Ann Hui's Song of The Exile-Hong Kong University Press (2010)

Ann Hui’s
Song of the Exile

Audrey Yue
Ann Hui’s
Song of the Exile
Hong Kong University Press thanks Xu Bing for writing the Press’s name in
his Square Word Calligraphy for the covers of its books. For further
information see p. iv.
The New Hong Kong Cinema Series
The New Hong Kong Cinema came into existence under very special
circumstances, during a period of social and political crisis resulting in a
change of cultural paradigms. Such critical moments have produced the
cinematic achievements of the early Soviet cinema, neorealism, the nouvelle
vague, and the German cinema of the 1970s and, we can now say, the New
Hong Kong Cinema. If this cinema grew increasingly intriguing in the
1980s, after the announcement of Hong Kong’s return to China, it is largely
because it had to confront a new cultural and political space that was both
complex and hard to define, where the problems of colonialism were
uncannily overlaid with those of globalism. Such uncanniness could not
be caught through straight documentary or conventional history writing:
it was left to the cinema to define it.
Has the creative period of the New Hong Kong Cinema now come to
an end? However we answer the question, there is a need to evaluate the
achievements of Hong Kong cinema. This series distinguishes itself from
the other books on the subject by focusing in-depth on individual Hong
Kong films, which together make the New Hong Kong Cinema.
Series General Editors

Ackbar Abbas, Wimal Dissanayake, Mette Hjort, Gina Marchetti, Stephen Teo
Series Advisors
Chris Berry, Nick Browne, Ann Hui, Leo Lee, Li Cheuk-to, Patricia
Mellencamp, Meaghan Morris, Paul Willemen, Peter Wollen, Wu Hung
Other titles in the series

Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s Infernal Affairs – The Trilogy
by Gina Marchetti
Fruit Chan’s Durian Durian by Wendy Gan
Fruit Chan’s Made in Hong Kong by Esther M. K. Cheung
John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow by Karen Fang
John Woo’s Bullet in the Head by Tony Williams
John Woo’s The Killer by Kenneth E. Hall
Johnnie To Kei-fung’s PTU by Michael Ingham
King Hu’s A Touch of Zen by Stephen Teo
Mabel Cheung Yuen-ting’s An Autumn’s Tale by Stacilee Ford
Peter Ho-sun Chan’s He’s a Woman, She’s a Man by Lisa Odham Stokes
Stanley Kwan’s Center Stage by Mette Hjort
Tsui Hark’s Zu: Warriors From the Magic Mountain
by Andrew Schroeder
Wong Kar-wai’s Ashes of Time by Wimal Dissanayake
Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together by Jeremy Tambling
Yuen Woo-ping’s Wing Chun by Sasha Vojković
Ann Hui’s
Song of the Exile
Audrey Yue
hong Kong University Press
14/F Hing Wai Centre
7 Tin Wan Praya Road
Aberdeen
Hong Kong
© Audrey Yue 2010
ISBN 978-988-8028-75-7
All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced

or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval
system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Secure on-line Ordering

http://www.hkupress.org
Printed and bound by Liang Yu Printing Factory Ltd., Hong Kong, China
Hong Kong University Press is honoured that Xu Bing, whose

art explores the complex themes of language across cultures,
has written the Press’s name in his Square Word Calligraphy.
This signals our commitment to cross-cultural thinking and
the distinctive nature of our English-language books
published in China.
“At first glance, Square Word Calligraphy appears to be

nothing more unusual than Chinese characters, but in fact it
is a new way of rendering English words in the format of a
square so they resemble Chinese characters. Chinese viewers
expect to be able to read Square Word Calligraphy but cannot.
Western viewers, however are surprised to find they can read
it. Delight erupts when meaning is unexpectedly revealed.”
— Britta Erickson, The Art of Xu Bing
Contents
Series Preface vii
Acknowledgements xi

Introduction 1

1 The Diasporas of Hong Kong 7

2 Re-turn to Hong Kong: Authorship, Memory, Intimate 49
Biography
3 Teaching Song of the Exile in the Diaspora: Minor 89

Cinema, Transcultural Literacy and Border Pedagogy

Notes 125
Awards and Nominations 129

vi
● contents
Ann Hui’s Filmography 131

Bibliography 133
Series Preface
The New Hong Kong Cinema came into existence under very special
circumstances, during a period of social and political crisis resulting
in a change of cultural paradigms. Such critical moments have
produced the cinematic achievements of the early Soviet cinema,
neorealism, the nouvelle vague, the German cinema in the 1970s
and, we can now say, the recent Hong Kong cinema. If this cinema
grew increasingly intriguing in the 1980s, after the announcement
of Hong Kong’s return to China, it was largely because it had to
confront a new cultural and political space that was both complex
and hard to define, where the problems of colonialism were overlaid
with those of globalism in an uncanny way. Such uncanniness could
not be caught through straight documentary or conventional history
writing; it was left to the cinema to define it.
It does so by presenting to us an urban space that slips away
if we try to grasp it too directly, a space that cinema coaxes into
existence by whatever means at its disposal. Thus it is by eschewing
a narrow idea of relevance and pursuing disreputable genres like
viii
● Series Preface
melodrama, kung fu and the fantastic that cinema brings into view
something else about the city which could otherwise be missed.
One classic example is Stanley Kwan’s Rouge, which draws on the
unrealistic form of the ghost story to evoke something of the
uncanniness of Hong Kong’s urban space. It takes a ghost to catch
a ghost.
In the New Hong Kong Cinema, then, it is neither the subject
matter nor a particular set of generic conventions that is paramount.
In fact, many Hong Kong films begin by following generic
conventions but proceed to transform them. Such transformation
of genre is also the transformation of a sense of place where all the
rules have quietly and deceptively changed. It is this shifting sense
of place, often expressed negatively and indirectly — but in the best
work always rendered precisely in (necessarily) innovative images
— that is decisive for the New Hong Kong Cinema.
Has the creative period of the New Hong Kong Cinema come
to an end? However we answer the question, there is a need now
to evaluate the achievements of Hong Kong cinema. During the
last few years, a number of full-length books have appeared,
testifying to the topicality of the subject. These books survey the
field with varying degrees of success, but there is yet an almost
complete lack of authoritative texts focusing in depth on individual
Hong Kong films. This book series on the New Hong Kong Cinema
is designed to fill this lack. Each volume will be written by a scholar/
critic who will analyse each chosen film in detail and provide a
critical apparatus for further discussion including filmography and
bibliography.
Our objective is to produce a set of interactional and provocative
readings that would make a self-aware intervention into modern
Hong Kong culture. We advocate no one theoretical position; the
authors will approach their chosen films from their own distinct
points of vantage and interest. The aim of the series is to generate
open-ended discussions of the selected films, employing diverse
Series Preface ix
●
analytical strategies, in order to urge the readers towards self-

reflective engagements with the films in particular and the Hong
Kong cultural space in general. It is our hope that this series will
contribute to the sharpening of Hong Kong culture’s conceptions
of itself.
In keeping with our conviction that film is not a self-enclosed
signification system but an important cultural practice among
similar others, we wish to explore how films both reflect and inflect
culture. And it is useful to keep in mind that reflection of reality
and reality of reflection are equally important in the understanding
of cinema.
Ackbar Abbas
Wimal Dissanayake
Acknowledgements
I owe debt to many people who have shaped and supported my

work on Hong Kong cinema. The genesis of this book came from
a chapter in my PhD, Preposterous Hong Kong Cinema 1984 to
1997, completed at La Trobe University in Australia. In particular,
chapter two, ‘Diaspora Cinema: Home and Re-turn’, examined Song
of the Exile. At La Trobe, I remained indebted to my supervisor
and mentor Chris Berry, the La Trobe University Postgraduate
Scholarship and Felicity Collins. I am also grateful to the support
from: Freda Freiberg, for sharing her passion for the cinema of
Ann Hui; Michael Campi, for his invaluable film resource and
knowledge; Meaghan Morris; and Esther Faye. I would like to thank
my colleagues (past and present) in the Cinema and Cultural Studies
programme at the University of Melbourne for encouraging me to
design the then ‘unfashionable’ subject on Hong Kong cinema:
Barbara Creed, Annamarie Jagose, Brett Farmer, Chris Healy and
Fran Martin. In the classes on Hong Kong cinema and Asian screen
cultures, my students have never failed to inspire me; they helped
xii
● Acknowledgements
to keep my knowledge of the field up-to-date. An earlier version of

chapter three was presented at the ‘Asian Cinema: Towards a
Research and Teaching Agenda’ International Conference, Centre
for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore, India, 2007. I
thank Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Tejaswini Niranjana and S. V. Srinivas
for their invitation to present and their valuable comments. I owe
deep gratitude to Ramon Lobato who provided exemplary research
assistance. Finally, I remain always indebted to Sandra Schneiderman
for living with my long periods of writing absences.
Introduction
Song of the Exile was released in Hong Kong from 27 April 1990
to 16 May 1990, and grossed over HK$3,071,212 (MPIA 1990).
Produced by Cos Group and distributed by Golden Harvest, the
film consolidated the career of the director, Ann On-wah Hui, Hong
Kong’s ‘most influential director in the ’80s’ and ‘one of Asia’s
premium directors’ (Kei 1994; Foong 2001).
Hui was born in Anshan, a Chinese iron-mining city in Liaoning
Province, Manchuria, in 1947 to a Japanese mother and Chinese
father. When she was two, her family moved to the Portuguese-
administered Macau. At the age of five, her family moved to Hong
Kong. Hui studied English at primary school, and later wrote her
Masters thesis on Alain Robbe-Grillet as a student of comparative
literature at Hong Kong University. Between 1972 and 1974, she
trained at London Film School. In 1973, she returned to Hong Kong
and worked as an office assistant to the late Beijing-born, Hong
Kong–based director King Hu for three months where she helped
to check the English subtitles to A Touch of Zen (Berry 2005: 426).
2
● Ann hui’s Song of the exile
She then joined Hong Kong’s Television Broadcasting Limited (TVB)

for eighteen months, where she directed nearly twenty episodes of
tele-dramas and documentaries, some on 16mm (Doraiswamy 1990:
21). In 1977, she directed six episodes for the Independent
Commission Against Corruption, a body set up to combat the triad
bribery of Chinese and British police officers, and made three
featurettes in the series Below the Lion Rock, of which the best
known is Boy from Vietnam.
Hui is part of the Hong Kong New Wave that inaugurated a
new style and a local consciousness for cinema in the 1980s. She
introduced the themes of displacement and migration that have
become key features of the New Hong Kong cinema. As Hong Kong’s
foremost female director, her films also showcase women in the
vicissitudes of their everyday intimacies, in the domesticity of the
home and their transformation in public life. From The Secret
(1979) to Night and Fog (2009), Hui’s cinema has traversed the
materiality of bodies, cities, memories and affect. In a career that
spans three decades, Hui has been director, producer, writer and
actress in more than thirty films. This book examines her ninth
film, Song of the Exile, undoubtedly one of her finest.
Song of the Exile is based on Hui’s semi-autobiographical story
about a daughter coming to terms with her mother’s Japanese
identity. When it was released in 1990, the film’s themes of cross-
cultural alienation, inter-ethnic marriage, generational reconciliation
and divided loyalties resonated with the British colony’s 1997
transition to Chinese sovereignty. Its narratives of migration also
spoke to the displacement of the Hong Kong people as they left the
colony in panic to escape the impending Chinese rule. Almost two
decades after its release, and ten years on from Hong Kong’s
handover, Hong Kong’s emigrants have returned as new diasporic
settlers, and the film is still a perennial favourite among global
cinephiles and international Hong Kong cinema students. In Hong
Kong and between the film aficionados, Song of the Exile is a new
Introduction 3
●
Hong Kong film classic. Many consider it the most haunting and
poignant of Hui’s films.
Existing analyses of the film are in short essays and frame it
as exemplary tropes for border crossing, gendered modernity,
generic transformation and exile cinema (Abbas 1997a; Barlow
1998; Erens 2000; Freiberg 2002; Ho 2001; Naficy 2001). This
book brings together and extends these existing analyses with a
new sustained approach on the intersections between intimacy and
diaspora. Theorizations of intimacy in Hong Kong cinema have
focused predominantly on the films of Wong Kar-wai and Fruit
Chan. These discussions highlight intimacy as private, erotic and
sexual (Abbas 1997b; Leung 2008; Lu 2007, Marchetti 2006; Siegel
2001). This book extends these approaches by providing a
theoretical framework for intimacy as an orientation that
emphasizes certain modes of relationship, not simply tied to the
private, erotic and sexual, but also associated with the limits of
(diasporic) borders and the externality of risks.1 It incorporates
Hong Kong film studies, cultural geography, film archival studies,
postcolonial feminist film and spectatorship theories, media
reception study, critical pedagogy, nostalgia and modernity studies,
and critical theories on intimacy and diaspora, to examine these
orientations and demonstrate this framework in the film.
Intimacy is a pertinent discourse to engage the diaspora because
it is a conduit for unraveling the interdependent relationship
between self and other, private and public, law and lore, home and
host. This is evident in diasporic relationships where home and
host cultures are transformed as a result of their interaction with
each other. In the diaspora, intimacy also refers to the nostalgia of
deep longing for the familiar, the cultural memories that make up
diasporic archives, and the transformation of kinship structures.
Diasporic intimacy is also produced through new media and
technological connectedness. For Hong Kong, these orientations
provide a critical site to expose the dominant symbolic and material
4
conditions that fulfill the fantasy of Chinese national identity; they

also provide a theoretical frame to reposition Hong Kong as an
alternative epistemological object excentric (or off-centre) to China
and central to Hong Kong modernity.
Intimacy is also significant to the wider circulation and popular
recognition of Hong Kong cinema. The cinema has always enjoyed
a unique status in the global film circuit as diasporic cinema, from
the 1950s with the South-East Asian distribution empire of the
Shaw Brothers, the 1970s cult success of Bruce Lee and the now
iconoclastic role of transnational action in Hollywood. The
circulation of Hui’s cinema is no exception. Song of the Exile, first
screened at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival, was one of the first New
Hong Kong Cinema films to receive international recognition, before
the best actress Berlin acclaim of Maggie Cheung for Stanley Kwan’s
Center Stage (1992), the Palm d’Or of Wong Kar-wai’s Happy
Together (1997) and the Lifetime MTV Award honoured to Jackie
Chan. This recognition of Hong Kong cinema, through film structure
and institutional genres, as well as through the flows of regional
proximity, subcultural exotic and global otherness, is a form of
intimacy, of knowing through familiarity, and competency through
mastery and emulation. As diasporic cinema, Hong Kong cinema
also cultivates the intimacy it enjoys with its diasporas, and
intimates the place of Hong Kong itself as a diaspora. This book
approaches Song of the Exile through these features of Hong Kong
cinema as diasporic cinema.
Chapter one, ‘The Diasporas of Hong Kong’, examines the
intimate relationship between the homeland and diaspora. This
chapter begins by first providing a critical overview of Hui’s films
to highlight the centrality of the diaspora in her oeuvre. It further
examines the film’s representations of homelands (Britain, China
and Japan) to demonstrate the diaspora’s intrinsic yet contradictory
relationship to the homeland. This chapter will show how new
practices of diasporic intimacies are produced by the displacement
Introduction 5
●
of migration. Diasporic intimacies expose the myth of home as

singular, domestic, familial and romantic. The film’s representations
of the second home (Macau, Manchuria) are further examined to
critically consider its excentric location as a new ontology for Hong
Kong modernity. For Hong Kong, this provides a different starting
point to return to its postcolonial predicament to consider how it
makes itself present according to the historicity of its own conditions.
Chapter two, ‘Re-turn to Hong Kong: Authorship, Memory,
Intimate Biography’, begins by examining the historical discourse
surrounding the film to show Hui’s cinema as a model of female
creativity and counter-cinematic practice. It demonstrates Hui’s
cine-feminism by showing how female textual authorship is evident
in the use of postcolonial feminist autobiography and the maternal
melodrama. These practices construct a narrative of re-turn that
challenges the teleology of homecoming. Rather than a return to
the impossibility of roots, rather than a return to the motherland,
a politics of ‘re-turn’ is marked by a movement that looks to but
takes a turn away from the motherland as the original home. The
narrative of re-turn questions the utopic tropes of homecoming,
reunification and reconciliation; it searches for new cultural sites
of desires and belongings through routes rather roots. This chapter
further considers how a newly reconstituted home is constructed
in the diaspora of Hong Kong. It examines the intimate history of
this home through the film’s use of indirect and collective memories,
common places and future nostalgia. For Hong Kong, the film’s
practices of re-turn provide an ethics to consider its current political
transition as an ethics of self-fashioning and co-existence that
confronts the honesty of its diasporic yet intimate relationship to
the motherland, China.
Chapter three, ‘Teaching Song of the Exile in the Diaspora:
Minor Cinema, Transcultural Literacy and Border Pedagogy’,
continues the focus on the intersection between diaspora and
intimacy by examining the teaching of the film in Australia as part
6
of the political pedagogy of critical multiculturalism. It shows how

the film’s status as minor cinema challenges the normalizing claims
of a neoliberal film curriculum. As a deconstructive critical practice,
the film’s minor mode of diasporic distribution allows students to
acquire a critical media literacy that opens up alternative ways to
orient new modes of co-existence and ethical self-fashion. As a
performative text, the film’s affective capacities for critical border
epistemologies allow students to acquire transcultural literacy.
These literacies reflect the contact zone of intercultural
communication as a site of diasporic intimacy.
This book extends existing theorizations on Hong Kong cinema
studies with a new framework on intimacy and diaspora. It also
shows how a critical Hong Kong film studies can be enriched by
media reception study using research-led teaching to map a
sociology of the film as diasporic maintenance and negotiation, as
well as a tool for border pedagogy. In studies of Hong Kong
nostalgia, the significance of the 1970s to Hong Kong’s cultural
memory, film history and modernity is emphasized. The focus on
transnational minor cinema and its distributive cultures also brings
a materialist framework to studies in independent Chinese cinemas.
This book hopes to show how the border cinema of Song of the
Exile, as a practice of representation and a representation of
practice, can articulate an alternative Hong Kong modernity as a
new form of public pedagogy central to the ethics of its re-turn.
1
The Diasporas of Hong Kong
Song of the Exile traces the postwar life of a Japanese woman

married to a Chinese Nationalist soldier, her adolescent daughter’s
discovery of her mother’s ethnicity, and their reconciliation as she
accompanies her homesick mother back to her native town in Japan.
Moving deftly between the past and the present through a series
of extended flashbacks, the story takes place across China, Britain,
Macau, Hong Kong and Japan. The central motif is the diaspora
as the inheritance of exile. Exile is a condition that ‘most explicitly
invokes a home or homeland’ (Peters 1999: 19). The Chinese title,
客途秋恨, literally translated as Guest Route Autumn Regret,
directly infers this. It is taken from an old Cantonese song popular
in South China about a solitary traveller who yearns for his
homeland (Stokes and Hoover 1999: 14). This chapter will consider
how diasporic intimacy functions in these sites and conditions of
diaspora in the film.
8
Diasporas in Hong Kong Cinema and the Films of

Ann Hui
The term ‘diaspora’ comes from the Greek word diaspeirein,

meaning ‘to disperse’, or as speirein suggests, ‘to scatter’. It refers
to the dispersion or spreading of people belonging to one nation
or having a common culture. Historically, this classical typology
speaks of the dispersions of the Jewish, Greek, Armenian and Polish
communities and articulates the condition of peoples without
nation-states (Tölölyan 1996: 3–17). The classification of this
experience has resulted in the study of diaspora as a sociological
and ethnic concept, evident in the trade, slave, religious and labour
characterizations of the Chinese, African, Sikh and Indian
dispersions (Cohen 1997). Unlike the term ‘exile’ that more
specifically refers to the psychological condition of people who have
been forcefully removed from the homeland, the concept of
‘diaspora’ focuses more on the conditions of displacement (and
resettlement) in the hostland.
The last few decades, affected by the changing landscapes of
late modernity, have witnessed the growth of diasporas. New
demographics are being formed ‘along the spatio-temporal-
information axes of world economy’ where ‘the national, unilateral
colonial model has been interrupted by the emergence of a
transversal world that occupies a “third space” (Bateson, Bhabha),
a “third culture” (Featherstone) beyond the confines of the nation-
state’ (Chambers 1994: 108). Migration, mobile work contracts,
globalization and cosmopolitanism have enabled the formation of
a new world of shifting populations or ethnoscapes (Appadurai
1996: 48–65). Diasporas are the ‘the exemplary communities of
the transnational moment’ (Tölölyan 1991: 5), characterized by
cultural displacement, new modes of expression and economies of
exchange. The Hong Kong diaspora attests to this transformation.
The Diasporas of Hong Kong 9
●
Hong Kong has always been part of the global pan Chinese
diaspora. Ceded to the British in 1842 and occupied by the Japanese
during the Second World War before its return to Chinese
sovereignty in 1997, its postcolonial experience parallels the
diasporic condition of ‘living here and belonging elsewhere’ (Clifford
1994: 311). Throughout its history, Hong Kong has been a
destination for Mainland Chinese immigrants and refugees, as well
as expatriate Britons, indentured South Asians and Sephardic Jews
(McDonogh and Wong 2005). More recently, emigration from Hong
Kong in the years leading up to the handover has also resulted in
the growth of the overseas Hong Kong diaspora in North America,
Europe and Australia.1 Against this, it is not surprising the diaspora
is a common feature in contemporary Hong Kong cinema.
The diaspora has served as a rich site to explore themes of
migration, displacement, mobility and hybridity. New Wave
filmmakers like Allen Fong and Johnny Mak use the aesthetics of
social realism and themes of lawlessness to capture Hong Kong
as a diaspora for Mainland Chinese refugees. The overseas Hong
Kong diasporas also feature in auteur films such as John Woo’s
Bullet in the Head (1990), Stanley Kwan’s Full Moon in New York
(1990) and Wong Kar-wai’s Days of Being Wild (1990). Star
vehicles like the late Leslie Cheung’s Okinawa Rendezvous (dir.
Gordan Chan 2000), Andy Lau’s A Fighter’s Blues (dir. Daniel Lee
2000), Leon Lai’s Moonlight in Tokyo (dir. Felix Chang and Alan
Mak 2005) and Jay Chou’s Initial D (dir. Andrew Lau and Alan
Mak 2005) are also set in the Hong Kong diaspora in Asian cities.
Of the three thousand films produced between 1989 and 1997, these
motifs, of Hong Kong as part of the Chinese diaspora, and the
overseas Hong Kong diaspora, reflect anxieties surrounding the
crisis of identity and belonging.
In the study of Hong Kong cinema, the diaspora has also
occupied a central approach. Underlying Ackbar Abbas’s (1997a)
seminal concept of disappearance is the diasporic condition of
10
displacement. Supporting Esther’s Yau’s (2001) conceptualization

of the androgynous cinema is the effect of diasporic hybridity. The
transnationalism of action culture discussed by Meaghan Morris,
Siu-Leung Li and Stephan Chan (2005) traverses a history of
diasporic connections. The film reader, Between Home and the
World (Cheung and Chu 2004), provides an expansive overview of
these intersections surrounding Hong Kong, the globalization of
its film industry and the politics of memory. The development of
the cinema and its studio institutions have also been archived
through the diaspora (Fu and Desser 2000). Writers like Gina
Marchetti (2006), Sheldon Lu (1997; 2007) and Helen Hok-sze
Leung (2008) have also approached themes of transnationality,
commodity consumption and sexuality through the disjunctures
afforded by the diaspora.
Diasporas are signature sites in the films of Ann Hui. In 1978,
while working at the government network, Radio Television Hong
Kong (RTHK), she began the first of what has been described as
her Vietnam trilogy, with Boy from Vietnam (1978), a powerful
episode as part of the popular dramatic series Below the Lion Rock.
Her focus on the displacement of Vietnamese refugees in Hong
Kong brought media attention to the plight of the ‘boat people’. In
1979, when she joined the film industry, she made her first film,
The Secret. Partially set in the diaspora of Macau, it was praised
for its ‘intricate structure’ and ‘firmly established [her] as one of
the freshest and most exciting cinematic voices of the Hong Kong
New Wave’ (Berry 2005: 424). Her second feature, The Spooky
Bunch, is a light comedy about ghosts. Horror and the ethereal are
treated as liminal spaces, just like the diaspora. The Story of Woo
Viet (1981) and The Boat People (1982) complete the Vietnam
trilogy and consolidated Hui’s status as a critically acclaimed
filmmaker. The Story of Woo Viet mixes gangster action with the
charisma of Chow Yun Fatt, and brought to light political concerns
of immigration facing the people in Hong Kong. Considered by
●
many as Hui’s masterpiece, The Boat People introduced Andy Lau

to the film industry and received many accolades, including official
selection at the Cannes Film Festival and the best film at the second
annual Hong Kong Film Awards. Based loosely on a Japanese novel
about a Japanese photo-journalist who witnessed the communist
liberation on the streets of Da Nang in Vietnam, it was a
controversial film initially banned in Taiwan, taken out of
distribution in Hong Kong and eventually banned in China. While
some criticized its portrayal of violence against Vietnamese refugees,
the Vietnamese refugees themselves queried Hui on the mild
treatment of violence. This period also saw Hong Kong cinema
facing double censorship from British and Chinese governments.
The film’s anti-communist stance was considered politically
sensitive. Its plot of the displacement of refugees as a result of the
communist take-over was also considered a metaphor for the plight
of Hong Kong in 1997 when the British territory would return to
Chinese sovereignty. As Li Cheuk-to states, the film ‘touched a
collective nerve among Hong Kong people who were by now
increasingly worried over their future’ (cited in Foster 1997: 142).
These four films herald the dynamism of Hui’s repertoire and single
out the multi-layered diaspora as a key theme in her film style.
After these four films, she joined Shaw Brothers and made
Love in a Fallen City in 1984, the year of the signing of the Sino-
British Joint Declaration that sealed the date for the 1997 return
of Hong Kong from the British to China. Set in 1941 on the eve of
the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong, the film, adapted from
Eileen Chang’s (Zhang Ailing) novel, focuses on Hong Kong as a
refuge for the Shanghai and European diasporas. Writing in the
1940s and considered China’s most distinguished writer of that
period, Chang’s works explored love and loss, and contemporary
relationships between men and women. Hui uses ‘the past to
visualize the forthcoming transfer of Hong Kong to the mainland
and what the future holds for the fallen city’ by ‘[drawing] attention
12
to the ambiguity of “origin” and “consequence”’ (Yau 2007: 133).

