It’s 9°C in Hong Kong at the moment—veritably freezing for this little isle on the South China Sea—and the CNY holiday has gifted me with some respite to reflect on what might be my most satisfactory period of work to date.
Two years ago today, I was sitting in my considerably chillier Montréal apartment, working from home as a historical researcher, desperately trying to conquer the voices of the void. I loved the research, but I dearly missed teaching. There is something unquantifiably exciting about engaging with young students who are grappling with new ideas for the first time; collaborating with fellow educators who are passionate about the value they bring to a community; contributing to building a more positive microcosm of the school; and embracing the never-ending novelty of learning something every day.
January marks the end of the first term of my second year teaching at an international school in Hong Kong. Due to some career changes, a global pandemic, and some family matters, it’s actually the longest I’ve worked anywhere. This academic year is for other firsts as well: first time teaching humanities and first time serving as a Head of Year.
I had anticipated some challenges prior to taking on these new roles. Would I be able to keep up with all the new content knowledge required of my IGCSE and A-Level courses? (The answer was yes—I actually struggled more with economics within KS3 Social Studies.) Would I be able to prove that I deserved a leadership position in pastoral amongst the many more-experienced teachers at my school? (I hope so—this one I still struggle answering with critical self-empathy.) Could I do this on top of expanding the scope and success of the Yearbook Committee? (TBD—the full publication and distribution should be completed by June 2025.) Would I be able to juggle everything while also completing an assignment-heavy PGCE? (Yes—although I cannot say I did so happily.) Looking back, these challenges appear easily overcome.
Being able to combine my love of teaching with my love for history has been a large tenet of why this first term has been so successful. An astute IGCSE History student, H.N., has asked more than once “why does it seem like you don’t miss being an English teacher?” There’s nothing wrong with the subject of course—I love language and literature, and an aspect I miss more than others is how reading my students’ written work allowed me to know them a little more deeply. More than once, I responded to H.N.’s inquiry by making a joke about how I no longer know how to speak English.
But if I were to answer honestly, I would probably say… I have loved the study of the past since I took four separate history electives in my suburban Ontario high school. Or perhaps even earlier, when my dad brought me to Unionville Public Library during summer break, and I borrowed out my pre-teen weight’s worth of historical fiction. It could be further back still, when my wee brother and I sat with our feet dangling from the dining room table, listening to stories of our family’s diasporic paths. Being able to plan and deliver lessons for a subject I am so passionate about makes every workday a joyful one. Being able to geek out with fellow history enthusiasts brings out the child in me. Being able to inspire students who initially dislike the subject to change their minds is incredibly motivating!
This blog started as an exercise to prove to myself that I can still write without AI, but it seems that I have waffled for long enough. I’ve soliloquised for so long it is now 17°C and I can go enjoy the last of my break with a trip to the beach. Here’s hoping for another good term.
A few months ago, I finally developed a roll of film from my time teaching in Qingdao during 2019-2020. Qingdao, also known as 青島, is a beautiful and bustling coastal city located in the northeastern province of Shandong, China. The city’s strategic position along the shores of the Yellow Sea has endowed it with a unique and internationally-influenced history.
The photographs I captured in 2019 on my Olympus OM-2 using Kodak 400 film truly capture the natural beauty of Qingdao’s breathtaking shoreline, which was a highly contested land for centuries.. The city’s international history has imbued it with a distinct character, making it a fascinating and picturesque destination.
Here’s a little known history that involves China, Japan, Germany, Tiananmen protests and the Treaty of Versailles, told through some old pictures I took. Qingdao originated as a minor fishing village, and during the Qing dynasty (1644–1911/12) it developed a significant junk trade, with a customs station established there. In the 1880s, as the Chinese government set up the Beiyang (“North Ocean”) fleet, they recognized the strategic importance of the location of Qingdao (then known as Jiao’ao) and established a small naval station there, along with building fortifications.
After the devastating first Opium War, China was forced to open its ports to foreign trade. After two German missionaries were killed in 1897, Germany took control of Qingdao and the surrounding Shandong peninsula, establishing the Kiautschou Bay concession. Germany then developed Qingdao into an important economic and naval base.
