Dr Meng Li; Yunting Qi; Lorraine Lau
Dr Meng Li
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, teaching fellow in The Confucius Institute of Hong Kong
Mainland Chinese Women and Their Diasporic Consciousness in Post-1997 Hong Kong Cinema
The paper studies Mainland Chinese female characters in post-1997 Hong Kong cinema. The films to be studied mainly include: Love Will Tear Us Apart (dir. Yu Lik-wai, 1999), Hollywood Hong Kong (dir. Fruit Chan, 2001), Night and Fog (dir. Ann Hui, 2009) and Port of Call (dir. Philip Yung, 2015). Analysis of these films that portray Mainland Chinese women highlights the diasporic identities—an embodiment of borders in question (Tololyan, 2007), as well as the diasporic consciousness, which is “an intellectualization of the existential condition” (Safran, 1991). Representing “a segment of people living outside the homeland” (Connor, 1986), these diasporic women are rendered as the underprivileged who are restrained by their illegal immigration into Hong Kong. With limited working opportunity, these immigrants are relegated to hard laborers and sex workers, suffering from material deprivation, social discrimination, and sexual violence. Whereas diasporic female characters in the films are featured with geographical, physical, and psychological dislocations, these dislocations further convey emotions such as anxiety, confusion, and disillusionment invoked by differential circumstances. The diasporic consciousness illustrates an increasing tension between Mainland China and Hong Kong as of the 1997 handover. The depictions of these female characters bring to light the difficulty of their self-identifications, which simultaneously speak to their alienation both from Mainland China and Hong Kong. Meanwhile, these depictions serve as a reminder of all hitherto connections between Mainland China and Hong Kong, however controversial they could be.
Yunting Qi
Royal Holloway University of London, Year 1 PhD student in Geography
Homeland Re-integration: Overseas Returned Students to Shanghai, China
Recent years have witnessed an increasing number of students returning to China. The Chinese government takes these returned students (numbering 0.67 million in 2017) as talents and aims to attract them back to China. While most scholarship has focused on the roles of returned students played in the socio-economic development of China, few academic attentions have been paid to potential plights encountered by many returned students in the job market, everyday life, and integration into wider society. To make up this research gap, I am going to interrogate returned students’ everyday emotional geographies during homeland re-integration. There are five research themes in my project: transnational journey, social relations, everyday emotional dynamics, everyday governance and the concept of home. Based on existing literature, I adopt the research approach of feminist geographies and the “more-than-representational” to uncover everyday emotional geographies of returned students. The primary research method will be ethnography, including regular open-ended interviews with participants, participant observation, focus groups, discourse analysis of online post and other visual methods. Semi-structured interview will be employed as the supplementary method if necessary. This project can contribute to migration research through focusing on overseas returned students to China, a less examined group; also, the project develops the knowledge of emotional geographies through combining everydayness and emotions. In practice, the findings of the project can provide advice to Chinese government in terms of its talent policy and immigration regulations.
Lorraine Lau
University of Oxford, MSt in World Literartures in English
From Erasing Myself to Erasing Others: Losing and Finding 'Chineseness' in Anglophone Diasporic Life Writing
Writing outside of the homeland, Chinese diasporic writers must confront the troubled relationship between language and identity. If the writer chooses a different language such as English, to what extent does this choice reflect one’s connection, or lack thereof, to cultural roots? In her poetry collection Loop of Jade, Sarah Howe laments her lack of opportunity to learn Cantonese, despite spending her early childhood in Hong Kong. By expressing uncertainty about what constitutes authentic Chineseness, the mixed-race poet positions herself as a stranger returning to her homeland, while drawing comparisons between her cultural alienation and her Chinese mother’s childhood as an orphan. Howe’s wistfulness contrasts with Yiyun Li’s defiance in the latter’s memoir, Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life. Writing during a period of severe depression in the United States, Li seeks recovery by eliminating her mother tongue from her vocabulary, which she frames as an act of suicide. Using the paradox that her recovery relies on destruction, Li subverts the assumption of a stable cultural Chinese identity.