The film became an allegory about the angst associated with Hong
Kong’s impending return, a theme coming to the full fore in Hong
Kong cinema and dealt with more directly by Hui in Starry Is the
Night (1988). During this period, Hui adapted Jin Yong’s martial
arts writings and made two period epics set in Mainland China,
The Romance of the Book and Sword (1987) and Princess Fragrance
(1987). The two-part film adaptation, about the overthrow of the
Manchu dynasty by ethnic Hans and minority Muslim women,
continues the theme of diaspora through its focus on belonging
and non-belonging, centres and margins.
In the 1990s and 2000s, the diaspora has become more explicit
in Hui’s contemporary dramas. My American Grandson (1991)
shows how the return of an overseas-born Chinese boy to Shanghai
to spend a summer vacation with his grandfather is an emotional
journey of cultural adjustment and reconciliation. Zodiac Killers
(1991), an action film, is set in Japan about overseas Hong Kong
students. Ordinary Heroes (1999) historicizes the territory’s
political activism through the plight of Hong Kong’s boat families
while the more recent The Way We Are (2008) examines the
predicament of a notorious small town in the New Territories. Ah
Kam (1996), Eighteen Springs (1997) and Summer Snow (1995)
show how women are marginalized in the development of modern
Hong Kong (Ho 2001). These liminal themes continue with the
crisis of mid-life in July Rhapsody (2002) and the haunting of the
after-life in Visible Secret (2001). From small towns like Nande in
Goddess of Mercy (2003), to the cosmopolitan metropolis of
Shanghai and the frontier province of Manchuria in The Postmodern
Life of My Aunt (2006), China, as Hong Kong’s diaspora, also
features strongly.
In these films, and through eclectic genres, the many diasporas
feature not only places (Macau, Shanghai, China, Manchuria, Japan,
Britain, America), but also people (refugees, immigrants, ghosts,
●
islanders, ethnic minorities, fringe dwellers, second generations)

and psychological conditions (crisis, loss, exile, nostalgia and
reparation). These tropes are explicitly dealt with in her diaspora
masterpiece, Song of the Exile.
Patricia Brett Erens approaches the film from Stuart Hall’s
concept of the diaspora as a locus for articulating the complexity
of double consciousness and cultural identity. She discusses the
film’s ‘diasporic aesthetic’ through the characters’ embodiment of
hybrid identity, the stylistic construction of the past through
memory and highlights the role of women’s autobiography (2000:
46). Freda Freiberg (2002) emphasizes the themes of travel and
food as motifs for border-crossing. Tony Williams (1998) extends
this discussion by situating it as an example of border-crossing
cinema. According to Esther Yau, border-crossing films in the 1980s
consider the ‘complex dynamics and symbolic structures that mark
the cultural positioning of a population whose ambivalence toward
the colonial administration is accompanied by nationalist
sentiments toward China’ (1994: 181). Siew Keng Chua (1998)
focuses on the twofold marginalization of home by drawing an
explicit parallel between women’s relegated role in the domestic
sphere and the condition of otherness faced by the experience of
exile. This chapter extends these discussions by focusing on intimacy.
This chapter begins by considering the spaces of diaspora
represented in the film. Britain, China and Japan are evaluated as
homelands that are entangled in Hong Kong’s postcolonial
predicament. Macau and Manchuria are further examined as
excentric second homes that foreground the diaspora as a peripheral
force in shaping an alternative Hong Kong modernity. The intimate
relationship of diaspora to colonization is highlighted as a conduit
for unravelling the interdependent relationship between self/other
and home/host. Diasporic intimacy is further demonstrated through
the concept of second homes that decentres the myth of a single
home. These considerations are central to how postcolonial Hong
14
Kong articulates its self-presence and cultural location, and key to

the film as an ode to the quest of home.
Framing Diaspora and Migration-as-Transition
As the term “diaspora” has gained currency in recent times due to

global migration and the rise of new nationalisms, it is necessary
to frame its taxonomy and briefly survey the field of diaspora
studies. In a seminal essay, ‘Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths
of Homeland and Return’, William Safran lists six defining features
of the diaspora: first, it refers to people who ‘have been dispersed
from a specific original “center” to two or more “peripheral,” or
foreign, regions’; second, diasporic groups ‘retain a collective
memory, vision, or myth about their original homeland’; third,
members of this group ‘believe that they are not — and perhaps
cannot be — fully accepted by their host society and therefore feel
partly alienated and insulated from it’; fourth, they ‘regard their
ancestral homeland as their true, ideal home and as the place to
which they or their descendants would (or should) eventually return
— when conditions are appropriate’; fifth, they ‘believe they should,
collectively, be committed to the maintenance or restoration of
their original homeland’; and sixth, they ‘continue to relate,
personally and vicariously, to that homeland in one way or another,
and their ethnocommunal consciousness and solidarity are
importantly defined by the existence of such a relationship’ (1991:
83–84).
Safran’s definition differentiates diaspora from other groups
such as expatriates, immigrants, refugees and aliens, and stresses
the emigration of people and their minority statuses within nation-
states. His taxonomy characterizes the first field in diaspora studies.
This field focuses on diasporic communities as ethnic minority
groups of migrant origins residing and acting in host countries but
●
maintaining strong sentimental and material links with their

countries of origin. Their marginalization encourages a strong desire
to return and they continually fetishize the collective homeland
myth through nostalgia (see for example, Freedman 1979; Hsu
1996; Skinner 1957).
In recent years, diaspora studies have proliferated and this
discipline has now expanded to other fields. The second field
concentrates on the interrelationships of networks and economic
organization at family, extra-national and regional levels. The
activities of the modern diasporas are considered part of a ‘trans-
state ethnic network’ that impacts on international politics (Sheffer
1986: 1). This group does not emphasize the emotional reverence
attached to the homeland and conceives of nationhood and
belonging through a multiplicity of diasporic identities. It highlights
the new habitus of cultural negotiation forged by migrant groups
in host communities and shows how belonging and identities are
expressed through the preservation, refashion and adaptation of
home cultures to suit host countries. Underpinning this field is a
weak or non-desire to return to the homeland (see for example,
Appadurai 1996; Bottomley 1992; Conner 1986; Hall 1990).
The third field comes from Chinese diaspora studies. This field
locates the Chinese diaspora as a peripheral force in shaping
Chinese transnationalism and Asian modernity. These writings fall
under two categories. The first celebrates the rise of the Chinese
diaspora through neo-Confucian and humanist enlightenment ideals
(Berger and Borer 1997; Godement 1997; Pan 1990; Tu 1994, 2005;
Wang 1991). Guanxi networks such as family relations are
celebrated as cultural strategies of difference by diasporic members
across regional divides (Cushman and Wang 1988; Lim and Gosling
1983; McVey 1992; Pred and Watts 1992). Private relations are
thus also public networks that connect transnational Chinese sites,
agencies and bodies. The second focuses on diasporic Chineseness
as a heterogeneous force for the representation, contestation and
16
articulation of disparate Chinese identities (Ang 2001; Chow 1991;

Nonini and Ong 1997). This approach articulates a non-essentialistic
identity and considers the possibilities of routes rather than roots
(see also Gilroy 1993; Hall 1990, 1993).
These fields broadly outline the features of the diaspora as a
concept and a migratory formation formed in relation to ‘the
strictures and structures of nationalism, and increasingly
imperialist, hegemonic forces of globalization’ (Braziel 2008: 25;
see also Braziel and Mannur 2003; Clifford 1994). As Robin Cohen
suggests in Global Diasporas, diasporic consciousness involves a
‘recognition of the positive virtues of retaining a diasporic identity’
as well as a ‘tension between an ethnic, a national and a
transnational identity’: members of a diaspora ‘sense not only a
collective identity in a place of settlement, nor again only a
relationship with an imagined, putative or real homeland, but also
a common identity with co-ethnic members in other countries’
(1997: 24). Arif Dirlik also frames what he calls a critical diaspora
discourse in this way:
[It] is marked not only by its attention to historicity, place,

multiplicity, ‘routes over roots’, rupture and difference, but also
by its attentiveness to the articulation of diasporic experience to
other kinds of experiences of displacement, oppression and
alienation. (2004: 494)
Dirlik’s focus on the ‘concrete locations of diasporic experience

— both locations of departure and locations of arrival’ (2004: 500)
provides a good starting point to attend to the spatial historicity
of homelands problematized in the film. These locations materialize
the film’s narrative of migration and also stress not just what unites
but divides the protagonists.
The multiple journeys of migration are central to the film. All
the protagonists have experienced migration. Aiko, the Japanese
●
mother married to a Chinese soldier, left Japan to work in

Manchuria and has resettled in Hong Kong. Hueyin, the eldest
daughter, moves between Britain, Hong Kong, Macau and China.
Huewei, the younger daughter, is about to migrate to Canada. Ah
Reng, the father, works in Manchuria and Hong Kong. Hueyin’s
Chinese grandparents are exiled in Macau before returning to
Guangzhou. While inhabiting the diaspora, each embodies the in-
betweeness of diasporic consciousness while also yearns to return
to their respective homelands. As the film progresses, each
protagonist physically returns: Hueyin to Hong Kong, Aiko to Japan
and the grandparents to China. They also symbolically return to
rework the roots of their origins as a result of the transformation
of diasporic acculturation.
These journeys of migration are represented in the film through
the motif of travel. Bicycles, ferries, rickshaws, boats, buses, trains
and harbours punctuate the film as the protagonists move from
place to place. This motif anchors the mobility of migration as a
‘human link between places’ (King 1995: 27) represented by the
places of departure, arrival and resettlement. The film opens with
an extreme close-up of a bicycle wheel and pans out to Hueyin
riding on the streets of London on the eve of her departure. In
Macau, a toddler Hueyin looks out of the window as the rickshaw
leaves with her parents. It cuts to the journey of the newly united
couple on a boat at sea. It segues to another ferry, in a similar
frame to the one before, taking a teenage Hueyin to Hong Kong.
Soon after, Hueyin and Aiko stand at the docks to farewell Huewei
as she and her husband leave for Canada. Japanese rice fields and
rural farms are introduced with a long spectatorial shot from the
window of a moving train. Hueyin and Aiko arrive in Beppu on a
bus. Hueyin explores the Beppu countryside on a borrowed bicycle.
Ah Reng proposes to Aiko at the harbour. Mother and daughter
reconciles by the sea overlooking a container ship, a space Hamid
Naficy calls the ‘cathartic border’ (2001: 234). The cathartic border
18
refers to how the border is a site of encounter, confession and

transformation. In this scene, the mother reveals to the daughter
the full account of how she met her father during the war. This
revelation prompts the beginning of the healing of tension between
mother and daughter. Set at dawn against the horizon of an ocean
liner announcing its arrival at the docks, this scene provides a
cathartic release of emotions that transforms the homecoming
journey into a ‘home-founding’ one (Naficy 2001: 234).
In these journeys, each segment is enhanced by the repetition
of the film’s main soundtrack, a new age instrumental, composed
by Chen Yang. These sequences dominate the film’s external
daylight shots. With almost no panoramic establishing shots, these
shots centrally frame the film’s theme of migration and its narrative
of displacement, and directly essay the sentiment of exile signposted
in the title.
The ‘exile’ is a term that refers to individuals or groups who
are forcibly removed from their homelands and unable to return
(Naficy 1993: 16–17). In the film however, none of the protagonists
can be strictly classified through this definition of exile. Hueyin is
an overseas migrant student in Britain; Aiko is an émigré spouse
through cross-cultural marriage; Huewei and her husband are
economic migrants to Canada; and the grandparents are self-
imposed refugees in Macau. Hence, exile functions as a trope for
the different journeys of migration encountered by the diasporic
protagonists. Key here is migration as a process of transition.
Migration is always an ongoing process of transition. It is a journey
of physical displacement, as well as social and psychological
dislocation. From the nostalgia of departure, the shock of arrival
to the belonging of resettlement, migration-as-transition involves
the continual transformation from one state to another (Yue 2004).
This process of transition parallels Hong Kong’s political
transition as it prepared for its return from capitalist British
●
Figure 1.1. Aiko and Hueyin at the ‘cathartic’ border by the dawn of
daylight. The camera framing from their backs connotes the introspection
of this scene, similar to the motif of flashbacks used in the film. This
similarity functions as a technique of literal and symbolic transition between
past memories and present narration. These techniques of transition are
also evident in the earlier sea sequence when Aiko leaves Macau and the
teenage Hueyin arrives in Hong Kong. These sequences are followed by a
similar scene at the harbour with Aiko and Hueyin bidding farewell to
Huewei and her husband, where a flashback immediately follows.
colonialism to post-socialist Chinese sovereignty. Transition began

with the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration that stipulated
capitalist Hong Kong remained, after 1997, a Special Administrative
Region under the unique model of ‘one country, two systems’ for
the next fifty years until 2046. This model includes Hong Kong as
a part of China but excludes it from its legal structure. It also allows
Hong Kong to continue to be a part of the deterritorialized empire
of multinational corporations and global capitalism. Underpinning
political transition is Hong Kong’s ambiguous postcoloniality. Rey
Chow problematizes Hong Kong’s predicament through the prefix
20
of the ‘post’. ‘Post’ is usually interpreted in two ways: ‘having gone

through’ colonialism, and ‘after’ colonization (1992: 152). The first
suggests an indirect end of imperialism with traces of current and
continuing aspects of colonialism including post-socialism and
transnational capitalism. The second suggests the direct end of one
colonial rule and the beginning of decolonization. As transition
marks the end of colonial rule to another, Hong Kong’s presents
‘a position situated between imminent decolonization (pre-1997)
and “re-nationalization”’ (Erni 2001: 390). It is a ‘paradoxical’
condition where ‘discontinuity and continuity are intertwined,
where there is a co-existence of opposites without sublation’ (Choi
2007: 395). Ten years after the handover, Hong Kong exists as a
postcolony of ‘entanglement’ where ‘inclusion and exclusion by the
sovereign become indistinguishable’ (Choi 2007: 406). This double
structure of postcolonial transition is reflected in the film through
its entanglements with the homeland.
Homelands
The homelands of Britain, China and Japan are significant in the

consideration of the multiple diasporas featured in the film because
they are sites of national and ethnic origins, and Hong Kong’s
postcolonial encounters. These sites construct home and express
diasporic consciousness that engages different degrees of
incorporation between home and host. Homes and homelands are
not only fetishized by the exile and the migrant; they are also
contested when these subject-positions change through migration-
as-transition. The diaspora is also inextricably intimate with the
homeland due to its ‘intrinsic and contradictory’ relationship, ‘with
one set against the other but at the same time without reference
to the other’ (Dirlik 2004: 491). This proximity also produces new
practices of intimacy.
●
Britain
The film begins in 1973 with a twenty-five-year-old Hueyin in
London. She has just finished her Masters education. Like her
school friends, she is waiting to hear the results of her job
applications. The opening scene shows her and her friends riding
their bicycles against the iconic background of London’s
Westminster Bridge. They eat Chinese dumplings by the street and
listen to a busker singing to Bob Dylan’s Mr Tambourine Man
before going to a nightclub. Upon their return to the dormitory
and opening the mailbox, she discovers her application to the British
Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has been rejected while her British
classmate, Tracy, is shortlisted. She also receives a letter from her
sister requesting her return to Hong Kong for her wedding. The
last scene in this sequence shows Hueyin unsuccessfully completing
another resume before typing a farewell letter to Tracy.
Although this is the only sequence set in Britain, it is significant
in the consideration of diaspora. When typing her personal details
on the resume, Hueyin’s marginal status is introduced. Born in
Hong Kong, she is naturalized and given the right of abode in
Britain due to Hong Kong’s status as a colony of Britain. However,
as a naturalized migrant and Chinese student, she faces
discrimination as an ethnic minority. She sits by herself in the
nightclub while her girlfriends are surrounded by British men. She
is subject to the institutional racism of the BBC despite her
proficient English-language skills. Her friends are culturally
ignorant, do not know how to use chopsticks and view her through
the mystique of orientalism. Hueyin is confronted and constructed
by everyday and institutional racism. This experience of
marginalization and isolation is evident in the point-of-view shots
in the nightclub and the dormitory’s hall. In the nightclub, she is
seen sitting alone, and these shots are then cut to a group of people
happily partying away; in the hall, she is also seen alone in a large
22
empty room. In the last scene in her bedroom, the camera pans
out to her silhouette by the desk against the sombre blue sky outside
the window. This colour palette frames the whole sequence,
beginning with the grey and dull London sky against the Thames
embankment. These modes of othering reflect the vexed postcolonial
relationship between Britain, China and Hong Kong at that time.
Figure 1.2. The camera frames Hueyin’s point of view as she types her
resume. The close-up shot magnifies how the ‘truth’ of her identity reveals
the contradictions between geographical origin and legal citizenship.
When the film was released in 1990 in the wake of the 1989
June Fourth Tiananmen Square Incident, Hong Kong was in a state
of heightened panic over the impending handover to communist
sovereignty. The Dylan song, which is also the extra-diegetic
soundtrack, signals this distrust: ‘There is no place I’m going to …
I have no one to meet, And the ancient empty street’s too dead for
dreaming’. As Tony Williams (1998) suggests, Hui’s choice of song
refers to surrender and freedom. For example, the surrender of the
British colony is evident in the lyrics, ‘that evenin’s empire has
returned into sand … vanished from my hand’. It also questions
●
the possibilities of freedom. For example, despite the 1973 setting

depicting swinging London as a place of hope and hedonistic youth
culture, it is a place of discrimination and isolation for Hueyin.
This is especially highlighted in the busking scene outside the British
Museum. The museum’s symbolic sites of cultural theft, imperial
education and contact zone are inferred through this image.
Together with the opening chimes of the Big Ben and the muted
sounds of military brass bands, this image exposes the legacy and
cultural hegemony of imperialism. The Westminster Bridge
functions as a symbolic bridge. It signals the postcolonial
conjunction of British and Hong Kong cultures (embodied by
Hueyin), as well as anticipates its withdrawal (represented by
Hueyin’s return to Hong Kong).
This scene provides an overview of the Hong Kong diaspora in
Britain in the 1970s. Members of the diaspora such as Hueyin are
recognized as British citizens but discriminated as ethnic minorities.
This marginalization problematizes nationality and ethnicity.
Nationality attests to the legal belonging in and of a place, people
and heritage. Ethnicity also affirms belonging to a group with
common solidarity and origins. Where the former provides
members such as Hueyin with the legal status of a citizen, the latter
fends off members through race and descent. As Hong Kong–
Chinese, Hueyin’s ethnic identity is minoritized through racial
difference. In the Hong Kong diaspora in Britain, diasporic identities
are formed in a tension to these ethnic and national identities.
This scene also introduces the postcolonial relationship between
Britain and Hong Kong. British cultural hegemony is evident in
iconic and indexical markers such as the use of the English
language, the British Museum, Big Ben, Westminster Bridge and
the BBC. These signifiers frame the monumentality of the British
empire and the pull of the metropolitan centre. The soundtrack
decentres this hegemony by acknowledging its withdrawal. In
drawing attention to the empire, it also functions as a motif to
24
question the possibility of postcolonial decolonization and

liberation. As Rey Chow wrote in 1992, ‘Hong Kong confronts us
with a question unheard of in colonial history. How do we talk
about a postcoloniality that is a forced return to a ‘mother country,’
itself as imperialistic as the previous colonizer?’ (1992: 153).
Marked by a ‘double impossibility’ (ibid.) of submitting to the
British and the Chinese, the soundtrack insinuates the ‘liminal
postcoloniality’ (Erni 2001: 390) of Hong Kong.
China
China appears in the last sequence of the film when Hueyin returns
to Guangzhou to visit her ailing grandfather. She arrives with a
suitcase full of food and sees her grandparents looking after a
young Chinese boy. After years of self-imposed exile in Macau
yearning to return when China is unified, the Kuomintang (KMT)
nationalist-supporting grandparents finally return to a communist
China in the throes of the Cultural Revolution. Their deep yearning
for an imagined homeland is symbolic of the exile’s ‘long dream of
home’ (Victor Hugo cited in Simpson 1995: 1). In this imagination,
the homeland is fetishized through the myths of a primordial
Chinese culture.
Grandfather represents Confucian Chinese patriarchy and
bourgeois nationalism. He reads poetry and classical literature,
practises calligraphy and is skilled in herbal medicine. He imparted
this patriotic cultural knowledge to Hueyin when she was growing
up and constantly reminds her not to forget her roots. Even on his
deathbed and in disillusionment, he reminds her to not lose hope
in China. Here, exile is fertile for producing fantasies about the
homeland and its distance from home becomes ideal for restoring
the original (Naficy 1993). Upon their return to the homeland, the
nationalist returnees are marginalized. Grandfather, old and sick,
is pardoned by the mercy of the Red Guards after he was caught
●
trying to send a book of Song poetry to Hueyin. Grandmother is

also bitten by the young boy who symbolizes the next generation
of Chinese descent. The boy’s unpredictable disposition and
grandfather’s frailty further represent the failures of Chinese
patriarchal nationalism and the impossibility of a rational future.
Space is represented through tight framing and dark lighting,
signifying the claustrophobia that reflects the liminality of
postcoloniality and the impossibility of a return to an original
homeland.2 This is evident from the moment Hueyin arrives on the
street of the apartment block. The scene of her arrival is shot from
the humble opening of her grandparents’ window. When she looks
up, the window frame appears small and dark. Peering from the
compact window, grandmother’s face is faint and hazy. When
looking up and looking to the grandmother, the symbolic figure of
Chinese authority is underwhelmed by the penetrating sunlight and
the minor window frame. These symbolisms of primordial origin
and homeland appear discordant, archaic and minuscule. As she
climbs the deep narrow stairs, she is shown precariously trying to
balance her oversized suitcase. In the room, the camera shoots over
the dining table and grandfather’s bed, dwarfing the space. When
cut to Hueyin’s point of view, these shots amplify her claustrophobia
over the environment. In a similar scene earlier in the grandparent’s
bedroom in Macau when Hueyin was a toddler, these props appear
at her eye level. Where the old Macau room is spacious and allows
her to run and sit, the new Chinese room is congested and narrow.
She even hunches and has to squat awkwardly to eat. Hueyin has
outgrown and is out-of-place in this space. These spatial framings
unsettle the myth of the exile’s return and show the homeland as
a space of continuous change and political upheaval; for the
diasporic Hueyin, these events further de-idealize the homeland
and reveal a pessimistic forecast about her future with this place.
The opening and closing shots to this sequence of her walking
across the bridge further disclose this foreboding. Unlike the
26
symbolic Westminster Bridge, this bridge represents the literal road

to China. In the path of Hong Kong’s reunification with the
motherland, it ‘prefigures the imminent 1997 re-incorporation of
Hong Kong into the PRC’ (Freiberg 2002; see also Erens 2000:
56). Foreboding is represented by the same overcast sky in London.
As Freda Freiberg suggests, ‘under the shadow of 1997, a contingent
and uncertain future awaits Hueyin in Hong Kong’ (2002).
Significantly, what this reveals is Hueyin’s refusal to naively follow
nativist longings for re-sinicization or re-nationalism and her
distrust of socialist nationalism. In this space, multiple Chinese
nationalisms (nationalist, communist, Hong Kong) and
heterogeneous Chinese identities (patriarchal, socialist, diasporic,
gendered) proliferate.
Figure 1.3. Hueyin carries a suitcase full of food as she walks across the
bridge to Guangzhou. At the Westminster Bridge, Hueyin is smiling and
carefree. At this bridge however, her struggle with the heavy suitcase
reflects the symbolic struggle of Hong Kong as it anticipates its 1997 return
to China.
●
These discourses are exemplified by the grandfather’s symbolic

reference to the book of Song poetry. Song poetry reflects the
political and cultural upheavals during the divided Song dynasty.
Considered by historians as the beginning of the modern age for
China, the Song dynasty was a period of radical introspections
characterized by factionalisms, radical reforms and neo-Confucian
re-evaluations in history, politics and government (Hymes and
Schirokuer 1993). The desire for Chinese nationalism underpinned
this questioning of pre-existing traditions. It supported an ideology
and a national sentiment rooted in the discourse of ‘love country’
(愛國) and the desire for unity. During this period, poetry was
expanded and transformed into a dominant literary art form
(Landau 1994). Song poems reflected the voices of intellectuals who
were sentenced to long periods in political exile as a result of voicing
dissent and increasing factionalism. The film’s symbolic reference
to this period and its poems directly infer the national sentiments
of modernity, exile and reunification.
Similar sentiments also surrounded the cultural milieu in the
late 1980s and early 1990s when the film was made and released.
China was in the throes of Cultural Fever and New Era reforms,
with cultural and intellectual interventions challenging the past and
questioning the experiences of the new (Zhang 1997). It was the era
of new Chinese modernism, a period not unlike the Song dynasty.
Against these direct textual and indirect contextual influences,
Chinese nationalism, as an ideology and a national sentiment, is
embodied and expressed by the protagonists in disparate ways. The
grandfather reflects nationalist nationalism: although he is
originally a supporter of the nationalist KMT party, who, like others,
have fled China, he returns to China and does not even consider
Taiwan, as the KMT-nominated Republic of China (ROC), a
potential place of return. His nationalism supports the ideology
that the Chinese nation should be united through democratic laws
28
and institutions; it also reflects his love for his country and
willingness to sacrifice for it. His return to China supports his
stubborn and naïve idealism that China can still be ‘transformed’.
His last words to Hueyin, ‘Don’t lose hope in China’, show his desire
for a unified China, and his reference to the Song poems epitomizes
this yearning. Grandmother engenders this form of nationalism;
she perpetuates Confucian patriarchy through the subservience of
housework and the violence she metes out to the young (the boy)
and the foreign (Aiko) when they do not obey. These ideologues
are at odds with the socialist milieu of communist nationalism they
find themselves in, with meagre basic provisions and being punished
for their bourgeois intellectual pursuits. Hueyin and Aiko represent
two discourses of Hong Kong Chinese nationalism: Hueyin, like
her grandfather, is also concerned with the changes sweeping China
and the conflicts they have ensued; however, hers is a national
sentiment of collective solidarity and her loyalty is with the impact
of these changes on Hong Kong, evident in the newsreel clips she
was watching prior to her China visit, and in her final voice-over.
Aiko’s Hong Kong Chinese nationalism is embodied through the
new loyalty of learnt language and everyday practices. It speaks to
the grassroots nationalism of the Hong Kong Chinese (Ma 2007),
as a form of bottom-up and diasporic nationalism reshaping the
Chinese national imagination.
It is interesting to note that Taiwan is an ‘absent present’ in
the film. This is registered through the motif of the KMT, through
Ah Reng’s absent presence in the film: he is absent from the present
diegetic time of the film and made present only through
recollections. The KMT army is an important backdrop to the film
as it is his role as an army translator that has led to his chance
meeting with Aiko. Taiwan’s ‘absent presence’ is also evident in the
grandparents’ choice to return to China despite their KMT-
nationalist leanings. In the homeland imagination, Taiwan is clearly
marginalized as the other China. Its diasporic undercurrents,
●
however, have shaped the narrative: the film’s script is written by