During World War I, Japan seized the opportunity of Germany’s involvement in the war to occupy Qingdao in 1914. Following Germany’s defeat, the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 awarded the Kiautschou Bay concession to Japan. Japan then created the Tsingtao (Qingdao) Naval District and expanded the port’s infrastructure and industries.
After Japan’s defeat in 1945, Qingdao was returned to Chinese control. The city’s architectural and infrastructural legacy from the earlier German and Japanese colonial periods remains an important part of Qingdao’s cultural heritage today.
This imposing piece of Romanesque revival architecture is St. Michael’s Cathedral, also called Zhejiang Road Catholic Church. It was built by German missionaries in 1934.
This is the May Wind sculpture in May Fourth Square 五四广场, a major tourist attraction in downtown Qingdao. During the early 20th century, the May Fourth Movement was a pivotal student-led political and cultural movement that swept across China in 1919. The movement arose in response to the Treaty of Versailles, which awarded German colonial holdings in Shandong province to Japan rather than returning them to Chinese control.
In Qingdao, which had been a German and then Japanese colonial holding, the May Fourth Movement resonated deeply. The city’s students and citizens took part in the widespread protests and demonstrations that defined the movement across China.
To commemorate Qingdao’s role in this pivotal moment of Chinese history, a sculpture was erected in the city’s central square. The May 4th Monument features a towering figure representing the student-led movement, symbolizing the city’s resistance to foreign imperialist control and its embrace of Chinese nationalism and modernization.
The monument stands as a testament to Qingdao’s complicated colonial past and its people’s struggle for self-determination. It serves as a powerful reminder of the city’s important place in the broader narrative of China’s 20th century political and social transformation.
Qingdao has a complex history of shifting colonial control, first by Germany and then by Japan, before ultimately returning to Chinese rule. This legacy has significantly shaped the development and character of the city. It was a beautiful place to kick off my international teaching career.
During my defence, someone on my examination board asked me an interesting question.
What is an an authentic TCM?
The wonderful thing about the defence is the freedom and space to reexamine and reconsider issues you yourself may not have considered yourself. Answering the examiner’s question led me to put together an important part of my final conclusion.
The question of authenticity in TCM is recurring throughout this thesis. On a practical level, governments (wanted) to legislate and regulate TCM to assure safety and authenticity for public health. On a personal level, TCM users questioned the authenticity and efficacy of the herbal medicines they were purchasing and consuming. An authentic TCM in a greater global, historical context, however, is a more delicate matter and therefore problematic to define. Considering Schechner’s concept of “twice-behaved” behaviour, each reiteration of an act is a novel original; authentic from the first. This begs the question—what was the first “behaved” iteration of traditional Chinese medicine? Perhaps one could credit the 2,000 year old Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon or Huángdì Nèijīng (黃帝內經) as the first authentic record of TCM, but the book itself is based on nearly 4,500 years of practice.
Perhaps Nora would recognize this set of ancient, communal practices on which the Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon is basedas acceptably authentic milieux. Scholars and TCMPs have termed the practice of TCM in pre-Cultural Revolution in China and preserved elsewhere in post-Cultural Revolution Chinese diasporas “Classic” Chinese medicine. However, this claim would negate the authenticity of translocal reiterations of TCM, which have morphed and adapted to regional environments in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Toronto, for example. In the same vein, my participants expressed a belief that TCM preserved in the peripheries is measured as more authentic than TCM in modern China, which has been systematically blended with Western medicine. Nevertheless, such comments disregard the periphery’s own disparate pathways to the westernization of TCM. Thus, this thesis argues that there is a singular ‘authentic’ TCM does not exist, as each iteration of the practice is as validly genuine as the other.
