Dislocated Locality

First off, I didn’t come up with this terminology myself – wish I had the talent for that. It’s brought up by Professor Ackbar Abbas, the honorary professor at the Comparative Literature of Hong Kong University who has written on the subject of HK studies. I just went to his keynote lecture at a symposium by the Comparative Literature Dept. on film scenes in HK. This lecture aimed at investigating the relations between cinematography and scenes in HK cinema, and the topic of the seen/unseen. This latter part then led to a more important question about the idea of disappearance (e.g. city image, identities, culture) in the wave of globalization. Professor Leo Au-Fan Lee, a retired Harvard Professor now teaching in HK (apparently, as he said, cause he likes it here…) then immediately responded to Prof Abbas’ lecture. The collective brain power these two men gave was so intriguing and inspiring that just made me realize…man, I haven’t had a lecture like this for a long time.

This term dislocated locality came up because a very big part of the talk was dedicated to the dialectic idea of appearance/disappearance seen in HK and its cinema scenes. I think both professors agreed that in films like Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love and 2046 (see, I got backup for my taste here), or Fruit Chan’s Durian Durian, or even Andrew Lau’s Infernal Affairs I, space and place are stripped from each other. Most obvious (or not), I think, is in Wong’s In the Mood for Love, for the movie was shot in Cambodia, aiming to re-create the “mood” of the old HK in the 60’s, which historically represents the “mood” of the old shanghai in the 20’s. The significance of this, particularly because Wong shot a lot interior scenes or interior-looking scenes even in the outdoors to create this old HK in a foreign country, is that scene/space of a film is longer related to the place it is set in and therefore, marking the disappearance of a city’s image (that’s why I said it could be unobvious, cause it’s disappearing). In other words, as HK is created in In the Mood for Love, the image of HK itself can no longer be found (i.e. disappear) in HK. In fact, as Abbas said, “what is lost is not the city”, but the boundary (or even memory) “between interior and exterior”. Of course he then went on to talk about other films and their significances (which I need sometime to take in, or maybe watch the films again), but overall, I think dislocated locality is a good term to sum it up. (Something else really interesting he said, dialectically, about the Tony Leung in the film was “disappointment to desire”…ah…so sad but true.)

What’s funny is that right when I could link this phrase to myself and “people like me” because it describes my situation in HK so well. What do I mean by “people like me”? – Kids who grew up here, or had lived here in some part of their lives, but went abroad elsewhere and came back for work or school, only to realize that the locality in them is dislocated.

That’s how I feel at least: before I went to Canada for school, I considered myself a local boy. I might have had some characteristics that was part of the globalized youth culture, like Skateboarding, Hip Hop, Breakdancing, or gee, Coke and McDonalds, but never a minute I doubted my locality. Then I went to Canada and got a bit more of the West and “white-washed”, I came back and the “local” people no longer consider me to be “local”. Despite the fact that my locality has not changed – what I used to do or say that was local, it’s still in me – I’m literally and physically dislocated, at least, in terms of my cultural identity and image. But seriously, I don’t consider any change in my locality, because as my best friend once put it “you can take a boy out of Hong Kong, but never Hong Kong out of the boy”.

SoThis label of non-Jupas does not just signify the physical dislocation of space that I have gone through, but also the shift of my cultural identity due to this shift, making me (and numerous others who had gone through this, or so-called 3^rd culture kids) a physical representation of the separation of locality and space.

In fact, I am gonna push this a bit further: when I was in Canada, people considered me HKese. Meaning that whatever they saw of me, they thought I represented a HK kid, fresh of the boat. So when I was there, I was also a dislocated locality, or, taking the perspective of the country I landed, a localized non-locality, because whatever I did would be slightly different from a local. So great, I am now dislocated, regardless of where I go. (Well, then I guess this being stuck in between makes me really global.)

Of course, the word dislocated has a negative implication to it, and that’s understandable because Professor Abbas used it when talking about the negativity of city disappearance and appearance. I used this term here because it fits well, not because I really think this is about negativity. But it’s funny how this idea is seen in real individual, which makes me wonder if people could be lost in globalization as well. Plus, the fact the I came back hoping to be re-immersed in this culture that I am most familiar with turned out to be a self-realization with disappointment, just fits well with Professor Abbas and Lee’s idea of affect in disappearance – it’s out of love (not the mood, ok) for the city I’m from that I experience this disappointment. Yet, more disappointment leads to more desire (for the city), just like how Tong Leung keeps dating the same “type” of woman, only with disappointment every time. Wha’ a playa.

But ain’t this just a form of hybridity – me as a hybrid of two cultures (or more) that I have experienced, just like different people can have in them traces of different backgrounds. Yea, it is. But how this dialectic approach makes sense even for ideas outside cinema and books amazes me. That’s all.

Some other point I thought is very related to what I am interested in here, is the idea of upcoming generic city – be it Hong Kong, Shanghai, or Shenzhen – seen in this force of globalization. As Professor Abbas suggested, it’s not just one city becoming like others, like following a prototype, but also, how a city leaves behind its cultural background (or burden) and becomes liberated to a new form – and thus, seen rather generic. Hong Kong is certainly at a stage right now of being claimed as one of the generic cities, and starting to lose its charm or “competability” among other Asian or China cities. Why? Well, cause we have had this “liberation” and became the generic city long ago in the colonization era, and have been enjoying the success and wealth the liberation had brought and thus, have not been able to move on from there to have another liberation. It might have worked for us then when not that many Asian cities are capable of this liberation (so we looked like we the shit), but now, with all cities and especially the China ones having equal capability and opportunity to become the “new and rising” rookie-of-the-year, we are losing our place. In fact, the slogan for HK, “Asia World’s City” is so out of date that it’s just a joke, ‘cause the whole world is after every single Asia city like it’s a World’s city – that’s why it’s called globalization.

It upsets me when I see this in HK: that when we are losing our grounds that brought us the success, and yet we are not willing to or putting effort to move on, so we keep falling behind. Even now after 8 years of struggle since the handover, we are still just barely catching up, only waiting to be swallowed by China (then we will really be generic, nation-wise).

Professor Leo Lee mentioned in the lecture that Hong Kong lacks local talents to do “crazy things”, and thus not capable of liberating. For instance, he said that we don’t have crazy architectures that would take off from us the label “generic” (which I wanted to respond to by saying that we have the building of Bank of China designed by IM Pei, which to me is an absolutely stunning, elegant beauty. But I realized it’s not by a “local” talent – Pei was a dislocated locality too). In a way, he suggested that we would need local HK talents to be creative and courageous to create a trend in the globalized world, but not to follow it. That, to me, is just a much bigger problem and picture, for globalization is affecting Hong Kong is a special way that’s different from its impact on China, partly because HK had colonial history and has had a different function in Asia.

What are there to do then, for Hong Kong to keep up and possibly lead in this globalized world? Well, first we need to rethink our place here, cause it’s obvious we are no longer enjoying what we had. And this will involve, somehow but not only, a choice between dislocating all of our locality (so that we are swallowed) or to re-localize the locality that has disappeared/dislocated (so we redefine not just our position in the world, but the idea of what can be globalized or not). I hope then Wong Kar Wai and other directors will have then rediscovered what could be appearing in Hong Kong, and they would be filming the time now, the present, but not the past that we are all nostalgically obsessed with.