Cultural Con ict in Kong Angles on a Coherent Imaginary

Edited by Jason S. Polley, Vinton W.K. Poon, Lian-Hee Wee Cultural Conflict in Jason S. Polley Vinton W. K. Poon • Lian-Hee Wee Editors Cultural Conflict in Hong Kong

Angles on a Coherent Imaginary Editors Jason S. Polley Vinton W. K. Poon Hong Kong Baptist University Hong Kong Baptist University Hong Kong, Hong Kong Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Lian-Hee Wee Hong Kong Baptist University Hong Kong, Hong Kong

ISBN 978-981-10-7765-4 ISBN 978-981-10-7766-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7766-1

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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-­01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore Preface

Cultural Conflict in Hong Kong: Angles on a Coherent Imaginary is a volume that celebrates as it critiques the current state of Hong Kong soci- ety on the 20th anniversary of its handover to . Focussing on cul- tural elements appropriated into its social tapestry (i.e. that which has been made into Hong Kong) through the spectrum of its social classes, this volume draws together scholars, critics, commentators, and creators on the vanguard of the emerging field of Hong Kong studies. The collec- tion weaves a patchwork of the territory’s contested local imaginary. Hong Kong today continues to navigate its colonial history alongside its ever-­ present Chinese identity. The past two decades can ostensibly be defined by the tearing of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region’s social fabric. At the same time, the place’s international relevance continues to be asserted through commerce and culture. Over this period, Hong Kong has witnessed a dra- matically widening gap between the rich and the poor. According to the South China Morning Post (June 10, 2017, http://www.scmp.com/ news/hong-kong/economy/article/2097715/what-hope-poorest- hong-kong-wealth-gap-hits-record-high), the richest 10% of the popula- tion earn about 44 times more than the poorest 10%. Citizens, however, are not only divided by material wealth, they also disagree about issues of (national) identity. Some categorize themselves as Chinese. Others embrace competing “localist” formulations. Self-classified “” reject any Chinese identity—and this, often, with disdain. Complex and unresolved, mounting disparities in wealth and ideology have com- pounded into cultural divisions and conflicts. In the autumn of 2014,

v vi PREFACE these climaxed into the almost season-long Umbrella Movement. This famous clash, along with a series of others not globally reported, exposed that Hong Kong citizens are increasingly in competition with one another. Escalating social tensions centre upon struggles about who speaks for Hong Kong and about how to interpret Hong Kong as community, as culture, and as collective imaginary. In its exploration of the currents and dynamics from around and behind these cultural conflicts, this volume features chapters by specialized aca- demics, cultural commentators, and creative writers. All contributors to this book are frontline observers of Hong Kong’s current tensions. And many of the authors collected herein are personally invested in these socio- cultural conflicts. To facilitate, and at times complicate, the complex Hong Kong identi- ties and imaginaries now extant two decades following the territory’s return to China, this collection is categorized into three interrelated parts: surveillance, sousveillance, and equiveillance. Big Data and biometrics forerunner Joseph Ferenbok and computer scientist and public intellec- tual Steve Mann first coined the latter two terms. Their work popularizes “inverse surveillance,” by which the colleagues mean the ways in which people can digitally record images and actions from below in order to counterbalance classical surveillance from above. Surveillance is, as the word itself suggests, observation from above by an institutional authority, usually with cameras installed higher than eye level. This is a form of monitoring and control (either physically or sym- bolically) from top to bottom, evoking the controlling and/or recording mechanisms of the Panopticon, CCTV, machine-readable identity cards, and other Fritz Lang-, George Orwell-, Philip K. Dick-, and Margaret Atwood-inspired surveillance apparatuses. Such “security” devices, tech- nological and behavioural, force the perpetuation of the status quo, thus maintaining the present social structure so that officially sanctioned social capital remains as such. Sousveillance is an outgrowth of the term surveillance. The morpheme “sur” in French means “over” or “on.” The coinage connotes a form of the abovementioned “inverted surveillance” or “subveillance.” With min- iature, wearable technology and social networking, individuals and collec- tives can (i) monitor, from below, an observer who is above and (ii) capture, from within, a participatory activity. Sousveillance recalls the PREFACE vii documentation and information-exchange practiced by the “gargoyles” in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992). The author’s “gargoyles” anticipate the networking of smartphones. Equiveillance designates “equal viewing” and connotes a counterbal- ancing of surveillance and sousveillance, a state whereby those who moni- tor from above and those who monitor from below restrain or offset one another by reaching “democratic homeostasis.” This (i) surveillance polic- ing and (ii) sousveillance policing-of-policing form a feedback loop: nei- ther party, in theory, fully usurps power. Consider the case of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, who, as witnessed in Alison Klayman’s documentary Who’s Afraid of Ai Weiwei? (2011), turned his own cameras on the cam- eras of the authorities who were recording him. From both the top-down and the bottom-up, equiveillance exposes limits to knowledge and/as power. The profile of contemporary Hong Kong is such that only a gyroscopic view can furnish a cultural understanding of the Special Administrative Region. The book, therefore, is not overly reliant on research hanging on specific disciplinary threads. Instead, the omnimax perspective that is Hong Kong’s everyday only begins to emerge when examined from the multiple angles that enable its fuller imaginary. To this end, the volume provides analyses from multiple perspectives, forming a panoramic, thereby wider, overview of Hong Kong culture. This book is the first true area studies book of its kind on Hong Kong— and thus valuable to any reader who wishes to explore the territory’s com- plexities without being bogged down by discipline-specific perspectives. At the same time, each chapter collected in the volume is itself a study of specific and significant sides or views integral to Hong Kong’s current imaginary. Readers of Cultural Conflict in Hong Kong consequently hold in their hands an array of carefully selected gems different in texture yet judiciously set on the same frame thus providing a kaleidoscopic treatment that speaks to the elegant complexity of Hong Kong today.

