Hong Kong’s Local: Generating and Degenerating Local Relations

Chapter 2 examines different manifestations of the local in the name of local consciousness, localism, local identity and local discourse. With reference to Mieke Bal’s “travelling concepts”, the chapter takes a critical look at both the generative and the degenerative moments experienced by Hong Kong’s local as it travels. Referring to the interactions between things, places and bodies in the making of a cultural icon, “local relations” as the key term of the book is coined in this chapter, revealing different degrees of connectivity and affinity between objects (as things and cultural signs), urban dwellers and their different realms of habitation and activities. The chapter furthers to demonstrate how the pluralistic local can be maintained through hybridizing the affinities shared between agencies such as things, places and bodies across different discourses, realities and fields.

Local Relations and Their Postcolonial Outlooks

With an eye to museum exhibitions, governments’ narratives, historical accounts and scholarly analyses, among others, Chapter 1 examines the underlying political, social and cultural connotations in different narratives about Hong Kong. By uncovering the hegemony of representing Hong Kong through “the Hong Kong story”, the chapter exposes the unequal powers at work, arguing for the need to hybridize different local milieus, positionings and perspectives by redistributing significances to both human and nonhuman agencies and rekindling connections to Hong Kong’s local on different levels. Highlighting the interconnection between the social, political and cultural realms in facilitating representation, interpretation and mediation, the chapter maps out the multiple realities, contrasting stances and varied connotations wherein different “Hong Kongs” are constructed and local relations are entailed in varying constellations.

Introduction: The Hangover after the Handover

The introductory chapter puts forward the notion of “hangover” to scrutinize the so-called colonial-postcolonial transition of Hong Kong after the handover in 1997. With an eye to the cultural, social and political landscape, the chapter explores how Hong Kong undergoes a dual hangover from the last years of British colonial rule, in which the administration made attempts to accelerate localization, democratization and institutionalization, and after the taken-for-granted state following the handover, in which the post-1997 authorities’ rhetorical claims of decolonization are contained within the frames of nationalization and globalization. In view of the cultural, social and political forces in flux, the multiple entry points introduced by this chapter open up a space to critically interrogate the further transition of Hong Kong from the post-handover to the post-hangover during the 2010s and the manifold impacts on the local, national and global levels.

Connecting with the Local, or Not: The Song Emperor’s Terrace

By taking the Song Emperor’s Terrace as the main object of analysis, Chapter 4 takes a step into history. The Terrace was once a popular cultural icon, for that it was valorized as a rock that stood witness to the royal visit paid to Hong Kong by the last two Song emperors at the end of the Song Dynasty in the thirteenth century—because of this event, the terrace became an oft-cited chanting object among the émigré-literati who fled China to Hong Kong during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To vent frustration at the loss of their home(land), nostalgia for ancient (Imperial) China and adherence to virtues such as loyalty and filial piety, the Terrace became a place of gathering for these literati in everyday life and an object that frequently appeared in their creative works, ranging from verses, calligraphy to paintings. With an eye to the special bond between the émigré-literati and the rock and David Der-wei Wang’s notion of “post-loyalism”, this chapter challenges the presumed collectivity of this literati community by unfolding their varying political aspirations, worldviews and connections to “Hong Kong” through the relationships they constructed with the rock.

Conclusion: Local and Translocal: Lessons from Hong Kong

The concluding chapter interrogates the troubling notion of hybridity, which was believed to be the core constituency of Hong Kong culture and identity in the pre-1997 era, but its actual practice and application has been subjected to questions in the postmillennial time. In view of the diversified and sometimes contradicting experiences and emotions that have been accumulated since the colonial era and have been continuously produced in post-handover Hong Kong, the chapter brings forth the potentialities of local relations by further problematizing the triangular articulation of the global, the local and the national in the context of Hong Kong and beyond. After all, how local relations are constellated embodies the continuous acts of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, not necessarily in terms of political control but through the cultural and social relations formed between things, places and bodies within the city.

Another Rock, Another Hong Kong Story: Lion Rock from Below and Above

Chapter 5 brings the book back to the present times. As an actual hill in Hong Kong named after the shape of its ridge, Lion Rock marks its appearance, both physical and textual, in different realities. Meanwhile, Lion Rock still possesses a high degree of cultural currency in today’s Hong Kong. As an emblematic icon since the 1970s, Lion Rock is understood by the local population as a synonym for Hong Kong’s unbeatable spirit, a site of collective memory and a symbol of Hong Kong at large, intersecting cultural representations with real-life scenarios. By tracing the pre-1997 and post-1997 trajectories of Lion Rock, the chapter discusses the experiences of enchantment, disenchantment and re-enchantment in the making of the city’s own myth across generations.

All Hail the King of Kowloon! Mediating Malleable Materiality

In Chapter 3, Tsang Tsou-choi—named “one of the oldest graffiti artists in the world” by the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003—comes into the picture. As a self-proclaimed “king” since the 1950s, Tsang spent decades writing his family’s “(hi)stories” on different surfaces in the streets of Hong Kong, ranging from walls, lampposts and post boxes to electricity boxes. Alongside the writings he produced and the places he reinvented in the city, the connection Tsang made with the local territory and local history is examined in this chapter as a confluence of local relations which reverberate and fluctuate on their own according to different footprints and traces Tsang left in the city and in the mind of his fellow urban dwellers.