blackwell, 2003), 384.
23. Lung King-Cheung, ed. , This Is How We Grew Up (Hong Kong: Ming
Cheung, 1997). Volume 3 was published in 2002.
24. Yau Sai-Man et al., Old Pictures of Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Cosmo, 1999).
25. Lung, 77.
26. Lee Jiu-Hing, ed. , Hong Kong 101: 101 Reasons to Love and Hate Hong Kong
(Hong Kong: Man Lam Seh, 2000).
27. Hong Kong Sixties: Designing/Identity, curated by Matthew Turner. Hong
Kong Arts Center, 1995. See accompanying publication edited by Mathew
Turner and Irene Ngan (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Arts Center, 1995).
28. Hong Kongs Food Culture, The Hong Kong Heritage Museum, September
17, 2003, to April 26, 2004.
29. This history is documented in Yauhahmyausiu: ahpoh haosuht si Youhanyou-
siao: ahpo koushushi (Laughing and Crying: The Old Ladies Oral History)
(Hong Kong: New Association for the Advancement of Women, 2001).
30. Of course, Sahmduos case is an exaggeration of what scholars have long
pointed out about the inuence of television on individual as well as societal
consciousness. Ng Fong, Our Souls Are Molded by the Television, in The
History of Hong Kong Television (Hong Kong: Subculture, 2003), 2432. Also,
Eric Kit-Wai Ma, Television and Cultural Identity (Hong Kong: Breakout,
1996).
31. Records of Sapheung, 153.
32. Mary Douglas, The Consumer Revolt.
33. Bill Brown, Thing Theory, Critical Inquiry (2001): 10.
34. John Treat, Contemporary Japan and Popular Culture (Honolulu: University of
Hawaii Press, 1996).
35. Margaret Crawford, H. The World in a Shopping Mall, in Michael Sorkin,
ed., Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public
Space (New York: Hill and Wang, 1999) 330.
36. Lui Tai-Lok, The Malling of Hong Kong, Consuming Hong Kong, 1246.
37. Chan Wai, Sound and Taste (Hong Kong: Subculture, 1998).
38. Zhonghua tansuo (Exploring China), a Ming Pao Daily, U.S. East Coast
edition, Saturday supplement (January 29, 2005), 12.
39. Hong Kong Annual Digest of Statistics, 2003 edition, 98.
40. Canclini, 151.
41. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985).
182 Notes to Chapter Five

42. Rey Chow, Fateful Attachments: On Collecting, Fidelity, and Lao She, Crit-
ical Inquiry (Autumn 2001): 290.

Chapter Five. Body Weight, Responsible Citizenship,

and Womens Social Spaces
1. The Berkeley Wellness Letter: The Newsletter of Nutrition, Fitness, and Self-care
21, 5 (February 2005), 8. The newsletter also points out the environmental
impact of this extra consumption of fuel. It resulted in the release of about 3.
8 million tons of carbon dioxide (a greenhouse gas) and other pollutants.
The direct and indirect costs of such a level of pollution are perhaps beyond
calculation.
2. Ming Pao Daily, July 20, 2004, Section C, U.S. East Coast edition.
3. Cheung is the chairperson of the extremely successful Sau San Tong Hold-
ings.
4. Priscilla Kwok, L Y Tse, Overweight and Obesity in Hong KongWhat Do
We Know? (September 2004) (http://www.dh.gov.hk).
5. See the fans blog in What Do You Think of Joyce Cheng? (http://www.
asianfanatics.net).
6. William Kelly, ed. , Fanning the Flames: Fans and Consumer Culture in
Contemporary Japan (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), 7.
7. Kelly, 78.
8. Ian Condry, B-Boys and B-Girls: Rap Fandom and Consumer Culture in
Japan, in Fanning the Flames, 19.
9. The September 12, 2004, election for Legislative Council (Legco) members in
which the otherwise popular Democratic Party that had rallied general
support in their criticism of Article 23, and then agitation for universal
suffrage, suffered a loss of two seats, while the pro-China, nationalistic, DAB
gained two seats, which ended the majority control of the Democrats in
Legco. This election result reects the peoples fear of chaos brought about by
too much antagonism toward China, but also is a result of Chinas economic
packages to bribe the Hong Kong publics obedience. The discipline of capi-
talism is never more obvious than in this relationship between the Hong
Kong people and the Central government of Mainland China.
10. Reported in Ming Pao Daily, July 12, 2004, Section A, Hong Kong edition.
11. Jessica Leung wrote, According to admango. com, a company that monitors
advertising media in Hong Kong, advertisements on slimming products and
services increased by 75% in the past year. From January to May 2002 alone, a
record HKD500 million was spent on slimming advertisements. More money
is spent on advertising in the diet industry than in any other industry in
Hong Kong, in The Dieting Phenomenon in Hong Kong: The Changing
Attitudes toward Dieting amongst Young Women in Hong Kong
(http://www.civic-exchange.org).
12. See Laura C. Nelson, Measured Excess: Status, Gender, and Consumer Nation-
alism in South Korea (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).
 Notes to Chapter Five 183

