Hong Kong Culture

Louie Kam

Published by Hong Kong University Press, HKU

Kam, Louie.
Hong Kong Culture: Word and Image.
Hong Kong University Press, HKU, 2010.
Project MUSE. muse.jhu.edu/book/21479.

For additional information about this book

https://muse.jhu.edu/book/21479

For content related to this chapter

https://muse.jhu.edu/related_content?type=book&id=757875
 10
On Spectral Mutations: The Ghostly City in
The Secret, Rouge and Little Cheung
Esther M. K. Cheung*

What we now call “hauntology” in critical and cultural studies arises from
attempts by critics and theorists to articulate the relation between textuality
and materiality. Some are particularly interested in the new world order after
the world-wide events of 1989 — a “time [which] is out of joint”, as Jacques
Derrida calls it, citing Shakespeare’s Hamlet.1 In my study of the spectral city
in Hong Kong cinema, the invocation of the ghostly has provided us with a
means through which the shock impact of the urban phantasmagoria can be
restored to itself by way of the things made strange, by ostranenie, which the
formalists call “defamiliarization” (see Shlovksy, 1994; Thompson, 1988).2 This
sense of estrangement from the world can therefore be seen as a moment of
aestheticization when allegories are screened.
If the turn to ghosts, spectres or apparitions offers tools of
“defamiliarization” for artists, spectral analysis in the present context is in
no way an attempt to focus on metaphysics and mysticism. On the contrary, it
follows the post-metaphysical strain in philosophical thinking, and in the recent
trend of spectral analysis to trace and track the material conditions of everyday
life in the mundane space of the city (see Paetzold, 2000; Gordon, 1997; Pile,
2002). In some cases, visible and invisible cross-cultural flows of various kinds
have shaped what one critic calls the “global uncanny” in the deterritorialized
space of the city (Wilson, 2005). When Walter Benjamin remarked on the French

* Research for this paper was completed with the generous support from the “General
Research Fund” of Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative
Region, China (Project no. HKU 7416/05H).

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 170 Esther M. K. Cheung

Surrealists in the 1920s, he wrote poetically, “No face is surrealistic in the same
degree as the true face of a city” (Benjamin, 1978, p. 182). As ghostly appearances
always challenge linear time, temporality in our analysis is more kairotic than
chronological. In Greek, kairos and chronos are two concepts of time. As opposed
to chronos, which refers to sequential chronological time, kairos is associated with
an opportune moment in which something critical and special happens.3 The
surreal, then, always intrudes at kairotic times, times that “are out of joint”. Instead
of occultism and mysticism, one may then speak of a special kind of “profane
illumination” that Benjamin observes in the work of the French Surrealists:
“There, too, are crossroads where ghostly signals flash from the traffic, and
inconceivable analogies and connections between events are the order of the
day” (Benjamin, 1978, p. 183). Intricately put, the sense of ghostliness is felt in
the everyday, mundane space of post–World War I Paris. When critical changes
are happening, some “materialist anthropological inspiration” can be derived
from the profane urban space. As Benjamin suggests, the city is “the region from
which the lyric poetry of Surrealism reports” (Benjamin, 1978, p. 183).
Almost a century apart from Benjamin’s time, the trope of the spectral city
in contemporary Hong Kong cinema carries the resonances of everydayness and
profanity at a different time and space. Such a different time and space of course
require specific contextualization of the rise and popularity of what critics now
call the “New Hong Kong cinema”. Not only does the cinema provide intriguing
texts for spectral analysis; it is in fact a product of Hong Kong’s changing cultural
space, as an aesthetic ostranenie emerging out of the intersecting filmic space of
art and industry. In this chapter, by reading three versions of the spectral city
in contemporary Hong Kong cinema, I attempt to trace how various moments
of disjointed time in Hong Kong history are associated with the expression of
a sense of ghostliness, alienation and homelessness. My aim is to explore the
possibility of writing a meta-history of Hong Kong over the past thirty years or
so through a hermeneutical reading of the cinematic depictions of space. Writing
a concise meta-history of space, this chapter asks two related questions: Does
1997 matter? What concerns us after the 1997 handover is over? In asking these
seemingly macroscopic questions, the emphasis is on how an allegorical reading
of the ordinary, quotidian aspects of urban life offers us chances to understand
the effects of eventful changes. Just as “the eternal would be the ruffles on a
dress rather than an idea,” as Benjamin puts it (Wolin, 1978, p. 130), the trivial
and the mundane lead us to deduce the profound aspects of Hong Kong’s
transformations during these kairotic moments.
The three films discussed in this chapter — Ann Hui’s The Secret /《瘋
劫》(1979), Stanley Kwan’s Rouge /《胭脂扣》(1987), and Fruit Chan’s Little
Cheung /《細路祥》(1999) — cannot be strictly classified as ghost films. In fact,

