M. Szeto: Draft of Conference Paper

We must ask carefully whose “Hong Kong” she is referring to in this exemplarist gesture. Also, whose “autonomy” and whose “community” is Lo’s work supposed to represent? For there are also elitist, avant-gardist, liberalist middle-class and above constituencies who already have a “prosperity” and “autonomy” to “maintain,” and they are also articulating their idea of Hong Kong as the forefront of Chinese modernity and modernisation, in terms of a cut-throat capitalist economy, a popular culture industry and a managerial technology! This could mean a dangerous imposition on the local a solution that the imperial West has already found to be fraught with problems - i.e. capitalist liberalism. This petite-gradiose Hong Kongism’s exemplarist claim is far from what Chow’s “model of postcolonial awareness” could be. The danger in this analysis is exactly how easily Chow’s sophisticated and highly politicised analysis could be collusively collapsed and hijacked by a liberalist avant-gardist gesture. It is hard to tell whose’s “postcolonial awareness” one is taking to serve as “the forefront of ‘Chinese’ consciousness of ‘Chinese’ modernity.” This is why it is problematic and risky for Chow to use Lo Ta-yu's work to represent a Hong Kong “model” here. Even Lo himself would problematise over and over again his relation to the Hong Kong platform. Lo is particular about his language and cultural identity. He sings in Mandarin Chinese when he sings as an outsider projecting feelings onto Hong Kong in “Pearl of the Orient,”^[13] in which he leaves his orientalist desires and projections exposed. In the title song of the same album “Queen's Road East,” he sings in his own inflected Cantonese together with a native speaker to express his feelings as a participant in the immediate Hong Kong situation he is also in. There are many other examples of his manipulation of Putonghua, Guoyu (Chinese Mandarin), Cantonese, Taiwanese language (Min Nan Hua) and so on. He is careful about his own ethnic and cultural positioning as a second generation Mainlander in Taiwan working between Hong Kong and Taiwan. In fact, Lo’s trajectory makes giving him the Hong Kong platform a very problematic gesture. What Rey Chow and Gregory Lee^[14] refer to as his songs that play the Hong Kong identity game so well as the marginalised, hybrid Hong Kong voice in-between the two colonisers, are in fact music made first for Min Nan Hua (one of the local Taiwanese languages) audiences. These songs intervene into Taiwanese local identity politics in Lo's album ≠Ï∂m (Yuan Xiang/Hometown).^[15] Only afterwards is the music remade with lyrics catering to more “Hong Kong-oriented” themes and audiences. His work is not so specifically made for a Hong Kong platform after all. Or should I say that they are made with the assumption that the music can fit into both localities as “hometowns,” or that there are situations and sensibilities translatable between Taiwan and Hong Kong in his music. Perhaps Lo’s ambitions are more Pan-Chinese than Chow and Lee would want to see. The itinerary of Lo's career betrays certain naïve notions of communication and certain avant-gardist desire, bordering towards a musical version of Greater China. In a January 5th., 1995 interview on Hong Kong’s ATV local channel, Lo Ta-yu, when referring to Chinese language music and the power of music in communicating among ethnic Chinese people everywhere, uses a vocabulary that rings too much of a certain orchestrated unity through music. There are certainly risks in using Lo as a figure for the articulation of a Hong Kong platform, or the “model” of “postcolonial awareness” and the “forefront” of “a ‘Chinese’ consciousness of a ‘Chinese’ modernity.”

I am not saying that we cannot use texts from popular culture in cultural studies, but an analysis that exemplifies such products to equate them with a “Hong Kong” “model” for “a paradigm of Chinese urban life in the future” is another matter. Although Chinese communities in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and other places will continue to present stereotypical biases about Hong Kong, and the self-centred inferiority-superiority complex that cause cultures to project such representations onto one another will probably be a problem not easily dealt with for a long while, using “strategic essentialism” to claim a certain speaking position has to be done with greater caution, despite all urgency. Even given the great currency that the term “strategic essentialism” has acquired, there is afterall the lurking embarrassing question of better or worse strategies. The difficulty is how to make strategic considerations about politics and necessity that do not end up simply imposing on other people one’s “necessary” “strategic essentialism.” A speaking position imagined within the trap of nationhood and state level imagination, among entities like Britain, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, is a highly dangerous strategy with hegemonic effects. It can consciously or unconsciously deny the possibility of other active voices, manoeuvres and imaginations in its essentialising of the other, and therefore, the self. No matter how well-intentioned such discourses are, the aggregate circulation of these discourses of identity does have real and negative effects on the lives, cultures and possibilities of the many de-voiced others who do not formulate their identities simply in terms of state or ethnicity. It is not enough for an academic just to speak up for something. The difficulty is how.

It is again instructive to read carefully the complex negotiations Rey Chow makes between her work on Lo and Hong Kong and her other critical endeavours. One of Chow’s most powerful and important argument is to expose the gender biases in certain sinological and modern Chinese cultural texts and contexts, as in her work in Woman and Chinese Modernity, Writing Diaspora and Primitive Passions. It would be instructive to apply her criticism to her own analysis of Lo. Curiously, despite the variety and transformations in Lo’s work, it is easy to spot in his music frequent projections that silence women and children These projections clearly reveal a masculinised world view about nation, family and love.^[16] Two cases in point are Lo Ta-yu's songs “Comrade/Lover” (∑R§H¶Pß”) and “The Yellow Faces” (∂¿¶‚¡y§’). The first song implies a yearning for identification and empathy on a public and private level in a kind of unification discourse incorporating the PRC, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Not surprisingly, as a gesture of ethnic inclusiveness, his song made in Taiwan and sung in Guoyu (Chinese Mandarin), contains also adaptations of “revolutionary” choruses borrowed from Communist Chinese rhetoric, and one idiomatic expression designated Cantonese in the footnote, which Lo somehow fails to sing accordingly. Therefore, both on a public and personal register, it is a love song sung by a supposedly Taiwanese male voice to a silent other, the comrade/lover, in the languages supposedly inclusive of Hong Kong, Taiwan and the PRC. It is a voice which is aware of the problems of a one-way desire for empathy as a projection onto the other. The song literally says “sorry” (©Í∫p) about this. Nonetheless, the song continues to reinscribe the other by arbitrary incorporations and misappropriations anyways, perhaps due to the inability to create other alternative tactics and politics of utterance. In this sense, the apology sounds almost like a self-serving gesture of political correctness. “The Yellow Faces” (∂¿¶‚¡y§’) is another song from the same album as “Comrade/Lover,” celebrating people’s unity in “a same dream,” and “a same heart.” Again, this monologic discourse erases the possible differences among Chinese communities. Also indicative of such problems are Lo’s romantic love songs. All the dialogic love songs he has ever made have lyrics written by somebody else. His own lyrics remain very much within the masculine voice that projects onto the silent feminised audience. A glimpse at his songs in relation to children like “New Born Generation”^[17] and “Masters of the Future”^[18] will show the obviously un-self-critical strategies of hijacking the voices of children. “New Born Generation” is sung by children and adult choruses, making the coercion of children to become “the premium new born generation,” “the elite,” “standard” and “advanced” “splendours of the future” who will “resolve” “Dad's and Mom's vexations,” very much intensified. They “waver unrestrictedly between East and West,” too, the song states. This generation of children is thus intepellated by a very elitist, avant-gardist and hegemonic discourse of hybridity in-between two hegemonic cultures, irrespective of the internal cultural differences among Taiwanese or Hong Kong communities that the song is addressed to. This song sung in Cantonese is a reductive and imperative version of a hybrid Hong Kong in-between two colonisers being the avant-garde of the future of Chinese modernity.

Although Chow and Lee have masterfully shown that some of Lo's works done in the first two years after he moved to base himself in Hong Kong, play on the state level of imagination a very skilful identity politics, his identity politics remain nonetheless, only within the state level of imagination. Lo homogenises the internal differences within Taiwan, Hong Kong, Britain and the PRC in this process of playing the role of the marginalised voice in-between two colonisers. Giving him “the” platform as “the” Hong Kong alternative music to the Canto-pop hegemony is also a gesture that silences all the independent, alternative and critical music made in Hong Kong, such as the work of AMK, Blackbird and many others. It is perhaps wise not to risk too much of one's theoretical concerns on a singer-song writer whose sexual politics is far from living up to Chow’s theoretical rigour and who is also ready to talk about the unification of all Chinese people through music.

Another concern we might ponder upon in Rey Chow’s essay is the suggestion that by listening otherwise for politics in Canto-pop songs, and by inference in popular culture, we can recover a certain agency of subversiveness. She opposes to “direct political participation” this “listening otherwise,” even in the autistic environment of the walkman. Whether Lo’s music is an example of subversiveness itself is one issue. Whether walkman autism and couch potato cynicism is more subversive than direct political participation is another. Chow’s argument is hard to evaluate due to the ambiguity of what Chow means by “direct” and “political” participation. Again, it might be a question of strategy in “direct” and “political” participation, whether one’s practice of politics is political/politicised or not. The question is also whether Chow’s proposal of a kind of Baudrillardian fatal strategy, the autistic refusal of the ideals and slogans of the state, is worth taking or not. What are the stakes in valorising listening otherwise in the mass media, instead of, for instance, speaking otherwise in a non-autistic space as a kind of participating otherwise in politics? If autistic subversiveness is only recognised by the doer/consumer herself, how can we deal with the issue of the simulational power of the media, which can co-opt us for their uses irrespective of how otherwise we listen, like in polling or consumer statistics? How can we consume otherwise the operations that are the very simulational forces that have been made use of by many to de-politicise and implode our relation to actuality, to the real and everyday materiality?

The revaluation of Lo Ta-yu as an exemplary articulation of a state level Hong Kong identity politics illustrates that this strategy, when employed in the context of coloniality as an identity politics, may very well fall into the danger of basing itself unwittingly upon epistemological and political problems inherent in colonial discourses that this strategy is supposed to criticise, when they operate in colonial and even gendered contexts. For example, the exemplarist discourse making cosmopolitan modern experience in Hong Kong “a paradigm of Chinese urban life in the future,” is not too unlike European cosmopolitanism making itself the paradigm for other Third World countries and cities. This analysis testifies to the difficulty of articulating effective cultural politics within the limitations of popular culture, a difficult task that requires far more archaeological and genealogical considerations, and far more careful ethnographical tactics than it may seem. Cultural matrixes are constantly changing, shifting between times, places, scales and levels of politics. This analysis also testifies to the difficulty of articulating effective cultural politics in the interstices of diasporic and local contexts, and in the intersections of critical cultural theories and popular culture. Cultural products that address one set of power relations might, when seen from another perspective and in another contextualised power relation, appear as exclusionary binary constructions. The point is not to shy away from attempting such engaged investigations. What is required is perhaps a more careful attention as to how the unravelling of these intersecting discourses is crucial to a questioning of hegemonic discourses about “Hong Kong identity,” an identity construction which can be as much a colonial pathology of identity politics, a neo-colonial and neo-imperialist gesture, or a critical “postcolonial awareness.”