13. Nestor Garcia Canclini, Consumers: Globalization and Multicultural Conicts

(Minneapolis: Minnesota, 2001), 42.
14. Georg Simmel, The Metropolis and Mental Life, in Metropolis: Centre and
the Symbol of Our Times, ed. P. Kasinitz (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995),
3045.
15. Laura Nelson, Measured Excess: Status, Gender and Consumer Nationalism in
South Korea (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 169.
16. Ofce Ladies or OL is the common appellation for women ofce workers
in Hong Kong.
17. Teresa Carillo, Cross-Border Talk: Transnational Perspective on Labor, Race,
and Sexuality, in Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational
Age, ed. Ella Shohat (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998).
18. However this is not true for women in the service industry, especially in the
low-paying positions. They are paid on average HKD2000 (about USD250)
less per month than men in the same positions for the same jobs.
19. All gures quoted from Ming Pao Daily, July 30, 2004, Section B, Hong Kong
edition.
20. Hong Kong Census Bureau (November 24, 2005) (http://www.3.news.gov.hk).
21. Collected in his Hong Kong Trilogy (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press,
2004). Chan Kwun-Chung is a well-known writer and a keen observer of the
Hong Kong society.
22. Ibid.
23. Carolyn Cartier, Globalizing South China (Oxford and Massachusetts: Black-
well, 2001), 194.
24. Hong Kong Census Bureau (November 24, 2005) (http://www.3.news.gov.hk).
25. Ming Pao Daily, July 1, 2004, Section A, Hong Kong edition.
26. Ibid.
27. Immigration Department of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region
Review 2004 (http://www.immd.gov.hk).
28. Maria Milagros Lpez, No Body Is an Island: Reproduction and Moderniza-
tion in Puerto Rico, in Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transna-
tional Age.
29. Tin Shui Wai, the poorest district in Hong Kong, where there is a particularly
large concentration of new immigrants from China, is the site of a shocking
incidence of domestic crime in which a man murdered his three children and
wife, a new immigrant woman from China, a long-suffering wife who had
been physically abused for years. In a 2004 investigation by the City Univer-
sity of Hong Kong in collaboration with Hong Kong Student Aid Society in
response to this incident, 39.7% of the interviewees in a survey answered yes
to the question of whether he or she had nancial difculties. 63% of women
had been in Hong Kong for less than ve years. This area has the second
highest gure for spousal abuse in Hong Kong. It ranks highest in Hong
Kong in terms of family violence. The report is posted on line in its entirety:
Study on Family with Needs in Tin Shui Wai (http://www.hksas.org.hk).
This publication in turn launched the social work project, Operation Tin
Shui Wai, in June 2004.
184 Notes to Chapter Six