Debates about authenticity have implications for belonging and otherness in cultural identity and the construction of Chineseness. Claims to authenticity have been used by power-wielding entities to position TCM practitioners and users between legitimate and illegitimate, us and them. In early twentieth century China, various governments attempted to regulate practice and practitioners to carve and sculpt the populace into their vision of a modern China. Towards the end of the twentieth century in Ontario, the Ontario government regulated TCM in an effort to gently fit practice and practitioners cohesively into the larger Canadian medical system. Therefore, accepting that authenticity in TCM is amorphous, uneven, and in constant renegotiation, one could also postulate that Chineseness is similarly resistant to clear definition.
This post is Part Three of a five-part series, where I use a blog format to present and elaborate themes less-explored in my M.A. in History thesis.
If I had more time to write and more pages to fill, I would have liked to analyze the question of language in oral history in working with Chinese diasporas. Language was a notable point of contention and interest at various stages of my research project.
I should mention my capacities in Cantonese. I can understand Cantonese fluently. I can speak with advanced skills, but my Canadian accent makes me nervous and often causes words to slip my mind. I cannot read or write except for basic characters like me, you, numbers, and random trivia.
Bilingualism was a concern for me even as I was preparing to interview. I had to recruit and prepare information for my participants in both English and Chinese. In the interviews, my participants would switch between English, Cantonese, and very rarely, Mandarin. Their combination of languages — of “Chinglish” was familiar to me as the child of immigrant children.
For my interviews in Canada, my participants would prefer to use English, even if they were more fluent in Cantonese and they understood that I could understand them in Chinese. They would switch to use Cantonese when using TCM terms.
For my interviews in Hong Kong, my participants would prefer to use either English or Cantonese. They were mostly conducted in Cantonese, even though their English was fluent. They would switch to English to describe certain colloquial idioms or phrases to add colour to a feeling, emotion, or experience. Their preference for English was for my sake. My spoken fluency in both Cantonese and English was useful when conducting interviews with participants, especially when one idea could not be translated into the other, or in other characteristically Hong Konger ‘Chinglish’ moments. However, my inability to read and write in Chinese strained the subsequent transcription process.
Language was contentious during the transcription of my interviews. Because I was unable to read or write in Chinese, I first tried to transcribe my interviews using a third party referred to my by my father. The transcriptionist/translator was a university student in Toronto who was raised in Canada but was fluent in both languages. I paid them to do transcription, them translation of anonymous interviews. They were ultimately unreliable and eventually I begged my father to help me do the work with the assistance of Google Translate and Pleco.
During the translation process, which I worked with my father on, we had many discussions about what exactly a word or phrase would be translated into. This process really taught us both a lot about language and meaning.
During the writing and analysis portion of my project, I became interested in when and why participants would use English or Cantonese or both. Perhaps for a different paper I would focus more on the nuances of language and TCM.
For example, TCM is increasingly being learned, used, practised by people who have zero Chinese language skills. As I mention in my paper, there are many concepts in TCM that are not fully explained in English. The terms, while translatable, also come with particular etymologies. They are used in particular daily conversations and experiences, that add meaning to the TCM term. How does the untranslatable change the thousands-year-old practice? What is lost? What is gained?
This post is Part Two of a five-part series, where I use a blog format to present and elaborate themes less-explored in my M.A. in History thesis.
This post is adapted from my Master’s thesis, entitled “Negotiating Chineseness in Diaspora: Traditional Chinese Medicine and Memory in Hong Kong and the Greater Toronto Area, 1960-2018”. This post is Part One of a five-part series, where I use a blog format to present and elaborate themes less-explored in my M.A. in History thesis. Part One: Introduction
Migrant memories of traditional Chinese medicine
Imagine this. A small child with a head of thick, raven hair gets an annoying cough and a drippy nose. At five or six years old, they are a little over a metre in height—barely tall enough to see over an imposing object in the kitchen. If the child stands on the tips of their toes they might be able to make out the image of someone very dear to them labouring over an odorous pot of boiling herbs and water.
Source: Jenn Ko
Only a few hours ago, they were in a similarly pungent space with jars packed full of dried herbs, fruits, seafood, insects and more. Imagine this small child was sat down in a chair, or if they are particularly small, in their dear someone’s lap, and made to face a doctor. The doctor took their pulse. The doctor looked at their tongue. Then, the doctor weighed out what looked like a cacophony of dried things and gave it to the child’s dear someone. They instruct the child to take it to return to harmony.
