空間、國族身份認同、性別：閱讀Elsie Sze《回歸》

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(1)國立臺灣師範大學英語學系碩. 士. 論. 文. Master’s Thesis Department of English National Taiwan Normal University. 空間、國族身份認同、性別：閱讀 Elsie Sze《回歸》. Space, National Identity, and Gender: Reading Elsie Sze’s Hui Gui: A Chinese Story. 指導教授：張. 瓊. 惠. Advisor: Dr. Joan Chiung-huei Chang 研究生：白. 曦. 源. 中華民國一零五年七月 July 2016.

(2) 摘要本論文旨在運用後現代策略去解碼香港社會、政治和歷史的意義，從而分析 Elsie Sze 的小說《回歸》裡空間的含義與其對國族身份認同和性別關係之影響。第一章先定義「場所」(place)和「空間」(space)，進一步探討這兩者和身份型塑的連結；其後，本章分析如何把香港閱讀為巴比塔城市(a city of Tower of Babel)，再以作者和小說的簡介作結尾。第二章爬梳香港從英國殖民開始到回歸中國 (1842-1997)的歷史，闡述英國殖民對香港的建構國族身份認同的深遠影響。第三章以整理昂利．列斐伏爾(Henri Lefebvre)的理論作開首，以其理論解讀《回歸》中空間如何對國族身份認同產生作用。第四章把重心移到《回歸》中空間與性別之關係。最終章著重於後九七時代香港人如何從國族身份認同的角度看待自己。. 關鍵詞：Elsie Sze、《回歸》、香港、空間、國族身份認同、性別關係. ii.

(3) Abstract Applying a postmodern approach to decode meanings and significations in the societal, political, and historical contexts of Hong Kong, this thesis peruses Elsie Sze’s novel, Hui Gui: A Chinese Story published in 2005, by concentrating on the multiple connotations and effects of space in Hong Kong especially on national identity and gender relations. Chapter One defines “place” and “space,” and their relationships with identity formation, then explains how to read Hong Kong as a city of Tower of Babel in terms of spatiality, and ends with an overview of Elsie Sze and Hui Gui. Chapter Two explicates the history of Hong Kong from 1842 to 1997, i.e., from the year of the advent of British colonization to the year of the transfer of sovereignty from Britain to the People's Republic of China, and the profound impact of colonization on Hong Kong people’s construction of national identity. Chapter Three reviews the major theoretical texts of this thesis, including Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space and The Right to the City, and incorporates with the textual analysis of Hui Gui in terms of the relationship between space and national identity. Chapter Four continues the discussion by elucidating the relationship between space and gender in this novel. The concluding chapter focuses on the post-1997 era and observes how Hong Kong people regard themselves in the 21st century.. Keywords: Elsie Sze, Hui Gui: A Chinese Story, Hong Kong, space, national identity, gender relations. iii.

(4) Acknowledgement First and foremost, my deepest appreciation goes to my advisor, Professor Joan Chiung-huei Chang. Without her guidance and meticulous proofreading, this thesis would not see the light of day. Even though we had some debates over my thesis, I learned how to choose my wordings carefully and organize my arguments logically and systematically. I have to thank my committee members, Professor Yauling Hsieh and Professor Hsiu-chuan Lee, at the oral defense for reading my thesis thoroughly beforehand and giving me so many insightful suggestions. Moreover, I am thankful to Professor Chia-chin Tsai and Professor Chiu-hua Su from Soochow University for giving me support and guidance, Professor Christine Kim from Simon Fraser University and Professor Chris Lee from UBC for showing interest in my research. Secondly, I am indebted to all my good friends. Writing this thesis was not an easy task that sometimes depressed me and drained my energy and passion. Without my beloved friends, I could have never been able to carry on. Of all of my good friends, I owe my greatest gratitude to Jenny Huang who has been my companion, “comrade-in-arms,” listener, and advisor throughout this writing journey. Other friends whom I have to thank for their love and encouragement are Alice Shih, Wilson Lau, Charmin Cheng, Ingrid Liao, Lily Cheng, Angel Hsieh, Annie Shao, Gary Chen, Kristy Fan, Vivian Lee, Marshall Lin, and also Susan Su. Other two caring friends whom I owe my gratitude are Professor Ferdinand M. Lopez from University of Santo Tomas and Professor Oscar V. Campomanes from Ateneo de Manila University. Thank you for spending your precious time reading my thesis and offering me so much help. There are too many friends on this acknowledgement list, and I hereby show my heartfelt gratefulness to all of you. Last but not least, I would like to dedicate this paragraph to my lovely family.. iv.

(5) My whole family has always been very supportive in my studies and never rejected my decisions. I need to thank my father and brother for encouraging me to study in Taiwan and supporting my decision to stay here. For my mother, she had always treated me the best in the whole family even in the time when she was suffering from a severe illness. She is no longer able to stand by my side, but she always lives in my heart and memory.. v.

(6) Table of Contents. Chapter One. Tower of Babel. I.. Introduction. 1. II.. Place, Space and Identity. 4. III. Hong Kong: A Tower of Babel. 7. IV. Elsie Sze and Hui Gui: A Chinese Story. Chapter Two. 10. Hong Kong as an Ivory Tower. I.. Britain: The Colonizer of the Ivory Tower in Hong Kong. 15. II.. British Carrot-and-Stick Policies. 20. III. The Hong Kongness: The Emergence of Double Identity. 27. IV. Case Study: Kowloon Walled City and Ladies Market. 30. Chapter Three. The Crystal Palace. I.. The Crystal Palace: A Palace of Modernity and Capitalism. 37. II.. Lefebvrian Analysis of Everydayness and Space. 40. III. Tak Sing’s Struggle with National Identity. 44. IV. Serena’s Struggle with National Identity. 54. Chapter Four. The Madwoman in the Attic. I.. The Madwoman in the Attic/Public/Body. 63. II.. Lily: A 20th-Century Wife and Mother. 68. III. Ah Lan: The Forgotten Other. 74. IV. Mimi: A Victimized Object. 77. vi.

(7) Chapter Five. The Undead Spirit. 81. Works Cited. 88. vii.

(8) Chapter One: Tower of Babel. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth.” . . . The LORD said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.” . . . So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel—because there the LORD confused the language of the whole world. —Genesis 11: 4-9. Cities, unlike villages and small towns, are plastic by nature. We mould them in our images: they, in their turn, shape us by the resistance they offer when we try to impose a personal form on them. —Jonathan Raban, Soft City. I. Introduction Tower of Babel, a widely known story in the Book of Genesis, is the archetype. 1.

(9) of the creation of different languages.1 The construction of this tower is classically regarded as humans’ rebellion against and their desire to position themselves an equal to God. In response to such a manner, God diversifies one uniform language into different tongues to punish humans’ preposterous arrogance in a way of traditional hermeneutics. Humans, bestowed with one language and unwilling to be “scattered over the face of the whole earth” (Gen. 11: 4), have an intense desire for homogeneity. In “The Tower of Babel and the Origin of the World’s Cultures,” Theodore Hiebert concludes that traditional critics interpret this desire as “the value of identity and belonging” and reckon heterogeneity “an obstacle, a source of confusion and chaos, a catastrophe and a curse upon the human race, and, ultimately, a judgment of God” (58). Tower of Babel in fact denotes less the “babeling” of languages than the creation of different significations. Hiebert subverts traditionalism and propounds a postmodernist reading by rebutting that “[t]he story’s terminology, explicit claims, and repetitive structure all focus on the tension between singularity and multiplicity with the purpose of explaining the origin and variety of the world’s cultures” (31). In Genesis 11: 6, God says that nothing will be impossible if people merely speak one language (and are granted with one culture); what God intends is to inflict challenges on humans and to render tasks arduous by means of confusing/diversifying one tongue into multi-languages. In this sense, most interpreters inscribe negative connotations on God’s action and ignore the positive implications behind it. Instead of being read as reproach of mankind, the story of Babel should, as Hiebert argues, be re-interpreted as “the origin and variety of the world’s cultures”—an aura of diversification and heterogeneity—which, he construes, corresponds to God’s 1. The spelling of “Babel” resembles the verb form “to confuse” in Hebrew (bll), signifying that the confusion of tongues originates from the Tower of Babel. See “Babel, Tower of” in Works Cited. 2.