30. Michelle Tsung-Yi Huang explained that Hong Kongs successful bid for
Disneyland, beating out Shanghai and other cities, is an important testament
to its still leading position in terms of infrastructure. Huang quoted Mike
Rowse, Hong Kongs Tourism Commissioner: Mr. Green (Chairman of
Disneys theme park division) said that Disney was also attracted by Hong
Kongs infrastructure. With a spectacular year-old airport and a gleaming
network of roads, railways, tunnels and bridges, Hong Kong is one of Asias
easiest cities to get to and get around in. Michelle Tsung-Yi Huang, Walking
between Slums and Skyscrapers: Illusions of Open Space in Hong Kong, Tokyo,
and Shanghai (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004), 16. As the
Disney bid shows, continuous investment in infrastructure is the only way to
maintain Hong Kongs status among Chinese cities.
31. See for example, Si Suqings Buttery Trilogy for a popular rendition of this
narrative of Hong Kong as a poor offspring of mighty parents, China and
Britain.
32. See for example, Yau hahm yau siu, ah po hau suhd si (Laughing and Crying:
An Oral History of Old Ladies), published by the Association for the Advance-
ment of Feminism (2001). Also, 16+Siu nui hau suhd si (Sixteen-Plus: An Oral
History of Young Women) (Hong Kong: Association for the Advancement of
Feminism, 2002).
33. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Crafting Feminist Genealogies: On the Geog-
raphy and Politics of Home, Nation, and Community, Talking Visions: Multi-
cultural Feminism in a Transnational Age, 491.

Chapter Six. Repatriating from Globalization

1. http://www.brandhk.gov.hk/brandhk/eresea3.htm#hk
2. Cultural Uprising (wenhua qiyi) (A collection of critical essays by local
commentators) (Hong Kong: CUP, 2004).
3. Ming Pao Daily, November 26, 2004, Section B, U.S. East Coast edition.
4. Lui Dai-Lok and Ohashi Kenichi, City ContactsHong Kong Street Culture
(Chengshi jiezuXianggang jietou wenhua guancha) (Hong Kong Commer-
cial Press, 1992).
5. Kwok Yan-Chi Jackie, The Production of Space in Hong Kong (a collection of
studies undertaken by the School of Design, Hong Kong Polytechnic Univer-
sity) (Hong Kong: Crabs, 1998).
6. It is true that prostitution has become more rampant in recent years because
of the more relaxed immigration procedures at the borders to the point
where residents of the neighborhood complain about being constantly
harassed.
7. See Don Mitchell, The Annihilation of Space by Law: The Roots and Impli-
cations of Anti-Homeless Laws in the United States, in The Legal Geographies
Reader, ed. Nicholas Blomley, David Delaney, and Richard T. Ford (London:
Blackwell, 2001).
8. Akbar Abbas, Cinema, the City, and the Cinematic, in Global Cities: Cinema,
Architecture, and Urbanism in a Digital Age, ed. Linda Krause and Patrice
 Notes to Chapter Six 185

