Postcolonial aging, amah, and diaspora in A Simple Life

Abstract

ABSTRACT Based on the life story of the Hong Kong film producer, Roger Lee, A Simple Life/Taojie (Ann Hui [2011] 2012) is a semi-fictional biographical film about the life of Taojie, an amah (Cantonese migrant domestic servant) who served three generations of Lee's family for more than sixty years. The intervention of this essay is two-fold. First, this essay situates A Simple Life in the burgeoning but understudied journalistic and documentary discourse on aging as a postcolonial condition in Hong Kong since the 2010s. An intertextuality between the film and its adjacent media productions, such as journalistic reportage and TV documentaries, reveals the social anxiety about the lack of holistic and accessible elderly care in Hong Kong's medical and social welfare system and the profit-driven nursing home industry. Second, this essay argues that A Simple Life responds to the postcolonial anxiety of old age by articulating an intergenerational kinship through Roger Lee and Taojjie, a diasporic Asian icon of amah that is localized, nationalized, internationalized under the framework of CEPA (Hong Kong and Mainland Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement). Multiple imaginaries of home, family, and community—Roger Lee's home, a local nursing home, Roger Lee's transnational family, and a new Hong Kong–Mainland cinematic community—co-exist in this film as interconnected and interdependent sites of care, demonstrating how a postcolonial, national, and transnational sense of home and belonging are simultaneously articulated under the framework of CEPA.