Hong Kong Culture: Word and Image

6 - From Xu Xi to the Chief Executive: Hong Kong in the Dock

As Hong Kong’s culture and politics have become more inexorably intertwined over the years since the handover, it is significant that its cultural production has reflected a subtle shift away from pure escapism toward something approaching a critical discourse. While a few critical swallows cannot be represented as constituting a more lucid summer, to adapt the proverb, it is significant that the last dozen or so years have seen the rise of the film essay in Hong Kong, as well as the development of the critical essay form juxtaposing the cultural and political histories of the territory. Veteran Hong Kong film director Herman Yau and English-language writer and Hong Kong literary commentator Xu Xi would seem on the face of it an unlikely pairing. Yau’s work has been mainly in commercial genre cinema (including the genre of pornography), while Xu Xi’s efforts to develop both creative and critical discourses in relation to Englishlanguage writing in Hong Kong from the publication of her first stories, Chinese Walls and Daughters of Hui in the mid-1990s have been very much on the margin of recognition. Despite a presence in Hong Kong and a subject matter that is predominantly related to the city of her birth, her work sells better in the United States, her second home, than here. Perhaps what links Xu Xi and Yau is a distinct fearlessness about speaking their minds on controversial issues, not a characteristic that is always welcome in any Chinese society, or many other societies, for that matter. In the present chapter, I will discuss one of Xu Xi’s most critically acute recent essays, “A Short History of Our Shores”, and Herman Yau’s controversial 1999 film essay Danghau Tung Chee-hwa Fatlok /《等候董建華發落》(From the Queen to the Chief Executive) and argue that they are among the most uncomfortably critical and stylistically virtuosic works made in the SAR and designed to prick Hong 6 From Xu Xi to the Chief Executive: Hong Kong in the Dock Michael Ingham ch06(097-111).indd 97 25/05/2010 3:02 PM 98 Michael Ingham Kong’s post-1997 self-congratulatory bubble. In the spirit of the argumentative essay these works tend to go “against the grain” of conventional, collectivist thinking and received ideas about the city’s culture, institutions and heritage. Given the orientation of the present volume toward both word and image in the Hong Kong cultural scene, I believe it appropriate to posit a connection between two types of creative non-fiction that would not normally be bracketed together. Both are, however, as I will argue, exceptional examples of the essay in their respective media. Referring to these two examples, I will present the case for encouraging the development of more critically polemical work in arts and literature in Hong Kong. I will refer to other examples of implicitly critical artistic works and discuss the thin line between fiction and non-fiction that the essay form so often, as here, successfully straddles. The Essay Form — Film as Essay The essay can be defined as: any short composition in prose that undertakes to discuss a matter, express a point of view, persuade us to accept a thesis on any subject or simply entertain. The essay differs from a treatise or dissertation in its lack of pretension to be a systematic and complete exposition, and in being addressed to a general, rather than specialised, audience; as a consequence, the essay discusses its subject in non-technical fashion, and often with a liberal use of such devices as anecdote, striking illustration and humour to augment its appeal. (Abrams, 1985, p. 82) The word essay, which comes from the French word essai, means literally an attempt or “trial”. In literature it has come to describe a non-fictional form of writing, which discusses a topic or topics and usually attempts to persuade the reader of the wisdom of a particular ideological position or point of view. Such persuasion can be attempted implicitly or more explicitly by the writer, depending on style and temperament. The essay as cultural or political intervention has a long and distinguished tradition, and many eminent writers have tackled issues of culture or social and political injustice with varying degrees of formality or informality in style and tone. Frenchman Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) is generally acknowledged as the father of the modern essay, although his essais were themselves influenced by the meditations of Roman authors such as MarcusAurelius. Some essays adopt...