Post by Yiu Fai Chow (Hong Kong Baptist University), Sonja van Wichelen (University of Sydney), and Jeroen de Kloet (University of Amsterdam)

This post is part of a partnership with the International Journal of Cultural Studies, where authors of newly published articles extend their arguments here on Antenna.

The 21st century is often heralded as the Asian, if not the Chinese, Century.

We understand the seduction of such nomenclature. At the same time, we think it is important to be critical and cautious about such narratives that are often accompanied with strong doses of nationalism; after all, who needs another hegemonic power in the wake and form of the United States? But we understand the seduction of calling this century the Asian one, as much as we see the urgency to acknowledge changing dynamics between here and there. It seems undeniable that the Rise of Asia in the global context of our century has been engendering important shifts in geopolitical power relations. They necessitate more nuanced empirical inquiries and intellectual thinking on all sorts of issues, rather than one grand narrative. Mobility is one such issue. In a world that is increasingly globalized, in flux, groups of people are constantly on the move, either voluntarily as businessmen, academics or tourists, or by necessity as migrants or refugees. And yet, we must not forget those who stay put. The majority of Americans, for example, do not have a passport, while their films, music and television shows are likely to constitute the heaviest cultural (and economic) traffic in the world. In the meantime, in nations like China, many citizens have no choice but remain in their hometown, paradoxically involved in paid labour enabled by global capital.

We are, however, not only interested in mobility in a general sense. More specifically, we want to inquire into the “Asianization” side of this. Such more specific configuration of our intellectual curiosity is interwoven in our biographies. All of us traverse between “the West” and “the East,” making do with what we have, occasionally wondering where on Earth we are. And then we become sharply aware that home is not merely a manifestation of personal choice and affect, but also an issue of politics and power, when we are asked by those who insist on asking: Where do you really come from? Where is your real home?

Questions of place, belonging and citizenship have been high on the intellectual agenda since the early 1990s, yet most of these studies take “the West” as their focal point. The Asian turn urges us to rethink these notions. Can we still feel at home in a world that is so much in flux? Is home such a nice and cozy place as we are often expected to believe? The demand to feel at home is ridden with power; it is often imposed upon migrants to enforce assimilation; it may render us less mobile than we would like to be; and it may hinder rather than support the multiculturalist dynamics of a city. A migrant worker who left his hometown in Anhui in search for a better life in Shanghai is less likely to feel at home, given that local urbanite Shanghainese may look down upon him as having less “quality” (suzhi). On the other hand, can he ever feel truly at home in the big city, while his hometown is still struck and stuck by poverty and a lack of opportunities? Home is consequently fraught with longings and belongings that may produce a deadlock, rather than a sense of intimacy, capable of pushing us into a perpetual state of schizophrenia.

An appeal to reconceptualize “home” seems necessary, not only to find a way out of such schizophrenic states of mind, but also to investigate how the Asian Century contributes to changing the notions of place, belonging, and citizenship so deeply anchored in the colloquial definition of home. Increasingly, we witness disjunctures and fractures between these three different modalities of home. People are forced to move and then even if they do develop a strong sense of belonging to that new place, they have to fight for their citizenship’s rights. Filipino domestic workers in Hong Kong, for instance, have left behind their own families to take care of the families of their employers. This displacement of homes plunges them deeply into the workings of global capitalism, without earning them any citizen rights from the authorities. In other fast-changing cities in Asia, such as Beijing, people often feel alienated, negotiating a deep sense of non-belonging with the massive mutation of the cityscape. It is our contention that these disjunctures, as demonstrated in such “Asianization,” will increase in the future; the tensions between home and the actual place we find ourselves living in, between home and our sense of belonging, and between home and the rights attached to it, are increasingly disjointed.

Where home is matters not just geographically, but also historically, politically and culturally. Given the complex realities of home and the persistent simplicity or simplification in its imagination, we want to make a modest plea: to bracket home, not unlike the way we hyphenate identity. We find it necessary to bracket home as (making) place, (not) belonging and (flexible) citizenship-–to foreground the never-ending process of homemaking, the multiplicity of feelings and experiences, and the possibility of transcending old loyalties. To bracket home is to remind us that home is always already implicated in such complexities, thus always already in the processes of making. It is a profoundly sensory enterprise that involves a structure of feeling, an affective mode of belonging, that requires constant maintenance, and that remains perpetually fragile. Perceiving home in this manner paves the way for probing into the role that imagination plays–including old and new media–in the negotiation of home. Campaigns, pictures, and other visual materials (for example in the local branding of Hong Kong) attest to this important role of the imagination, as significantly as the limitations of such. Put differently, they are concerned with moments when memories flow in frustration with imagination, when longings duly evoked run havoc with the construction and maintenance of a sense of belonging.