Now, imagine the kitchen again. The child’s dear someone pours the dark liquid into a bowl. The child takes a sip. It is bitter, but their dear someone might have placed some sweet, round, pinkish thin crisps on the table to eat with the bitter liquid. Haw Flakes 山楂餅 (sahn jah bang). The child is told to drink it all, and so they do.Every participant in my study shared a version of this narrative about being a child and being sick.
It is a memory so ubiquitous, so obvious, as common as the common flu.
Source: Jenn Ko
From fall 2016 to fall 2018, I studied the construction of cultural identity through the microcosmic perspective of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) as culture for Chinese Canadians between two localities, Hong Kong and the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) for my Master’s research.I was interested in subjective questions of culture and identity. The main questions guiding my research were: what role(s) does traditional Chinese medicine play in cultural identity formation in trans-Pacific Chinese communities in Hong Kong and Toronto? How is the notion of Chineseness perceived, experienced, negotiated, and narrated by TCM practitioners and users? How do their perceptions, experiences, negotiations and narrations of TCM relate to family, caregiving, and community? I conducted 11 in-depth, face-to-face, oral history interviews conducted in Hong Kong and the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), 8 of which I analyzed in my actual thesis. I argue that Chineseness is found in the liminal spaces of their narrative identifications of self, their performances and transmission of knowledge in family, and their negotiation of Otherness in the TCM community in the GTA.
Traditional Chinese medicine is a liminal space where Chinese diasporic communities practice and express hybrid narrative cultural identities. The history of TCM is religious, socioeconomic, political, and deeply personal. TCM is an ancient form of healing built on a foundation of over thousands of years of practice. Sources range in the age of TCM knowledge and practice — it is likely 2,500 years old, but some say it could be 4,500 years old. It is comprised of herbal medicine, acupuncture, massage, cupping, moxibustion, exercise (eg. tai chi), and dietary therapy. At its most fundamental, the concept of TCM aims to balance two opposing principles in nature—feminine and negative 陰 (yin) and masculine and positive 陽 (yang)—to maintain the flow of vital life energy or 氣 (qi). TCM is not a monolithic canon of medicine as much as it is a “multi-sited, multidirectional, and sociohistorically contingent” set of practices and processes.
TCM is a system of knowledge of healing “made through—rather than prior to—various translocal encounters and from discrepant locations” (Zhan, 2009).
TCM arrived first in Canada with the immigration of Chinese workers in the mid-nineteenth century. In The Concubines Children, Denise Chong’s award-winning memoir about her grandmother May-ying’s struggle as an early immigrant in a Vancouver Chinatown, TCM was a consistent thread of daily life: “A line of pickle jars was her medicine cabinet […] For everyday use, to promote circulation, energy and vitality, were […] yuk choy, dong guai, ginseng and various grasses and tree barks” (Chong, 1996). In 1921, of the thirteen families among 2,035 documented Chinese in Toronto, three were herbalists (Chan, 2011). These early Chinese immigrants brought TCM with them in their suitcases, minds, and bodies in the form of texts, dried goods, seeds and more importantly—their rituals, practices, and memories. In Canada, herbal medicine and acupuncture are the most commonly practiced components of TCM.
Source: Jenn Ko
Today, TCM is no longer restricted to immigrants and a few rare believers—70% of the Canadian population has tried TCM at least once. In the GTA, dozens of TCM colleges and clinics serve Chinese and non-Chinese populations. The usage of TCM is also modernizing; consumers take capsules, tablets, and tinctures in lieu of the traditional process of brewing and drinking herbal tea.
Throughout its history, TCM has been used across socioeconomic identifications and demarcations. The rural poor of 1960s Hong Kong practiced TCM in daily life as affordable and accessible healthcare. The educated and more prosperous Chinese immigrants in present day GTA practice TCM as a part of their culture as they can optimize their health with the combined usage of Western medicine. The participants in my study use TCM as ritual health care in daily life and as medicine to address acute illness. In the GTA, immigrants connect to Chineseness through daily life performances of TCM for self and for family.
