The Crystal Palace in London, featuring the cast-iron and sheet-glass architectural structure with the application of modern technology, is not only “an
III. Tak Sing’s Struggle with National Identity
Born and raised in a well-to-do landed gentry in pre-communist China, Tak Sing, the male protagonist in Hui Gui, acquires his Chinese national identity through his life in the rural village in Guangdong province, China. Tenant farmers living in this village practice agriculture in the paddy fields and are obligated to offer their cash crops to their landlords as a form of tribute: “In times of plenty, my father received as many as five thousand dan of rice a year from his tenants, plus other cash crops. But in lean years, he expected them to pay only whatever they could, no more and no less” (Sze 18). The village is conceived as a space in service for agricultural purpose and is “uncontaminated” by capitalism because it remains clean and void of industries or factories. The village as a conceived space
disseminates the ideology of Chinese feudalism; that is to say, the economy is still structured by the reciprocal relationships of landlords and tenant farmers, and the possession of land can bring in both the service of the laborers and the
accumulation of capital. The lived space of the villagers is dominated by such a feudal ideology. Growing up in a rural village in China, Tak Sing constructs his Chinese identity via the feudal system of governance.
Besides the physical environment, the Chinese culture and tradition manifested in his father’s land further buttress the Chinese identity of Tak Sing.
The environment has instilled a strong sense of bonding and belongingness in Tak Sing as he receives the influence of religious belief, superstition, and the Chinese classics from his family. Tak Sing, born as the son of a landlord, confesses that he has been confined to his father’s land without transgression till the age of eight:
“My days until the age of eight were divided between my lessons and roaming the grounds of the big house and beyond, in the fields my father owned” (18). As his area of activity is restricted in a conceived patriarchal space that is repressive, Tak Sing acquires knowledge, such as religious belief and superstition, from his family.
For instance, his mother always carries Buddhist beads in hand and visits the temple “on the first and the fifteenth day of every moon” to pray for blessings to the whole family (10); his mother’s feet are once-bound called “the three-inch golden lilies” since, as his grandmother has said, respectable family would only marry women with small feet (9). Apart from these religious and folklore beliefs, Tak Sing is forced to receive formal education from a hired tutor, Fu Tze, who teaches him The Book of Three Characters (三字經), The Four Books, and The
Five Classics (四書五經) (18). Living in such a patriarchal space, Tak Sing shows
homage and familial piety especially to his father: whenever his father urges him to do something, even to leave home for Hong Kong, he conforms. Despite his life being dominated, Tak Sing develops an inseparable connection with his family and a sense of morality from learning the Chinese classics. Even after Tak Singmigrates to Hong Kong, he still cares about his father, writes him letters and never abandons his sense of morality cultivated at his hometown. The education received, whether formally or not, strengthens Tak Sing’s sense of belonging to his family and China.
The rural atmosphere in the neighborhood evokes Tak Sing’s pleasure in senses and connects him closely with China. Right after the Second Sino-Japanese War breaks out in 1937, Tak Sing’s family flees to Tai Shek, a fictitious place, to sojourn; what he remembers from the flight are paddy fields, fish ponds, and farmhouses (28). When they stop to rest at night, the rural surroundings arouse the sensuous pleasure of Tak Sing and Ah Chu, his playmate and servant, which
manifests their attachment to the land: “Ah Chu and I thought it was wonderful, sleeping under a thousand stars, a night fragrance brushing through our nostrils, the cool air filling the pores of our skin, and the sound of crickets forming rhythmic music on our ears” (31). Both Tak Sing and Ah Chu are indulged in nature through the use of their senses—seeing, touching, smelling, and hearing. The interior of their bodies harmoniously interact with the exterior surroundings. Another occasion of interacting with the natural space takes place on the day of Tak Sing’s departure from Ka Hing to Hong Kong:
I was unusually aware of the limpid country air on my skin, a cool, luring caress touching my senses. I took deep breaths. Funny, the air
never smelled so sweet as on the morning of my departure, that country
smell of newly-turned sod moistened with dew drops in the night, before it hardened and cracked under the scorching sun. (90; emphasis added)The sweetness of the air in the countryside has alerted Tak Sing in three aspects, as he was hardly aware of the natural scene of his dwelling village. Firstly, it confirms a harmonious relationship between the inside of his body and the outside nature.