In the editor’s note to this post, you will find the reference to a special issue of articles on “home,” which, in turn, found its roots in a conference we organized. The conference took place in Hong Kong in early 2013. Let us end with what took place in the city more than a year later, as an extended postscript to underline the urgency to revisit notions of home, belonging and citizenship in the Asian context. The protests loosely grouped as the Umbrella Movement were in many ways implicated with contestations precisely over home. Protesters claimed the streets, eventually calling the occupied areas “villages” with postal addresses, donning flyovers and highways with works of art, equipping public toilets with personal but communal toiletries, in short, making a place yet to be defined. At the same time, other populations fought to “reclaim” their city back to the older manners of running their shops, going to their work, and generally to the place already made. More immediately, the protests, and the counter-protests, were part and parcel of the larger contest over political power, democracy and freedom: who has the right to decide the city’s future? Beijing? Hong Kong? Who in Hong Kong exactly? The protests took place also in the midst of heightening Sino-Hong Kong tension not only in the political arena but also in everyday life. Many “local” people complain that “local” resources are being abused by increasing numbers of newcomers from mainland China, sometimes culminating in instances of intra-ethnic discrimination or downright xenophobic attacks. While mainland Chinese tourists are accused of being “unpatriotic” for spending money in Hong Kong, Hong Kong people are blamed for their lack of nationalistic feelings for their mother land. The latest controversy flared up when the largely local audience booed the national anthem of China when Hong Kong was hosting a football match against Bhutan for the World Cup preliminary match.

Such are the complex realities of home being played out in Hong Kong, China, Asia and, we believe, everywhere else. If this were the Asian Century, it’s time we learned more about place, about home–about the emerging processes of place-making, of belonging and of regulating citizenship statuses.

[For the full introduction to this special issue, see “At Home in Asia?: Place-making, Belonging, and Citizenship in the Asian Century,” forthcoming in International Journal of Cultural Studies. Currently available as an OnlineFirst publication: http://ics.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/03/03/1367877915573758.abstract]

All photos taken by Jeroen de Kloet.

Post by Yiu-wai Chu, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

This post is part of a partnership with the International Journal of Cultural Studies, where authors of newly published articles extend their arguments here on Antenna. 

Hong Kong, now a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of China, had been a British colony for 156 years before sovereignty over the territory was handed to China in 1997. Shortly after reversion to its “motherland,” it was expected that Hong Kong people would have a stronger sense of belonging to their home city. The surprisingly stellar rise of China in the new millennium, however, has resulted in many impacts on Hong Kong. Hong Kong people have worried about forced integrations, in particular during the post-free-tour period, when countless Mainlanders crossed the border to purchase different commodities, ranging from luxury goods to baby formula.

The Hong Kong SAR government launched BrandHK, a global communications platform, in 2001 to focus international attention on Hong Kong’s drive to become “Asia’s World City.” In March 2010, a “Faces of Hong Kong” campaign was inaugurated via the BrandHK platform as a new marketing and communications strategy to promote the city and enhance the sense of belonging of Hong Kong people. The strategy of the overhauled campaign endeavored to highlight the “human” side of Hong Kong, thus its main thrust was focused on a series of promotional videos that featured different Hong Kong citizens. While the series of promotional videos feature both celebrities and common folk, familiar faces, such as international film star Chow Yun-Fat, have stolen the limelight. Although Chow Yun-Fat has achieved global success in his film career, he is well-known for being local as well. Praised by local media as “The Son of Hong Kong,” Chow Yun-Fat is famous for living an ordinary local life, despite his enormous success. As such, Chow Yun-Fat was the choice to promote Hong Kong to the world, as this campaign focuses on locals.“Faces of Hong Kong” tactfully used Kowloon City, Chow Yun-Fat’s favourite neighbourhood, as the main setting. In the video there were lots of signatures local stores where Chow has been hanging out for several decades. “Over the years, other parts of Hong Kong have changed a lot, but Kowloon City is a place that still feels the same. Much of what I remember from my childhood is still here. The way of life, the atmosphere, the friendliness of the neighbourhood. It’s the same for me now as it was back in the sixties.” Chow’s voice-over in the video might sound sweet to many years, but my “re-search” of Kowloon City told a different story. If the feeling of being at home is based on “security, familiarity, community and a sense of possibility,” which are actually the underlying themes of the “Faces of Hong Kong” promotional videos, the case of Kowloon City exposes a harsh reality that insists on showing a different picture: these key feelings have no place in the redeveloped district.

Photo 1: Kowloon City wet market; across the street once stood the famous local restaurant Dragon Palace.

Photo 2: New Citygate Chinese Herbal Medicine Store on the left; across the street once stood the district’s largest department store, International, boasting a history of more than 50 years.

