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ItemMigration-as-transition: Hong Kong cinema and the ethics of love in Wong Kar-wai’s 2046(Asia Research Institute / Singapore University Press, 2005)Migration is always an on-going 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. Central to this transformation is the encounter of the intersection as a border cultural practice consisting of convergence and divergence: the former through the bonds of similarities between home and host cultures; the latter through the transnationality of diasporic and global intimacies. At the heart of this intersection is a hope constituted in the anticipation that a better life elsewhere is also accompanied by the reciprocity of love. From the macro politics of the love for refugees, foreigners and strangers, to the micro regions of neighbourliness, to the daily vicissitudes of romantic and family love, the ethics of love has become synonymous with the making of the migratory subject and the forming of the coming community in our current times.This chapter examines migration-as-transition in Hong Kong cinema. Hong Kong cinema is an exemplary site to examine migration-as-transition because of its pre-post-1997 cultural condition that precipitated a period of transition beginning in the 1997 Handover of the British colony to the Chinese motherland, and ending its ‘one country, two systems’ Special Administrative Region rule in 2046. The pre-1997 and post-1997 transitional years have witnessed the migration of its people and its film industry to the region and the West. For the diasporic community and the global audience, Hong Kong cinema is a site of transition through cultural maintenance and negotiation. Within Hong Kong, the cinema is a site of transition through cultural survival. The political crisis of the pre-1997 Handover has transformed into the post-1997 economic crisis evidenced through the pre-millennial financial meltdown and the post-SARS market collapse. With the promises and lies of reform, the ethics of love now complicates Hong Kong’s triangulated grand narratives of Britain and China. This chapter will further illustrate how the ethics of love is evident in Wong Kar-wai’s 2046, a love story with a science-fiction subtext set in 2046. It argues that love is an intermediary that can question Hong Kong’s political transition because its ethics enable the possibility and the potentiality of a post-transitional coming community.
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ItemPaging ‘New Asia’: sambal is a feedback loop, coconut is a code, rice is a system(Duke University Press, 2003)The issue of sexuality in Singapore is an ambivalent discourse that crosses the borders between prohibition and endorsement, official and unofficial and private and public. On one level, homosexuality is prohibited and consensual same-sex desires are punishable as criminal offences. On another level, transgenderism is endorsed by the discourses of biology and medicine, and sanctioned (albeit unofficially) through state support and policy. This ambiguity manifests itself in numerous aspects of Singapore’s cultural location within both Asia and the West, and is exemplified also in recent discourse about New Asia. This chapter will investigate the culture of such an ambiguity by examining the consumption practices of computer-mediated communication (CMC) technology by lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities in Singapore cyberspace.
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ItemAsian-Australian cinema, Asian-Australian modernity(University of Queensland Press, 2000)This chapter examines the emergence of Asian-Australian modernity through cinema as site of cultural production. Using three films to map three characteristics, this paper presents Asian-Australian modernity as constituted in a culture of mobility that reconfigures ethnicity and reconstitutes desire. Beginning with the narrative of Chinese heterogeneity in Won Ton Soup (Clara Law, 1993), this paper argues that such a narrative is delineated by a mobile trajectory called ‘going south’. This trajectory acknowledges the movement of Asian migration into Australia, and as a critical transnational direction, it characterises the emergence of Asian-Australian modernity. Implicit in this trajectory is the formation of a cultural diaspora. Using the performativity of ethnicity in Floating Life (Clara Law, 1996), this paper further argues that such a performativity articulates the diasporic affect of alienation, defamilarisation and dis-placement. As a form of differential repetition, it produces an incommensurability of difference that redefines the paradigm of ethnicity. Asian-Australian modernity is further characterised by a reconfiguration of ethnicity. Underpinning this reconfiguration is a reconstitution of desire. Examining the politics of intercultural queer desire in the experimental documentary China Doll (Tony Ayres, 1997), this paper argues that the shift of gay desire from a postcolonial ‘rice-and-potato’ hybrid sexuality to the ‘sticky rice’ model locates an agency framed by the ambiguity of Asian-Australian visibility and pride. Characterised by such a model of cultural desire, Asian-Australian modernity articulates an emergining identity that visibilises as well as questions the hegemonic forces surrounding its constitution, expression and production.