Family Exposures:  Victim’s Secrets

Paper for

After the End: Hong Kong Culture After 1997

International Conference, UCLA May 25-26, 2001

Esther C.M Yau
Film and New Media
Occidental College
yau@oxy.edu
© 2001

Family Exposures:  Victim’s Secrets

Esther C.M Yau

[Note:  This essay is a work-in-progress. Please do not cite in any form or use in any ways without permission of the author.]

I.       After the End: A New “Telos”?

Writing the introduction to a new Hong Kong cinema anthology not long ago, I named Hong Kong a “world city” and in doing so, followed a trend.  There are quite a few justifications for this move, not the least has to do with taking the opportunity to engage the questions raised by economic globalization, urban studies, and cinema studies in order to render open the many unexpected ways by which predicaments, paradoxes, and crisis in Hong Kong are connected, through mass-mediated cultures, to similar ones elsewhere, both formally and affectively (Yau, 2001).  Current studies of transnational urban spaces have constructed a broad terrain in “Asia Pacific” and the “city-states,” and previous studies of bounded cultures, traditions, developments in “East Asia” and “China” or “Japan” have shifted onto analysis of flows, publics, migrations, links and dislocations for interdisciplinary studies. Together with the idea of “world cities” is a different  mapping of what Saskia Sassen calls a “new geography of centers and margins”. This new geography does not erase the territorial marks of the nation-states but bring into sharp focus the cities and zones of dense transnational (corporate) presence which have brought the state, the judiciary, and the corporation within and across the nation-state(s) into constant negotiation and new alignments (Sassen, 1998).  What these new alignments mean for the cultures and cultural productions in the centers and margins remain to be explored. The language of globality is, as we know, misleading if it gives an impression of a totality that can be grasped, either theoretically or experientially; thus one needs to acknowledge that this new space of mass mediated cultures have not been mapped adequately, either by films or by film and media studies, despite the many works discussing “globalization”, “global cultures”, and “global screens”. Doreen Massey and Aihwa Ong have argued in their works that gendered hierarchy and patriarchal family relationships persist in the middle-class families’ transnational business undertakings, and women and men are implicated differently when it comes to mobility, networks, and given responsibilities or power (Massey, 1993; Ong, 1999).  Without considering gender and subjects in the issues of flows, publics, migrations, link, and dislocations, the discussions of globalization and transnationality can easily dovetail into another round of stubborn resistance of feminist/womanist insights, and follow the tracks of world systems discussions that assume neutral interests and stances (Tomlinson, 1999). In calling Hong Kong a “world city”, I consciously place Hong Kong and its movies in the map of an Asian imaginary and a global one, to identify the realignments that are made by a largely working-class base cinema adjust itself to accommodate the tastes of an expanded Asian and Western middle-class audiences, and the implications of gender relations in this context. Instead of closing off the idea of “Hong Kong”, this heading is intended to open up to the other side of the world city, as much as the “other shore of another heading” is what entails in speaking of a place like Europe today (Derrida, 1992).

The global market and the Asian regional market hangs over film-making like a renewed mandate presently. The Asian imaginary, treated by many as a more securable step to the global imaginary, has unhinged imagination from the pathos of colony, nation, and history and open up an economic horizon with Asian characteristics (Ho, 1999). Whereas hegemony in the southeast Asian film market has for decades provide an important source of income to sustain the Hong Kong film industry, the “new” Asia is associated the rise of middle class consumers who presumably have compatible tastes for popular music, movies, and brand-name products, and yet who hold relatively conservative family values as well as social values.  Besides the economic prospects, the Asian market promises a more seductive field: exotic Asian imagery beyond familiar ethnic Chinese ones,  locations and idioms that promise new stimulation and challenges and, new investment and collaborative expertise.  It is also more competitive in filmic terms, as young Asian directors exposed to art and commercial films like Hong Kong directors are coming up with interesting works that garner attention in film festivals.   With the accumulated experience of mainstream commercial filmmaking, the recent assurance that Hong Kong directors can make an American blockbuster within the Hollywood industry system, and that Hong Kong film auteurs can rival mainland Chinese ones in garnering festival awards and critical acclaim, there are renewed interests to capitalize on a more affluent Asian audience. Going for the “new” Asian market offer opportunities for Hong Kong filmmakers to play Hollywood in a smaller scale with action spectacles, with technocultural experiments, and with border-crossing narratives.

Strategic responses to the Asian imaginary and the global imaginary from the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) government have its think-tank and advisors (in a broad sense rather than limited to any one committee) offering plans and ideas that give rise to new names of Hong Kong as an “international metropole” in Asia, the “Digital Bay”, and so forth.  The swiftness with which Hong Kong SAR’s think-tank responds to the new challenges of economic globalization as well as China’s prospective entrance into the WTO parallels,  in some ways,  American corporation’s and university’s response to a similar set of concerns.  For the latter, the challenges of a multicultural and multiethnic world are consistently articulated with the shifting demands of global market and its cultural components.   To the extent that U.S. corporations, in their multinational stage since the 1960s, have already set the pattern of systematic transfer of capital and factories overseas and made both an enormous accumulation of capital and a remarkable improvement in communication, as Masao Miyoshi points out, they have developed complex ways of maximizing profits and reducing competition while playing to the persistent illusions of an American national community (Miyoshi, 1996, 84-93). In Miyoshi’s account, the new purpose of economic globalization is, simply, the transnational corporations (TNCs) seeking “maximum profit” rather than “progress for humanity”, and there shall be no illusions about the disappearance of colonialist and imperialist forces, which still impact upon nation-states in the rest of the world (93). Nevertheless, it is this “maximum profit” as the renewed purpose or “telos” that beckons many to adopt the purpose and mimic the behaviors of the TNCs.

