Mimi first appears as a dance hall girl, a prostitute indeed, at a dance hall where she meets and flirts with Tak Sing. Mimi puts on heavy makeup, with “a white
powdered face, and large dark eyes” when working in the dance hall (106-07).
Compared to Tak Sing who is young and inexperienced with women when he meets Mimi, Mimi is experienced in communicating and flirting with men. Besides, she uses her body as an instrument to overpower and even paralyze Tak Sing by touching and hugging him: “I [Tak Sing] felt her breath, and smelled her perfume, too strong, too intoxicating. . . . I felt like one forced to smoke opium and afterward unable to refuse it. She was so close her body touched me in places that sent electric shocks through me as we moved on the dance floor ever so slowly” (108). Tak Sing is addicted to and paralyzed by Mimi’s flirtatious manner at that particular moment as if smoking the addictive and tempting opium. She at last kisses him on the lips, throwing him “into a
state of unspeakable pleasure and utter abandonment” (109). What Tak Sing abandons is his morality as he, a young decent man, comes across with a prostitute who can bring to him sexual pleasure. Being able to affect Tak Sing’s emotions, from
“euphoria” into “shame and distress” (109), Mimi has sexually overpowered him.
Unfortunately, the dance hall is a gendered space where Mimi falls prey to sexualization and objectification. For Mimi, Hong Kong is “a great place to live, to enjoy life, to make lots money” (107). She, as a Chinese immigrant like Tak Sing, frenziedly aspires to accumulate wealth in this free land. Due to her low education level, she realizes that “it isn’t easy for a woman who cannot read and write to make a good living in Hong Kong” unless through human relations (117). Using her body as a means to establish connections, Mimi devotes herself to her job as a dance girl and prostitute: “Tak Sing, what I did with my clients was all part of my job. . . . But it certainly helped to know people with connections” (124). The dance hall where Mimi works at is designed as a conceived space that disseminates the patriarchal ideology of objectifying and sexualizing female body used in exchange for money. In Space, the
City and Social Theory, Fran Tonkiss indicates the relationship between the body and
the gendering of space: “The ways in which bodies take on and reproduce these social codes [produced by ideology] can make the gendering of certain spaces seem—if not exactly natural—then at least normal and certainly tenacious” (97). In the dance hall, also a “nes[t] for prostitution” (Sze 108), Mimi puts on heavy makeup, wears working costume, and flirts with male customers who consume her body. According to Arina Lungu, “commodification reaches even the innermost level of personal relationships,”including sexual pleasure (par. 9). The dance hall is a gendered space that commodifies her service, objectifies and sexualizes her female body.
In order to make money to fulfill her dream of being rich, Mimi quits her job and becomes a mistress of a tycoon, rendering her a madwoman. Years after parting
with Tak Sing, Mimi meets him in a café, looking “respectable, almost elegant” (144).
In their conversation, Mimi metaphorically uses a pebble in the sea to speak for herself: “The pebble just goes with the rise and fall of the surge, but it remains the same, indestructible, for it was once part of a big rock. Eventually, it will wash ashore, after many waves, where, embedded in the sand, it will remain. I am such a pebble and I will survive” (145). The waves symbolize the hardship she is going through, including being a prostitute in the dance hall in the past and at present “wrapped up”
by a tycoon (144); she is determined to chase her dream by means of her body and sexuality. After quitting her job as a dance hall girl, she surrenders herself to a married tycoon and claims: “. . . I am with someone now—he treats me well. . . . I am not in want anymore” (145). By saying that he treats her well, she means he can provide her with materialistic enjoyment but not spiritual fulfillment. Therefore, she looks
respectable and elegant chiefly because of the financial support from the tycoon. As Tak Sing describes, she is confined to the house bought by the tycoon as if a bird
“kept in a gilded cage, and then cast out and left in a ditch when her keeper’s interest waned” (144). Tak Sing’s description corresponds to Gilbert’s and Gubar’s analysis that “women in patriarchal societies have historically been reduced to mere properties, to characters and images imprisoned in male texts because generated solely . . . by male expectations and designs” (12); in the house, Mimi is shaped into a mere sexual object in pursuit of money, and this frenzy makes herself a madwoman.
In her later years, Mimi is repetitively dumped by several tycoons and ends up living alone in an unwholesome tiny cubicle. The next time Tak Sing meets up with Mimi after the reunion in the café is when she is diagnosed with tuberculosis, living in a building in a poor environment—street with “decaying garbage” and “rotten orange or blots of yellow spittle” (173). Living in the tiny cubicle that barely accommodates a single bed and allows some light in, Mimi realizes that using her
body in exchange for money is against her will and re-evaluates herself as “nothing but a whore” (175). Mimi is a caged bird which can be “cast out and left in a ditch”
by any tycoon who gets bored of her. And she admits, she has been “with a few [tycoons], none lasting more than a couple of years” (176); she is just a plaything of men. Worse still, she is addicted to opium which deteriorates her health. The pebble metaphor she previously used is ironical in the sense that she is severely assaulted by the big waves (men’s objectification and sexualization) and, in fact, not invincible.
Being a madwoman in the public who has frantically pursued money, she ends up with nothing left and dies of pneumonia.
Striving in British-colonized Hong Kong, the three female characters in Hui
Gui represent different types of madwomen and unfortunately end up with a tragic life.
Chris Patten, the last governor before Hong Kong’s reversion to China,
metaphorically compares the new airport to be constructed after 1997 to a dowry, which implies that “Hong Kong is compared to a daughter to be married, with Britain her father, and China her husband” (Huang 150). Like the Thornfield built by
Rochester in Jane Eyre, Hong Kong is a city that has been colonized and shaped by Britain, the metaphorical patriarch. The three female characters, Lily, Ah Lan and Mimi, encounter different scenarios in Hong Kong but all end up becoming a madwoman.