Hong Kong, Hong Kong Jason S. Polley Vinton W. K. Poon Lian-Hee Wee Acknowledgement

The editors wish to acknowledge the help of many reviewers from within and without Hong Kong. Each has granted us invaluable time and expertise, thereby ensuring the quality of every piece enshrined in this volume. In no order, the reviewers are Kathleen Ahrens, Robert S. Bauer, Stephen Chu, Angela M. Gayton, Paul D. He, Heidi Yu Huang, Magdalen Ki, Mike Ingham, Fiona Law, Grace Y.Y. Mak, Nathan Miczo, Rowan Mackay, Douglas Robinson, Andrew Sewell, Janice W.S. Wong, Wendy S. Wong, and Jessica W.Y. Yeung. We would also like to thank Sara Crowley-Vigneau and Connie Li of Palgrave for their gracious guidance in the preparation of this volume.

ix Contents

1 Introduction: Made into Hong Kong 1 Jason S. Polley, Vinton W. K. Poon, and Lian-Hee Wee

Part I Surveillance 13

2 Turning English into : The Semantic Change of English Loanwords 15 John C. Wakefield

3 Beehives and Wet Markets: Expat Metaphors of Hong Kong 35 Kathleen Ahrens

4 Hong Kong Paradox: Appearance and Disappearance in Western Cinema 53 Tammy Lai-Ming Ho

5 Hong Kong Diversity in Anglophone Children’s Fiction 71 Marija Todorova

6 Ann Hui’s Allegorical Cinema 87 Jessica Siu-Yin Yeung

xi xii Contents

Part II Sousveillance 105

7 Approaching Linguistic Norms: The Case of/for on the Internet 107 Vinton W. K. Poon

8 Hong Kong’s Edward Snowden/Edward Snowden’s Hong Kong 131 Jeffrey Clapp

9 The Lazy Element: LMF and the Localization of Hip Hop Authenticity 149 Michael Ka Chi Cheuk

10 Worlding Hong Kong Literature: Dung Kai-cheung’s Atlas 167 Heidi Yu Huang

11 Writing Hong Kong’s Ethos 179 Tammy Lai-Ming Ho

Part III Equiveillance 209

12 Chiaroscuro of the Uncanny: An Unknown Side of Old Master Q 211 Kum-Hoon Ng and Lian-Hee Wee

13 “I Didn’t Think We’d Be Like Them”; or, Wong Kar Wai, Hongkonger 235 Jason S. Polley

14 Becoming Hong Kong-Like: The Role of Hong Kong English in the Acquisition of English Phonology by Hong Kong Students 257 Chuan Qin Contents xiii

15 Struggling to Become Non-Hong-Kong-­Like: The Necessity and Effectiveness of Training Hong Kong Youngsters’ Perception and Production of General American English Vowel Contrasts 281 Janice Wing-Sze Wong

16 Glocalizing Hong Kong Anglophone Literature: Locating Xu Xi’s Writing Across the Decades 307 Jason Eng Hun Lee Notes on Contributors

Kathleen Ahrens (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University) is the vice-­president of the Hong Kong Academy of the Humanities and former director of the (Hong Kong Baptist University, HKBU) International Writers’ Workshop, the only workshop of its type in Asia. She is also a member of the Board of Advisors for the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. Michael Ka Chi Cheuk (School of Oriental and African Studies, SOAS) studied African-American literature in Hong Kong. He is currently in London working on Gao Xingjian, the first Chinese-language writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. He is a founding member of the Hong Kong rock band Chantaiman. Jeffrey Clapp (Education ) is writing a book about the relationships among surveillance, democracy, and literature. Tammy Lai-Ming Ho (Hong Kong Baptist University) is the recipient of the 2015 Hong Kong Young Artist Award (Literary Arts) and the founding co-editor of Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, established ten years ago, as well as the academic journal Hong Kong Studies in 2016. She is currently a vice-president of PEN Hong Kong. Heidi Yu Huang (Sun Yat-sen University) was born in Guangzhou, China, engaged in transcultural studies in Lyon, France, and taught minor literatures and world literature in Hong Kong. She translates Chinese poetry.