In an essay on “financial globalization” written for the Hong Kong Economic Journal Monthly,  author Yi Xian-rong puts it bluntly in one of the concluding statements, “whether we like it or not, we have to actively participate [in economic and financial globalization], otherwise we will be ‘marginalized’, forever left in a backward position.” (Yi, 2000, 9) Yi also adds, “we are not to hold onto the luxurious hope that in this struggle in which the weak ones will be devoured by the strong ones, other people or other countries will take care of our profits and accumulation; instead, we have to do well in our own undertakings, so as to become the strong one in the equal competition of financial globalization.” (9; my literal translation). The argument is familiar to capital-savvy Hong Kong readers, though keeping oneself in the state of economic and financial prosperity now appears to be injunction and the only protection against becoming the abject entity or zone in this new geography.  This injunction has shaped everyday work rhythms as well as one’s sense of self worth. In the words of director Teddy Chen of The Purple Rain (1999), “Hong Kong people…can’t stop, because they are afraid to fall behind” (Ho, 1999, 60).  This fear is further complicated by the fact that the uncanny rush or withdrawal of “hot money” in stock markets currently spur shorter cycles of boom and bust. Falling behind is more than before an uncontrollable and unpredictable state of collective and individual experience.  The race with the TNCs and ceaseless transformation of the city’s economy and its people into competitive entities for whatever new standards have been noticed in world cities is thus not only a push for competitive knowledge, but also a source of deep anxiety that induces abject subjectivity for those who have fallen behind and “forever left in a backward position.”

Re-framing Hong Kong as a world city according to a critical or a survivalist perspective of economic globalization delineated above can thus mean envisioning the city by a renewed “telos” or end, now understood to have the prospect of rapid advancement as well as the horrors of terrible defeat.  Once again, Hong Kong’s economic self-worth stands in the forefront of a self-identification.  Aihwa Ong notes that the “market-driven sense of citizenship” came with colonial rule (Ong, 1999), and full citizenship in this sense is openly male, with some concession for the economically profitable female citizen, who is still considered an exception to women who are happy with complementing their husband’s public roles and supervising a home base for recovery from their busy work schedules.   With the SAR government given relative autonomy and responsibility for balancing its own budgets, this renewed “telos” is both a replay of the old market-driven sense of citizenship while it also struggles with  the given “end-points” of nation-state and colony: it accepts neither the “glorious end” of the colonial era (in which colonialism reinstates itself as a monitoring gaze, measuring all performance as a sort of “coming of age” of British capitalist preparation), nor the pathos of a Hong Kong “between colonizers” (in whose narratives the locals, lacking sovereignty, never meet up with the political cultures of its new and old masters let alone making meaningful departures).  The sway of these “end-points” of colonial discourse as named above is still strong, and the local economic “heroes” during the Asian financial crisis, from Yam Chi-kong of the Monetary Authority to Tsang Yam-yuen as Financial Secretary (before he succeeded Ansen Chan) confirm the persistence of gendered and market-driven citizenship beyond the year 1997.  

The two dictionary meanings of “end,” one as a point of termination and the other as the “aim” or “purpose”, give room to two readings of the phrase “After the End” in the conference title.  “After the End” can be an interesting starting point in exploring the state of things and the current perception of Hong Kong’s relationship to an objective temporal past and projection of the future: as a better and a worse replication, as unexpected and difficult departures, as elusive culture and instructive politics, and so on.  As discussed here, there are invisible yet persistent figures of gendered economic citizenship entailed in the self-representation and identification.  “After the End” can also be read, with a slight twist, as going after a given purpose, thus entails an inevitable movement of life towards death, thus calling attention to questions of bodies, psyches, and subjectivities of the citizens.  Going “beyond the end”, as another interpretation of what goes “after the end”, raises the possibility of going beyond a given or dominant purpose and giving voice to  experimental project(ion)s and opportunist investments alike, and in the process brings in the possibility of intervening into the dominant purpose as well as the invisible relationships that hold such an “end” in place.  Put this way, the “end” becomes a contested space in between the “after” and the “beyond”. Giving a slight twist to what’s written on the poster for this UCLA conference, “At the other side of the ‘end’, life goes on”,  this “other side” of the given, dominant purpose that holds the community and its market-driven citizens in place is a potentially fascinating zone of anxiety, horror, abjection, experimentation—as much as the repressed in psychoanalytic terms is to the psyche, and as horror film studies have shown, the realm that is integral to the normalcy of bourgeois affluence and nuclear family (Williams, 1996).

