Running on Trauma:Cultural Identities in Evans Chan’s To Liv(e) and Yan Yan Mak’s Butterfly

By Edmund Lee

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 China stay on and influence their identity formation up to recent days. The traumatic experience from the Tiananmen Square Massacre has left a scar in the mind of most Hong Kong people at that time, especially because of the city’s impending return to the rule of Chinese authority in 1997. The local cinema, as a form of aesthetic representation, is a popular arena for the young people of that generation to reenact that particular stage of their past; in a large amount of movies, ranging from Evans Chan’s Crossings (1994), Ann Hui’s Ordinary Heroes (1998), Mabel Cheung’s City of Glass (1998) to Vincent Chui’s Leaving in Sorrow (2001), the trauma of June Fourth 1989 is repeatedly re-presented, and this process of aesthetic articulation in turn demonstrates a change in the ways we remember the incident.

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 Hong Kong, the cultural identities of the local people are fundamentally shaped by their experience towards the June Fourth incident as well as their ways to cope with that truth, as shown by the tides of emigration, for example. To a large extent, that incident functions to these people in the same way a trauma functions to mental patients, and the responses of the people do display a tendency towards amnesia, and this could be observed in the discussions of the following sections.

[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 Hong Kong people and their incapability to establish a concrete cultural identity for themselves might be viewed as a parallel to the same experiences in the myth of Oedipus complex proposed by Sigmund Freud, which describes the repression of sexual desires of boys for their mothers and the trauma during the confrontation with such incest taboo. In the case of Hong Kong, “under the ruthless oppression of the grand narrative, the powerless citizens, students and females all face the threat of the guns (the symbol of phallic power)” (Lee). Putting the entire situation into our context, the apprehension of Hong Kong people (the castration anxiety) is generated by the trauma they went through in year 1989, where they are tormented with the struggle between their passion for the (mother) nation and their fear of the brutal Chinese government (the authority of the father). The sentiment to the trauma remains as a repressed piece of memory in people’s mind; this assumption in turn facilitates our analysis of the different representations of the incident in the Hong Kong narrative cinema.

[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 Hong Kong citizens, as explained in the previous part. To put it briefly, the people involved in these social movements love their country passionately, but they find that their passion hurts them so much that it still comes back to haunt them until recent time. In To Liv(e), Tony (played by Wong Yiu Ming) is in love with an older, divorced woman, Teresa, (played by Josephine Ku) who has a child with her, and the relationship is strongly rejected by the family, which represents the oppression of the traditional Chinese values; in Butterfly, Flavia (played by Josie Ho) is a married woman whose homosexual desire towards a young woman, Yip, (played by Tian Yuan) leads to a similar rejection from her family and the breakdown of her marriage. These persona traumas, akin to the political ones, can never be solely redeemed; in Butterfly, Flavia never describes her mother’s suicide attempts verbally, but the recurrent images continue to haunt the protagonist and are unlikely to go away soon.

[film still II from the butterfly]

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 ‘Hong Kong people’ is first formed by an insider/outsider mentality in the 1970s. Although the population of this city is made up of Chinese immigrants arriving at different periods of time, the images attached to them differentiate significantly. The earlier immigrants in the 1950s and 60s are called ‘Tai Heung-lei’, roughly meaning ‘country bumpkins’, a social label without discriminatory nature (Ma, 66). Stuart Hall has proposed that “[s]tereotyping … is part of the maintenance of social and symbolic order. [It determines] what ‘belongs’ and what does not or is ‘Other’, between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’, Us and Them” (258). This process is evident in Hong Kong as the mentioned local identity is built up in the 1970s precisely by the establishing of the newer immigrants as the inferior ‘outsiders’. The binary opposites between Hong Kong people and Mainland Chinese are clear-cut at that time, but they grow increasingly obscure as the relationship between the two develops.

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 Hong Kong took on the most dramatic turn. During that period, the membership collection of Hong Konger/mainland Chinese is abandoned in favour of another collection – the identification process with China was split into two parts, as we grouped the Hong Kong population together with the Chinese population and established the brutal Chinese authority as the ‘outsider’ in this membership collection. In other words, at that moment we strongly identified ourselves both with (the ‘insider’ group of human beings fighting for their basic rights) and against (the ‘outsider’ group of Chinese government) China. In the local cinema, the impact of this dramatic change is evident in its shift from the desinicization process originated from the Hong Kong New Wave movement, to the rising subgenres about emigration, new immigrants to foreign lands, and mainland Chinese abroad in Hong Kong (Marchetti, 219).