Wu Nien-jen, one of Taiwan’s leading authors and a forerunner of
Taiwanese New Cinema. Hui’s collaborative mode of production
will be further explored in the next chapter.
Japan
Japan appears in the second half of the film when Hueyin
accompanies her mother, Aiko, to her hometown. This is Aiko’s
first visit since she left to serve as a nurse in Manchuria during the
Pacific War. Aiko’s exilic ‘dream of glorious return’ (Rushdie 1988:
205) is evident in this part of the film. Upon reaching her hometown
of Beppu and meeting her older brother, she tells him how hard
life is ‘in a foreign country’. Home is constructed in this section
through the comfort of kinship, language, food and social networks.
At the restaurant on the way home, she orders three servings of
her favourite food and laments to Hueyin the lack of Japanese food
authenticity in Hong Kong. The next morning, she pays respect at
her parent’s grave in Japanese. Her friends visit and they sing
Japanese folk songs together. She catches up with her old teacher
and her ex-lover. She even makes a wooden seal of her real name
in Japanese. In these scenes, the comfort of home constructs Aiko’s
Japanese identity in two ways: first, the similarity of social practices
and collective acknowledgement that warmly embraces her as one
of the same; second, the self-construction of personal identity
through mother tongue, name and heritage.
As the trip progresses, Aiko begins to reveal how the years of
acculturation in Hong Kong have changed her attitude towards the
homeland. Japanese food begins to taste bland and cold. Traditional
hot baths are impractical and inconvenient. Her old flame is a
grumpy alcoholic. Her friends are unworldly and ethno-centric.
The family home she has fought hard to keep begins to feel small.
Her favourite younger brother whom she dearly misses is
30
xenophobic. Unlike the small town of Beppu, the city of Hong Kong
is equally as modern as Tokyo. In these sequences, Aiko embodies
the tension between what Edward Said has described as the
contrapuntal vision of exile (1990: 386). Imbued with an awareness
of at least two sets of expressions, between ‘here’ and ‘there’, ‘old’
and ‘new’, the contrapuntality of exile decentres the familiar site
of ‘home’ that encloses borders and forms barriers. She no longer
feels victimized by her brother’s accusation of disloyalty nor sad to
sell the house. She even looks forward to returning to Hong Kong.
During the second and final visit to her parent’s grave, she pays
her respect in Cantonese, showing how she has come to accept the
changes in her identity that are different from her original place
of birth or heritage.
Just as the use of language allows Aiko to construct the
sameness and difference of her exile identity, it is also a site that
marks Hueyin’s otherness. In Japan, Hueyin experiences the
alienation of exile her mother felt all the years in Macau not
knowing how to speak Cantonese. Unable to speak Japanese,
Hueyin is now the silent other. Hueyin’s otherness is also evident
in the remarks made by her mother and uncle that she does not
behave like ‘her mother’s daughter’. This language barrier prevents
her from communicating with other members of the family and
people in the neighbourhood. When she is lost and found by the
villagers, she is called a ‘foreigner’. Her Chinese ethnicity is stranger
than American ethnicity. Here, familiarity is defined through the
intimacy of cultural exchange and contact. Japan has always been
considered an ‘honorary’ white civilization through its history of
the appropriation of Western models of bureaucracy (Tamanoi
2005: 1–24). In contrast to the competing nationalisms between
Japan and China, China has always been Japan’s other (ibid.).
Unlike in Britain where she is the national other, here she is the
nationalist other. The ‘national other’ refers to someone who is
marginalized in a country because of perceived cultural difference
●
despite having acquired the status of legal belonging, whether by

birth or naturalization. The ‘nationalist other’ refers to someone
who is marginalized in a country as a result of dominant sentiments
that ascribe other cultures and interests as inferior. Hueyin’s
diasporic Hong Kong Chinese–J a p a n e s e n e s s r e m a i n s
undifferentiated and subsumed under the sign of China. In these
discourses of nationalism, the identities of self and other are fixed.
In Japan, Hueyin also begins to discover the heritage of her
mother’s ancestry. Childhood and family photos, together with the
privileged location of her grandparent’s grave, materialize the
nobility of her mother’s class and identity. It is here that her uncle
recounts to her in Mandarin how her parents met in Manchuria
and how her father, a translator in the Nationalist Army, helped
save his son’s life. In these sequences, Mandarin and Japanese
function as linguistic bridges for mediating a diasporic inheritance
that includes the ancestral roots of maternal origin and the conjugal
routes of matrimony. As the film progresses, Hueyin comes to
accept these histories as also her own. She takes her father’s place
by accepting a drink from her uncle, and fulfills the promise her
father made to her mother.
In the above, Aiko and Hueyin enact the desire to return in
similar ways. As a Japanese exile, Aiko possesses a strong desire
to return. The homeland of Japan is fetishized through the
authenticity of food, the familiarity of language and the comfort of
the family home. As a Hong Kong exile, Hueyin experiences acute
otherness in Japan. She is constructed as a foreigner and a stranger.
As she comes to accept her bicultural Chinese-Japanese identity,
Japan becomes a place to re-imagine her diasporic inheritance.
Similarly, as Aiko comes to accept her enculturation, Japan also
becomes a place to re-imagine her exilic consciousness.
Japan’s colonization of Manchuria during the Pacific War, its
cultural hegemony over China and China’s postcolonial relationship
with Japan, are also represented in these sequences through the
32
politics of nationalisms, language and ethnicity. Aiko’s younger

brother, Masahiko, represents colonial Japan. A kamikaze pilot
unable to fulfill his mission, he is still ‘at war’ and unable to forgive
his sister for marrying the enemy. He has not corresponded with
her and refuses to acknowledge her existence. Aiko, always the one
who seeks forgiveness and initiates reconciliation, is subject to his
colonial Japanese patriarchy. This lack of communication, as Lisa
Stokes and Michael Hoover point out, foregrounds the mistrust
and intolerance between the Chinese and the Japanese (1999:
144–146). This mistrust is also evident when Hueyin, unable to
understand Japanese, wrongly interprets the friendly caution of
the farmer. Similar incidents also occur in Macau between the
grandparents and the newly married Aiko who could not speak
Cantonese. They are suspicious of her cold food, misjudge her care
for Hueyin and even accuse her of stealing the family jewels. This
absence of communication highlights the hostility and lack of
respect between the two groups, and shows the postcolonial
contestation of different nationalisms. Both are ethno-centric and
collude in practices of othering. Only the older brother, who speaks
Mandarin, and the father, who speaks Japanese, are able to cross
the linguistic divide and participate in the social relation of
intercultural communication.3
The film’s representation of Japan reflects the history of
Japanese colonization in Hong Kong, and the period of film
production in the early 1990s. Unlike Japan’s benevolent
relationship to Taiwan (most seminally explored in Hou Hsiao-
hsien’s The Puppetmaster [1993]), Hong Kong’s New Wave cinema,
for example, Hui’s Love in a Fallen City, portrays the history of
Japanese colonization through bloodshed and war. During the film
production context of the 1990s, however, Japan was a powerful
economic presence in the Asian region. Its influential role as a
regional mediator was also represented in films such as Hui’s Boat
●
People that features a Japanese photo-journalist as the protagonist.

In the early 2000s, the cultural capital of Japan was increasingly
employed in the cinema, through box-office successes such as
Okinawa Rendezvous (dir. Gordan Chan 2000), Initial D (dir.
Andrew Lau 2005) and Moonlight in Tokyo (dir. Alan Mak 2005).
These representations of Japan mark out different and competing
discourses of home and nationalism, from shared cultural identity
(The Puppetmaster), enforced displacement (Love in a Fallen City),
interchange (Boat People) to fantasy (Okinawa Rendezvous) and
place (Moonlight in Tokyo).
In Song of the Exile, the homelands of Britain, China and Japan
are sentimentalized as places of origins, nationality, belonging and
comfort. More than a physical place, it is also, like the concept of
home, a symbolic space for personal and social identities. It marks
out one’s self-identity and allows others to recognize the self. In
their journeys of return, the protagonists unsettle the fixity of
belonging, and the homeland becomes an indeterminate site of
meaning. Britain, as a centre of colonial distinction, is unhinged
through surrender. For the naturalized Chinese Hueyin, it is also
a place of discrimination and isolation. China, as the origin of
tradition and descent, is apprehended with foreboding. For the
nationalist grandfather, it is also a place of socialism. Japan, as the
comfort of home, is intimated through food and social networks.
For the exiled Aiko, it is also a place of nostalgia. In these journeys
of return, the imagined communities of the homeland are reworked.
Their impure roots are acknowledged as a part of a diasporic
inheritance. ‘Diasporic inheritance’ does not just refer to origins
and descent but more to how kinship, family, heritage and
generations are transformed as a result of migration.4 Key to
diasporic inheritance are new intimacies produced by displacement.
34
Diasporic Intimacy in the Homelands
Intimacy is derived from the Latin word intimus to denote what is

innermost. Its verb, intimaire, means to make known. Together,
its etymological meaning refers to the process of making known
what is innermost to a close friend. Theorizations of intimacy about
the West locate it in the private domain, in the home, with the
family and through sexual relations (Giddens 1992). It is also
regulated in the public to create compliant subjects and normalize
heterosexuality (Berlant 1998). In these definitions, intimacy is
related to the construction of personhood, and located in the
private-public spheres of the home, family and romance. It is also
experienced as authentic, erotic, affective and somatic. In the
diaspora, the experience of migration has transformed the practice
of intimacy. The intimate is practised as ‘embodied social relations
that include mobility, emotion, materiality, belonging, alienation’
(Mountz and Hyndman 2006: 447). It is not only experienced in
the everyday, but also through its ‘subtle interconnections to
everyday intimacies in other times and places’ (ibid.). Intimacy
participates in the tactile, and supplements as a corrective to the
distance created by migration (Pratt and Rosner 2006: 17). In
diaspora, some cultivate intimacy with the homeland through the
media (Bhabha 1999: vii–xii). Others live with changed family and
kinship relations as a result of displacement. New intimacies are
formed in the diaspora.
Arif Dirlik suggests there is an ‘intimate relationship from the
very beginning between diaspora and colonization’ (Dirlik 2004:
492). Dispersions and resettlements, he argues, have resulted not
only in the desire to return, but also mutually beneficial ‘functional’
relationships between the diaspora and the host (ibid.). Giovanni
Arrighi’s (1994) ‘diasporic bourgeoisie’ Genoese bankers were
welcomed in Europe because they played a key role in the economy.
Aihwa Ong’s (1999) middle-class ‘flexible (Chinese) citizens’ are
●
also embraced in places like North America and Australia because

they contribute professionally and financially to the economy. This
functional approach underpins the cultural philosophy of intimacy
as an interdependent relationship between the self and other, and
how the self is transformed as a result of the other (Kasulis 2002).
As Emmanuel Lévinas writes, ‘intimacy which familiarity already
presupposes is an intimacy with someone’ (1969: 155). As a dual
relation between self and other, intimacy is ‘a matter of turning
into someone else’s reality, and risk being changed by that
experience’ (Dowrick 1991: 193).
In the film, this form of diasporic intimacy exposes that which
unites and divides Hueyin and her friends. The familiarity with the
English language is integral to the encounter with colonial intimacy.
It provides Hueyin with cultural capital in and about the
metropolitan. This cultural capital has also enabled Maggie Cheung,
who plays Hueyin, to acquire her cosmopolitan film repertoire and
consolidate her transnational stardom (Williams 2003). Not
coincidentally, this is Cheung’s first art house film role that launched
her career as a serious actress.5 Cultural intimacy, as the social glue
that facilitates national identity, is also evident in Britain. It refers
to ‘the recognition of those aspects of cultural identity that are
considered a source of external embarrassment but that nevertheless
provide insiders with their assurance of common sociality’ (Herzfeld
2005: 3). The approximation of spring rolls for rice dumplings,
and the exoticization of the necklace, show how the Chinese
stereotype functions as a source of shame for Britain but
nevertheless provides its own with a collective identity. In the Hong
Kong diaspora in Britain, these intimacies, in the proximities of
personhood and the nearness of others, reveal ‘what haunts those
social relations, to the untoward, to the strangely familiar that …
inequalities may produce’ (Stoler 2006: 14).
The interdependent relationships between self and other are
also evident in the border-crossing journeys of Aiko and the
36
grandparents. The unhomeliness of home in China and Japan shows

how intimacy in the diaspora requires a different genealogy tied
more to the experience of exile and away from the normalization
of private lives (Boym 1998). Rather than utopian, diasporic
intimacy is dystopian. In China, home is dark and lacking in
nourishment. It is also chaotic and unpredictable. This is opposite
to the fantasy of how identity can be recovered through nostalgia
for a lost home or homeland. Rather than care and belonging, it is
intimated through domestic violence and clandestine rituals. Food
is supplied secretly and traditions are maintained surreptitiously.
The intimacy of talk and the intimate practice of eating take place
through muted whispers and volatile contacts. In Japan, friendship
and love are marked by hypocrisy and betrayal. Dead sons and
unfilial brothers undo the kinship of the family. Incomplete families
also expose the big family house as hollow and empty. Diasporic
intimacies expose the myth of home as domestic, familial and
romantic; they also expand intimacy as a ‘spatial proximity or
adjacent connection’ (Lowe 2006: 192) to the migratory places of
departure and resettlement. The next section further considers how
diasporic intimacy is experienced in the second homes of Macau
and Manchuria.
Excentric Homes
Macau is examined as a transnational Chinese second home. Second

homes are sites of diasporic intimacy that usurp the myth of a
single home. Manchuria is also considered as an excentric cultural
location to consider the ontology of Hong Kong modernity. The
excentric refers to a cultural location that is off-centre and at the
threshold of a border that can question both the inside and the
outside (Hutcheon 1989). Macau and Manchuria are excentric
because they are on the periphery and yet central to China.
●
Manchuria’s history of Japanese occupation (as the Japanese state

of Manchukuo) and its continuing transnational ties to Russia and
Europe, and Macau’s history of European colonization, have
produced political and cultural histories that divide the family and
nation. Rather than the original home of Chinese ontology, the
second home is an excentric site to examine Hong Kong modernity
as a process that questions how Hong Kong makes itself present
according to the historicity of its own condition.
The excentric privileges the periphery to consider the purpose
and practice of empire. As James Clifford (1994) has influentially
stated, the periphery of the diaspora subverts the nation-state
through other transnational affiliations. Excentric Macau and
Manchuria are situated as peripheral forces in decentring China and
reshaping Hong Kong modernity. For postcolonial Hong Kong, this
is a different starting point to return to the postcolonial predicament
encountered at the crossroads of British imperialism, communist
post-socialism, Chinese nativism and Japanese colonization
discussed in the previous section. These issues are central to the
film because the practice of re-making home in the second home
is also a farewell to the motherland, a paean to inhabit the exile
and an acknowledgement of the legacies of diasporic inheritance.
Macau
Macau is the childhood home of Hueyin where she lives with her
grandparents and her mother while her father works in Hong Kong.
Here, she learns the traditions of Chinese culture from her
grandfather, and witnesses her mother’s silence and reserve. She
continues to live with her grandparents in Macau when her mother
joins her father in Hong Kong until she is fifteen.
Macau is the diasporic home for the grandparents, Aiko and
Hueyin. In this space, all try to re-make a second home. The second
home is a shared space consisting of predominantly two rooms on
38
the first floor. Grandparents occupy one room where they also cook
while Aiko and Hueyin live in the other. The rooms, like the one
in Guangzhou, are dark and narrow. Homemaking rituals, taken
up by grandfather’s Chinese poetry and calligraphy, are haunted
by the memories of and objects from home. The imperfections of
diasporic intimacy, such as precarious affection, improper family
and sexuality, and indirect recognition, characterize the second home.
Daily tension caused by mutual mistrust is expressed intimately.
Food conveys warmth and censure. Eating alone is wrenched with
guilt and eating together is exclusionary. Rather than nourish and
cohere, food and eating are proxies for hostility and alienation.
Touch is also fragile and cozy. Grandfather’s skilled penmanship
and grandmother’s firm grasp are also accompanied by Aiko’s hard
slap. In the second home, affections are precarious (Boym 1998:
499). Mother’s care — cutting Hueyin’s hair, making her wear a
school uniform and asking her to live in Hong Kong with her and
her father — is cruelly mistaken, reflecting the inadequacy of her
translation. Her love is experienced not through deep emotional
fusion, but the explosive tactility of quick smacks, cold meals and
sharp scissor blades.
The second home is also a place of improper family and
sexuality. Without the prodigal son and with a foreign daughter-
in-law, the protagonists make up an improper family with neither
pure bloodline nor dutiful piety. When Ah Reng arrives, he is only
shown quickly sitting down and hastily taking his wife away. Always
shot fleetingly, and in distant middle and long shots, he is outside
the centre of the domestic intimacy. Working in Hong Kong, he is
unable to regularly fulfill his conjugal duties. Improper sexuality
is evident in the lack of touch between husband and wife in this
sequence, and through his failure to produce a son to continue the
family ancestry. His manhood is also shortened by his early death.
In the second home, recognition is intimated rather than
directly interpellated. Hueyin’s affirmation of her mother is
●
expressed distantly. She looks at her mother’s back from the

mahjong room and watches her mother leave from the window.
These shots show Hueyin and Aiko separated by the frames of a
doorway and a window. Rather than convey estrangement, they
communicate indirect love. As long and quiet sequences, they
disturb the disorder of the second home, and show how love, as
brief respites of silent and strange recognition, can also be
reciprocated obliquely.
Figure 1.4. From the lingering point of view of a young Hueyin by the
first-floor apartment window in Macau, a long shot of her parents leaving
Macau. Like the earlier shot in the apartment when she watches her mother
walk away into the other room, this shot frames the diasporic intimacy of
her furtive gaze and captures her indirect love.
The scenes featuring Macau are central because they form the
flashback sequences of the film.6 Significantly, the establishing shot
of the Macau home is the only one of the many homes featured
that is shot in full daylight and in full frame. Against this, the second
home of Macau is key to consider the re-making of home in the
film. In Hong Kong’s quest for home, the periphery of the excentric
is also a force to decentre China as the ultimate reference point.
40
Macau, a small peninsular at the mouth of the Pearl River, was

the first and last European colony in China (BBC News 1999). It
was a Portuguese colony from the sixteenth century until it was
returned to China in 1999 under the similar ‘one country, two
systems’ rule. First established as a Portuguese port, it was a base
for trade between the West and China in the seventeenth century.
When Hong Kong replaced Macau as a favoured port, Macau
continued with the illegal un-free coolie labour trade. This
reputation for vice was notoriously recognized when gambling was
legalized in 1848. Gambling is currently the largest source of
government revenue (McDonogh and Wong 2005: 148). Historian
Jonathan Porter writes,
By the 1920s and 1930s, Macau had become one the world’s
notorious ‘cities of sin’ where gambling, prostitution and opium
houses flourished … Macau never lost its notoriety as a seedy,
disreputable, and sometimes dangerous place, a refuge for down-
and-out and a haven for smugglers, spies and other malevolent
characters. (1996: 94)
After the Second World War, it was a neutral place to settle

refugees and trade in gold. It became a haven for pro-Mao
communists during the Cultural Revolution. During the 1970s,
Portugal granted a large degree of autonomy to the colony. In the
wake of the leftist military coup in Portugal in 1974, Macau was
regarded by Portugal and China as ‘a Chinese territory under
(temporary) Portuguese administration’ (Fung 1999: 148). It is
currently a free trade port, a tax haven and a key destination for
gambling tourism. With a mixed population comprising
predominantly Chinese from Guangdong and Fujian, an ethnic
minority group of Chinese/Portuguese descent known as Macanese,
as well as people from Hong Kong, the Philippines and Portugal,
Macau is ‘an imaginary city’ at ‘the threshold between two worlds,
●
which some Europeans and Chinese succeeded in crossing and

others did not. Even when they did not, they encountered people
from across the threshold’ (Porter 1996: 186).
Although the film did not feature the transnationalism
described above, it shows how second homes like Macau are
excentric sites of Chinese transnationalism. Chinese transnationalism,
a broad phenomenon encompassing all aspects of economy, culture,
politics and everyday life, can be defined as the ‘a recent global
phenomenon with historical roots in premodern trade systems,
European colonialism, and more recent American geopolitical
dominations of the Asia Pacific’ (Nonini and Ong 1997: 12). Macau,
like Hong Kong’s status as the Special Administrative Region (SAR)
of China, is both same and other. This is reflected in their border
statuses as threshold cities. The threshold collapses the distinction
between inside and outside; it is ‘the experience of the limit itself,
the experience of being — within an outside’ (Agamben 1993: 69).
Both cities’ inclusion in China is also their exclusion, and this
exclusion is precisely what China’s capitalist development needs.
These cities are historical and contemporary intermediaries in the
commerce and trade between China and the West. Excentric Macau,
like Hong Kong, is a ‘satellite metropolis of global capitalism’ (Fung
and Ma 2001: 76). As sites of satellite modernity functioning as a
‘nexus that relays sites of high modernity and developing modernity’
(ibid.), they are peripheral forces of Chinese transnationalism.
Their peripheral status is also evident in their imperfections.
Macau’s notorious imperfections are also reflected in the
imperfections of diasporic intimacy. Imperfections are excentric
forces that decentre the status quo of China. Like Macau’s crime,
sex and gambling, the intimacies of precarious affection, improper
family and sexuality, and intimated recognition are alternative
modes of survival that challenge the conventions of the Confucian
and post-socialist family and their codes of moral duty. Intimate
imperfections destroy the myth of a single original home. As
42
Svetlana Boym suggests, ‘diasporic intimacy is an affectionate

farewell to the motherland’ (1998: 524).
For Hong Kong, Macau is also its other. As spatially adjacent,
it is not only a literal second home to many Chinese émigrés (like
the protagonists in the film); it is also a day trip or weekend retreat
for many fun-seeking Hong Kong and Mainland residents. Its (ap)
proximity to Hong Kong allows Hong Kong to question its
modernity. Hong Kong’s modernization, represented in Macau by
Hong Kong property tycoon Stanley Ho, is also partially fuelled by
Macau’s gambling tourism. Before the 2004 opening of the Sands
Macau, a US$240 million Las Vegas–owned and –inspired
waterfront pleasure dome that transformed Macau into an East
Asian centre of gambling, Macau’s gambling business, which
generated one third of its gross domestic product, was the exclusive
province of Stanley Ho (Schuman 2004). The proposed Hong
Kong–Zhuhai-Macau Bridge to reduce travel time between the two
cities also poses the question of whether Macau would be another
suburb of Hong Kong (McDonogh and Wong 2005: 152). These
dominations reveal the intimate inequalities that structure Hong
Kong’s alternative satellite modernity.
Excentric sites like Macau are clearly peripheral forces in
decentring China. The film shows how diasporic intimacies
expressed in the second home of Macau displace China as the
ultimate frame of reference. For Hong Kong, the intimacy of Macau
also allows it to take a turn away from the motherland and
problematize its own modernity. The excentric cultural location of
Manchuria further allows Hong Kong to construct a new ontology
for its modernity.
Manchuria
Post–Second World War Manchuria in 1948 takes place in the film
through Hueyin’s imagination when she hears about this encounter
●
from Aiko’s brother during their visit to Japan. This is aestheticized

as a flashback sequence in the film, what Patricia Brett Erens calls
the ‘cinematic representations of Hueyin’s creative fantasies’
(2000: 50).
Manchuria is a diasporic home for Ah Reng and Aiko who are
both on professional duties as a translator and a nurse. The
professions of translating and nursing are excentric and intimate.
Translation is a process of expressing one language to another. The
practice of translation usually requires the translator to stand on
the side to mediate the languages of two interlocutors. In Ah Reng’s
case, he is an excentric figure collaborating on the periphery
between the two empires of China and Japan. Nursing is a practice
of emotional care and intimate labour. In Aiko’s case, she is seen
tending not only to her brother’s sick son, but braving the unsafe
conditions of postwar hostility by leaving her hiding place and
seeking help. At the Japanese repatriation centre, she cooks and
launders. In the film, Manchuria is the origin of a new ontology
for Hueyin.
Although Hueyin is not born in Manchuria, Manchuria is the
place where her parents met and married. Ah Reng and Aiko first
met when he stops his military truck to help the sick baby she is
nursing and upon realizing they are Japanese, offers to take her
brother, his son and her to the repatriation centre. While awaiting
their return to Japan, Ah Reng visits regularly with food. On the
eve of their departure, he proposes to Aiko. Aiko agrees and they
continue to live in Manchuria until Ah Reng is transferred to
Hong Kong.
Hearing this encounter as a twenty-five-year-old, Hueyin’s re-
imagining reflects the experience of delay in diasporic intimacy.
Unlike the immediacy of normative intimacy, diasporic intimacy is
belated (Boym 1998: 502). This experience of belatedness constructs
the intimacy of the second home differently. With no internal shots,
the second home is a refugee camp whose spatial boundaries of
44
Figure 1.5. At the Japanese repatriation centre in Manchuria, Ah Reng

proposes to Aiko. This establishing mid-shot of their union consolidates
the taboo marriage.
inclusive exclusion parallel the threshold cities of Macau and Hong