We must also bear in mind that articulating tactics of resistance through popular culture has its own risks and dangers, even in the best scholarship and where postcolonial awareness is invoked. After all, the Latin words for “culture” and “colonisation” have a common root.^[19] Oppositional politics that invoke the tropes of “marginality” and “in-betweeness,” as well as poststructuralist/postmodernist politics that invoke “hybridity” if not eclecticism, all have to face up to the limitations of a hegemonic mainstream culture where all existing resistances are those that it is willing to carry, which are always already reappropriated, always bordering towards complicity. For what the mainstream mass media community finds tolerable, no matter how absurd, catatonic, apocalyptic, cynical, ironic and rude, are but oppositional positions that the mainstream is able to carry. The mainstream is always already appropriating their harmless subversiveness as kids’ pranks that have no effect on the basic structure of the binary impasse upon which the hegemony operates. In the case of cultural politics played only on the state level of imagination, the strategic essentialism of diasporic discourses that make possible certain urgent claims to speaking positions are often at the same time, that which can be easily appropriated by hegemonic discourses in the erasing of localised and subaltern perspectives and histories. We must consider this against an academia where more and more people are capitalising on the fashionable production of “post-colonial” studies about Hong Kong, especially in terms of its “uniqueness,” and therefore “avant-gardist” status in relation to places supposedly “less developed” in terms of modernisation and postcolonial possibilities. When this “Hong Kong” is referred to only on a state level of imagination, the many complex dynamics of power and forces within the operational space-time of Hong Kong is subsumed and devoiced by gross reductions. For a cultural studies that goes on working upon popular cultural materials made with regional and/or international distribution in mind, within a field of cultural studies which is more and more self-sustainable in terms of its numerous practitioners being its audience/consumer, there is the danger that such scholarship could become a simulation process in itself, a gleeful part of the portable spectacle it criticises. Caution must be taken too, not to assume that cultural practices and criticisms can be abstracted from local and transnational political and socioeconomic forces, an oversight which might knowingly or unknowingly end up being co-opted into complicity with the powers that be. Between the diasporic and the local vis-à-vis transnational politics, there is perhaps the need for a more careful and exposed translocal articulation.

It is important also to investigate the stakes in the reliance upon the construction of manhood/masculinity in mainstream Hong Kong's construction of its modernist, cosmopolitan identity discourse under the conditions of coloniality, which is based on the marginalisation of women and children in the first place. This issue we find in Lo’ music is also pertinent to the next two contradicting claims about Hong Kong identity in coloniality which can be put in terms of the now popularised paradigms of (1) The Northbound Cultural Imaginary (•_∂i§Â§∆∑Qπ≥) and Cosmopolitanism as well as (2) the Southbound Cultural Imaginary (´n∂i§Â§∆∑Qπ≥) and Sinocentrism. These sets of paradigms centres around and continues from the debate on “Northbound Imaginary - Relocating Post-Colonial Discourses in Hong Kong” in the Hong Kong Cultural Studies Bulletin, Issue 3, September 1995.^[20] This, together with the previous issue of posing Hong Kong in-between two colonisers vis-à-vis a petite-gradiose Hong Kongism, provide some versions of the dis-located cultural matrixes and political paradigms against which we can attempt a discussion of postmodernity-as-coloniality in Hong Kong culture.

The Northbound Cultural Imaginary (•_∂i§Â§∆∑Qπ≥) and Cosmopolitanism as well as the Southbound Cultural Imaginary (´n∂i§Â§∆∑Qπ≥) and Sinocentrism:

The Northbound Cultural Imaginary projected by the “imagined community” called Hong Kong, which is part of what I call petite-grandiose Hong Kongism (§p§p§j≠ª¥‰•D∏q) does not exist alone. It is a local state level articulation of Hong Kong’s avant-gardist position in the picture of global and regional capitalism against the pressure of the real and imaginary Sinocentrism of the PRC national-state’s expansionist project. It is mainstream Hong Kong's countering northbound imperialist gesture, that tries to deal with anxiously, the so called southbound nationalist and economic expansion project of the PRC, in terms of an oppositional politics. It is as ideological as that which it sets out to oppose. It is very easy for postcolonial scholars working about Hong Kong's conditions to either simply claim a localist stance, and blame the PRC for a southbound sinocentrist neo-colonialism; or to simply reverse the opposition - to show that it is rather Hong Kong, which is exercising a northbound cultural and economic neo-colonial civilising mission on disadvantaged places in the PRC. While we might agree with both theses about the cultural imaginary of the Hong Kong and the PRC state machines, we must heed to what this binary opposition together ends up silencing and marginalising - the many differences among the people within and between Hong Kong and the PRC.

The mainstream Hong Kong myth that desires to civilise the Chinese Tong-bao (¶P≠M i.e. kinsmen) in term of its cosmopolitan culture and capitalist expertise, can in fact be read as a reverse colonial project and discourse. It is not self-generated by the state machine and the mainstream of Hong Kong alone, but is also a product of the external pressures and competitions from the contending Chinese “native.” It is necessary to bear in mind that capitalist and cosmopolitan gestures are not just the practice of a Hong Kong neo-colonising the Chinese “native.” It is also a Hong Kong internalising the previous coloniser’s values, and thus imposing colonialism internally. Furthermore, it is also the practice of the PRC's bureaucratic-capitalist machine in its gesture of self-colonisation, through the exercising of internalised imperialist values upon its own people. Both the elitism of mainstream Hong Kong and the elitism of the PRC capitalist bureaucracy must answer to the charge that their elitism lies in their imposition on the “local” and the “native,” cultural-economic models that the imperial West has already found impossible and are fraught with problems. This is the kind of analysis Benita Parry says Said does to the West that I now do to Hong Kong as a state level “imagined community.” In other words, this is to reconceive “the encounter between unequal partners,” in this case between mainstream Hong Kong and its neo-colonies and neo-colonial subjects in the PRC, “as an area of `overlapping territories and intertwined histories' taking place on the same cultural terrain.”^[21] Distinct from mainstream Hong Kong’s representation is a critical opening that refuses simple “centre/margin polarity” involving Hong Kong, the PRC, the West and the economic neo-colonies of Hong Kong. “This entails breaking into [Hong Kongism's] representation of [Hong Kong's history of cosmopolitanisation and modernisation though capitalism] as self-generating.”^[22] “Whereas the formal displacements of [this] modernist culture have conventionally been attributed to the internal dynamics of [westernised/western] societies,” “Said argues that an explanation of the dislocations must include the response to external pressures, and specifically to the contending native.”^[23] In this case the peoples of the PRC are at once Hong Kong's imagined colonial subjects, as well as the subjects of Hong Kong's new coloniser. Ploughing into “postcolonial” cultural studies published locally in Hong Kong in the 1990s, I sense that those critics who elaborated on Hong Kong's status in-between two colonisers, all tend to focus on the analysis of Hong Kong's relation to the PRC bureaucracy as an impending coloniser. They however, also tend to glaringly over-simplify the discussion of Hong Kong in relation to the other neo-colonisers, for example, transnational capital operating through the accommodation of the British colonial machine, and its Western neo-colonial counterparts in North America and Europe. These are usually briefly written off in cliché anti-colonial discourses as condemnable pasts, without much careful analysis of their present and future implications. Even the Eurocentric colonialist/imperialist centre they invariably condemn, has already started to reflect upon itself in relation to issues of transnationalism, capitalism and neo-imperialism^[24] due to the onslaught of neo-Marxist, poststructuralist and postmodernist critiques from within, and postcolonial and feminist critiques from without. Why then are so many Hong Kong's cultural critics and academics still internalising and reproducing those neo-colonial discourses and neo-imperialist values of transnational capital, decontextualised liberalism, modernisation and progress, as “postcolonial” strategy in their discourse? Here I am referring to critics who pose Hong Kong as an avant-gardist model for others in an exemplary gesture. What does this amnesia, this lack of self-reflexivity, tell us about the Hong Kong in their cultural imaginary? Criticism must go two ways. It is tactically important to throw the Eurocentric imperialist's game back onto itself. If the so-called “postcolonial” intellectual bashes only the PRC for internalising and reproducing colonialism upon cultures it claims sovereignty upon (i.e. places such as Hong Kong, Tibet, Taiwan and other non-Han cultures), without producing the same implosive critical effect upon that neo-imperialist machine whose cultural values and systems both Hong Kong and the PRC internalise to become modernising/modernised neo-imperial states in the first place, then the unjust international division of labour will be reproduced, even within the field of “postcolonial” studies. The field will then become one of the neo-imperial centres that continue to profit through re-exporting the neo-colonised's concerns and traumas to the neo-colonised, without having to seriously deal with the repercussions of those issues themselves. This is when transnational cultural studies can become complicit with transnational capital, and “postcolonial” critics who have a part in maintaining this unjust international division of labour and distribution of surplus value in the field of cultural studies, are therefore, liable to charges of being neo-colonial compradores.

What must be asked at this juncture is the relation between the discourse of modernity and the desire to become exemplary. Rey Chow in Primitive Passions^[25] (arguing somehow against her own work in the “Between Colonizers” essay), and Homi Bhabha in his conclusion to The Location of Culture, both identify this desire to become exemplary as the “essential gesture of modernity.” In Hong Kong's case, it is the internalisation of the colonisers’ founding myth as its own founding myth. It is this “ethics of self construction” that is so “typical of modernity.” “[T]he present it belongs to have no objective status, they have to be perpetually (re)constructed”^[26] through first defining the other as object of knowledge, upon which the myth of self identity as modern is built. More often than not, this gesture of modernity entails what Rey Chow calls the primitivising of the other, in order for the self to be defined as the other of the primitive, the modern. If this is the discourse of Western modernity, this gesture of individual freedom and expansion is also an unchecked liberalism decontextualised from its reliance on the necessary violence against the other. What then is the “modernity in those colonial conditions where its imposition is itself the denial of historical freedom, civic autonomy and the ‘ethical’ choice of refashioning?”^[27] What is this modernity in Hong Kong's case, when in order not to remain the primitive of the West, this Hong Kong has to in turn primitivise others so as to over compensate for the sense of cultural inferiority in coloniality, by out-doing the West in reproducing this imperialist gesture? What is self fashioning for Hong Kong, if there is no other fashion except that uniform avant-gardist, progressivist modernised state that Hong Kong is obliged to wear by the colonial machine? For this colonised’s self fashioning is in this sense only a reproductive part of transnational, humanist, liberalist capitalism. Arjun Appadurai therefore “initiated this focus on the transnational dissemination of cultural modernity,” a focus on the “simultaneous” global locations of such a modernity that does not lose sense of the conflictual, contradictory locations of cultural practices and products that follow the unequal development of tracks of international or multinational capital.^[28]

The impact of these issues need to be illustrated contextually. The text Crazy appeared towards 1997, in the context of a peak of confidence in Asian economies. Mainstream Hong Kong of course bought into that euphoria until the Asian economic crisis at the end of 1997, slightly after Hong Kong’s change-over to PRC sovereignty. Looking back in comparison, the present Hong Kong state level discourse is again revamping a similar rose garden euphoria. New cultural myths and heroes of transnational technology and capital are again emerging to recover lost purchase. One such mythic figure that emerged in the period of pre-Asian-economic-crisis euphoria, contemporaneous with the cultural context that produced the Crazy text, is the Hong Kong phenomenon of Mr. Capable/Smart - a commodified entity of “Hong Kong Identity.”

Mr. Smart is a figure fronted by the anchor man Chan Bak Cheung (≥Ø¶ ≤ª). He hosted the top audience percentage show of the year 1995 - “Show By Showbai” (πB∞]¥º•{¨P) on TVB Jade Hong Kong, and is also voted as one of the top ten local media phenomena of the year. This show is re-run on TVB Jade in late 1996 still claiming a large audience. The cover song of his immensely popular CD “I Am Smartest” goes like this (words in bold are originally in English, the rest are my translation):

Yeah, I am smartest (4 times)

How's the Hong Kong environment? Really so good?

