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To Queer History: Gender, Borders, and Body Politics in Post-Handover Hong Kong Crime Films

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To Queer History: Gender, Borders, and Body Politics in Post-Handover Hong Kong Crime Films Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 46.1 March 2020: 39-57 DOI: 10.6240/concentric.lit.202003_46(1).0003 From “Crisis of Masculinity” to Queer History: Gender, Borders, and Body Politics in Post-Handover Hong Kong Crime Films Leo Chia-Li Chu Science and Technology Studies University of British Columbia, Canada Abstract This paper will examine the ambivalences and contradictions in post-handover Hong Kong cinema through the lens of gender, border, and the body politic in three crime films. The first of them, Intruder (恐怖雞 Kongbu ji, 1997), released when sovereignty over Hong Kong had just been transferred from Britain to China, may evoke a “crisis of masculinity” through its border-crossing female antagonist; in contrast, the portrayal of women, as well as transgender and queer people, in Ming Ming (明明, 2006) and I Come with the Rain (2009), appears to be more nuanced. Reading the three films against one another and against established narratives about the city, I intend to investigate how these films adopt gendered narratives and the questions of border in the construction of identity politics in post-handover Hong Kong. By juxtaposing the fluid, unstable, and multi-faceted bodies of fictional characters with the city’s history, this paper argues that the representation of past and future in these films reflects the struggle to narrate anxiety and hope in post-handover Hong Kong. Keywords Hong Kong, crime films, handover, gender, border, body politic 40 Concentric 46.1 March 2020 Introduction The development of Hong Kong cinema reflects the evolution of the city as well as the imagination and construction of its present, past, and future. A contested locus of capital and state, hegemony and heterogeneity, and different versions of imperialism, nationalism, and cosmopolitanism, Hong Kong cinema needs to be critically situated in multiple socio-economic and political contexts, as well as in various constructed images about its border. To approach the three crime films I discuss in this paper, the representation of border-crossing criminals in the cinema of the 1980s may provide a relevant context. The focus on sensational crimes committed by gangs coming from adjacent Mainland provinces, such as the robbery depicted in Long Arm of the Law (省港旗兵 Shenggang qibing, 1984), manifested and shaped Hongkongers’ ambivalence toward China as well as their own Westernized urban society, populated mostly by first- and second-generation refugees who had themselves escaped the turmoil of the Mainland. Gangs and the police, depicted as almost indistinguishable from each other, are considered by Stephen Teo as symbols of the threats capitalism posed to traditional Chinese morality, with its “code of honor” is called into question “in the ensuing violence” triggered by corruption and greed (233). These wounded, embittered, and betrayed characters therefore juxtapose the anxiety over external forces bringing unforeseeable danger with a sense of anomie brewing inside people’s insecure bodies. In the following sections, I will elaborate on the relation between crime cinema and the cultural imagination of Hong Kong through three post-handover films: Intruder (恐怖雞 Kongbu ji, 1997), Ming Ming (明明, 2006), and I Come with the Rain (2009). It should be noted that this chronological order does not entail a “progressive narrative” in which an authentic depiction of Hong Kong will gradually emerge from imposed categories or identities. As I will argue, while the discussion of borders and the body politic in the latter films seems to be more “nuanced” and focuses more on the positive connotations of hybridity, this emphasis on the fluidity of identity can itself buttress dominant discourses about Hong Kong’s history and evade certain political questions. Wing Sang Law has rightly argued that, since socio-political narratives surrounding Hong Kong are saturated with binary oppositions and imported ideologies, attempts to move beyond the impasse can be complicit in the “unreflective recycling of reified categories” embedded in postcolonial critiques, patriotic capitalism, or global multiculturalism (177). The trope that posits China as “(m)other” to Hong Kong is Leo Chia-Li Chu 41 especially problematic in the cultural depictions and construction of border and body politics. Although the current paper cannot adequately address, let alone resolve, these entrenched issues, it does try to contribute to the debate by examining the various modes of representation and imagination of Hong Kong as a body politic in relation to its border, along with the deliberate efforts to create a boundary—as well as those who travel across it—as a reference point to define the identity of Hongkongers. Epidermal Anxiety: Borders and The Crisis of Masculinity in Intruder (1997) The plot of Intruder centers on the scheme of Yip (Jacklyn Wu [吳倩蓮]), a Mainland woman who plans to enter Hong Kong by posing as a woman she murdered