Kong. These scenes take place outdoors and in daylight. While food
is rationed and life is hard, these are compensated by the secret
luxuries of smuggled provisions, new friendship and forbidden
courtship. These intimate contacts provide a new ontology for
Hueyin. At that time inter-ethnic marriage between the Japanese
and Chinese was a taboo practice frowned upon, as discussed
earlier, through mutual distrust. A mixed-race Sino-Japanese
heritage pollutes the body politic of both states and disrupts the
lineage of ethno-centric heteronormative descent. Hueyin’s
discovery of her birth, as her new ontology, decentres the norms
of Chinese and Japanese heteronormativity. This diasporic
inheritance of transnational mixed-race Chineseness is reflected in
the cultural history of Manchuria.
Manchuria, bordered on the Northeast (Dongbei), is located at
the intersection of China, Russia, Korea and Japan. Considered
‘the cockpit of Asia’ (Reardon-Anderson 2005: 2), it is a part of
●
China. Like Hong Kong and Macau, it is a frontier centre of

industralization. In the early seventeenth century, Manchu culture
emerged when Manchu emperors established the Qing dynasty
(Crossley 1997; Elliot 2000). During this period, ethnic Han
migration to Manchuria was actively encouraged.7 In the late
nineteenth century, Britain, Russia, the United States and Japan
began to claim interests in Manchuria (Lee 1970). In the early
twentieth century, Manchuria was a multinational and multi-ethnic
‘imperial melting pot’ (Mitter 2005: 27). By the 1930s, Manchuria
was ‘a field of contest between three types of civilization — the
Chinese, the Russian and the Western [represented by the
Japanese]’ (Lattimore cited in Tamanoi 2005: 1). These civilizations
marginalized the northern tribes of the Manchus and the Mongols.
The Japanese colony of Manchukuo was formed in 1932 and lasted
till 1945. Japan imagined Manchuria as a ‘distant place of heroic
dreams for the colonizers and migrants’ while China imagined it
as ‘a dominant nationalist project’ (Mitter 2005: 25). These two
forms of modern nationalism constructed the transnationalism of
Manchuria. As Prasenjit Duara states, China ‘rejected, required and
commandeered the ideology of transnationalism’ for its construction
and maintenance of nationalism (1997: 1–43). This inclusive
exclusion is similar to the states of exception in Macau and Hong
Kong. Like these cities, postcolonial Manchuria is an effect of the
geopolitical imaginary shaped by imperialism, nationalism,
colonialism, pan-Asianism and contemporary globalization.
Together with current redevelopment projects focusing on the
production of affect and service (Lu 2007: 12), it is undoubtedly
excentrically intimate to China.
Postcolonial Manchuria provides a new starting point to
decentre China and considers a new ontology for Hong Kong
modernity. Its excentric modern Chinese transnationalism and
postcolonial entanglements are similar to Hong Kong. More
significantly, in the film, it is the place of Manchuria that enables
46
Aiko and Hueyin to ‘re-turn’ and make for a new home together in
Hong Kong. Hong Kong’s return to the motherland, as the political
process of transition, requires such an ethics of ‘re-turn’. Through
routes rather than roots, ‘re-turn’ ‘shows the impossibility of
reconciliation through an unproblematic reunification and how this
is divested by taking a turn elsewhere’ (Yue 2005: 170). After
twenty-five years of mother-daughter conflict, it is through the new
ontology of Manchuria that both are finally at home in Hong Kong.
This new ontology shows a new genealogy of diasporic inheritance
that resounds through Manchuria as an intimate imagination
shaped as much by its frontier contact with the outside-in as it is
‘made … from the inside out’ (Reardon-Anderson 2005: 7).
Conclusion
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, diasporic intimacy is also evident
in similarly themed independent films. Notable ones include An
Autumn’s Tale (dir. Mabel Cheung 1987), Farewell, China (dir.
Clara Law 1990) and Full Moon in New York (dir. Stanley Kwan
1990). An Autumn’s Tale is a romance story about a mismatched
couple from different social backgrounds. A Hong Kong student
(Jenny, played by Cherrie Cheung) arrives in New York to meet
her boyfriend only to find he has lost interest in her. After her
initial heartbreak, Jenny seeks solace in her distant cousin, Sam.
Although Sam is older, unsophisticated and uneducated, he cares
and looks out for her welfare. The unlikely chemistry between them
blossoms through the diasporic intimacy of missed timings,
awkward silences and indirect intentions. Imperfect second homes
are lovingly made in the dark basement of a run-down apartment
block with a small window looking out onto the rambling train
tracks. This mise-en-scene is also repeated in Farewell, China where
a student (Li, played by Maggie Cheung) from China arrives in New
●
York only to find herself robbed and raped. The story is told through
her estranged husband after he smuggles himself into the country
to look for her. The suitcase he was handed by her ex-landlord
intimates the dystopia of home. Here, Li keeps the new clothes she
has bought for her husband and their child in China. In between
these folds are also maggot-ridden pieces of rotten cooked food she
has kept aside for them as she descends into her delusional feverish
days of sickness and paranoia. Unlike the happy ending of An
Autumn’s Tale, the film ends with the husband finding the wife
only to discover that she does not recognize him. Here, indirect
recognition is intimated through mental illness. In Full Moon in
New York, the friendship between the three women from China,
Hong Kong and Taiwan transpires in the underbelly of a restaurant’s
kitchen. Kitchens such as these have defined the intimate heartland
of the Chinese diaspora. They are material sites for migrant and
often gendered labour: such labour — the labour of exotic
multicultural food and regular and irregular work — has
stereotypically defined the ethnic community; not ironically, it is
through the second homes of these intimacies that the Chinese
diaspora is also constructed as an exemplary imagined and model
minority community. These practices of diasporic intimacy, this
chapter has argued, provide a new approach to consider the topic
of the diaspora in Hong Kong cinema and Song of the Exile.
The diasporas featured in Song of the Exile question the place
of home and its condition of belonging. Its theme of migration
reflects Hong Kong’s political transition and allows the film to deal
with the broader issue of its postcolonial entanglement. The
homelands of Britain, China and Japan are challenged by the routes
of diasporic inheritance. In the second immigrant homes of Macau
and Manchuria, the practices of diasporic intimacy undo the myth
of a singular home and decentre China as the origin of cultural
roots and identity. Diasporic intimacy and second homes provide
a new ontological and genealogical beginning to consider Hong
48
Kong modernity. Hong Kong’s transition requires such an ethics

of re-turn. The next chapter considers the ethics of re-turn by
examining the genre of the film and its politics of memory.
2
Re-turn to Hong Kong:
Authorship, Memory, Intimate
Biography
Ann Hui is best known internationally as one of the very few

successful female directors working in a male-dominated industry.
From early art house films such as Song of the Exile to the more
contemporary and commercial The Postmodern Life of My Aunt,
Hui has been consistently described as a ‘woman filmmaker’
(Doraiswamy 1990: 22). Most recently, in a 2007 Harvard Film
Archive retrospective of her films, she was praised as having
‘produced a varied body of work which offers a more thoughtful
contemplation on national identity and the role of women in
contemporary Asian society’ (Harvard Film Archive 2007). In her
published print media interviews however, Hui has never self-
identified as a feminist filmmaker or woman’s director. As she
states, ‘when I’m working, I’m not conscious of being a woman’
(Hui, cited in Jaivin 1987: 11). Despite such refutations, the term
‘woman’s director’ has been mobilized by critics and academics.
This chapter uses the context and text of Song of the Exile to
consider this positioning of Hui’s female authorship. Authorship
50
is central to Hui as an auteur and the film as a semi-autobiography

of her relationship with her mother. The first section situates the
film in its historical context to map the key styles of her female
authorship. The second section considers textual authorship by
approaching the film text through the framework of postcolonial
feminist autobiographical cinema. The third section consolidates
female authorship by considering the film as melodrama. As
postcolonial feminist autobiographical cinema and melodrama,
Song of the Exile returns to the sites of the family home and memory
to rewrite master narratives. The final section considers this as a
narrative of re-turn by examining the intimate histories that are
inscribed in this space. Intimate histories are the ‘micro-histories’
(Cheung 2001) that offer an alternative modernity to write the
biography of Hong Kong.
Ann Hui’s Female Authorship: The Historical

Discourse of the Film
Hui’s female authorship is mapped using a three-fold structure: ‘1)

authorship as a historical phenomenon, suggesting the cultural
context; 2) authorship as a desiring position, involving determinants
of sexuality and gender; and 3) authorship as a textual moment,
incorporating the specific stylistics and preoccupations of the
filmmaker’ (Flitterman-Lewis 1990: 21–22). According to this
tripartite structure, the concept of a feminist cinema would not be
defined according to the biological gender of the filmmaker, but
‘specific and enunciative processes that posit the work as alternative
cinema’ (ibid.). This approach is appropriate for Hui as not only
the most established female director in contemporary Hong Kong
but one of the first to define an ‘alternative’ cinema (Ortiz Dy 2008).
This section critically examines the contexts of Hui’s authorship
and Song of the Exile within their cultural specificities and as
Re-turn to Hong Kong 51
●
historical discourses to consider how a counter-cinema has emerged

as a feature of her cine-feminism. The next section examines the
textual author through the practice of postcolonial feminist
autobiography.
When The Secret was released in 1979, Hui marked for herself
a unique place in the industry. The film was made for an
independent studio, Unique Films, co-run by Sylvia Chang. A
popular 1970s Taiwanese star of the teen romance melodrama,
Chang was, at that time, making her transition to the emerging
Hong Kong industry. Chang not only lent her star billing to The
Secret, the film’s creative input was also supported by peers such
as Joyce Chan (writer), Violet Lam (composer) and Audrey Li
(producer). The film’s ‘intricate structure firmly established the
director as one of the freshest and most exciting cinematic voices
of the Hong Kong New Wave’ (Berry 2005: 424). Hui not only
brought a new style and sensibility; she also introduced a ‘model
of female creativity’ to the industry (Kei 1994). These creative
collaborations have become a regular feature in her prolific career.
The Boat People was initiated by producer Miranda Yang who
was also the scriptwriter for The Secret. Two of Eileen Chang’s
(Zhang Ailing) novels were adapted into Love in a Fallen City and
Eighteen Springs. Eighteen Springs features the late Canto-pop
singer and film star Anita Mui, while Love in a Fallen City has
Chow Yun Fatt supporting the lead female protagonist played by
Cora Miao. Like Love in a Fallen City, the mid-life male crisis
explored in July Rhapsody is also sparked by a young female
protagonist. Written by Ivy Ho (An Xi) who also penned the equally
award-winning Comrades, Almost a Love Story (dir. Peter Chan
1996), the film is led by Anita Mui and Canadian-born, Taiwanese-
Japanese actress Karena Lam. Summer Snow provided Josephine
Siao, a child star of the 1960s Cantonese melodrama and martial
arts cinema, an opportunity to resurrect her career with a best
actress award at the 1995 Berlin Film Festival. Ah Kam, based on
52
the life of a stuntwoman, is played by action star Michelle Yeoh.

In Visible Secret, lead protagonist Shu Qi is praised as ‘an
extraordinary heroine’ (Foong 2001). Through these female creative
collaborations, Hui became known for her strong, ‘richly life-like
[and] compassionately drawn female characters’ (Kraicer 1998).
She also established a reputation as a ‘feminist role model’ (Chung
2002: 5).
Although Hui’s films gave ‘new emphasis’ to female roles, Hong
Kong film critic Sek Kei points out that Hui ‘cannot be described
as a feminist director’ because her films do not take ‘an anti-male’
stand (1994). Writing about her film achievements in the 1980s,
he argues her strong female roles are ‘more ideal characters’ because
the films lament the impossibility of female equality. He locates
these films within their production context and suggests the social
and political milieu of the 1980s enabled the expression of emotions
and representations of strong women. The crisis of the handover
sensitized the society to be more receptive to emotions; economic
modernization also allowed women to achieve progress at work
and home. Women had become more financially and socially
independent, and visible in the public sphere. New female audience
also contributed to a burgeoning film market. Kei’s assessment of
feminism, premised on the films’ representation of equality, is also
shared by another Hong Kong film scholar, Stephen Teo, who
considers how Hui’s strong female roles are often ‘about women
who must live up to and justify their roles in a system wrought by
tradition’ (1997: 212). While Hong Kong’s socio-political
transformations in the 1980s have certainly supported the rise of
female stars in the industry, Kei and Teo approach Hui’s films
through their female representations and do not consider gender
as an ideological fault-line for problematizing Hong Kong
modernity. Examining Hui’s cinema, Elaine Ho uses the motif of
the woman’s struggle against male-centred histories to discuss the
role gender plays in the modernization of Hong Kong. She shows
●
how the empowerment and marginalization of women in her films

question nationalist and patriarchal discourses by revising dominant
ideologies (Ho 2001: 162–87). In particular, Song of the Exile, she
argues, challenges Hong Kong’s reunification by providing ‘an
alternative narrative of return and homeland’ (ibid., 177).
Nineteen ninety, the year Song of the Exile was released, was
arguably the benchmark year for rethinking how gender has
challenged dominant nationalist and patriarchal narratives. In Hong
Kong, key films that year included Queen of Temple Street (dir.
Lawrence Ah Mon), Farewell, China (dir. Clara Law), Full Moon
in New York (dir. Stanley Kwan) and Kawashima Yoshiko (dir.
Eddie Fong). Queen of Temple Street, starring Sylvia Chang, returns
to the social realist aesthetic of the New Wave, and uses this
aesthetic to portray the street trade of sex work in Temple Street.
Challenging the then popular, slickly produced and larger-than-life
romantic action cinema that tends to glamourize the heroines or
make the woman a romantic sidekick, the film inscribes the gritty
messiness of the local through the margins of prostitution. Farewell,
China and Full Moon in New York, both starring Maggie Cheung,
follow in the tradition of Mabel Cheung’s An Autumn’s Tale (1987).
Set in New York, both question the handover by focusing on female
immigrants and situating the diaspora as an excentric space of
reunification and re-turn. Farewell, China consolidated the status
of Clara Law as a premiere female director alongside Mabel Cheung
and Hui. Full Moon in New York, following Rouge (dir. Stanley
Kwan 1987), also marks Stanley Kwan’s reputation as a director of
women’s films. Kawashima Yoshiko, directed by Law’s husband
and frequent collaborator, Eddie Fong, uses cross-dressing and
bisexuality to trace the life of the Manchu princess Aisin Gioro
Xianyu, who became a Japanese spy. It shows how sexuality
functions as a professional trope for moving between two normative
empires. These films portray female directors, use female stars,
and focus on intimacies of sexuality, sex, female friendships and
54
hysteria to challenge the conventions of patriarchy, and by default,

its dominant ideologies of nationalism, colonialism and reunification.
Set against such a backdrop, although Hui’s films are not
feminist, the issues they raise are central to Hong Kong cine-
feminism. In particular, the 1990 socio-political milieu of production
provided a fertile arena to consider how female authorship has
emerged in the cinema to question the dominant ideologies of Hong
Kong modernity. Ka-fai Yau, in an attempt to consider how Hui’s
cinema engages the political, argues that Hui has two groups of
films: the first deals explicitly with political subject matter, while
the second consists of personal stories that have political subjects
(2007: 122). Common to both is Hui’s determination ‘to assert the
individual against the imposing power of political determination’
(ibid., 144). This personal-political, individual/collective
consciousness resonates with the ‘personal is political’ foundation
of Western feminist film culture. Not surprisingly, Hui’s cinema
has been embraced by the international film festival circuit of
women’s filmmaking.
Following the success of Song of the Exile, her body of work
was featured during a sidebar on Asian women directors at the
1991 Creteil International Women’s Film Festival, a leading annual
event for the showcase and a central conduit for the distribution
of women’s cinema. The term ‘women’s cinema’ emerged in the
West in the 1970s, through festivals, journals and conferences, as
a way of articulating a feminist film movement concerned with
female filmmaking and issues of female desire, sexual difference,
spectatorship and film history.1 In particular, Claire Johnston’s
(1974) seminal conceptualization of women’s cinema as ‘counter-
cinema’ was concerned with the female body and how female
directors in mainstream Hollywood cinema use opposing myths of
femininity to affirm and contradict hegemonic femininity. While
counter-cinema is a strategy from the West that critically celebrates
the oppositional spaces opened up by films as political tools and
●
films as entertainment, this type of cinema shares similarities with

Hui’s mode of filmmaking. As she states, Hong Kong cinema has
‘no strict distinction between art or commercial films’; when
working, she has ‘never really compromised’ and ‘never thought of
commercial cinema as a compromise’ (Doraiswamy 1990: 23).
Indeed, whether making documentaries (e.g., As Time Goes By),
historicizing political activism (e.g., Ordinary Heroes) or taking on
an action film with a popular male lead (e.g., Nicholas Tse in
Goddess of Mercy), Hui’s counter-cinematic strategies are evident
through, for example, the genre of critical autobiography, the
thematic challenge to official history and the entertainment appeal
of male stardom. These strategies, from the foci of female
autobiographical filmmaking, gender inequality and sexual
difference, combine form and content to construct female
spectatorship as a gendered mode of address using ‘narrative
strategies, points of identification, and places of the look that may
address, engage, and construct the spectator as gendered subject’
(De Lauretis 1987: 123). As Susan Flitterman-Lewis writes, ‘a
counter-cinema will attempt to reinsert the subject — a sexed
subject — into the processes of meaning-production thereby
allowing its structures to subject, rework, or offer alternatives to
the pervasive logic of masculine desire articulated by dominant
cinema’ (Flitterman-Lewis 1990: 23).
It is within this context that her work, especially Song of the
Exile, has been included in feminist and diasporic film anthologies
on non-Western filmmakers. Hamid Naficy’s influential study on
diasporic cinema situates Hui’s work as part of the corpus of
accented cinema. Key to this is the style of ‘embedded criticism’
(Naficy 2001: 26). Embedded criticism works with dominant
conventions of Hollywood and national cinemas to subvert ‘the
conventions of story telling and spectator positioning’ (ibid.). Song
of the Exile’s embedded criticism is evident in its industrial context.
Conventional narratives in Hong Kong cinema at that time arguably
56
follow the dominant Hollywood style with its linear plot, classical
realism and continuity editing. Consider for example Film News
Biweekly’s non-Hollywood box-office records for the years between
the 1979 debut of Hui and the 1990 release of Song of the Exile.
Top films include Rising Sun (dir. Jiang Zhiwei 1980), Security
Unlimited (dir. Michael Hui 1981), Burning of the Imperial Palace
(dir. Li Hanxiang 1983), Aces Go Places 3: Our Man from Bond
Street (dir. Tsui Hark 1984), My Lucky Stars (dir. Sammo Hung
1985), A Better Tomorrow (dir. John Woo 1986), Armour of God
(dir. Jackie Chan, 1987), The Eighth Happiness (dir. Ching Siu-tung
1988) and God of Gamblers (dir. Wong Jing 1989) (MPIA 1990).
With the exception of the documentary Rising Sun, these films are
predominantly made by male directors (Hui, Woo, Hung, Li and
Wong), use male stars (Jackie Chan, Sam Hui, Chow Yun Fatt) and
in the genres of historical swordplay, contemporary comedy and
romantic gangster action. Contrary to these conventions, Song of
the Exile features female stars, focuses on the mother-daughter
plot, and combines flashbacks and television documentaries to
rework these dominant styles of realism and narration. These cine-
feminist aesthetics are considered strategies of ‘corrective realism’
(Rich 1990: 283). Corrective realism refers to a set of stylistic
devices and conventions that challenge dominant (usually classical
and patriarchal) modes of authenticity. These include, but are not
limited to, editing and narrative structure (mise-en-scene and
iconography; plot; cinematography; dialogue and performance;
characterization; music and sound). Together, this constellation
questions the clarity, economy and coherence of the mimetic mode
so that ideologies that are naturalized can be deconstructed and
redressed. As the later sections will further explore, these strategies
of corrective realism are evident in the maternal melodrama and
postcolonial feminist autobiography.
Hui’s international reputation as a woman’s director was
consolidated in 1996 when she became the first Asian director to
●
win the Grand Prix for Summer Snow at the Creteil International
Women’s Film Festival. The following year, Hong Kong émigré
Clara Law went on to win the same prize for her first Australian
film on the Chinese diaspora, Floating Life, written by Eddie Fong.
In an international bio-critical dictionary on women film directors,
Gwendolyn Foster highlights how Hui’s work in the West has been
undeservedly subjected to ‘Western pre(assumptions)’ (1997: xxxvii)
that limit subjectivity and inclusivity. Foster redresses this by
situating Hui within the debates of postcolonial feminism that then
allows her to expose the double marginality faced by non-Western
female filmmakers in the international film arena. Foster’s
classification of Hui’s work as ‘falling somewhere between tradition
and Westernization’ complements the hybrid styles of counter-
cinema and accented cinema (142). More recently, Gina Marchetti
(2006), working from within the Hong Kong academic and film
contexts, groups Hui together with Sylvia Chang, Mabel Cheung
and Clara Law. Marchetti specifically notes how the Hong Kong
industry has only four established female directors, and of the four,
Hui is the only one based in Hong Kong and who does not engage
in regular collaboration with a male partner. Chang is Taiwanese;
Cheung makes her films with Alex Law; and Law has migrated to
Australia. Hui’s input as director, producer and actress in more
than thirty features that spanned three decades make her the most
established and productive. Her model of female creativity and
strategy of embedded counter-cinematic film aesthetic have indeed
been innovative forces in the local industry and the global feminist
and diasporic film cultures.
This historical discourse surrounding Song of Exile situates
Hui’s cinema as feminist through her model of female creativity
and her counter-cinematic strategies.2 Evaluating the film in its
cultural and historical contexts allows an understanding of Hui’s
female authorship in its full complexity that intersects the
workings of the local film industry, reception in the international
58
festival circuit and the global arena of feminist and diasporic

film scholarship. Hui’s female textual authorship is evident in
the film through the use of postcolonial feminist autobiography
and melodrama.
Postcolonial Feminist Autobiographical Cine-Practice
This section demonstrates Hui’s female authorship by considering

the textual author through the cine-practice of postcolonial feminist
autobiography. Rather than using autobiography as an androcentric
tool that shapes an identity through an orthodox return to
patriarchal and colonial memories, postcolonial feminist
autobiography subverts the ontology of the colonial and patriarchal
by returning to the reparative motif of the mother-daughter plot.
Song of the Exile is a Taiwanese production written by Wu
Nien-jen, one of Hong Kong and Taiwan’s best scriptwriters.
Reviewed and promoted as a semi-autobiographical account of her
life, Hui reported that in the writing of the film, she told Wu all
kinds of anecdotal stories about her life, and he provided the
structure for the film (Berry 2005: 431). The use of autobiography
is a key example of Hui’s embedded counter-cinematic film
aesthetic. In particular, she uses a cine-feminist autobiographical
practice to engender the genre by interpreting herself publicly in
a patriarchal (film) culture.
With fictional names, created scenarios, selected events and
enacted life stories, the autobiographical in the film does not follow
the conventions of autobiography. Autobiography is ‘a process
through which the autobiographer struggles to shape an “identity”
out of amorphous subjectivity’ (Smith 1987: 5). Theorizations of
autobiography in the West have developed through various stages
beginning with the focus on bios (experience) and its attendant
biological facticity, the focus on auté (sense of identity) and the
●
truthfulness of self-presentation, to the focus on graphia (textuality)

as ‘a mode of writing’ (Lejeune 1989).3 With its androcentric
emphasis on the autobiographical ‘I’ as a subject of humanism and
enlightenment, this genre has been traditionally structured as
patrilineal and associated with colonization (Smith and Watson
1998: 27–28). Discussing diasporic women’s autobiographies,
Cynthia Sau-ling Wong (1993) argues for a framework towards the
double relationality of migrant and indigenous women. Caren
Kaplan (1992) describes this transnational feminist practice as an
‘out-law genre’ where women negotiate and reform narrative codes.
Against these approaches, the autobiographical in the film is a
cine-practice of textuality rather than the practice of lives lived
chronologically. Hui’s collaboration with Wu also de-authorizes the
authenticity of ‘I’.
Freda Freiberg classifies Song of the Exile as a ‘fictionalised
autobiographical film’ (2002) while Tony Williams describes it as
‘fictionalized autobiography’ (1998). Patricia Brett Erens situates
it within the larger context of ‘women’s autobiography and exile
literature’ (2000: 44). Comparing the film with the literature of
Maxine Hong Kingston, she calls the film a ‘memoir’ rather than
autobiography because the latter is male-centred and the former
possesses an ideological form that destabilizes a ‘unified selfhood’
(55). While Erens discusses this genre as a culturally specific site
for the intersection of feminism and postcolonialism, her focus on
narrative fragmentation as reflective of the discontinuity of women’s
actual experience as mothers, wives and daughters ignores how, in
autobiographical practice, the autobiographer embodies a double
subjectivity, as a protagonist in her story and as narrator.
Double subjectivity is evident in the film in two ways: it opens
with and consists of Hueyin’s first-person, voice-over narration.
This voice-over, as narrator, structures the story. The film also
consists of Hueyin’s flashbacks, which, together with the voice-over,
function as an autobiographical cast to the film (Freiberg 2002).
60
As narrator, she is also a protagonist in the unfolding of her story.