(10) command: “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the earth” (Gen. 9: 1). Ever since the late 20th century, the advent of postmodernism, which overthrew universality and the Absolute Truth, has ushered in an era of indeterminacy, heterogeneity, instability, and hybridity and valued difference and diversification. Diversification refers not only to the world’s languages and cultures but also to a postmodern interpretation of their meanings and significations. The capitalized Truth no longer exists; instead, by putting forth unprecedentedly new propositions or amending existing theories, it is superseded by multiple truths which are either replaceable or superimposable. This thesis does not concern the babeling of languages; instead, with a postmodern approach to decode meanings and significations in the societal, political, and historical contexts of Hong Kong, this thesis peruses Elsie Sze’s novel, Hui Gui: A Chinese Story published in 2005, by concentrating on the multiple connotations and effects of space in Hong Kong especially on national identity and gender relations. Chapter One defines “place” and “space,” and their relationships with identity formation, then explains how to read Hong Kong as a city of Tower of Babel in terms of spatiality, and ends with an overview of Elsie Sze and Hui Gui. Chapter Two explicates the history of Hong Kong from 1842 to 1997, i.e., from the year of the advent of British colonization to the year of the transfer of sovereignty from Britain to the People's Republic of China, and the profound impact of colonization on Hong Kong people’s construction of national identity.. 2. Chapter Three reviews the major. theoretical texts of this thesis, including Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space and The Right to the City, and incorporates with the textual analysis of Hui Gui in. 2. Not until the 1960s has the Hong Kongness emerged, people from China had referred themselves as Chinese; thus, I have used different terms to indicate the people living in Hong Kong: the natives referring to the Tankas, the Chinese immigrants, Hong Kongers appearing after 1960s, and generally Hong Kong people. 3.

(11) terms of the relationship between space and national identity. Chapter Four continues the discussion by elucidating the relationship between space and gender in this novel. The concluding chapter focuses on the post-1997 era and observes how Hong Kong people regard themselves in the 21st century.. II. Place, Space and Identity At the outset, two similar but distinctive terms should be defined beforehand to steer clear of confusion. As defined by Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life, a place is governed by “the law of the proper” according to which co-existing elements are situated in distinct location; thus, it is “an instantaneous configuration of positions” and “implies an indication of stability” (118). In contrast to fixity, a space is “composed of intersections of mobile elements” and “in a sense actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it” (118). The correlation of place and space is: a place filled with stable meanings and immobile order will be transformed into a space of multiple significations and mobility by the act of human practices and social relations. De Certeau’s forceful note, “In short, space is a practiced place” (118), summarizes their interrelationship. Place, I argue, is thus a stone-like location, while space involves humans’ sentiments and memories once they are engaged in the transformation process. Investigating place as a point of departure, this thesis probes into the transformed space “as a site of social encounter and social division, as a field of politics and power, as a symbolic and material landscape, as an embodied space, [and] as a realm of everyday experience” (Tonkiss 1). In “Location, Place, Region, and Space,” Helen Couclelis offers an all-embracing definition of space and categorizes space into five major groups. She combines de Certeau’s definition of place and space into one and points out that the. 4.

(12) latter “is probably the most fundamental” (215), defining space as “both expanse and confine, both what is between things and what contains them, both empty of matter and defined by the presence of matter; space is even a period or interval of time!” (215). The vastness of space would jeopardize criticism if one attempts to pin down and categorize space systematically in order to facilitate examination and understanding. But categorization is a necessary evil because a focal point is required for every critic to accomplish the analysis. Couclelis categorizes space into mathematical, physical, socioeconomic, behavioral and experiential, and exemplifies each kind with examples from daily life. Mathematical space refers to geometry that has, as Couclelis claims, long been considered “the formal science of space and spatial relations” (218). Mathematical space is mostly used to study spatial irregularity, such as the measurement of a spreading forest fire, a diffusing epidemic or urban areas. Physical space, defined as “place” in de Certeau’s account, is the one interacting with the physical world (Couclelis 220). Couclelis asserts that space could be conceptualized as “a container of objects,” such as “oranges are in a box and fish are in water,” and subsequently formalized as “a neutral background against which the positions of objects can be pinpointed and their motions described” (220). Physical space thus encompasses space/space and space/object dynamics, corresponding to the transformation of immobile place into mobilized space proposed by de Certeau. Socioeconomic space concerns “the interplay between [socioeconomic] relations and spatial structure” (224). For example, the factors to decide the location of a factory substantially would be the minimization of transportation and labor cost; or the distribution of residential areas is associated with citizens’ income levels. Next, what “people respond to environments largely as they perceive and understand them” is known as behavioral space (226). People, for instance, have a propensity to “avoid. 5.

(13) a perfectly efficient route to work [if] that is perceived to be dangerous or stressful” (225). Lastly, experiential space is an all-embracing space which human beings actually experience, physically or contemplatively, before any logical and scientific analysis (Couclelis 229). All the above-categorized spaces, except the last one, facilitate the analysis of space in Hong Kong in this thesis. As Hong Kong has developed into a highly urbanized metropolis under the British colonization, urban space is worthwhile to be investigated. Sophie Watson and Katherine Gibson, the editors of Postmodern Cities and Spaces, narrow down the study of space by focusing on urban areas and delineate how developed cities as postmodern spaces have problematized “discontinuity, disjuncture, and transformation” (1). In this collection, John Lechte conceptualizes a postmodern city as a space of indetermination in which meaning “goes in all directions” (106); Paul Patton discusses the shaping of one’s identity within a postmodern city as urbanism has an effect of confusing who is who, of giving opportunities for people to play many roles, and of losing themselves (5). Patton’s discussion bridges the transformation of space with the shaping of identity. Engaging oneself in the spatial transforming process, especially through walking and observation in a city, is to place one’s identity at stake: taking up many roles may either inaugurate a brand new self or get lost by the overwhelming burden that eventuates in the confusion of the self and the others. Space and identity mutually transform each other in the sense that space necessitates human activities to transmute from static place to dynamic space, while humans’ sentiments and memories are invested in such process that gradually shapes their identities.. 6.

(14) III. Hong Kong: A Tower of Babel All the expositions of space mentioned above help to analyze Hong Kong’s spatial pattern and its connotation to flesh out the skeleton of the geographical distribution and to discern the spatial mechanism. Hong Kong, as highly capitalized, is historicized into a hybrid city, in terms of languages used, people composed, and nationalities involved, a mountainous city where accommodates approximately 7.24 million dwellers.3 Hong Kong has always been one of the highest densely populated cities in the world; in other words, it is extremely hard for developers to find flatland for new construction unless through reclamation and removal of mountains. Penetrated with a strong aura of British colonization and capitalism, Hong Kong transforms herself from a fishing village to a world-leading financial center and cosmopolitan trade harbor, and has been elevated to be one of the Four Asian Tigers. With this evolution, every piece of flatland is preferably developed into a commercial/financial area for further capital accumulation, or into a residential community to accommodate the ever-increasing population.4 The speed of demolishing old and shabby buildings is unimaginably fast for building fancy and modern skyscrapers dedicated to commercial use.5 Sophie Watson and Katherine Gibson call postmodern space an urban space “of transformation and disjuncture” (1). Disjuncture happens in the spatial form in Hong Kong, such as mixed commercial-residential land use, most notably in Kowloon and Hong Kong Island, and in geographical distribution, such as the promiscuous construction of buildings 3. 4. 5. See Hong Kong. “Population.” 2014. GovHK. Web. 28 Nov. 2015. <www.gov.hk/tc/about/abouthk/factsheets/docs/population.pdf> The reclaimed land accommodates 70% of the commercial activity and 27% of the total population. For instance, a huge piece of land was reclaimed, and still in the process, in Lantau Island of constructing Disneyland by one of the largest transnational corporations in the world. The Victoria Harbor was narrowed as more spaces were needed for commercial development. West Kowloon and Shatin are two reclaimed residential areas. Two of the most distinctive commercial high-rises are Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC) Headquarters and the Bank of China Tower located in Central, Hong Kong. 7.