My pedestrian inquiry started with Kowloon City’s public wet market, Chow Yun-Fat’s favourite. Just across the road from the market stood a well-known local restaurant called Dragon Palace, but it was closed in 2012 and was subsequently torn down to make way for new luxury apartments (Photo 1). Unfortunately, this was not an isolated event. On the other side of the public market, the same developer demolished another old residential building to make way for its real estate project entitled “Billionaire Avant.” One block away from the public market stands three famous local stores: New Citygate Chinese Herbal Medicine Store (Photo 2), Hoover Cake Shop (Photo 3) and Kung Wo Soya Bean Factory (Photo 4). In the “Faces of Hong Kong” video, Chow Yun-Fat tastes delicious egg tarts at Hoover and consumes thirst-quenching soya bean milk at Kung Wo. These are undoubtedly landmark stores with a long history. However, on the same street many old buildings have already been swallowed up by developers. In the promotional video, Chow Yun-Fat works excitedly with the staff of New Citygate Chinese Herbal Medicine Store. The store is still there but the building just across the road, once housing the district’s largest “international” department store and boasting a history of more than fifty years, was pulled down not long after the video was released. Urban redevelopment is not uncommon in metropolis regions such as Hong Kong; however, what is most troubling is that the retailers of the new buildings are often completely different from their predecessors. As profit is the raison d’être of property developers, it is not surprising that the street stores in the luxurious redeveloped buildings target chain-store renters who can afford higher rates (Photo 5). It is a shame that the recent changes in Kowloon City, which might become a “generic district” in the near future, has told a story opposite to a local sense of belonging.

Photo 3: Hoover Cake Shop on the left; a new luxury apartment project across the street.

Photo 4: Kung Wo Soya Bean Factory on the right; a new luxury apartment project across the street.

Photo 5: A new building with street shops occupied by chain stores.

While “Faces of Hong Kong” highlights the stories of Hong Kong people from all walks of life, they are simply used to illuminate the values of “Asia’s World City,” which desperately brands Hong Kong as a generic global city. Generic cities that embrace neoliberal capitalism are very similar in nature. It is difficult if not impossible to have a strong sense of belonging if the “homes” in these cities are all equals. The problem is that both China and the West would like Hong Kong to further develop into a generic commercial city. The fluid, vibrant, and hybridized everyday life practices, a vital source of multiplicity in Hong Kong over the past fifty years, have been under threat in the past decade or so. Hong Kong citizens recently expressed that it is ever more important to safeguard core local values. Apart from values, sadly, local space cannot remain unfazed as well. Urban redevelopment has been sped up by not only rampant capitalism but also integration with the Mainland, the free tours from which, for instance, profoundly alters the ecology of the local market. The example of Kowloon City has shown that “to belong” has already become a luxury for many Hong Kong people.

[For the full article, see Yiu-Wai Chu, “‘Faces of Hong Kong’: My City? My Home?,” forthcoming in International Journal of Cultural Studies. Currently available as an OnlineFirst publication: http://ics.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/02/25/1367877915572186.abstract]

All photos taken by the author on 23 October 2013.

*

On the night of 28 September 2014, thousands poured onto the streets of Hong Kong expressing their protest over the use of teargas by the police to quell otherwise peaceful demonstrators who had only umbrellas and lab goggles to protect themselves from the noxious white clouds. As darkness descended onto the postcolonial city state, one of the collective actions of the spontaneous crowds was to sing in unison the Canto-pop band Beyond’s “Under the Vast Sky” (海闊天空).

Written in 1993 by its lead vocalist Wong Kar Kui who died in the same year from an accident in Japan, the song has become synonymous with the youth driven “Umbrella Movement” pushing for more meaningful universal suffrage in a city under the watchful eye of Beijing.

原諒我這一生不羈放縱愛自由
Forgive me if I am unable to give up my love for freedom
也會怕有一天會跌倒
Though I am afraid I may still fall
背棄了理想　誰人都可以
Everyone can give up their ideals
那會怕有一天只你共我
I am not afraid it is someday there is only you and me.

Excerpts from one of Beyond’s songs “Golden times” (光輝歲月) on the Yellow banners that reads “embracing freedom in the storm”, and “self-confidence can change the future”

As seen in the excerpts of the lyrics above, in the otherwise largely apolitical industry of Hong Kong’s Cantonese based popular music, or Canto-pop, the song can be considered as one of the household tunes. Emphasizing on newness and “now-ess” contemporary popular music has often treated past productions as residual and vestigial to older consumers that are locked in the nostalgic “evergreen” past. However, with not just from the lyrics coming out coherently in unison from the sea of people that occupied the streets, but banners of the lyrics of the song scrolled down from bridges and strapped across walls, the two decade old Vast Skies has taken on new relevance.

