Six “Hong Kongs”
in search of a Negative Director:
Wong Kar-Wai’s alter-Native cinema

By Ivan Yau

published in tofu-magazine #1

If what people meant by “Hong Kong Cinema” is defined by the general direction of the Hong Kong film industry and the preference of most Hong Kong audience, Wong’s films are definitely not representatively “Hong Kong

Based on certain vulgar senses and perceptions of nationality and market relations, Wong Kar-Wai seems unquestionably to be a Hong Kong director. Saying that these senses and perceptions are “vulgar” does not imply that they are wrong, though to some extent they are indeed wronged. If what people meant by “Hong Kong Cinema” is defined by the general direction of the Hong Kong film industry and the preference of most Hong Kong audience, Wong’s films are definitely not representatively “Hong Kong”, whilst he made expensive films with the most famous actors and actresses in the mainstream Hong Kong film industry.

Let us position him on the side of the nonrepresentative, which makes him equally,
or at least no less apparently “Hong Kong”. Though not alternative, Wong’s films
alter the Native. Wong is a “Hong Kong director”, in the sense that, in his films, Hong Kong as a subject is inevitably assumed but can in no way be positively grasped.

The 1st Hong Kong

In Wong’s films, Hong Kong is a cliché, so long as “Hong Kong” becomes a label that nativizes the elusive. In As Tears Go By (1988), Mongkok , Lantau Island and Tiugengleng are districts in Hong Kong where the urban and the rural are discerned. Being a city where economic developments are emblematically highlighted, rural areas like Lantau island, where the love affairs between Wah and Ngor advance, and Tiugengleng, where Fly wants to return to after being rich someday, present a “Hong Kong” which is unemblematic enough to be the part which is there but cannot be seen in cinema. Mongkok, one of the most “prosperous parts” in Hong Kong as its name literally means in Chinese, is, in As Tears Go By, the site where vices and cruel power struggles take place.

However, ten years after the film was made, all these rural signs have been undergoing speedy vicissitudes that turn the urban-rural contrast into an irony: Mongkok is still very prosperous, but Tiugengleng, the place where refugees from mainland China lived after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, as well as where Wah asks Fly to return to after leaving the triad society, has already been demolished by 1997; and Lantau Island has a new airport and lots of newly built public and private housing estates. If As Tears Go By suggests an alternative to the “prosperous Hong Kong”, Hong Kong as an elusive subject utterly denies this alternative via a series of urban developments. As Tears Go By and its “afterlife" alter what is supposed to be the image of the native and its alternative possibilities. This surreptitiously turns the film into an object of mourning that symbolizes the fading-out of the “alternative Hong Kong” in the face of the “prosperous image of Hong Kong.” Who knows how this urban-rural irony will develop after the Asian economic crisis that uncovers a “Hong Kong” in the course of economic recession since the end of 1997?

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