Petro (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003). Abbas employs Rem
Koolhaass notion of the Generic City to make his argument.
9. Ng Fong, The History of Hong Kong Television (Hong Kong: Subculture, 2003),
150.
10. Ibid.
11. In fact the local phrase to describe a television actor who has successfully
gained popularity is yuhp uk (to have entered homes).
12. It is a government-funded but independent broadcasting venue, after the
model of the BBC.
13. Ng Hung, A Critique of Sam Hui (Pai poon Hui Koon Kit), in Reading Hong
Kong Popular Cultures: 19702000, ed. Ng Jun-hung and Cheung Chi-wai
(Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 2002), 200205.
14. Cheung Fung-Lun, The Comic Characteristics and Meaning from Four of
the Hui Brothers Comedies. Lo Kun-Cheung and Man Kit-Wai, eds., Age of
Hybridity: Cultural Identity, Gender, Everyday Life Practice, and Hong Kong
Cinema of the 1970s (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press), 17180.
15. Ibid.
16. Frederic Dannen and Barry Long, Hong Kong Babylon: The Insiders Guide to
the Hollywood of the East (New York: Miramax, 1997).
17. Ilaria Sala, CEPA and Hong Kong Film: The Mixed Blessing of Market
Access, China Rights Forum 4 (2003): 13.
18. New-Look Baselword Gets off to a Rocky Start, Antwerp Facets 2, 7 (May
2003) (http://www.antwerpfacets.com/uples). Hong Kong Withdrawal
from World Jewelry and Watch Fair 2003 in Basel, Legco Panel on Commerce
and Industry (http://www.legco.gov.hk/yr0203/English/panels/ci/papers).
19. Joey Yung, Pride in Your Eyes, music by Chan Kwong-Wing; lyrics by
Anders Lee. OP: Click Music, 2003, Emperor Entertainment (Hong Kong).
20. A fragment of this song is recorded in the documentary 2003.7.1
(VCD/03/71/HK), publisher and director unlisted.
21. Mingri Zhige, Music Icon Records, 2004.
22. Original song by Joseph Koo; lyrics by Chang Kwok-Kong; sung by Danny
Chan (1984). OP: Warner/Chappell Music, HK.
23. A description popularized by the writer, Chan Kwun-Chung.
24. Song written by Joseph Koo, lyrics by James Wong; sung by Liza Wang (1980).
OP: Musicell, SP: Universal Music Publishing.
25. Song written by Joseph Koo; lyrics by Tao Tsin; sung by Cheng Ting (1967).
OP: Shaw Brothers (HK), SP: EMI Music Publishing HK.
26. Music composed by Joseph Koo; lyrics by James Wong; sung by Roman Tam
(1979). RTHK. See Chu Yiu-Wai, Hong Kongs Local Consciousness in the
Song Lyrics of Hong Kong Popular Music, Ng Jun-Hung and Cheung Chi-
Wai, 25461. This song was updated in 2006 when the RTHK produced a new
Under the Lion Rock series that began airing in May 2006. The new version
of the song is sung by Joey Yung. It overlays Roman Tams version. Before his
death, Joey was one of his students.
27. See introduction.
186 Notes to Conclusion

28. Ho, 142.

29. Ho, 141.
30. Ho, 89.
31. Ho, 93.
32. Ho, 147.
33. Ho, 148.
34. Aihwa Ongs vocabulary describing transnational citizens. Flexible
Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham: Duke Univer-
sity Press, 1999).
35. Ho, 128.
36. Term used by Akbar Abbas to describe the postmodern instability and illu-
siveness of Hong Kong culture at the end of the 1990s. See Hong Kong:
Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1997).
37. The quick adaptability of Hong Kong businesses to new demands and
constraints of the world markets is often considered another virtue of Hong
Kong people and a crucial character that contributed to Hong Kongs nan-
cial success.
38. Ho, 191.
39. Hui Po-Keung, What Capitalism Is Not (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press,
2002).
40. C. C. Williams, The New Barter Economy: An Appraisal of Local Exchange
and Trading Systems (LETS), Journal of Public Policy 16, 1: 85101.
41. There has been a lot of interest in these grassroots alternative economic orga-
nizations in Hong Kong. In 2003, Oxfam Hong Kong published a volume, Not
Utopia: Community Economy Theory and Practice (Hong Kong: Oxford,
2003), that collects the writings of scholars, social workers, and journalists on
such organizations. The popular magazine Ming Pao Weekly also published a
long article introducing the various community efforts and grassroots orga-
nizations in 2004. Ming Pao Weekly 1837 (January 24, 2004): 1422.
42. Ibid.
43. Stuart Hall, quoted from Laura C. Nelson, Measured Excess: Status, Gender,
and Consumer Nationalism in South Korea (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2000), 175.
44. See Ming Pao Weekly, 1837 (January 24, 2004): 1422.

