Introduction - the legacy since 1989
The day has long gone, but for many people, memories of the political unrest and strings of social movements back in 1989
While some critics claim that the insertion of that political element into whatever movies are somewhat forced and reflects only the personal interests of those filmmakers, a careful study on the list of films mentioned above would reveal that these films do exhibit a certain kind of pattern – for instance, most of them have posited the political discourse alongside stories of unrequited love. In Evans Chan’s independent movie, To Liv(e) (《浮世戀曲》1992), it is clear that emotions still run high in the aftermath of that tragic page in Chinese history; when we turn to some recent indie productions that attempt to deal with the same issue, such as Yan Yan Mak’s Butterfly (《蝴蝶》2004), we may observe the subtle changes in cultural identities throughout the years, with the 1997 Hong Kong Handover being the watershed. The memories stay on, but they have never been the same since the day they were formed.
Forbidden love and repressed historical past
In the pre-1997
[film still I from the Butterfly]
In psychological studies, “[p]sychic trauma occurs when a sudden, unexpected, overwhelming intense emotional blow or a series of blows assaults the person from outside. Traumatic events are external, but they quickly become incorporated into the mind” (Terr, 8). Here, the brutality of the Tiananmen Square Massacre can be referred to as a kind of traumatic experience to the people of that generation: it represents an incredible destruction of the public belief in democracy and, more importantly, basic human rights; the event surely is a fierce violation of human dignity, but it does not help for the Hong Kong people to be reminded that their city would juxtapose onto that same political picture in a very short time. In Evans Chan’s 1992 movie, To Liv(e), the recalling of the event still reveals a sense of shock: as a character reflects, “[h]ow strange to look back upon those innocent, pre-1982 days, that eerie calm … isn’t there a Holocaust survivor who wrote somewhere that she had been deceived into believing in the safety of the world?” (Chan, 36-37). The impact of the trauma can be noted as the experience is understood in terms of the infamous massacre of Jews by Nazi authorities in the above quote.
As though this essay is by no means a thorough psychoanalytic study of the issue, I do find it appropriate to employ another notion from that discipline to illustrate the case here. The anxiety of
[film still I from film To Liv(e)]
Of the two films studied in this essay, Evans Chan’s To Liv(e) and Yan Yan Mak’s Butterfly, both share the theme of forbidden loves and the common sentiment towards the June Fourth legacy. I have since mentioned that the plots of unrequited and forbidden loves are recurrently linked to movies that try to recall the Tiananmen incident, and that this phenomenon can be reviewed in light of the ‘Oedipus complex’ experienced by the
By constantly juxtaposing the present dilemma with the social movements in 1989 and then resolving it, it could be said that the filmmakers may be looking for a form of identity reaffirmation through the fictional representations. As Yan Yan Mak observes, “[p]eople of [her] age are very sensitive to the June Fourth incident, and desperately want to put it into their own creations” (HKIFF 2004a). In fact, the therapeutic nature of these movies can also be traced in the narratives. For instance, shortly after the characters Flavia and Yip meet for the first time in the film Butterfly, Yip asks Flavia to “tell [her] a secret”, and the moment triggers the long repressed homosexual yearning of the character, as in the process of psychoanalysis. With the intricate parallel between the liberations of sexuality and politics in mind, the remembering processes in cinema essentially serve the same purpose as catharsis in psychoanalytic terms, for both the characters in the films as well as the filmmakers who made them with their own intentions.