(15) everywhere in the city. Facing the prevalent trend of globalization, the highly capitalized Hong Kong is undergoing a nonstop process of commercialization and financialization that eventuates in shaping into a city with commercial and residential areas congested together. Tsung Yi Michelle Huang comments thus on the impact of globalization on Hong Kongers and on the yearning of the Hong Kong Dream:6 Living and walking in such a space, people in Hong Kong are spoon-fed the glorious global dream. . . . The urban space of Hong Kong embedded with such a narrative of global progress thus turns out to be a space of fantasy for its walkers to inscribe their own desires and dreams, a space glossed over by the grand rhetoric of globalization. (32) The hybrid Hong Kong is replete with diversified spatial significations that result in indeterminacy and instability, making her a Tower of Babel. Indeterminacy and instability are often perceived in a negative sense as they easily arouse undesirable outcomes such as chaos and disorder; but the scope of these two terms could be much larger than what we usually perceive, as they could embrace plurality, diversity, and opportunity. In his “(Not) Belonging in Postmodern Space,” John Lechte remarks on the characteristics of a postmodern city as “a city of indetermination. It is a phenomenon of flows, of clouds of people and clouds of letters, of a multiplicity of writings and differences” (106). Hong Kong, a city of Tower of Babel, is fraught with meanings that flow and penetrate in all directions. Even though meanings are indeterminate and unstable, they are significant in explaining different occasions and phenomena. Spatial analysis is considered captivating only when space 6. The Hong Kong Dream, which is in fact not officially declared, heightens the influx of immigrants or/and the reflux of expatriates on the grounds of the instability and unpredictability after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. People were desperate to migrate to Hong Kong in the 1950-60s because they conceived that Hong Kong was a city glossed with the color of economic prosperity and social stability, and China was not a safe haven to root in. See Chi-Kwan Mark. “‘The Problem of People’: British Colonials, Cold War Powers, and the Chinese Refugees in Hong Kong, 1949-62.” 8.

(16) is “viewed as a social production: something constituted, reproduced, and changed by social relations, and in turn constraining the unfolding of such relations” (Couclelis 225; italics original). In “History: Geography: Modernity,” Edward Soja affirms that our “life-stories” (history) should be placed in the geographical context: “they [life stories] have milieux, immediate locales, provocative emplacements which affect thought and action” (139). The interaction between space (geography) and individuals (history) offers a useful clue to spatial conundrums, but not the only one. Culture and geography are connected, for example, in the thesis entitled “Beyond Hybridization: The Spatial Histories of Mong Kok, Hong Kong.” Siu-hang Wesley Tang concentrates on the spatial histories and spatial analysis of Mong Kok district supplemented with other instances. Tang aims to “understand Hong Kong culture with a strong emphasis on its complicated urban spaces which constitute and interweave the everyday lives of most Hong Kong people” (16). What he means by “beyond hybridization” is that Mong Kok is not simply a hybridized district with modern commercial high-rises interweaving with short worn-out residential buildings; it is “culturally underestimated and ideological complex” (17), the same as Hong Kong culture. By analyzing the historical relationship between the present culture and space, and several specific spaces in Mong Kok, Tang offers an alternative elucidation of the relations between space and culture. Another instance of such connection is provided by Wai Yin Chen. In “Urban Space and Cultural Identity of the Postcolonial Hong Kong in the Age of Globalization” 〈後殖民香港在全球化下的城市空間與文化身份〉 ( ), Chen illustrates the effects of capitalism and globalization on the governance of the city and the land-use planning before and after 1997. According to her observation, the city planning carried out by Britain had not resonated with social hatred and the concern. 9.

(17) of mass media; yet, Hong Kong people have become increasingly aware of the dismal future and the disappointment to the governmental policy, urban planning in particular, in the postcolonial era; thus, they have aroused their Hong Kongness and dedicated themselves to resisting against the government in terms of space, which Chen calls “the cultural identity politics” (文化身份政治). The relationship between history and geography is shown to be closely knotted. Besides culture and cultural identity, the impact of space on national identity and gender relations is the focal point of the analysis of Elsie Sze’s Hui Gui: A Chinese Story.. IV. Elsie Sze and Hui Gui: A Chinese Story Being a passionate traveler, Elsie Sze has written novels that transport readers to different times and spaces. Born and growing up in Hong Kong, Sze left her birthplace to further pursue her graduate studies in the U.S. and Canada after her graduation from University of Hong Kong at the age of 22 and has now settled down in San Mateo, California. After being an English teacher and a librarian for nine years, Sze has embarked on her writing career and published three novels until now: Hui Gui: A Chinese Story in 2005, The Heart of the Buddha in 2009, and lastly Ghost Cave: A Novel of Sarawak in 2014. Because Sze is a local Hong Konger and an avid traveler, the settings of these three novels are based on places that Sze’s grows up or travels.7 Sze selects Hong Kong and China to be the settings of Hui Gui mainly out of the reason that the former is her birthplace and root with which she has a strong attachment, while the latter is a place where her father and mother “had some wartime harrowing experiences similar to those of the characters” in Hui Gui when they were university students in China during Japanese occupation (“Elsie Sze’s Novel Hui Gui: 7. The Heart of Buddha and Ghost Cave bring readers to two other Asian places Bhutan and Sarawak, the largest Malaysian province on the island of Borneo. 10.

(18) A Chinese Story,” par. 1). Before and throughout her writing of Hui Gui, Sze has traveled to China a couple of times to explore and research “the historic period for the early part of the story with the help of books, films, the Internet and interviews” (Sze, par. 7). Being a Hong Kong diasporic writer, Sze loves writing on homecoming or root searching, one of the motifs in her novels.8 The theme of Hui Gui, returning home in Chinese, is apparently revealed in the book title that carries twofold meanings: the handover of Hong Kong from Britain to China in 1997 and the journey home of the characters in the novel. Hui Gui is a family saga that transports readers from China to Hong Kong during the 1930s to 1997. Tak Sing, the patriarch and protagonist, was born to an affluent landlord family which later went bankrupt after the Japanese occupation and the inauguration of the People’s Republic of China in 1949—house being ruined by Japanese army and property being confiscated due to nationalization. Tak Sing immigrates to Hong Kong as a refugee and starts making a home in this city by acquiring a reputable job as a policeman and forming his own family with his wife Lily, their daughter Serena, and Lily’s maidservant Ah Lan. Towards the end, Serena takes Tak Sing’s bone ash back to China and says, “Papa is home, and Mummy is with him. This is their hui gui” (290). Serena’s attitude is affirmative because Tak Sing has once confessed to her that Hong Kong is considered as his second home, while China is the first (198). The narratives of this novel shift the focus from Tak Sing to Serena so as to underscore the passing down of the Chineseness from one generation to another and the root of the family. But does Serena conform to Tak Sing. 8. The Heart of Buddha depicts two sisters, Marian and Ruthie, who undergo physical, between Canada and Bhutan, and spiritual journeys. The motivation of writing Ghost Cave is that the birthplace of Sze’s great parents and father is Sarawak in which Sze has an intense interest: “If you want to find out about your roots, you have to go back to the birthplace of your parents. My father was born here (Sarawak), and that’s the reason I want to write a book about Sarawak” (“Elsie Sze’s New Award-Winning Novel,” par. 4). 11.