            Going back a few years, there was no common agreement about what the “End” looked and felt like, and there is still none from the present perspective. The disparity between the spectacle and the affects of “the 1997 Handover” or the “Chinese takeover” (these two phrases already implicates different speaker-subjects and their politics) were brought to the fore by the ceremonies and fireworks that officially finished off one era and began another in the summer of 1997.  The planned, juridical, and homogenized aspects of the official ending and beginning had, despite their stately intentions to bring clarity to history, transformed public and private spaces into an amorphous, schizophrenic, tension-ridden, and tortuous one.  (Mis)marked by the highly politicized “transitional” and “post-transitional” (as well as “post-handover”) phases throughout the late 1980s and the 1990s were, as Ackbar Abbas noted, a highly elusive cultural space that had escaped many honest and skillful efforts to narrate and represent it, much less to explain its many components and its experiential, affective meanings to oneself and to various local and distant interpreters (Ackbas, 1997).

The gap between what the ending rituals looked like and the many inarticulate feelings condensed into a specified year in the spaces in Hong Kong shows up in the stylized cinematography in Fruit Chan’s The Longest Summer (1998).  Sequences of floats and people depicted in fast-motion cinematography juxtaposed with televised footage of the handover ceremony and fireworks on multiple monitors suggest that film documentary realism as an approach is inadequate in capturing the almost surreal aspects of that space and time, even though paradoxically, film documentary realism is also needed to visualize the surface of life and its textures that is in the danger of being shown in water-down fashion in homogeneous overseas television broadcasting of the Chinese takeover of Hong Kong.  The bluish-grayish sequences give a hazy look to the many sequences depicting  televised events and personal struggles of the unemployed men; punctured only by the sharp red-and-white patterns of the SAR flags, the tonal treatment serves as a visual nerve of the befuddled unemployed British-Chinese-soldier-turned-gangster whose identity crisis quickly veers into that of internal exile or abjection.  This presentation of abject masculinity to speak for a disempowered public that is part of Hong Kong’s lived experience, yet unable to make itself known or understood on the global television monitors covering the 1997 events, that which entails the failed bonding of the natural family and the surrogate family is worth noting here. I will return to them later.  Suffice it to say that abject masculinity is put to rest at the end of the film, with the reinstatement of social hierarchy, and it’s all over when the hot midday sun returns to ascertain the resilience of the city and its survivors.  They have been made to undergo a process akin to imposed death and sudden rebirth, as the gangster boss says to the protagonist, “Seems like Hong Kong has become a baby overnight; you and I, we are old babies now”.  This post-nostalgic mentality is staged in the ending sequence showing the survivors’ own comebacks (in their middle and working classes manifestations), and dovetailed by a taxi-driver’s scatological revenge for the school girls—this final act as a form of abject (fecal) punishment of young women possessing no sense of shame or purpose.  The end of the film also ushers in memory and forgetting, a motif that gains significance in many films made in the late 1990s, before and after the year 1997.  The motif of  amnesia as the chief figure of identity crisis and identity search, cast in both temporal and spatial terms, in the commercial genre films made before and after the year 1997 attests to their expressive roles and ideological functions in the contested space after/before the end.

II.  Captives of Memory and History

In the realm of practical economic life, many local voices now speak for what appears to be a form of new injunction, and that is,  Hong Kong cannot afford to fail.  Since the city became a boomtown with a “deadline” in the early 1990s, failing or losing became increasingly defined in economic and financial terms, such as in the middle-class’s ability to accumulate wealth through real estate speculation and stock market investments, or in the movie criminals’ plans to realize their quick get-rich schemes—a point of living in-between late colonial politics and capitalism that The Longest Summer brings out, through a father’s advice to his son shortly before the British departs.   To me, this advice, given at the time when History dominated the public space, says something about a local space that does not easily align itself with History that takes the forms of a powerful Chinese nation-state asserting sovereign rights, and of powerful Anglo-American global media corporations commenting on the inadequate sovereign state-subject that falls outside of the History of Western modernity.  The heterogeneous concerns within the social space are, nevertheless, shown by the film as overdetermined under the sign of money.  Taking one’s economic opportunity whenever possible, together with the rewards that came with the high point of economic and financial achievement now function as a powerful injunction and positive memory that once again reinforce the “market-driven sense of citizenship” and the evaluation of self-worth publicly and privately.   Added onto several decades of everyday pressures for survival and competition in turning the once “barren rock” into a regional financial center, the commonsense understanding of  “money or nothing” does not get disembedded by political changes but always reappears in multifarious versions, perhaps as one stubborn form of historical knowledge of capital.  

In an essay that proposes the significance of cultural memory, Ng Ho argues for the role of historical knowledge and cultural memory to maintain a vanishing Chinese cultural identity.  As “identity of the self is the sum total of all memories,” forgetting, a perpetual form of death that is part of life itself, has horrific consequence if it concerns cultural memory (Ng, 1997, 97)  Ng cites Leo Ou-fan Lee’s words in a 1994 interview, “to modern people, May Fourth and Tang Dynasty are not that different as they have nothing to do with everyday life….literature taught in the classroom helps to resuscitate cultural memory, those without memories will be very wretched…” (96).  This modern life in Hong Kong is thus everything but culture oriented.  If cultural memory is nourished by social knowledge and lived experience, according to the first part of this statement, one wonders if there needs a different idea of history and cultural memory in the (post)colony, which is not a simple replication of or submission to indoctrination with the state’s grand narratives on the one hand, and which recognizes the predominantly economic purpose of life borne by its citizens.  According to Ng Ho, the chaotic juxtaposition of events out of their place in chronology in Once Upon a Time in China’s sequels III, IV, and V is the combined results of the filmmakers’ historically-ignorant colonial education which finds perverse justification in the Chinese government’s disrespect for historical truth (to which many held witness on June 4^th), and the spirit of mockery in films that seek to ventilate their response to such and similar blatant abuses of power.  The mocking attitude and “historical idiocy” that Hong Kong movies spread around,  Ng’s cautions, can cause the collapse of historical consciousness of the Chinese people all over the world. Added onto the fact that most Chinese people have a low cultural literacy and they have learned little or nothing from history, their cultural identity will decease (92-3).