Everybody as smart as me, how can it not be good!

Flexible and adaptable, conscientious, quick and shrewd

Opportunist and calm, money left after real estates and cars

Money grabbing over the border, Knowing at least Chinese and English

Quick and skilled at constructing buildings and bridges, foreign ghosts look on stunned

Our horse-racing pools are greatest, enough to buy up an army

Don't need a fortune teller to know we have luck and future plenty

Chorus:

Yeah! I am smartest, we are head of the table every meal

Yeah! I am smartest, we can turn glass into diamonds at will

Yeah! I am smartest, we are never clumsy, always efficient and smartest in everything,

Woo...Woo!

Young man full of new ideas, and particularly tasteful

So much sense in clothes, that designers look wasteful

Use credit card as cash one don't even need to carry

Becoming 18 is big event, beauty pageant choose her as you likey

Entertainment industry, we preside, Kungfu films, Bruce Lee, more than you can surmise

Shows at Hong Kong Colosseum 10s of 1000 times, Guiness' Book of Records Fans numbers highest

Great business in Karaokes, foreign ghosts also learn Canto songs

Don't want to be bumpkin? Watch sensational docus of Hong Kong.

What the Mr. Smart phenomenon come to show, is that the “imagined community” called Hong Kong, is being gleefully represented by mainstream Hong Kong to the world, first and foremost as a metropolitan city and a cosmopolitan centre. This grandiose, hyper-cocky myth is unembarrassingly proud of its capitalist qualities. It outrightly others the women and foreigners in sexist and ethnocentric language. This is the myth of the petit-bourgeois Hong Kong male making it big through plenty of adaptability and cleverness. It is a case of colonial pathology in the form of an inferiority-superiority complex, a desire to recolonise the coloniser and out do the colonising West in its own game, all expressed in terms of money and sex. I call this myth petite-gradiose Hong Kongism (§p§p§j≠ª¥‰•D∏q). Let me interrupt its gleeful tempo.

We come up with local mythic heroes of monumental scales like Mr. Smart only when the validity of the myth in daily lived experiences begins to falter, and therefore needs some boosting and revamping. A state and mainstream culture orchestrated Hong Kong identity is in crisis. This sensational mainstream identity discourse is part of a masculinist scapegoating process. People identifying with this upstart society are gradually outdone in their own upstart show in terms of speed and intensity by places in China that mainstream Hong Kong has for a while been imagining as some sort of cultural and economic colony. This happens when transnational capital moves from the more “developed” Hong Kong metropolitan centre to other places in China. Since the PRC is Hong Kong's impending coloniser at that time, and since the Hong Kong people migrating into the PRC camp of capital and power are those pro-nation beneficiaries of the future coloniser, ordinary people resident in Hong Kong dare not antagonise them. These ordinary Hong Kong people can only displace the brunt of their resentment against being hijacked of identity myth, money, jobs, opportunities and spouses all at once, onto the victimisation and persecution of the female other, the othered scapegoat, as female.

Before the Asian crisis and the change-over to PRC sovereignty, this cultural imaginary is acted out in terms of the •]§G•§ Phenomenon (Bao-Yi-Nai in Cantonese pinyin, Bao Ernai in Putonghua pinyin). The reverse or anti-colonialism that works so well with capital flow in the Mr. Smart song is resonant in this issue of Bao-Yi-Nai (•]§G•§). •] means buying up, §G meaning second, and •§ is a derogatory term for wife or mistress, the word also designating teats, breasts, reducing a woman to her body parts symbolic of her sexual and reproductive functions. These designations suggest a patriarchal and capitalist “exchange abstraction”^[29] of women into a form of commodity fetishism, in which “her sensuous human subjectivity” is construed “abstractly” and perceived “as an object reduced to a common value,” “to be exchanged” and quantitatively measured.^[30]

Although this Bao-Yi-Nai issue is more widespread between men and women within the PRC, the Hong Kong mainstream converges to represent it as an issue between Hong Kong men and PRC women. This has become for a long time, the local daily popular social topic in every medium, serious to scandalous, private and public. It has also become the major content of numerous TV and radio talk shows, call-in shows and game shows. Many TV sensational docu-dramas, soap operas, TV films and feature films were built around the issue. The entire mainstream Hong Kong is staging itself as part of the sexy/sexist action genre in this issue of economic and sexual conquest. Our then governor Chris Patton suddenly announces and claims in 1995 that there are, in China, around 300,000 illegitimate children with one Hong Kong parent, which would become a heavy socioeconomic burden to post 1997 Hong Kong. This is very close to a reinvocation of the refugee tide xenophobia of the 1950s to 1970s. Strategically, his announcement coincides with this Bao-Yi-Nai issue, and our legislative councillors immediately proposes criminalisation, or legislation pitted against the Hong Kong men and/or Chinese women and children concerned, as a means of controlling or curbing this trend. This is argued in the name of Hong Kong taxpayers, who therefore need to support many more single parent families on welfare and to cater to future disputes over heredity and social facilities. This issue even materialise as the major and immediate post 97 precedential immigration issue. Clearly, in the state level Hong Kong discourses, the women and children in mainland China, without reference to specificities, are all conjured up as foreign threats, to be ferociously excluded and punished. The othered women and children become the preferred scapegoat and the brunt of vehemence in the mainstream cultural imaginary.

After the 1997 Asian crisis and after Hong Kong’s change-over to the PRC’s sovereignty, the anxiety over the “purity” and “autonomy” of Hong Kong’s cultural identity, coupled with the anxiety over the draining of jobs and welfare money, all translate into a cultural and economic border policing, which acts out the cultural imaginary outlined above once again. The Patton orchestrated xenophobic scenario is out-done by the scandalous and dubious over statement of the new Special Administrative Region government, which says that the projected number of new immigrants should be 1.67 million instead. Mainstream Hong Kong’s second xenophobic acting out takes the form of the struggles around the precedent cases in immigration legislation against immigrant children and their mothers or fathers from the PRC. The mainstream Hong Kong that has so far been opposing the less democratic operations of the new post 97 government’s executive and legislative branches (as compared to the formally more democratic Patton era), is alarmingly, willing to forgo and hand-over even Hong Kong’s judicial autonomy to the PRC government, in return for the PRC government’s guarantee to police and halt immigration into Hong Kong. This issue still breaks-out sporadically even presently. For two full years after the change-over, this is a major issue of the local mainstream cultural imaginary, living under the shadow of a xenophobia fanned out of proportion.

This same primitivising and scapegoating discourse is operating all along on a more sophisticated note, too. The freelance columnist Xinjing Yi-er-san (∑s§´§@§G§T) writes, in the December 1994 issue of The Nineties Magazine^[31] that she is “happy” and “relaxed” when she returns to Hong Kong's “Tsimshatsui,” which she calls “a `civilised' world.” She is worried at the fact that “[i]n two years and seven months, `they', “ (she means people from the PRC) “will takeover Hong Kong. A big horde of barbarians administering a civilised society.”^[32] In this same issue, Gong Fan (§Ω¶|) outrightly elaborates a northbound discourse in his essay entitled, “From economic northbound invasion to political northbound invasion.” He obviously argues that this is a historically established and legitimated pattern where the South acts as the avant-garde of the North in terms of political economic and cultural modernisation. He opts for a peaceful northbound economic and cultural advance. He also considers Hong Kong as “compatible with” universal “global paradigms” in terms of “progress,” and that if “Hong Kong's political influence in the whole nation grows bigger and bigger, it is an enormously good thing.”^[33] This is an obvious case of internalisation of neo-imperialist values of cosmopolitanism and progressivism employed as a legitimation for Hong Kong's desire to reverse colonise the PRC (its impending coloniser at the time of that essay). This scenario is projected for the now new millennium, too. In Lian He Bao (¡p¶X≥¯) on July 16th. 1994, Wu Guo-guang (ßd∞Í•˙), a Princeton Political Science Ph.D., and the ex- PRC president Zhao Zi-yang's senior assistant and ex-editorial writer for People’s Daily (§H•¡§È≥¯) also wrote an editorial entitled: “China in the Next Century: Hong Kong against Beijing?” He considers Hong Kong's “exemplarist role” as “important.” He also suggests that Hong Kong must do so if she wants to become a “Chinese city” on equal status with Beijing, and not a “colonial city” or an intimidated “little daughter-in-law city” (note the anti-colonial and nationalist discourse hijacking patriarchal metaphors). This cultural imaginary that sees the “imagined community” called Hong Kong within this cosmopolitan discourse is not, as we see, only particular to the literati of Hong Kong, but also very much part of the cultural imaginary of the PRC bureaucracy and its spokes-people and sympathisers. See for example the book °m´n§HªP•_§H°n (Nanren Yu Beiren, i.e. Southern People and Northern People), in which there is an essay by Yang Dong Ping (∑®™F•≠) called °ßºs™F§Â§∆°G•@¨…•Ω™∫∑s•_•Ô°® (“Guangdong Wenhua: Shijiemo de Xinbeifa,” i.e. “Cantonese Culture: The New Northbound Invasion of the fin-de-siècle”).^[34] I invoke Rey Chow’s critique against this gesture of representing the cultural other as “primitive” and “barbaric.” This “interest in the primitive” “emerges at a moment of cultural crisis...when...the predominant sign of traditional” Hong Kong “culture...is being dislocated” and “can no longer monopolise signification....These fantasies...stand in for that `original' something that has been lost” or never were,^[35] in this case the mainstream Hong Kong myth that considers Hong Kong as the original upstart success. In Hong Kong's mainstream cultural imaginary, there is this double primitivisation, the defining of the economically disadvantaged areas in China as the primitive, and the primitivisation of Hong Kong as the original upstart success story. This claim is in danger of losing to the very primitivised places in China in terms of the speed and intensity of competitive modernisation. The “imagined community” called Hong Kong, which is represented to the world as a metropolitan city and a cosmopolitan centre in relation to a discourse of modernity, is but a “worlding of the world.”^[36] “In the logic of...’capitalistic’ and cosmopolitical discourse, what is proper to a particular nation or idiom would be to...advance itself as a heading for the universal essence of humanity.”^[37] This claim of itself as the exemplary, the universal example/paradigm against which all others are measured and re-membered, is an avant-gardist position that “advances and promotes itself as an advance,” ahead of others, so as “to love to violate, to colonise,”^[38] as it self-colonises by this act of essentialising the self and the other all at once, through this logic of the binary impasse.