(19) and regard China as her home? To her, journeying home is an ongoing process that reflects the non-stop internal conflict in terms of national identity. Portraying Serena as a reflection of herself, Sze questions and problematizes the stability of home and national identity. According to the reviewer Shawn B, the definition of home is different for each of the character. “This yearning for home takes each on their own path and leads them on a journey of self-discovery” (par. 3). Home is categorized into three kinds: ancestral home, home of birth, home of attachment. B’s remark is so true that Serena defines home in her own term and takes a journey of self-discovery: a local born Hong Konger who treasures, but does not embrace, the ancestral home and later makes up her mind to leave for England. Sharing the same background with Serena, Sze is a local born Hong Konger who first migrated to Canada and then settled down in the U.S. Both Serena and Sze are determined to leave Hong Kong, the home of birth, and make a home of attachment in a different country, undergoing a struggle with their national identity, as a Hong Konger or a Chinese. This novel is chosen out of the reason that the contradiction between its title and its content renders it significant in providing another angle of looking at the relationship between Hong Kong and China. The title, Hui Gui: A Chinese Story, seemingly suggests that it tells a story of recovering the Chinese heritage and of connecting with the Chinese root through the journey of returning home; yet, the story manifests the hopelessness of communism and delineates the characters’ fear and abomination of it, distancing Hong Kong from China. This contradictory relationship, just as the conflicting dimension of national identity, makes the story worthwhile for research. Jonathan Raban has described accurately the dynamics between city and. 12.

(20) humans in Soft City. Cities are like plastic that can be molded concordant with human imaginary; they, in return, shape humans in a form of resistance, such as confusing/diversifying our national identities and gender relations. More significantly, all types of spaces, the urban and the rural in particular, produce the same effect of mutual molding. This thesis, thus, aims to study the public and private spaces in both China and Hong Kong and probe into their impact on national confliction and gender relations. The next chapter maps out the history of Hong Kong for the sake of expounding on Hong Kong people’s struggle with their national identity.. 13.

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(22) Chapter Two: Hong Kong as an Ivory Tower. The ivory tower of reason, rationality, and rigid structures colonizes the world of lived experience. And as a result, those who seek academic legitimacy for their narratives from the heart end up echoing the sanitized tone of the Master Narrative. —Kirsten J. Broadfoot and Debashish Munshi, “Diverse Voices”. This teapot of jasmine tea prepared for you is perhaps too bitter. I am now going to tell you a story of Hong Kong legend which, I am afraid, is equally bitter—Hong Kong is a city of both grandeur and sorrow. 我給您沏的這一壺茉莉香片，也許是太苦了一點。我將要說給您聽的一段香港傳奇，恐怕也是一樣的苦──香港是一個華美的但悲哀的城。 —Eileen Chang, “Jasmine Tea”9. I. Britain: The Colonizer of the Ivory Tower in Hong Kong Ivory tower, a term originated from the Bible and frequently used in the 20th century, has been infused with a sense of postcoloniality in the 21st century. This term first appears when Solomon is glorifying the stunning beauty of his beloved in Song 9. The English text and title are my own translation. 15.

(23) of Songs in the Bible, but has been applied as a pejorative since the 20th century to designate an environment of intellectual pursuit that is, according to Oxford Dictionaries, “a state of privileged seclusion or separation from the facts and practicalities of the real world” [emphasis added]. If this state of insulation is privileged, why does it carry a negative connotation in the modern contexts? The answer perhaps goes to impracticality, seeing that the insiders of the ivory tower, the intellectuals, cannot reify knowledge in reality since they confine themselves to their imaginary world. Living in the 21st century, Broadfoot and Munshi put forth a re-reading of the ivory tower in a postcolonial context: the dominance of colonial structures and ideologies (255). They apply the concept of colonialism to examine the meaning of the ivory tower and find how the colonizers, often coming from the West, construct the discursive space and structure to define values in accordance with their western ideology, while the colonized, i.e. the local people, are eager to be accepted by the colonizers. The governing framework designed by the colonizers was considered impractical insomuch as they insist on following their ways of thinking and coercively implanting such ideologies on the colonized, without any acknowledgement of the colonized culture. Thus, the colonized are marginalized and often voiceless as they are, compulsorily or not, required to give up their individuality and to observe the game rules set by the colonizers, in the hope of joining the dominant culture; in other words, they have no choice but to accommodate themselves to the space “constructed by the dominant mainstream structures and ideologies” (255). “The ivory tower,” Munshi lays a simile, “functions like an exclusive club whose membership is tightly controlled by what might be called a ‘dominant frame’” (257). Striving to assimilate (join) into the mainstream (“the exclusive club”) in order not to be marginalized and excluded, the colonized therefore forsake their unique local culture by conforming to the ivory tower. This pessimistic 16.

(24) response, however, does not suffice Broadfoot and Munshi, so they conceptualize an active position, “a postcolonial awakening” or “a postcolonial self-reflexivity,” a response similar to the desire proposed by Simon During: a desire “of any decolonized community to have an identity and language of their own” (qtd. in Broadfoot and Munshi 256). The hope of “using their [the colonized] experiences and ways of knowing to talk back to, reframe, contextualize, and perhaps even reinterpret commonly used theories and concepts” (264) is what both authors expect of the academia, as scholars “potentially absorb, without reflection, a particular way of understanding the world” in a situation where they have only intake of Euro-American ideologies without any output of their cultural specialties (264). The idea of the ivory tower can be extended to the examination about Hong Kong. History is conventionally considered objective and realistic, but Dominick LaCapra in History and Criticism reminds us that “[historical] documents are texts that supplement or rework ‘reality’ and not mere sources that divulge facts about ‘reality’” (11). By scrutinizing historical records that are sometimes fragmented, historians are merely capable of putting their subjective perspectives into play for generating secondary sources that still involve the component of imaginary (Wong et al. 143). History, Wang-chi Wong in The Burden of History: A Hong Kong Perspective of the Mainland Discourse of Hong Kong History claims, “is a discourse through which the historians tell us what has happened in the past” (6; my translation). British historian George Beer Endacott claims in A History of Hong Kong published in 1958 that “[t]he history of Hong Kong really begins with the coming of the British in 1841” (4). This bold claim is loaded with Britain’s superiority but has been significantly implanted into the mind of most Hong Kong people as, before the handover in 1997, they are only educated with Hong Kong’s colonial history of the. 17.