xv xvi NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Jason Eng Hun Lee (Hong Kong Baptist University) specializes in globalization and postcolonial studies, with a secondary interest in Shakespeare and contemporary poetry. He is currently writing a book on critical cosmopolitanism in global Anglophone literature. Kum-Hoon Ng (Independent scholar and freelance translator) drew comics for a Chinese periodical and taught Chinese stratagems and mod- ern poetry in Hong Kong. His doctoral research relates to the demonol- ogy of the early Qing novel Nüxian waishi. Jason S. Polley (Hong Kong Baptist University) teaches literary journal- ism and postcolonialism. His non-fiction book Cemetery Miss You details the underworld exploits of an illegal South Asian refugee hiding out in Hong Kong. Vinton W. K. Poon (Hong Kong Baptist University) taught Chinese in the UK and English in Hong Kong, both instances where the norms of one culture are communicated to another. He coaches debating in English to local Hong Kong students. Chuan Qin (Guangxi University) studied phonological acquisition of English among Asian communities, specifically, Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong and Guangzhou, and Vietnamese speakers in Guangxi province. Marija Todorova (Hong Kong Baptist University) is a council member of the International Association for Translation and Intercultural Studies and has lived in Hong Kong since 2011. She specializes in conflict media- tion/resolution and civic art as resistance. John C. Wakefield (Hong Kong Baptist University) is the president of the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong. He also starred in Hong Kong mov- ies, contributing directly to Hong Kong’s popular culture before and after the 1997 handover. Lian-Hee Wee (Hong Kong Baptist University) is a local animal activist who has written poetry in response to Hong Kong’s political circum- stances. His phonological studies established the tonal nature of Hong Kong English as a system distinct from the prosodies of Cantonese tones or British English. NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xvii

Janice Wing-Sze Wong (Hong Kong Baptist University) is a phonetician whose studies have focussed on finding patterns and strategies towards effective acquisition of English as a second language for Cantonese speakers. Jessica Siu-Yin Yeung (School of Oriental and African Studies, SOAS) is born and raised in Hong Kong where she studied British literature. Now based in London, she studies the literary and visual cultures of , Hong Kong, and Lebanon. List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 Cathay Pacific 747-300 on descent into Kai Tak airport 36 Fig. 3.2 Cathay Pacific plane at Hong Kong international airport 37 Fig. 7.1 The application of linguistic norms 112 Fig. 8.1 Snowden’s Hong Kong, according to Laura Poitras (Film still from “PRISM: Snowden Hong Kong Interview,” courtesy of Praxis Films) 139 Fig. 8.2 The Mira Hotel, according to Oliver Stone (Reproduced by permission of Sacha, Inc.) 141 Fig. 8.3 The Mira Hotel, according to Laura Poitras (Film still from Citizenfour, courtesy of Praxis Films) 143 Fig. 12.1 Sequential art by Wong Chak. Xuan bin duo zhu [Ousting the host] (Reprint from Wong Chak, Laofuzi jingxuan xilie [Old Master Q selections series] (Hong Kong: Ng Hing Kee, 2004–2010), 14 (2005):105 (hereafter cited as LFZJX). Reproduced by permission from OMQ ZMedia Limited) 212 Fig. 12.2 Sequential art by Wong Chak. Ren xia gui [A human scaring a phantom] (Reprint from LFZJX, 36 (2006):42. Reproduced by permission from OMQ ZMedia Limited) 216 Fig. 12.3 Sequential art by Wong Chak. E meng cheng zhen [A nightmare comes true] (Reprint from LFZJX, 29 (2005): 42–43. Reproduced by permission from OMQ ZMedia Limited) 218 Fig. 12.4 Sequential art by Wong Chak. Nai ren xun wei [Enigmatic] (Reprint from LFZJX, 49 (2006): 55. Reproduced by permission from OMQ ZMedia Limited) 224

xix xx List of Figures

Fig. 12.5 Sequential art by Wong Chak. Hu bu. gui [Why not returning?] (Reprint from LFZJX, 94 (2008): 81. Reproduced by permission from OMQ ZMedia Limited) 227 Fig. 12.6 Cartoon by Alfonso Wong. Jinyu yu meinü [Goldfishes and the beauty] (Undated, seen in Zheng (1992, 143). Reproduced by permission from OMQ ZMedia Limited) 229 Fig. 14.1 English syllable structure 261 Fig. 14.2 Cantonese ­syllable structure 261 Fig. 14.3 Spectrogram of i-Tunes 267 Fig. 15.1 Boxplots showing the mean percentages of accurate identification of the trained groups with significant differences between the pre-test (white boxes) and the post-test (dark boxes) [*** = p < 0.001; * = p < 0.05] and non-significant difference (n.s. = p > 0.05) in the control group for the target vowel pairs. The circles represent outliners. The horizontal line indicates the probability (50%) performance 290 Fig. 15.2 Mean percentages of accurate production of the trained groups with significant differences between the pre-test (white boxes) and the post-test (dark boxes) [*** = p < 0.001] and the control group with no significant differences across /ɪ/, /iː/, /e/, and /æ/. Black dots and circles represent outliners 292 Fig. 15.3 Vector plots of individual participant’s perceptual identification accuracies (x-axis) and target productions (y-axis) from the pre-test (starting point of the arrow) to the post-test (ending point of the arrow). Dotted lines are participants from the H group; solid lines are from the HP group; broken lines are from the P group. The bold arrows represent the group mean for each experimental group, while the dotted diagonal indicates the hypothetical and ideal location for a perfect correlation between perception and production 293 Fig. 15.4 First (F1) and second (F2) formant frequencies (converted to the Bark scale) of the four target English vowels and their Cantonese vowel counterparts produced by the HP group 298 List of Tables