It is in this distracting and convulsive context in which the cultural imaginary of Hong Kong and its imagined and real colonisers and colonised are all locked into the binary representational structures of the North-south-bound and in-between impasses, that the analysis of Crazy, the intriguing postmodernist response to Hong Kong’s multiple colonialities, becomes instructive. The literary success A Crazy Horse in a Mad City («®g´∞∂√∞®» is well known only among a highly selective cultural, critical and academic circle. It however, like the mainstream Mr. Smart and Bao-Yi-Nai phenomena, partakes in the articulation with the popularised enframings of Hong Kong identity in cultural studies, i.e. the postulation of Hong Kong as the marginalised in-between two colonisers vis-à-vis s a petite-grandiose Hong Kongism (§p§p§j≠ª¥‰•D∏q); and the postulation of Hong Kong’s relation to the PRC and the West, that is, the postulation of Hong Kong’s coloniality, in terms of the Northbound Cultural Imaginary (•_∂i§Â§∆∑Qπ≥) and Cosmopolitanism vis-à-vis the Southbound Cultural Imaginary (´n∂i§Â§∆∑Qπ≥) and Sinocentrism. The text’s struggles within these impasses are the struggles of a delicate transaction between local ethnographies and transnationalising cultural theories which inform and affect each other in the process of political and cultural negotiations in the text. Although it is impossible to prescribe in what enframings we can read the novel, because this enframing of contexts and theoretical paradigms can itself be easily turned into a gesture of delineating the parameters within which a stable Hong Kong identity can be reinscribed, we can however, read how the novel frames itself, in all senses of the word. What this paper tries to do is therefore, to juxtapose this text in mutual critical proximity with several seemingly incompatible large frames in which the “imagined community” called Hong Kong has been imagined and used in cultural, academic, state and mainstream discourses. The incompatibilities thus exposed, warns about the impossibility of any such frames to sustain themselves exclusively without violence.

A Crazy Horse in a Mad City: pathology or subversion?

A Crazy Horse in a Mad City «®g´∞∂√∞®» is the award winning work of the anonymous author with the pseudonym Xinyuan ( §ﬂ∑·). Many controversies immediately arose after the award. To borrow Trinh T. Minh-ha’s phrase, this is a case of “A Net with No Fisherman,”^[39]in which both the author(s) of literary texts and their critics are caught in a very unstable negotiation of many registers, in the shadow of Western theory and the effects of coloniality. I will call this a case of the dis-location of cultural matrixes in postmodernity-as-coloniality. It is almost impossible to speak about controversies without being caught in it oneself. What I am risking here is not at all to make statements about factual claims or evaluations, but to show the precarious dis-location of critical paradigms under the condition of postmodern simulation, or what Deleuze and Guattari call de-territorialisation and re-territorialization, under the present configuration of capitalism in the colonial context. The case in point about the Crazy controversies in Hong Kong is that there seems to be an insistent harping on certain ethical issues of authorship while the important cultural issues that the text actually focuses on are deflected, diffused or made to disappear. The debate revolves around rumours as well as theoretical and cultural debates that focus on the ethics and responsibilities of authors and critics, on the use of satire and pseudonyms, but refuse largely to see the obvious concern of the novel itself for sexual and colonial politics. It is interesting to explore why local Hong Kong critics harp on issues that are somehow off the mark from the perspective of the novel’s author(s), or of transnational theoretical and cultural concerns. This is a difference in and a dis-location of cultural matrixes that we must investigate. The local debate in Hong Kong onset by the novel’s award focuses on two issues: (1) on the relation of the anonymous author or authors to the judges, and (2) on the alleged libel the text performs vis-à-vis the local Hong Kong cultural phenomena that the text satirises, as well as the cultural personages and icons it caricaturises.

First about the latter issue. Many local critics find the intended satire of the novel to be largely unsubstantiated claims and personal bile rather than critical analyses of cultural phenomena. The thinly veiled caricatures are largely unknown to outsiders, but old jokes in the circle. The gratification might simply be that someone dare to shout it out. The local reception does not see this gesture in the Crazy text as very radical or critical at all. The relative lack of self-reflective awareness in the novel also allows the issues the text lashes at to boomerang back at the author(s). There is a general question about why the judges think of this work so highly.

Secondly, about the pseudonym issue. The local cultural studies debate built around the text is formulated in the popular local Chinese newspapers Ming Pao (©˙≥¯, Ming Bao) and the Economic Journal (´H≥¯, Xin Bao) as an age old issue of the ethics and authenticity of authorship. Interestingly, none of the participating critics “sees” their own anxious involvement in the anonymous trickster affair as an anxiety about the failure to anchor cultural politics in face of simulation. What is at stake but not recognised as such, is simulation’s power to dis-locate, de-territorialise, and abstract our direct relations to the materialities of cultural production and politics. The horror of simulation is that the virtual reality thus abstracted and simulated for us does not even have to be believed in to be operative. They live a life of their own irrespective of how we see them. The discourses on this issue run as follows. In one article^[40] one of the judges was alleged to be the author, or a co-author with another woman. This makes this judge liable to the charge of partiality, and the organiser of the award liable of mishandling. The article also states that the autobiography the anonymous author produces for the award blurb was a fictional invention, too. There is never such a person matching the details of that life. The editor of the novel rebukes this charge in the same issue of the paper, endorsing the biography of the author as true.^[41] This defence however, was taken generally with skepticism, too, because the editor herself is also being suspected as the author, or the other co-author of the book. Insiders point to the intimate references in the novel to the parallel details of the judge’s and the editor’s lives. Many prominent sensibilities and ideas in the book are also clearly influenced by the judge’s discourse on Hong Kong cultural studies. All these however, cannot prove anything one way or another. After the possibility of simulation is triggered, it is a point of no return to “truth.” Even if someone comes forward and declares himself or herself author, there is no reason why we must take this as truth and not another layer of cover-up, simulation or passing. Even if there is some official registered author of the book, there is no way to prove that somebody else too, did not have a part in writing it. Suspicion is enough of a speech act to create the infinite deferral of truth and meaning. The judge’s subsequent articles in Ming Pao clarify a lot about the award selection process, and argue well for his own impartiality. The editor’s article also states that while the newspaper Xiandai ribao «≤{•N§È≥¯» was serialising Xinyuan’s novel, the judge was out of town, implying that the judge is not the author. This however, cannot prove whether the judge had a part behind the pseudonym Xinyuan or not. One does not have to be in Hong Kong to write or co-write a serialised novel in its papers. And of course, any writer, including the judge himself can use a pseudonym as well, on his own or with somebody else. In the whole process, the anonymity and right to privacy of the author(s) are also carefully protected by all parties, the “author(s),” the publisher, the editor and the award authorities. Whether we trust or not trust certain discourses is entirely a matter of faith or skepticism.

My point is however, that the anchor point for important sexual and colonial interventions in the text and its context do not rely on the authenticity and factuality of the author(s)’ identity at all. Whether s/he be male, or female, be one or more, be one person or another, still makes the author function responsible for the text’s issues of sexual, cultural and colonial politics, as well as the issues of knowledge and liability, however differently they might position themselves. I would argue that the multiple possibilities opened up by this anonymity forces us to even more carefully assess the intricacies of the converging modalities of power, sexual and colonial, in the body of the text and its contexts.

Other articles^[42] charge the anonymous author(s) of irresponsible criticism in anonymity. The alleged “author’s” own written rebuttal claims in reverse, outing herself as “female,” and claiming that “she” was “attacked” in this “witch-hunt” as “a female first-timer,” by “hurled invectives, abuses and railings” of a “same generation male hegemony.” Wong Bik-wun (∂¿∫—∂≥), herself also an award winner for the first time, discusses however, that openly asking an author to be responsible for what she says does not constitute a “witch-hunt.” She further argues that for creative writers, every new work is the first time of a product of its kind, and authors have to be responsible for one’s work every time, anew. She characterises Xinyuan’s tone as a “little red-guard style,” condemning others as hegemonic, while she herself does the same. She further argues that it is counter-productive to gender politics and also pathetic to claim femaleness as victimhood and marginality, solely in order to shield oneself from a sincere response to open criticisms. She encourages Xinyuan to courageously take up the challenge instead.^[43] What the author function Xinyuan does here seems to be a curious deterritorialisation and dis-location of the politics of sexism away from its situated politics in the text, while reterritorialising and displacing another question of power and knowledge, naming and responsibility with a simulated virtual claim of “same generation male hegemony” and sexist “witch hunt.” This is how easy the matrix of sexual/textual politics can be shifted and distracted from the more complex and anchored considerations in the text, strangely with the scandalous complicity of the author. We might be justifiably intrigued, for it is not too much to expect that at least the author would be more interested in the discussion of the converging modalities of colonial and sexual powers in the book than in the triviality of the libel scandal!

Throughout the debate, a careful discussion of the text’s politics in its very language, structure and context, did not happen. One such attempt by Kwai-cheung Lo appeared long before this scandal. He analysed the novel’s satirical and caricaturish style and shows that the novel’s attack on phenomena and people to be too “reductive” and “cartoonic,” “not at all generated from” and “substantiated by the narrative context.” This he thinks, “borders towards a mere expression of angst.”^[44] He considers the text’s “characterisation of all men, especially men from Mainland China as lewd and sexist, all women, especially Hong Kong women as worshippers of power and the phallus,” with the exceptions of the protagonists Lo Ma (¶—∞®) and Neo Yeg Seu (Ø√¨˘§Ù),^[45] as “too biased a kind of gender politics.” He also discusses how the way the novel “treats androgyny and gender confusion fails to challenge the classic binary opposition of masculine and feminine gendering.” He considers its trickster practical jokes to be too simple and “consumable in the off the shelf style” to allow for genuine questioning of the issues alluded to. He praises, however, several later chapters for their interesting and affective treatment of the protagonists relation to each other and their situation. I agree with Lo that the later chapters are significantly different. I consider them to be more inward looking, and in many senses, more complex and interesting, giving much more personal history and psychological depth to Neo Yeg Seu’s and Lo Ma’s earlier proclamations, allowing us ways to anchor the earlier statements in more traceable trajectories of discourses. I refer more specifically to chapters fourteen to twenty-three, as a remarkable change of tone and narrative voices and positions, from the previous thirteen chapters. These different narrative voices also produce different responses to the complexities of sexual and colonial power relations. The different narrative positions seem to relate differently to the same converging issues. This at least invites the consideration that the text is written to include and act out several responses of colonial subjectivities to the converging anxieties of sexuality and coloniality, even if not written by different writers. Both possibilities do not undercut the importance of this text as a complex engagement with the conditions of its specific time and place.

The challenge of this essay is to attempt to further Kwai-cheung Lo’s study of this text, and anchor and fine tune the precarious negotiation of the converging modalities of power in which sexual and colonial politics and pathologies are articulated. This requires one to attend to the distractive local politics of the scandalous and the mundane, while also remaining informed by the shadow of Western theory and the effects of coloniality. However complex, paradigmatic and interesting a city’s future might look to the purposeful gaze, the distractive mundaneness of everyday life in fact shares as much in the vested interests.