Source: Jenn Ko
The history of TCM in the GTA is intensely political. The evolution of TCM from those early ancient practices and texts has been affected by the geopolitical events in China in the early 20th century, from the conception of Chinese Western integrated medicine in the 1950s, to the abolition and persecution of TCM in the Cultural Revolution, to the modern system of combined traditional Chinese and Western medicine. It has been influenced by the politics surrounding the handover of Hong Kong in 1997, which would bring a ‘classic’ iteration of TCM to the GTA. It was influenced by Ontario regulation and the uneven negotiations of Chineseness within Chinese individuals and communities in the GTA. TCM has a translocal history influenced by capitalism, communism, movement and diaspora.
Traditional Chinese medicine is fiercely personal. It is a set of embodied practices rich with the subjective narratives of family and community, of personhood and identity.
TCM is embodied memory, affective practice, and transmitted knowledge—a basic part of Chinese diasporic life.
The heuristic examination of narratives of TCM practice in Chinese individuals in Hong Kong and the GTA opens a discursive space to explore diaspora, affect, and performance in their lived experiences. Hong Kong Chinese Canadian individuals living between Asia and Canada use their memories of TCM to perform, negotiate and transmit cultural capital. Chineseness is narrated in individuals, performed in familial roles, and negotiated in TCM communities.
People and practice are rooted in specific historical narratives influenced by real political, social, and economic events. They adapt as they traverse spatiotemporal routes. Both have the potential for healing and harm, flow multi-directionally, and are inscribed by generational memory. Like the Hong Kong Chinese diaspora in Toronto and Chinese Canadian diaspora in Hong Kong, traditional Chinese medicine also straddles constructed narratives of East and West. Placing these two elements—Chinese diaspora and traditional Chinese medicine—on either side of an imagined, conceptual mirror may coax out the interesting and meaningful differences and similarities in the myriad of reflections which comprise cultural identity.
This post is Part One of a five-part series, where I use a blog format to present and elaborate themes less-explored in my M.A. in History thesis.
References
Chan, Arlene. The Chinese in Toronto from 1878: From outside to inside the circle. Toronto, Dundurn: 2011.
Chong, Denise. The Concubine’s Children: Portrait of a Family Divided. New York: Penguin Books, 1996.
Zhan, Mei. Other-worldly: Making Chinese medicine through transnational frames. Durham, Duke University Press, 2009.
This summer, I was lucky to be working with the Canadian Tulip Festival as a curatorial assistant to create a small exhibition for the World Tulip Summit in October 2017 and the next Canadian Tulip Festival in May 2018. It was my job to research the history, search for artifacts, and write the exhibit text. The contract was only nine weeks long. If I’m being honest, I felt a little like a fish out of water. Off the stove and into the oven? I’m not great with idioms.
Most of the time, my student job looked like this:
There were few historical materials available to me at the beginning of my contract, as The Festival had recently moved into a small office space at in the Horticulture Building at Lansdowne. I spent the first week reading through a previous archive student’s notes and emailing local museums in hopes they may have some tulip-related artifacts in their collection. There was a noticeable void of material. In desperation, I decided to think out of the box and put out a call on Reddit Ottawa…
“To all tulip festival goers past and present: Do you have any old knick knacks, posters, pictures, or artifacts from past Tulip Festivals that I can use for a project? I’d give you full credit for your items. Putting together an exhibit of sorts.”
Redditor and local historian Dave Allston replied with a clue that would lead me on a journey to the Reid Farmhouse on Sherbrooke and Reid, just off of Carling Avenue, and to some difficult curatorial decisions. The Farmhouse is a dusty, forgotten-in-time structure slated for demolition built in 1865, and at one point, it was the only three-story home in Kitchissippi. This makes the farmhouse one of the oldest buildings in the Ottawa region. Astonishingly, it also happens to be the storage space of a decade’s worth of Canadian Tulip Festival materials!