Conclusion

1. Hong Kong: Pro-Beijing Media Condemn Long Hair, South China Morning
Post, October 7, 2004 (http://asiamedia/ucla.edu).
2. Ming Pao Daily, December 14, 2004, Section B, U.S. East Coast edition.
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 Index
Abbas, Akbar, 45, 141, 168, 175, 176, 180,
184, 185, 186, 187
agora, 67, 86
alternative currency, 3, 157, 158
Amoy gardens, 146
Anothermountainman, 85, 179, 187
Wong, Stanley, 85, 86, 88, 148, 179
annihilation of space by law, 68, 178,
179, 184, 193
Anthony Fung, 78, 168, 173
antisubversion law, 9, 31, 32, 33, 59, 60,
61, 69, 80, 114
Article 23, 9, 31, 37, 38, 39, 59, 69, 80,
114, 115,160, 165, 174, 182
As tears go by, 144
Asia TV, 106
Asias world city, 12, 35, 139, 140, 166, 187
Asian crisis (1997), 35, 90, 125
aesthetic foundation of communities,
107
auratic, 51,101, 110
Balibar, Etienne, 15, 83, 171, 179, 187
Basic Law, 9, 39
Bank of China, 73, 78
beauty industry, 114, 115, 116, 119
Beijing Central Government/ Beijing/
Central Peoples Government, 2, 3, 8,
13, 31, 32, 33, 38, 39, 40, 46, 52, 6062,
67, 80, 91, 104, 114, 119, 145, 156, 164
Beijing Liaison Ofce (Zhonglian
Ban), 61
197
Benjamin, Walter, 101, 175
Bicol Migrant Workers Hong Kong,
83
biopolitics, 126, 136
body politic, 16, 127
Breaking News, 148
British Colonial Government/British
Hong Kong/ Colonial Government
6, 7, 9, 12, 13,14, 31, 32, 35, 36, 45, 46,
49, 52, 53, 54, 63, 69, 70, 72, 77, 78, 151,
169
Brown, Bill, 101, 175, 181, 187
Butler, Judith, 82, 179, 187
CEPA (closer economic partnership
arrangement), 61, 115, 144, 173, 178,
185
Canclini, Nestor, Garcia, 20, 90, 97, 98,
120, 107, 171, 180, 181, 183, 187
Caf Do Brasil, 102
cantopop, 143, 147, 148
Caritas, 157
Cartier, Carolyn, 123, 183, 188
Catholic Labour Association, 157
Census Bureau, 123, 183, 190
Centaline (Holdings), 165
Central Policy Unit, 165
De Certeau, Michel, 3, 6, 15, 16, 17, 18,
50, 60, 66, 84, 165, 168, 170, 171, 175,
178, 188
Chan, Alan, 85
Chan, Annie Hau-Nung, 91, 180, 188
198 Index
Chan Kwun-Chung, 122, 183, 185, 188
Chan, Kelly, 145
Chan, Jackie, 144
Chan, Ronnie, 165
Chan, Wai, 90, 95, 96111, 142, 149, 181,
188, 189
Chen, Kaige, 35
Chen Shui-Pian, 40
Cheng, Joyce, 113119, 125127, 129, 136,
182
Cheung, Leslie, 27, 35, 143, 147
Cheung Kong Centre, 78
Cheung Yuk-Shan, 115
Chinese Communist Party, 8, 34, 39,
69, 163
Chinese University Of Hong Kong, 59,
158
Chow, Rey, 110, 169, 172, 174, 175, 176,
182, 188
Choy So-Yuk, 13
Chungking Express, 32, 144
citizenship, 11, 15, 57, 67, 68, 83, 98, 100,
113, 119, 120
citizen-consumers, 95, 98, 112, 119
female citizens, 127
exible citizen, 154, 186, 193 DAB (Democratic Alliance for the
City Magazine, 102, 172, 189
City University Of Hong Kong, 159
civil society, 16, 69, 83, 165
civic duty, 119
Clean Hong Kong Campaign, 57
collective experience, 52, 86, 125, 146, 156
collective memory, 44, 68
collectivity, 63, 98, 101, 117, 151
colonialism, 45, 65
concept city, 3
competitive consumerism, 101
consumerism, 17, 53, 84, 89, 90, 91, 92,
98, 101, 117, 127
lifestyle consumerism, 117
consumption, 49, 73, 88, 90, 91, 92, 95,
96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 102, 103, 106, 108,
109, 110, 113, 117, 118, 119, 120, 131,
132, 159, 182
agitated consumption, 117
consumers, 91, 92, 93, 98, 100, 102, 105,
106, 109, 112, 117, 118, 119, 131, 160, 164
women, 90, 120
citizen, 95, 101
consumer culture, 86, 95, 101, 109, 110,
120
consumer capitalism, 89, 101, 105, 127
consumer choices, 118
consumer economy, 105, 113, 114, 120,
121, 131
consumer ideals, 88
consumer materialism, 93
consumer practices, 90, 120
consumers rights, 128
consumption sites, 109
cooperative, 146, 158, 159, 160, 161
Women Wokers Cooperative, vi,
158, 160, 161
labor/workers cooperatives, 3, 158,
159
le Corbusier, 10, 169, 194
cosmopolitanism, 145, 154
Courtesy Campaign, 57
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, 32, 141
Cui Zhekai, 61, 173, 174
Cultural Revolution, 33, 54, 61, 172, 174
Betterment of Hong Kong), 13, 37,
39, 182
Days Of Being Wild, 35, 144
Deja disparu, 45
Democratic Party, 40, 182
Deng Xiaoping, 2, 34, 52, 61
Dengue Fever, 146
Department of Health, 116
Department of Leisure And Cultural
Services, 11, 70
District Council, 39, 87
Douglas, Mary, 91, 100, 180, 181, 189
Doyle, Christopher, 23, 32
Dragon Reloaded 2003, 148
Ellickson, Robert, C., 67, 68, 86, 178, 189
East-Meets-West, 54
Employers and Workers Relations
Association, 159
end of politics, 86
ephemera, culture of, 110
 Index 199