The gendering of colonial pathology: sexualised xenophobia of the colonised

A Crazy Horse in a Mad City calls forth a consideration of the issues of androgyny, gender passing, gender melancholia and misogyny, all caught up in their articulation of and with issues of coloniality, cultural marginality and in-betweeness, i.e. the paradigms in which Hong Kong cultural studies is usually framed. I would like to propose the reading that the hysteria, the ontological identity crisis of the unstable colonial subject in this text is played out in relation to discourses of cultural ressentiment, ethnic paranoia and scapegoating. These issues link inextricably race, coloniality and sexuality to offer a way to read the text’s sexualisation of colonial conflict. This text also forces us to question the easy evaluative assumptions about a text being either subversive or disappointing. If this text disappoints some critics, it nonetheless fails interestingly, symptomatically, as it struggles to push the envelop of certain binary impasses of sexuality and coloniality. It is at once pathological, pathetic and full of pathos, as well as comic, critical and deserving of criticism at times. This text’s complex negotiations with its cultural context allow us a way to sensitise the reader to the hysterical uncertainty of negotiating the complex matrixes of contemporary conditions of postmodernity-as-coloniality in Hong Kong, and the precariousness of discourses of radicalism in postmodernity-as-coloniality. The necessary precariousness of the text and thus its critical evaluations, is conditioned by our present historical condition, at the moment of intense negotiations of colonial effects under the comings and goings of British and PRC political and cultural hegemony, under which different temporalities and spatialities can co-exist and travel in a kind of postmodern deterritorialisation. This condition has come to be described by different understandings of the terms transnationalism, globalism, postmodernity, modernity, coloniality, postcoloniality, and so on, so forth. Rey Chow formulates the problem as “the reality of modernity-as-postcoloniality.”^[46] I want to ask further the place of postmodernity-as-coloniality in this picture. There is a contestation among the dis-located, multiple and heteroclite world pictures and spatial-temporal orders that we now find ourselves in. Cultural and political elements previously thought unrelated have converged into new hegemonies of contesting discourses and operations. Cultural grids and matrixes are constantly displaced and radically altered from where and what we imagine them to be, while obsolete paradigms remain as zombic structures, their binary operations being the very simulational force that have been made use of by many to de-politicise and implode our relation to actuality, to the real and everyday materiality. The text and its critics are all caught up in this dislocation of critical paradigms and radical politics in coloniality.

Haunting the most destructive scenes of this novel is the pervasive persecution complex that expresses the fear of the impossibility of Hong Kong’s cultural survival in face of the PRC’s invasive cultural hegemony. Neo Yeg Seu,^[47] the female protagonist’s home is literally invested by pests of cultural invasion from the colonising state, breaking most of her Canto-pop CDs and furniture that she had painstakingly and lovingly acquired. In this scene of great pathos the narrative voice asks:

She grows up in this city and this is her home. Why is it that even one’s home seems unlivable now? Why is there the looming sense of an invasion that might take away her life and her way of life anytime?^[48]

Similarly, Ma’s home being ransacked is made an allegory of Hong Kong’s paranoia of cultural invasion by the narrative voice:

Hong Kong is originally their home. They were originally two simple people. It is so ridiculous that they now have no home to return to in their own city.^[49]

Towards the end, the novel discourses upon the issue of exile with an even more depressing gloom:

From the refugee experience of our parents, Hong Kong has inherited very early every preparation for escape....Every legitimate form of travel ends up becoming the refugee’s flee.^[50]

The novel shifts constantly between pathos and panic. However, against this pathetic, subdued helplessness is posed the novel’s more comic, cynical and cacophonic side. It flags throughout the trope of Hong Kong as marginalised in-between two invasive colonisers. It starts with the protagonist, Lo Ma (¶—∞®, i.e. old horse or old Mr. Ma)^[51] in the Hong Kong bar district Lan-Gwai-fong, which is written as the pun meaning Rotten Ghosts Square.^[52] Looming large behind him are the China Bank and the Hong Kong Bank, the two monuments of PRC and British dominance in the city of Hong Kong. In this place, he meets his English colleague who has been in Hong Kong for twenty years without having learnt Cantonese,^[53] but who can speak to him in crisp Putonghua as a “China expert.” He then meets the Mainland Chinese poet, a thinly veiled Gu Cheng (≈U´∞), who does not show any interest in Hong Kong the whole time he was there. Then he meets Siu Lei (§p≤˙) who is a sexy female writer Southbound from the PRC to write a trilogy saga about Hong Kong. Thus ends chapter one. Lo Ma is thus the Hong Kong subject in-between the indifferent representatives of Britain and the PRC. These are characterised as stereotypical men and women from the two colonising cultures, arrogant and dismissive of Hong Kong’s people and its cultural particularities.

These stereotypes proliferate throughout the novel in garrulous, gaudy glee. All people from the PRC are characterised in the novel as Sinocentric and dismissive of Hong Kong without exception. All Westerners are orientalists. One major target of attack are Mainland Chinese exiled artists who are always characterised as lascivious and well fed. These are especially graphic in the chapters on “the future world” and the “China Club murder case.”^[54] The Sichuanese oil painter undresses gradually the women in his paintings. The Fujian painter runs around the club taking off women’s stockings. In their paintings women subtly, submissively unbutton their clothes, abandoning themselves faithfully and sacrificially to the avant-gardist painters’ hollow statements.^[55] The tone of reverse racism and envy, exasperation and revulsion persist throughout as an acerbic aftertaste, especially when it comes to the Eurocentric and Sinocentric assumptions dismissive of Hong Kong’s culture and politics. The novel jibes at the British gentlemen as poor, i.e. vis-à-vis the rich Hong Kong colony.^[56] Again in a racist manner, the Australian is characterised as half a beat slower and dumb.^[57] Hong Kong artists, art directors and art administrators get a fair share of derogation as well. They are characterised as always living on ludicrous funds solicited through hollow claims and loud lip-services, about unsubstantiated claims of “political censorship,” “avant-gardism” and “grass-root radicalism.”^[58]

Crazy aims its irritated animus at stereotyped opponents that remain sterile and trite. These effigies are propped up thinly with hardly any cultural context. One wonders from what silenced trajectories of anti-colonial anger and what compressed temporalities of bruised memories they now erupt as bitterly swallowed insults regurgitated as sour cud. Crazy’s bitter cynicism remains symptomatically repressed in its repetitive imaginary impasse, rejecting those who identify with and worship the stereotypes and enviously hating the stereotypes. However, the action of social encounters in the narrative context are hardly resistant to the status quo. In the narrative, the colonisers are almost never confronted with the perspective of the colonised. Ma and Neo swallow most of their bile silently, complaining naggingly only to the reader in narrative asides, except for the few remarks Ma makes when in disguise, dressed up in a black Chinese cheung-sam, defending uncomfortably the localist and essentialist Chinese positions vis-à-vis the West.^[59] In this frozen state of “affective dysfunction,” “feelings of ressentiment - of envy, jealousy and covetousness”^[60] pervade the novel.

In contrast to this swallowed anger in face of the male cultural other, the novel’s narrative voices and the voices of Neo and Ma, in particular, are incessantly outspoken about their anger and revulsion directed at local and Chinese women in general, as the irritating othered category. Outrageously, in this novel, all women, Hong Kong or Mainland Chinese, are always passive and shallow;^[61] are always valorising the West; are always marrying and in love with Westerners to the exasperation of Hong Kong men like Ma;^[62] are always the elided unknown translators behind Deng Xiao-ping; are always the unknown sacrificial women behind legislators; are always in love with sentimental and weeping male TV stars; are always waving goodbyes to political figures; are always collecting Mao memorabilia; are always in love with revolutionary exiles who take their body, soul and money without even remembering their names.^[63] Invariably, the colonisers Chinese and Western, the local Hong Kong men including Ma (the supposedly alternative and redeeming protagonist), and even the narrative voice all participate in the exasperating torrents of attacks at women, from both Hong Kong and Mainland China, with the exception only of Neo Yeg Seu, the female protagonist. This alerts us to a careful analysis of the text’s sexualisation of colonial conflicts. This text demands our careful theorising of the colonialising of gender and the gendering of colonialism. The text’s misogyny is inextricably linked with pathological colonial discourses. Among the tirade of attacks against women, the text dwells more extensively on several stereotypes that deserve closer analysis. These are the categories of the drab and the dread.

The drab women as traitor: the externalised subjects of internalised colonialism

Drab is an adjective for dirty, dreary, lifeless monotony and slovenly women. Drab refers to the novel’s feminising, externalising and marginalising of the colonised’s desire for the coloniser’s culture, both Western and Sinocentric Chinese, as the colonised female’s desire for Western or PRC men. A whole colonised community’s ambiguous and complicituous desires are externalised and blamed on women, here in this novel, first and foremost as drab, as prostitutional sell-outs, as the butt of the novel’s resentment/ressentiment. The most varied and populous othered women in this novel are the sexy and ruthless ones. Ma visits and revisits them in a serial manner. The above mentioned Siu Lei comes first in line. She is one of his ex-girlfriends, who simulates clichés of Hong Kong for a lucrative writing career. She reappears in chapter eight, entitled “Bedroom Politics” as the spy who tries to elicit a secret from him in the course of sex. The sudden realization of such betrayal of his affection renders impotent his member, clad in a condom decorated with the head of Chairman Mao, a favourite among her Mao memorabilia. She is portrayed therefore, as a shallow worshipper of Chinese patriarchal authority, crystallised into the icon of the fascist, superegoistic Chairman Mao. In a drunken and orgasmic outburst, he utters: “I ain’t a hero, nor a womaniser... I have no V.I.P. cards, can’t dance, does not own a villa or a Comrade Jiang Qing, ... I am simply a small Hong Kong photo-journalist....” The narrator teasingly adds that a kiss disrupts this “outburst of postcolonial subjectivity.”^[64] This is the novel’s clichéd invocation of the Hong Kong male subject in-between two colonisers. This is a self-conscious delineation and definition of the position of the Hong Kong subject, in Ma and in the narrative voice, to the point of stating this as a Boxer^[65] mentality. This exhibits a clear bruised pride of the colonised male, expressed in terms of the externalisation of all compromises and complicities onto the female other as scapegoat.

In this projection onto a whole list of female subjects of the coloniser’s lascivious desires and harassments, there is a clear metaphysics of presence, a clear split between the critical mind as the male colonial subjectivity, and the violated body as the objectified and colonised feminine. This is a gendering of the resistant colonial subjectivity as a male consciousness and the compromised colonised as the sexualised female body is a binary and exclusionary structure. This is a subscription to “the Cartesian distinction between freedom and the body,” maintained by a “mind/body dualism”^[66] mapped onto a colonised’s imaginary that generate constructions of categorical otherness and identities through the logic of male centred projections of sameness, difference and complementarity. In this picture, the colonising men, especially racially othered, are marked as competitors. Women, whether marked as Hong Kong or Mainland Chinese, are categorically treated as bodies to be possessed, used, violated and exchanged. All these prominent binarisms that function in this colonial imaginary, whether on the side of the colonising men or colonised men, are complicit with the coloniser’s Western metaphysics and are a “part of a phallogocentirc economy that produces the feminine as its constitutive outside.”^[67] To subscribe to this binary opposition of man/woman, form/matter underscores matter as the site at which the feminine and the body is excluded. The feminine is figured within these binaries as the specular feminine and the feminine that is erased of subjectivity. She is nothing but the excessive and excluded other, the exploited condition for the projections of this masculinist cultural imaginary. This logic of scapegoating and exclusionary binary projection continues into the figure of the dreaded woman.

Misogyny in colonial discourse: the dreaded sword of ideological passion

The dread refers to the dread of the sword of ideological hegemony feminised and externalised as another of Ma’s ex-girlfriend. She is rejected as a representative of another set of colonial mentality. This is the focus of chapter nine, entitled “Righteous Muk Lan-fa.”^[68] This alludes to the figure of the Woman Warrior Fa Mulan in Chinese history. In this novel, the colonised’s involvement with the passions and ideals of reform and revolution is packaged as a female Red Guard figure, Muk Lan-fa. She is made into a stereotypical image of the fascist sword of ideology and repression as female. This image is justified by the implied pop psychology complicit with patriarchy, which assumes that the powerless female repressed under Confucian or colonial society will return as the power-thirsty underdog, the return of the repressed with a vengeance. What the novel does is to cynically attack the colonised’s internalisation of institutionalised and ideological passions by marginalising the butt of the blame onto the female as internalised repression ferociously exercised to the point of fascism. Exposing the absurdity and violence of prescriptive passions is one thing. Packaging the butt of the problem as female is another. This othering of the culturally and socially repressed as female/Woman, is a kind of outcasting of the pervasiveness of threatening elements in the subject onto an other, similar to the othering of the guilt about the Cultural Revolution onto the Gang of Four, of which Jiang Qing is the symbolic head. Her image, caricaturised as the female party apparatchik, desexualised, fascist and moralistic, is invoked in the novel here as the prototype for Muk Lan-fa. The man, Lo Ma, who nonetheless loved her once for the qualities he now shuns is made surreptitiously blameless for being able to see through the myths and misrecognitions.

