CLIT 2028 The City as Cultural Text                  Journal TWO

 

Hong Kong, a city as stranger

 

Started from September 2003, Hong Kong MTR decided to add Mandarin in broadcasting. 3 languages are pronounced: Cantonese, Mandarin and English.

 

Some of us express a dislike attitude, “It is for the good of mainland travelers?” Some said. One of my friends had an immediate reaction by saying that “HK’s peculiarity rests exactly on its distinctiveness between East and West. If HK is modified as a mere one of the provinces of China , Chinese tourists do not need to come, they can just visit their home; Westerners do not come either. They can directly travel to mainland. Why Hong Kong ? It would be the death of HK.”

 

Likelihood, unlikelihood; Multitude, solitude; Globalization, Nationalism. Hong Kong is and can only be a stranger, a wanderer, a nomad who neither stands out from nor fits in to the East or the West. We were politically colonized by Britain and ideologically colonized by the West; but no matter how modernized, internationalized and globalized Hong Kong is, from the Orientalists prospective, we are still alien and stranger who just mask with a Western face. Yet, we are “impure” Chinese; at least, in terms of life style, value and ideology, it is far more different from the People’s Republic of China . Before or after the handover, we are still the colony, and the colonizer is changed from Britain to China (Rey Chow, 1995/1998). We are situated in an embarrassing position, an abject, which is “fixed within a certain spatial circle – or within a group…but his position within it is fundamentally affected by the fact that he does not belong in it initially and that he brings qualities into it that are not, and cannot be, indigenous to it.” (Simmel, 1971, 143).

 

How can Hong Kong survive? We can uphold our identity as a stranger. The West treats us as a bridge to connect their economic network with mainland China ; and China sees Hong Kong as headquarter for her to explore outwardly to the world. We can only survive as a middleman. “the distance within this relation indicates that one who is close by is remote, but his strangeness indicates that one who is remote is near.” (Simmel, 1971, 143). Don’t forget, we are no “landowner”.

 

Some call us ‘HK bastard’, a child who is abandoned by his adopted father and unwilling to return to his biological mother, yet unable to be independent. We belong to everyone and at the same time belong to no one, and never belong to ourselves. But we are not alone – we still have a brother, whose name’s TAIWAN .

　

 

Reference:

Simmel, Georg. On Individuality and Social Forms. “The Stranger”. Eds. Donald N. Levine. Chicago & London : The University of Chicago Press. 1971

Chow, Rey. Ethics after Idealism: Theory, Culture, Ethnicity, Reading . “Between colonizers: Hong Kong ’s postcolonial self-writing in the 1990s”. Bloomington : Indian University Press. 1998