The Reid Farmhouse has been renovated and reconstructed so many times, it was unable to attain a heritage designation.
One room of materials. An historian’s wildest dream/nightmare!
Unfortunately, because the building has been modified at various times, the structure could not attain a heritage building designation. The Reid farmhouse will maintain a small portion of its first floor and be revamped to better fit the needs of the Kitchisippi community. Moreover, because the Canadian Tulip Festival experiences a high staff turnover, the artifacts in storage were almost entirely forgotten about.
On two separate occasions, I swallowed my vehicular fears and got behind the wheel of a coworker’s old pick up truck that has neither air condition nor interior car lights. Together, we sifted through dusty photo albums, financial reports, posters, objects and rat-droppings; selected the most important materials; and hauled boxes and boxes of them to back to headquarters. Today, our little Horticulture Building office is pressed for elbow room.
I was also faced with (what I think is) the classic curatorial dilemma. My original problem of not having enough materials was now the inverse — I had an enormous excess. How to go through it all?
After consultation we decided to write a story about the tulip as a symbol of international friendship, using images and objects that were shared between Canada and our friendship countries around the world. My favourite object is a wooden Japanese flower vase, a gift from the Japanese delegation in 1997. The vase will be shown with a fresh ikebana flower arrangement, created in collaboration with the Ottawa Ikebana Chapter.
UPDATE:
Here’s a sneak peak of a couple of interesting finds. See the finished exhibit at the World Tulip Summit at the Westin Hotel in Ottawa October 4-7, 2017.
I can hardly thank the Canadian Tulip Festival enough for giving me the space to learn independently and trusting me to take on this project. After these short nine weeks, I have a renewed appreciation for the tulip, and the kind people who take their time to ask people to stop and smell the flowers.
Promotional posters from the 80s when the festival was called “Festival of Spring”.
A carved sculpture from Skagit Valley in the United States. 1999.
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.
The front page of The New York Times on July 1, 1997.Credit
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.
Still From Going Home (2002).
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.
Still from the denoument of Going Home (2002).
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/
There are moments when there can be no objective divorce between the politics of the present and the study of the past. This is one such moment in the political present where the world we live in cannot be removed from the politics of the past, nor the graduate-level public history assignment.
For Canadians who woke up on November 9th, 2016 to a world they no longer comprehend, it is important, now more than ever, to understand the public historian’s role in civil society, consider our responsibilities by virtue of it, and work to assure the Canadian public does not succumb to demagogic narratives of isolationism, fear, and hate.
Our Role
Public history serves the public — a collection of peoples cohabiting spaces with memory and history. Public historians aspire to honest, context and evidence-based truth-telling. This can be achieved by employing diligent historical analysis, championing multiple manifestations of remembering and using evidence-based storytelling to maintain accountability. Done right, public history can engender learning, healing, and individual and collective development. Done wrong, it can contribute to misinformation, suffering, and painful reminders of our shared colonial pasts.
Our Challenges
There are several stories in Canadian public history professionals need to thoughtfully consider before pursuing future projects. Historicization of public history shows the discipline has authored its own uncomfortable chapters in the ongoing colonial narrative. The field needs to adopt a generous and unflinching reflexivity to see it’s own power in shaping public discourses. Andersen puts it eloquently: “spaces of cultural representation— like museums and national historic sites—can be spaces of mutual recognition rather than mere manifestations of colonial power.” Here are some suggestions on how to do that.
What Not To Do
Do not confine identities in history, as it is in the Batoche National Historic Site in Batoche, Saskachewan. Chris Andersen points to telling “three-dimensional,” high “density” stories of that champion both the Metis’ peoples modern complexities and and historical celebrations as a way to move forward instead.
Do not work in insolation, as the infamous failure of an exhibit, Into the Heart of Africa at the Royal Ontario Museum, mistakenly did. The curators did not fully consider their audiences and the way they might receive the exhibit. Eva Mackey discourages the use of universal claims to truth, especially in such a “powerful agent in defining public culture.”