Memory and historical consciousness were important issues in the late colonial era.  Ng’s point is well-taken especially considering what Jianying Zha has said about the Party’s motto to “let bygones be bygones” and “look ahead” at “something [which] has turned out to be a large dollar sign.” (Zha, 1995, 18).  Nevertheless, as new knowledge is being institutionalized in SAR’s schools to create stronger links with its motherland, questions of history and memory return with other concerns. Precisely when historical knowledge has become an integral part of legitimating  political power, the political myths as well as the state’s role in the writing of history are most relevant. These issues point to an increasingly univeralized topic of debate, on mainstream history’s relationship with minorities, nomads, genders, and various social classes that have not been encouraged by conservative politicians and authoritarian governments.  It is thus necessary to make it obvious that historical consciousness is not just a matter of proper history education used to keep a Chinese cultural identity in an overly market-driven environment. Precisely the abuses of power are integrally connected to Chinese history as legitimating discourse, and to those who have learned sharp lessons from history (the example of Mao himself will suffice), historical consciousness and cultural memory in themselves do not guarantee any opportunities for a democratic future that allow cultural memories to flourish in an open social field. Short of this, the cultural identity that remains is certainly not one that Ng would like to see standing.  The changing attitudes towards History and the end of a certain concept of history are not the same as, or causes to lament, the collapse or vanishing of  historical consciousness.

If historical consciousness should not be considered as given, or it should not be assumed that human consciousness, taking up truthful historical material, will turn into desirable historical consciousness, then it is as important to create space for critical and imaginative possibilities to flourish in the realm of history and memory as insisting on ethics in writing and historical practice.  In other words, history and cultural memory cannot be simply posed as panacea to postmodernity’s short cycles of memory that parallels the operative cycles of capital.  In her study Dreamworlds and Catastrophe: the Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (2000), Susan Buck-Morss’s makes a comparable point as she focuses on the cultural fragments of the Bolshevik experiment in the Soviet Union after the mass utopia has failed its prophets, practitioners and supporters.  “History”, together with the “cult of historical progress”, Buck-Morss posits, has come to an end as the dreams of Western modernity (of which the Bolshevik experiment was vitally attached), of social utopia, historical progress, and material plenty for all, have shattered (68).  The cultural memory of this experiment’s large resources of images, writings, paintings, posters, sculpture, movies, and architecture, as fragments of the past, nevertheless remain the complex webs of memory desire.

Buck-Morss’ point, however, is not to preserve these texts and images for the sake of historical education (these were the achievements made during that period or under a certain cause), or redeem memories of the past experience as a worthy historian’s exercise, least to use them as basis to build the arguments against authoritarianism that justify economic reform and the transition to a market economy, even though she is fully aware of the new generation’s familiarity with commodity cultures and their unfamiliarity with cultural theories and cultural criticism.  Instead, revisits of the cultural materials of the past establish many invisible connections between Soviet and American cultural productions, as well as argue effectively on the Soviet experiment’s basis in modernity’s dreamworld of mass utopia.  Her work thus serves as an intervention, consciously performing a “historical task of surprising” by means of experimental juxtaposition of the fragments of Eastern (Bolshevik and Communist) revolutionary culture with fragments with Western (American, Hollywood) culture.(69)  I do not have time to undertake a full explication and analysis of her innovative method and to assess its relevance for rethinking the revolutionary ideals that were started in May Fourth and crushed in June Fourth.  This study recognizes the “contemporary ontological complexities” that notions of cultural hybridity cannot do justice to, and scholars working across borders need to be aware of the “’global intellectuals’…floating from one international meeting to another”, “’national intellectuals’ carry[ing] on a rear-line defense of cultural exceptionalism from their home territories below, and “producers of culture” working…at cultural intersections, within electronic landscapes—in subaltern worlds that avoid the homogenizing topology of globalization” (277).

