Hong Kong: A Cultural History (Cityscapes)

287 Pages·2007·12.9 MB·English

by  Michael Ingham

HONG KONG

HONG KONG
A CULTURAL HISTORY
Michael Ingham
OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
2007
OXPORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
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Copyright © 2007 by Michael Ingham
Foreword © 2007 by Xu Xi
Foreword © 2007 by Lord Patten
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ingham, Michael.
Hong Kong : a cultural history / Michael Ingham.
p. cm. — (Cityscapes)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-531496-0; 978-0-19-431497-7 (pbk.)
1. Hong Kong (China)—History. 2. Hong Kong (China)—Civilization.
3. Hong Kong (China)—Description and travel. I. Title.
DS796.H757I54 2007
951.25—dc22 2007001938
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
Foreword
Hong Kong is an exciting city for many reasons.
First, it is one of the greatest maritime cities in the world—in the
same league as Sydney, New York, San Francisco and Shanghai.
Second, it provides an extraordinary mix of colonial history and
Chinese energy.
Third, Hong Kong is both literally and figuratively at the cross
roads of the Asian and Western worlds. Stir all these ingredients together
and you have an urban mix which has excited and delighted travellers
and writers for over a century.
I am not entirely convinced that the writing has always been as
entertaining as the City itself though the great travel memoir by Jan
Morris does the business. But Michael Ingham, in this entertaining and
original book, gives us a lot of good reasons why Hong Kong should stir
our imagination and inspire a suitable response.
No-one who ever visits Hong Kong could ever be bored by the ex-
perience. Michael Ingham gives ample reason why this should always
have been so.
Lord Patten
Finally.
What a pleasure, and relief, it is to be able to say of a Hong Kong
visitor's guidebook: finally, one that does our city justice. Of course,
this is not the typical guidebook, merely detailing places to stay, eat,
shop, sightsee, but rather, one that takes the reader inside the city's soul.
"Guidebook" is therefore a misnomer for this volume, because even a
local reader will discover Hong Kong as the imagined city, which is what
any great city becomes in the world.
When in its history can a city be said to exist in the global con-
sciousness? Hong Kong arguably has long been a part of that collective
imagination. Our significance in trade and finance, tourism, even the
peculiar history that is Hong Kong have all contributed to our city's
stature worldwide. Meanwhile, martial arts films, fashion, Canto-pop,
TV shows, and increasingly, high quality "made in Hong Kong" brands
make their mark on popular culture.
But how and why does a city enter the world's artistic and cultural
consciousness?
Michael Ingham answers this very question in the pages that follow
with insight, wit and yes, imagination. His gaze is that of the "inside out-
sider", the newcomer who stays and stays and stays so long he becomes
one with the city, as Ingham does, this "foreigner" who is now "local".
This is a heartfelt perspective, because he pays his adopted city homage,
evidenced in his deep respect for local artistic endeavours, in the way he
details Hong Kong's cultural maturation. This homage is admirable, be-
cause it emerges from a critical gaze and excellent research. This homage
is infectious, because it is genuine, enthusiastic, personal. This homage
is long overdue to a city that offers the world not just shopping, dining,
entertainment, fashion, but also thoughtful films, artistic excellence in
all the performing arts, a diverse and stunning cityscape and landscape,
good literature, contemporary visual art in many mediums, a peculiarly
unique history... all this from a place that ignites and invests the imagi-
nation with multiple expressive returns.
Come to Hong Kong, he says, but don't for god's sake come just for
Disney ("beware low-flying giant mice" is the message he imagines for
the advertisement near the airport) or merely another five-star global
experience. Come and peer into this amazing city's soul and discover your
own connection to the humanity of this one-time barren rock.
I first experienced the raison d'etre of Ingham's imagined city in the
summer of 2001, over curry and beer in London. I was passing through
on my way to a writer's residency in Norway; he was doing his annual
theatre field trip with his English literature students from Lingnan Uni-
versity. We were in the process of co-editing City Voices, the anthology of
Hong Kong English writing that brought us together, and were still new
colleagues then and did not know each other well. The Tate Modern was
already closed—my afternoon ranneth over and I had missed this cor-
ner of my imagined London, which I hadn't visited for at least seven or
vi
eight years. And here was this Englishman, by then resident in my home
city for about a dozen years, telling me all about Hong Kong's literary
and cultural consciousness. Was he, as they say in American vernacular,
"teaching a grandma to suck eggs?"
"It was the way their eyes lit up," he said of his Hong Kong stu-
dents, "as the words they studied came to life during their first visit
to England," where he brought them to theatre, ferried them along
the byways of culture and history, showed them unexpected connec-
tions between the words they read in their New Territories classrooms
to their own lives, and helped them understand the importance of
imagination. Listening to him talk about his students—the abiding