Table 2.1 List of types of semantic change 24 Table 2.2 Summary of syntactic and semantic changes 31 Table 3.1 Source domains and postulated inferences 49 Table 7.1 Informant demographic 115 Table 7.2 Responses to Questions 3, 5, 6, 7, and 9 116 Table 13.1 Selected Hong Kong demographics since the 1960s 250 Table 14.1 Information of the subjects 260 Table 14.2 Partial list of the tested words 262 Table 14.3 Stimuli ­testing the attitudes to the ways of producing consonant clusters 263 Table 14.4 Stimuli testing the attitudes to final devoicing 264 Table 14.5 Consonant cluster patterns of HKE speakers 265 Table 14.6 Time proportion of i-Tunes 267 Table 14.7 Preferred pronunciation category for onset clusters 270 Table 14.8 Preferred pronunciation category for coda clusters 271 Table 14.9 The frequency by which each pronunciation category was most favorably perceived 272 Table 14.10 The frequency each final voicing pattern was preferred 273 Table 14.11 Different communities’ acceptance of the local variety (arranged in chronological order) 274 Table 15.1 Number of participants in different groups 286 Table 15.2 Summary of experimental schedule for all training and control groups 287

xxi CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Made into Hong Kong

Jason S. Polley, Vinton W. K. Poon, and Lian-Hee Wee

Q: What is Hong Kong’s coherent imaginary? In other words, how does Hong Kong imagine—and collectively understand and envision—itself?

A: Hong Kong is Cantonese-speaking. A: It’s Chinese- and English-speaking. A: Hong Kong mainly embraces Cantonese and English speakers. A: Hong Kong is increasingly localist. A: The place remains very much outward-looking. It’s international. A: Hong Kong is constructed by misconstrued cinematic representations. A: It’s creative. Creativity makes Hong Kong Hong Kong. A: Hong Kong is evermore dogmatic and pragmatic. A: It’s a place of ideals, business, and otherwise. A: Hong Kong is politically engaged. A: Hongkongers are encouraged to be ideologically aloof, to just not care.

As this variety of dialectical responses attests, the original question meant to inaugurate the cutting edge, original, interrogative subject of this book suffers from presupposition failure. This leads us to wonder why Hong Kong has no single, coherent imaginary, no shared sense of itself. The quick answer to this Hong Kong conundrum, a response that the essays

J. S. Polley (*) • V. W. K. Poon • L.-H. Wee Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong, Hong Kong

© The Author(s) 2018 1 J. S. Polley et al. (eds.), Cultural Conflict in Hong Kong, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7766-1_1 2 J. S. POLLEY ET AL. collected in this volume substantiate, is that everything in Hong Kong is made into Hong Kong. This assessment accounts for the many nodes of cultural conflict in this densely populated place of almost 300 islands. The 50-year from Britain to China began on 1 July 1997. In the two decades since, the city has endured drastic changes in politics, culture, and identity.1 Most recently, the Hong Kong community— or, better, Hong Kong communities?—is increasingly divided.2 Over the past two decades, the place has witnessed, and stomached with progressively greater indigestion, an upsurge of oft-competing parties: young and old, local and expat, local and localist, wealthy and working class, pro-democrat and pro-China, pro-Cantonese and pro-Mandarin, pro-change­ and pro- status quo. This list is far from comprehensive. Each politicized faction, and their fracturing offshoots, attempts to interpret what postcolonial—or decolonized or recolonized—Hong Kong is. Competing blocs construct and promote particular understandings or characterizations of Hong Kong according to sometimes self-serving, sometimes self-sacrificing, objectives. As a result, cultural clashes over any single type of unified Hong Kong cultural imaginary foment. Underlying these rival imaginary constructions is the notion of what in fact qualifies as having been made into Hong Kong. After all, with the exception of Hong Kong’s dwindling set of (natural) flora and fauna, hardly anything belong- ing to the territory is intrinsically native to the place. Even a rudimentary argument propounding the essential Chineseness (a tellingly current visual-­ culture signifier not to be confused with the eighteenth-century decora- tive art-style chinoiserie) of Hong Kong proves problematic. Does Chineseness denote a specific ethnicity? Or imperialism? Republicanism? Communism? Or is it a very precise form of putative communism? Adding complication to any coherent and comprehensive Hong Kong imaginary, we might envisage an endo-normative model of Hong Kong as a hybrid of England and southeast Canton, of the British and the Cantonese, to the exclusion of other versions or variations of the identifier “Chinese.” A more liberal embrace of Hong Kong’s ethnic plurality might include its

