Troubling American Women: Narratives of Gender and Nation in Hong Kong

3. “A Second Voice of America”: Women’s Performances of Nation in Cold War Hong Kong

In the decades following the end of World War II, Hong Kong was a safe harbor for refugees fleeing the political turmoil on the Chinese mainland, a hot bed of ideological protest of various types (pro/anti-Communist, pro/ anti-Kuomintang, pro/anti-colonial), an R & R post for US military personnel fighting in Korea and Vietnam, a site of rapid industrialization, commercialization, and transport, and a Cold War perch from which to view events in China. Andrew Whitfield writes that by 1960 Hong Kong had also “become the eyes and ears of America’s cold war containment strategy in the Far East.”1 As the US increased its military, political, economic , and cultural influence in the region, American women came in greater numbers to live and work in Asia, and by the late 1950s members of the American Women’s Association (AWA) declared the organization “a second voice of America” in Hong Kong. Many women, in addition to those linked with the AWA, were also “voices of America” during the postwar/Cold War period. Some were publicly supportive of organized efforts to promote “the American way” in Hong Kong. Others, like the Maryknoll Sisters (a group of Catholic nuns, most of whom were from the US) worked diligently to distance themselves from national identity in their relief efforts for Hong Kong’s refugee populations .2 What these women had in common was that they were all part of an unprecedented outmigration of US citizens who were accepting jobs and assignments and establishing households in foreign countries at a time when American power (hard and soft) was ascendant. Concurrently, Hong Kong was changing rapidly. A home to more Chinese women as well, it was a place where people from many nations lived, worked, and worked out their identity crises. 3 “A Second Voice of America” Women’s Performances of Nation in Cold War Hong Kong 104 | Troubling American Women Because so many Americans moved beyond the shores of the US in this period, the chapter begins by placing events in Hong Kong in a broad context, touching on some of the ways in which the expatriate experience in this era was gendered. Men proffered views of how American women should behave when living overseas. Postwar/Cold War conduct literature, written for families of those who were stationed in Asia as employees of US corporations, the military, or the diplomatic corps, counseled women, particularly wives accompanying husbands on overseas assignments, to be aware of their roles as unofficial ambassadors abroad. If, as Donald Pease asserts, “American exceptionalism played as the encompassing fantasy of the cold war state,” it is worth noting that the fantasy itself was created, largely, by men who, generally speaking, projected their own gendered notions of citizenship onto women. Women then embraced, reconceptualized , or challenged various aspects of “the cold war exceptionalist fantasy” in their narratives.3 Following a brief discussion of conduct literature for expatriate women, the chapter considers two models of American womanhood evident in Hong Kong during this time: the manifestation of institutionalized exceptionalism as exemplified by the AWA, and a retreat from both exceptionalism and American identity in the autobiographical novel The Spring Wind by Gladis DePree. In the second part of the chapter, the focus shifts to the ways in which stereotypes of American girlhood and womanhood were utilized in performances of a new type of modernity and femininity in Hong Kong in this period. I argue that tropes of Hong Kong exceptionalism were informed, in part, by Hong Kongers’ appropriation of certain aspects of American culture, identities, values, and lifestyles, including American exceptionalism . Two examples of this process will be considered: The Cathay Studio films starring Grace Chang, and the autobiography of Catherine Woo Mo Han, A Hong Kong Story before 1997. Read together, the narratives and examples speak to the diversity of the types of Americanization that circulated in Hong Kong in the Cold War era. Women’s narratives in this period represent the reciprocal flows of culture. On one hand, as more Americans came to Hong Kong they increasingly exerted influence, both individually and collectively, in certain settings. However, a more diffuse and arguably more powerful American presence began to make itself known in the postwar period as local Chinese populations embraced certain “American” myths and products in “A Second Voice of America” | 105 unique and unanticipated ways. Speaking of this presence, and of what it meant to grow...