Hong Kong Culture: Word and Image

4 - Chinese English, English Chinese: Biliteracy and Translation

In the past decade, local activism has encouraged public interest in cultural identity but there is little doubt that the global attention on Hong Kong evident around 1997 has receded. As one local historian and sinophone literary scholar lamented, Before 1997, Hong Kong was the focal point of the world. Everywhere, there was “Hong Kong fever”, and a whole mass of publications on many areas of Hong Kong appeared…. Unfortunately, this turned out to be a “five-minute fever”. After 1997 … all that was splendor returned to quietude. Very quickly, everything seemed to have fallen back into silence. 九七前夕，香港曾經是全世界焦點，四處都鬧哄哄的出現 「香港熱」 ，各種各樣有 關香港的著作出了一大堆⋯⋯可惜的是，這原來只不過是五分鐘的熱度，九七過後 ⋯⋯絢爛很快便歸於平淡，一切都好像在瞬息間沉靜下來。 (Wong, 2007, pp. 176–77). The years before and after 1997 did witness an unprecedented surge of activity in research and publications on Hong Kong, notable among which was the work of Wong Wang-chi (王宏志) and his collaborators (see, for example, Wong et al. 1997, Wong 2000). Such work disseminated into the discourse on Hong Kong cultural identity and politics perspectives on the “local” opened 4 Chinese English, English Chinese: Biliteracy and Translation Elaine Yee Lin Ho* * Part of the research for this chapter is supported by a grant from the General Research Fund, University Grants Council, HKSAR. I would like to thank my colleagues, Janny Leung, Katherine Chen and Chris Hutton for sharing with me their knowledge on bilingualism and the language situation in Hong Kong. ch04(055-073).indd 55 25/05/2010 3:01 PM 56 Elaine Yee Lin Ho up by Western post-structuralist and postcolonialist thinking. They critiqued various attempts to translate a globally disseminated theoretical discourse on hybridity (and related terms) into specificities of Hong Kong cultural identity. At the same time, they made sustained efforts to conceptualize a non-essentialized “local” in terms of the postcolonial paradigm of “hybridity”. Gesturing towards Hong Kong’s colonial past, this discourse often posits hybridity in terms of interwoven Chinese (Zhong) and English (Ying) elements (see Lee in Wong et al., 1997; Chan in Wong et al., 1997; Wong, 2000). But surprisingly, Zhong and Ying rarely refer to actual languages. The silence on this point is surprising for at least three reasons: first, the linguistic turn instantiated in much post-structuralist and postcolonial theorizing; second, the language issue as a nexus of ongoing postcolonial contestation globally; third, and crucially, how Chinese and English, as linguistic media in interaction, inscribe and transcribe the movements of the local as hybrid. The third reason develops a particular urgency in view of the official HKSAR policy of biliteracy (Chinese and English) and trilingualism (Cantonese, Putonghua, English) announced in the chief executive’s policy address in 1999. The policy address sought to define within a wider aspirational framework measures concerning medium of instruction announced two years earlier, and to legitimize these measures. In 1997, the “Medium of Instruction Guidance” issued by the Education Department stated that a school should use Chinese as the medium of instruction unless it could demonstrate that its teachers and students were proficient to teach and learn in English. After a year, only 114 of the 411 secondary schools in Hong Kong were designated English medium; others with English medium status had to change to Chinese (Cantonese or Putonghua), and those that had planned to change to English found their plans thwarted. There was immediate outcry and protests from schools, pupils and parents, and their pressure on the government has never slackened in the decade since 1997. Recently, in 2009, the government decided to adopt what it called “fine-tuning” (微調), allowing schools to choose which medium of instruction to use and in which subject. This effectively means the abandonment of the 1997 policy and a return to the pre-1997 situation.1 Language policy issues were by no means straightforward before 1997, and the passion they can arouse in the public domain has been repeatedly attested to in the years since the handover. The medium of instruction controversy — important though it undoubtedly is — has telescoped Hong Kong’s complex linguistic geography so that it has become largely visible as a single issue. It has created a situation where public debate over language use becomes excessively focused on oral performance and classroom and pedagogical competency at the expense of other aspects and contexts of language use that “biliteracy” ch04(055-073).indd 56 25/05/2010 3:01 PM Chinese English, English Chinese: Biliteracy and Translation 57 and “trilingualism”2 involve. Because biliteracy concerns reading and writing rather than...