Ann Hui’s Song of the Exile

Introduction

introduction Song of the Exile was released in Hong Kong from 27 April 1990 to 16 May 1990, and grossed over HK$3,071,212 (MPIA 1990). Produced by Cos Group and distributed by Golden Harvest, the film consolidated the career of the director, Ann On-wah Hui, Hong Kong’s ‘most influential director in the ’80s’ and ‘one of Asia’s premium directors’ (Kei 1994; Foong 2001). Hui was born in Anshan, a Chinese iron-mining city in Liaoning Province, Manchuria, in 1947 to a Japanese mother and Chinese father. When she was two, her family moved to the Portugueseadministered Macau. At the age of five, her family moved to Hong Kong. Hui studied English at primary school, and later wrote her Masters thesis on Alain Robbe-Grillet as a student of comparative literature at Hong Kong University. Between 1972 and 1974, she trained at London Film School. In 1973, she returned to Hong Kong and worked as an office assistant to the late Beijing-born, Hong Kong–based director King Hu for three months where she helped to check the English subtitles to A Touch of Zen (Berry 2005: 426). ● ann hui’s Song of thE ExilE 2 She then joined Hong Kong’s Television Broadcasting Limited (TVB) for eighteen months, where she directed nearly twenty episodes of tele-dramas and documentaries, some on 16mm (Doraiswamy 1990: 21). In 1977, she directed six episodes for the Independent Commission Against Corruption, a body set up to combat the triad bribery of Chinese and British police officers, and made three featurettes in the series Below the Lion Rock, of which the best known is Boy from Vietnam. Hui is part of the Hong Kong New Wave that inaugurated a new style and a local consciousness for cinema in the 1980s. She introduced the themes of displacement and migration that have become key features of the New Hong Kong cinema. As Hong Kong’s foremost female director, her films also showcase women in the vicissitudes of their everyday intimacies, in the domesticity of the home and their transformation in public life. From The Secret (1979) to Night and Fog (2009), Hui’s cinema has traversed the materiality of bodies, cities, memories and affect. In a career that spans three decades, Hui has been director, producer, writer and actress in more than thirty films. This book examines her ninth film, Song of the Exile, undoubtedly one of her finest. Song of the Exile is based on Hui’s semi-autobiographical story about a daughter coming to terms with her mother’s Japanese identity. When it was released in 1990, the film’s themes of crosscultural alienation, inter-ethnic marriage, generational reconciliation and divided loyalties resonated with the British colony’s 1997 transition to Chinese sovereignty. Its narratives of migration also spoke to the displacement of the Hong Kong people as they left the colony in panic to escape the impending Chinese rule. Almost two decades after its release, and ten years on from Hong Kong’s handover, Hong Kong’s emigrants have returned as new diasporic settlers, and the film is still a perennial favourite among global cinephiles and international Hong Kong cinema students. In Hong Kong and between the film aficionados, Song of the Exile is a new ● introDuCtion 3 Hong Kong film classic. Many consider it the most haunting and poignant of Hui’s films. Existing analyses of the film are in short essays and frame it as exemplary tropes for border crossing, gendered modernity, generic transformation and exile cinema (Abbas 1997a; Barlow 1998; Erens 2000; Freiberg 2002; Ho 2001; Naficy 2001). This book brings together and extends these existing analyses with a new sustained approach on the intersections between intimacy and diaspora. Theorizations of intimacy in Hong Kong cinema have focused predominantly on the films of Wong Kar-wai and Fruit Chan. These discussions highlight intimacy as private, erotic and sexual (Abbas 1997b; Leung 2008; Lu 2007, Marchetti 2006; Siegel 2001). This book extends these approaches by providing a theoretical framework for intimacy as an orientation that emphasizes certain modes of relationship, not simply tied to the private, erotic and sexual, but also associated with the limits of (diasporic) borders and the externality of risks.1 It incorporates Hong Kong film studies, cultural geography, film archival studies, postcolonial feminist film and spectatorship theories, media reception study, critical pedagogy, nostalgia and modernity studies, and critical theories on intimacy...