Hong Kong — home and memory: nostalgic and aspiring
During the 10-day quarantine in Edinburgh, I have been spending quite a lot of time reminiscing my time in Hong Kong, my hometown. The internet has tremendously shortened the virtual distance with my family and my friends in Hong Kong. Watching Japanese and Korean TV dramas also make me feel that it doesn’t make much difference where I am.
Time and space might have been diminished with the frequent use of social media. Before I left Hong Kong, I kind of tried to convince my family the little meaning of distance in the digital age, especially with the tragic experience of the COVID pandemic. After all, we haven’t been able to meet our relatives so often in the past one and a half years. Home doesn’t seem to be so remote….
As I’m going to spend the next few months at University of St. Andrews, the feeling is getting stronger on what I can share with others about Cantonese culture, and more precisely Hong Kong culture. While I’m writing the current thesis chapter (which is also what I’m writing for a journal article) on prominent scholar activist Benny Tai (I think we can use this term to describe him) and academic freedom in Hong Kong, various memories about my life in Hong Kong have been coming up again and again.
It might have been a cliché for many of us from Hong Kong (it also feels strange when I write this sentence to describe myself as among those from Hong Kong and no longer in Hong Kong) to say how Hong Kong has changed so much in the past two years that it’s no longer the Hong Kong we knew. Having just left Hong Kong for about ten days, I still don’t know how I can understand myself as being in engaged in diasporic studies on Hong Kong. Yet, it does come up to my mind — which Hong Kong are we talking about? Naturally, I now think of Hong Kong as “pre-2019 Hong Kong” and “post-2019 Hong Kong”.
We used to look at pre-handover and post-handover Hong Kong. But my personal experience, which might also be many Hongkongers’ experience, is that the difference has been much stronger pre and post 2019.
With the uncertainty ahead, I’m prepared (or actually not yet prepared) for my journey to look at Hong Kong culture from a very different perspective. Nostalgic and aspiring.
