Forms of Solidarity and the Self: A Postcolonial Reading of Yuli Riswati's Hong Kong Writing

Abstract

Abstract: This article puts together the seemingly disparate topics of transnational domestic labor and the Hong Kong protests to discuss inter-ethnic and cross-class solidarity. It does so by examining the writing of Yuli Riswati, an Indonesian migrant worker and civic journalist who was deported from Hong Kong in 2019. City-wide civil disobedience in Hong Kong has historically been predicated upon the liberal ideal of suffrage (as in 2014) and an essentialized and Han-centric identity of Hongkonger (as in 2019), both of which have overlooked the needs of ethnic minorities, especially those who are ineligible for citizenship. Building on scholarship in decolonial and intersectional feminism, this essay focuses on Riswati's two short stories, namely "Violet Testimony" (2016) and " 那個傷口依然在我體內 " ("The Wound Is Still Inside Me" 2019) as well as her personal essay, "Some Notes about Hong Kong as My Second Home" (2020), which was featured by the exhibition afterbefore at the Chinatown Soup gallery in New York. This essay argues that Riswati's writing embodies what Gayatri Spivak would call an oppositional transformative: Riswati's stories about political involvement and gender-based domestic violence challenge the traditional history of the international labor movement that has a distinctive masculinist ethos and the typical narrative of Hong Kong protests focused exclusively on the citizenry, a rhetorical move underpinned by the homogenizing assumption that all Hongkongers are Han Chinese. As a former Hong Kong domestic worker, Riswati's textual performatives throw into relief the shared precarity which makes herself and her community relatable to a global audience; thereby, her writing brokers a type of intersubjectivity of the human or a postcolonial humanism that does not rely on a preconceived notion of humanity which shows up in the definition of a nation or a region's citizenry but rather on audience engagement that speaks to her publications' distinctive context and culture.