A marginal person is one who is not at home at home, one who does not belong to his/her own country. For example, the recent film Falling Down portrayed a middle-class, white American who found himself homeless in his hometown. Another example: after the fall of the Berlin Wall, many Berliners still found a number of psychological walls between East and West. Another city, Hong Kong, may present a clearer situation for us to explore the resolution of this marginal psychology.
Park studied human migration and coined the term "the marginal man." He conceived the migrant as a person at the margin of two cultures and two societies. The two opposing entities never blended into one. Kim examined the intercultural adaptation of sojourners and their psychological adjustment. He concluded that cultural shock and cultural adaptation could lead to personal development over time. Factors such as personality characteristics, technical skills, and communication behavior could determine an individual's adaptation to cultural change. Barnouw examined the extreme case of cultural maladjustment for the schizophrenic. The intensity of urban change could lead to a "cultural fatigue" toward schizophrenia.
The marginal mentality of the Hong Kong people stems from the transitional life-cycle of the city of Hong Kong. At present, Hong Kong is still a British colony, to be returned to China in 1997. Over 90 percent of the population is ethnic Chinese. Historically, Hong Kong was the illegitimate child of an opium war and was raised by runaway parents. They were cut off from the ethnic culture in education and rendered passive by colonial rule. They were seduced by material affluence and doomed in destiny by the 1997 deadline. The people of Hong Kong seemed powerless and fatalistic, a dreamless generation, strangers in their own homeland.
The greatness of the Chinese culture conflicts with the apparent backwardness of the society in China. Chinese cultural pride clashes with the humiliation of British colonial reign, itself a declining world empire. Many unfulfilled dreams and unresolved identity crises are suppressed.
Emancipation of the Hong Kong corporate and individual mentality is expressed if one is thinking, planning, or moving to American soil. All the fear and aspirations, ego and shame, love and hate, dignity and negation of the self are expressed in interpersonal relationships. In film, these inner conflicts are externalized in male-female love, in relating to the older generation, in child-rearing, and in relating to American-born ethnic kin. The key question is: how can this marginal mentality be resolved?
Literature on Hong Kong film studies seldom examines the marginal personality and marginal culture of the people of Hong Kong. They focus more on the business and production aspects (Bart, Elley, Rayns, Stanbrook). Studies in Chinese films were primarily interested in aesthetic and stylistic aspects (Chen Xihe, Clark, Desser, Li, Pan, Semsel). However, the marginal personality of the Chinese people, and Hong Kong people in particular, did exemplify a strong cultural statement in films. It is the purpose of this study to examine the phenomenon of marginality and its resolution in films made by Hong Kong filmmakers while set in the US.
Statement of the Problem
This paper proposes to examine three key films produced by Hong Kong
filmmakers, set in the US, that addressed the paradoxical issue of marginality.
The films include: Love in a Foreign Land, Dim Sum: A Little Bit of heart, and
An Autumn Tale. This study explores a few key questions: How did these films
portray the split personality of the Chinese people on foreign soil? What icons
and symbols were employed? What narrative styles were used? What resolutions of
the marginal mental conflict were offered by these filmmakers, if any?
Love in a Foreign Land
This film by Law cheuk-yiu portrays a couple from the southern part of China
struggling to leave their own country. After repeated application to and
rejection by the American consulate, the wife finally arrives at New York. She
undergoes humiliation, rape-attempts, joblessness, sickness, and abuses to stay
alive. Her husband seeks after her by way of Panama. His search becomes a
series of flashbacks revealing his wife's tragic story. At the end of the film,
the husband discovers that his wife has become schizophrenic. The final scene
shows the wife killing her husband in front of a statute of the Goddess of
Democracy, a recast of the one erected at Tienanmen Square during June 4,1989.
Finally, the camera tilts up to an American flag.
The film shows a growing divergence between the Chinese side and the American side of the wife's personality. Symbols are used to suggest her Chineseness. She struggles to carry a large cushion on a bicycle and lives on a scanty supply of food. Her letters to home are written but not sent. She fights against oppression and rape. She survives after sickness and abuses. Her baggage, signifying her old self, is gone. Her family portrait turns pale. She finds wounds and guilt, humiliation and shame on a foreign soil. No one understands her inner self, so she is driven to the edge of schizophrenia.
The other side of her personality lives among the rich and the beautiful. She shuttles between art galleries, speaks fluent English, dresses in vogue, and uses her sex and her Chineseness as instruments to earn a luxurious living. She turns from prey to predator, cheating old folks in Chinatown for money, living a lifestyle that her Chinese half would never accept. She epitomizes the Chinese-American of her time, marginal between two heritages; and, in the end, rejecting both.
This film uses folk songs of mid-western China as a backdrop. They serve as reminders of China. The calling of the motherland never ceases to echo in one's heart. The film ends with a complete negation of the Self, both physically and psychologically, with no resolution of this internal conflict.
Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart
Dim Sum by Wang Wing narrates a conflict between two cultures-
-
Chinese
and American--
in
the inner self of an American-born woman and her aging mother. The insecurity
of the mother and her inconsistency in behavior demonstrate the intense
conflict of a marginal person living on alien soil, incapable of integrating
two cultures. The mother is possessive of her daughter. She fears being left
alone in a foreign land. She hates the thought of dying and being buried in
America.
The daughter is an American bird housed in a Chinese cage. The camera frequently includes a bird cage in many shots. The daughter speaks fluent American. She hates having her privacy violated when her mother tries to read her letters. She urges her mother to remarry her uncle. She wants to leave her mother and indeed tries, only to find she cannot handle her mother's psychosomatic illness. She is bitter toward her sisters who are all married and gone, leaving her to take care of the old lady. Her Chineseness makes her feel obliged to take care of her mother. She finally realizes how Chinese she is and accepts it, though reluctantly.
Two scenes reinforce the resolution between the two cultures. In the first, the daughter skillfully makes dragon-boat dumplings. The title of the film, "Dim Sum," means "dumpling." Making the dumplings, she comes to terms with her Chineseness. She will never be a "pure" American like her sisters.
The second scene shows a family dinner with the daughters and sons- in-law. One of the daughters has married an African-American. Marriage to an African- American by one of the daughters signifies the hope, disappointment, and the coming to terms with American reality by the mother, very reluctantly.
An Autumn Tale
An Autumn Tale by Mabel Cheung is an intersection of an illiterate, streetwise
survivor in New York's Chinatown with a student from Hong Kong. It is a love
story in which a young, female intellectual gradually understands herself
better when placed on foreign soil. As Derek Elley observes, the plot is a
predictable story in which hostility is turned into romance (183).
The female lead character finds herself in love with the streetwise cousin. In him, she finds a raw kind of Chineseness and the wit of a marginal man in a foreign land. Encountering an alien culture helps stimulate her self- reflection and brings a reconstruction of her marginal self. She discovers she is less purposeful in life than she thought. She is less equipped to handle change and cultural shock than she wished. The experience is humiliating.
The male lead is direct, full of Chinese slang, unrefined, and ready to risk his life for his friends in gang fights. He has the resilience to endure the hardship of life, including a broken love.
The humorous remarks of the male character played by Chow Yun-fat give the audience a sense of hope, showing that the incompatibility between the Chinese and American cultures can somehow be bridged within oneself. He is rough in language but kind at heart. He can joke about himself and his Chineseness, embracing the American dream of opportunity without rejecting his own Chinese personality. It is he who, at the end, is able to start a restaurant at the pier and fulfill his dreams. Only one living in harmony with one's ethnic heritage, embracing a sense of purpose in life, can survive the strangeness and reality of the American dream. At the end of the film he invitingly asks the girl, "A table for two?" The American dream can be shared by all.
The Ethos of the Hong Kong Chinese
The ethos of the Hong Kong Chinese has a cultural and historical root. The
people in Hong Kong shared with many on the mainland a refugee mentality. They
were strangers in their homeland. They were not at home with their own cultural
identity. Going to America was part of the attempt to negate one's past. But
negating a significant part of oneself did not promise an indwelling of
something new. Many Chinese found themselves more Chinese than they would like
to be. They were less adaptive to the American culture than they would have
hoped for. What did the people of Hong Kong and China try to escape from? Was
it the system or the culture? Was it wealth or opportunity they were seeking?
One may have to trace the historical root to answer to some of these
deep-structure questions.
The genealogy of the people of Hong Kong reveals a history of ethnic humiliation and suffering. Millions were massacred during the Nanking attack of the Sino- Japanese war. The power struggle between the Communist party and the Kuomintang killed another million. The nation was torn apart by the territorial zones claimed by eight Western superpowers. Cannibalism and a fatal attack on human dignity occurred during the Cultural Revolution. Often the fight for democracy was crushed, in 1978, 1986, and in 1989 at Tienanmen Square.
Natural disasters have ravaged the land into futility. One of the greatest earthquakes of the century killed half a million in Tang Shan. Great floods killed many along the Yangtze and the Yalu rivers. In many parts of mainland China, people are still struggling to maintain basic subsistence.
Intellectuals were abused and debased, both during the Qien dynasty and during the past forty years of socialism. Many human and natural resources were laid waste. A country that once produced the greatest inventions of the world- -the compass, gunpowder, paper and press printing- - found itself so backward that some predicted the Chinese culture would not survive another century.
China, the most populated nation of the world, is at a crossroads. It cries out for deeper resources to face the challenges of the 21st century. Hong Kong, its prodigal son, would be a reminder of national humiliation and a model bread winner. The people of Hong Kong need to demonstrate a stronger inner-strength to inject life into this ancient civilization. Film and the media could be an indispensable vehicle for this cultural renewal.
Through pain and hope, through identification and regeneration, one might break through the cultural dilemma and face the challenge of the future. Only when the Chinese people, and the Hong Kong Chinese in particular, come to terms with the past, can they muster strength for the future. How can one appreciate and accept one's ethnic heritage without being imprisoned by it? Can one integrate Western thinking with the Eastern mind? Maybe the blending of these paradoxical postures becomes an asset to face the acculturation challenge of the 21st century.
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