fans, 117, 127 Hong Kong Book Expo, 115

family ideal, 127 Hong Kong core value, 30, 85, 172
female citizens, 127 Hong Kong Consumer Council, 116,
female body, 119, 127, 128 126
elds of sentiments, 14 Hong Kong Festivals, 71
Filipino Community, Filipinas, Hong Kong Heritage Museum, 46, 85,
Filipinos, 56, 82, 83, 84, 86 86, 96, 179, 181, 190, 195
Filipino Domestic Workers, 58, 88 Hong Kong History Museum, 4357,
First Amendment (US Constitution), 96
62 Hong Kong identity, 26, 44, 53, 54, 95,
Flagstaff House, 73 100, 110, 143, 166, 172
exible citizen, 154, 186, 193 collective identity, 43, 120
Fong, Mrs. Sally Yam, 106, 107, 108 Hong Kong International Airport, 9,
Foster, Sir Norman, 73, 78, 140 140, 169,
Foucault, Michel, 6, 168, 170, 189, 192, Airport Authority, 10, 169
194 Hong Kong Macau Affairs Ofce of
the State Department, 61, 174
gender, 16, 30, 113, 120, 121, 122
Hong Kong Park, 7276, 77
Girl Who Met A Sea Lion In 1997,The,
Hong Kong Spirit, 29, 36, 56, 85, 172
139, 152156, 190
Hong Kong Tourism Board, 12, 91
Giard, Luce, 15, 18, 170, 188
Hong Kong Women Centre, 157
God of Songs, 143, 148
Hong Kong Women Manual Labour
Good Samaritans, 36
Association, 158
Gramsci, Antonio, 16
Housing Authority, 11, 13, 165, 170,
Great Leap Forward, 33
190
grassroots, 3, 55, 63, 76, 159, 161, 163,
Hu Jintao, 24
186
Huang, Michelle, 9, 168, 169, 184,
grassroots hero, 164
190
Grover, Paul, 157
Hui, Po-Keung, 157, 167, 186, 190
H5N1 Avian Flu, 146 Hui Sam, 143, 148
HSBC (Hong Kong and Shanghai Hui Brothers, 143
Banking Corporation), 49, 78, 140 Hunghom Peninsular, 164, 165
Hakka, 47, 55 Huyssen, Andreas, 45, 175, 177, 190
Hall, Stuart, 160, 186,
In The Mood For Love, 32, 141, 144
Handover, July 1, 1997, 1, 3, 6, 7, 19, 34,
Infernal Affairs (Wujian Dao), 19, 20,
35, 58, 80, 103, 104, 113, 145, 150
2528, 31, 3436, 4042, 147
Hang Lung Group, 165
International Financial Centre (IFC),
Harvey, David 11
93
Hero (Yingxiong) 2026, 28, 3133, 38,
International Herald Tribune, 93
40, 41, 42
Ithaca-Hours, 157
Ho Ka-Wai, 139, 152156, 190
Ho, Patrick, Secretary for Home Jameson, Fredric, 69, 86, 169, 178, 190
Affairs, 37 Jenny (Singer), 56
Ho Yuk, 114, 127136 Jiangnan-Style Gardens, 65, 76, 77
Hoklo, 47 July 1 Demonstrations, 9, 38, 5963, 70,
Hong Kong Arts Centre, 53, 54, 96, 176 87, 114, 145, 147, 160, 164
200
June 4, 69, 71
Tiananmen Prodemocracy Move-