The drab women and dreaded women together exhibit how the text’s converging power of colonialism and sexism works in representing the colonial imaginary as a male imaginary. This colonised’s masculine position is however, consistently feminised vis-à-vis the coloniser. This imaginary and pathological acting out of a colonial imaginary is then dealt with in the form of drag. This performance of drag in the text is the gesture in which we can most cogently analyse the precariousness of the text’s desire for radical sexual and postcolonial agency which borders paradoxically towards conservative gender melancholia and xenophobic persecution complex. The novel’s state of gendered resentment/ressentiment and hate is shockingly coupled with the professed and approved gender radicalness of the novel (i.e. what the novel is awarded for). In fact its success is hyped in terms of its transgender experiment and its presumed radical gender performativity. Its critical acclaim as a trickster novel rests largely on its seemingly queer gender trouble-making. This essay will analyse these disturbing and contradictory assumptions under the issue of drag as conservative gender melancholia being mis-recognised as radical gender trouble.

Drag as gender melancholia and colonial pathology: androgyny, passing and failed gender trouble

Drag refers to what I call the novel’s failed transgender experiment. It has to be read against the text’s statements about its idea and ideal of femininity. I would argue that Crazy’s experiment with gender trouble ends up less perverse than it attempts to be. I consider its politics as politically more of a male to female drag than transgendering performativity, as more a gender melancholia about lost gender ideals, sometimes acted out in maniac misogyny, than a challenge to gendered binarisms.

Ma’s transformation into a female body happens without the transgender and transsexual subject’s complex desire to be the other gender. It lacks a sexual and cultural context that represents the transformation as an attempt to radically deal with gender and sex. It happens out of Neo Yeg Seu’s mischievous experiment of pouring the gender changing Neo Yeg Seu (New York water) onto the unknowing and confused Ma.^[69] Neo herself never attempted this experiment in the novel. The issue is therefore centred on Ma’s experience of sex change. Ma starts with the gaudy feminine clothing Neo throws towards “her” and sees first and foremost, in the mirror, a woman. This sets womanhood down as first and foremost a specular imagined object.^[70] The subjectivity of Ma however, remains in the position of the observing male. He then awkwardly and exaggeratingly performs what he assumes to be femininity. His first female experience is described as a bodily experience of sexual harassment and lewd gazes from men. This is not a generic man, but the third protagonist Chubby (§p≠D§l, in Cantonese pinyin, Siu Bun Ji, in Putonghua pinyin, Xiao pangzi ).^[71] He is allegedly the bastard son of a high official of the PRC government, and therefore, a hybrid version of the coloniser from the Chinese side. The second male harasser who violates Ma is a southbound Sinocentric intellectual from Shanghai, Ma’s colleague at the news agency.^[72] Again a stereotype of the southbound coloniser. The third harasser is a hairy white English young man. This is clearly the representative of the stereotypical British coloniser.^[73] In the chapter entitled “Daily dangers,” Ma generalises from these experiences his empathy for his “female kinsmen” (his word is §k¶P≠M≠Ã), for the possible sexual harassments they have suffered. He cynically mentions that there are Chinese and foreign kinds of sexual harassments, depending on whether the women join the Chinese orchestra or the ballet troupe.^[74] We witness again a sexual harassment version of the Hong Kong subject in-between two colonisers. Soon after this remark, right in the next chapter, Ma runs into his ex-girlfriend, the sexy spy. The plot conveniently transforms him back into his male body by a shower in the bath.^[75] This is all there is to the transgender experiment. In the entire representation, women are understood as merely a female body, merely a matter for male victimisation and violation. There is no other imagination of female experience other than this flat, repetitive representation of the colonised woman othered as the corps, the body, the parchment for male inscription and projection. In this whole fiasco, the novel exposes the colonising other as racist and sexist, but unconsciously does exactly the same, repetitively, symptomatically. Its internalisation of the colonising pathology is totally unrecognised within the novel itself. Instead of really queering the colonising other by a critical and self-aware gender performativity, it only performs a passing. It passes itself off as more critical and ethical within the limits of its own colonial fantasy. Dropped in much later like a politically correct after-thought, the novel backs this experiment up by alluding to one instance of cross-dressing in Ma’s childhood, the motives and context of which he cannot remember.^[76] Ma laments instead his unexplainable falling into the trap of the indoctrination of mainstream masculinity. It is instructive here to invoke Judith Butler’s discussion of the fine line between an uncritical, perhaps even unselfconscious gender performance, and gender performativity, which is the radical exposition of gender as just a performable masquerade:

performance as bounded ‘act’ is distinguished from performativity insofar as the latter consists in a reiteration of norms which precede, constrain, and exceed the performer and in that sense cannot be taken as the fabrication of the performer’s ‘will’ or ‘choice’; further, what is ‘performed’ works to conceal, if not to disavow, what remains opaque, unconscious, unperformable.The reduction of performativity to performance is, therefore, a mistake.^[77]

Ma’s triple acting out is exactly this reduction of performativity to a performance of drag that involves no wilful choice or resistance. The childhood occurrence indicates no clear desire or motive on his side. The adult occurrence is a passively incurred heterosexual male cross-dressing that is imagined within the experience of a male subjectivity. He does nothing whatsoever to challenge the binary, formuliac hierarchy of the sexist and colonial mind/body split that genderises and prioritises men as active, colonising subjectivities and denigrates women as the passive, abiding and victimised substance of abuse. The novel therefore, merely internalises “the social regulation of the psyche” that “can be read as the juncture of racial and gendered prohibitions and regulations and their forced psychic appropriations.”^[79] It partakes of the “convergent set of historical formations of racialised gender, of gendered race, of the sexualisation of racial ideals, or the racialisation of gender norms,” which “make up both the social regulation of sexuality and its psychic articulations”^[80]of the colonial culture that it imagines it is criticising and resisting.

I read Ma’s failed experiment of gender trouble as drag also due to the novel’s purported gendered and colonised ideology about femininity as a clear statement of gender melancholia expressed in terms of drag. Besides Ma’s drag, the narrative voice of the omniscient narrator, of Ma and of Neo all make statements delineating the good woman from the bad woman, the desired feminine from the repudiated feminine. I read this as the text’s symptom of hysteria in face of the disillusionment over the breakdown of traditional gender ideals and stable gender roles. Ma states that he “likes better women with short hair and independent masculine air. He is already at a stage where he does not emphasise gender particularities.^[81] Such statements are completely unself-consciously self-contradictory. The first sentence essentialises independence as a masculine quality and identifies short hair as a masculine gender sign. The second claims that he makes no such emphasis. He continues to fantasise that

[r]ather, he is interested in gender confusion, the upsetting of sexual symbolisation. He is more and more unsure of what he likes. He finds himself strange, unable to live with both men and women.... He finds out that when he does not treat the other as men or women, he feels the most liking for the other. Once gender is demarcated, he becomes self conscious and unnatural.... When he meets the “Real Woman”, he is incurably freaked out.^[82]

These “real women” are generically denigrated as the ex-girlfriend, the generic “girlfriend” essentialised as boring, brainless,“nonsensical.”^[83] He prefers Neo Yeg Seu because she is “interesting. They admire each other’s brain.”^[84] Thus again, while claiming a discomfort with stable gender identities, he nonetheless, upholds the mind/body split that is the fundamental structure in the setting up of the man/woman, form/matter gendered hierarchy. He sets up the gender bedrock just as he denies his desire for such gender stability. He exclaims in desperation that he does not want to fluctuate between the extremes of the “real” woman, between the sexy toy and the woman warrior. “All he wants is to find a good normal woman.”^[85] Against this essential demarcation of the legitimate and normal feminine from the extremes that he repudiates, he approves of a passive, docile, trusting feminine against the women exhibiting sexual and ideological power, independence and assertiveness. Lamentingly he asks why he cannot find a “normal woman” all his life. This woman he finds, however, in his hallucinatory entry into the “labyrinth of images” in the chapter entitled the same.^[86] In this chapter, Ma literally walks into the “labyrinth of images” in the exhibition of historical photos, like Alice going through the looking glass. This is a time tunnel type of fast flashback through historical grand narratives in terms of clichéd images. In the hallucination of the Japanese invasion of Hong Kong in 1941, he meets this “woman of his heart.”^[87] She is the simple, unpretentious peasant girl. She will not “hear some lyrics and cry hegemony.” She is the scared peasant girl who can elicit his “simple, solid old heroism.”^[88] Thus despite the novel’s claim of Ma’s desire and ability for gender confusion, he is terribly nostalgic about the lost myth of idealised patriarchal versions of femininity. Even Neo Yeg Seu, who is portrayed as the only radical and transformative alternative woman, is nevertheless not the one actively troubling gender with transgressive or perverse challenges. Although Mary Wong compares her and Ma positively to Orlando’s androgynous figure,^[89] they are in fact as far from a challenge to genderism as possible. Apart from claiming that she is a woman who does not want to be woman and Ma a man who does not want to be man, the text shows nothing otherwise. Apart from mixing some gender markers on her body and in her dressing code, apart from denying her obvious features of female sexuality, she simply embodies the ultimate extreme of the traditional feminine ideal. She is an expert in domesticity. She cooks “authentic” dishes learned from a genealogy of ethnically “authentic” Lebanese, Sri Lancan, Sichuanese and gypsy women.^[90] She desires strongly a sense of home and stability in her indulgent fantasies.^[91]Ma and Neo together, I suggest, exemplifies the hysterical fluctuation within the binary impasse of gender, and of gendered colonial imaginaries. This idea can be clarified by mapping onto this gender trajectory, the text’s consistent reference to the colonised space as feminine.^[92] I would claim that Crazy is in part an acting out of “desire, displacement and jealous rage that has significant implications for rewriting psychoanalytic theory in ways that explicitly comes to terms with race”^[93]and coloniality. Despite Crazy’s passing of its colonial pathology off as queering, it nonetheless, displays merely the melancholic’s redirection of the colonised rage, from accusing the coloniser to accusing the local women, from accusing the colonial Other to the accusing the feminised other in the self.