1 See, for instance, Lo (1998); Fong (2014); Wong (2015); Ng (2010 and 2016). 2 See Goodstadt (2013); Veg (2015). INTRODUCTION: MADE INTO HONG KONG 3 minority of South Asian communities as well as the smaller minority of naturalized expatriates (who tend not to be referred to as living in “com- munities”) from the West. An absorbing anxiety current among Hong Kong youths concerns the relevance of historical sovereignty, whether British or Chinese. It can be argued that neither nation deserves any real sense of allegiance. When all is said and done, in 1997 the former handed over to the latter what the latter lost to the former in 1841. Consequently, each colonial power should be disqualified from ostensible ownership. Neither is trustworthy. By this logic, neither of these places owns, or belongs to and in, contem- porary Hong Kong. So Hong Kong belongs to whom? The political elites who publicly perform their claims to Hong Kong sovereignty? The local statesmen and women who claim, under Beijing fiat, to run the political marketplace? The property moguls and landowners who claim to build and house present and future Hongkongers? The financiers who claim to not only be enriching themselves? The local underclass who experience the effects of globalism but profit little, if at all, from it? The youth who have a claim in inheriting pieces, however small, however approximate, of the puzzle that is Hong Kong? The above all have strong Hong Kong entitlements—physical, financial, or moral. Hong Kong has a history of belonging to all since this very “all” has made parts of Hong Kong and has been made into Hong Kong. Take universal suffrage, for instance. This is something never formally bestowed to Hongkongers, notwithstanding its official guarantee in the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984. Arguments continue vis-à-­vis the basis and justification, or the present-day lack thereof, of said pre-1997­ agreement(s). Still others retort that politics was almost never really relevant to Hongkongers after the beginnings of the Cultural Revolution in the mid-1960s, that is, until what Ackbar Abbas has referred to as the “double trauma” or a priori haunting that resulted from the spectre of the handover in 1984 and the horrors of the Tiananmen Massacre in 19893 when everything became ineludibly politicized—this stemming from the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist-Dengist framework inform- ing what we’ve globally come to envision as the Chinese economic jug- gernaut. Again, though almost three decades past, the euphemized “events surrounding 4 June 1989” loom—and, perhaps, for Hongkongers most especially, since the free circulation of information has yet to be circum- scribed, as it has on the other side of the mainland perimeter.

3 Abbas (1997), 6–7. 4 J. S. POLLEY ET AL.

These conflicts of ideas, these contests between ideologies, divide and provoke different people and groups. They also inflame a Trump-modelled social ambience: the egoistical and egotistical worldviews of certain ­individuals and collectives are at once steadfastly aloof about and assuredly convinced that certain media outlets skilfully control only the minds of their compatriot competitors (Joseph 2006, 141–2). However, the media in Hong Kong, not unlike its counterparts in the USA, India, and Nigeria, to name three main global cinematic centers, focuses on popular enter- tainment first and traditional news second. This point is not lost on Hongkongers, irrespective of their personal/political allegiances. It is not for nought that since 2014’s Umbrella Protests, leading local TV news and entertainment network TVB’s sardonic appellation CCTVB4 has become widespread. In exploring and articulating Hong Kong’s manifold imaginaries, one specific irony that cannot escape attention remains writ large. Between being conceded to the British in 1841 and handed over to the Chinese in 1997 (and, to a much lesser extent, continuing in the present), the major- ity of Chinese material artefacts and cultural interpretations were de facto made in Hong Kong. As evidence of this global reproduction of a China once almost entirely made in Hong Kong, revisit actual and representational—such as at fairs and carnivals, and in novels, movies, and television—“Chinatowns” and the languages spoken and depicted therein. At the most standardized or popular level, reconsider Short Round and Lao Che in Indiana Jones; despite their “Shanghai” cover stories, they are Cantonese. The same applies, for instance, to the locally famous Chinese restaurant Shanghai Chop Suey, established in 1949, and situated in Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada. Its founders are Cantonese. Its present-day owners are Cantonese-Canadians. At the local, everyday level, this Shanghai, these Shanghais, not unlike Jackie Chan’s character in Shanghai Noon (2000), are literally made in Hong Kong. Hong Kong (as the Chinese cultural outpost, a place where citizens observed the policies of their colonial leadership) managed to perform this cultural translation in no small part by making all that passes through its ports into—as in, part of, and integral to—Hong Kong. Traditionally contrasting cultures have

4 CCTV is an abbreviation for China Central Television, which, so President Xi proclaimed on 19 February 2016, has “Party” as its real, family name. INTRODUCTION: MADE INTO HONG KONG 5 been and are made into Hong Kong.5 Given the assortment of cultural ­elements that constitute Hong Kong, it is no wonder that the territory now finds itself at serious loggerheads. Hong Kong is a place in transla- tion, just like any place undergoing a regime change, anywhere experienc- ing a systematic alteration in its governing (and self-identifying) structures. Yet, historically, Hong Kong has always been a place in translation and transition. Indeed, the contest of ideas concerning what Hong Kong is, what Hongkongers are, and what its collective imaginary might or might not be is arguably the very incoherence that binds Hongkongers, the inco- herence that establishes the place as actually coherent. In Hong Kong, irony may very well be the preserve of solidarity. On the 20th anniversary of Hong Kong’s 50-year return, this volume provides a look into the divisions, dynamics, and interactions between Hong Kong’s two most obvious competing identities: colonial and post-­ handover. Essays collected in this volume excavate the ways in which variegated cultural elements are appropriated into the Hong Kong imag- inary, and the process by which they gain (or fail to gain) recognition by Hongkongers. The topics of each essay in this volume differ, but what- ever issues individual contributors examine (be it an author, a director, a cultural happening, a political event, a linguistic variety, a public policy, a new language usage, or selected fictional versions of Hong Kong), the overall focus and stake of the book remains indebted to this serious question: how is what is made in Hong Kong made into Hong Kong— and legitimated as such? Integral, if not too patent, addenda to this question are: And by whom and why? In order to facilitate, and at times complicate, the complex Hong Kong identities and imaginaries existing and developing two decades following the territory’s return to China, this collection is categorized into three interrelated parts: surveillance, sousveillance, and equiveillance. This gyro- scope methodology facilitates a multitude of perspectives by which to investigate and organize a selection of underpinnings to the incoherent imaginaries inhabiting Hong Kong. Big Data and biometrics forerunner Joseph Ferenbok and computer scientist and public intellectual Steve

5 As Chris DeWolf (2017), for instance, explains, “It was in the dai pai dong [‘literally big licence (street) stalls’ (19)] that the city’s famous ‘soy sauce Western’ cuisine of milk tea, fried egg sandwiches and macaroni noodle soup was born” (22). As DeWolf clarifies earlier, “The foods were high-calorie, localized versions of Western dishes that were meant to fill the bel- lies of hungry shift workers” (20). 6 J. S. POLLEY ET AL.