Double subjectivity is formally structured through ‘first-person
filmic narrative and subjective camera technique’ (Gernalzick 2006:
3). In the film, subjective point-of-view shots are evident in the
voice of the narrator and the story of the protagonist. During each
voice-over, the image is either on Hueyin or from Hueyin’s point
of view. In particular, each flashback sequence is also triggered by
the involuntary memory of ‘getting a haircut, Aiko’s tears, seeing
a papaya, or a verbal cue’ (Erens 2000: 50). These triggers locate
the optical point of view through the introjection of memory. This
use of memory also underpins the autobiographical film genre. As
Catherine Portuges posits, this genre consists of: ‘a desire to set
the record, the wish to restore a creativity presumed lost or
attenuated, the need to tell one’s family story, the longing for
reconciliation with persons loved or feared from the past’ (1988:
339). With its plot revolving around the revelation of her mother’s
Japanese identity that then allows Hueyin to tell her family’s story,
the film engages these memory motifs to fulfill the quest for
reconciliation with the lost family. In the telling of the story, Hueyin
repairs the traumas caused by her estrangement with her mother
and her alienation from her family. Childhood and adolescence
thus feature predominantly, with six flashback sequences of
Hueyin’s childhood in Macau and teenage years in Hong Kong.
Together, these features — double subjectivity, subjective point of
view, memory, childhood mise-en-scene — form the ‘reparative
motif’ of the genre (Portuges 1988: 343). The narrative of the film,
as told by the narrator and protagonist, is the mother-daughter plot.
The mother-daughter plot is one of the key characteristics of
feminist autobiographical fiction in diasporic Chinese literature.
Rather than glorifying the woman’s return to the maternal
homeland, they recover ‘the problematical site of struggle among
sedimented levels of conflicting ideologies of the self’ (Saldívar
1990: 191). Wendy Ho postulates a few characteristics:
●
Figure 2.1. Hueyin’s first voice-over in the film. The voice-over anchors
the double subjectivity of the narrator as the subject of the film. This frame
shows Hueyin as object and subject of the narrative: on the one hand, she
is the object to be looked at; on the other hand, she also possesses the gaze
of the camera.
[they] tell stories of betrayal and complicity within oppressive

systems, not just about satisfactions, resistance and empowerment.
They portray the cruelties that women (and men) can inflict on
each other and their families; they tell the stories of the social,
economic, and historical deformation and exhaustion of women,
men, their families, and ethnic communities. They represent the
complicated struggles women confront in naming desire, self and
community in ways that better approximate their embodied
understanding of experience. (1999: 22)
These characteristics are manifest in the film. In Macau, the

grandmother enforces the rules of language, dress and food on the
silent daughter-in-law, and in doing so, is complicit with and a
proxy for nationalist Chinese patriarchy. The strangely inarticulate
Aiko also metes out similar harsh codes of expectations on a young
62
daughter by forcefully cutting her hair and making her wear a

uniform, and in so doing, reveals the sad desperation of a foreign
mother trying to fit in. In Macau, the wife has an absent husband
and the mother cannot even ‘own’ her daughter. In Hong Kong,
the absent mother enlists the father, and together with the younger
daughter, excludes the other daughter, who then removes herself
from them by going to boarding school. When the abandoned
daughter returns to Hong Kong, the mother continues to argue
with her during the wedding preparation. By insisting on permed
hair, red dress and matching shoes, the foreign mother upholds
the virtues of Chinese traditions. The younger daughter marries in
a grand Chinese style but, with a dead father, is only given away
by a single Japanese mother. In Japan, the absent mother and
motherless daughter reconciles without the burden of dead fraternities.
Figure 2.2. Aiko and Hueyin, with similarly permed hair and red dresses,
at Huewei’s wedding. Hair and clothes are aesthetic signifiers that unite
the estranged mother and daughter. Aiko’s cheongsam (qipao) and her
wide smile embody the celebratory embrace of Chinese tradition while
Hueyin’s sullen expression and more contemporary dress signifies her
distance from Chinese roots.
●
The film’s mother-daughter plot, as the stories of motherhood

and daughterhood (Hirsch 1989: 10), shows the struggle of the
women in trying to name their desires to better reflect the
embodiment of their experiences. Familial relations are distorted
and strained by migration. Aiko’s experience of motherhood is
heightened and intensified by the economies of inter-ethnic
marriage, Chinese nationalism and Confucian patriarchy. These
economies are also the technologies that circumscribe her
individuation and subject-formation. She learns to cook Chinese
food, speaks fluent Cantonese, cultivates a close-knit mahjong social
network and becomes more Chinese than Hueyin. Hueyin’s
experience of daughterhood is also deformed by an absent and dead
father, and a distant and silent mother. Technologies that construct
Aiko’s individuation and subject-formation also govern Hueyin’s
identity. She disavows her mixed race at home while mixing
comfortably with other races away from home. She longs to be
Chinese but refuses to follow its traditions. Less Chinese and yet
more China-centric than Aiko, both mother and daughter reveal
the contingency of Chineseness that underlies the crisis of identity.
As narrator and protagonist, the voice of the daughter speaks for
her mother, and through the voices of mother and daughter
speaking to each other, both reshape the conventions of the family
romance with the maternal. In speaking for her mother, the narrator
celebrates her mother’s life by appropriating her voice and silencing
her. In speaking to her mother, the protagonist gives allegiance to
the complexities of her racial, ethnic and gendered identity. These
contradictory modes of identification and dis-identification reflect
the entanglements of Hong Kong’s postcoloniality.
As a postcolonial feminist autobiographical film text, the film
provides a narrative artifice to articulate alternative identities that
subvert the truthfulness and intentionality of ontological master
narratives. Significant here is the textual author’s central concern
with identity and her desire to repair and rewrite the story of her
64
family. Key to this reparative motif are the stories of the mother
and the daughter, as well as their story of reconciliation. Contrary
to what Ackbar Abbas has suggested about the film’s intention as
a ‘rational song of reconciliation’ (1997a: 38), the mother-daughter
plot defies the rationality of the proper by showing reconciliation
without the authority of paternal and colonial fathers. This
subversion is also evident in another counter-cinematic strategy in
the film: the use of melodrama.
The Maternal Melodrama
In an interview about the film’s intended melodramatic imagination,

Hui states: ‘What left me most dissatisfied ... was the fact that the
arguments between the mother and daughter were not bitchy
enough’ (cited in Berry 2005: 431). Against such authorial design,
it is not surprising the term ‘melodrama’ has been used to describe
the film. Writing about Hui’s cinema, Shelly Kraicer suggests her
films explore ‘the roots of women’s identity (by adopting) the
structure of melodrama, only to subvert it …’ (1998). Tony Williams
calls Song of the Exile ‘a border crossing melodrama’ that uses
melodrama for historical, social and political commentary (1998).
Ackbar Abbas situates the film as a family melodrama and suggests
its conventions function ‘as a social allegory … to show the
emotional confusions about “home” that result from a rapidly
changing cultural space’ (1997a: 38). He uses the term ‘dis-
appearance’ to highlight pre-1997 Hong Kong as a transient culture
that is constantly re-constructed and suggests that the transformation
of the family melodrama shows how generic ‘morphing’ is a practice
associated with dis-appearance (299). While these reviews highlight
melodrama as a mode for registering social change, they do not
show how, as part of Hui’s female authorship of women’s cinema,
the maternal melodrama uses abject motherhood and corrective
realism to challenge the patriarchal Confucian family.
●
Melodrama can be considered a genre and an expressive code.

As genre, it refers more generally to the male melodrama of gangster
thrillers, crime and westerns that deal with fate, suspense, disaster
and comedy (Neale 2000). As expressive code, it uses setting, drama
and music to heighten emotions and create a dramatic effect
(Elsaesser 1987 [1972]). Through exaggerated representation,
rhetorical excess and the intensity of moral claim, the ideology of
melodrama exposes the conflict between good and bad, and explains
to the audience the moral confrontations that face them in a
changing modern world. Peter Brooks discusses this sensibility as
a ‘modern mode’ (1976: 21). It is common in places where the
‘traditional imperatives of truths and ethics have been violently
thrown into question, yet where the promulgation of truth and
ethics, their saturation as a way of life, is of immediate, daily,
political concern’ (15). Melodrama ‘starts from and expresses the
anxiety brought by a frightening new world in which the traditional
patterns of moral order no longer provide the necessary social
glue’ (20).
In Chinese film studies, the modern mode has also been used
to discuss the relationship between cinema and social change. Paul
Pickowicz points to how melodramatic representation is popular
in the May Fourth tradition of Chinese cinema because it focuses
on the conflicts in family life that reflect the struggle confronting
ordinary people (1993: 308).4 The melodramatic imagination,
Pickowicz argues, is a flexible mode that spans different periods in
Chinese history, from the leftist social realism of the 1930s to the
socialist realism of the 1970s. Nick Browne discusses political
melodramas using the role of women in the cinema of the 1940s
and argues they represent ‘an expression of a mode of injustice
whose mise-en-scene is precisely the nexus between public and
private life, a mode in which gender as a mark of difference is a
limited, mobile term activated by distinctive social powers and
historical circumstances’ (1994: 43). Ma Ning (1993), writing in
the 1980s on Fifth Generation Chinese films, highlights the family
66
drama as a site of social contestation. Cantonese melodramas in

Hong Kong during the 1950s and 1960s also predominantly feature
the family melodrama (Li 1986: 9). Li Cheuk-to’s outline of
Cantonese melodrama, as wenyipian, shares similarities with
Western melodramas: ‘highly schematic characters, plots punctuated
by fortuities and coincidences, extreme emotions and conflicts’
(ibid.). More specifically, wenyipian focuses on the modern mode
that depicts family relationships under social change (Law 1986:
15). These discussions demonstrate, as E. Ann Kaplan (1991) has
persuasively argued, the relevance of Western melodrama theories
to Chinese cinemas. These discussions also show how the family
melodrama has been considered the ultimate form of film
melodrama for questioning the family as a social institution of
oppression (Elsaesser 1987 [1972]; Nowell-Smith 1977; Mulvey
1977/78; Kleinhnans 1978; Gledhill 1987).
Thomas Schatz’s (1981) characterization of the family
melodrama through themes and character-types such as victimized
heroes, conflict between the generations, the ambiguous function
of marriage and the household as a locus of social interaction, can
be found in Song of the Exile. The story revolves around the narrator
and the protagonist as a victim and a heroine. She is the abandoned
daughter who also ends up helping her foreign mother accept her
acculturated life in Hong Kong. The plot of reparation and
reconciliation is propelled by the desire to solve the generational
conflict between the mother and daughter, a divide between a
wartime bride who cannot speak her language and express her
culture due to cultural hostilities, and an unloved child who cannot
understand her mother’s silence and inability to nurture. The cross-
cultural marriage is also at once a source of social liberation and
oppression for Aiko. These events expose the Chinese patriarchal
household as a site of trauma for both mother and daughter.
The direct portrayal of melodramatic pathos is achieved through
long close-ups and the frequent use of shot-reverse-shots to
●
heighten the emotionality of the tension between mother and

daughter. This tension is also built up dramatically and progressively
throughout the film. It is only after twenty minutes that the mother’s
Japanese identity is revealed as the cause of the mother-daughter
tension. The Macau flashbacks, taking place in the same temporal
period, is punctuated across the length of the film to construct the
highs and lows of emotional swings. The mise-en-scene of the
claustrophobic homes in Macau, China and Hong Kong also adds
to and substitutes for the emotionality of oppression Hueyin and
Aiko cannot articulate. These representations of pathos reflect what
Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar have described as the mixed mode
of ‘melodramatic realism’ (2006: 76). Melodramatic realism, they
argue, is a major feature of Chinese cinema because ‘its central
theme of outraged innocence was often perceived as real in national,
not just personal, terms’ (82). Melodramatic realism is structured
in the film through on-location shooting, the explicit use of
subjective point of view, and a mix of continuity and non-linear
editing. Physical realism is achieved through on-location
establishing shots. Emphasizing enclosed interior spaces, window
frames and door ways, physical realism combines with psychological
realism to present the interiority of personal emotion as real
structures of feeling. These structures of feeling resonate with Hong
Kong cinema’s aesthetics of realism (xieshi): representations
‘portraying slices of life’, ‘clear, practical experience’, ‘self-
consciousness’ and ‘individualism’ (Kei 1988: 15). The juxtaposition
of television newsreel protest footages with fictional autobiography
naturalizes the personal voice as public and actualizes it as a fact.
Through multiple close-ups and shot-reverse-shots, the subjective
point of view supports the reality effect by privileging a high degree
of audience identification. These techniques of editing and mise-
en-scene use dominant conventions of realism to foreground the
women’s narrative and its female plot, drawing attention to the
space and affect of daily life, and endorsing emotional ties. As cine-
68
feminist strategies of corrective realism, these gestures, settings

and moods also form the aesthetic of muteness that are used to
represent the ‘violent sentimentalism’ of the maternal melodrama
(Doane 1987: 86).
Figure 2.3. A reverse shot from Hueyin’s point of view as she walks
through the door upon her arrival home in Hong Kong. There is no
establishing shot of the mother’s presence in the living room. This close-up
jump cut magnifies the heightened emotion of tension as Aiko meets
Hueyin’s gaze.
The maternal melodrama focuses on the relationships of

separation and unification between the mother and child, and
because of the affect associated with this genre, is usually considered
a woman’s film. Kaplan differentiates between women’s melodrama
and a woman’s film: the former is ‘complicit with dominant,
patriarchal ideology … enunciated from a patriarchal position, even
if the narrative makes a woman central’; the latter ‘lie(s) in their
positing a female desire, a female subjectivity as theoretically
possible’ (1991: 10–11). Steve Fore (1993) suggests the difference
is in the construction of the point of view in the gender politics of
●
melodramas. Examining Clara Law’s 1986 The Reincarnation of

Golden Lotus, he shows how women in Hong Kong cinema are
portrayed ambivalently as subjects and objects of desire. This
emphasis on a female point of view is also reflected in Chris Berry’s
formulation of ‘women’s cinema’ in China during the same period:
they achieve female enunciation by ‘(recognizing) and (valorizing)
subjective experience’ and presenting a ‘personal and subjective
point of view’ (1988: 15).
Central to the maternal drama as a woman’s film is the
contradictory role of the mother in a patriarchal society.
Motherhood, Mary Ann Doane argues, ‘is conceived as the always
uneasy conjunction of an absolute closeness and a forced distance’
(1987: 74). This thematic motif is explicit in the film. Aiko is
marginalized as a mother due to her perceived cultural impurity.
She is seen to be standing in the way of Hueyin’s social entry into
language and culture. Hence, she is relegated to the side, unseen
and silent. The camera framing of Aiko in Macau, for example,
composes her from her back, in between the rectangular door frame
as she walks away from the child. From Hueyin’s point of view,
distance is created as she watches her mother diminish into the
suffering darkness of the other room. Aiko also watches Hueyin
from afar, like she does at the window looking down and watching
her mother-in-law take Hueyin to school. Aiko is constructed as a
bad mother who cannot provide, and a good mother because she
sacrifices herself for her child. In these sequences, female
spectatorships are coded with tears and suffering. These gestures
and moods are also non-linguistic, like the pre-language of mother
tongue. As Li Cheuk-to writes, the ‘women’s films’ of Cantonese
melodramas are sustained by these themes of ‘ill-fated women,
long-suffering and victimized under the dominant values of the
patriarchal society’ (1986: 9). The film uses motherhood to expose
how maternal excess is controlled and contained by the patriarchal
Confucian Chinese family. The maternal, in this sense, is an abject,
70
both horror and desire, that threatens the boundaries between the
self and other. Like the Japanese Aiko, it is also ‘a place both double
and foreign’ (Kristeva cited in Doane 1987: 83). By enacting the
conflict in the home and making the women resolve the crisis, the
film de-centres the patriarchal Confucian family and urges for a
new social order and a set of ethical imperatives.
Similar to the use of postcolonial feminist autobiography, the
maternal melodrama in the film contributes to Hui’s female
authorship as a cine-practice that privileges the double subjectivity
of the female subject, its subjective point of view, and its stories
between mothers and daughters. Through the pathos of high family
drama, abject motherhood and corrective melodramatic realism,
these styles of women’s cinema construct a modern mode that de-
centres the authority of patriarchal and colonial fathers, exposes
the epistemics of their oppressions and re-turns to a newly
constituted home as a site for reconciliation. The following section
considers the intimate history of this home through the diaspora
of Hong Kong.
Re-turn to Home: The Intimate Histories of Hong Kong
As the earlier sections have discussed, Hui’s cine-feminist

positioning of the film uses postcolonial feminist autobiography
and maternal melodrama to relate mother-daughter conflicts and
contradictions of motherhood to the crisis of Hong Kong’s
postcolonial entanglements. Both practices enact a return to home:
postcolonial feminist autobiography returns to memory to
reconstruct a new biography; maternal melodrama returns to the
family home to reconstitute a new home. Both practices of return
resonate with the film’s plot of reconciliation as an allegory for
Hong Kong’s pre-1997 reunification.
●
Reviews of the film frame the autobiographical narrative as an

optimistic allegory for Hong Kong’s homecoming: it is ‘a poignant
metaphor for a considerably larger homecoming’ (Chuah 1991: 22);
‘it is not hard to see a metaphor for another homecoming seven
years down the road’ (Stanbrook 1990: 148); ‘(t)he problem of
identity — whether Hongkongers think of themselves as Chinese
or not — is addressed … Can Hongkongers in general unite with a
nation, China, from which they have grown apart?’ (The Economist
1990: 93); it ‘takes a very optimistic view of reconciliation’ (Chua
1991: 30). This discourse of homecoming is not overstated. As Hui
states, ‘in “Song of the exile”, I pushed everything towards the
reconciliation’ (cited in Chua 1991: 30). Although the film was shot
after the June Fourth Incident, the writing was completed before
and production had already begun. However, unlike Yim Ho’s
Homecoming made in 1984 at the height of the euphoria
surrounding the signing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration, or
Mabel Cheung’s 1989 Eight Taels of Gold that also celebrates the
literal return of a U.S.-based working class Chinese man, the theme
of homecoming in Song of Exile usurps the utopic return by
providing an alternative narrative of ‘re-turn’.
The narrative of re-turn is characterized by an excentric
movement that consists of looking to and turning away from the
motherland toward a transformation of location. Rather than a
return to the impossibility of roots, it recalls what Paul Gilroy (1993)
has described as the detour of routes. Like the exilic figures in the
film affected by displacement and migration, and like the mother
and daughter who finally make a home together in the diaspora of
Hong Kong, the narrative of re-turn inscribes how Hong Kong’s
own location is transformed by its history as a diaspora.
The approach to the excentric recalls Svetlana Boym’s approach
to the ‘off-modern’. The adverb ‘off’, she suggests, refers to ‘“aside”
and “off-stage,” “extending and branching out from,” “somewhere
crazy and eccentric” (off-kilter), “absent or away from work or
72
duty,” “off-key,” “off-beat,” occasionally off-color but not offcast’

(2001: 30). The off-modern unsettles and confuses the
straightforward teleology of modernity by exploring ‘sideshadows
and back alleys’ (xvii). It functions as a critique of progress and
tradition, and illuminates the ‘reflection and longing’ (ibid.) of
unresolved tension. As a way to make sense of the impossibility of
homecoming, the off-modern of re-turn is not only a strategy of
survival but an articulation of Hong Kong’s self-presence. The
narrative of re-turn is thus an alternative Hong Kong modernity
that challenges the contesting normative modernities of progressive
British colonial capitalism and traditional Chinese nativism.
This section will show how Hui’s cine-feminist practices of
autobiography and melodrama articulate the narrative of re-turn.
First, melodrama’s site of the family home is reconstructed as a
maternal home. The reconstructed home is excentric and locates
Hong Kong as a cultural diaspora. The anticipated loss of Hong
Kong is compensated through a future nostalgia that historicizes
the 1970s as a significant period for the emergence of Hong Kong
modernity. Second, the autobiographical impulse to return to record
memory is de-emphasized through the reflective nostalgia of
indirect memory. Reflective nostalgia narrates Hong Kong’s micro
history as an intimate biography that not only questions the costs
of normative modernity, it side-steps into the alleyways to self-write
Hong Kong through the intimacies of everyday life, collective
memory and common places.
The focus on nostalgia, as a history of emotion, a yearning
for a different time and a critique of modernity (Boym 2001), fits
the sensibility of Hong Kong’s entangled postcoloniality as an
identity of time (Hughes 1968). It is especially appropriate for
Song of the Exile as a nostalgia film of homecoming. Postcolonial
time, as Homi Bhabha has influentially stated, ‘questions the
teleological traditions of the past and present, and the polarized
historicist sensibility of the archaic and the modern’ (1990: 304).
●
Time is crucial to the symbolic and affective processes of

identification because the location of culture is a question of
temporality rather than historicity. As ‘an expression of local
longing’, nostalgia is ‘a result of a new understanding of time and
space that made the division into “local” and “universal” possible’
(Boym 2001: xvi). For Hong Kong, this provides a strategy to
consider the singularity of its identity.
Re-turn to Hong Kong: Reconstructing the Family

Home
Unlike the second homes in Macau, Manchuria and Guangzhou,

the family home is the one in Hong Kong where the father, mother
and two daughters eventually settle. This space appears in two
parts: in the historical setting of 1963 when Hueyin arrives from
Macau, and in the present setting of 1973 when Hueyin returns
from Britain.
The family home of 1963 appears as Hueyin’s flashbacks. Rather
than a mythical place of security, comfort and belonging, the
patriarchal family home is recast as divided, hostile and furtive.
Hueyin arrives as a teenager to reunite with her family after living
with her grandparents. As Hueyin’s place of birth, this space is
paradoxically a foreign home. She does not understand why her
mother loves watching Japanese films and only discovers her
mother’s Japanese identity belatedly. The patriarchal family home
is devoid of unity and proper duty. Her mother does not cook. Her
father makes her do household chores. Her sister chides her for
not understanding their mother. These sequences are filmed in
mid-shots that cut out the establishing frame of the individuals to
connote their oppression and partiality. Division is evident when
her father discloses Aiko’s real identity to Hueyin in her bedroom.
The framing of this scene replicates the reflection and self-
74
introspection of the mirror. It begins with a mid-shot of a seated

Hueyin and her father standing behind her. The camera frames the
two protagonists from the front as if they are both looking at a
mirror. The apparent mirror’s reflection functions as an optical
shot that constructs a ‘melodramatic point of view’ reminiscent of
the narcissism of the self that is characteristic of the 1950s
Cantonese melodramas made by ‘homesick’ immigrant filmmakers
yearning for home (Garcia 1986: 48). It is a symbolic border-
crossing threshold that questions the imagined unity between
members of the family. This framing continues as the camera
slowly dollies around the two of them creating a sequence of edits
that encircles and makes literal the apparent unity between father
and daughter.
This flashback questions the progressive modernity experienced
in the family home. The family home is a modern apartment in the
high-rise tower block. The nuclear family is also a modern social
form typical of Hong Kong families at that time who have moved
away from the three-generation family home. The mother’s female
friendships and relative freedom from home-making chores also
evince the emerging liberation of women. These female experiences
of transition, Tani Barlow (1998) argues, demonstrate the body
politic of late capitalism and the gendered effects of development
in the region. However, as a locus of high family drama,
misunderstandings and secrets, the modern family home exposes
the tensions of an unproblematic return (to home).
The 1973 setting of the maternal home shows how reparation
is a contradictory process of confusing sentiments. As reparation
also reconstructs identity, the newly reconstructed maternal home
also reveals itself as a space for questioning the authenticity of
identity. The maternal home begins and ends the film. At the
beginning of the film, Hueyin is shown reluctantly returning from
Britain. Colours and subjective point-of-view shots connote this
place as an exilic location. The establishing Hong Kong skyline
●
appears quickly and shows the place in the dark blue palette of
night-light. It aesthetisizes the silence of distance and dejection.
This is anchored by the next low-angle cut to the establishing shot
of the apartment block, and from Hueyin’s point of view, anchors
the looming forebode. There are no establishing shots or mid-shots
inside the apartment. When Hueyin greets her mother, it jump cuts
to a close-up of her face that immediately sets up and heightens
the tension between the mother and daughter. Interactions between
the three women are tightly framed, further suggesting affection
and estrangement. This tension is evident at the hair salon when
the three women are getting their hair permed. The mirror captures
Hueyin’s point of view as she looks at her long hair being cut. When
it becomes a trigger to the flashback in Macau as Aiko was cutting
her hair, her reflection seems to support her non-identity as a
daughter. This mirror scene confirms the disunity of a shattered
identity (Erens 2000: 48).
Figure 2.4. Hueyin looking at the mirror at the hairdressing salon with
Aiko and Huewei. The close-up supports the intensity of disunity connoted
by the mirror.
76
In the last sequence after their return from Japan, the same
setting that earlier connoted distance and alienation is now a
liberating space for understanding and reconciliation. Aiko’s
tentative care is evident when she encourages Hueyin to visit her
grandparents. She even helps to pack her suitcase with Chinese
food she has bought for them. The absent mother, recast with
plenitude and nurture, is reunited with the abandoned child and
the motherless daughter. Unlike the alienated Hueyin, the doubly
exiled Aiko is at home in this place. The film uses her Cantonese
proficiency, Chinese cooking skills and knowledge of Chinese
customs to question the authenticity of Chineseness. As Lisa Stokes
and Michael Hoover write, ‘(t)his revelation raises questions about
being Hong Kong Chinese — just what does it mean? If a Japanese
woman passes as such, playing mah-jongg, wanting her daughter
to wear a red dress for her sister’s wedding, what is the ethnic
make-up of the majority of Hong Kong Chinese?’ (1999: 145). The
maternal home transforms the patriarchal family home as the space
for a primordial identity by disrupting the authenticity of identity.
Its emotional confusion of division and reunification also underlies
reparation as a continual process of contradictory sentiments.
Using the Chinese compound word for nation (guojia) to
explain how the Chinese nation (guo) is composed of family units
(jia), Berry and Farquhar examine how Chinese films’ representations
of divided families reflect divided nations, and reconstructed
families, reunited nations (2006: 82–86). In Song of the Exile
however, the reconstructed family does not suggest a united nation.
The film enacts reunification by showing a desire for reconciliation,
and in looking to and turning towards reconciliation, makes a turn
away from the unity of the Chinese homeland to the excentricism
of Hong Kong.
Excentric Hong Kong exists as place of exile for Hueyin and
Aiko. Both have arrived there involuntarily with the former forced
to join her family and the latter forced away from her daughter.
●
While desiring to be elsewhere, both have, at the end of the film,