Let me explain this intricate nexus of power and pathology. I read this drag in Crazy as a gender and colonial melancholia, in the sense that in melancholia, the subject directs the rage that should be aimed at the lost and disappointing Other, at the ego itself. What should be resistance and rage against the hegemonic Other (gender norms, the colonising discourse) turns into debilitating self-victimising guilt in melancholia. As Judith Butler summarises,

Melancholia describes a process by which an originally external object is lost, or an ideal is lost, and the refusal to break the attachment to such an object or ideal leads to the withdrawal of the object into the ego, the replacement of the object by the ego, and the setting up of an inner world in which critical agency is split off from the ego, and proceeds to take the ego as its object.”^[94]

This could imply in the colonial condition the identification with and love for the colonising culture, the culture that imposes gendered colonial relation and idealised gender norms which together exclude the colonised self to the extent that the colonised is unwilling to break off the attachment to the lost and denied ideals imposed by the colonising Other. The “accusations that the critical agency” of the melancholic subject “is said to level against the ego turn out to be very much like the accusations that the ego would have levelled against the object or the ideal,” i.e. the colonising Other.^[95] This object or ideal can, in the colonial case, be the colonising culture that is excluding the colonial subject and not the colonised’s own culture. Melancholia in this colonial context is therefore, “an instrument of containment of the ego’s aggression” towards the colonising Other, “a rebellion that has been put down, crushed.”^[96] If this scenario is repeatedly acted-out in Crazy as if it is a critical discourse, who is criticising what at all?

Drag in Crazy is thus about “what happens to the norm in the process of internalisation.”^[97] It “allegorises some set of melancholic incorporative fantasies that stabilise gender” and colonial relation as genderised in terms of the feminisation of the colonised space/place/culture/subject. In terms of gender melancholia, Ma’s “drag” merely “exposes or allegorises the mundane psychic and performative practices by which heterosexualised genders form themselves through the renunciation of the possibility of homosexuality.”^[98] This is exactly why both Ma and Neo rejects Chubby (Siu Bun Ji, §p≠D§l ) as possibly homosexual and therefore, repulsive and other, as and when Ma performs his drag at the initiation of Neo’s experiment.^[99] They together fail to find or exemplify the simple “Woman,” the essentialised pure gendered feminine. “It is a blockage revolving around the impossible:”^[100]

Between the impasse of “the belief in man,” in “the Other without flaw,” and the “cult of woman,” the opposite nonexistent ideal, “we progress from the universal to the particular, we run up against the impossible, the impossibility of saying something of the particular; the way from the particular to the universal leads to” what I would called immobility.^[101]

This is the immobility of the melancholic, caught debilitatingly between the loss of the idealised essential feminine and masculine. Within this impasse s/he fluctuates hysterically, under the imperative that there should be but never was an ideal object cause of desire. Ma and Neo’s “failure to approximate the norm, however, is not the same as the subversion of the norm. There is no promise that subversion will follow from the reiteration of constitutive norms; there is no guarantee that exposing the naturalised status of heterosexuality will lead to its subversion.”^[102] It can instead, like Ma’s case at the end, generate the hysterical anxiety which set out to “re-idealise heterosexual norms without calling them into question.”^[103] The mere fact that Ma and Neo exceed in some sense the strict gender markers does not automatically qualify them as radical and subversive. As Butler outlines, “[t]o claim that the subject exceeds either/or is not to claim that it lives in some free zone of its own making. Exceeding is not escaping, and the subject exceeds precisely that to which it is bound.^[104] What the text’s reliance on androgyny fails to conceptualise is exactly the gendered trouble-making implied in the realization and exposition of the performability of gender. Judith Butler outlines this issue as follows: if, like what the idea of androgyny assumes,

it is possible to speak of a ‘man’ with a masculine attribute and to understand that attribute as a happy but accidental feature of that man, then it is also possible to speak of a ‘man’ with feminine attribute, whatever that is, but still to maintain the integrity of the gender. But once we dispense with the priority of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ as abiding substances, then it is no longer possible to subordinate dissonant gendered features as so many secondary and accidental characteristics of a gender ontology that is fundamentally intact. If the notion of an abiding substance is fictive construction produced through the compulsory ordering of attributes into coherent gender sequences, then it seems that gender as substance, the viability of man and woman as nouns, is called into question by the dissonant play of attributes that fail to conform to sequential or causal models of intelligibility.^[105]

Ma’s and the text’s anxiety and hysteria comes exactly from such an unsettling effect not being recognised. Rather, the text tries to cover up, to displace and deny the recognition of the gender trouble through fantasies of queering and perversion, in place of real acts of queering and perversion.

Between passing and queering, between normativity and perversion

At this point it is instructive to take Juliet Flower MacCannell’s caution that in the domain of literature, our reading must also be destabilised in face of these performances of colonial and sexual pathologies as nevertheless, the conscious staging of a mimetic and performative acting out of the unconscious pathologies. This literary, imaginative and symbolic gesture becomes no longer easily termed either conscious or unconscious in this demonstrative and provocative work of art with decided interplay in a public domain.^[106] Perhaps Crazy’s appeal and its being hyped as radically perverse lies in the reception, the audience’s sharing of the fantasy of perversion nowadays, in face of the collapse of the authority of stable symbolic orders in the dis-location of cultural matrixes in postmodern Hong Kong. This perverse cultural condition, this perverse cultural unconscious is now collectively and publicly acted out. It is a denial of the recognition that in some cases, the pervert’s trumpeting of new agencies, of a “new basis on which ego and other, subject and object can be bonded,” can be but a fantasy. It can be merely an unconscious desire that makes up for the fact that “the pervert,” that is our collective subjectivity, is already the simulated object of the Other’s colonial and invasive jouissance.^[107] This present vogue that valorises perverse behaviour as the new agency, as the new possibility of radicalism is afterall only a collective fantasy that tries to recover a sense of community, decency and normativity that traditional neurotic sexuality and subject/object relation can no longer guarantee under the conditions of the postmodern and colonial dis-location of traditional cultural matrixes. Thus, this desire for new social agency is but a misrecognition of a normative and conservative desire as subversion itself. This fantasised perversion is exactly why the contradiction in this text is totally unrecognised, denied, disavowed in the public discourse of its reception. This is the contradiction in which a text that is conservative, exclusionary and xenophobic, can be misrecognised as transgressive, radical and transformative of the very binarisms it in fact maintains in all earnestness.

This polemical reading of Crazy is itself a part of the discourse it intervenes into. With full respect for the precariousness of the articulation in the context of the converging of power relations and pathologies, colonial and sexual, this essay itself can do no more than sensitising the reader to the hysterical uncertainty of negotiating the complex matrixes of contemporary conditions of postmodernity-as-coloniality. What this essay hopes to achieve, is a studied and empathic response-ability, without precluding engaged and self-reflective criticism. It tries to bring home the pressures of coloniality looming large over texts produced in its shadow, in order that an empathic but critical evaluation of the colonised’s texts about gender melancholia and colonial paranoia can happen in all its complexities. We must read for their illustrative failures, as well as for their successful efforts at touching and exposing the limits of their sexual and colonial impasses.

^[1] §ﬂ∑·, «®g´∞∂√∞®» (kuang cheng luan ma) (≠ª¥‰°G≥d§ÂÆ—´Œ), 1996. Xinyuan, A Crazy Horse in a Mad City (Hong Kong: Youth Literary Book Store), 1996. Henceforth called Crazy. All translations from this text henceforth are mine.

^[2] This idea of “dis-location” is inspired by the work of Ackbar Abbas. He discusses the “dis-location of culture” in his manuscript “Cultural Studies on a Postculture,” Paper presented at the Second International Symposium on Cultural Criticism entitled Cultural Politics of Cosmopolitanism: Critiques of Modernity in the Non-Western Context, organised by the Programme for Hong Kong Cultural Studies, Research Institute for the Humanities, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, January 4-6, 1996.

^[3] I am referring to a kind of decontextualised pluralism, instead of the insistence on the delicate differential power relations among plural genealogies.

^[4] Chiu, Fred Y.L., "Rearing Tigers: Politics And The Body Of The Social In Colonial Hong Kong", paper presented at the Second International Symposium on Cultural Criticism: "Cultural Politics of Cosmopolitanism: Critiques of Modernity in the Non-Western Context", organised by the Programme for Hong Kong Cultural Studies, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 4-6 January, 1996, MS p. 23.

^[5] Lau Siu Kai, Society and Politics in Hong Kong (Hong Kong: The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 1982), p. 67.

^[6] Incidentally, at the time of the writing of this essay, besides the Chinese presence in Hong Kong, Chris Patton, the ex-governor of British colonial Hong Kong is coming back as the representative of the European Union in its negotiation with China over the issue of the latter’s entry into the World Trade Organisation.

^[7] Chow, Rey, “Between Colonizers: Hong Kong’s Postcolonial Self-Writing in the 1990s,” in Diaspora, volume 2, Number 2, Fall, 1992, pp. 151-170. I prefer this version to her later rewriting of the essay in her book Ethics after Idealism (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998), pp.149-167, for the more daring statements she attempted here that she edited out in the later version. I will therefore, quote from the former version.

^[8] This is how he spells his name in English. Also, in this essay where the original texts use the Taiwan or Cantonese formats of pinyin rather than Putonghua pinyin, I will follow the original.

^[9] Chow, Rey, Woman and Chinese Modernity: the Politics of Reading between West and East, (Minnesota & Oxford: University of Minnesota Press), 1991.

^[10] Chow, Rey, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies, (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press), 1993.

^[11] Chow, Rey, Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema, (New York: Columbia University Press), 1995.

^[12] Chow, Rey, “Between Colonizers: Hong Kong’s Postcolonial Self-Writing in the 1990s,” in Diaspora, volume 2, Number 2, Fall 1992, p. 158; Chow, Rey, Ethics and Idealism, 1998, p. 157.

^[13] Lo Ta Yu (this is how he spells his name) (√π§j¶ˆ) , “Pearl of the Orient” (™F§Ë§ßØ]), in the album Huanghoudadaodong (Queen’s Road East) (¨”¶Z§jπD™F) (the English translation is there on the record), (Hong Kong: Music Factory≠µº÷§uºt, 1991). For lyrics of the songs discussed, please refer to the appendix.

^[14] I am referring to the said essay by Rey Chow and also Lee, Gregory B., “Chinese Trumpeters, French Troubadours: Nationalist Ideology and the Culture of Popular Music,” Troubadours, Trumpeteers, Troubled Makers: Lyricism, Nationalism, and Hybridity in China and Its Others (London: Hurst & Company), 1996, pp. 149-178.

^[15] Lo, Ta Yu, Hometown (Taipei: Rock Records & Tapes Co. Ltd., 1991).

^[16] The work of Lo Ta-yu (√π§j¶ˆ) consulted here includes: Lo Ta-yu, Weilai de Zhurenweng (•º®”™∫•D§HØŒ), (Taipei: Rock Records & Tapes Co., Ltd., 1986); Lo Ta-yu, Chih Hu Che Yeh(§ß•G™Ã§]), (Taipei: Rock Records & Tapes Co., Ltd., 1987); Lo, Ta-yu, Home (Æa), (Taipei: Rock Records & Tapes Co. Ltd., 1987); Lo Ta-yu, Comrade Lover (∑R§H¶Pß”), (Taipei: Rock Records & Tapes Co., Ltd., 1989); Lo Ta-yu, Brilliant Days (∞{´G™∫§È§l), (Taipei: Rock Records & Tapes Co. Ltd., 1989); Lo Ta-yu, The Year to Say Farewell (ßißO™∫¶~•N), (Taipei: Rock Records & Tapes Co., Ltd., 1989); Lo Ta-yu, To Return Gloriously (¶Á¿A¡Ÿ∂m), (Taipei: Rock Records & Tapes Co., Ltd., 1989); Lo Ta-tu, Hometown (≠Ï∂m), (Taipei: Rock Records & Tapes Co., Ltd., 1991); Lo Ta-yu, Huanghoudadaodong (Queen’s Road East) (¨”¶Z§jπD™F), (Hong Kong: Music Factory≠µº÷§uºt, 1991); Lo Ta-yu, Capital (≠∫≥£), (Hong Kong: Music Factory≠µº÷§uºt, 1992); Lo Ta-yu, Love Song 2000 (≈ ¶± 2000), (Hong Kong: Music Factory≠µº÷§uºt, 1994); Lo Ta-yu, Chasing Dreams II: Sheltered Harbour of Big Times (∞lπ⁄II°G§jÆ…•N™∫¡◊≠∑¥‰), (Hong Kong: Music Factory≠µº÷§uºt, 1995).