ment (1989), 34, 38, 60, 62, 63, 85
Kelly, William, 117, 182, 189, 191
Kowloon Park, 45
Koo, Joseph, 56, 185, 1956
Kwok, Yan-Chi Jackie, 76, 168, 169, 177,
178, 179, 184, 185, 191, 194, 195
LETS (Local Exchange and Trading
System), 157
Lau, Andrew, 19
Lau Siu-Kai, 165
Lau, Yi Tat, 148
Lefebvre, Henri, 5, 15, 17, 43, 44, 58, 62,
66, 68, 76, 83, 84, 87, 95, 167, 168, 171,
174, 178, 179, 181, 191, 194
Legislative Council, 9, 13, 39, 80, 87, 163,
165, 182
Lesbian, 121, 1278, 131, 132
Leung, Kwok Hung (Long Hair), vi,
163, 164, 186
Leung, Anthony (Secretary of
Finance), 31, 38, 142
Li, Ang, 32, 141
Liberal Party, 39, 165
Lingnan University, 31, 159
Link Reit, 13, 164, 165, 170
Linton, Michael, 157
Lippo Centre, vi, 73, 74, 75
Lopez, Milagros, 123, 183, 192
Long Hair (Leung Kwok Hung), vi, 163,
164, 186
Lui, Tai-Lok, 92, 102, 141, 168, 178, 179,
180, 181, 188, 192, 193
Luxury 2004, Lure of Asia, 93, 187
Ma, Eric Kit-Wai, 12, 168, 169, 170, 177,
181, 192
Macau, 33
Mak, Andy, 19
Mandarin Hotel, 36, 82
Mao, Zedong, 33
Mass Transit Railway (MTR), 92
Mayol, Pierre, 15, 16, 18, 170, 188
Medallion, The, 144
Index
Men Suddenly In Black, 148
Miller, Daniel, 118
Mitchell, Don, 62, 68, 78, 83, 166, 178,
179, 184, 193
middle-class myth, 2, 60
Ming Pao Daily, 38, 59, 87, 95, 124, 140,
165, 167, 168, 170, 172, 173, 174, 177,
178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 186, 191,
192, 193, 196
Mission of Filipino Migrant Workers
(HK) Society, 83
Mohanty, Chandra, 134, 135, 184, 193
Mui, Anita, 35, 36, 147
Museum of the City of New York, 50
Museum of Tea Ware, 73, 75, 76
Needing You, 121122
Nelson, Laura, 9091, 120, 180, 182, 186,
193
neoliberal economy, 18, 157
neoliberal city, 126
neoliberal government, 14
New China News Agency, 39
New York City Municipal Govern-
ment, 50
New York Historical Society, 50
Ng, Chit-Hang, 76, 178, 191
Ng, Fong, 142, 177, 181, 185, 193
nostalgia, 4, 33, 4445, 4964, 96, 101,
105, 147, 149
repetition, 51
Ocean Terminal, 92, 94, 102
one country, two systems, 7, 103, 173
Pacic Place Shopping Centre, 73, 75
panorama cities, 66
Pearl River Delta, 48, 125
Pei, I. M. 73, 78
Peoples Liberation Army (PLA), 8, 34,
38, 58, 173
People Mountain People Sea, 148
Philippines Alliance, 83
political unconscious, 6
politics of reproduction, 123
Pride in Your Eyes, (Joey Yung),
146147, 185, 196
 Index 201

