What Is Hong Kong Time?

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What Is Hong Kong Time? Christopher K. Ho (bio), Melissa Karmen Lee (bio), Godfre Leung (bio), and Holman Wang (bio) The title of this roundtable draws from a rhetorical question posed in GODFRE LEUNG'S curator's essay on CX 889, a public artwork created by artist CHRISTOPHER K. HO for the Vancouver Art Gallery. Drawn from memory and old photographs, CX 889 restages an iconic feature of Hong Kong's old Kai Tak airport: the double ramps of the arrivals hall, complete with a luggage cart and "no re-entry" signs. The airport was closed a year after the city's transfer from the United Kingdom to the People's Republic of China (commonly referred to as "the Handover"). Conceived in part as a tribute to the wave of Hong Kong-to-Vancouver immigration between 1989 and 1997, CX 889 explores the emotional residue of diaspora, the nostalgic ties to one's homeland, and the "unhomeliness" of being somewhere anew. The airport, an "in between space" or transitional interlude in between homes, is what is so interestingly interrogated in HO'S artwork. Its title refers to the flight code for Cathay Pacific's recently discontinued daily flight from New York City to Hong Kong with a layover at Vancouver International Airport. In this conversation, the four panelists, Christopher K. Ho, Melissa Karmen Lee, Godfre Leung, and Holman Wang—all with familial or citizenship ties to both North America and Asia—consider issues such as diaspora, transnational citizenship, and the imprint of the wave of Hong Kong to Vancouver immigration, from 1989 to 1997, on the city today. [End Page 1] MELISSA KARMEN LEE/ I want to begin by thinking about transnational crossings and in particular how the Hong Kong-to-Vancouver migrational axes affect forms of cultural identities, rendering a community's imagination and identity as transcultural. By this, I mean how the back-and-forth nature of Hong Kong and Vancouver residents through multiple generations creates a resonance of particular memories that are passed from one family member to another. This includes not only the sights and smells of both cities but also their landmarks—and here I'm thinking of Chris's restaging of Hong Kong's now defunct Kai Tak airport, which mostly lies in our collective memories.1 Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities (1983) references how collective imagination transforms the colonial into the national state, made possible by the "established skein of journeys through which each place, city, and village is experienced by its residents."2 In Chris's work, I imagine a shared Chinese community (moving between Hong Kong and Vancouver) in search of new transformative expressions of identity, told through the stories of migrants, immigrants, and travelers. GODFRE LEUNG/ I'm not sure if I'm just inflating the complexities of Vancouver because it's the place in the world I've lived the longest and know the most about, but there's a hunch I've had for a long time: in the way that people who study geography and space used to be fascinated with Los Angeles in the 1980s and '90s, and then with Singapore in the 2000s, I think Vancouver is really, really interesting. Partially, what's interesting about Vancouver stems from the reasons you so eloquently articulate, Melissa, and partially the inverse: this city is, to my knowledge, totally unique in how it's been shaped, both spatially and in its cultural imaginary, by involuntary white flight. I'm not an academic anymore, so I'm not super invested in whether Vancouver is exemplary or paradigmatic of anything—in the way the scholarship we all read as students fetishized Paris, Vienna, and Berlin as exemplars of modernity. But if I had graduate students, I would advise them to write their dissertations on Vancouver. I'm just realizing this now: maybe this is why I invited Chris, an artist who was doing really brilliant work on Chinese diaspora, to interface his questions about mobility with Vancouver as a site (or nonsite). [End Page 2] CHRISTOPHER K. HO/ Godfre's invitation in 2018 came at a perfect moment. I was still U.S.-based, and during those first years of...