Mann coin the “sousveillance” and “equiveillance” neologisms as a means of articulating “inverse surveillance,” by which the colleagues mean the ways in which people can digitally record images and actions from below, thus negating or counterbalancing “surveillance” from above (Mann and Ferenbok 2013).

Surveillance Part 1 of this collection covers representative made in Hong Kong cultural artefacts as products of power that merge both downward and upward, and inward and outward. These five chapters unpack a range of privileged power dynamics that have been made into Hong Kong. Not necessarily advocating any specific Hong Kong top-down power-structure perspec- tive, papers in this section analyse current modes of power, or discuss the ways in which these modes function—and (may) malfunction. John Wakefield’s “Turning English into Cantonese: The semantic change of English loanwords” discusses how particularly poignant loan- words are contextually appropriated and adapted by Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong. Although, so Wakefield mentions, loanwords are inevitable products of language contacts, it proves edifying to assess how English, the language of Hong Kong’s former colonial power, continues to impact Cantonese, the language of the colonized. Counterfactually, it’s not the other way around—even two decades after the official end of this colonial influence. Reflecting the power imbalance between colonizer and colo- nized, anisotropic linguistic influence literally speaks to the dynamics of surveillance: a top-down power model. Tempering this local model, of course, is the greater international context of the English language. After all, English remains the global lingua franca. Kathleen Ahrens’ “Beehives and Wet Markets: Expat Metaphors of Hong Kong” considers how the territory’s Western expatriate community lyrically describes Hong Kong. How Westerners see and understand local landmarks, Ahrens argues, reflects how they conceptualize the place they have decided to call home. Local expats tend to hail from diverse places and landscapes inherently distinct from Hong Kong; these contrasts directly influence their new perceptions of their new homes. Some label the city as an oversized wet market, others as an ongoing off-runway fash- ion show. A particularly compelling and pervasive simile to describe Hong Kong is as a “beehive.” Residential and commercial buildings are com- partmentalized, and Hongkongers, not unlike busy bees, unremittingly fly to and fro these diminutive cubicles. These descriptors, and how they’re INTRODUCTION: MADE INTO HONG KONG 7 selected and interpreted, offer clear glimpses of the alternate views of a small sector of unusually privileged Hongkongers. Surveillance does not only include the word choices and viewpoints of privileged and less-privileged citizens in Hong Kong. The place is likewise signified from without. International representations of Hong Kong also influence how the city is seen and understood—by locals, visitors, and non-visitors alike. In “Hong Kong Paradox: Appearance and Disappearance in Western Cinema,” Tammy Ho considers how Western cinema fashions (and refashions) the territory. The Hong Kong stylistically staged in select movie posters is not a Hong Kong that Hongkongers recognize—or fully recognize and accept. In a placard promoting the sci-fi filmArrival , for instance, Hong Kong’s famous skyline integrates the Oriental Pearl Tower, a landmark of the Shanghai skyline. Ho contends that, in the eyes of cer- tain filmmakers and/or their propagandists, it does not matter whether Hong Kong is more or less faithfully reproduced. In some ways, the city’s actual architecture—and its spaces, pathways, and people, by extension— are no longer singularly important. Televisuality or, more specifically, cin- ematic visions, whether subtle or not, increasingly determine how Hong Kong is depicted and recognized. Marija Todorova continues discussing the ex-colony in terms of how it’s seen through Western eyes. By means of narrative theory and meth- ods from imagology, “Hong Kong Diversity in Anglophone Children’s Fiction” plumbs the ways whereby Hong Kong is textually constructed in literature produced after the handover. Given that Hong Kong rarely publishes its own children’s books in English, local children rely on books from beyond Hong Kong to create, and from which to view, their ideas of the city. Still, Todorova recognizes how local authors respond to the dearth of English books for local children that are made in Hong Kong. In this sense, there is a call for illustrated stories and books that feature more locally pertinent, not to mention practical—and realist—imaginaries. Part 1 concludes with Jessica Yeung’s chapter on prominent Hong Kong film director Ann Hui. In her examination of several Hui movies, Yeung addresses how Hong Kong filmmakers struggle between sincerity and censorship, between highlighting local socio-political issues and con- forming to Chinese government dictates. Hong Kong directors require funding in order to produce their work. As the local, mainly Cantonese, market continues to shrink, these filmmakers are incorporated or com- pelled to nod northward in order to secure money (and surrender certain creative autonomies). This became especially apparent following the 8 J. S. POLLEY ET AL.

Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement (CEPA), whereby mainland Chinese companies came increasingly to co-produce “Hong Kong” films. Yeung sees allegory as the escape hatch from this creativity versus co-­ optation predicament. She assesses particular post-CEPA era cinematic strategies, thereby illustrating how surveillance enters the local picture at once from the West and the mainland.