Private Eyes, 143 Story of Hong Kong, 45, 46, 49, 50, 56
production of space, 5 strategic space, 135, 136
PTU, 19, 2731, 3436, 4042, 147 structures of feeling, 109
Public Security 8, 34, 173 suicide, 27, 33, 36, 97, 148, 173, 195
Sun Hungkee, 164
Rainbow in His Pen, 149, 195 Sun Yat-Sen, 33, 34
Redwhiteblue, 85, 86, 195 Suzie Wong, 54
Regional Council, 46
Reifenstahl, Leni, 33 Taiwan, ROC, 19, 32, 33, 40, 123, 145
repetition (nostalgia), 51 Tak Wah Park, 76, 77
return governance to the people Tam, Roman, 35, 142, 147
(huanzhen yumin), 38, 164 Tanka, 47, 55, 56
right to the city, 2, 67 Task Force For Political Reform, 40
Riots 19671968. 54, 59, 62, 69, 70. See Tat Ming Pair, 148
also Storms of May Tiananmen Prodemocracy Movement
Roberts Rules of Order, 67 (1989), 34, 38, 60, 62, 63, 85
Ross, Kristin 5, 16, 168, 171, 174, 194 June 4, 69, 71
RTHK (Radio Television Hong Kong), Tibet, 33
69, 142, 185, 196 Ting, Joseph, 46
thingness, 97, 101
Sahpheung Kei (Shixiangji, Records Of To, Johnny, 20, 27, 2930, 121, 148
Sahpheung), 96100, 102, 110, 142 transnational
SARS (Sudden Acute Respiratory capital, 12
Syndrome), 27, 37, 38, 90, 114, 115, 118, citizen, 156
146, 157 Treat, John, 101, 181,195
sexuality, 127, 128 Tsang, Donald 13, 126
schooling of desires, 14 Tung Chee Hwa, 13, 31, 70, 79, 126, 165,
Shanghai, 7, 125 174
Shek Kei, 34, 113 Mrs. Tung Chee Hwa, 79
Shih, Wing-Ching, 165 Television Broadcasting Company
Shopping Festival, 91 (TVB), 106, 142
Shum, Lydia, 113, 115
Simmel, Georg, 16, 171, 183, 194 Under the Lion Rock, 142, 151, 185, 196
social space, 17, 55, 83, 87, 113, 114, 127, United Nations, 54
128, 161, 163 University of Hong Kong, 59, 143
Songs of Tomorrow (Mingri Zhige), Urban Council, 46
149151 Utopia, 11, 55, 69, 73, 86
South Korea, 90, 120 Utopian Space, 56
Sound and Taste, 102, 181, 188 Utopian Ideal/ Principle, 69, 76,
86
Taste, 103110
Venice Biennale (51st International Art
Special Olympics, 146
Exhibition), 85
stability and prosperity (Anding
Victoria Harbour, 17, 54, 78, 79, 81, 165
Fanrong), 2, 8, 10, 40, 54, 55, 57, 61,
Victoria Park, 6972, 77, 88
67, 100, 127, 134, 165
Stoler, Ann Laura, 14, 16, 170, 171, 195 Waterfront Promenade, 78
Storms of May, 54, 59, 62, 69, 70 Wai Ka-Fai, 121
202 Index

Wan Chai, 90, 95, 96, 142, 149, 181, 188 Xiao Weiyun, 40
Wen Jiabao, 24 Xinjiang, 33, 155
West Kowloon, 17, 140, 165 Xu Ze, 61, 174
Who Am I?, 144
Yau Ching, 114, 127, 134, 135
Women Workers Cooperative, 159, 160,
Yip, Regina Lau, 3132, 38
161
Yu, Ronny, 144
womanhood, 124, 127
Yung, Joey, 146, 147, 185
Wong, Anthony, 148
YWCA, 118
Wong, James, 147
Wong, Kar-Wai, 32, 35, 141, 144 Zhang Yimou, 2025, 3234, 38, 40, 41,
Wong, Stanley, 85, 86, 88,148, 179 172
Woo, Mathias, 76 Zhang Zhiwei, 24, 172