Secondly, it implies Tak Sing’s waving farewell to his hometown (Ka Hing), a place that has fostered him for more than two decades. Thirdly, it foreshadows that Tak Sing would enter a totally different world, the highly capitalized Hong Kong.
Even though Tak Sing is fond of the rurality in China, he later on considers Hong Kong his second home due to his childhood experiences which provide a concrete explanation why he embraces the capitalist ideology in a subtle way.
Coming from a society that still carries the feature of feudalism, Tak Sing has been conscious of the class demarcation and of the possession of wealth in his father’s land. In fact, Tak Sing’s family has owned “five thousand mou [acres] of land . . .
for over a century” (17-18). His father has toiled on this land and built a big house adorned with luxuries such as rosewood furniture, whitewash walls, and the Qing Dynasty crystal chandelier (58). Lefebvre considers that if any construction of a natural space happens, the space is “modified in order to serve the needs and possibilities of a group,” which is called the appropriated space (Production 165).
The land is appropriated by his father to accumulate capital, including the cash crops and the human laborers. His father leases his land to tenant farmers, and purchases mui tsai (female servants) from poor families to help with the housework.
His father rationalizes his buying mui tsai by saying that it is a feasible way to help the poor. What Tak Sing thinks about this is: “Indeed, owning mui tsai seemed to be the correct thing to do” (Sze 8). Although later on he realizes that this sort of transaction seems to be morally flawed (8), he as a child, living in this conceived patriarchal space, is taught by his father that owning mui tsai as a form of capital is acceptable and profitable. At this point, Tak Sing is aware of the class
demarcation—his father the upper class, the tenant farmers and the mui tsai the lower class; the former is affluent while the latter owns nothing in hand. When he grows older, he becomes uncertain about the legitimacy of his father’s purchase of human laborers but he is certainly aware of class differentiation and the importance of capital accumulation.
Tak Sing is eager to rid off class demarcation among people, which can be understood by his experience in the sedan chair. Wherever Tak Sing’s family goes, they travel by sedan chair rather than on foot. The sedan chair is a conceived space designed to diffuse the ideology of power and class differentiation, showing how Tak Sing’s family entertains their class superiority and discriminates the powerless lower class. While riding in the sedan chair with his mother to visit the temple, Tak Sing feels confined by this dominant space. Tak Sing endeavors to break out of the
confinement by attempting to leave the sedan chair but in vain: “How I wished I could jump out and join Ah Chu on the ground, but I knew my place was inside the sedan chair (Sze 15-16). Lefebvre points out that “the ultimate foundation of social space is prohibition” (Production 35). In this case, the sedan chair becomes a space that denies the admission of Ah Chu, a little boy from the lower working class and Tak Sing’s best friend, mainly because Tak Sing’s mother, whose presence
symbolizes authority, does not let Tak Sing share the sedan chair with Ah Chu. But once his mother, an adult from the upper class, is not nearby, Tak Sing succeeds in eliminating the class differentiation between himself and Ah Chu by inviting Ah Chu to ride with him: “We soon felt a lot better [after urinating in the bushes] and laughed the rest of the way home, squeezed into seat of my sedan chair” (Sze 17).
The absence of his mother endows Tak Sing with the power of transgression to subvert the ideology of the conceived sedan chair. In other words, the sedan chair is transformed by Tak Sing into a site of overcoming class discrimination; here he is able to temporarily free himself from the control of the ideology of class
demarcation.
