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Wong Bik Wan "Losing the City" - Coggle Diagram
Wong Bik Wan "Losing the City"
Themes
People in Transit
○ What was the main cause of emigration in the early 1990s? Reunification → 'Handover' of Hong Kong to China
“In the context of Hong Kong in the late 1990s, the longing for home is easily understood: tens of thousands left their families and friends in Hong Kong to become ‘astronauts,’ waiting for citizenship abroad, caught between homes, and cut off from places of emotional attachment and relationships. (49)
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○ Influx of pop. (into Hong Kong) ○ Political turbulences in China and other areas ○ Example: "Southern sojourners", refugees ○ Outflow of pop. (from Hong Kong) ○ Since the late 60s ○ Especially since the 80s: a response to the 1997 handover Ex: "upper middle-class and upper-class diaspora" in the late 20th C.
Aihwa Ong: Since the 1960s, Overseas Chinese from Hong Kong, but also from throughout Southeast Asia, often seek residential rights in Western countries to escape current and anticipated political discrimination and upheavals that are considered detrimental to their businesses and family security.” (746) • “By the 1980s, fear of the imminent reversion to China rule and its potential threat to the Hong Kong economy generated a steady emigration stream, mainly to Western countries.” (749)
1997 Transition
○ 1942-97: British Colony
○ 1997 onwards: Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR)
○"Crisis of disappearance"
"A State of Disappearance"
1) Xi Xi, "Marvels of a Floating City"
"floating identity" of HK
○ "a city of transients"
"Fin-de-siècle overtones"
○ "paradoxical phenomenon of doom and boom"; although there might be an upcoming doom, there might be an emerging boom
2) "Strange dialectic b/w autonomy and dependency"
3) "Reverse hallucination: Not seeing what is there"; not being able to see what's there
quasi-colonial situation post-1997
Home/homelessness
“
At the same time, home, even for those who never left, became a strange place when Hong Kong's ‘return’ to China
meant an enforced adoption of alien political, historical, and cultural legacies and practices
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China's campaign to reabsorb HK, in having HK people having patriotic love to motherland
return to a familial embrace
hoped that the idea of China as ‘homeland’ would offer a new object of affection for any lingering political loyalties to Great Britain
○ "Written in the thriller mode, the story is set on the eve of the 1997 turnover, invoking home as an uncanny trope with a strong sense of displacement and desperation ○ Uncanny → literally means "unhomely"
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uncanny: "unhomely"; the coming back of something familiar as unfamiliar; paradoxical nature of A & B
Home
: such imposed notions of home and the familial were experienced as an oppressive burden. This home to which the Hong Kong people return turns out to be unheimlich and becomes a source of anxiety and alienation.”
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e.g. Chan Lo Yuen returning to HK
Polyphony
"multiple voices"
*themes in Wong's work include home, pathos, nostalgia + violence
Concepts/Topics
2) Voice/polyphony
Jim Hak Ming, Evans, Chan Lo Yuen; all three different voices present across text
revolves around character narratives, where each explain their relation to the 1997 handover's effects and repercussions, + own respective storylines happening in story
Voice characteristics:
○ Who speaks?
○ Who speaks to whom?
○ Who speaks when?
○ Who speaks what language?
○Who speaks with what authority?
3) narrative situation, narrator, focalizer, object of focalization, etc.
each character's narrative situation has narrator themselves, and different focalizers, object of focalization, etc.; e.g.
Jim Hak Ming; object of focalization is Chan Lo Yuen, Mei and children when seeing them enter house for first time
Chan Lo Yuen; object of focalization being Mei and his kids
Evans; object of focalization being Valerie
1) home/homeland
concept is understood amidst 1997 handover events
; reunification with motherland, with "homeland:
Chan Lo Yuen and family emigrating out of "homeland"; leaving their home in hopes of better lives
Chan Lo Yuen and Mei contemplating whether they should return "home"; feeling as outsiders in West, constantly moving, not having a "home"
4) memory
Hong Kong as a "mediated past"
e.g. when Chan Lo Yuen and Mei reminisce about Hong Kong when sitting under a tree, or when Chan Lo Yuen goes back to HK and see all its changes
5) identity
who are Hong Kong people with 1997 reunification? Are they Chinese, are they Hong Kongonese?
Chan Lo Yuen and family struggling with their identity, not fitting it in the outside world, etc.