also come to make Hong Kong their home. This exilic status reflects
the pre-1997 history of Hong Kong as a diaspora. Like Macau and
Manchuria, it is a peripheral satellite. As a diaspora, it is physically
and culturally excentric to China. Standing where China meets the
Greater China, it is an outlet and a threshold to the ‘motherland’
and functions as ‘the junction between the diaspora and its
homeland’ (Pan 1990: 373). As dispatch and destination, the
diaspora of Hong Kong was the greatest node in the Greater Chinese
network. Because of its proximity to the Chinese mainland, Hong
Kong enjoys a unique status in the Greater Chinese network. Unlike
the Chinese in South-East Asia where physical uprootedness and
transplantation have reoriented emotional and political allegiances
towards China, the diaspora of Hong Kong, despite Hong Kong’s
history of migration and status as a classic immigrant city, never
really had a new homeland to which to transfer its loyalty. With
the British colonial administration uninterested in and indifferent
to giving the people of Hong Kong the vote,5 Hong Kong was always
the place where no new allegiance or loyalty was ever demanded.
In this regard, the diaspora of Hong Kong had never really felt
itself cut off from its original homeland. The film records the
anticipated loss of this place through future nostalgia. Future
nostalgia, a sentiment prolific in Hong Kong during the years before
the handover, is a form of yearning about the anticipated loss of
Hong Kong after its 1997 return to Chinese sovereignty. It is
characterized by using the past to write the loss of the future.
Nostalgia, as a ‘longing for a home that no longer exists’ (Boym
2001: xiii), is a popular sentiment in Hong Kong cinema. Made in
1990 and set in 1973, Song of the Exile’s nostalgia for the 1970s is
significant because it challenges the nostalgic impulse in dominant
cinema of that time. Popular and iconic films such as Peking Opera
Blues (dir. Tsui Hark 1986), Rouge (dir. Stanley Kwan 1988),
Painted Faces (dir. Alex Law 1988), As Tears Go By (dir. Wong
78
Kar-wai 1988), Mr Canton and Lady Rose (dir. Jackie Chan 1989)
and Days of Being Wild (dir. Wong Kar-wai 1990) were set in the
historical periods between 1940s to 1960s, and capture what Yingjin
Zhang has called ‘the golden age of the colonial period’ (Zhang
cited in Berry and Farquhar 2006: 99). A period seldom represented
in the cinema at that time, the 1970s was a significant decade for
Hong Kong. It was a time of emerging popular culture and economic
prosperity. Decolonization and its attendant rule of law introduced
in the 1960s also began to set Hong Kong apart from China. These
values were embraced by the local population and produced the
conditions for a sense of local identity (Tsang 2004: 182). The film’s
television footages of collective action and political protests show
how local people are also social agents of change. Nostalgic
articulations of the 1970s evince how a weak nationalism has
provided an empty space to inscribe a local history with its origins
in migration, capitalism and democracy (Ma 2005). The 1970s is
significant not only as a period of economic, social and cultural
modernization; it is also a time when Hong Kong people came of
age and began to consider the makings of its own self-presence.
This articulation of alternative modernity is examined in the following
through the film’s ‘re-turn’ to memory to record a new biography.
Re-turn to Memory: An Intimate Biography
Hui’s personal-political cinema has always used memory to

construct identity, challenge authority and question history. In
particular, her films ‘deal with the issue of forgetting which is a
pretext for a soul-searching journey in which memory is never
taken for granted’ (Lee 2005: 279). They also inflect ‘a specific
sense of time passing, one which acknowledges loss, but forestalls
nostalgia’ (Kraicer 1998). Song of the Exile makes this practice
explicit through postcolonial feminist autobiography by using
●
‘countermemory’ (Erens 2000: 55) to question ‘the burden of

remembering’ (Stokes and Hoover 1999: 146). More specifically, it
re-turns to memory to construct a new intimate biography.
The film re-turns to memory through the autobiographical
device of remembering. Rather than use direct memory to signify
return, re-turn is intimated through indirect memory. Indirect
memory refers to memory that is derived from another source. In
the film, this refers to the mother’s memory that is re-enacted in
the Manchuria sequence imagined by Hueyin. As argued in chapter
one, this sequence maps the beginning of a new ontology for
Hueyin’s identity. The film constructs its new biography from this
form of indirect memory. Devices of biography include the realism
of the fictional story and the re-enacted flashback sequences. When
juxtaposed against the archival footage of the protests on television,
indirect memory shows how the techniques of the historical,
fictional, journalistic and autobiographical are used to foreground
remembering as a process of recollection through fragments, secrets
and lies. Rather than commemorate the past through the totality,
truth and authority of official history, indirect memory is intimated
through the personal memory of reflective nostalgia.
Unlike restorative nostalgia that emphasizes national past and
future, reflective nostalgia focuses on ‘individual and cultural
memory’ (Boym 2001: 49). It does not compensate for loss by
constructing the past through public memorials and heritage but
focuses on ‘an individual narrative that savors details and memorial
signs, perpetually deferring homecoming itself’ (ibid.). Personal
memory is evident through the autobiographical mother-daughter
plot and the maternal narrative. Appearing as short bursts of anti-
linear flashbacks, personal memory is also fragmented: for example,
the flashback that shows Aiko leaving Macau comes before the one
where Aiko asks Hueyin to leave with her. This temporality of
belatedness resonates with the pre-1997 panic days when Hong
Kong’s past was considered to be in danger of disappearing as a
80
result of its perceived lack of recorded local history and imminent

absorption by China. Fragmentation and belatedness reflect the
forward and backward juxtaposition of a non-teleological narrative
that privileges the partiality of imperfect remembering.
The film’s fragmented memories detail the cyclical repetition
of everyday life. Habitual rituals of eating, shopping, cooking are
emphasized instead of life-forming events like birthdays,
graduations and deaths. Even the importance of marriage is marked
more vividly by the remnants of food left over from the wedding
feast. The temporality of everyday life challenges the understanding
of modernity as permanent progress; its temporality of repetition
is opposed to the modern idea of time as accumulative and forward-
driven: everyday life ‘serves as a retardation device, slowing down
the dynamic of historical change’ (Felski 1999–2000: 19). Everyday
life temporalizes home as a site of disjunctive present — evident
in how space is coded through multiple times in the family home,
second homes and the reconstructed maternal home.
In Macau, the restorative nostalgia of the grandparents is
contrasted with the exilic homesickness of Aiko. The grandparents’
desire for the old China is constructed through the historical and
official time of national pasts and future (i.e. they long to return
to China, and when they have, could not accept the country’s march
to socialism and still harboured hope China will be the great
civilization it once was). Aiko’s yearning for Japan is constructed
through a fetishized and ritualized time, fixed in the past and
repeated in the present (i.e. her daily cooking Japanese food). In
Manchuria, the progress of modern nations is juxtaposed with the
death of conjugal love. The time of the modern nation is an
accumulative time of progress and development; in Japan and
China’s war over Manchuria, it has enabled the modern nationalisms
of both countries to emerge. The time of love, however, is a time
of death. Conjugal love (Ah Reng’s marriage to Aiko) is an
Aristophanic dialectic: desire is a lack that can be fulfilled by the
●
other and love constructs the self through the annihilation of the
other. As dead time, conjugal love consumes the ‘has been’ of the
other. In China, at least two national times collide. The private
restorative nostalgia of the grandparents is anachronistic to the
public and collective time of communist socialism. In Japan, family
time is also interrupted through woman’s time. As the time of
reunification with the family, family time is constructed through
hetero-patriarchy, while woman’s time, as the time of reunification
between mother and daughter, is outside of patriarchy (in the pre-
symbolic, signified by the metaphor of the womb in the bath
sequence). Even the filmic time of Hueyin’s biographical self-
construction, moving back and forth between childhood, adolescence
and adulthood, is constructed as continuous and discontinuous.
These disjunctive temporalities are enacted through the pathos
in Hong Kong as a melodramatic mode of mistiming (Doane 1987:
91). Pathos is an anachronism of time because it relays the
disappointment of mistimed affections and missed encounters. As
a mode of dis-placement (Chow 1998) and an effect of dis-
appearance (Abbas 1997a), these disjunctive presents are exemplary
of postcolonial Hong Kong’s entanglements. In the film, they
articulate the intimate biography of Hong Kong.
Intimate biographies do not rely on the recovery of truths to
narrate identity. Rather, they focus on collective memories by using
everyday memories as ‘the common landmarks of everyday life’
(Boym 2001: 53). Collective memories function as the shared
frameworks of social life that are composed by individual memories.
Collective memories, as intimate histories, rely on ‘insider and
outsider explanations’ (Hajratwala 2007: 304) to confront meta-
narratives. This weaving of meta-stories is evident in Hui’s
distinctive focus on how ordinary people are affected by politics in
her films.
Summer Snow features an ordinary middle-aged housewife
confronted by the forces of economic modernization. Ordinary
82
Heroes, about the lives of five ordinary people, is based on real

historical events in the 1980s. The Postmodern Life of My Aunt
shows how the ordinary life of a low-ranked retired government
official is affected by the rapid changes sweeping present-day
Shanghai. David Bordwell describes them as ‘Hui’s films examples
of “humanistic cinema”. She’s less interested in technical
experiments or physical action than in psychological dramas that
reveal unexpected sides of human being’ (Bordwell cited in Podvin
2006). Hui’s commitment to the social is a distinctive feature of
her cine-practice. From the moment she began work in the
television industry in 1997, the television films she directed for the
widely acclaimed the ICAC (Independent Commission for Anti-
Corruption) (1977) and the Below the Lion Rock (1978) series
already previewed her deep engagement with the powerless and
the social problems of the colony.
Song of the Exile follows in this tradition with its focus on how
ordinary mothers and daughters are affected by history and politics.
Aiko’s silent story is situated alongside official histories such as the
Sino-Japanese war and the Cultural Revolution. Hueyin’s
abandoned story is insinuated into the Vietnam War and the 1970s
Hong Kong riots. Even Hui’s oral history is crafted through the
external influence of Wu’s script and further augmented by the
speculation of fiction, the citations of folklore and history, and the
vulnerability of emotional truths. In the film, the shift in Hueyin’s
voice-over particularly highlights this feature of Hui’s cine-practice.
In the beginning the voice-over is filled with self-pity, emotional
distance and isolation. As Hueyin matures in her profession as a
journalist and television producer, the voice-over begins to take a
turn from self-introspection to a concern about Hong Kong and
the plight of its ordinary people. Such weaving of insider-outsider
meta-stories produces a discrepancy that questions the play of the
fiction it constructs and problematizes the fictional present of the
past. The liminality between past (representation) and present
●
(narration), old (Hui) and new (Hueyin), opens up a critical distance

to conceive of authenticity as a hybrid and creative process. In these
disjunctives of the text, an intimate biography is produced rather
than assumed.
Biographical tropes of birth, marriage and off-spring are
explicit in the film. Hueyin’s obsession with her identity and her
insistence of the recovery of this identity are sparked by none other
than the questionable parentage of her birth and to whom she
belongs. As an off-spring from mixed bloodlines, she shows how
the local is a site of mixed heritage and descent, as well as cultural
adoption. Visual representations of this space — Hong Kong — are
non-spectacular common places and common objects. A phone
booth, a window frame, a block of flats. They map the intimacies
of micro history.
Micro history is ‘the microscopic study of a specific historical
subject, often a history from below’ (Cheung 2001: 567). They focus
on the subaltern and excentric. Excentric Macau and Manchuria
are used to show how the history of the local is constructed from
these spaces of alterity that are also the forgotten and subaltern
histories of Hong Kong. More significantly, micro history inscribes
the common place of the city. The common place is a minority or
unofficial place that acts out its own staging to make possible the
universality of a particular place (De Certeau 1984: 2). It functions
as Hong Kong’s ‘origin of value’ (Chow 1998: 177). The nondescript
apartment in a tower block in land-scarce Hong Kong is exemplary
of this space. It is generic, ordinary and yet specific to the materiality
of the spectacular Hong Kong skyline established earlier. This space
captures the messy reality of kinship and the reciprocity of
relationships where the inclusion of emotional strain is also its
exclusion from blood ties. Other visual representations of common
spaces include the street market and the laneway in Macau, and
the narrow cobblestone road and the rural farm tracks in Beppu.
The film lingers on these ruins of home: the peeling paint outside
84
the houses of Macau and China, the grit of dirt on barred windows
in Hong Kong, and the emptiness of life in a dormitory in Britain.
In these spaces, practices like buying bread, using a public phone,
rural farming or walking in the crowd provide a critique of the
progress of modernization and its experience of modernity. Micro
histories illuminate the intimacies of the everyday and the subaltern
that make up the multiple archives excentric to the singularity of
official history.
Song of the Exile subverts autobiography and melodrama to
construct two narratives of re-turn that challenge the teleology of
homecoming and the ontology of home. Key to the narrative of
re-turn is a temporal-spatial movement that looks to but turns away
from the motherland to the periphery of Hong Kong. In this space,
a new reconstructed alternative home acknowledges its diasporic
history. An intimate biography is also articulated through the social
framework of collective memories and the materiality of common
places. The film’s nostalgic yearning provides a temporal approach
to also challenge the progress of modernity, the irreversibility of
passing time and the impossibility of return. As both retrospective
and projective, the narrative of re-turn embodies a disjunctive
present that challenges the symbolic foreclosures of modernity,
colonialism, nationalism and nativism. In its desire to narrate the
end of exile and the beginning of reconciliation, the film’s evocation
of remembering is also about forgetting what is left out in the
discourse of fragments.
Conclusion: Towards an Ethics of Re-turn
Song of the Exile provides a textual and contextual framework to

discuss Hui’s female authorship. Written, produced and released
in the controversial and prolific year of 1990, the film inspires a
model of female creativity and encourages a mode of female
●
spectatorship. Hui’s use of postcolonial feminist autobiography

enunciates the double subjectivity of the female subject and
privileges a subjective point of view as a reparative motif for a
mother-daughter plot. Her use of maternal melodrama focuses on
corrective melodramatic realism to express the pathos of high family
drama and abject motherhood. Together, these cine-feminist
techniques subvert the film’s allegory of Hong Kong’s utopic
homecoming with an alternative narrative of re-turn. This narrative
of re-turn challenges the authenticity of memory with indirect
memory and reconstructs Hong Kong as a new home through its
status as an excentric diaspora. It also anticipates the loss of Hong
Kong through a future nostalgia that writes the intimate history of
Hong Kong as a common place. As retrospective and projective,
affection and estrangement, here and there, the narrative of re-turn
provides a disjunctive present that allows Hong Kong to construct
for itself an alternative narration of its self-presence. These practices
necessarily entail a consideration towards an ethics of re-turn.
An ethical consideration of re-turn does not dwell on moral
judgments about whether reunification has been good/bad or right/
wrong for Hong Kong. Common sentiments lament the loss of the
local as a result of its incorporation by the dominant ideologies of
re-nationalization and re-sinicization. These common
sentimentalities, in their extremes, potentially evoke the same
violent sentimentalism as paranoid nationalisms. Rather, an ethical
consideration of re-turn can take its cue from Hui’s cine-feminist
strategies of embedded criticism.
The film provides an aesthetic frame to critically consider ethics
as a self-fashioning process where technologies of the self are
shaped through individuation and subject-formation. For subjects
such as Hueyin and Aiko, the technologies that govern their
identities are also those that have allowed them to cultivate their
practices of freedom. Self-fashioning demonstrates subjectivation
as a process of understanding how the self gains knowledge and
86
uses this knowledge to conduct its relationship to others (Foucault

1997). For Hong Kong’s self-fashioning, ethics is necessarily
practised from within this restricted position because it is
historically constituted by the forces of contact and subordination:
‘Rather than being the occasion for benevolent philosophizing, then,
ethics in this restrictive position involves an understanding of
subordination, of irresolvable social and cultural antagonisms, and
of finding oneself negotiating at the limits of possibilities even as
life must go on’ (Chow 2004: 686).
The film also provides an exilic vision to consider an ethics of
co-existence that responds to the inarticulate silence of unresolved
tensions. Exilic ethics — as the ethics of the exile — takes into
account two considerations. It combines theorizations of the exile
and ethics to reconsider the location of home and the subjectivation
of identity. First, following the exile’s desire to return, exilic ethics
returns to ‘home’ by taking a detour through routes rather than
roots. Second, following Foucauldian ethics that conceptualizes
identity through subjectivation, exilic ethics considers how identity
is governed through ethical self-fashioning rather than the morality
of conduct or alterity of otherness.6 As a cultural practice of the
border, exilic ethics is pertinent to Hong Kong and its ‘one country,
two systems’ transition. It relates to the border (Hong Kong) as a
site of cultural recognition for diasporic migrants (e.g. Aiko) and
impure Chineseness (e.g. Hueyin), shifting the emphasis from the
rights of cultural inclusion and the benevolent appeal to cultural
diversity, to question the justice of cultural recognition. Exilic ethics
also relates to the cultural recognition of Hong Kong as the same
of the other (system) and the other (system) of the same, shifting
the emphasis from the politics of mutual tolerance, joint co-
operation and hegemonic Chinese nationalism, to question the
self-autonomy of Hong Kong and the limit of the difference between
one country and two systems. In the film, exilic ethics takes risk
to confront the honesty of precarious affection, indirect recognition
●
and imperfect homes. These diasporic intimacies show the

impossibility of return through an unproblematic reunification.
They highlight a re-turn to place, history and memory to question
the roots of cultural identity. As the family home is reconstructed
as a maternal home, as Hong Kong is repositioned as a diaspora,
and as its biography is reclaimed through the collective memory
of everyday practices and common places, the film’s exilic ethics
provides the foundation to create a global solidarity based on
displacement, migration and international multiculturalism that
speak to the potentiality of a coming community held together, not
through roots and origins, but being-in-common. The next chapter
considers the teaching of these pedagogies.
3
Teaching Song of the Exile in
the Diaspora: Minor Cinema,
Transcultural Literacy and
Border Pedagogy
As Hong Kong cinema continues its ascendency into the global film
circuits, Hong Kong films are increasingly incorporated as key texts
in the disciplines of cinema, cultural and media studies in Asia and
the West. The feminist art house style of Song of the Exile is often
used as a counterpoint to the popular genres of swordplay, martial
arts and heroic action. In introductory subjects, the film can teach
core concepts such as ethnicity, migration, acculturation and
assimilation. In more advanced subjects, it can explore the social
construction of identity and its role in shaping intercultural
communication. This chapter continues the emphasis of the
previous chapters on the diaspora by mobilizing the diaspora as a
key site for pedagogical considerations. It shows how Song of the
Exile cultivates a transcultural literacy that challenges the
hegemonic currency of neoliberal multicultural education. As a
practice of radical critical pedagogy, transcultural literacy addresses
the diaspora through the film cultures of minor cinema and the
critical epistemologies of border crossing.
90
This chapter is framed by my own experiences of situated

pedagogy (Lather 1991; Sharma 2006). A situated pedagogy
provides the possibility of putting to use the resources developed
by the theoretical approaches in the practices of the classroom. It
is constrained by the broader institutional frameworks and specific
learning contexts in which it operates. I began teaching Song of
the Exile in 1998 in a subject I designed on Hong Kong cinema. It
was taught as part of the second and third year core subject offerings
in the cultural studies programme at a university in Australia,
offered biennially and cross-listed in other programmes such as
media and communications, Asian studies and cinema studies.
Although subject development has evolved through the years to
incorporate the burgeoning field of Hong Kong film studies and
ameliorate the pressures of liberal arts curriculum reform, two aims
were maintained in the design of the module. One has been to
approach postcolonial Hong Kong cinema as a type of border
cinema characterized by an industry and a critical practice that
have emerged out of its border politics with China, the colonial
West, the neo-colonial transnational as well as its own evolving
and contesting local. Another aim has been to design a subject that
can challenge the pluralism of the multicultural curriculum. It was,
and still is, the only subject in the programme and the faculty that
examined Asian cinema. I was required to teach ‘the official
transcripts’ of the field but was motivated by the need to establish
the conditions for reading the dominant texts and master narratives
differently. Hong Kong cinema, as a site for examining alternative
modernity, became the main critical device in the design of the
subject. Alternative modernity provided a platform to decentre
Western modernity and the experiences of Hollywood and European
cinemas. It also provided the vocabulary for understanding the
self-presencing of the cinema and its emergence as a result of
contradictory and disjunctive postcolonial forces. I wanted students
not only to know the cultural, political and social histories of Hong
Teaching Song of the Exile in the Diaspora 91
●
Kong and its cinema, but also how, as border cinema, Hong Kong
cinema functions as a signifier for their own contemporary global
taste formations and consumption practices. I also wanted them
to explore how Hong Kong cinema’s relationship with the West
and in Asia can aid in the understanding of Australia’s own border
politics with Asia. As the postcolonial border has become
synonymous with reconceptualizing the world in our contemporary
times, border pedagogy became a belated and self-reflexive critical
practice that has helped to develop the curriculum.
This chapter uses feedback from thirty students in 2008 to
show how pedagogy implicit in postcolonial Hong Kong films about
border culture not only creates the conditions for rewriting the
cultural politics of the border between Asia and Australia, but also
provides a materialist approach to engage critical debates in global
popular culture. The topic for the week that screened Song of the
Exile focused on diasporic cinema and the cultural politics of
diasporic identity. Hong Kong cinema was introduced as a diasporic
cinema through its role in maintaining and negotiating culture.
After the screening that preceded the lecture, students were given
additional questions about the film that would help them reflect
on the film’s role in shaping their experiences of identity, migration
and the world.1
The first section begins with a critical introduction to the role
of film as a form of public pedagogy, and problematizes the inclusion
of Hong Kong cinema in a pluralist multicultural curriculum. It
develops a framework towards a critical pedagogy of film and media
culture, and shows how the minor cinema of Song of the Exile
potentially challenges the normalizing claims of a neoliberal
multicultural film curriculum.
The second section demonstrates the minor cinema of Song of
the Exile through its diasporic film distribution in Australia. It uses
a materialist framework to locate the film in the social and political
contexts in which it inhabits. It shows how the film’s diasporic film
92
circulation constructs Hong Kong modernity as an alternative

process of making present Hong Kong in the Western diaspora. It
further highlights the pedagogic function of diasporic film
distribution. As a deconstructive critical practice, it allows students
to cultivate a critical media literacy that opens up alternative ways
of articulating new subject-positions and desires.
The third section demonstrates how the minor cinema of Song
of the Exile is deployed in a site-specific encounter for transcultural
literacy. Transcultural literacy uses the diaspora to construct a new
spatial theory of literacy that emphasizes the importance of the
contact zone as a site for questioning unequal power relations and
engaging in intercultural communication. This section uses student
responses to critically examine the film as a performative text, and
considers its affective capacities in the classroom. This approach
does not naively presume the film innately performs a radical
pedagogy, but suggests it can be a potential deployment for
identifying a transcultural literacy necessary to new ethical
subjectivities. It examines how students use the film’s textual
practices of diaspora as a starting point to perform self and group
narratives of displacement and worlding.
The fourth and final section continues to critically discuss the
film as a performative text for border pedagogy. As a practice of
transcultural literacy, border pedagogy exposes the borders that
have constructed knowledge and power and enables students to
learn to become border-crossers. It explores how the performance
of otherness provides the capacity for an ethical self-fashioning
that reinvests ethnicity as agency rather than identity. These issues
are central to the diasporic teaching of the film as an ethnically
marked text, as well as in critical multiculturalism’s teaching of
identity and cultural difference.
●
Hong Kong Film Studies in the Age of Multiculturalism

and Neoliberalism: Towards a Critical Pedagogy of
Film and Media Culture
From the capacity to entertain to their potential to provoke, films

connect to students’ experiences by relating to the broader contexts
of their social, cultural and economic worlds. As social and political
allegories, they express everyday life, and articulate fears and desires
for the future. In our contemporary image-saturated and media-
laden world, they have become significant sites for influencing
education and transforming pedagogy. Their extensive public
circulation and intensive impact on public culture have led Henry
Giroux (2008) to consider films as a mass-produced form of public
pedagogy. Films need to be understood within their ‘political and
educational character’ and how they speak to the broader network
of social, cultural and institutional formations: ‘As a space of
translation, they also bridge the gap between private and public
conversation, and offer a pedagogical space for addressing how a
society views itself and the public world of power, events, politics
and institutions’ (Giroux 2008: 8). Films are forms of civic
engagement that shape individual behaviour and public attitude.
They need to be studied not as isolated texts, but in their relationships
to cultural, historical, institutional and social contexts that uncover
the workings of power relationships and ideological assumptions.
As public pedagogies, films address the need for forms of
literacy that facilitate ways of understanding how knowledge is
constructed in contemporary culture. Literacy is more than simply
the acquisition of language rules; it refers to how the retrieval,
recognition and production of information are deployed in
communication practices (Schirato and Yell 2000). More
specifically, as knowledge of meaning systems that allows the
negotiation of those systems in different cultural contexts, cultural
literacy shapes communicative practices. A tool for ‘feeling’,
94
understanding and ‘making one’s way’ in different cultures, cultural

literacy highlights the official and unofficial operations of different
cultural fields and the relationship of these fields to cultural and
economic capital (ibid.). Eric Hirsch refers to cultural literacy as
the shared discourse of a national, public community (2002: vii).
Not all citizens, however, have access to and can participate in this
shared national discursive forum. Hirsch sees education as a
solution and proposes the teaching of cultural literacy as a means
to this end. Sharing a discourse means more than sharing the codes
of its meaning system; it also implies the acquisition of the
contextual knowledge that makes this discourse coherent, relevant
and significant.
The use of feature films as a pedagogical tool has advanced
rapidly in the last three decades as a result of the push for education
to achieve greater social relevance and the increased pervasiveness
of media in everyday life. From media literacy movements to critical
media studies projects, films are integrated into disciplines as
diverse as sociology, urban studies, linguistics and history, to name
a few. Henry Giroux (1994) shows how Hollywood films about youth
culture, while reinforcing stereotypes about race, also ‘(create) the
condition for rewriting such films’ through diverse pedagogical
strategies (1994: 285). In a class on ‘Mexican American Experience
through Film’, Avelardo Valdez and Jeffrey A. Halley mobilize
hermeneutics as ‘vehicles for teaching the Chicano experience’
(1999: 286–289). Linda Erhlich (2000) extends the study of film
history to consider how films such as The Scent of the Green Papaya
(dir. Tran Anh Hung 1993), set in the mid-twentieth-century city
of Saigon, provide a new perspective of Vietnam for American
students not through the trauma of war, but childhood nostalgia.
In Hong Kong cinema, Meaghan Morris (2007) examines the appeal
of Bruce Lee in the West, and suggests it is his role as an iconic
film teacher, rather than the physicality of his body or his martial
arts skills, that is popular with American working-class white
audience. These methodologies, coming from cultural studies,
●
sociology and history, highlight film’s contribution to these