When Tak Sing’s family moves from their glamorous house to a humble wooden shelter during the war, there is still class differentiation in the family, which finally makes Tak Sing accepts unfairness in reality. The dominating power extends beyond the land possessed by Tak Sing’s father: when they flee to Tai Shek for shelter, the wooden house where they are sojourning inherits the dominating ideology from the previous big compound where masters and servants do not share the same meal and carry out daily routine in segregated domains (37). Here, Tak Sing mostly conforms to the existing culture rather than fighting against it: “Since there was only one room on the ground floor of our house near Tai Shek, Ming Suk, Ming Sum [Ah Chu’s mother] and Ah Chu ate after us at the same table. I had
come to accept such unfairness as a way of life” (37; emphasis added). His active
effort of subversion ends in failure and becomes a passive acceptance of unfairness in life, anticipating the forthcoming covert embrace of capitalism in Hong Kong where class stratification is evident.Being aware of the class demarcation and the capital inherited from his ancestors, Tak Sing registers his distaste for and dread of the communism due to its persecution of landlords and its deprivation of freedom before and after the
inauguration of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. Once the Second
Sino-Japanese War comes to a truce in 1945, Tak Sing’s family returns to the ruined house in Ka Hing. When Tak Sing’s father uses “ill winds” to describe communism, what he criticizes is not the devastation of his house but the destruction caused by the Communist troops who “are abolishing land tenancy, confiscating the landlords’
land and redistributing it to the peasants” (58). Influenced by his father, Tak Sing as a teenager already finds communism disturbing when he overhears that landlords have been badly thrashed or killed (58). In 1949, when Tak Sing is studying at Zhongshan University in Guangzhou, big red banners are all over the main entrances and buildings, “inscribed with the characters Long Live the People’s
Republic of China!” (68). The university students are in a state of euphoria, hoping
that the new government “would rectify social evils and improve the condition of the peasants and workers” (69). Therefore, the whole university becomes aconceived space penetrated with the communist ideology that dominates the perceived and the lived space. Even though a university is perceived to be a place
for education, it has now been transformed into a site of political promulgation where students participate in political activities to glorify communism (68).Likewise, Nan Hoy Square, a fictitious square in Guangzhou, becomes a place for
“the ritual of a public execution” rather than a place for public assembly (69). Tak
Sing is stunned by the brutality of the executors and the senselessness of the communist supporters: “The execution is as disturbing now as it was when I witnessed it with a throng of onlookers at best curious and at worst bloodthirsty”
(70). Instead of going back to Guangzhou, Tak Sing, persuaded by his father, is eager to leave communist China for Hong Kong, a dreamland of freedom and opportunities.
Approaching the border of China and getting ready to cross over, Tak Sing registers curiosity and later gratefulness towards the British-ruled Hong Kong. At Lo Wu, a border station between China and Hong Kong, Tak Sing confesses that this is the first time he comes across with the Union Jack, seeing “the British flag flying above the guard station marking the entrance to Hong Kong” (93). The border, a space of transition, marks a watershed in Tak Sing’s life: geographically, it is a farewell to communist rural China and a new beginning in the capitalist and modernized Hong Kong; and culturally he is leaving the Chinese past behind and looking forward to the future in Hong Kong, as he thus reminisces about the moment of crossing years later, “I would look back at the moment of my first crossing into Hong Kong and feel how lucky I was that the border was open when I stepped over” (93). This statement indicates how lucky he is to be able to spend the rest of his life in Hong Kong. The border plays a double role. For Chinese refugees who come after him, the border signifies a space of prohibition because it interdicts the uncontrollable influx of them; but for Tak Sing, the border is, as Lefebvre views,
“the space of ‘yes,’ of the affirmation of life” (Production 201).
As soon as Tak Sing steps on the soil of Hong Kong, a sense of enchantment mixed with awe seizes him as he has never been in an urban city. In The Right to
the City, Lefebvre remarks that an urban city undergoes a double process of
industrialization and urbanization, and is constituted by the urban fabric whichbuttresses urbanites’ “way of life” in urban society (70, 72). He further defines the urban fabric in his subsequent book The Urban Revolution as both “the built world of cities” and “all manifestations of the dominance of the city over the country” (4).
In short, the urban area swallows up the rural land use. Given that Tak Sing is overwhelmed with the urban fabric of modern technology—cars, tall buildings, gas street lamps—after reaching the city center, Kowloon, he feels thrilled and awed beyond words (Sze 94). Furthermore, displays in store windows fascinate him, such as “a big dried sail-shaped fin of a shark,” “a huge coiled snake preserved in a glass jar,” ivory-made miniature elephants, and “a yard-long tusk.” (95). The experience of Tak Sing is similar to that of the tourists in the Crystal Palace to the extent that the displays, which are inaccessible to the workers, are made for the
middle-to-upper class. Tak Sing, degraded from a rich landlord’s son in China to a jobless poor man in Hong Kong, can merely afford window-shopping. From his viewpoint, those exotic merchandises, which he has never come across in China, carries “signs of happiness, of satisfaction, of power, of wealth, of science, of technology, etc.” (Lefebvre, Right 95). The capitalistic luxury in Hong Kong strikes Tak Sing and arouses his awareness of the importance of capital.
