Hong Kong in New York: Global connections, national identity, and filmic representations

Abstract

According to self-proclaimed “border artist” Guillermo Gomez-Pena, “in one way or another we are all, or will be immigrants.” But what does it mean to cross a border that Gomez-Pena calls a “multiple metaphor of death, encounter, fortune, insanity, and transmutation” and relocate? While some diasporic narratives emphasize the sacrifice embodied in migration, others focus on subjects struggling against adversity and violation by affirming their cultural hybridity and changing social positions. Nevertheless, theorists and writers tend to rely upon bipolar formulations (“us vs. them”) that lessen comprehension of the emigrant experience in terms of global relations of power and the world capitalist system. Migrations of Asians as cheap labor, displacement of refugees, and the exile of large groups historically developed different diasporas around the world. Recently, affluent Chinese (principally from Hong Kong and Taiwan) possessing what anthropologist Aihwa Ong calls “flexible citizenship” have been able to shuttle back and forth between “home” and enclave without holding allegiance to or identifying with either. The mobility of this stratum serves to underscore the immobility of the less privileged “stuck” in whatever place they find themselves. Both sets of circumstances, however, exacerbate the general sense of dislocation disrupting affective values such as stability, bonding, and belonging. “Border crosser” films made by Hong Kong directors such as Cheung Yuen-ting (An Autumn's Tale), Stanley Kwan (Full Moon in New York), Clara Law (Farewell China), Peter Chan (Comrades, Almost a Love Story) and Evan Chan (Crossings) in the 1980s and 1990s use New York City as a backdrop for telling immigrant/migrant stories. These filmmakers variously present the diasporic experience as surmountable obstacles leading to acclimation; as loneliness and struggle as well as friendship and intimacy; and as difficult adjustments in conflict with tradition. In the process, they either explicitly or implicitly negotiate Hong Kong's pre-1997 predicament and the sense of anxiety created in its wake.