disciplines for educational reform. Films relate to students’
experiences of the world by showing how power and knowledge
inform each other in the production, reception and circulation of
cultural identities. In cross-cultural film pedagogies, these
experiences and identities are further contested through the social
histories and representations of migration, racism and ethnicity.
In recent years, the inclusion of a multicultural curriculum to
address identity politics has resulted in a pedagogy of difference.
One strand emphasizes the cultural diversity of different ethnic
groups while another focuses on anti-racism in dominant cultures
and texts. While these have opened up a heteroglossic democracy
where many readings and voices are seen and heard, multicultural
curriculum has been criticized for its absorption by the
cosmopolitanized liberalism of the postmodern left and its
preoccupation with individualized, moralized and culturalized
politics of differences (Cho 2006; McLaren and Jaramillo 2007).
These tendencies have developed as a reaction to critical theory
and alongside the rise of a neoliberal education milieu more
interested in meeting the demands of ‘consumer pedagogy’ (Giroux
2000: 175). For film studies, this has meant ‘dumbing down’ course
syllabi, assigning fewer and easier readings, screening more popular
entertainment films, and a return to the ‘basics’ of film canons,
genres, auteurs, national cinemas, and aesthetic and formalist
concerns (Ginsberg 2003).
In the West, the inclusion of Hong Kong cinema has followed
these trends of multicultural and neoliberal education. Hong Kong
films, on its own, or as part of the corpus of Chinese or Asian
cinemas, add value to the diversity claims of world cinemas. It has
become increasingly commonplace to find directors such as Wong
Kar-wai, John Woo and Johnnie To in auteur studies. Similarly,
Jackie Chan also features alongside high concept spectacle films in
courses on action cinema. In the libraries, Stephen Teo’s (2005)
structuralist study on Wong Kar-wai and David Bordwell’s (2000)
96
formalist approach to kung fu choreography are two of the most

borrowed books in this field. While these inclusions attest to the
internationalization of Hong Kong cinema studies, they call to task
the problematic assumptions of a neoliberal and multicultural
curriculum that celebrates banal diversity through the promotion
of popular texts. In conservative multicultural classrooms, the
difference of material history is reified and neutralized through the
sameness of mass entertainment. It has the tendency to disavow
the complexities of the ethno-specific national, class, gender and
racial compositions of the film texts and its media cultures, and
may potentially reproduce the racialized and gendered ideologies
of labour and social life.
These assumptions are evident in books that feature the study
of Hong Kong cinema. Lee Server’s Asian Pop Cinema (1999) is
an early attempt to harness the trendiness of multicultural diversity
by framing the cinema through the exoticism of Western cinephilia.
The book’s introduction, ‘Once Upon a Time in the East’, constructs
this fetish through aestheticizing stereotypes. The section on Hong
Kong singles out the ‘costume epics’ (10) of King Hu, the hard-
boiled action of John Woo and the exploitation cinema of Category
III films. Genres and auteurs are introduced by exaggerating the
clichés of historical fantasies, triads and hypersexualized Asian
femininity. In more academic film readers, the cinema is also always
introduced from the traditional and problematic ‘national cinema’
as ‘other cinema’ perspective, beginning with orientalism and cross-
cultural reading practices. This perspective has, for the most part,
framed the teaching of Asian cinemas in the West, and is most
recently reproduced in the 2006 collection, Asian Cinemas: A
Reader and Guide. The collection begins with a section on Japanese
cinema and orientalism. The editors suggest they wanted to dispel
the myths surrounding ‘the problematic relationship between
Western scholar/student and Asian context’ (Eleftheriotis and
Needham 2006: 2). These include student expectations about the
unqualified appreciation of Asian films as either exotic and cult, or
●
inferior. Perhaps the films of Ozu or the Godzilla films may fit well
within this rubric of orientalism and techno-orientalism, but to
frame Hong Kong cinema in this regard would be to begin with the
cult status of Bruce Lee in the 1970s or Chow Yun Fatt in the 1980s,
and risk eliding the diasporic circulation of Bruce Lee among black
and working-class Americans, or John Woo’s panic action cinema
that can almost universally transcend language and cultural borders.
This framework also assumes a rigid demarcation between
landscapes of audiences and regions of cultural production. The
rubric that defines ‘Asian cinema’ no longer simply refers to a group
of films made in Asia, and Western spectatorship is no longer simply
a mode of looking or exchange confined to audiences in the West.
The conceptual frameworks of ‘orientalism’ or ‘national cinema’ do
not fit Hong Kong cinema. Even when Hong Kong cinema has been
subsumed under the rubrics of ‘new Chinese cinemas’ (Berry 1991)
and ‘quasi-national cinema’ (Chu 2003), theorists are careful not
to label it ‘national cinema’. More appropriate terminologies such
as ‘crisis cinema’ (Abbas 1997a; Stokes and Hoover 1999; Williams
1997), ‘urban cinema’ (Leung 2000), ‘entertainment cinema’
(Bordwell 2000) and ‘transnational cinema’ (Lu 1997; Morris, Li
and Chan 2005; Yau 2001) also do not begin with the orientalization
of Hong Kong cinema in the West.
One way to address the neoliberal and multicultural
incorporation of Hong Kong film studies is to develop and
disseminate what Terri Ginsberg calls ‘a critical pedagogy of film
and media culture’ (2003: 30). Critical pedagogy, developed by
Marxist and neo-Marxist critical theorists such as Paulo Freire
(1995), Henry Giroux (1983) and Peter McLaren (2003), teaches
students to expose hegemony and challenge domination. Central
to critical pedagogy is that education is political, and educators and
students should become ‘transformative intellectuals’ (Giroux) and
‘cultural workers’ (Freire). It aims to engage students in the practice
of critical consciousness, what Freire calls conscientizacao: it
emphasizes ‘reading the world’ — students and teachers decode
98
texts that are images of their own concrete and social experiences
of the world. Through this form of cultural literacy, students and
teachers engage in praxis through reflection and action in order to
understand, and change, the world. In this context, some of the
underlying principles of critical pedagogy share with cultural studies
similar traditions of philosophy, namely, the commitment to
addressing cultural politics by reinforcing and challenging students’
experiences and perceptions of the world and how these in turn
constitute their everyday lives and regimes of truth. Other
similarities include the relationship between culture and class, the
historicities of knowledge, and the critical tools of ideology,
hegemony and resistance (Darder, Baltondao and Torres 2003:
11–17). For Ginsberg, a critical pedagogy of film and media culture
involves assigning and integrating difficult critical concepts in the
classroom, and the inclusion of non-commercial and non-narrative
film as part of the canon. This would challenge and enlighten
students by displacing and repositioning them within the value of
their own collective intellectual labor (Ginsberg 2003: 16). Kobena
Mercer (1994), Paul Willeman (1994) and Laura U. Marks (1999)
have also emphasized the cultural politics of minority film to
creatively interrogate complex questions of identity, difference and
otherness. It would also make material connections between
students, contemporary film studies and the global commercial
media, and expose the social relationships between critical film
studies and the ideological foundations of neoliberalism,
postmodernism and multiculturalism.
Song of the Exile is a useful case study to illustrate the syllabus
for a critical pedagogy of film and media culture. Its experimental,
independent and art house style suits the non-canonic status of the
non-narrative and non-commercial film text of minor cinema. Minor
cinema, Ka-Fai Yau (2002) argues, is more than just a cinema of
the margin conceived in terms of production and distribution. He
uses the Deleuzian concept of the minor as a strategy to situate
●
Hong Kong cinema in the 1990s and its relationship to modernity.

The minor has three characteristics: it uses the language of the
major to demonstrate its displacement from the major; it is political,
and also collective (Deleuze and Guatarri 1986). Applying
Rodowick’s (1997) elaboration of the minor, Yau suggests the
purpose of minor cinema is to produce a collective imagination
that addresses ‘a people who do not yet exist and in doing so, urge
them toward becoming’ (Rodowick 1997: 154, cited in Yau 2002:
547). For Yau, Hong Kong cinema in the 1990s is suited to this
framework because it takes into account its confrontation with the
geo-historical forces of reunification as well as the complexities of
market and political forces in the making of a Hong Kong subject
and its own subjectivity (see also Abbas 1997a). The appropriation
and deterritorialization of the major allows the cinema to resist
preconceived subjecthood by introducing a thirdness that reworks
and transforms the binary constructions of identity. In the
independent and digital cinema of Fruit Chan, Yau locates how
the minor at the levels of production and representation negotiates
the potential of another way of ‘seeing otherwise’ (2002: 550).
These strategies, he argues, respond to the complexities of Hong
Kong modernity and provide the foundations of a self-reflexive
modern cinema.
Yau’s ‘thirdness’ resonates with studies of ‘thirdness’ in critical
multicultural pedagogy. Peter McLaren develops this concept to
distance it from the more conservative, liberal and pluralist notions
of multiculturalism. His aim is to construct ‘a theoretical grid that
can help discern the multiple ways in which difference is both
constructed and engaged’ (1995: 120). McLaren’s formulation
‘brings questions of the theorization of cultural difference to the
forefront in an interrogation of the discourse of educational
multiculturalism’ (Sharma 2006: 13). Critical multiculturalism
provides a ‘more elusive “third space”… of curriculum and pedagogy’
to explore the tension between the representations that students
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hold when imagining who they are and in relation to the

representations that are made of them (Yon 1999: 624). This tension
suggests students act on discourse as much as use them for self-
fashioning (Foucault 1979). It relates directly to film’s affective
capacity to move students to new sites of ethical agency. Before
considering Song the Exile as such as a performative text, I first
demonstrate, in the following, the film as a minor cinema through
its material circuit of diasporic distribution in Australia. This
distributive form constructs Hong Kong modernity as an alternative
process of making present Hong Kong in the Western diaspora,
and allows the film to function as a deconstructive pedagogical
practice for critical media literacy.
Minor Cinema: Film Distribution and Critical Media

Literacy
Song of the Exile is not only an example of minor cinema through

its subaltern relationship to popular genres and narrative cinema.
In Australia, the cultural politics of the minor is evident through
its distribution. Film distribution is a rich and critical site to
examine the wider critical pedagogy of film cultures. Although
‘distribution is the key to the film industry’, it is often an under-
theorized field due to its almost ‘invisible’ and unglamorous nature
(Moran 1996: 2). Distribution, as the process that moves media
across space and time (Cubitt 2005), not only delivers content to
audiences; it helps to shape viewing practices and film cultures. It
regulates different forms of media access, creates specific demands
for media content, and constructs audience’s tastes, habits and
values. Song of the Exile is distributed in three minor ways in
Australia: counter, excentric and decentred.
The first site of distribution is on free-to-air television. The
‘international version’ of the film was screened on the network
●
Special Broadcasting Services (SBS) in the first few years after its
international cinematic release. SBS is the country’s unique national
multicultural and multilingual broadcaster created in 1991. It
broadcasts in more than sixty different languages, and attracts
about seven million audiences annually. Their main mandate is to
screen content that speaks directly to the homeland cultures of
migrants, and priority for programming is given to groups that are
recently arrived. In the years between 1995–2005, Hong Kong films
have been programmed on a weekly basis as a result of increased
migration and the prolific outputs of its cinema. First-run films are
usually screened during the prime time slot of 10pm, and repeat
screenings are usually available for the following two years in
afternoon or midnight time slots. Unique to SBS are its own
translation services. When Song of the Exile was screened in the
early to mid 1990s, it was noted for its licensed yellow subtitles.
SBS’s minor logic can be understood in terms of narrowcasting.
As Hamid Naficy (1993) suggests, there are different logics to being
narrow. For SBS, this logic is premised on ethnic narrowcasting.
Language and media policies regulate the counter-national network
and shape its specialist ‘minority ethnic’ audiences:
While broadcasting is driven by the logic of maximising audiences

across difference by the production of an abstracted ‘mass’,
narrow-casting fragments the audience using specialist media
targeted at minority or niche publics. While broadcasting converts
difference into demographics, narrow-casting often fetishes it,
privileging notions of singular or ‘special’ identities … ethnicity,
race, sexuality…. Broadcasting (is) the heartland of nation and
family and narrow-casting (is) the space of the migrant, the exile,
the refugee. (Yue and Hawkins 2000: 54–55)
The second site of distribution is through ethnic video stores

in Chinatown. In Melbourne, they are also available in the suburb
of Richmond, known locally as Little Saigon. These stores are minor
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as they elude the mainstream and are part of the excentric diasporic
business circuits involving the homeland and hostland (Laguerre
1998). Usually locally owned family businesses, these stores are
situated behind, or next to grocery stores, and stock the latest
popular culture releases from the East Asian regions. In the late
1980s to mid 1990s, Hong Kong television and film dominated the
bulk of the stock. Distributors would import directly from Hong
Kong television stations such as Television Broadcasting (TVB) and
Asia Television (ATV), and the regional cable television, STAR-TV.
Stores would receive one master video copy, and make as many
copies as possible according to demand. Variety shows, concerts,
television series and films make up the different genres available.
When the demand for the latest has fizzled, tapes are re-used.
Resolution is low but turnaround is quick and cheap. In recent
years, the same copying practice is applied to DVDs. A tape or DVD
film would cost about AU$3.00 to rent for one day; with six films,
a week’s loan period is usually allowed. I first encountered the
‘Hong Kong version’ of Song of the Exile through these stores in
Melbourne in the early 1990s. As expected, the tape is of poor
quality. In addition to the film’s mood aesthetic of darkness, the
viewing experience is similar to those borrowed under similar
circumstances. At the end of the borrowed film is usually the rest
of another one that has been taped over. Like other migrants who
are frequent borrowers, this satiates the immediacy of home
cultures rather than the quality of film content. In recent years
when my students have borrowed Song of the Exile from these
stores, it was discovered that the smaller stores would have erased
their copies of the film while the bigger and more established stores
would keep one video copy of the film. These are listed under
‘Maggie Cheung’ rather than ‘Ann Hui’. None of the stores has
purchased the DVD to replace the old video stock.
The third mode of minor distribution is through the more
recent decentred network of the Internet. DVDs of Song of the Exile
can be purchased online through specialist Asian media outlets
●
such as YesAsia or hkflix. Unlike the recent re-releases of old classics

from Stephen Chow or Jackie Chan, Song of the Exile is yet to be
digitally re-mastered as a DVD. The only DVD copy available online
is reproduced from its analogue version. Released by a China-based
distributor, Guangzhou Blue Spirit Culture Media Limited, the DVD
is advertised as a ‘China version’ although it bears no difference to
the Hong Kong or international versions except in two instances.
The first is the title. Although it is listed as ‘Song of the Exile’ on
the websites, the actual DVD sleeve bears the Chinese title ‘Qiang
Huo Zhong de Nuren’ (槍火中的女人), which literally translates as
‘a woman caught in the midst of gun fire’. This reference to the
historical epic of war is represented in the sepia cover, foregrounded
by Maggie Cheung carrying an umbrella as if to shield herself from
the spray of bullets in the background, with bombing planes,
running soldiers and ruined buildings. The second deviation is in
the watching of the film. The logo of Guangzhou Blue Spirit Culture
Media — a yellow-haired animated smurf-like blue spirit wearing
a crooked witch’s hat and carrying two discs — would pan across
the screen at periodic intervals throughout the film. On the previous
two occasions when I have screened this version in class, students
would laugh whenever the blue smurf appears. This type of
interruptive animation is similar to others found on pirated DVDs
from Hollywood and Bollywood. In spite of prior warning at the
start of the screening and priming students to consider the
potential viewing practices of piracy, the giggles would last till the
end of the film.
In a study of the Indian B circuit of Hong Kong martial arts
cinema, S. V. Srinivas points to the modification of films by
distributors as characteristic of local intervention in order to
‘transform the object to suit existing spectatorial practices’ (2003:
55). In the case of Song of the Exile, while the change to the title
(and its explicit foregrounding of the war genre) may be prompted
by the transnational celebrity cache of Maggie Cheung, the re-issued
DVD has also transformed the cultural value of the film, from its
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art house origins to one not dissimilar to the new cultures created
by piracy and B films. Indeed, this collapse between high and low
values is indicative of the networked decentralization of Hong Kong
cinema brought about by the new distributive capacity of the
Internet. David Desser points to the rise of a new Hong Kong
cinephilia enabled precisely by this techno-orientation: it ‘is the
product of global communication formations and film production
sites centered in global cities, the cosmopolitan centers of cultural
production as well as cultural consumption’ (2005: 213). Like
Srinivas’s account of local modifications, new cinephillia is also
characterized by replications; for Desser, these replications, as
‘retellings, reworkings, reimagings’, reproduce both the original
cultural idea and create a new object. If Song of the Exile is rendered
through this lens, the reimaginings by the new DVD sleeve and its
generic configuration would suit the new tastes of this audience,
both in terms of celebrity cultural capital and its penchant for a
pan-Asian war film, thus accounting for the flattening of differences
between the genre, cast and geographical location on the DVD
sleeve. The specificity of Hong Kong art house, and the film’s themes
of exile and migration, are subsumed under the new pan-Asian
narrative of war. Indeed, some students have responded directly
to this trope of war when asked how the film has changed their
views of the world:
Hardships of war and how that affects the family. (S8)
War is bad. The world is toward mixture. Never lose hope. (S24)
A better understanding of the cultural tensions that still run deep

between Japan and China. Traversing nations, borders and
diasporas was a much more intense experience in the 50s and
60s, but the cultural transgressions still apply even as travel
becomes easier. (S29)
Broadened my understanding of the Sino-Japanese relationship

in relation to personal lives of individuals. (S30)
●
Figure 3.1. The logo of the Blue Spirit scrolling across the top banner of
the screen. Grandfather and a young Hueyin are displaced by the war and
seek refuge in Macau.
Figure 3.2. The re-issued DVD sleeve of the film distributed from
Guangzhou Blue Spirit Culture Media.
106
These three modes of distribution are minor in their challenges

to existing dominants. Ethnic video stores, as ethnic businesses,
help migrants construct disaporic citizenship through the
triangulated business networks created by new citizens, distribution
companies in the homelands and infrastructures of the hostlands
(Laguerre 1998). Migrants continue their homeland affiliations
through media capitals while also making claims to the hostland
by creating new economic and social strategies of self-determination.
In mainstream host communities, they challenge the ghettoization
of these businesses and the fetishization of these products. They
also create new excentric transnational networks by facilitating the
circulation of Hong Kong cinema in its overseas diasporas and the
West without negotiating mainstream distribution companies and
media regulation.
The ethnic narrowcasting of SBS uses the language of the major
by relying on mass media’s broadcasting technology to show its
displacement from the mainstream English-language television. It
can be considered a form of counter-modernity that exposes the
multicultural diaspora as a décalage. Brent Edwards refers to this
French term as a wedge that is added to re-establish a prior
unevenness or diversity: it ‘alludes to the taking away of something
that was added in the first place, something artificial, a stone or
piece of wood that served to fill some gap to rectify some imbalance’
(2001: 65). For Edwards, the diaspora is ‘inherently décale or
disjointed’, and has been ‘discursively propped up ... into an
artificially “even” or “balanced” state of “racial” belonging’ (ibid.).
In Australia, the social and media policies of multiculturalism
function as such discursive props to counter the cultural anxieties
of migration. As a minor medium, SBS exposes the migrant diaspora
as a kernel of incommensurable difference that cannot be
incorporated or translated. By using multicultural broadcasting to
link the migrant to the heartland, its point of separation is also its
point of linkage, suggesting a form of articulation posited on the
strangeness of disarticulation as a consequence of displacement.
●
Finally, the decentred network of Internet distribution points

to the new cultures of replication that disrupt the ontology of cinema
and its dominant constructions of spectatorship. The hegemony of
the art film is disrupted through the inauthenticity of distracted
viewing; in its place, a new distribution of cultural capital is
produced, not through the old cinephilia of the art house, but the
cosmopolitan tastes of its (predominantly young and pan-Asian)
audience. The sanctity of film-as-art, and its attendant practice of
immersive spectatorship, are displaced in this replication.
These excentric, counter and decentred networks highlight how
the minor distribution patterns of Song of the Exile in Australia
construct critical media literacy. Critical media literacy is concerned
with ‘helping students experience the pleasures of popular culture
while simultaneously uncovering the practices that work to silence
or dis-empower them as readers, viewers, and learners’ (Alvermann
and Hagood 2000: 194). Following Freire (1995), it is about helping
students learn to read the world as well as the word. This pedagogy
develops out of the Frankfurt School’s concerns about the culture
industry as a dominant tool for passifying the masses (Adorno
1991). Critical media literacy advocates the importance of teaching
people to read the unconscious effects of popular culture and media
for increased consciousness of the world. By learning the diasporic
circulation of the film in constructing new film and media cultures,
students learn how these cultures can reinforce or challenge
dominant traditions, identities and values. They learn how the
excentric, counter and decentred circulation of the film constructs
Hong Kong modernity as an alternative process of making present
(and imaging) Hong Kong in the Western diaspora. They acquire
knowledge about how these media cultures challenge the claims of
an Anglo-dominated Australian modernity through creating
alternative subject-positions and desires including migrant
audiences, ethnic consumers and new cosmopolitan taste cultures.
From these minor distributive networks, students learn to contest
the monopoly of film capital that continues to exacerbate the ethnic
108
stratification of non-Hollywood cinema. In Australia, these networks

further challenge the ethno-centric claims of white nationalism and
the protectionist industry of state-funded national cinema. These
literacies highlight the pleasures associated with film consumption,
emphasize the role of film as a site for resisting dominant cultures,
and allow students, as individuals and groups, to construct their
identities within the specificities of historical and social contexts.
In particular, critical media literacy allows students to further
cultivate and acquire transcultural literacy.
Transcultural Literacy: Textual and Worlded Practices

of Displacement
Transcultural literacy highlights the thirdness of critical

multicultural pedagogy by focusing on the transcendence of
boundaries and using the concept of the diaspora to connect textual
practices to the constructions of hybrid identities. Alex Kostogriz
and Georgina Tsolidis (2008) examine how transcultural literacy
emerges out of border-crossing techniques that extend beyond
the ‘us’ and ‘them’ binary as they are lived between and within
nations. This approach, they suggest, provides an alternative to
neoliberal understandings of cultural difference that celebrate
multicultural diversity by exoticizing otherness and ignoring
entrenched inter-ethnic power relations. The socio-cultural
formation of the diaspora provides ‘a network that binds the local
and global, the particular and the abstract, ‘us’ and ‘them’, and in
doing so, transcends these binarisms through cultural-semiotic
innovations that cannot be simply captured within a bounded space
of nation-states and their cultural politics of literacy education’
(Kostogriz and Tsolidis 2008: 126). Transcultural literacy not only
responds to and reflects the various shifts between the global and
local, place and space; it is embedded in social and cultural practices
●
of meaning-making and identity-making as the site between various

and often competing cultures.
Students’ affective responses and the discourses they perform
about the diaspora reflect how transcultural literacy is cultivated
by relating the textual practices of the film to experiences of
displacement and hybrid identities. These experiences are related
to but not reduced to focus on the Hong Kong diaspora: they
highlight how literacy is shaped by continual interactions and
overlapping national socio-politico-cultural relations, and
transformed through specific and individual cultural practices;
they also reflect the diverse range of students’ viewing positions.
While some students from Hong Kong focus directly on issues
relating to the Hong Kong diaspora, others from Hong Kong and
China view Hong Kong as a part of China, and consider these issues
through the lens of the national. Students from Taiwan and South-
East Asia, together with students from Anglo-Australian, American
and South American backgrounds, use the issues of the Hong Kong
diaspora to relate to their broader experiences of travelling,
migration and displacement.
Textual practices of displacement

Liked the representation of national/cultural connections
through food — how the mother’s complex feelings of
displacement and belonging can be mapped through her reaction
to it — first not knowing how to cook ‘properly’; her pleasure at
having Japanese food again; and then her admission that she
liked the food in Hong Kong better. (S12)
I like how the film makes stark contrasts between the different
nations that were brought up and the reflection process as well
as the cuts during this process. (S10)
It has also made me gain some knowledge of history. (S11)

110
Sino-Japanese relationship has improved but there still is the

tension at the present. I realized that it is always hard for the
older generation to understand how the younger ones always
seeks for dramatic changes. The changes may be difficulty but
may result in a positive way like the characters. (S13)
China and Japan’s relationship is always an issue between two

countries. From the films, maybe these two countries’ relationship
is not that as we think. Another thing is the relationship b/w
mother and daughter or older people and younger people. (S9)
In the student responses above, students highlight, in the first

instance, the textual practices of diasporic displacement. Food is
seen as a signifier for national belonging and cultural displacement
(S12). This tension is also evident from the film’s aesthetic practices
of editing, as well as through the different technical codes of colour
and mise-en-scene (S10). From the film’s micro politics of eating
to the macro narrative of national differences, the film’s historical
genre is also acknowledged as a site for understanding the
relationship between Japan and China (S13). These motifs of history
and tension are also metaphors for the plot’s intergenerational
conflict (S9). These responses use formalist film language to decode
the film’s textual practices of displacement. Here, the film’s
experiences of the diaspora are connected to the history of migration
and its effects on everyday life and kinship. From these direct
technical and symbolic codes of signification, the film’s textual
practices of displacement are used as starting points to further
perform a worlded discourse of global migration.
Worlded practices of displacement

How globalisation has affected inter-personal relationships (with
family, friends). … Displacement and its consequences: the
identity problem, acceptance in a new society, integration issues.
(S8)
●
It shows the darker side of maybe globalisation yet characters

can find solace in closed ones. (S10)
I think it’s illustrated for me the real sense of confusion and

dislocation that migration can create. (S21)
Before the movie, I have always felt that displacement from

home is an extremely sensitive and emotionally situation. This
movie has further justified the intensity of such emotion. (S22)
It constructs a clearer image of how migration is, especially

when you do not know the language. It reflects how hard it is.
(S28)
The film’s textual practices of displacement allow students to further

articulate a worlded discourse of global migration. This performative
move recalls Freire’s (1995) insistence on how reading the word is
also a way of reading the world. Edward Said has also reiterated
the importance of placing the presence of the text in the world
(1983: 31–53). While the term ‘worlded pedagogy’ refers to the
text’s geographical ‘global’ positioning, it also points to a pedagogic
practice that denaturalizes area or historical studies, towards ‘new
spatialities and temporalities (that) might help to continue to
produce students who, while not at home in the world, are
productively strangers in it, and have a better idea of what questions
to ask and where to go for them’ (Connery 2007: 11). Student
responses above eschew the utopic universality of globalization,
and critically evoke globalization’s transformation of personal
relationships (S8) by complicating it with the material realities of
physical, social, linguistic and psychological dislocation (S10). They
highlight hardships arising from geographical separation (S22),
community marginalization (S8), language deficiency (S28) and
emotional trauma (S22). Here, the textual practices of migration
open up a worlded pedagogy based on how social spaces and
relations are transformed as a result of geographical movement
and cross-cultural encounters. This type of pedagogic practice
112
uses a new spatial theory of literacy afforded by the diaspora as

a ‘material-semiotic space’ (Kostogriz and Tsolidis 2008: 134).
It attends to how space is extended and intensified by globality,
and explores how it is transformed by boundary crossing rather
than boundary maintenance. By focusing on the intermixing
between local and global, it also problematizes the normative
ascriptions to binary understandings of ‘us’ and ‘them’, and accounts
for the messiness of intercultural communication and complexities
of becoming.
Personal practices of displacement