The city found in binary opposites
As a transient community, the cultural identity as ‘
The situation may be explained with Harvet Sacks’ concept of membership categorization device (MCD): it organizes the identities attached to a person into different membership categories, such as family, class or ethnic group. In Sacks’ ideas, to choose one collection of categories excludes another. From this, I would suggest that it is in the midst of the social movements during 1989 when the cultural identities of
The identities of
[film still II from To Liv(e)]
Identities and hybridity
In the previous section, I have discussed the use of binary oppositions in the identity formation process of
[to liv(e)]
In fact, the character may well be seen as the representative of Hong Kong in the movie; above all, her name Rubie (‘Ruby’) is intricately linked to the Oriental ‘Pearl’ that she promotes to the foreigners in the party. Besides, Rubie also displays her hybridized identity in an awkward yet thought-provoking manner: she is born to a traditional Chinese family, but her outlook resembles a Eurasian and thus arguably, is neither a British nor a Chinese; she speaks English, and her Cantonese also has a foreign accent attached to it, thus “manag[ing] to embody [a] cacophony of ‘voices’” (Marchetti, 210). According to Marchetti, “this contradiction alienate[s] the spectator from the character, but it also serves to highlight the indeterminate identity and position of the people of Hong Kong as Chinese British subjects, as educated and superstitious, as Western and Asian, as poor and struggling and established and well-to-do” (209). A similar character is also present in the movie Butterfly:Yip (played by Chinese actress Tian Yuan) lives in
Apart from the characters, the backgrounds of the two movies analyzed in this essay also exhibit the hybridized nature of cultural texts these days. Evans Chan , the director and scriptwriter of the film To Liv(e), “is a New York-based filmmaker, born in mainland China, bred in Macau, educated in Hong Kong and America, who makes independent narrative films primarily for a Hong Kong, overseas Chinese, ‘greater China’ audience” (Marchetti, 197). Yan Yan Mak’s film, Butterfly, is adapted from a short story, “Hu Die Di Ji Hao” (〈蝴蝶的記號〉), from a Taiwanese novel, Meng You 1994 (《夢遊1994》) by Chen Suet (陳雪). The setting have been changed from Taiwan to Hong Kong, the plotline of June Fourth legacy is added to the script, and the director’s “own memories and sentiments to 1980s Hong Kong [were also inserted] into the student life of the female protagonist, Flavia” (HKIFF 2004b). Besides, extracts from a novel by Tian Yuan (who is a Chinese student studying English in university), Zebra Woods (《斑馬森林》), were also added to the script, to be exact, the parts about premeditation and about things in the school. The background music of the movie even uses the songs of an Icelandic group, Mum. This kind of intertextuality is not only a characteristic of the postmodern world, but also a testimony to the hybridized nature of the modern
Linguistic subaltern in a schizophrenic society
In general, movies operating with a range of languages “can be taken as palimpsests where the elements overlie one another, obscuring meaning for some, illuminating a different kind of meaning for others. … [In To Liv(e),] layers sit on top of one another, some (almost) postcolonial in English, some diasporic and accented in American English, some (almost) postsocialist in Chinese” (Marchetti, 203-204). Evans Chan, in response to “the film’s identity being characterized as schizophrenic”, feels that
however, the notion that English is alien to the film’s [then] yet-to-be-post colonial identity is curious, After all, English is still primarily the official language of Hong Kong … Both the language and the accent arguments, consequently, struck me as an unconscious obsession with an authentic (non-westernized) cultural identity that is, I believe, more fantastical than real at this point. That
In this case, while Chan is right to point out the schizophrenic nature of his film, I would like to point out that that nature is unable to ‘justify’ the use of the English language in his letters to Liv Ullmann, in the name of Hong Kong people. After all, the identity of a schizophrenic person is not defined by the sum of his many personalities. Since English is never the mother tongue of the majority group of Hong Kong population, and this group I refer to points exactly to the population of ethnic Chinese that has a true nationalistic sentiment towards China, and is supposedly the addresser of those imaginary letters to Liv Ullmann. Many critics see this emphasis on the use of local language as an obsession; Rey Chow, in Woman and Chinese Modernity: the Politics of Reading between West and East, points out that the search for an ‘authentic’ voice or a ‘native’ position only represents the critics’ desire for a pure and distinct other. This kind of theoretical premise is surely useful for our understanding in the studies of identity formation in the transcultural context, but in adopting such a theoretical discourse single-mindedly, it would not lead us far in our study into the real impact of language use in a community, as these critics have simply ignored the actual situation surrounding the use of English language in Hong Kong.