(25) 19th century and hereafter, without knowledge of the pre-colonial period.10 Wong asserts that most Hong Kong people have no sense of Hong Kong’s history (7),11 because local historians, who were less concerned with the local than with the Chinese history, did not write history about Hong Kong and Hong Kong people had not been able to access local historical discourse except via English writings till the 1980s.12 Britain as the ivory tower took advantage of this occasion to manipulate the history and historical discourse in Hong Kong. China had not taken heed of this place before the British troops sailed in. In 1841, when Britain requested for the cession of Hong Kong, the Chinese government was not really clear about the location of Hong Kong, and mistook it to be “adjacent to Stanley, Hung Hoeng Lou and Kwan Tai Lo” (「與赤柱、紅香爐、裙帶路各處互相毗連」) (馬金科 44).13 A Chinese thinker and fiction writer Wang Tao, who fled to Hong Kong for shelter in 1860s, wrote a series of essays explaining the current situation of Hong Kong, such as “Xianghai Jizong” (“My Sojourn in Hong Kong” translated into English and published in 1994) and “Xianggang Luelun” (“A Brief Introduction to Hong Kong”). Wang’s motivation to write these essays was obvious: Hong Kong was “an abandoned land [by China]” (「棄土」) and “located in a remote corner where few recorders wrote about” (「香港僻在一隅，紀述者罕」) (qtd. in 王 10. 11. 12. 13. This is the experience of most Hong Kongers, including the author of this thesis, because we are not taught about the history of Hong Kong in the history class in elementary and secondary schools. Therefore, Hong Kongers are often criticized of being unconscious of or indifferent to the local history. For more details, please see 王宏志等 in Works Cited. It seems contradictory to say that Hong Kongers have no sense about history even though most Hong Kongers are aware of the fact that Britain has indeed colonized Hong Kong. One suggested answer would be the uncertainty of the origin of Hong Kong history, as Wong asserts: “The length of Hong Kong history has been a contentious issue. A large number of Hong Kongers deem that Hong Kong has history only after British people arrived, whereas some Hong Kongers emphasize that its history should begin from the Neolithic period and is therefore very long” (「香港歷史的長短是一個很具爭議性的問題，不少人認為香港是在英國人到來後才有歷史的，但也有人強調香港早在新石器時代便有人居住，所以有非常悠長的歷史」, 王宏志 7). Wong has mentioned that very few Chinese historical texts on Hong Kong history were published before 1980 (7), and only a few English books were published for documentation. See Eitel, Ernest John; Sayer, Geoffrey Robley; Hurlimann, Martin in Works Cited. All translations are mine unless stated otherwise. 18.

(26) 宏志 19-20). In contrast, Britain has had a record of naming the island Hong Kong since 1816 when William Pitt Amherst sailed to Beijing and was stopped by the sea of Hong Kong. He then saw a mountainous and magnificent island which he later named Hong Kong. “The date of this record is 10 July 1816, ‘Hong Kong’ already appeared in the writing of the British people since then” (王宏志等 159-60). Hence, Britain but not China is the one who brings the name of Hong Kong into being; it is thus logical to make such a claim that Hong Kong history “officially” commences in 1841. In addition to Hong Kong’s name, Britain colonizes people’s mentality through propagandizing the positive impacts of colonization on this city. Britain tactically narrates the colonial history by highlighting its benefits and smothering up its atrocities brought to the people. A strong scent of colonialism/imperialism diffuses in most history of Hong Kong in English.14 Endacott, for instance, affirms that the colonizing action bestows a so-called “brand new” history on Hong Kong, and Frank Welsh terms Britain as “the ‘Mother Country’” of Hong Kong in order to emphasize the inseparable linkage between these two places (xii). These statements are no doubt peppered with an imperialistic ideology which is not uncommon in the English writings between late 19th century and early 20th century (王宏志 11). Before anti-colonial consciousness was mature, there would be no need for Britain to conceal its ambition of imperialistic expansion, so it could endeavor to promote the positivity of colonialism. But when anti-colonial sentiments among the Hong Kong people became full-fledged after the Second World War, partly inspired by the successive independence of many British colonies, Britain would only downplay or even subdue the dark side of Hong Kong’s history so as to attenuate the sprouting nationalism and patriotism. For instance, textbooks on Chinese Studies were meticulously scrutinized 14. The simplest way to distinguish colonialism from imperialism is that the former “can be thought to be a practice and [the latter] as the idea driving the practice” (S., par. 2). Both terms work hand in hand with each other. For more details, please see S., Prabhat in Works Cited. 19.

(27) and revised after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. Here is the excerpt of an official report on Chinese Studies issued by Education Department in 1953: Since the founding of the Republic, the Chinese politicians have striven hard to unite the nation by appealing to the people’s patriotism, narrow nationalism and racialism. This explains why History textbooks published in China usually contain anti-foreign allusions, comments and propaganda, and are therefore not quite suitable for use in Hong Kong. . . . Objectivity in treatment is, of course, to be strictly observed, especially in connection with such topics as the Boxer Uprising and the so-called Opium War. [emphasis added] (31) This one-sided narrative not only criticizes Chinese brainwashing education but also lessens the hostility of the people towards the British government by foregrounding the importance of objectivity in historical events.. II. British Carrot-and-Stick Policies In most Sinocentric history of Hong Kong, Britain is a relentless dictator who inflicts pain, sufferings, and humiliation to Hong Kong people. History, as mentioned above, is a discourse supplemented with imaginary and therefore is subjective and biased; like the British discourse, the Chinese discourse is one-sided too. With the advent of 1997, many Chinese books and documentaries appeared after the 1980s, such as Xianggang de Youyu (The Melancholy of Hong Kong) edited by Wei-luan Lu (盧瑋鑾) and Xianggang Cangsang (The Misery of Hong Kong) issued by CCTV, the Chinese official propaganda which aims to eradicate the contributions of the British governance, demonize Britain while glorifying China, and alienate Hong Kong from Britain while drawing closer relationship with China. Obviously, these productions 20.

(28) attempt to register empathy and compassion for the people and to discredit Britain’s colony as the British rule has made Hong Kong a messy and sinful city. For example, CCTV has thus commented: Hong Kong “is the largest center of opium smuggling in the world” (「全世界最大的鴉片走私中心」) and is regarded as “an unsinkable opium barge” (「不沉的鴉片躉船」) (中央電視台 42; 余繩武、劉存寬 48). Besides drug smuggling, China stigmatizes Hong Kong with other evils, such as prostitution, illegal gambling, poor living condition and corruption.15 Wong has summarized these Chinese discourses and categorized into three aspects to highlight the dismal side of Hong Kong: the absolute manipulative power of Britain, the implementation of racist policies against the Chinese immigrants, and the hardship of the people in Hong Kong (105-07). Each governor assigned by Britain enjoyed a supreme power in Hong Kong. In 1843, Queen Victoria signed and promulgated Hong Kong Letters Patent and Hong Kong Royal Instructions that bestowed each governor with an unchallengeable authority to rule Hong Kong. Even though there were Executive Council, Legislative Council and Judiciary of Hong Kong, they merely performed a counseling function but had no power to hold back the governor. The speech of Alexander Grantham, the 22nd governor of Hong Kong from 1947 to 1957, is often quoted in all sorts of Chinese discourses to spotlight the absolute controlling power of Britain: “In a crown colony the Governor is next to the Almighty. Everyone stands up when he enters a room. He is deferred to on all occasions. It is always ‘Yes, Sir,’ ‘Certainly, Your. 15. For more negative descriptions of Hong Kong, please see 王宏志等 57-62 and 盧瑋鑾 in Works Cited. Both China and Britain criticize the miserable conditions in Hong Kong. For instance, Jan Morris delineates Hong Kong as “a port city so volatile as this: protection rackets, pornography, prostitution, illegal gambling, smuggling, violence of one sort or another.” (43). She speaks in an ironical tone when discussing the issue of corruption: “Most notoriously, Hong Kong has specialized in criminal venality. When it comes to corruption the territory has always sailed as close to the wind as possible, and bribery . . . has always been a fact of life . . .” (45). Hong Kong, she adds, “seems to have been more prurient even than most such colonial settlements” (47). 21.