The identities of Hong Kong were somewhat chaotic throughout the 1990s. The shock of the traumatic moment in 1989 might have its stem from the suddenly obscured status of Hong Kong identities – the insider/outsider configurations become unclear, and the people are genuinely afraid of being the outsiders. In the movie To Liv(e), the fear of being excluded is manifest: as a character, Trini, reflects on her journey to Beijing during the mid-summer in 1989, and concludes that Hong Kong people are neither Chinese nor British, the population has virtually become the Other, as “a bastardized link between a China weighed down by tradition and the clamorous demands of modernity” (Chan, 61). Referring back to the theories of Stuart Hall, “stereotypes refer as much to what is imagined in fantasy as to what is perceived as ‘real’. And, what is visually produced, by the practices of representation is only half the story. The other half – the deeper meaning – lies in what is not being said, but is being fantasized, what is implied but cannot be shown” (263). In recent years, the people of Hong Kong have witnessed a dramatic post-transition re-sinicization process. This conscious glorification of China may only serve to cover the deeper, more troubling fantasy of China being a potential threat to Hong Kong, or simply, the reality that they now depend on the financial help and benefits from China to survive.

[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 Hong Kong people, yet, we should note that our cultural identities nowadays are no longer as simple as before, as the world has entered the postmodern age, and the city has become a mixture of hybridities. On this, Gina Marchetti states that “when the cosmopolitan world of Hong Kong … promises a certain freedom associated with the hybridity of the metropolitan experience, it also represents a world in which identity is cast adrift and there is no safe haven” (215). In To Liv(e), Rubie has mistaken the movie Heaven Can Wait for Days of Heaven, and bemoans that it is “difficult to keep track of these ‘heavens’. So many of them!” (Chan, 38). And this may not be a joke after all!

[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 Hong Kong, speaks Putonghua and English, but is supposedly not a Chinese in the story.[1] Whereas the 1992 version of hybridized character, Rubie, embodies the hybridization of Hong Kong and foreign high culture, the latest revision, the character Yip, displays the newly added Chinese dimension into the context, reflecting the ongoing interaction between Hong Kong and China.

[the butterfly]

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 Hong Kong cinema.

[the butterfly]

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 Hong Kong is a linguistically hybridized being is a fact that the film is not obliged to transcend (5)

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 Hong Kong people, but the opinions of the linguistically subaltern groups are silenced by the dominant discourse presented ‘for’ them by the intellectuals; objectivity is lost, and the represented public is not “agents of their own histories” (Loomba, 244). Even when we look into the situation on the more obvious, perception level, the spectators of the movie, whether English is Hong Kong’s official language or not, is inevitably alienated by the language that is hardly used in their daily life. It is a bit naïve to expect the general audience to have a strong sense of feeling to the narrative, no matter how good the argument the film presents, or how close the issues the film addresses are to them, because to most of the audiences, the coding of the film itself has already formed the first stage of alienation.

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 China. In To Liv(e), the Hong Kong people are anxious to find out if they are British or Chinese, and are desperate as they find themselves neither. Applying an Ingmar Bergman quote in the film script, “reality is longing” (Chan, 60). After the anxiety level has decreased with the passing of 1997, the longing is relaxed and the reality takes on a new look. In Butterfly, identity is no longer defined by the bigger issue of nationality, but is connected to personal experience and economic considerations. Flashback and newsreel footage are still used, but the primary focus has now fallen on the emotions instead of politics; when the character Yip finally introduces herself to Flavia in details, she talks only about her past lovers and money matters. In the post-97 Hong Kong, the longing for national identification is pacified, and the reality retreats back to the personal and material level. “Tiananmen anchors the slippery identities of the films’ characters as well as the slippery identities those characters represent as citizens of Hong Kong” (Marchetti, 205). ‘But even the Hong Kong people, who would like to keep the history and sentiment distinct in their memory, can speak only of the one, because the recollection of the other, in the lack of words to fix it, has been lost.’

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.

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[1] This point is verified with the actress, Tian Yuan, in person.