[to Liv(e)]
The standpoint of Evans Chan has assumed the perspective of an intellectual – understanding the English language is probably not an issue in the director’s circle of well-educated people – and essentially put the Chinese language in a ‘linguistically subaltern’ position in the global political discourse. I have here proposed a binary opposite regarding the use of the English language, which can be practically understood as: the first group, which speaks fluent English, and the second, which does not speak the language fluently or does not know the language altogether. Here, the letters to Liv Ullmann are supposedly the voices of the indigenous
The city lost in representations
[ To Liv(e)]
In To Liv(e), the character John has nicely applied a chapter from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities to describe the situation of Hong Kong: “the inhabitants still believe they live in a Hong Kong which grows only with the name Hong Kong and they do not notice the Hong Kong that grows on the ground” (Chan, 27). By combining the scenery of the city with the narration, the sequence describes the commercial districts as “a colourless city, without character, planted there at random” (27), and the traditional cultures on the streets as “the hint of something unmistakable, rare, perhaps magnificent” (27-28). The character concludes by saying that the statement will be even more valid in the post-1997 era. The identity of Hong Kong does seem to be quite uncertain in recent years; an interesting discovery from the two films is that, while many of the musicians working for To Liv(e), such as Cui Jian (崔健) and Tat Ming Pair, expressed their angst for politics, the favourite musician of the characters in Butterfly (whose portrait on Rolling Stong magazine cover is also hanged on the wall of the setting), Kurt Cobain, is an iconic figure in the States, famous for his nihilistic lifestyle and his rage of the ‘Generation X’ – or precisely, angst against nothing. Entering the new millennium, the object for rebellion has become indistinct, and the people’s identity search seems to have lost focus.
The urge to search for an identity was triggered by the Tiananmen incident and eventually soothed by the reunification with
Reference List
Butterfly. Yan Yan Mak (Dir.). Josie Ho, Tian Yuan, Eric Kot (Perf.). Filmko, 2004.Chan, Evans. “To Liv(e)” in Evans Chan’s To Liv(e): Screenplay and Essays. Wong Tak-wai (Ed.). Hong Kong: Department of Comparative Literature, The University of Hong Kong, 1996.
Chen, Suet. “Hu Die Di Ji Hao” in Meng You 1994. Yuan Liu Chu Ban She, 1996.
Chow, Rey. Woman and Chinese Modernity: the Politics of Reading between West and East. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991.
Hall, Stuart. “The Spectacle of the ‘Other’” in Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. Stuart Hall (Ed.). London: Sage Publications in association with the Open University, 1997.
HKIFF. October CIA Review. Hong Kong International Film Festival Society Limited, 2004a. 13 Dec. 2004.
HKIFF. October Programme. Hong Kong International Film Festival Society Limited, 2004b. 13 Dec. 2004.
Lee, Bunny. “Butterfly – The Liberation of Gender and Rights”. Hong Kong Film Critics Society, 2004. 13 Dec. 2004. .
Looma, Ania. “Challenging Colonialism” in Colonialism/Postcolonialism. London; New York: Routledge, 1998.
Ma, K.W. Culture, Politics and Television in Hong Kong. London: Routledge, 1999.
Marchetti, Gina. “Transnational Cinema, Hybrid Identities, and the Films of Evans Chan” in Between Home and World: A Reader in Hong Kong Cinema. Esther M.K. Cheung and Chu Yiu-wai (Ed.). Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Sacks, Harvey. Lectures on Conversation. Gail Jefferson (Ed.). Oxford: Blackwell, 1992.
Terr, L. Too Scared to Cry: Psychic Trauma in Childhood. New York: Harper & Row, 1990.
Tian, Yuan. Zebra Woods. Nan Hai Chu Ban Gong Si, 2002.
To Liv(e). Evans Chan (Dir.). Lindzay Chan, Josephine Ku, Wony Yiu Ming, Fung Kin Chung (Perf.). Mei Ah, 1992.
[1] This point is verified with the actress, Tian Yuan, in person.
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