             Bringing back the dashed hopes of a failed revolution turns out to be a transnational marketing strategy in a recent Hong Kong film.  Terry Chen’s The Purple Storm (1999) turns personal memory into a contested space of fabrication and interpretation. The film provides a fully formulated narrative of identity crisis, one that is besieged by amnesia, partial memory, artificial memory, and the conscious act of forgetting.  The story begins with heirs of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge in Cambodia who still hold onto the Revolution as only accomplished by cleansing human corruption and starting everything anew.  The paradox of erasing everything in the past as the result of holding stubbornly onto a misguided utopian notion turns master-disciple and father-son relationships into a (near) deadly one.  Todd, a master terrorist’s son played by Daniel Wu, suffered “behavioral amnesia” after being wounded in a shootout with the police in Hong Kong.   Unable to extract any details about a suspected terrorist activity, the commander of the Anti-Terrorist Force (ATF), together with the expertise of a psychiatrist who hypnotizes her patients, implants artificial memories into Todd by telling him stories of his childhood, his love life, and the professional choice that he has made as an underground police officer infiltrating the terrorist group.  Despite apparent success, fragments of the past, surfacing with the prompts of ethnic music and indigenous rhythms, appear in flashes and threatens Todd’s shaky self identification.  His faithfulness to his memory-based identity is put to severe test when he was recaptured by Soong, the master terrorist (note, Chinese name, “the house guest”, or “sik hak” with explicit allusion to hired thinkers during the warring period).  Returning flashes of his childhood memory fragments give enough clues to confirm Soong as his father.  Torn between two memories that give him two different identities, Todd struggles and waivers between family bonds with terrorism and the possibility to choose peace for the future. The given collection of butterflies, some given to him by his fictive girl friend, evokes for some audience the reference to Zhuangzi’s puzzle of the “I” as the butterfly.  Todd finally sticks with the latter decision and put himself through many trials, eventually causing his father’s death. The film was commended by critic Li Cheuk-to for having Todd’s character’s let go of his “yesterday’s self”, which indicates the film’s down-to-earth attitude and openness about identity and the past.  With two women writers and Joan Chen playing the psychiatrist, this film has also created a more satisfying and non-sexist role for a mature woman that is still rare in commercial Hong Kong movies.

Taken as a whole, the story is an Oedipal narrative about coming into one’s own, resisting the father’s authority and influence, and partaking in exchanges as an adult.  Inspired by Edward Yang’s idea of every person being a terrorizer in his 1986 film Terrorizer, and taking the idea of brain conversion of criminal behavior from Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange(1971),  The Purple Rain stages instances in which the ATF commander and the psychiatrist, as much as Soong, take truth and justice in their own hands, in a form of mental terrorism.  Artificial memory and political indoctrination are not entirely dissimilar when they terrorize a person’s memory and impose a sense of purpose into a life, limiting the freedom to choose.  The film makes clear its  assumption of a free and rational subject capable of making ethical decisions.  Forgetting, as much as remembering, is an ethical decision that involves risks.  At the same time, this freedom is well contained within the law and money. At the end of the story, Todd is rewarded twice for his decision:  in the airport’s departure area, he picks up the psychiatrist’s book, Captives of Memory, which has a special note of dedication to him and his adventures ahead, and he also receives a monetary reward from the ATF commander.  The grown up adult now enters into a contractual relationship with an agent of the law, now consolidated by the reward of money, as well as freedom to take the next flight out of the city. Thus, unlike The Terrorizer and A Clockwork Orange, the ending of The Purple Rain does not make any deeply unsettling notes on the terrors of/in normal bourgeois family life.  leaving instead an image of the butterfly that evokes, for some audiences, Zhuangzi’s puzzle of the “I” and the butterfly.   

Amnesia becomes a recurrent figure of identity confusion, identity change and adapting to new challenges in recent movies.  Chow Yun-fat, Tony Leung, Jacki Chan, and Jet Li, among others, have played roles that suffer from a loss of memory in God of Gamblers, Ashes of Time (1994), Who am I (1998), and Once Upon a Time in China and America (1997).  The location changes in the Once Upon a Time in China sequels, notes Tony Williams, suggests a move from an ethnic Chinese entity that bears strong nationalistic characteristics to a space of diaspora (Williams, 2001)  The shifts prompts Williams to suggest the possibility, as Rey Chow has  noted, for the film characters to “unlearn that submission to one’s ethnicity such as ‘Chineseness’”, yet eventually,  they did not negotiate new forms of cultural identity in a changing and multiethnic world (13).  As films made to take a better share in the overseas market, memory losses in  Who am I  and  Once upon a Time in China and America are devices for border crossing narratives in which a star with a well-established screen persona becomes a blank slate of sorts.  Amnesia becomes a device to suspend the conventions and characters established in the star’s previous films, turning him into a new comer who will be receptive to the ways and mores as well as the cultural conventions of a new setting.  This device is inviting to a spectatorial gaze that cannot afford to be burdened too heavily by unfamiliar cultural codes and yet is receptive to a washed down version of difference.  In this way, what might appears to be a potential experimentation with ethnicity is the transnational commercial film’s creation of a transitional space.  Recovery of memory, together with the return of some of the established conventions that the star has been associated with, then takes place after the audiences have been well introduced to the character.