faith he had in their abilities to rise above second language limita-
tions and lack of cultural exposure—it struck me that this foreigner
to my city placed great value on the intrinsic power of the ordinary
person's imaginative abilities. Lingnan is one of the newer universi-
ties, certainly not a venerable institution like the University of Hong
Kong (which he describes in these pages) and its students are not the
privileged elite of the older and more established tertiary institutes.
Yet here was this graduate of elite Oxford, believing that Hong Kong
students, regardless of their backgrounds and circumstances, would
be inspired if given the opportunity to experience arts and culture
first hand. What a refreshing perspective, I thought, to hear someone
speak of the possibilities of an artistic soul for my city, tired as I was
of the old cliches—"Hong Kong is a cultural desert that only cares
about money and business"—that much of the local privileged elite,
especially, seems too fond of repeating.
As I read this book, I was reminded of our London meeting. Ing-
ham's enlightened perspective is perhaps best summed up in his musings
on the high-quality fake antiques that abound in Hong Kong, which
visitors are nonetheless drawn to purchase. "After all, value," he writes,
"might well be said to reside principally in the belief systems of the imag-
ination." So to all readers I say, caveat emptor, those without imagination
need not enter here.
Sometimes it takes an outsider to see the true beauty of a place,
because locals often become too jaded. Ingham brings an educator's zeal
to this volume which instructs yet entertains, informs yet also delights.
He roves across a broad spectrum with an open and democratic eye and
has penned an astonishing "word album". There are tantalizing histori-
vii
cal snapshots (the oft maligned Charles Elliot's viewpoint presages that
of Chris Patten, the last British governor); geographical anomalies (early
Tsimshatsui streets were originally named after those in Central, with
"little thought for the confusion this was likely to cause to posterity");
unexpected connections (Sun Yat-sen juxtaposed with George Bernard
Shaw segues to the Canto-pop lyricist James Wong).
But it is the array of cultural expressions he collects and examines,
allowing a panoramic view of a clever, contrary, quirky artistic soul, that
most delights. This soul continually strives for meaning, significance,
identity, excellence, all of which Ingham accords Hong Kong in this
highly original and finely detailed collage. He quotes from works of writ-
ers passing through who appropriate the city as locale, like Somerset
Maugham from England or Eileen Chang (Chang Ai Ling) from Shang-
hai, as well as from home-grown authors such as P. K. Leung, Xi Xi,
Louis Dung (Dung Kai-cheung) and Agnes Lam. He shows us the city
on screen, as imagined by numerous directors, Wong Kar-wai certainly,
but also Johnnie To, Evans Chan, Ann Hui et al He takes us to live
performances by Hong Kong's many theatre companies, to dance and
music, Chinese operas. And he guides us through art spaces of all kinds,
introducing us to painters, commenting on art installations, photo ex-
hibits. In short, he gives us the imagined city as artists have expressed
it, mapping the byways down the roads less and more travelled in order
that we may engage with the city as fully as possible before departure.
Refreshed, informed, enlightened. Finally.
Xu Xi
June 2006
viii
Preface
It always seems more than a touch presumptuous for a non-indigenous
writer to hold forth on the cultural heritage of a city without really be-
longing to that city. Although I have lived in Hong Kong since 1989 and
consider the city my home, I cannot claim to "belong" to the place in
the way that those who are born here do. However, many of their parents
and grandparents were not "authentic" Hong Kongers. Like me, they
made the place their home, even if at first it appeared to them merely a
transit point in their lives.
The gulf of language and culture between the Chinese and the av-
erage Westerner is enormous, despite the "twin cities" of Hong Kong
and Macau representing a unique cultural bridge between East Asia and
the West. I have tried my best to cross that bridge from my side, but of
course we must recognize that it is usually Chinese people who make
the greatest effort to do so from theirs in terms of linguistic and cultural
meeting of minds. In this respect I must point out that I have deliber-
ately angled the book toward the reader, who has little or no knowledge
of Chinese, which means inevitably that much about Hong Kong that
cannot easily be translated is not included.
With reference to language, it is worth pointing out that most of
the transliterations used in the book are based on Cantonese pronun-
ciation, rather than Mandarin, the expression Jung shui being a case in
point. In my citations of writers who prefer the pinyin Mandarin Chi-
nese version, feng shui, I have deliberately retained their spelling for the
sake of literal accuracy. However, in general I have chosen to employ the
Yale System of Cantonese transliteration as my standard romanization,
without wishing to imply that it is the only—or necessarily the most
recognized—method of rendering the aurally challenging nature of the
Cantonese tonal system. In the case of street and place names in Hong
Kong there exist officially recognised transliterations, which I have con-
sidered it sensible to follow. A further linguistic note to bear in mind is
that a significant number of citations that appear in this book are Eng-
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