Sousveillance The coinage sousveillance connotes a form of “inverted surveillance” or “subveillance.” Sousveillance empowers the officially disempowered by allowing their views and voices to be digitally disseminated. The five chap- ters in Part 2 highlight the self-positioning of disempowered persons and groups. Contributors detail counterpoints to more established top-down power structures; contributors consider Hong Kong from the bottom-up; and contributors address, question, or reinscribe normalized power relations. Vinton Poon focuses on local usages of the English language on the internet. Despite considerable pressure to normalize “standard English”— after all, this linguistic variety is the local marker of success in terms of education and career—Hongkongers practise non-standard forms of English so as to earmark their own online identities. Poon’s “Approaching Linguistic Norms: The Case of/for Hong Kong English on the Internet” illustrates a new set of English language norms, norms generated from the bottom-up, norms legitimated by netizens and citizens alike as indicative of a unique, collective Hong Kong identity. Jeffrey Clapp’s “Hong Kong’s Edward Snowden/Edward Snowden’s Hong Kong” enters sousveillance vis-à-vis Hong Kong from an alternate vector. Notwithstanding the city’s bureaucratic avant-gardism and, even, cachet, as well as its increasing efforts to maintain stability by silencing dissenting factors and forces, Hong Kong continues somehow to negoti- ate an autonomous spatial vacuum, one from which Edward Snowden (not unlike James Bond before him) managed to evade the efforts of a powerful government on his heels. The city’s architectural dynamics pro- vided Snowden with places to hide. Hong Kong’s legal grey area, stem- ming from its complicated partial autonomy, paved the path for this global fugitive to pass into relative political safety. INTRODUCTION: MADE INTO HONG KONG 9

Michael Cheuk propels the sousveillance discussion from cyber-cultures,­ spies, and the National Security Agency (NSA) to countercultures, hip-­ hop, and LMF. In “The Lazy Element: LMF and the Localization of Hip Hop Authenticity,” Cheuk considers the famous local Hong Kong hip-­ hop band Lazy Mutha Fucka (LMF). At once a hip-hop group, and a local hip-hop group, LMF operates within a delicate balance between “being hip-hop” and “being Hong Kong.” Cheuk’s close reading of selected LMF lyrics identifies the skilful means by which band members popularly inhabit the collision of two primo aspectu opposing authenticities: black American, like the genre’s 1970s inner-city roots, and Cantonese Hongkonger, like the band’s ten full-time members. LMF embraces an internationally normalized genre. Yet they also personalize and even reify this genre at the local level in stark contrast to the more locally popular, and co-opted, . Heidi Huang focuses on Hong Kong author Dung Kai-cheung’s Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City. Huang suggests how the award- winning novel furnishes a space for alternate walks of life, for different expectations, and for competing ideas to engage in continuous dialogue, and by extension endless dialogic interpretation. Atlas thus affords and encourages a Hong Kong imaginary comprised of different “words” and “worlds,” thus reflecting the competing self-identifications of distinctive readers and readerships, this irrespective of social class, gender, and other politicized affiliations and interpellations.Atlas ’ evocation of the dialogic enacts the heterogeneous energy and cultural life of Hongkongers. Part 2 concludes with Tammy Ho’s “Writing Hong Kong’s Ethos”. Ho engages in how non-­native English-speaking Hong Kong poets express their understandings of Hong Kong history, as well as their daily experiences of the city, in English. We are reminded that English in Hong Kong, as in many other places, is simultaneously an international and a colonial language. Ho illustrates that Hong Kong’s “local ethos” appropriates and indigenizes non- local elements, including Western poetic forms, explicit Western references, and the transposition of lines from Western verses. Perhaps counterintui- tively, these methods make English-language Hong Kong poems relevant to the city’s continuously evolving cultural and political contexts. The poems, as a result, are neither wholeheartedly “Chinese” nor “English.” Instead, they create and inhabit a third space, one that is uniquely made in Hong Kong. 10 J. S. POLLEY ET AL.

Equiveillance Papers in Part 3 either analyse surveillance and sousveillance or disrupt the sur/sous dichotomy. Just as sousveillance is a response to surveillance, equiveillance is a reaction to the presence of both. To be fair, and compre- hensive, equiveillance is not some new-fangled intervention. The counter- balancing of unequal power distributions has always been around: equiveillance marks the state where monitoring from the top-down and the countermeasure of re-monitoring from the bottom-up at best create a model form of “democratic homeostasis.” Kum-Hoon Ng and Lian-Hee Wee re-evaluate a famous and locally produced comic in “Chiaroscuro of the Uncanny: An Unknown Side of Old Master Q.” As their title suggests, the widely read and comically cher- ished serial integrates several unheimlich aspects. Ng and Wee survey Old Master Q in detail so as to posit how the series, which makes a virtue of finding and feeling a sense of familiarity or at-home-ness in the unfamiliar, can be categorized into three modalities: the “funny uncanny,” the “hor- ror uncanny,” and the “as-is uncanny.” Each “modality,” in the sense of cultural and psychological system, proves to be connected to colonial/ modern Western visions of dark Otherness (a surveillance and exceptional- ism element) and to Hong Kong cultural imaginaries (a sousveillance and postcolonial element). Wong Chak, creator of Old Master Q, artfully includes this collage of uncanny facets in his work, thereby not only forg- ing a collective identity for Hongkongers but also creating a collective memory of Hong Kong. Moving from comics and the unconscious, to film and the underclass, Jason Polley studies Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar-wai’s informal 1960s trilogy—Days of Being Wild (1990), In the Mood for Love (2000), and 2046 (2004)—in order to provide a discursive entry to a consideration of what the fractious identity marker “Hongkonger” speaks to 20 years following the handover. Polley sees Wong’s work in terms of nostalgia, discontinuity, and repetition. “‘I Didn’t Think We’d be Like Them’; or, Wong Kar Wai, Hongkonger” adopts a similar destabilizing approach, one that echoes Wong’s re-enacted, distorted, and remembered scenes, one that reflects the sometimes congruent, at other times competing, narratives and counter- narratives of Hong Kong’s numerous cultural imaginaries. Also offsetting both top-down and bottom-up influences are the lan- guage choices of Hong Kong students. Chuan Qin’s “Becoming Hong Kong-like: The Role of Hong Kong English in the Acquisition of English INTRODUCTION: MADE INTO HONG KONG 11