A comparable observation can be made about amnesia and memory in The Purple Rain.  In a 1999 interview, director Terry Chen explicitly links the cosmopolitan faces of his cast to his intention to “turn Hong Kong films into Asian films” that will “break through national barriers” and have a good share of the Asian film market (61).  Planned future collaborations with writers and filmmakers from Korea, Thailand, Singapore and Taiwan  Seen this way, the story that makes reference to Khmer Rouge, memories of a revolution, images of death in a war setting, and a peaceful present within the bourgeois context may be understood as establishing conscious and selective links and bridges between a Hong Kong action film and its projection of its audience’s historical knowledge.  Amnesia towards the past, juxtaposed with the fragility of bourgeois comfort in the present, provides one articulation of what a Hong Kong filmmaker’s (and the writers’) perception of viable links between historical knowledge of the war-torn parts of Asia and the prosperous, middle-class Asia of the Tigers.  In addition, the film’s visual surface—its high-tech look, its characters as elite professionals, and the cast’s cosmopolitan faces are the components that will constitute the cultural memory of Hong Kong movies.    With its choice of the most horrific rendition of despotic Revolution in Asia (Khmer Rouge) and  corpses strewn across the paths of the revolutionary terrorists, The Purple Rain’s message for peace is a token one, while its use of historical material takes a reverse direction of Buck-Morss’s experimental juxtaposition—the film affirms the freedom of bourgeois life at the elite and professional level.   

III.   Family Exposures and Victim’s Secrets

In a sequence in The Purple Storm, a team of elite professionals—a computer specialist, a psychiatrist, and the commander of the Anti-Terrorist Force work together to fabricate a family history for the amnesiac Todd.  Combining photo scanning, computer morphing techniques, and digital alterations, a black-and-white family picture of a young Todd with his biological father is fabricated, framed and then placed on a table in Todd’s “own” apartment.  The family photo of a kind-looking man standing side-by-side with a child is used, as indexical sign, to confirm the objective existence of a fictive father-son relationship, reinforced by the psychiatrist’ family romance narrative (“you had a loving father”).  The framed picture does not stand alone, however, is it part of the visible evidence of a normal life in a young man’s apartment filled with his hobby collections, music CDs, girlie magazines, gifts from a girl friend, and furniture items befitting those of a young and independent young middle-class member.

            Framed family portraits, an indispensable yet quite invisible item of interior decoration, are  indexes of normative spousal and parent-children relationships and evidence of happy lives together.  As Roland Barthes speaks of certain landscape pictures that invoke a longing to inhabit certain places, family pictures have a fantasmatic nature in Freudian terms, such that they arouse in the subject a recognition of and desire for the maternal body, as “heimlich” or home (Barthes, 1981, 40).  It is thus not necessary for the literal body of the mother to appear in the picture, but the picture’s ability to “bear me forward to a utopian time” or “to carry me back to somewhere in myself” that gives it the awakening qualities as the maternal body does (40).  Meanwhile, the literal maternal body is an abject mother to the child as she carries the memory of the child’s struggles to break away from and reject the mother (Kristeva, 1982), and as Barbara Creed says of horror films, the images of blood and gore deliberately point to the “fragility of the symbolic order in the domain of the body which never ceases to signal the repressed world of the mother” (Creed, 1995, 44).

Ringo Lam’s Victim (1999) plays with the multiple implications of the family portrait and the maternal body to thematize abject masculinity through a dramatic rendering of sexual rivalry and its deathly consequences.  The setting is the Hong Kong bourgeois family beleaguered by the depressed real estate market, layoffs, and stressful work schedules, which put the middle class men in crisis.  The main character, Manson Ma, is such a man hemmed in at all sides—laid off as a computer programmer, accumulated a high amount of debts, unable to meet mortgage payments, and losing his sex appeal at middle age. He made a plunge by murdering his debtor and burying the body in his backyard.  Early in the story, Manson Ma is supposedly kidnapped in an old abandoned house. The police arrive and find him hanging upside down. This early image, reminiscent of the country boy hung upside down by gangsters at the end of Zhang Yimou’s Shanghai Triads, is demonstrative of the confusion of the normal, working man whose lives have been turned into complete disarray.  More than thirty years ago, a man decapitated his wife and then killed himself and his son in the same house. When Pit, the police detective, searched the house for clues to the kidnap, he saw the family portrait of the once-happy nuclear family.  The man, wearing a small and well-trimmed mustache and dressed in a western-style suit, was seated with his virtuous-looking wife who appears in a “cheungsam” with their young, innocent-looking son.  As he left the house, this portrait dissolves into another black-and-white family portrait elsewhere, this time with the young Manson standing in front of his parents. Later, as Pit calls home to tell his wife and daughter that he will be late at work, three framed pictures of his family in color surround the telephone.  The contiguity of the first two family portraits suggest on the plot level that Manson is indeed somehow possessed by an evil spirit of the past—the ghost of a man who gruesomely killed his wife and son. The pictures of this family surrounds Manson as he hangs upside down, pictures which mask a darkness beneath the surface.  In order to find out what Manson saw in this position, Pit also put himself upside down in the same room, thereby completing the circle and his character became besieged by rage and suspicion of his wife having an affair, as his investigation takes him closer to an obsession with the criminal. 

