This is an excerpt of my final essay for the Directed Readings Course, Migration, Ethnicity, Diaspora I took in Winter 2017 with my thesis supervisor, Dr. Daniel McNeil. MAJOR SPOILERS ahead.
In his seminal essay, ‘Reflections on Exile,’ Edward Said denounced modern culture’s attempts to manifest honest representations of exile, calling its objectifications banal and its beneficial claims mute. An exile of Palestine and Egypt himself, Said described the unenviable condition as “the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted.” Literary productions originating in such unglamorous suffering can hardly be understood by those who read them enveloped by a sense of belonging. He asks: is it not true that these representations obscure the horrendous? Do such cultural productions not hide exile’s affective likeliness to death, but without death’s lenient finality? The nations of Said’s eclectic upbringing are similar to the Hong Kong of the following discourse: none exist as they did due to the recidivism of British colonialism and the politics of nation-building. Handover-era Hong Kong’s unique position of in-betweeness situated a cultural space that tried to answer questions on exile, being, and belonging.
Here I argue that pre- and post-1997 Hong Kong handover cinema can stand in refutation of Edward Said’s assertion of the humanistic and aesthetic incomprehensibility of modern culture’s representations of twentieth-century exile. The dark, comedic ‘banality’ in Stephen Chow’s desires and necessities, and the excruciating ‘muteness’ in Wong Kar Wai’s strained romantic encounters are a couple obvious examples of well known Hong Kong directors and their ability to put exile to screen. However, much has been written about the international successes of Steven Chow’s use of glocalization in transnational, transcultural filmmaking success and Wong Kar Wai’s masterful command of time and emotion to convey exile and emptiness. I do not wish to add to that canon of literature. Instead, following Žižek’s Lacanian analysis, I want to interpret the less-restrained particularities and revelations found in the Hong Kong B-horror fantasy space of Going Home (2002). Unlike the “auteur of time’s” manner of speaking in ellipsis that entrances international critics and academics, Peter Chan produces diasporic feelings of exile, loss, and transience in Going Home through fear in the juxtaposition of absurdity and familiarity. The film was the third part of Three (2002), a collaborative horror anthology from Thailand, Hong Kong, and Korea.
The film is opened in a sea of subjectivity—a young girl in a bright red coat stands amidst dozens of foggy, sepia-toned portraits in a dingy, phthalo green photo studio. A cop, Chan Kwok-wai (Eric Tsang) and his son, Cheung move into a battered, near-vacant apartment complex slated for demolition. Chan learns that only other residents are Yu (Leon Lai), his paralyzed wife, Hai’er (Eugenia Yuan)—both introverted doctors trained in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) from the mainland—and their young daughter. Cheung catches the girl in the red coat leering at him through windows and behind doors, is unsure why he is afraid of her, but the two become friends and he follows her to the photo studio to play. Upon returning home, Chan cannot find Cheung and accuses the only other resident, Yu, of kidnapping his son. Chan breaks into Yu’s apartment, but stunned to find Hai’er unmoving, breathless and submerged in a bathtub of herbal medicine, he is caught and rendered unconscious. Yu takes the cop hostage because Chan has learned his secrets: his wife Hai’er is dead; he is attempting to bring her back to life with Chinese medicine; and he talks to her every day. Strange, but kind, Yu tells Chan the couple never had a daughter, but aborted their child when Hai’er was diagnosed with a fatal cancer. He plans to release Chan when his wife revives in three days, when they will depart home to Changsha home in the mainland.
In those three days, Chan learns that Yu’s necrophilia and mystical dedication to reincarnation does not make him evil. The two experience intimate moments of friendship while Chan is bound and restrained, and Yu even attempts to find Cheung. On the third day, exactly three years from the day Yu strangled his wife to death to begin the healing process to cure her cancer, and the day of Hai’er’s supposed reincarnation, Chan’s police colleagues arrest Yu and collect his wife’s body. Just as Hai’er’s fingers begin to twitch, Yu escapes from the police and is hit by a passing car and killed. After, Chan watches a video recording of Hai’er speaking to her husband as she uses the same traditional healing process to revive Yu’s dead body. Going Home ends with Cheung leaving the photo studio and Yu, Hai’er, and the girl in the red coat posing to get their photo taken.
In Going Home, Chineseness is embodied in Yu, Hai’er, and their dedication to traditional Chinese healing practices. Directer Peter Chan envelops the couple in otherness by contrasting myth/science, traditional/modern, Chinese medicine/Western medicine. Yu’s repetition of the same memory—the moment he met his wife—both speaks her personality into her expressionless corpse and reinforces their shared Chinese identity. In Mandarin Yu lovingly says to his wife’s body, “Do you remember when I first took your pulse?” When the cop yells back from the corner of the room, tied up, that his wife is dead, Yu switches to Chan’s Cantonese dialect with ease: “Yes, Western medicine says she is deceased, but her tumours will be dispelled if I immerse her in Chinese herbs every day. She’ll revive and all will be well.” Their exchange creates the divide between insane Chinese captor and sane Hong Kong captive, but also accentuates the cultural connections through the men’s linguistic fluency. Yu masterfully flits between the dialects and while Chan does not choose to speak Mandarin, he understands it. The language of both are Chinese, but the manner of speaking them are named Mandarin and Cantonese. The ‘I’ speaks language and it is imperative to representation of the self through expression. But language also speaks the ‘I’, in that words shape subjective identities through their inherent histories. Therefore Chan can be read as a defiant Hong Konger, hearing his captor’s tongue but speaking his own Cantonese. Yu can be read as fluid—adapting to the dialect of this different, but similar land.
In his aptly named personal essay, “On Not Going Home,” literary critic James Woods writes that his “softer emigration” is not quite the same as Said’s “desert of exile.” Is the ‘unhealable rift’ finally patched in death? Or does death connote a more permanent desolation? If Said considered exile to be death’s less merciful cousin, were Yu and his family graced by a kinder fate? Although Chan lives, he remains in the desolate complex. His son is nowhere to be found and he remains captive in Yu’s story. Chan seems unable to cross the threshold into a temporality and spatiality can begin its march anew. Earlier in the film, Cheung is afraid of the empty rooms and screams into each one, but only forgotten photographs hear him. He is screaming at walls that do not move, and he is likewise unable to move. Father and son continue to struggle. Perhaps both men are migrants: Yu is not going home and Chan is in exile. In the character’s exploration of being and belonging, it would seem that the former feels the softness of knowing his home, and the latter is left with the discomfort of an untethered identity.
- “Going Home.” As part three in Three. Directed by Peter Chan. Hong Kong: Applause Pictures, 2002.
- Said, Edward. “Reflections on Exile” in Reflections on Exile: And Other Literary And Cultural Essays, 173-186. Granta Books: London, 2000.
- Woods, James. “On Not Going Home,” London Review of Books, 20 February 2014.
- Žižek, Slavoj. Looking Awry: An Introduction To Lacan Through Popular Culture. MIT Press: Cambridge, 1992.
- “Front Page,” July 1, 1997. The New York Times. https://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/07/01/in-hong-kong-handover-day-is-a-day-of-protest/
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Jenn Leah Ko 