^[17] Lo Ta-yu, Capital (≠∫≥£), (Hong Kong: Music Factory≠µº÷§uºt, 1992).

^[18] Lo Ta-yu, Weilai de Zhurenweng (•º®”™∫•D§HØŒ), (Taipei: Rock Records & Tapes Co., Ltd., 1986).

^[19] Derrida, Jacques, The Other Heading:Reflections on Today’s Europe, trans, Pascale-Anne Brault & Michael B. Nass (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press), 1992, p. 7.

^[20] “Northbound Imaginary - Relocating Post-Colonial Discourses in Hong Kong,” in the Hong Kong Cultural Studies Bulletin, Issue 3, September 1995 (Hong Kong: The Programme for Hong Kong Cultural Studies, Research Institute for the Humanities, The Chinese University of Hong Kong), pp. 2-52. See also §˝ßªß”°Aßı§p®}°A≥Ø≤Mπ¥µ¤°A°mß_∑Q≠ª¥‰°Gæ˙•v°D§Â§∆°D•º®”°n (ªO•_°G≥¡•–•X™©°A§@§E§E§C¶~)°A≤ƒ229-240≠∂°CWong Wang-chi, Li Siu-leung, Chan Ching-kiu Stephen, Hong Kong Un-Imagined: History, Culture and the Future (Taipei: Rye Field Publishing Company, A division of Cité Publishing Group, 1997), pp. 229-240; Law, Wing-sang, “Northbound Colonialism: A Politics of Post-PC Hong Kong,” in Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique (Duke University Press), volume 8, number 1, Spring 2000, pp. 229-261.

^[21] Parry, Benita, "Overlapping Territories and Intertwined Histories: Edward Said's Postcolonial Cosmopolitanism", in Sprinker, Michael (ed.), Edward Said: A Critical Reader (Oxford, U.K. & Cambridge, U.S.A.: Blackwell Publisher, 1992), p. 24.

^[22] Ibid., p. 24.

^[23] Ibid., p. 25.

^[24] The word "neo" is used as a catachresis that refers not to specific new ways in which colonialism is conceived. It only points our attention to the very sites and the very techne-logic of simulation that has made colonialism more and more obscured and disappeared, making traditional forms of cultural critiques quite beside the point. It also points to the dis-location of the sites in which the intricacies of cultural politics are now most intensely played out.

^[25] Chow, Rey, Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).

^[26] Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture (New York& London: Routledge, 1994), p. 240.

^[27] Ibid., p. 241.

^[28] Ibid., p. 241.

^[29] Donaldson, Laura E., Decolonising Feminisms: Race, Gender and Empire-Building (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 120.

^[30] Ibid., p. 123.

^[31] This is a serious local socio-political magazine which goes out of print since the 1997 change-over.

^[32] ∑s§´§@§G§T°A°ß≠ª¥‰¬˜§§∞Í¶hª∑°H°®°A”§E§Q¶~•N”°A1994¶~12§Î°A≠ª¥‰ø≤µΩ¶≥≠≠§Ω•q°A22-23≠∂°CAll translations from Chinese articles are mine.

^[33]§Ω¶|°A°ß±q∏g¿Ÿ•_•Ô®Ï¨F™v•_•Ô°®°Aibid., pp. 74-75≠∂°C

^[34] ∑®™F•≠°A°ßºs™F§Â§∆•@¨…•Ω™∫∑s•_•Ô°AΩ≤¥…Ωs°A°ß´n§HªP•_§H°®°A•_® °G§j•@¨…•X™©¶≥≠≠§Ω•q°A1995¶~10§Î°A250-261≠∂°C

^[35] Chow, Rey, Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 22.

^[36] Spivak’s phrase.

^[37] Derrida, Jacques, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today's Europe, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault & Michael B. Naas (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992), p. 48.

^[38] Ibid., p 49.

^[39] Trinh T. Minh-ha, “Film As Translation: A Net with No Fisherman,” in her book Framer Framed (New York & London: Routledge), 1992, p.111.

^[40] æ§∞∑±j°A°ß§]¥µ¨O§£¨O§ﬂ∑·°H°®°A«´H≥¯» °A≠ª¥‰°A§@§E§E§C¶~§Q§G§Î§G§Q§≠§È°CLei Gin keung, Economic Daily (Hong Kong), December 25, 1997. Translations of all quotes from all newspaper articles are mine.

^[41]∂¿≤Qº_, “§]¥µ§£¨O§ﬂ∑·,” «´H≥¯» °A≠ª¥‰°A§@§E§E§C¶~§Q§G§Î§G§Q§≠§È°CMary Wong, Economic Daily (Hong Kong), December 25, 1997.

^[42] Please refer to the numerous articles in the cultural pages of the Hong Kong newspapers the Ming Pao (©˙≥¯, Ming Bao) and the Economic Daily (´H≥¯, Xin Bao), between December 20, 1997 and February 4, 1998.

^[43] Wong Bik-wun (∂¿∫—∂≥), °uÆ£©∆´ƒ§l°v(“Kungbu haizi”), Ming Pao (©˙≥¯, Ming Bao), Hong Kong, January 13, 1998.

^[44] √πµ£ (Law Tong is the pen name of Kwai-cheung Lo)°A “πLß‚≈}¥N¶∫°H°X ΩÕ°m®g´∞∂√∞®°n,” «´H≥¯» °A≠ª¥‰°A§@§E§E§ª¶~§E§Î§G§Q§K§È°C°CLaw Tong (Kwai-cheung Lo), “Get thrilled and then die? On Crazy Horse in a Mad City,” in Hong Kong Economic Journal, 28 Sept. 1996, p. 20.

^[45] I use Cantonese pinyin in this essay in relation to Chinese used specifically in a Cantonese speaking context.

^[46] Chow, Rey, “Between Colonizers: Hong Kong’s Postcolonial Self-Writing in the 1990s,” in Diaspora, volume 2, Number 2, Fall, 1992, pp. 151-170. Chow, Rey, Ethics after Idealism (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press), 1998, pp.149-167.

^[47] This is the Cantonese pinyin of the Chinese characters Ø√¨˘§Ù (Putonghua pinyin: niuyue shui).

^[48] Xinyuan, A Crazy Horse in a Mad City, pp. 89-90.

^[49] Ibid., p. 129.

^[50] Ibid., p. 222.

^[51] The adjective before his name will change in the course of his fluctuating identities and affectivities.

^[52] Ghost is a local pejorative allusion to foreigners.

^[53] The daily language and even mother tongue of more than 95% of Hong Kong people.

^[54] Xinyuan, A Crazy Horse in a Mad City.These are chapters 5 and 13.

^[55] Ibid., p. 115.

^[56] Ibid., p. 37.

^[57] Ibid., p. 59.

^[58] Ibid., p. 106.

^[59]Xinyuan, A Crazy Horse in a Mad City, pp. 120-121.

^[60] Abbas, Ackbar, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 61.

^[61] Xinyuan, A Crazy Horse in a Mad City, p. 47-49.

^[62] Ibid., chapter 11, pp. 95-104, entitled “Red Rose and Hybrid Ma.” See especially p. 100.

^[63] Ibid., p. 52.

^[64] Xinyuan, A Crazy Horse in a Mad City, p. 70-71.

^[65]An anti-Manchu rule and anti-Western exploitation sect of martial arts rebels lashing at those imposing powers in disastrous bloodshed during the late Qing dynastic period.

^[66] Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 12.

^[67] Butler, Judith, "Bodies That Matter", in Engaging With Irigaray: Feminist Philosophy and Modern European Thought, ed. Carolyn Burke, Naomi Schor, Margaret Whitford (New York : Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 149.

^[68] “•ø∏q§Ïƒı™·,” in Putonghua pinyin, “Zhengyi Mulan Fa.” Xinyuan, A Crazy Horse in a Mad City, p. 77-82.

^[69] Xinyuan, A Crazy Horse in a Mad City, p. 28.

^[70] Ibid., p. 29.

^[71] Ibid., p. 30.

^[72] Ibid., p. 37.

^[73] Ibid., p. 51.

^[74] Ibid., p. 57.

^[75] Ibid., p. 68.

^[76] Ibid., p. 142.

^[77]Butler, Judith, “Critically Queer,” in Shane Phelan ed. Playing With Fire: Queer Politics, Queer Theories (New York & London: Routledge), 1997, p. 20.

^[78]Butler, Judith, “Critically Queer,” in Shane Phelan ed. Playing With Fire: Queer Politics, Queer Theories (New York & London: Routledge), 1997, p. 20.

^[79] Butler, Judith, Bodies That Matter, p. 181.

^[80]Ibid., p. 182.

^[81]Xinyuan, A Crazy Horse in a Mad City, p. 20.

^[82] Ibid., p. 20.

^[83] Ibid., p. 33.

^[84] Ibid., p. 33.

^[85] Ibid., p. 77.

^[86] Chapter 19, ibid, pp. 193-208.

^[87] Ibid., p. 201.

^[88] Ibid., p. 200-201.

^[89] ∂¿≤Qº_, “ª¤∂Ø¶P≈È°G¥Mß‰≤z∑Q™∫§HßŒ°H, ” «´H≥¯» °A≠ª¥‰°CWong, Mary, “Androgeny: In Search of The Ideal Human Form?” Economic Journal, Hong Kong.

^[90] Xinyuan, A Crazy Horse in a Mad City, p.25.

^[91] Ibid., p. 152, 155.

^[92] Ibid., pp. 29-30, 52, 84, 86, etc..

^[93] Butler, Judith, Bodies That Matter, p. 182.

^[94] Butler, Judith, The Psychic Life of Power:Theories in Subjection, (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 179.

^[95] Ibid., p. 190.

^[96] Ibid. p. 190.

^[97] Ibid., p. 19.

^[98]Ibid., p. 21.

^[99] Xinyuan, A Crazy Horse in a Mad City, chapter 4.

^[100] Quackelbeen, with L. Billiet, J-M. de Wulf, L. Jonckheere, D. Lorré, L. Van de Vijver, H. Van Hoorde, and P. Verhaeghe, “Hysterical Discourse: Between the Belief in Man and the Cult of Woman,” in Mark Brader, Marshall W. Alcon, Jr., Ronald J. Cortell & Françoise Massardier-Kerney, ed. , Lacanian Theory of Discourse: Subject, Structure, & Society (New York & London: New York University Press, 1994), p. 132.

^[102] Butler, Judith, “Critically Queer,” p. 17.

^[103] Ibid., p. 17.

^[104]Butler, Judith, ThePsychic Life of Power, p. 17.

^[105] Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble, p. 24.

^[106] MacCannell, Juliet Flower, “Perversion in Public Places,” in New Formations, Number 35, Autumn, 1998, p. 47.