(29) Excellency . . .” (107).16 Chinese historians accuse Britain of implementing racist policies which discriminate and torture the Chinese immigrants. They point out that some policies have weakened the power of the Chinese and segregated them from the Europeans.17 Before the 1880s, no Chinese members served in any governmental institutions; in other words, the Chinese never got to have a say in any decision-making process. Curfew, harsh physical torture, and poll tax were imposed on them. The European District Reservation Ordinance and the Hill District Reservation Ordinance were issued in 1888 and in 1904 respectively in order to maintain the cleanness and security of the living area for the Europeans as the colonizers mostly considered the Chinese contaminated and unsafe—a Eurocentric way of thinking that was prevalent in that period. In addition, the following excerpt from The Hong Kong Government Gazette is perhaps the most discriminatory and humiliating notification that Britain has had ever issued: “Chinese Mechanics and labourers will not be allowed to use the Garden as a thoroughfare” and “No admission will be allowed to Chairs and Chair Coolies, or to Dogs unless led” (279). Gardens “having been established for the recreation of the inhabitants of Hongkong [sic]” were open for “respectable persons” but not low-class Chinese and dogs (279). The hardship of people in Hong Kong derived from the supreme power of Britain and the implementation of racist policies thus becomes an issue for discussion. Chinese laborers were sold as indentured servants or in-debt workers to the West for. 16. 17. This speech is transliterated into Chinese in several books, please see 余繩武、劉存寬 and 劉蜀永 in Works Cited. See Yu and Liu, and CCTV for a detailed explanation. Not only do the Chinese historians bring up the racist ordinances, but also Western scholars notice this issue of how Chinese were discriminated. For example, Peter Wesley-Smith quotes a prejudiced speech made by a legislative councilor in 1856: “Above all I object to the admission of Chinese as Attornies [sic] in our Courts of Law. They are a peculiar race of people, and in my opinion are generally crafty, corrupt, mendacious, and deficient in those qualifications which are needful in a trustworthy legal adviser . . .” (qtd. in Wesley-Smith 91). 22.

(30) profit-making, termed as maai zyu zai (literally meaning “selling piglets”) in Cantonese.18 Hong Kong was congested with Chinese immigrants as the population kept rising. Wang Tao (王韜) describes the crowded living environment in “A Brief Introduction to Hong Kong”: “Most houses where the Chinese dwell are as small as snail’s shell, as dense as beehive” (「華民所居者，率多小如蝸舍，密若蜂房」) (qtd. in 王宏志等 33). Once the two reservation ordinances were put into practice, the Chinese dwellers were expelled from those areas and packed the buildings outside the reservation zones, which resulted in poor living condition and unwholesomeness. If the Chinese account was infallible, the population in Hong Kong would never skyrocket from 12,361 in 1842 to approximately 4 million in 1971 (余繩武、劉存寬 299; Young 146), and Chinese refugees would never so desperate to migrate to Hong Kong, a phenomenon called Da Tao Gang (“fleeing to Hong Kong”), in and after the 50s. All the factual evidence proves that the Chinese historical discourse is unpersuasive and biased. The stick policies were veritably manipulative and oppressive (the application of stick), but Britain excelled that by maneuvering to “reward followers, exclude rivals, neutralize the hostile, and disorganize the dangerous,” i.e., by offering Hong Kong people “a carrot” (Ngo 2). In his “Chinese Collaboration in the Making of British Hong Kong,” John M. Carroll traces back to the transactional co-operation between Chinese compradors/merchants and Britain, a relationship that “assisted both the British victory in the Opium War, which led to the cession of the island, and the early development of the infant colony [by providing them essential supplies]” (16-17). Those Chinese suppliers were often labeled as Hanjian (Han traitors) from 18. Indentured servants were those who signed and were bound by indentures that limited the freedom and rights of the servants. The second type, in-debt workers, was devoid of any contracts. Agents paid the ship tickets for them and later reclaimed the money back, adding 5-15% commission, from the workers whose obedience was a must to the creditors. This whole process is termed as Credit Ticket System. For more details, please see 劉蜀永 in Works Cited. 23.

(31) the Chinese nationalist perspective. Colonization and imperial expansion, Carroll writes, involved “a process of physical construction—from government, residential and commercial buildings to entire cities and towns. As in many other Southeast Asian colonies [including Hong Kong], this construction was carried out by Chinese workers and contractors” (18). In return, Britain rewarded them with exclusive entitlements such as “land grants and monopolies and enforcing separate business and residential districts for the Chinese” (Carroll 23), thereby stimulating the Chinese business and leading to the emergence of the Chinese bourgeoisie who later developed a close operation with Britain so as to stabilize their status and augment their revenue. Britain’s acquisition of the island aroused the hostility and wrath from the natives in Hong Kong; therefore, Britain aimed at appeasing negative sentiments by proclaiming to govern the natives by the application of Chinese laws and customs. Charles Elliot announced a proclamation right after the occupation of Hong Kong in 1841: “the natives of the island of Hong Kong and all natives of China thereto resorting, shall be governed according to the laws and customs of China, every description of torture excepted” (Tsang 16).19 Even though Hong Kong (Hong Kong Island in precise) was ceded to Britain after the signing of Treaty of Nanking in 1842, the first to-be governor Henry Pottinger made an official announcement that assured the respect of Chinese habits and customs (Sayer 103). The reason for not coercively imposing juridical and customary changes on the natives was to alleviate the repulsion derived from the humiliation of losing sovereignty, to facilitate the governance, and to pave the way for enacting manipulative bills in the years to come. 19. This proclamation justifies the fallacy of Britain’s initial usage of torture on Chinese criminals in those Chinese discourses of Hong Kong’s history. Sir John F. Davis, the second governor of Hong Kong, confessed that the British law—penalty and imprisonment—did not have an intimidating effect, Britain thus finally decided to brutalize Chinese criminals by appealing to the Chinese law which is ferocious and inhuman. 24.

(32) The most illustrious “soft” policy Britain implemented on Hong Kong is laissez-faire or economic non-interventionism. On 1 February 1841, Elliot and James John Gordon Bremer jointly proclaimed that “[t]he inhabitants are hereby promised protection, in her majesty’s gracious name, against all enemies whatever; and they are further secured . . . in the enjoyment of their lawful private property and interests;” furthermore, “Chinese ships and merchants resorting to the port of Hongkong [sic] for purposes of trade are hereby exempted . . . from charge or duty of any kind to the British government” (Bridgman and Williams 64). By doing so intentionally, Hong Kong has developed into a free entrepôt “so as to give every encouragement to the commerce of all nations” (Tsang 17), a passage extracted from a document written by Foreign Secretary Lord Aberdeen to Governor Pottinger in 1843. The adoption of economic non-interventionism appealed to Chinese merchants who later transferred their business from Canton (now Guangzhou) to Hong Kong, boosting the economy and eventually crowning Hong Kong Pearl of the Orient. The prosperity of the society and affluence of the people in Hong Kong on surface were able to divert their attention from the dark to the bright side of colonization. Xu Jiatun (許家屯), a former Chinese Communist Party official, has conducted an analysis on the British governing model which aims to pacify the outrage of the people in Hong Kong: “Britain has implemented a sort of “benevolent” dictatorial governance in Hong Kong. In other words, it is a soft governance, with much freedom yet with no democracy. But insomuch as not being intimidated by the British rule, people had opportunities to vent their discontent and present their opinions which, to a certain extent, would be heard and accepted” (「英國在香港的統治，實施了一種所謂「仁慈」的獨裁統治，換言之，是懷柔性質的統治──有很大的自由度，沒有民主，但又可以讓人在不危及英國統治的程度下，有各種機會來宣洩他們的不滿或意見，而這些不滿和意見在一定程度上也得到了傾聽和改善。」) (183). 25.