Do not sanitize violent histories, as former Prime Minister Stephen Harper inadvertently does in a speech during the 2009 G20 meeting in Pittsburg by saying “We have no history of colonialism”. We should not be exempt from remembering traumas 1 year, 1 decade, or 1 century after the highly orchestrated public apology for Canada’s role in residential schools. Healing from traumatic pasts requires remembering with as much deference to truth as possible.
What To Do
Share authority. As Andersen writes, public historians should strive for a “history in between.” Narratives should be situated in between structure and agency; local, regional and global; indigenous and white, commemorative, scholarly and community based remembering. Public historians can look to the c̓əsnaʔəm, the city before the city exhibitat the Museum of Vancouver as a step forward into shared authority and respectfully indigenized history. This in-betweeness also exists between times. Public historians need to recognize what Sharon Macdonald calls the multi-temporal nature of public remembering, that “wrong done in a time marked is recognized as such” but also exists in a present orientated to future. One of the greatest challenges is deciding what to choose
Recognize power and poverty. Museums and monuments hold significant social capital as institutions. Public historians need to recognize the privilege and responsibility that come with storytelling for publics, which inadvertently creates spaces of belonging and exclusion.
Listen. Researches and practitioners in Canada need to adopt the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls To Action as much as it is feasible. Canadians need to read the TRC adopt it into schools, museums, books and popular culture. In the history of public history, certain narratives were told over the silences of others. To move forward towards reconciliation, we need to hear the quieted truths from quieted voices.
Pierre Nora’s concept of lieu de memoire, sites of memory urgently negotiated and established in an era of perilous modernization and subsequent cultural amnesia, is obtuse even for a graduate-level public history seminar. The complexity in Nora’s theory lies within his contentious forced binary between ideas of memory and history, where the former exists in a pure, folklore dreamland and the latter in a structured, incompetent reality that destroys the thing it hopes to preserve — memory. Museums, monuments, books, films and sites of significant are lieux de memoires. Oral storytelling and generational transmission of craft skills are milieux de memoires.
I decided to explain this idea to my parents. Using a list of interview questions based off of the Canadians and Their Pasts survey launched in 2006, I asked my mom and dad to think about memory, history, identity, and how they relate to and understand their pasts. I was surprised to discover that despite never encountering Nora, my parents had formed their own distinctions between memory and history and their respective roles within time-space.
Similar to the findings in the survey, my parents, who immigrated from Hong Kong in the 1980s, placed themselves at the centre of their own pasts to reconcile their identities in the present within ethnic/cultural group and country. In the clips of our phone interview below, my parents first discuss their daily encounters with lieux de memoires (photos) and memory-work (gathering with friends to tell stories). Later, they explain their understandings of memory and history…all before I attempted to explain Nora’s concept.
Over the summer of 2016 I had the opportunity to work on Ottawa’s historic Sparks Street as a social media coordinator, among other things.
One of my first projects working for the Business Improvement Area was a 200th year anniversary of Nicholas Sparks’ settlement into Bytown, today known as the Ottawa-Gatineau region. Sparks’ descendants were planning a giant hurrah! to celebrate their ancestor’s good fortune and hard work in collaboration with the Bytown Museum. My job was to find some fun facts about Nicholas Sparks and Sparks Street for posters to be hung up up and down the pedestrian walkway. Little did I know, I was helping to create what Pierre Nora would consider lieux de memoire in downtown Ottawa!
One of the fun facts hanging between O’Connor and Metcalfe. Many streets in downtown Ottawa are named after Nicholas Sparks.
I was surprised the endeavour was launched by the family. There was only room to print one sentence of general historical information on each poster (an embarrassing misfortune for this MA History candidate with an 120 page thesis looming in the future), so the historical value is in somewhat dissolved. Pedestrians won’t immediately know some of the darker elements that complete the 200-year-old picture, but they will feel a slight reminder that the land they are standing on, eating lunch on, shopping on, has a deep connection to the past.
There are more posters on Sparks than there are pictured here. Go for a stroll downtown for to read the rest!
Jenn Leah Ko 