in Shenzhen. The film details how she kidnaps Chan (Wayne Lai [黎耀 祥]), a middle-aged Hong Kong man, in order to furnish both herself and her husband with new identities. Intruder reaches a climax with a scene depicting Chan’s arms being cut off by Yip’s disabled husband, who subsequently uses them to provide fingerprints for an identity card application. As contemporary critics have noticed, the film may manifest “Hong Kong’s worst paranoia about rapacious Chinese” (Davis and Yeh 12). The conspicuously xenophobic plot notwithstanding, here I intend to approach Intruder via a critical reading of the presentation of identity, boundaries, and the abject horror induced by their violation. My focus will be on how the film presents a certain motif of the “crisis of masculinity” in order to illustrate the emerging new social and political (dis-)order in 1990s Hong Kong. To understand the portrayal of Yip as an intruder, I will argue that the terror she induces originates in her ability to cross the border through murder and identity theft. National and regional borders are not created by physical infrastructure alone. Paperwork such as the production of identity documents as well as their examination may be viewed as an “immune mechanism” buttressed by the police and bureaucracy, while affective reactions may be triggered if such an immune response fails. And yet the contested Hong Kong identity—emerging in the context of, as Ackbar Abbas aptly puts, “love at last sight, a culture of disappearance”—cannot be treated as a given, stable artifact, but must be analyzed in relation to the specific project and ideology any claim of identity implies (777). Intruder therefore manipulates the anxiety surrounding the handover by offering a sensational picture in which not only a breach of border—depicted here as a reified bodily boundary that is nonetheless susceptible to invasion—becomes a source of 42 Concentric 46.1 March 2020 horror, but the very bodies of Hongkongers are vulnerable to mutilation and theft. The cross-border movement that is common in Hong Kong is consequently dramatized. In a series of close-ups of Yip’s border-crossing, audiences, watching but unable to intervene, might find themselves instead subject to the “reverse monitoring” Yip conducts once arriving in the city. Using the business cards she found on the murdered woman, who it is implied was a sex worker, Yip identifies Chan as a suitable target. She then deprives him of his mobility in a planned car accident, and eventually imprisons him in his own house.1 The expected rise in cross-border mobility after the handover is recycled by the film to create a terrifying caricature: as malevolent imposters take advantage of it, ordinary Hong Kong people like Chan appear hopelessly entrapped by a mobility that invites strangers to their houses, who subsequently become masters rather than guests. Significantly, the procedure of applying for an ID card is shown meticulously in the film, which contains real footages of governmental offices, various application forms, and citizens waiting in lines. While the film includes other narrative techniques such as suspense and the cliff-hanger in Chan’s failed escape attempt, the central narrative tension is developed around identity acquisition and evasion of the “immune responses” of a polity. After receiving her new ID card and subduing her captive, Yip, no longer an intruder but an ordinary citizen who easily and naturally passes a police identity check, thus completely inhabits the dead woman’s identity and penetrates Hong Kong society. Both the law and the protective border are now on her side. It is necessary also to examine the portrayal of male characters in order to understand how the crime committed by Yip is connected to gender representation. In the context of Hong Kong, if the crime films of the 1980s suggest a breakdown of traditional Chinese values and Western capitalist modernity, the 1990s is an era in which cinema relocates the implosion of social tension to the bodies of individuals. A middle-aged, divorced, unemployed man like Chan may be viewed as a caricatured embodiment of what Laikwan Pang described as “a sense of entrapment and impotency” prevalent in the social imagination of Hong Kong in the 1990s (331). The uncanny rural mansion Chan inherited from his father is made into an isolated prison, while his wealth becomes the very reason for his imprisonment. The murdered woman’s husband (Yuen Bun [元彬]) is another important male character in this film. Encountering Yip at the border checkpoint, he 1 The Chinese title of the film, Kongbu ji 恐怖雞 (literally “Horrible Chicken”), hints at both Yip’s self-presentation as a “chicken,” i.e., prostitute in Cantonese slang, as well as issues of gender which I will later discuss. Leo Chia-Li Chu 43 tries to confront her and expose her true identity. Being the only “able-bodied” male character in the film, he is ironically also the person who makes Yip’s border-crossing possible—since his wife is murdered for nothing but a document, her so-called “One-way Permit,” which allows Mainlanders marrying Hong Kong citizens to acquire residency immediately upon their arrival.
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