Nostalgia that is provoked by the black-and-white pictures and other images in the abandoned house point to an illusion and specters from the past.  Manson Ma’s sense of himself as a man of certain worth is clearly linked to the location and size of his house, his professional status, and his working girlfriend.  He has clearly inherited the familial values of the past, hailed as the stabilizers of society which accounted for the upward mobility of the present middle-class since the 1970s.  In the course of the film, these values are shown to be in disarray, and the manhood self-image that Manson holds is a nostalgic one put under the severe trials of a competitive world.  He is then driven into a moral deficit, murdering, lying and pretending in order to gain the time for a comeback.  Pit, the investigator of his case, is his emotional double who is driven by a similar force of family values and the need to win.  The result is time away from his family, suspicions of his wife’s infidelity, and the inability to communicate with his family.  To compensate for the daughter’s loneliness and her constant begging for him to come home, his only improved response by the end of the film is the promise of the family trip to Disneyland.    In both instances, the oppressive forces present in the lives of men result in “emotional negative assets”, or “moral negative assets” [1] which are the hidden secrets of families standing up to the challenges of a world city.  The “emotional negative assets” are ripping the patriarchal family apart, as much as, and perhaps more so than the economic negative assets that strapped middle-class real estate owners and speculators since the year 1997 or even earlier.  Besieged masculinity and middle-class men in financial and family troubles now speak for the  predicaments of a larger community.

Ringo Lam is a director known for his action-filled “On Fire” films: City on Fire (1987); Prison on Fire 1 (1987), Prison on Fire 2 (1991), and School on Fire(1988).  In all of these films,  there is a sense of hard-hitting urban realism.  With characters who are torn between a disintegrating moral world and disintegrating social institutions in some form of crisis, Lam provides a social critique and touches upon controversial issues through a dramatized criminal world.  Lisa Stokes and Michael Hoover name their study of Hong Kong cinema City on Fire, giving recognition to Ringo Lam’s sensitivity to the city as a space of tension and contradictions.  In their discussion they say this of Lam, “If John Woo films his dreams, Ringo Lam shoots his nightmares.” Or, put differently, if John Woo films a nostalgic world of honor, Ringo Lam dramatizes the post-nostalgic, crisis-ridden Hong Kong.  If Woo’s films try to salvage a lost world, Lam’s films survey its ruins.  Prior to the year 1997, the city on fire was a place of fervent passions and fears of the unknown future. His characters are already hardened, over-stressed, yet capable of extraordinary action under duress.  Hired to direct a Jean-Claude Van Demme movie for Hollywood in 1996, Lam later returned to Hong Kong and made action films that paid more attention to character psychology.  His exposure to Hollywood and the appeal of the Asia film market has taken him to direct The Suspect (1998), produced by Sil-Metropole company as an action thriller shot in the Philippines. In Victim, Lam experiments with mixing two genres, what he calls the “suspense”  film and the crime genre. Lam admits that this low budget feature is not entirely successful, and adds that given another opportunity, he would elaborate further on the elements of horror. Critic Wong Ain-ling identified the film horror elements that resonate with Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) and Kubrick’s corrosive manhood as an exploration of humanity’s deterioration (Wong, 1999). [2]   

            In her discussion of the “spectacle of male intimacy,” Jillian Sandell notes that in the male genres such as the western and the gangster films, men are similar to women in drawing attention, even sexualized attention from the spectator’s voyeuristic gaze. The men in the final scene of John Woo’s The Killer, for example, gaze “lovingly into each other’s eyes even as they themselves are the center of spectatorial attention during the midst of a spectacular shootout.”  Even wounded or symbolically castrated men, she notes, can retain a considerable amount of social and sexual power. As in Hollywood films, male characters in Hong Kong action films are often entrusted with the act of looking—it is their looks that tell the audience where to look. The affective dimension of that gaze and its social and sexual power, however, needs to be specified.  Ringo Lam’s Victim provides an interesting instance to examine spectatorial attention on the men under immense financial stress and psychological strain.  Manson’s strange behavior and possible spirit possession call attention to his moves both from the other characters and from the spectators, making abject masculinity a subject of curious, pitiful and horrified gazes.  It is these gazes that the middle-class man resists, especially when they come from his girlfriend Fu.  Their looks at their respective wife and girlfriend, moreover, are inflected with sexual insecurity, paranoia, and rage.  Suspicion of betrayal by their female companions provides the motivation for Pit and Manson’s enraged looks.  An unexpected phone call by an unidentified man for his wife made detective Pit lose his temper. Working late in the haunted house himself, he howls at the telephone receiver about her coming home late from work when his wife returns his calls. Right after this, he gives Fu, who was helping him with the kidnap case, a blank stare and continues, “now I know why this man decapitates his wife,” thus letting himself be possessed by the misogynist spirit. A similar rage accompanies Manson when Fu returns home. Spotting her leaving work with Pit earlier on, Manson asks Fu where she has been and she replies that she was detained at work.  At which point Manson, who is crouching by the flower bed, looked sideways and stared back in silence at his girlfriend, who is standing a few feet behind. Manson’s eyes are filled with mixed emotions, contextualized in the scene as combining anger, hatred, sense of betrayal, distrust, and a barely suppressed rage that could explode violently.  The elements of horror film up to this point has instilled a dread for unsightly violence, yet the horror has turned internal.  The look in Manson’s eyes is both reveals and conceals his sense of vulnerability—his fear of losing the love and respect of the woman he loves, when the economic status by which (he thinks) he can keep Fu has turned into negative assets.  On the level of plot, Manson is also trying desperately to hide his own crime (the flower bed is where he buried his victim, his debtor’s middle-man). The film’s Chinese title, Mu Lu Xiong Guang, literally means “the eyes revealing a glimmer of brutality” or “Murderous Gaze Expressed in the Eyes.”  This glimmer of brutality that appears to be coming from a masculinity going out of bounds actually conceals the deepest insecurity.   This instance is one of the few in the action movies that comes close to acknowledging the loss of private possession of women and real estate property as the  privilege and proof of status can easily crumble modern manhood. 

