Hong Kong's Table Talks

Hong Kong Guest-edited by Tammy Lai-Ming Ho the city issue Featuring Xi Xi 56 Kit Fan 57 Jennifer Wong 58 Bei Dao 59 Kate Rogers 62 Arthur Leung 63 Eddie Tay 64 Lian-Hee Wee 65 Favorite Hong Kong Foods 68 Belle Ling 70 Wawa 71 Chris Song 72 Jason S. Polley 73 Xu Xi’s Reading List 74 52 WLT SPRING 2019 Hong Kong’s Table Talks by Tammy Lai-Ming Ho Tammy Lai-Ming Ho is the founding co-editor of Asian Cha and an editor of the academic journal Hong Kong Studies. She is an associate professor at Hong Kong Baptist University and a recipient of the Young Artist Award in Literary Arts presented by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council. Yang (yangillustration.com) is currently based in Macau, working and learning to be a good visual storyteller. Her family members include two cats, and she almost naps every day. A slow reader who daydreams a lot, Yang is also interested in growing little plants. Illustration by Yang A S THE YEARS GO BY and I get more advanced in age, I find I have become increasingly self-aware. It’s hardly an astonishing revelation, of course, but my sense of self-awareness is greater than the self and extends to my home city—Hong Kong. Or, to some extent, the self has been subsumed or even replaced by the city—the two are one. Roland Barthes in A Lover’s Discourse writes, “The lover’s fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.” My identity, not fatal but at once practical and emotional, is this: I am where I live. This is a sentiment perhaps shared by many in this turbulent world who swear allegiance to their cities and vow to defend them at all times, at any cost. And it is a sentiment inherent in the longing for their home cities by those who have been deprived of the right to live there. These days, both in my creative works and academic research, I write more about Hong Kong. It is as if writing can have concrete effects in the real world, and I hope that at least some of the time it can. I ask questions such as Can we say Hong Kong? How is Hong Kong represented in film? What is the local Hong Kong ethos and how is it articulated? How many Hong Kongs are there? Do they speak to one another; do they try to decipher one another? With self-awareness comes constant wondering what other people think about you. Pride and insecurity WORLDLIT.ORG 53 COVER FEATURE HONG KONG are wont to go hand in hand. And I also wonder about how Hong Kong is perceived by those who do not live here or those who imagine it in passing. We can see ourselves, or so we think, but how are we seen? People might marvel at Hong Kong’s magnificent skyline, a labyrinthine cityscape wrought out of a built environment that is one of the world’s densest. These are all very visual and have been repeatedly captured and reproduced , with varying degrees of success and fidelity, by filmmakers and photographers, even if some of them, lacking any genuine emotional attachment, merely use the city as a picturesque backdrop. Others might consider Hong Kong with detached and in some cases authentic pity, half-understanding what has happened to it and what might yet be in store for the city. Since the city’s sovereignty was “turned over” from Britain to China in 1997, it has experienced much: two financial crises, the SARS outbreak, a growing discontent in civic society, the Umbrella Movement of 2014, the abduction of the Causeway Bay booksellers two years later, and the unmistakable deterioration of the city’s democracy. Writing during the lead-up to the handover , the scholar Ackbar Abbas suggested interpreting Hong Kong culture through the lens of “a culture of disappearance.” He wrote, “The change in status of culture in Hong Kong can be described as follows: from reverse hallucination, which sees only desert, to a culture of disappearance, whose appearance is posited on the imminence of

Art · Art history · China · Literature · Media studies · Revelation · Sociology · The arts · Visual arts · History · Hong Kong and Taiwan Politics