Not only the space but also the gestures of Hong Kong people strike him.
The city, Lefebvre writes, “writes and assigns, that is, it signifies, orders, stipulates . . . This [city] text has passed through ideologies, as it also ‘reflects’
them” (Right 102). As Lefebvre claims, the reflection of ideologies occurs not only in the city but also in human gestures: “Gestural systems embody ideology and bind it to practice” (Production 215). The capitalistic ideology in Hong Kong modifies and regulates human gestures. In order to sell one of the three gold bars given by his father to support himself, Tak Sing steps into a jewelry store,
“displaying a glittering array of gold rings, bracelets and chains in its showcases”
(Sze 95). It is a conceived space diffusing the capitalist ideology and a perceived space that welcomes the rich to make transaction. At first, the shopkeeper dressed
“in a brown Chinese jacket of silky brocade and matching pants” disdainfully looks at Tak Sing, who is in his samfu outfit (two-piece Chinese traditional outfit
consisting of jacket and pants), “with the haughtiness of a minister of an ancient emperor’s court” (96). But at the moment when Tak Sing presents the gold bar, his attitude drastically changes: “As soon as he saw the yellow bar, his countenance changed from disdain to disbelief. He took the bar with both hands almost
reverently. He beckoned to me to sit down at one of the inner counters away from
the entrance to the store and the inquisitive eyes of passersby” (96; emphasis added). The jewelry store is therefore transformed from a space of prohibition to Tak Sing to a space of affirmation for him only when Tak Sing is identified as a capital possessor, and thereby is uplifted in social status. Hence, money and commodities, Lefebvre confirms, “bring with them not only a ‘culture’ but also a space”—a culture of consumerism and an abstract space (Production 265). In light of Lefebvre’s explanation, abstract space functions as a set of things/signs that erases distinctions and “endeavors to mould the spaces it dominates (i.e. peripheral spaces),” dominating spaces in Hong Kong (Production 49).The abstract space produced by capitalism modifies Tak Sing’s thoughts and deeds. In Hong Kong, the abstract space erases spatial distinctions by erecting commercial and financial buildings (things) on which signs of power, wealth and ideologies are imposed. It thus corresponds to the conceived space inasmuch as it dominates or even crushes the lived and the perceived space. The images
demonstrated by the abstract space have the power of brainwashing as we human beings “buy on the basis of images” (Lefebvre Production 76). Tak Sing is
besieged by the abstract space that regulates his perception and gesture in the lived
space. When Tak Sing first arrives in Hong Kong, he works as a hawker that someone has introduced him to do as a means to earn a living. As Tak Sing stands at the waterfront waiting for the market to open, the smell of urbanity seizes him: “I could smell whiffs of salt sea air mixed with rotting garbage in the water lapping against the cemented shoreline. In these moments, I would have an unspeakable
sense of satisfaction . . .” (Sze 114; emphasis added). This sense of satisfaction is
unspeakable on the grounds that his lived space is unconsciously dominated by the abstract space of signs and images. Even though the smell of urbanity combines sea water (comfort) with rotting garbage (disgust), it arouses positive sentiments on Tak Sing as it means a hope for him to upgrade himself (gaining power) and make a better living (gaining wealth). Later on, he aspires to join the police force to serve the British-ruled Hong Kong government, “something meaningful for [himself] and for the city” (121); namely, something that is respectable and promising, with better money (124). While working for the government, he is eager to learn English, the colonizer’s language, so as to get promoted and to uplift his social status. With improvement in his economical situation, he also moves out of the squatter area where he initially stays in a rented room in North Point, a decent place with a flush toilet, tap water and shared cooking facilities that “only the upper echelon, the ‘menspace. When Tak Sing first arrives in Hong Kong, he works as a hawker that someone has introduced him to do as a means to earn a living. As Tak Sing stands at the waterfront waiting for the market to open, the smell of urbanity seizes him: “I could smell whiffs of salt sea air mixed with rotting garbage in the water lapping against the cemented shoreline. In these moments, I would have an unspeakable