(33) Seeing the coming of 1997, the last governor Christopher Francis Patten gave a political address in 1992 to advocate democracy, an element that had been absent in the whole colonial history. The first step to realizing democracy was made by Mark Aitchison Young in 1946, known as The Young Plan, but ended in failure.20 But the second attempt made by Patten achieved a phenomenal success of pleasing Hong Kong people and led Hong Kong forward to democracy. Referring to the “one country, two systems” proposed by Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s and the subsequent promulgation of the Basic Law in 1990,21 Patten initiated a series of political reforms, one of which was an electoral system that enabled local permanent residents to vote for the members of Legislative Council. In addition, he delegated Hong Kongers for high-ranking posts such as Chief Secretary and Financial Secretary.22 Despite the anger from the government in China and pro-Beijing parties in Hong Kong, Patten upheld two notions: “Hong Kong People Governing Hong Kong” (港人治港) and “Handing Over the Power to the People” (還政於民). As a result, the advocacy of democracy highly impressed the people and made them further estranged from the socialist China. In the end, China failed to break down the relationship between Hong Kong and Britain, but on the contrary draw them even closer to each other. Most Chinese discourses overemphasize the negativity of the British rule which in fact has brought economical prosperity to Hong Kong. These Chinese discourses failed to set Hong 20. 21. 22. After the Second World War, a host of British colonies were eager for independence. Such circumstance would necessitate an appealing political reform in order for Britain to bribe Hong Kongers and to arouse their sense of belonging. “One country, two systems” means that Hong Kong and Macao could remain as a capitalist society while the rest of China is governed under a socialist system. The Basic Law was co-drafted by China and Britain with reference to the “one country, two systems” and the Sino-British Joint Declaration signed in 1984, and went into effect on 1 July 1997. According to Chapter I Article 2, “The National People's Congress authorizes the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region to exercise a high degree of autonomy and enjoy executive, legislative and independent judicial power, including that of final adjudication, in accordance with the provisions of this Law” (2). These two posts are the most senior officials in the Government Secretariat. The former is responsible for the administration of Hong Kong, while the latter takes the responsibility of all financial and economic matters. 26.

(34) Kong people apart from the British government; worse still, they aroused their distaste for the socialist China. Britain’s carrot-and-stick policies have successfully won concession from Hong Kong people, and by turning Hong Kong into a capitalist society, they were eager to distinguish themselves from the Chinese in socialist China.. III. The Hong Kongness: The Emergence of Double Identity In the pre-colonization era, China paid no attention to Hong Kong. Due to its distant geographical location and eccentric cultural practice, the Chinese hegemony used to discriminate against Hong Kong, and the people in Hong Kong were unwilling to identify with China. The Chinese used to believe in the notion that “China is the center of the world, and the other areas are as all barbaric” (「居天地之中者曰中國，居天地之偏者曰四夷」) (qtd. in 王宏志 110).23 Geographically, Hong Kong is located at the far east of China and thereby viewed as an uncivilized area; Take the Tankas, one of the four biggest aborigines in Hong Kong for example.24 They dwelled in boats and made a living on fishing, but were considered barbaric, or even dehumanized as animals; they were forbidden to receive education, to wear silk clothes, and to live ashore. Discriminated, exploited and brutalized by the mother country, the natives could hardly cultivate a sense of patriotism and nationalism toward China. The arrival of British troops marked a turning point of Hong Kong history by bringing over the capitalist ideology which has been deep-seated in people in Hong Kong since the early 20th century. By virtue of the laissez-faire policy and economic non-interventionism, Hong Kong was transformed into an entrepôt and a financial 23. 24. Foreigners were treated as barbarians and categorized into four groups according to the direction by China: Eastern Barbarians (Dongyi), Southern Barbarians (Nanman), Western Barbarians (Xirong), and lastly Northern Barbarians (Beidi). The four biggest aborigines in Hong Kong are often known as the Tankas, the Hakkas, the Hokkien people, and the Weitou people. Only the Tankas, however, were locally born while the others were originally migrants from China. 27.

(35) center, which thereafter attracted loads of the Chinese in China to migrate to Hong Kong to pursue the Hong Kong Dream. Living in a greatly capitalized metropolis, the natives and the Chinese immigrants, who did not regard themselves as Hong Kongers yet, focus their goal on maximizing income and accumulating assets, sparing no time for political issues: “One of the effects of a very efficient colonial administration,” Ackbar Abbas comments, “is that it provides almost no outlet for political idealism (until perhaps quite recently); as a result, most of the energy is directed toward the economic sphere” (5). Hong Kong has thus become well-known for its pursuit of wealth and material enjoyment: “The beauty [of Hong Kong] is the beauty, like it or not, of the capitalist system. More than a usual share of this city’s energies goes towards the making of money, and nobody has ever pretended otherwise . . .” (Morris 33); Wang Tao criticizes the Chinese in Hong Kong are “people greedy for benefits and chasing after fame” (「錐刀之徒，逐利而至」) (qtd. in 王宏志 145). Britain has succeeded in instilling the natives and the Chinese immigrants with the capitalist ideology for the sake of not arousing any attention or efforts for politics; therefore, these people have increasingly identified with the British rule and distanced from the socialist China. Britain carried out not only economic colonization but also cultural implantation on Hong Kong. Danlin Lu (陸丹林) assailed how the Chinese in Hong Kong were severely Westernized in the 30s: “[People in Hong Kong] think being Chinese is embarrassing; they resent that their skin color and face were not like those of the white people, which has brought them life-long misery” (「他們的心思，以為做了中國人是投錯胎的，頂丟臉的，只恨皮膚面孔不像白種人，使他(她)一生的倒霉」) (177-78); in addition, Yangci Tu (屠仰慈) criticizes that the Chinese in Hong Kong “lost the spirits and soul of China” (「缺失了中國的氣息，失去中國的靈魂」) (157). Both Chinese critics notice the rampant Westernization in Hong Kong culture. 28.

(36) After many trips to Hong Kong for thirty years in the mid and late 20th century, Jan Morris confirms that Hong Kong has been deeply Westernized in terms of architecture (31-33), hobby (37-41), language (56), table manner (56), title (57), English naming (57), and so forth. By assimilating themselves more to the British culture while retaining some Chinese customs, the Chinese immigrants gradually cultivate a hybrid cultural identity. Accompanied with the economic colonization and cultural implantation, the Hong Kong consciousness, Hong Kongness in short, emerged when the 1967 Leftist riots happened. As the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, the leftists in Hong Kong went on demonstrations that later were worsened into riots. People in Hong Kong faced the dilemma of either supporting the British government (as a Hong Konger) or the Chinese leftists (as a Chinese). Most of them chose the former due to the threat of communism and reprimanded the pro-China protestants (Young 140). Compared with the Chinese in China, people in Hong Kong enjoyed life security and economic stability which whitewashed the negative impacts of colonization. According to Tai Lok Lui (呂大樂), colonialism was not a problem after the mid-1970s; what Hong Kongers were concerned about instead was whether or not the British government could be efficient in bringing economic growth and political stability (35-36). Being a Hong Konger literally denotes a double identity—being British in terms of economic and capitalist ideologies and structures, and being Chinese in terms of ethnicity. Metaphorically, Hong Kongers are taking a Sisyphean journey that never ends—an eternal state of in-betweenness. The following two examples illustrate this in-betweenness struggle and the impact of the British rule on gender relations in terms of space.. 29.

(37) IV. Case Study: Kowloon Walled City and Ladies Market Kowloon Walled City (hereafter the Walled City), demolished in 1993 and re-constructed into a park in 1995, was a self-governed Chinese exclave beyond the governance of the British rule. As Hong Kong Island became a British colony in 1842, the Qing government in China mobilized its army and cannons to the Walled City for defense. Once the Convention between the United Kingdom and China Respecting an Extension of Hong Kong Territory was signed in 1898, the whole Hong Kong was at the mercy of the British colonization, except the Walled City.25 It then functioned as the military and administrative base of the Qing government.26 Within the Walled City, the Qing officers and army constituted their own community and exercised their sovereign power. About the dynamics between space and power, Michel Foucault makes a succinct conclusive remark in an interview entitled “Space, Power and Knowledge”: “Space is fundamental in any form of communal life; space is fundamental in any exercise of power” (168). The British government, however, was unwilling to relinquish the sovereignty of the entire Hong Kong, consequently invading the Walled City in 1899 and expelling all the Qing officers, which left it in a vacuum state until the end of the Second World War.27 The influx of refugees from the Mainland China after the inauguration of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 poured into the Walled City and made it the world’s most densely populated area with. 25. Under the terms of the convention, the New Territories, that is north of Boundary Street and south of Shenzhen River, and all the outer islands were leased to Britain for 99 years with no rental involved, and were colonized in Britain’s hands. 26 The Qing government insisted to maintain the sovereignty of the Walled City on the grounds of the establishment of a foothold so as to enable Chinese army troops, merchants, and ships to enter the city justifiably, exerting military and economical influences on and gaining considerable benefits from Hong Kong (Sin et al. 12). 27 During the Second World War, the Japanese troops occupied Hong Kong from December 1941 to August 1945, which is commonly known as Three Years and Eight Months. They destroyed the ramparts of the Walled City due to the expansion of Kai Tak Airport; thus, the Walled City was literally devoid of walls after WWII. 30.

