Hong Kong Viscera

by Koon-Chung Chan

published in Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 10, No.4, December 2007

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It was said pre-colonial Hong Kong was an island of barren rocks. That was a half-truth. There were pockets of natives living on boats or in various walled communities, some complete with their own sophisticated classical education institutions, long before there were colonialists. But the natives were soon out-numbered by settlers, mostly Han Chinese from the mainland and particularly from the Guangdong area: Cantonese, Hakkas, Hoklos and Tankas, who for motley reasons preferred to live in the free port. Their dialects were almost incomprehensible to each other. On the eve of the Pacific War, the population reached one and a half million. Most fled the colony to the mainland during the Japanese imperialist occupation. Only half a million people remained in 1945. It soon ballooned to over 2 million in 1951. The year 1949 alone witnessed an influx of nearly 900,000 people from the mainland. Some were returnees from Guangdong, but there were also phalanxes of new migrants, refugees fleeing communism from every part of China. To them Hong Kong was a safe haven, a sojourn that protected them until they could return to China, or a jumping-board for migration to other countries. Many of them became settlers eventually. The word ‘local’ did not have a coherent meaning until the post-war local-born baby boomers came of age in the 1970s, when the identity of Hongkongers, in contrast to the mainlanders, was minted.

Culturally it makes no sense to say the end of the colonial rule will facilitate the re-emergence of local culture. It could not possibly be referring to a pristine, pre-colonial culture. It is also senseless to presume an essentialist Chinese culture, traditional or contemporary. As for locally generated culture that could be conveniently called Hong Kong’s indigenous culture – a mongrel culture, it had always existed and flourished during colonial times.

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The colonial authority’s pragmatic ‘benign neglect’ resulted in a de facto multicultural condition that had allowed local culture to subsist largely untrammeled since early colonial days. Before 1949, local mongrel culture and Guangdong indigenous culture nourished each other. Hong Kong-made movies in Cantonese or Hoklo dialects were watched in Guangdong, while Cantonese opera troupes routinely travelled back and forth between Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Macau and other parts of Guangdong. After 1949, immigrants from other parts of China brought their own eclectic indigenous cultures to Hong Kong. Among the new immigrants were filmmakers, singers, writers and scholars from various provinces but particularly from Shanghai, then the centre of Chinese national cultural industries. They might speak Shanghainese in private, but their artistic outputs were in Mandarin, already the official national language. Mandarin songs became Hong Kong’s pop songs; Mandarin-speaking movies out-performed Cantonese-speaking productions at the local box office, and the prolific ‘south-bound’ writers penned most of the newspaper columns and serialized novels. Meanwhile, there were English newspapers, radio, television and Hollywood movies for the consumption of the expatriate communities and the growing population of English-speaking bilingual locals. Anglo-American pop songs, fashion and youth culture captured the imagination of the post-1949 boomer generation, especially after The Beatles’ visit to Hong Kong during its first world tour in 1964. English, Mandarin and Cantonese pop and elite cultures together formed a trans-cultural space where the locals, especially educated young people, could cross-over and exercise cultural sampling without much difficulty.

When the boomers came of age, their regurgitated cultural curds were mongrelized beyond salvage. With all its impurity, excess and misappropriation, a Hong Kong style appeared on the horizon, not meant to be admired but to be enjoyed by the locals – and it was eventually consumed in other parts of the world. Hong Kong movies, TV series and Cantopop music, all in Cantonese this time, not only dominated the local market as substitutes for imported English and Mandarin products, but were also exported to neighboring areas, including mainland China, so much so that they constituted what one radical Taiwanese critic called a ‘sub-imperialist’ condition. This all happened in the late 1970s and the 1980s, long before the end of the colonial rule in 1997.

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Local writers have also been trying out different strategies of Chinese writings in the colony. In the 1950s and the 1960s, Hong Kong was called ‘the fortunate land’ (fu di) or ‘heaven’ (tian tang) by those who fled Communism. The pro-government mainstream press routinely pleaded to the discontented masses not to ‘rock the boat’ – the logic of the lesser evil, colonialism or Communism, prevailed here. Left-leaning or anti-colonial writers however were more inclined to adopt realist narratives, in an often tendentious attempt to show the plight of the colonial under-class, though in the Communist mainland, it was agitprop revolutionary romanticism rather than European high realism that was officially promoted or tolerated.

Some of the less partisan writers understandably wanted none of the above and turned to other genres. Closely following trends of the West, a small group of ‘serious’ Hong Kong writers freely experimented with the writing styles of stream of consciousness, existentialism, magical realism and meta-fiction, before similar techniques were attempted by their contemporaries in Taiwan and the mainland. These works were later canonized not only for their early use of modernist or post-modernist techniques but also for their penetrating portrayals of the otherwise ineffable Hong Kong. It would be therefore unfair to regard these modernist writings as ‘co-authors’ of colonialism, as non-Western modernist literature was sometimes accused of in postcolonial literary criticism. Serious literary works in Hong Kong were rare and marginalized. The very act of writing serious literature – realist or modernist – was itself a conscious resistance to the mainstream market-oriented value which was also the core value of late colonialism in Hong Kong. Some of the modernist attempts, with their uncanny narratives and stylistic pastiche, were prescient in depicting the fledgling local identity, which was a product of hybridization.

Middle-brow literature also exhibited distinctively Hong Kong characteristics. Popular ‘women’s’ novels often wrote about the romantic vicissitudes of career women, together with their consumerist lifestyle. They had been instrumental in defining what an educated and often affluent, urbane and independent Hong Kong woman should be like. Coloniality was seldom the subject matter. Characters in the novels often considered themselves sophisticated denizens of a cosmopolitan city called Hong Kong.

Even more widely read were serialized fable writings – martial arts novels. In its early days of the 1950s and 1960s, this genre was simply read as entertainment. Now the best of the martial-arts novels are considered literary classics. Their setting was pre-modern China. Though they were not about Hong Kong, some of them made allegorical reference to the political situation of contemporary China. The martial art genre allowed its writers greater freedom to talk about traditional Chinese culture and history, the literati class’ strategy of resistance to the westernizing colony and the tradition-trashing of Communist China. These novels were scribed in a polished form of written Chinese that added to their prestige. As a result, many local readers’ perception of Chinese history and culture was  heavily mediated by the narratives of martial art novels.

Though there were some literary works using vernacular Cantonese, or a combination of Cantonese dialect and formal written Chinese, they were often looked down upon by the local elites. For a long time, only satirical short essays and serialized low-brow fictions on contemporary plebian subject matters were written in hybrid Cantonese-Chinese. The more ambitious literary works were in formal written Chinese, at most inserting a few Cantonese words to enhance local colour. Even the dialogues in the realist novels about Hong Kong were mostly in formal written Chinese, instead of the popular Cantonese dialect. Cantonese-speaking local writers were known for their anxiety of inadequacy over mastering formal written Chinese largely based on Mandarin and northern dialects. Though the inclusion of Cantonese dialect in published works has been more common in recent years, hybrid Cantonese-Chinese could not hope to replace formal written Chinese. A hybrid Cantonese-Chinese work will be almost impossible for easy reading even to the Cantonese-speaking locals, since reading habits have been built on formal written Chinese for generations. Whether this could be considered a handicap – a discursive stuttering - for the locals who tried to articulate in its own tongue needs further exploration.