A University of Sussex DPhil thesis Available online via Sussex Research Online: http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/ This thesis is protected by copyright which belongs to the author. This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the Author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the Author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Please visit Sussex Research Online for more information and further details In the Mood for Travel: Mobility, Gender and Nostalgia in Wong Kar-wai’s Cinematic Hong Kong Lei, Chin Pang Doctor of Philosophy University of Sussex August 2012 I hereby declare that this thesis has not been and will not be, submitted in whole or in part to another University for the award of any other degree. Signature___________________________ Acknowledgement “Making films is just like holding water with your hands. No matter how hard you try, you will still lose much of it.” Chinese director Zhang Yimou expresses the difficulty of film making this way. For him, a perfect film is non-existent. At the end of my doctoral study, Zhang’s words ran through my mind. In the past several years, I worked hard to hold the water in my hands – to make this thesis as good as possible. No matter how much water I have finally managed to hold, this difficult task, however, cannot be carried out without the support given by the following people. First of all, this thesis cannot be done without my supervisors Sue Thornham and Ben Highmore. If working with supervisors can possibly be one of the most knotty parts in doctoral studies, I am lucky enough to have them as my supervisors since they are responsible, responsive, helpful, thoughtful and inspirational. I remember when Sue was going to take a research leave for one term a couple of years ago, she said that her leave “does not include not seeing me” and promised to meet me and read my writings during her leave. I also remember in the early stage of my study, every time after supervision, Ben took care of my emotion by asking how I felt. One day in the future, if I have the opportunity to be a thesis supervisor, I just hope I will be as good as Sue and Ben. I need to thank my parents Lei Kueng-long (李炯龍) and Lam Mio-wan (林妙雲). I doubt whether I can find more loving, supportive and understanding parents in the world. On the one hand, they supported me throughout my doctoral study. On the other hand, they always told me not to work too hard; for them, the health and happiness of their son is more important than anything else. At the final stage of my writing, one day I watched a Hong Kong film A Simple Life (dir. Ann Hui, 2011) in London. The loving old woman in the film reminded me of my parents, which wet my eyes in the BFI theatre. After watching the film, I hurried to leave the theatre and called my parents just to say hello to them. Their love is one of the most valuable gifts in my life. In addition, my thanks go to my friends in Macau, Taiwan, mainland China and the UK. Some of them inspired my writing; some helped to proofread my thesis; some shared my pressure, worries as well as happiness on my way to a PhD. Also, I am grateful to those who gave me advices after my presentations in the conferences in the University of Sussex, University of Ulster, University of Surrey, University of Bangor, University of Bournemouth, University of Hong Kong and Sorbonne University in Paris. After all, my doctoral study is not only about the subject matter of my thesis, but also about love and the understanding of life. University Of Sussex Lei, Chin Pang DPhil, Media and Cultural Studies In the Mood for Travel: Mobility, Gender and Nostalgia in Wong’s Kar-wai’s Cinematic Hong Kong Summary The director Wong Kar-wai has been widely recognized as a key figure in contemporary Hong Kong cinema. His films have been seen through a number of critical lenses: as auteurist artworks (Brunette, 2005); as creative popular cinema (Bordwell, 2000); as highly political texts responding directly to the 1997 handover (Stokes and Hoover, 1999). Rather than focusing on an aesthetic, technical or political (in a narrow sense) interpretation, this thesis, using the approach of textual and contextual analysis, seeks to bring Wong’s films into dialogue with contemporary cultural theories about the nature of space, mobility, gender and nostalgia. In this way I hope both to re-position the films within the cultural context to which and of which they speak, and to show the ways in which they also speak to contemporary cultural concerns which far exceed it. Thus my argument is that these are globally significant films because of the paradigmatic nature of the specific Hong Kong culture which they explore, a culture which embodies in heightened form characteristics seen as typifying modern urban experience. In light of Bhabha’s theories of post-colonial culture (1994), Abbas’ suggestion of Hong Kong culture as indefinable “postculture” (1997), and Rey Chow’s analysis of Hong Kong’s post-colonial self-writing (1998), this thesis seeks to show how a marginal culture not only survives, but also creates a speaking position for today’s global culture through Wong’s cinema. The thesis is structured around three major themes, those of mobility, gender construction and nostalgia, all of which are both regionally specific concerns and global issues. Today, we see the dual trends of nationalism and globalization; the former brings exclusivity and the latter brings homogeneity. Wong’s films displays the creativity of Hong Kong’s post-colonial culture, whose hybridity and ambivalence defy these conservative trends and shed light on the future of global culture. Contents Introduction: The Future of Cinema and the Future of Culture………………..…….1 Chapter 1: A Legless Bird: Physical Mobility and Fluid Identity……..……................27 Part 1: Spatial Others: Life Is All about Journeys…….……………….…….….,….….29 Part 2: Global Mobility: In between Travel and Home, Global and Local….……..…..50 Chapter 2: Men in Crisis and Women in Mobility………………………….………...76 Part 1: “I Hate to Pull a Bullet out of My Body”: Men in Crisis……….…….………..80 Part 2: “Take the Longest Way to Cross the Street”: Women in Mobility.….……….101 Chapter 3: The Past in a Hotel: Nostalgia and Alternative History Writing….……134 Part 1: Looking for History in a City without History: The Contexts of Nostalgia.….139 Part 2: “Heading for a Drowsy Future”: The Strategies of Nostalgia…………….…..153 Conclusion: The Two Sides of a Journey…………………………….……………….184 Bibliography…………………………………………………………….………………193 Appendix: Filmography……………………………………………………………….208 1 Introduction: The Future of Cinema and the Future of Culture First of all, I need to make the confession that Wong Kar-wai is my favourite director. I started watching his films when I was in junior high school. I’ve watched and re-watched these films whose apparent subjects are love stories, and they touch me every time. For years, I never doubted that these love stories were the reason for my admiration of his films. However, in my doctoral study of the films, I have found another factor – there is something more than love stories embedded in these urban romances. I am also attracted to his films because they touch me with the recurrent themes of physical mobility, fluid identities and hybrid cultures, which make my thesis not only about Wong Kar-wai’s films, but also about myself. I too was born in a colony; I grew up without national identity; my culture is a marginal one. Three Passports and Identities I am from Macau, an ex-Portuguese colony handed over to mainland China in 1999, two years after Hong Kong’s handover. I earned my Bachelor’s Degree in Taiwan, which has been politically separated from mainland China since the end of the civil war in 1949. Because of this life history, I have three passports: a Portuguese passport that was given to me when I was born; a Macau SAR (Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China) passport that was given to me after the handover; and a Taiwanese (Republic of China) passport that was given to me when I was a student in Taiwan since the KMT, the ruling party in Taiwan, used to consider Chinese people in Hong Kong and Macau as politically “their” people. However, none of these passports is equivalent to my 2 identity – I somehow feel alienated by all of them. In the case of my Portuguese passport, I don’t speak Portuguese and until recently I hadn’t been to Portugal. I like Portuguese culture but I don’t feel I belong to that country. I seldom use my Taiwanese passport, which is far less useful than my Portuguese passport and Macau SAR passport when I travel, due to the diplomatic predicament faced by Taiwan – it is not recognized by the United Nations. I love Taiwan but I never claim to be a Taiwanese. The Macau SAR passport, issued by my hometown where I still live, is my “newest” passport and thus one to which I have not yet built up any emotional attachment. Growing up in a colony, I feel distant from mainland China. According to the law in Macau, my official nationality is Chinese, and my official passport is the Macau SAR one.