(38) a population density of over 1 million per square kilometer.28 Owing to the overpopulation and the lack of management,29 the Walled City was transformed into a lawless, chaotic and unwholesome slum area, a hotbed of crime, prostitution, gambling, and drug. The following description of the Walled City by a travel writer Jan Morris could help us to imagine the Walled City at that time: One after another, glass-fronted to the street, they are the surgeries of unqualified dentists. Their windows are full of pickled abscesses, illustrations of impacted wisdom teeth, grinning rows of dentures. . . . A maze of dark dank alleys pierces the mass from one side to the other. Virtually no daylight reaches them. Looped electric cables festoon their low ceilings, dripping alarmingly with moisture. It is like a bunker. Sometimes you seem to be all alone, every door locked around you (293, 295). Guaranteed in the 1898 convention, the Walled City, though left empty and unmanaged before the Second World War, remained a Chinese territory and attracted Chinese refugees to sojourn for the sake of security regardless of the poor and repulsive milieu.30 The preservation of the Chinese sovereignty over the Walled City thus engenders the complexity of Hong Kongers’ construction of national identity. As shown above, Chinese refugees flushed into the Walled City, in hope of securing their safety in a Chinese exclave. Except the illegal immigrants from China, those who 28. 29. 30. Manipulated by Britain, the Hong Kong government sent police to march into the Walled City to expel Chinese refugees and demolish numerous buildings, aiming to gain control over it. This event afterwards engendered a huge protest in Guangzhou, China. After several times of negotiation, all suppressions finally came to an end. The Walled City later became a no-man’s-land (三不管地帶), meaning that it is a place that the Hong Kong government dared not manage, the British government did not want to manage, and the Chinese government could not manage (香港政府不敢管，英國政府不想管，中國政府不能管). The British government was so aggressive that it plotted to occupy the Walled City after its vacancy; in response, the Chinese government decried its action and strived to re-claim the sovereignty of the Walled City but ended in failure. 31.

(39) legally crossed the border and entered Hong Kong, known as the first generation, strived for a Hong Kong identity card. After the 1967 Leftist riots, most people in Hong Kong posed themselves as Hong Kongers. Living in the close-knit community in the Walled City, the Chinese refugees would consider themselves Chinese; however, they would have to shift their identity to a Hong Konger and assimilate into the society once they step out of the Walled City in order to assimilate into the society. The complexity of the construction of national identity demonstrates the fluidity and instability of identity in Hong Kong, a modern city that is fraught of various significations and connotations. Different from the Walled City as a space free from colonial influence, Ladies’ Market epitomizes what Abbas terms “colonial space.” In “Building on Disappearance: Hong Kong Architecture and Colonial Space,” Abbas specifically investigates Hong Kong architecture from the perspective of colonial history. “Colonial space,” Abbas writes, “can be thought of as the projection of a colonial imaginary that maps out a symbolic order in whose grids the real appears and disappears for a colonial subject” (148). In other words, it is a space molded according to the colonial imaginary, and what is displayed/hidden is conditioned by the colonial subject. Abbas further manifests that cultural preservation in terms of architecture in Hong Kong is a strategic device “to exclude the dirt and pain [of colonialism]” and to erase local history for the sake of consolidating and stabilizing British governance and manipulation (149). Ladies’ Market, located at Tung Choi Street between Argyle Street and Dundas Street, reveals Britain’s intention to transform Hong Kong into a metropolis by means of capitalization and commodification. Tung Choi Street, literally meaning Water Spinach Street, used to be a farmland. Once the British rule embarked on capitalization, the farming terrain. 32.

(40) was eliminated and replaced by commercial-residential buildings for being leased to street vending business. The appellation of Tung Choi Street remains the same; however, at least in local Hong Kongers’ mind, it has already become a disordered alley for cheap clothes, accessories, appliances and daily necessities; the street’s agricultural history is almost gone. Britain the colonizer did preserve the street name (local history), but at the same time has converted it into a capitalized market for capital accumulation (colonial imaginary).31 This maneuver, on the one hand, soothed the enmity of the colonized populace by incorporating foreign intrusive British administration (the commercialization of the street) with local inherent Chinese culture (keeping the original name); on the other hand, this kind of preservation echoed what Anthony D. King terms “the preservation syndrome”: [I]n the colonial context, this has a double irony. Not only does planning effort go into inculcating the colonized culture with similar values but the criteria of the colonial power are used to define and “preserve” “buildings of architectural and historic importance,” while remnants of the indigenous culture are left to disappear. (56) Britain values “the colonized culture” by preserving the original name but at the same time endeavors to erase the local history by developing it into a new scenic spot for commercial activity. Localness is obviously displayed, but with no contents of local history. Such phenomenon is congruous with Abbas’s notion of “colonial space” and “space of disappearance.” Ladies’ Market is also a domain of commodified space. Situated along the coastline and in a non-seismic zone accompanied with non-frozen deep harbor, Hong. 31. Tung Choi Street is divided into two parts: Ladies Market and Goldfish Market. The latter traditionally was an area devoted to selling goldfish, but was later flushed in by pet shops selling different kinds of animals, from cats and dogs to beetles and reptiles. Agriculture has been fully wiped out and replaced by commercial activities. 33.

(41) Kong was at first spotted by Britain to have a high potentiality of developing into an entrepôt for global capital accumulation; commodity production continues non-stop during and after British colonization. As a result, “a fetishism of material wealth” featured by “a rampant and rapacious desire for material advancement” roots and sprouts in Hong Kongers’ ideology (Lau 69). This fetishism of commodity applies not only to products but also to space. For instance, the section of Ladies’ Market is demarcated as a pedestrian zone for consumerist activity for 8 hours per day on weekdays and 12 hours per day during weekends. It is regulated into different booths (in the middle of the road) or stores (along the road) that are leased to entrepreneurs who are eager to make profits. Space is, in short, commodified for capital accumulation under “total surveillance and control”, for the benefits of both the entrepreneurs and the government (Cuthbert 146). This was one of the ways for the British government to gain control over and monitor Hong Kong’s space, and how it inculcated the capitalistic ideology into Hong Kongers before 1997.32 Commodity fetishism and consumerism disperse into every corner. Suffice it to say that Hong Kongers’ are not so much infatuated with spiritual enlightenment as with material fulfillment, fervently desiring for money in all forms, be it portable cash or immovable property. Apart from the colonization and commodification of space, the renaming of Tung Choi Street as Ladies’ Market emanates a smell of genderization. Once Tung Choi Street was developed into an alley for shopping, vendors targeted at female customers and mainly retailed women’s clothing and accessories; this explains why it was named as Ladies Market, a female place. This instance justifies how most people 32. As Hong Kong is tremendously capitalized and commodified, social open space is combined with commodified space which is under surveillance. Due to the coming of 1997, Britain plotted to offer benefits for private developers to purchase property if they were willing to provide open space; that is to say, more developers would own the space as private for the avoidance of socialization and Chinesization when the day of handover approached. See Cuthbert for further discussion. 34.