Mabel Cheung Yuen-Ting's An Autumn's Tale

4. An Autumn's Tale, Assimilation, and the American Dream

An Autumn's TaLe, Assimilation, and the American Dream Although there are many powerful myths and ideologies that circulate in U.S. society, among the most powerful is the notion of the American dream. While there is no one specific definition of the dream,Americans generally understand the meaning to be that if one works hard, opportunities for success are plentiful in the United States. As Jennifer L. Hochschild has noted in her work on the ideology of the American dream, the dream is the “faith that an individual can attain success and virtue through strenuous efforts."l The connection between the newly arrived immigrant and the American dream in literature is present in well-known texts by diverse authors such as Anzia Yezierska, Jane Addams, Gus Lee, Amy Tan, Younghill Kang, and Carlos Bulosan. On the big screen, the quest for (and often failure to fulfill) the American dream is among Hollywood's most favored plotlines. Stories of immigrants who come to the U.S. (and often New York City) to pursue happiness and success include iconic films such as J7ze Goφ0the.乃 Avalon, Coming to America, Far andAwa，μand Titanic. "這這話。 MABEL CHEUNG YUEN.TING'S AN AUTUMN'S TALE The popularity ofAmerican dream narratives spills beyond the geographic borders of the United States. Many people from various countries travel to and from “America" in virtual (via popular culture) and real time, in the process re-fashioning and claiming the dream as their own. In the case of Hong Kong - dubbed by Milton Friedman as the ultimate free market economy - it is not surprising that much ofthe rhetoric of aspiration within civil society parallels that which circulates in the U.S. Narratives of upward mobility and economic success circulate freely in the media，的 if to prove that “making it" in Hong Kong is well within reach regardless of who is in charge - Britain before 1997, Beijing after. In the American Studies courses 1have taught at the University of Hong Kong,1notice that students warm to the notion of the dream. They believe that Hong Kong offers opportunities for success if they are willing to work hard enough, and they see the notion as universal rather than American. In the climate of uncertainty that has marked much of Hong Kong's past, as well as its present, self-reliance offers some refuge. For students at least, and arguably for many in Hong Kong who have access to American ideology via travel, exchange, dual citizenship, or popular culture,the rhetoric ofthe dream offers hope and a possible way forward. Despite (or perhaps because of) colonialism before 1997, and the still evolving paternalism ofBeijing in the present, Hong Kong people generally embrace individual narratives of self-improvement over critiques of structural or institutional inadequacy. Hong Kong migration films both affirm and critique the embrace. Canny in their knowledge of various power dynamics in the postcolonialjglobal-imperial rush for diverse types of capital among governments, corporations, and individuals, films likeAnAutumn 台 Tale enter the conversation about aspiration and migration in a moment of “flexible citizenship."2 Critiquing not only the American dream but American multiculturalism and the “comforting narratives of liberal inclusion" that mask U.S. AN AUTUMN'S TALE， 的SIMILATI 酬， AND THE AMERICAN DREAM 峙話。 imperialism at home and abroad (something that scholars such as Victor Bascara and others in Asian American and Postcolonial Studies are doing more intentionally), migration melodramas like AnAutumn 台 Tale manage to simultaneously a缸Ïrm and lampoon the “self-made man" mentality on both sides of the Pacific.3 As Hong Kong films interrogate various “American" cultural orthodoxies,they also manage to subtly explore repressed historical connections between the U.S. and Hong KongjChina. Pushing the discussion of race and ethnicity in the U.S. beyond the Black and White binary, Hong Kong films often simultaneously claim and contest the American dream for the post-1965 Hong Kong Chinese “astronaut." In the process, they offer a view of multiculturalism that is more than a clich已. As Kwai-Cheung Lo writes, since “the Asian role is not fixated in the dominant racial discourse, Hong Kong film people can take the opportunity to go between one culture and another and increase their agency in remaking the transnational codification of their identity.叫 In the case of An Au的mn 台 Tale， the transnational codification of self is in process for the characters on screen as well as for many of those involved...