Phonology by Hong Kong Students” concerns the patent attitudes of local students when compelled to communicate by means of this linguistic variety. Qin first identifies specific phonological features of Hong Kong English. He then shows these features to a group of local university stu- dents and determines whether or not the test group responds positively to these very features. Qin ultimately assesses the students’ balanced responses in terms of what Bourdieu has popularized as “social capital.”6 Hong Kong “subjects” herein negotiate their ways through social and academic life with minds attuned to Hong Kong’s main linguistic varieties. Janice Wong comes to comparable conclusions in “Becoming Hong Kong-like: The Role of Hong Kong English in the Acquisition of English Phonology by Hong Kong Students.” She reports on the teaching of “standard” English features to local students. Wong’s results illustrate how an individual’s accent primarily indicates his or her social identity. As a consequence of these findings, she laterally comes to quiz the ethical implications of pragmatically changing one’s accent. She also addresses the fact that, for native Cantonese speakers, attaining a “standard” native English accent proves unrealistic. Hongkongers have thus adopted more open and positive attitudes towards localized English accents. Part 3 closes with Jason Lee’s “Glocalizing Hong Kong Anglophone Literature: Locating Xu Xi’s Writing Across the Decades.” Lee sees Xu Xi’s fictional and occasional writing as the product of a negotiation between the global and the local. Xu Xi, an Anglophone Indo-Chinese writer, adopts an “insider-outside” perspective to appreciating Hong Kong as a community and culture. Surveying two decades of the author’s publications, Lee posits a “glocal” Hong Kong identity, one that artfully and judiciously merges local senses of identity with global ones. This merger process is never whole and clear-cut. Continuing conflicts per- petuate the dynamism that defines Hong Kong, both as place and as perspective. The three parts, representative of three different and oft-intertwined perspectives to disentangling Hong Kong’s complex social fabric, offer an imaginary that can be coherently perceived only when a viewer is ready to embrace the conflicting dynamics ofand in Hong Kong history and cul- ture. In this collection, selected socio-political, economic, and cultural threads plaited by different textures are embroidered into a comprehensive

6 For a comprehensive discussion of social capital, see Bourdieu (2011). 12 J. S. POLLEY ET AL. tapestry. Any microscopic view thus necessarily yields only partial, albeit representative, fractional understandings. This point is not merely aca- demic. Until policymakers, both in the local context and at the Beijing level, recognize, accept, and respond to the complexities of Hong Kong, the place shall remain lost in a nostalgic past, locked in a conflicted present, and, likely, left to a bleak future.

References Abbas, Ackbar. Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1997. Bourdieu, Pierre. Language and Symbolic Power. Edited by John B. Thompson. Translated by Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011. DeWolf, Christopher. Borrowed Spaces: Life Between the Cracks of Modern Hong Kong. Australia: Penguin Group, 2017. Fong, Brian C.H. Hong Kong’s Governance under Chinese Sovereignty: The Failure of the State-Business Alliance after 1997. New York: Routledge, 2014. Goodstadt, Leo F. Poverty in the Midst of Affluence: How Hong Kong Mismanaged Its Prosperity. Hong Kong: Hong Kong UP, 2013. Hong Kong 20/20: Reflections on a Borrowed Place—A PEN Hong Kong Anthology. Hong Kong: Blacksmith, 2017. Joseph, John E. Language and Politics. Edinburgh Textbooks in Applied Linguistics Series. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2006. Lo, Shiu-Hing. “Political Parties, Elite Mass Gap and Political Instability in Hong Kong.” Contemporary Southeast Asia 20.1 (April 1998): 67–87. Mann, Steve, and Joseph Ferenbok. “New Media and the Power Politics of Sousveillance in a Surveillance-Dominated World.” Surveillance & Society 11. 1/2 (2013): 18–34. Ng, Jason Y. Hong Kong State of Mind: 37 views of a city that doesn’t blink. Hong Kong: Blacksmith, 2010. ———. Umbrellas in Bloom: Hong Kong’s Occupy Movement Uncovered. Hong Kong: Blacksmith, 2016. Veg, Sebastian. “Legalistic and Utopian: Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement.” New Left Review 92 (2015): 55–73. Wong, Stan Hok-Wui. Electoral Politics in Post-1997 Hong Kong: Protest, Patronage, and the Media. Singapore: Springer, 2015. PART I

Surveillance

Found Public Art in Hong Kong