I can see how someone like my mother would be able to relate
a bit more to Hueyin’s mother — having come to Australia at a
mature age from a different background (Chinese background).
(S3)
Migrating to a western country at a young age. The culture at

home and the culture outside are so completely different.
Sometimes I feel I’m neither Asian nor Australia. (S5)
I migrated from China (Guangzhou) when I was young so the

issues/ideas portrayed in the film were nothing new to me. I
could relate with Hueyin’s feelings. (S7)
Being away from home certainly seemed similar to Hueyin and

her mother’s sense of loss and uncertainty. (S10)
(Differences from my own experience.) Experience in overseas

for me wasn’t really an isolation from that culture as people
around me were keen to integrate. People are now more open-
minded as they have better access to media. (Similarities)
nostalgia of my own culture, homesick. (S13)
I felt a sense of identification with Hueyin in being in a way

dislocated, in not feeling which country which culture she
associated with most and which was home. (S21)
●
Students use Hueyin and Aiko’s practices of displacement to

explicitly construct their personal performance of migration. They
form a ‘sympathetic identification’ (Jauss 1982) with the central
protagonists through similar experiences of migration, and the film
reproduces and reinforces these experiences to confirm what they
have already felt, thought or know. While identification is based
on sameness, identity is nonetheless constructed through the
‘thirdness’ of the diaspora that encompasses the cultural
ambivalence of ‘both and also’ (Soja 1996). This performance
extends the earlier worlded discourse of migration to focus on the
locality and historicity of displacement. Articulations of liminality
destabilize the normative divisions between the Chinese homeland
(S7) and the Western hostland (S5); they also construct the
inbetweeness of Asian Australian identity (S5) from interlocking
cultures, intergenerational histories and nostlagic loss (S21; S10;
S13). In this material-semiotic space, hybrid identity is fashioned
through multiple temporal and spatial scales of belonging.
Multi-modal belonging
It has reinforced the idea the many dimensions of relationships
between countries, races etc. (S3)
I can see a lot similarities in this movie. I also have multiple

cultural background which involves France, China, U.S and
Australia now. I have to say all these countries are important
to me. (S5)
The world is transnational as a whole. (S14)
I like the ending — the uneasy resolve to almost live in between

several worlds … It has sort of validated my existing world view.
(S20)
(Identified with) multi-ethnicity. (S26)

114
The transnationality echoes with my own background. It also

showed how complex Hong Kong identity is. (S27)
It shows the contradiction of being a migrant, and reflects the

social problem under a complicated, multi-nation society. (S28)
Students’ multiple scales of belonging combine textual, worlded

and personal practices of displacement to construct a transformed
sense of belonging to several places and no particular place at the
same time. The textual identity of Hong Kong (S27) is used as a
departure point to relate to the similarities of personal experiences
such as migrancy (S28) and multinationality (S5; S26). These are
further expanded to include a transnational globality (S14) that
confronts exclusionary antagonism (S20) and combines the
inclusive pleasure of co-existence (S3). Here, the students’ diverse
viewing positions and the expanded scale of their transcultural
identification provides a potential new template to consider how a
critical multicultural pedagogy responds to the urgency of a
multicultural and global society. Against the increased flows of
people and cultures across nation-states, the materiality of the
diaspora articulates the complexity of multiculturalism that insists
on ‘new geographies of identity’ (Lavie and Swedenburg 1996).
Diaspora’s divided and multiple inheritances, between here and
there, Asia and Australia, also suggest that this encounter is never
pure; rather, it can only be shaped by the dialogic irreducibility of
intercultural communication and translation.
Transcultural literacy is a ‘contact zone’ where cultures often
confront each other in unequal relations of power (Pratt 1998: 173,
cited in Kostogriz and Tsolidis 2008: 132). As a new pedagogical
tool for critical multiculturalism, transcultural literacy foregrounds
the significance of the contact zone as a third space to read,
understand and develop responses to asymmetries of power
relations. In students’ affective responses to Song of the Exile, the
performative effects of the text have enabled them to begin from
●
this contact zone to consider the broader impacts of global, personal

and multi-modes of displacement, identity-formation and belonging.
The next section will further show how transcultural literacy
constructs a border pedagogy that allows an ethical self-fashioning.
Border Pedagogy: Agency and Self-fashioning
When theorizations on gender, race and inequality by black and

feminists-of-colour began to impact the development of critical
pedagogy in the 1990s, border pedagogy emerged as a practice that
can produce different readings of history and empower those groups
that had existed at the margins of mainstream life. Gloria Anzaldua’s
Borderlands/La Frontera was influential to contributions in
educational theory and pedagogy (Anzaldúa 1987. See also Fried
1995; Elenes 2003). Giroux argues that ‘(b)order pedagogy is
attentive to developing a democratic public philosophy that respects
the notion of difference as part of a common struggle to extend the
quality of public life’ (1992: 28). It has three aims: (1) recognizes
the epistemological, social, cultural and economic margins that
structure history, power and difference; (2) students learn to
become border crossers and understand otherness in their own
terms; (3) makes visible the strengths and limitations of socially
constructed places and borders that shape our social relations. As
Jane Fried clearly summarizes, ‘[a] significant purpose of border
pedagogy is to help people learn where borders have been
established, explore the forces that established them, how each
person is defined by a range of borders which may be invisible to
him or her and whether or not people feel comfortable and
competent with the borders that define them’ (1995: 80). These
central tenets of border pedagogy are reflected in how students
perform otherness and use ethnicity to construct agency in their
ethical self-fashioning.
116
Performing otherness as border-crossers

The isolation from another culture. (S7)
I have experienced the feeling of being in a foreign country and

limited by lack of understanding of the language when I was on
exchange in France. I experience those times of frustration
created by language barriers — like the daughter experienced
when going with her mother in Japan. (S17)
I identified with Hueyin during her trip to Japan as I have

experience the feeling of being isolated in a new country and
not understanding the language or culture. (S18)
I identify with the sentiment of not understanding your

surrounds. I spend a year in France and felt out of place at first
and was always conscious of the fact that they knew I wasn’t
French. I also spent some time in Japan in a host family. In all,
though I tend to enjoy being immersed in a situation where I
don’t understand what is being said around me. (S19)
Students perform otherness by understanding otherness in their

own terms. The film’s textual practice of otherness (explicitly
denoted by both the mother and daughter’s inabilities to speak and
understand Chinese and Japanese) allows students to read these
codes historically and critically, and further enables them to engage
this knowledge as border-crosses. One student highlights the
difference between centres and margins (S7). Other Anglo-
Australian and Chinese students draw out differences between
themselves and French or Japanese cultures during their study
exchange overseas (S17–19). Abdul JanMohammed (1994) discusses
this performance as both dis-identification and re-identification in
order to form alliances with other positions. Students first dis-
identify with the text by not relegating the othering of Aiko and
Hueyin to the racialized codes of ethnicity. They then re-identify
with their own subject-positions to self-reflexively understand the
●
constructions of their own identity in relation to their everyday

experiences of access and privilege. That is, they did not fetishize
Hueyin or Aiko’s othering, but use othering to understand the
conduct of their experiences in foreign countries. This pedagogical
encounter with otherness is important in the critical consideration
of teaching cultural difference using an ethnically marked text.
Sanjay Sharma (2006) describes this as a practice of ‘alterity
pedagogy’ and advocates its significance as an encounter with the
other outside of the reductive categories of racialized knowledge
and experience: ‘It would be a relationship to the ‘other’ which
resists reifying its identity, and instead enters into a productive
ethical “alliance”’ (2006: xiv). Ethical self-fashioning is further
evident in the following responses that use ethnicity as a form of
agency rather than identity. I first discuss how students code ethical
self-fashioning in the film text, and then show how they perform
ethical self-fashioning from the film text.
Ethnicity as agency: Ethical self-fashioning in the film

text
I like the aspect of culture shock of the film e.g. the mother is
Japanese, how the relationship gets changed between the mother
and her daughter. (S9)
[I identified with the mum]: As a foreigner living in China. She

had to face a stressful life and made her a strong character.
(S14)
How different cultures were taken out of the context and fitted
into a totally different culture. I liked the sense of adaptation
but yet some what alienation as it questions the identity of the
characters. (S16)
Going to the foreign country and not understanding the language

or culture complete and also feeling more at home in a way in
a different country. (S21)
118
How hard it must have been to learn another language and

different culture, and trying to fit in. (S23)
Representations of otherness in the film are used to construct

agency. Students draw out the film’s motifs of ethnic otherness
such as Aiko’s foreignness, culture shock, anachronistic cultures
and linguistic difference, and use these ethnic markers to construct
the protagonists’ agency: the transformation of kinship (S9); the
resilience of the migrant (S14); the ability to adapt despite
discrimination (S16); the acquisition of language (S23), and the
symbolic entry into culture (S21). Although these practices are
coded through ethnicity, they are ‘put to use’ as agency. Students’
affective responses to these practices expose the self-fashioning
tactics of Hueyin and Aiko as they learn to undo the ethnic burdens
of their marginality. In Aiko’s and Hueyin’s desire for self-
determination (and reconciliation), they learn a different language,
come to accept each other’s cultural difference and successfully
assimilate. Coded through the labour of ethnicity, these agential
practices question how dominant power and knowledge structures
construct borders that prevent migrant families and ethnic
minorities from making claims to and participating in culture. They
expose ethnic labour as a site for the accumulation of material and
affective capital, and show how the neoliberal governance of
ethnicity has been mobilized as a cultural resource for ethnic
inclusion and recognition (Chow 1998; Ong 1999; Yudice 2003).
This approach considers ethnic self-fashioning through the concept
of ethics.
Rey Chow (1998; 2004) uses an anti-humanist concept of ethics
to advocate a critical reading practice that exposes the strategies
of benevolence in discourses such as the liberal, humanist,
multicultural and universal claims to diversity, otherness, rights
and tolerance. Chow’s concept of ethics departs from dominant
postcolonial studies that discuss ethics through morality and
●
celebrate the alterity of hybrid ethnic identity by valorizing and

universalizing cultural difference as freedom. Her deployment, as
demonstrated in the previous chapter’s discussion on Hong Kong’s
self-fashioning, is more aligned with Foucauldian ethics as the
negotiated practices of freedom. Foucault (1997) discusses ethics
as the practice of self-fashioning governed by various biopolitical
practices of regulation and self-regulation. Students’ affective
responses to the self-fashioning of Aiko and Hueyin clearly reveal
the restrictive structures that shape the subjectivation of the
protagonists’ encounters with kinship, migrancy and reconciliation.
Ethical self-fashioning is also evident in the performative text.
Ethnicity as agency: Ethical self-fashioning in the

performative text
I speak the 4 languages spoken in the film actually. That’s why
I know how Aiko feels when she speaks. The vocabularies she
used, the tones, etc. She’s somewhat alienated … unable to ‘alter’
little Hueyin, therefore ‘self-subaltern’ herself even in an
unpleasant way (e.g. Mahjong, bring left overs home). (S1)
I always know the world is more complicated than I could

imagine. One may lose his/herself (metaphorically) in his/her
own culture (imagine different social status, wealth, etc) let
alone in another culture. And when one’s out of town, he/she
would tend to reminisce the good things of his/her own culture,
to make comparisons between them … Unfortunately to the folks
in the home country (fantasising too? Maybe) then that person
is forced into telling them the wonderful things happened outside
… That person is different from the locals, at the same time,
different from the teenagers. So this is where “inbetweeness”
comes in. (S2)
The two student responses highlight how the film speaks to their
own agential practices of self-stereotyping. Although S1 chides
120
Aiko’s presumed ‘self-subalternization’, what the previous chapter

has described as the technologies that shape Aiko’s individuation
and subject formation, s/he nonetheless qualifies this by pointing
out his/her shared experience with Aiko. S1’s comment raises the
issue of authenticity in relation to language and ethnicity. S2 also
uses Aiko’s return to Japan as an event to discuss how relatives
and friends from home have come to stereotype the visiting
emigrant. For S2, inauthenticity is evident from cultural hybridity
ensued as a result of assimilating in the hostland. These two
reflections of inauthenticity further show how these students’ self-
awareness of such stereotypes are actively ‘put to use’ in their
self-stereotyping of ethnicity: S1 uses his/her accented voice to
show up and reinforce the dominant construct of his/her othering;
S2 uses his/her cultural inbetweeness to ‘boast’ about the good
migrant life in order not to lose ‘face’ and thereby conforms to the
stereotyped expectations about the visiting/returning emigrant.
Both self-reflexively use their ethnic otherness to perform the
migrant stereotype in order to secure recognition and
acknowledgement from the mainstream.
By drawing from their own experiences, these students perform
their own ‘critical narratology’. As a process of ‘reading personal
narratives against society’s treasured stock of imperial or magisterial
narratives, since not all narratives share a similar status and there
are those which exist, highly valued, within society’s rifts and
margins’ (McLaren 1995: 91), these narratives form the cultural
contact between the individuals, groups and the world. They
challenge the conventional rules of self-fashioning within diasporic
and autobiographical identities that are encouraged and dominated
by the totalizing narrative of a hegemonic white Australia.
George Yudice (2003) discusses this agential practice by
extending Foucauldian ethics to refer to how minority groups are
not only governed by discourses that demand their conformity to
dominant representations, but also how they self-stereotype in their
●
representations in order to make claims in their demands for

cultural resources. Anthony Appiah (2005) builds on this
theorization of ethical subjectivation to refer to these processes of
self and group fashionings as the cultivation of individuality. Rather
than the hybridity of ethnic identity that celebrates the emancipation
of the subject through the recognition of cultural difference, the
ethics of ethnic identity highlights the constraints by which migrants
and diasporic groups construct their self-presence and self-
autonomy. By showing how the self is governed through individual
cultivation, group management and/or official representation, it
emphasizes how identity is governed, how resources are distributed
and how cultural power functions. For ethnic minority groups such
as the two students cited, ethical self-fashioning shows how this
self-awareness of ethnic identity is reinvested as ethical agency. In
this way, border pedagogy empowers students by transforming the
language of self-representation and visualizing a new ethnic
configuration and subject-position.
Conclusion
This chapter has provided a self-reflexive account of teaching Song

of the Exile in Australia. By situating the film under the rubric of
critical multiculturalism, it has shown how the teaching of
postcolonial Hong Kong cinema can be sustained as a political
pedagogy that resists the pluralist demands of a neoliberal
curriculum. Unlike the more popular cinemas of John Woo, Jackie
Chan and Wong Kar-wai, Song of the Exile does not enjoy the
privilege of cult fandoms or DVD re-issues. In the West, the film’s
longevity is largely attributed to its inclusion in film studies
curriculum. This chapter hopes it has provided an ethical pedagogy
for how the film can be used to teach identity and cultural
difference. These issues are central to the film text; they are also
122
significant to understanding the increasing prominence of Hong

Kong cinema in the global film arenas.
The chapter has shown how a deconstructive pedagogical
critical practice is possible by considering the diasporic circulation
of the film as an excentric, oppositional and decentred formation
that speaks directly to the exigency of Hong Kong modernity. A
radical critical pedagogy promotes critical media literacy to
understand and interrogate the workings of minor cinema under
the monopoly of global and national film capitals. This chapter has
also shown how the film functions as a performative and affective
text. In the classroom, a radical critical pedagogy also promotes
transcultural literacy by using the contact zone as a departure point
to engage in the necessities of intercultural translation and ethical
self-formation.
As Asian cinemas continue in their ascendance to other parts
of the world, as China’s cultural exports are expanding to becoming
the second largest global creative economy, and as Hong Kong
cinema continues to be incorporated and remade by Hollywood,
the fundamental challenge facing teachers of Hong Kong cinema
in the age of neoliberalism is to provide the conditions for students
to address how knowledge and capital are related to self-definition
and social agency. There is a need to construct more vocabularies
to address Hong Kong cinema’s new locations of struggle and
subject-positions that allow students (as audiences and consumers
alike) to participate in cinema’s public life. Border pedagogy, with
its emphasis on the specificity of place, foregrounds the cultural,
political and emotional baggage that educators and students bring
to their encounter. It questions the assumptions behind this
encounter and makes students and educators accountable for the
stories they produce, the claims they make upon public and
cinematic memory, and the ways they legitimate them. Song of the
Exile reflects the complexity of the border as a practice of
representation and a representation of practice. As border cinema
●
(practice of representation), the film has facilitated the development

of border pedagogy in the teaching of the curriculum. As alternative
modernity (representation of practice), it has also enabled the
development of a critical border consciousness. In Australia and
elsewhere where a critical multicultural curriculum is at risk of
being absorbed by a more liberal education where the vocationalizing
of higher education takes precedence over education’s role as a
resource to the civic life of the nation, the role of pedagogy as a
political platform for cultural democracy needs ever more to be
defended.
Notes
Introduction
1. See for example: Berlant 1997, 1998; Bhabha 1999; Cohen 2002;
Dowrick 1991; Giddens 1992; Kasulis 2002; Lévinas 1969. This
theorization will be fully explored in chapter one.
Chapter 1 The Diasporas of Hong Kong
1. According to the official Hong Kong government’s figures tabled by

Ronald Skeldon (1995: 57), emigration from Hong Kong accelerated
from around 20,000 per annum in 1981 to about 62,000 in 1994.
2. Hamid Naficy (2001) discusses claustrophobia as a mode of
spectatorship that reflects the liminal perspective of the migrant.
3. On translation as a practice of the social relation of communication
between two language communities, see Naoki Sakai (1997: 15).
4. On the transformation of inheritance in the diaspora, see Chakrabarty
(2001) and Chow (2007).
126
● Notes for pp. 35–65
5. Hui revealed in an interview that Cheung was the film investor’s choice
for the film. Hui initially did not consider Cheung appropriate for the
role as she was of the wrong age. See Kong 1999: 19.
6. Chapter two will discuss the flashback sequences more fully in relation
to genre and memory. Arguably, there is a seventh ‘flashback’ — the
scene in Manchuria — which is actually Hueyin imagining the event
as told by the brother.
7. For a discussion of ethnic Han Chinese migration to Manchuria during
this period, see Reardon-Anderson 2005.
Chapter 2 Re-turn to Hong Kong: Authorship, Memory, Intimate

Biography
1. The writings of Laura Mulvey, Teresa de Lauretis, Pam Cook, Mary

Ann Doane, Ann Kaplan, Annette Kuhn, Judith Mayne and Deidre
Pribam are key in this field. For a detailed history of the movement,
see Blaetz 2007.
2. I have not used the term ‘post-feminist’ to frame Hui’s cine-practice.
In popular discourses in the West, the term ‘post-feminist’ describes
the backlash against second-wave feminism in the early 1990s and
has been loosely associated with third-wave feminism. These discourses
encapsulate a range of practices by a generation of women born after
the second wave; some of these take an anti-feminist stance that
promotes female self-empowerment (through individual capitalism)
but do not interrogate the structures of heterosexism and patriarchy;
and some even proclaim that feminism is no longer relevant. On these
critiques, see Bordo 1997, Faludi 1991 and Walker 1992. Hui’s model
of female creativity and her counter-cinematic strategies do not reflect
these generational, individualistic and anti-feminist positions and
practices.
3. For a development of these approaches, see Olney 1980; Smith 1987.
4. The May Fourth tradition in cinema comes from the political and
intellectual developments in May Fourth thought, and is characterized
by the ‘nationalist opposition to imperialist aggression, support for
Notes for pp. 77–91 127
●
the political democratization of Chinese life, and rejection of traditional

Confucian morality and values’ (Pickowicz 1993: 297).
5. As witnessed during the initial stage of the transition in 1991 when
the colony initiated its first democratic elections, the previous 140
years or so of British imperialism have revealed deeply entrenched
colonial structures.
6. Foucault (1997) refers to ethics as a specific set of regulations defined
not in relation to universal law (morality) but subjectivation.
Subjectivation is a process of the transformation of an individual into
the subject. That is, the subject is the outcome of a set of procedures
that produce the transformation which constitutes it. This means the
subject is produced through a history that determines and defines the
conditions of existence for the subject. To understand an ethical history
of the subject is to question how history ‘subjects’, ‘subjectivises’ and
‘makes subject’. Foucault formulates ethics as a practice of the self to
refer to the labour of self-cultivation and transformation: ‘a history
of “ethics” (is) understood as the elaboration of a form of relation to
self that enables the individual to fashion himself into a subject of
ethical conduct’ (1985: 251). The ethical subject is a subject (of self-
knowledge) as well as an object (of regulation). As the process of the
formation of cultural identity and as the process that transforms the
individual into a subject, subjectivation is also a practice of the border.
Chapter 3 Teaching Song of the Exile in the Diaspora: Minor

Cinema, Transcultural Literacy and Border Pedagogy
1. In this diverse cohort, two thirds of the students were from various
Asian backgrounds including China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan
and Malaysia, and the rest were from Anglo-Australian backgrounds,
or from American and South American backgrounds. Student statuses
vary, including local, international and exchange. Their responses to
the film are coded from S1 to S30.
Awards and Nominations
Asia-Pacific Film Festival (1990)

Best Film
Golden Horse Film Festival (1990)

Nominated Best Film
10th Hong Kong Film Awards (1991)

Nominated Best Picture
Nominated Best Director, Ann Hui
Nominated Best Screenplay, Wu Nien-jen
Ann Hui’s Filmography
The Secret (Feng jie), Hong Kong 1979

The Spooky Bunch (Xiaojie Zhuang dao gui), Hong Kong 1980
The Story of Woo Viet (Hu Yue de gu shi), Hong Kong 1981
The Boat People (Tou ben nu hai), Hong Kong 1982
Love in a Fallen City (Qing cheng zhi lian), Hong Kong 1984
The Romance of Book and Sword (Shu jian en chou lu), Hong Kong/China
1987
Princess Fragrance (Xiang xiang gong zhu), Hong Kong 1987
Starry is the Night (Jin ye xing guang can lan), Hong Kong 1988
Song of the Exile (Ke tu qiu hen), Hong Kong/Taiwan 1990
Zodiac Killers (Ji dao zhui zong), Hong Kong 1991
My American Grandson (Shanghai jiaqi), Hong Kong/Taiwan 1991
Boy and His Hero (Xiao nian yu ying xiong), Taiwan 1993
Summer Snow (Nu ren si shi), Hong Kong 1995
Ah Kam (A Jin de gu shi), Hong Kong 1996
As Time Goes By (Ji du chun feng), Hong Kong 1997
Eighteen Springs (Ban sheng yuan), Hong Kong/China 1997
Ordinary Heroes (Qian yan wan yu), Hong Kong/China 1999
132
● Ann Hui’s Filmography
Visible Secret (Youling renjian), Hong Kong 2001

July Rhapsody (Nan ren si shi), Hong Kong 2002
Goddess of Mercy (Yu guanyin), China 2003
The Postmodern Life of My Aunt (Yi ma de hou xian dai sheng huo), Hong
Kong/China 2006
The Way We Are (Tian shui wei de ri yu ye), Hong Kong 2008
Night and Fog (Tian shui wei de ye yu mo), Hong Kong 2009
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Ann Hui’s

Song of the Exile

Series General Editors

Other titles in the series

© Audrey Yue 2010

All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Secure on-line Ordering

Hong Kong University Press is honoured that Xu Bing, whose

“At first glance, Square Word Calligraphy appears to be

Series Preface vii

3 Teaching Song of the Exile in the Diaspora: Minor 89

Awards and Nominations 129

Ann Hui’s Filmography 131

analytical strategies, in order to urge the readers towards self-

I owe debt to many people who have shaped and supported my

to keep my knowledge of the field up-to-date. An earlier version of

She then joined Hong Kong’s Television Broadcasting Limited (TVB)

conditions that fulfill the fantasy of Chinese national identity; they

of migration. Diasporic intimacies expose the myth of home as

of the political pedagogy of critical multiculturalism. It shows how

Song of the Exile traces the postwar life of a Japanese woman

Diasporas in Hong Kong Cinema and the Films of

The term ‘diaspora’ comes from the Greek word diaspeirein,

displacement. Supporting Esther’s Yau’s (2001) conceptualization

many as Hui’s masterpiece, The Boat People introduced Andy Lau

to the ambiguity of “origin” and “consequence”’ (Yau 2007: 133).

islanders, ethnic minorities, fringe dwellers, second generations)

Kong articulates its self-presence and cultural location, and key to

Framing Diaspora and Migration-as-Transition

As the term “diaspora” has gained currency in recent times due to

maintaining strong sentimental and material links with their

articulation of disparate Chinese identities (Ang 2001; Chow 1991;

[It] is marked not only by its attention to historicity, place,

Dirlik’s focus on the ‘concrete locations of diasporic experience

mother married to a Chinese soldier, left Japan to work in

refers to how the border is a site of encounter, confession and

colonialism to post-socialist Chinese sovereignty. Transition began

of the ‘post’. ‘Post’ is usually interpreted in two ways: ‘having gone

The homelands of Britain, China and Japan are significant in the

the possibilities of freedom. For example, despite the 1973 setting

question the possibility of postcolonial decolonization and

trying to send a book of Song poetry to Hueyin. Grandmother is

symbolic Westminster Bridge, this bridge represents the literal road

These discourses are exemplified by the grandfather’s symbolic

however, have shaped the narrative: the film’s script is written by

despite having acquired the status of legal belonging, whether by

politics of nationalisms, language and ethnicity. Aiko’s younger

People that features a Japanese photo-journalist as the protagonist.

Diasporic Intimacy in the Homelands

Intimacy is derived from the Latin word intimus to denote what is

also embraced in places like North America and Australia because

grandparents. The unhomeliness of home in China and Japan shows

Macau is examined as a transnational Chinese second home. Second

Manchuria’s history of Japanese occupation (as the Japanese state

expressed distantly. She looks at her mother’s back from the

Macau, a small peninsular at the mouth of the Pearl River, was

After the Second World War, it was a neutral place to settle

which some Europeans and Chinese succeeded in crossing and