Even as new songs have been created, “Under the Vast Sky” has shown the significance of cultural memories. Acquired and familiarized probably from the repeated late night radio and television broadcasts as well as karaoke outings, and more recently, internet uploads, the persistent popularity of the songs of Beyond has probably been the result of the sustained everyday process of inter-generational cultural transmissions; a transmission that has in turn been drawn upon at a critical juncture as an organic social resource by a generation was born after Wong’s death. Nostalgia, idealism, heritage, authenticity, vernacular, plurality, dignity, Cantonese, and traditional-ized, Beyond’s “Under the Vast Sky” stands in contrast with the politics of displacement, erasure and amnesia in Mainland China. Against hegemonic memory-draining statist narratives and corporate projects, the Umbrella Movement is about remembering to struggle, and the struggle to remember.

Here, I have been reminded of a scene from Hong Kong’s film director Fruit Chan’s 1999 Little Cheung (細路祥), wherein the nine year old protagonist (Yiu Yuet-Ming) after whom the film is titled, is dragged out by his father to stand on the streets with his pants pulled down. Humiliated but defiant against an oncoming rain, Little Cheung shouts out the verses of the late Cantonese opera star Tang Weng Cheung (鄧永祥), known also as New Ma Sze-Tsang ( 新馬師曾). Even in frightened anger as he starts to urinate uncontrollably in the open, the boy who had grown up learning about the late Cantonese opera star from watching television repeats with his grandmother, recited the verses fluently to the last word. While having no direct relevance to the situation, the stage quotes and songs of “Brother Cheung,” as the late singer was affectionately known, becomes a latent cultural pool from which the humiliated boy draws strength.

As an organic vernacular text, the “Yellow” Cantonese popular culture has been a voice for not just Hong Kongers living precariously now within the embrace of the “Red” culture of Mainland China. For the Chinese diaspora in particularly Southeast Asia living in a time of blatant anti-Chinese sentiments, even in the ethnic Chinese majority of Singapore, Canto-pop was one such cultural tube that kept communities culturally oxygenated. For me in the context of Singapore, growing up in a Cantonese speaking community, I have been linked to such tubes from Hong Kong. Although my parents and relatives have accepted the government’s “Speak Mandarin Campaign” that was implemented in 1979 to “discourage the use of Chinese dialects” through barring its use in the mainstream media, they continued to listen to old Cantonese opera quietly. Like Little Cheung, I grew up on such televisual and musical traditions, and the theme songs from productions like Purple Hair Pin (紫釵記) and Princess Cheung Ping(帝女花) have become part of my cultural memories against the institutional erasure and fossilization of what the party-state in Singapore considers as parochial and unproductive for the project of state formation. From the messages from non-Hong Kong supporters of the Umbrella Movement around the world, several who consumed Canto-pop and Hong Kong television dramas through their formative years have cited these cultural resources as inspiration.

In a rally in Singapore supporting their Hong Kong counterparts, the songs of Beyond were sung by Singaporeans who have likely been inspired by their music as well. Here, I would like to feature a poem from a friend that goes by the name of KT Wong on his Facebook page on 4 October 2014 which states:

我不是港人
I am not a Hong Konger
但是對於香港的一切並不陌生。
But, I am no stranger to Hong Kong
自懂事以來就以港劇「撈飯吃」
Ever since I first knew things, I was already watching HK dramas [over dinner]
到後來慢慢的可以以粵語溝通。
And, overtime, I gradually can converse in Cantonese
香港文化，一直陪我成長。
I grew up with Hong Kong culture, its a part of me
港人，你們就像我的家人。
Hong Kongers, you are like my family
香港，我沒本事為你做任何事情，
Hong Kong, I don’t have the ability to do anything for you.
但是，我希望送你一把黃色的傘，
But, I hope to give you a yellow umbrella
至少，風雨來臨您還可以遮遮雨。
At least, it can shield you from the rain during storms
梅可 愛繪本
I feel the same way. Thanks Kt Wong

What has been extraordinary about the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong is the peaceful and organized nature of the student led protests and, more importantly, their struggles to remember as much as their remembering to struggle. Apart from Hong Kong, the struggle of the Umbrella Movement is also for the non-Hong Kong residents that have drawn memories and strength from Cantopop. Should there be a day when they get punished and stripped in public like Little Cheung, I hope that the memories of Wong Kar Kui would give them the strength to resist being stripped of their dignity. Meanwhile, in a way no official state and corporate project can match, by amplifying the songs of Beyond onto the streets of Admiralty, Causeway Bay and Mongkok, the Umbrella Movement has made significant emotional investments to make Hong Kong a distinctively memorable city that continues to give others memories.