SUNY series in Global Modernity. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2018. xii, 296 pp. (B&W photos.) US$27.95, paper. ISBN 978-1-4384-7168-6.
Found in Transition: Hong Kong Studies in the Age of China is a successor to and an updating of Yiu-Wai Chu’s earlier book, Lost in Transition: Hong Kong Culture in the Age of China, published in 2013 also by SUNY Press; this book discusses Hong Kong films and popular music over the past decade through a cultural studies lens. Much has happened in Hong Kong, and in Hong Kong cultural production, since the author’s earlier book, and so this is a welcome addition to the scholarly canon—although since it also portrays the ongoing diminishment of Hong Kong, it makes for depressing reading in many of its chapters.
The introduction, “Are We Dead Yet?” discusses the 2014 protests in Hong Kong and what has happened there since (although not including the protests of 2019, no doubt too recent); it references the phrase of a 2011 TV drama, “This city is dying, you know?” and how in Hong Kong today, “non-local” does not mean “internationalization,” but rather “mainlandization,” with Hong Kong’s “one country, two systems” increasingly slanting towards “one country.” Chapter 1, “My City? My Home? Hong Kong is not Hong Kong Any More,” explores Hong Kong identity, with Hong Kong becoming increasingly culturally unrecognizable to many of those who have long called it home. It considers the recent dystopian film Ten Years, about Hong Kong’s future under mainland control; and it examines at length the career of the actor Yun-Fat Chow and how he has continued to stand for Hong Kong, in his advocacy of the neighbourhood of Kowloon City against both neoliberal developers and Hong Kong’s mainlandization. Chapter 2, “Between and Beyond Postcolonialities,” considers Hong Kong writers—theorists of cultural studies and of literature in Hong Kong—and discusses Shu-meih Shih’s concept of “the Sinophone,” (74), allowing for critique as a method beyond nationalist pressures. Hong Kong literature has long not been offered in local universities, and only recently has begun receiving scholarly attention, as has Cantonese popular music as well; this is welcome but ironic, since Hong Kong as a separate culture and society is itself under threat.
Chapter 2 concludes with the hopeful remark that “Hong Kong’s cultural translations—neither pure nor contaminated—could become a specter between global capitalist and national systems that refuses to be exorcised” (89). However, the next chapter, “Who Speaks for Lion Rock?” depicts such an ongoing exorcism, in the diminishing role of Hong Kong’s language of Cantonese, particularly in education. “When one talks about Chinese in Hong Kong, the language increasingly refers to Putonghua [Mandarin], although more than 90 percent of the Hong Kong population speaks Cantonese” (92). Cantonese—not a dialect but a separate language, Chu vociferously and rightly maintains—is increasingly being supplanted by Mandarin in primary school instruction. Cantonese has been perhaps the most important element of Hong Kong cultural identity, as Chu points out, and its increasingly diminishing role in Hong Kong education does not bode well for the future of that identity.
Chapter 4, “Strategic Erasure and Milkyway Image,” discusses Hong Kong films over the past decade, focusing particularly on the movement of Hong Kong filmmakers towards mainland co-productions and the lure of an unimaginably larger market, as well as state or self-censorship. “As the Chinese market has become imperative to the Hong Kong movie industry and the co-production model its golden rule, the ‘Mainlandization’ of Hong Kong filmmaking seems to be the only way out” (121). Chu addresses a number of directors who are able to do this in a way that still preserves the integrity of their Hong Kong roots, focusing most particularly on the prolific films and artistic vision of the director Johnnie To. Chapter 5, “Cantopop as Sonic Memories,” explores Cantopop music, particularly how it is featured in films as a way of evoking nostalgia, but also how, for films co-produced, it is featured in Mandarin versions as if in some sense negating the original Cantonese version. While songs of earlier eras such as the rock band Beyond’s “Under a Vast Sky” have continued to have enduring resonance today, as in the Umbrella Movement (91), all in all, “Hong Kong cinema, popular music, and television are falling from grace” (177). The book’s conclusion, “This is Just the Beginning…” sets forth “Hong Kong Studies as method,” tracing out the “complicated entanglements” which are “what made Hong Kong unique” (183). This seems to entail speaking for Hong Kong between mainlandization and the academic imperialism of the West—which is a touch ironic since this book was published in the US rather than in Hong Kong. This book concludes with a limited degree of optimism, as if to say, “somehow, keep the faith.”
I enjoyed reading Chu’s book and have learned a great deal from it, particularly in the author’s discussion of Hong Kong popular culture, which as a foreigner in Hong Kong I have felt partially excluded from. I thank him for writing it. At the same time, with the implementation of China’s new National Security Law over Hong Kong as a dramatic new step in Hong Kong’s mainlandization, I fear that, as if in answer to the query of this book’s introduction, “Are We Dead Yet?” the only future book he may be able to write about Hong Kong culture will be a funeral oration.
Gordon Mathews
The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong