The Englishized Subject: Postcolonial Writings in Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia

157 Pages·2019·3.086 MB·English

by  Kwok-kan Tam

Kwok-kan Tam
The
Englishized
Subject
Postcolonial Writings in Hong Kong,
Singapore and Malaysia
The Englishized Subject
Kwok-kan Tam
The Englishized Subject
Postcolonial Writings in Hong Kong,
Singapore and Malaysia
Kwok-kan Tam
The Hang Seng University of Hong Kong
Shatin, Hong Kong
ISBN 978-981-13-2519-9 ISBN 978-981-13-2520-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2520-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018957316
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Preface
When I traveled in China in the early 1970s, I was often given forms in English to
fill in, probably because I did not look like the local Chinese. But after I filled out
the forms and submitted them, they would be rejected because I should not have
used English for a Hong Kong address. At that time, China insisted Hong Kong was
not a colony but a place that originally belonged to China and was acceded to Britain
as a result of an unequal treaty forced upon China after the Opium War. Since Hong
Kong was part of China’s sovereignty, I should not use English. Filling in a Hong
Kong address in English was of course politically incorrect. This was my first expe-
rience with the politics of English.
When I was traveling in Europe in the 1980s without a passport, I could only
prove my identity by showing an identity paper issued by the Hong Kong govern-
ment which stated that I was Chinese living in Hong Kong without Chinese or
British nationality. Nothing in the paper said anything further about what I was. The
immigration officers looked with suspicion at my identity paper, which was partly
damaged because of frequent use. I felt I was treated as someone, or something,
abandoned and being tossed around. When I was a graduate student in the United
States, I had the same difficulty in explaining who I was because Americans could
never understand why a Chinese-looking person, who spoke Chinese, was not
“Chinese” by nationality. Gradually I begin to understand that Chinese means more
than nationality, more than race, but more importantly for me my cultural identity
and the Chinese language I speak. However, I also speak and read other languages,
such as English, French, Norwegian, Japanese, and some German. I only know that
I am the same as many other Chinese-looking people who have become more than
Chinese, linguistically and culturally, but I am also more Chinese than many
Chinese-looking people. My extensive travels and encounters in Europe and North
America then made me understand that I needed to ask myself, and myself only,
who I was.
As a person without an officially recognized nationality, I know all the complexi-
ties about identity and about how a person is often treated and misunderstood
because of the colour of his or her skin and because of the language(s) he or she
speaks. I often ask myself: “Can’t a Chinese be Chinese without having to be
v
vi Preface
recognized? Can’t a person be a person without having to be recognized? Am I not
what I am? I don’t need anybody’s recognition.” Now I travel with a passport. When
I showed a passport in the Frankfurt airport a few years ago and in Munich recently,
I was questioned many times about where I obtained the passport and why I held a
passport but did not live in that country. “Can’t a Chinese-looking person have a
different passport than what he is supposed to have? Can’t a Chinese-looking person
speak English? Must a Chinese-looking person hold a Chinese passport and speak
Chinese only?” I asked myself as well as the airport officer.
For a person who has spent most of his life in the study of global issues in lan-
guage and literature, I am used to looking at things from wider perspectives.
Comparative literature has given me a world perspective. That also is the beginning
of my interest in World Englishes. It all began in Urbana-Champaign in the late
1970s when Braj Kachru proposed World Englishes as a subject of research and
study, a designation of new varieties of English that emerge as a result of the diffu-
sion of English to other parts of the world. The more I meet people from other parts
of the world, the more I find people like me, who are transnational, transcultural,
and translinguistic in their thinking and their language use. They speak English, but
they are not English nationals, very similar to the Chinese who speak Chinese but
are not Chinese nationals. This perhaps is the new subjectivity in the twenty-first
century. Many people speak several languages and are culturally mixed and cultur-
ally globalized. The languages they speak represent their multiple identities. This
has been the case for many decades in Southeast Asia but only recently more so in
East Asia, where the countries like China, Japan, and South Korea are largely mono-
cultural and monolingual.
My travels in Bangladesh, Myanmar, Singapore, and Malaysia have made me
understand more the cultural and linguistic transformations English has brought to
these parts of the world. Indian English, Myanmar (Burmese) English, Singapore
English, and Malaysian English are some of the varieties that the British have left as
legacies of colonialism, but now people who speak these varieties are proud that
they have their own variety of English that can mark their cultural and linguistic
identity. With a language, people have an identity. Without it, people don’t. Behind
a hybrid language is a hybrid identity. How many of us living in the twenty-first
century are not culturally and linguistically hybrid?
This book consists of critical studies of how a new Asian subjectivity has emerged
as a result of Englishization via processes of colonization, postcolonization, global-
ization, and localization. Localization does not mean getting rid of English but
localizing it and making it a language usable in local contexts. Englishization thus
occurs hand in hand with localization of English. Some of the materials in this book
have appeared in publications elsewhere, for example, in my books Englishization
in Asia: Language and Cultural Issues (2009), English and Globalization:
Perspectives from Hong Kong and China (2004), Anglophone Cultures in Southeast
Asia (2003), and Shakespeare Global/Local: The Hong Kong Imaginary in
Transcultural Production (2002), and in the journals, Tamkang Review (2004),
Canadian Review of Comparative Literature (2003), and Journal of Asian Pacific
Preface vii
Communication (1998). They represent the journey that I have taken in probing
questions of language and identity.
In adapting past research findings for this book, I have updated and revised them
and put them into a framework to argue for the emergence of a new Asian subjectiv-
ity which is linguistically and culturally Englishized, and thus hybridized. As a
global language, and an interlanguage in many places, English has a dominant posi-
tion over other languages that it interacts with. Englishization is of course also
enculturation, in which a speaker learns the rules and values that the culture of
English entails. When we say that this is a borderless world, we do not just mean
that the state ceases to be the only defining element in identity formation. We mean
that there is something that connects everyone and that this thing is English, the
global language with many varieties. As we use a language, it becomes a medium of
our self-expression. Englishization is not simply a social phenomenon; it is also a
socialization process in which the self of a person is formed. We are shaped by the
language we speak. We are Englishized but also English-nativized. We are the
language(s) we speak.
Many ideas in this book originated from the courses in comparative literature and
World Englishes that I taught at the Chinese University of Hong Kong from the mid-
1980s to 2006 and from the lectures I gave at different institutions over the last
ten years. I would like to thank colleagues who gave me comments on my lectures
at the National University of Singapore, Sophia University, Tunghai University,
Stockholm University, University of Vienna, Guangdong University of Foreign
Studies, Central China Normal University, Fudan University, Zhongnan University
of Economics and Law, and City University of Hong Kong, to name just a few. In
the preparation of this manuscript, I would like to thank Teresa Ho and Carol Zhong
at the Open University of Hong Kong Press for copy editing the drafts. I would also
like to thank Carolyn Zhang and Rebecca Zhu, editors at Springer, for their kind
assistance in publishing this book.
Shatin, Hong Kong Kwok-kan Tam
July 2018
Contents
1 Introduction: Englishization and the New Asian Subjectivity . . . . . . 1
1.1 English and the World Order . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.2 N ew Englishized Subjectivity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
1.3 Localizing Global English . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
2 Post-Imperial/Postcolonial English(es) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
2.1 Britain in Search of Britishness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
2.2 Loss of Empire/Loss of Language Ownership . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
2.3 Diffusion of English/Plurality of Englishness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
2.4 Postcolonial Britain/The Pinterian Fear . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
3 Transnational Shakespeare . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
3.1 Transnationalism in Shakespeare . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
3.2 Shakespeare in a Globalized World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
3.3 A Hong Kong Experiment in Sinicizing Shakespeare . . . . . . . . . . . 35
3.4 A Hybridized Shakespeare . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
4 Englishization of Education and (Post/)Colonial Identity
in Hong Kong . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
4.1 Colonialism in Early Educational Policy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
4.2 Colonial Utilitarianism and English Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
4.3 Westernization vs. Colonialization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
4.4 Decolonization and Identity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
4.5 English as an Asian Language and the Postcolonial Subject . . . . . . 49
4.6 Hong Kong Identity at a Crossroads . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
5 Localism in English Language Teaching in Hong Kong . . . . . . . . . . . 55
5.1 Globalization vs. Nativization of English . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
5.2 Asianization of English: ESL, EFL, or ESP? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
ix
x Contents
5.3 The Singapore Model and Its Implications
for China/Hong Kong . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
5.4 Critical Language Education for a New Asian Subjectivity . . . . . . 62
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
6 Identity of the In-Between in Contemporary Hong Kong
Literary Writings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
6.1 Hong Kong and the Anomaly of (Post)Coloniality . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
6.2 H ong Kong Chinese: Discourses of a Floating
Self in a Floating City . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
6.3 A n Alternative Identity: Images of China as the Homeland . . . . . . 69
6.4 The Sense of Place and Voice in Identity Formation . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
6.5 A Hong Kong Discourse: A Hong Kong Subjectivity . . . . . . . . . . . 72
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
7 The Self Between Race and Language: Two Hong Kong
Bilingual/Bicultural Plays . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
7.1 The Politics of Race: Racialization and Identity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
7.2 Globalization in Reverse: Reterritorializing Hong Kong . . . . . . . . . 79
7.3 Face: (Non-)Identity of the In-Between. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
7.4 Back to the Wall: Identity of the No-Return . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84
7.5 Auto-ethnographic Performance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
8 Bilingual Metaphor and Hybrid Identity in Hong Kong
and Singapore Writings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
8.1 Cultural Hybridity and Language Mixing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
8.2 Postcolonial Metaphors and Englishized Chinese . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94
8.3 Bilingual Metaphors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
8.4 Biculturalism and Contact Linguistics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
9 Hybridity in Identity: New Englishes in Hong Kong,
Singapore, and Malaysia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
9.1 Code-Mixing and Cultural Hybridity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
9.2 Hong Kong and Identity Mixing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
9.3 Singapore/Malaysia and Identity Construction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
9.4 Englishization of Asian Identity and Nativization of English . . . . . 106
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
10 I n Between Cultures and Nation: Writing the Self in Singapore . . . 109
10.1 T he Self as Linguistic Mediation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
10.2 Identity Politics and Postcolonial Nationhood in Singapore . . . . 112
10.3 English and the Construction of Identity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
10.4 C ultural Contestation and Hybridization of the Self . . . . . . . . . . . 114
10.5 T he Self as an Imaginary Construct . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118
Contents xi
11 The Self as Hybrid Contestation: Three Autobiographical
Stories from Singapore and Malaysia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
11.1 The Autobiographical Self in Contestation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122
11.2 Hybridity in Food and Identity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
11.3 Home and the Cultural/Ethnic Self . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125
11.4 Body Colour and the Split Self . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
11.5 Voices of the Postcolonial Hybrid Self . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
12 Conclusion: Globalization as Englishization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
12.1 The “Glocal” Paradigm in Cultural Formation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134
12.2 The Postcolonial Paradigm and Cultural Re-Visioning . . . . . . . . 136
12.3 N ativization vs. Globalization: Models of World English(es) . . . 138
12.4 Dynamics in Global Language/Cultural Formation . . . . . . . . . . . 141
12.5 Toward Critical Language Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149