Pilgrimages: Memories of Colonial Macau and Hong Kong

Introduction: Life Writing and Borderlands

Introduction: Life Writing and Borderlands 1 Introduction: Life Writing and Borderlands Pilgrimages: Memories of Colonial Macau and Hong Kong 2 I teach and research cultural studies, an area that, in Ien Ang’s analysis, “conceives of itself as a borderland formation, an open-ended and multivocal discursive formation.” Certainly, the implied transcultural and transnational nature of intellectual borderlands appeals greatly to someone who grew up in one culture and nation and works in another culture and carries a dif ferent passport. Furthermore, borderland existence, to borrow Ang’s term, promises liberation from a past perceived as burdened with the inauthentic baggage of colonial acculturation. Thus, I experience borderland existence both geographically and metaphorically. However, this liberation is short-lived when I start writing a memoir of my childhood and teenage years in Hong Kong, when past and present confront each other not as a series of teleological events but as territorial conflicts. Persistently, my impulse to write as-I-know-it is curbed by either a lack of architectural and physical evidence, or by finding my knowledge negated by another witness. The emotional need to “write back,” if not postcolonially to the metropolitan centre, then to some personal psychological repository, is frequently checked by the life-long training of writing rationally. And I am forcibly struck by the irony that a postcolonialist should find herself indulging in a nostalgic journey to a lost colonial past. Life writing, then, as practised by an academic, becomes an anxiety-ridden borderland existence as one confronts one’s past, a practice often giving the impression of slipping out of the control of intellectual debates and discussions. Much of my present intellectual profile has been shaped by specific Hong Kong places in my youth, which I had considered to be a suitable starting point for recalling my early life. First and foremost is the Catholic convent I attended. Like other writers (for example, Edna O’Brien, Jean Rhys, Simone de Beauvoir), I find growing up under the influence of nuns and the rituals of the Catholic church of primal importance in my life. I am partial to clothes that have a flowing shape because they remind me of the habit of the nuns. I prefer the combination of black and white because, for years, those were the colours worn by my teachers. I enjoy choral music because we listened to it every morning at assembly. The sense of guilt and the need for Introduction: Life Writing and Borderlands 3 perpetual redemption have been indelibly ingrained in me. The ideal preparation to write my memoir would be to go back to the convent and experience a day-in-the-life-of again, in order to rediscover and reassess what growing up in a convent would be like from an adult perspective. Sadly, though the building is still there, it has been sold to some private and secular educational enterprise. No nuns, no morning assembly, no Wednesday-afternoon chapel, no Latin mass. Apart from the convent library, I learned to love reading at two colonial outposts in Hong Kong in the 60s — the United States Information Service and the British Council Reading Room. In my memoir, I dwell with great affection on these places. They provided a sanctuary for a young girl who needed an escape — from family obligations, from the Chinese culture that she was alienated from because of her colonial and convent education, from a general philistine culture of trade that energized the city. In my memory, the books in the libraries blocked out the noise and reality from the outside world the way the cork-lined walls protected Proust as he sat in his bed to write. I took no pictures of these places, but I remember them well and with affection. Both libraries have been gone since the 90s or earlier. They might exist in other forms in the age of the internet; but gone are the rooms lined with book shelves and furnished with refectory tables and green-shaded lamps. How much, then, are these affectionate pictures a form of nostalgic indulgence, since I do not even have an existing architectural structure to compare them with? As if finding no architectural witness to my memory were not enough to undermine my will to recall, my mother, the only living witness to my childhood, disagreed with me on certain key moments when we discussed them. My mother is in her eighties...