Near the end of Victim, Pit’s colleagues tell him that they found his wife with another man in a bar-restaurant. He rushes to the restaurant and spots his wife having a conversation with another man. Pit gets immediately infuriated, as if he had always been on the verge of explosion with his wife, and especially when he disapproves of what his wife does.  Soon afterwards, his colleagues gather around and tell him that they and his wife have organized a surprise birthday party for him, to give him some down time to be with his family, and they bring to the table a birthday cake, while his daughter also appears.  Most revealing about this incident is Pit’s explosive macho behavior and his readiness to assume his wife’s disloyalty, which reveal his insecurities as a husband, as well as the fragile state of the (un)happy bourgeois family.  As if to create another illusion to salvage this institution, the colleagues tell them to sit close together with their daughter in front of the birthday cake, to get the family picture taken.  Another black-and-white picture is produced, presumably ready for framing and subsequent neglect.  The creation of family portraits, caught in the act of forced smiles and reluctant intimate poses, is exposed as a manipulative act to create happy memories when the lived family experience is otherwise.  Taking the film as a sort of unexpected “family exposures”, the seeming difference between an artificial memory of a loving father, the promises of bourgeois life, and the horrible secrets that lay underneath the surface has become negligible.

IV. Concluding Remarks

In the first section, I took note of the instructive writing in the Hong Kong Economic Journal Monthly for the middle-class readers.  An example of how prosperity and self identification consistently split the liberal speaking subject of the world city into schizophrenic   can be found in the same essay by Yi Xian-rong mentioned earlier on. His concluding statement, “this is a competition in which the weak is devoured by the strong, and one must try to become the strong one in the equal competition of financial globalization.”(9) demonstrates a mindless error in which the “survival of the fittest” metaphor repudiates the “we”-ness in his rhetoric.  This casual slippage reflects middle class liberal discourse’s habitual and nostalgic allusion to the community while having accept class segregation and social fragmentation as fact.

Without explicitly stating so, the essay implies the most obvious lesson from the Asian financial crisis, that borders and community neither guarantee any innate alliances nor provide adequate barriers against the mobile capital that extracts maximum profits in any given terrain, and the middle-class is ridden with the anxiety to trample his rivals to prove his manhood and his citizenship’s market value, which, as shown in Victim, combines the economic assets and the possession of women as sexual property.   

Fruit Chan’s character in The Longest Summer pronounces his judgment on Hong Kong at the eve of the turnover, “many have already sold their souls to the evil.” While this could refer to the immediate change of allegiance that the knighted and once-loyal British subjects made towards the incoming Chinese governments,  his film already shows that the man (Ga Yin) who cannot contribute towards his family’s monthly mortgage payments is an excess son, a son that the father would not take seriously.  In the process of Hong Kong’s rapid (over)urbanization, technological rush, and accelerated materialization under late colonial capitalist boom, the patriarchal family,  which once existed at the core of “Asian values” and gave rise to Hong Kong’s success story, can no longer hold its center and is shown as defunct in Victim. [3]   A nostalgia sense of the proper middle class family still haunts many, as the fantasmatic images of family portraits indicate. The family exposures in Victim contrast with John Woo’s nostalgia for manhood of the past, and the repressed returns in the form of explosive rage, murderous sentiments, emotional exhaustion, and madness—these are somewhat displaced onto the abject man and the working wives, but are in fact extreme versions of the sense of being betrayed by a society that has moved faster than the human mind and body can compete with, as well as the sense of nonsensical work and study that keep the mortgage payments coming, but affectively removed from the beautiful promises of “home with a garden on a sunny day.” (Fu’s words in Victim).

Lam’s local story, based on a middle-class family murder that took place many years ago, can only point to the many news stories of working class families under duress that appear often.  Admitting that he is nostalgic about Shanghai before the 1950s, Lam nevertheless takes away the seduction of nostalgic images proffered by Stanley Kwan’s Rouge (1987) against the rising concrete jungle and Kwan’s memories of a time that are bathed “in beautiful golden colors that contrast sharply with the mundane documentary tones of the present” (Chow, 2001,  224). Lam’s “temporal dislocation” (as Chow analyzes nostalgia) takes the spectators’ gazes to the modern bourgeois home with its hourly stock market reports on the television monitor, rather than Kwan’s alluring brothel and its leisurely erotic practices.  In this bland setting, past patriarchal values and the market value weigh on manhood and womanhood.  Artificial memory and escapist consumption become the small, normal pleasures while what was once unmistakably normal and human have vanished. The other side of a world city, where moral and emotional negative assets that beleaguered man and woman who are bonded to the spectres of the past, offers a glimpse of secret despair beneath the mandate that “man cannot fail” and “Hong Kong cannot fail.” These are the secrets that most filmmakers do not think can afford costly exposures in the up-and-coming Asian film markets.

Esther C.M. Yau

Occidental College

Los Angeles

May, 2001

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