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 On Spectral Mutations 171

in The Secret and Little Cheung, there is a clear absence of ghosts. The former
is closer to a psycho-thriller in which the female ghostly victim is in fact very
much alive; the latter is often hailed as a social-realist growing-up story with
only occasional references to half-seen and disappearing humans in the old
neighbourhoods of Hong Kong. Rouge is a supernatural melodrama, but the
ghost is less a spooky and horrifying phantom than a beautiful and nostalgic
spectral figure. The semi- or quasi-fantastic mode of these films provides us
with evidence to examine the feeling of ambiguity and unsettlement that elides
the boundary between waking and dreaming in a mutating city. While there
has been a long tradition in Hong Kong cinema of horror and ghost films, what
ties these particular films together is less the literal presence of the ghost than
the ways in which they evoke a sense of ghostliness in the space of the city at
various critical moments in Hong Kong history (see Cheung, 2004).
Between the emergence of Hui’s The Secret as a representative New Wave
film in 1979 and the production of Chan’s Little Cheung, Hong Kong was
transformed from a British colony to a postcolonial city known as the Hong
Kong Special Administrative Region. Hong Kong’s complicated cultural space
has been shaped by colonialism, postcolonialism, globalism and postsocialism.
During this time, the cultural imaginary of Hong Kong has shifted as much
as the socioeconomic environment of the city. These moments are deeply
associated with the ways in which Chinese identities are defined and re-
defined in the intersecting space of the local, the national and the global. Hong
Kong also sees itself changing from manufacturing to service industries that
are aptly encompassed in the acronyms “FIRE IT” — Finance, Insurance,
Real Estate and Informational Technology. Within this global city, issues
about urban development and how it is intertwined with people’s perception
of their identities are worthy of our attention. The selected films provide
clues to understanding both the subtle and explicit mutations that occurred
throughout these years. From the death of old Chinese tradition in The Secret
to the imminent disappearance of old urban neighbourhoods in Little Cheung,
these films show the power of recalcitrant memories through the construction of
spectral, surreal images. We will soon see in our spectral analysis that both films
feature the birth of new identities out of the old tenement houses. Separated
by almost twenty years, however, they convey very different interpretations
of the old neighbourhoods as domestic, homely spaces. While the former film
inflects a gradual process of desinicization as a crucial feature of British colonial
legacies in Hong Kong, the latter allows us to trace the influences of China’s
postsocialism on the cross-cultural space in Hong Kong. As uncertain as the
countdown days to 1997, the years after 1997 chart a series of escalating cultural
flows between Hong Kong and China that have been shaping new identities in

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 172 Esther M. K. Cheung

the city. As a post-1997 cultural production, Little Cheung not only articulates
the formation of new subjectivities and interstitial spaces but also foreshadows
recent debates on historical preservation and urban renewal. It is also around
these recent discourses that the notion of “Hong Kong as home” is redefined.
The well-known Burkean sublime suggests that the uncanny derives
from the sense of terror and dread associated with the comforting hearth of
the domestic space. Inspired by Anthony Vidler’s sophisticated notion of the
“architectural uncanny”, the “spectral city” I discuss here is also associated
with two kinds of actual space: the unhomely interior and the ghostly urban
exterior. The formulation of this trope brings together the intricate relation
between aesthetics, space and the city (Vidler, 1992). In both the domestic and
the city spaces, the uncanny needs to be understood in its aesthetic dimension in
connection with the representation of a mental state disturbed by the ambiguity
between what is real and unreal, between waking and dreaming (Vidler,
1992, p. 11). Undergoing a process of allegorization and defamiliarization, the
representation of this mental and psychical state creates a shocking viewing
effect.
In her interesting book, Avery Gordon discusses the relation between the
perceiver and the perceived in spectral analysis. While “the ghostly haunt gives
notice to that something [which] is missing,” the perceiver says with empathy, “I
see you are not there” (Gordon, 1997, pp. 10, 16). Spectral analysis is undeniably
always associated with the problems of visuality. One can even trace such an
etymology in the Latin root of “spectral”: spectare means to behold. However,
in my discussion, unlike Ackbar Abbas’s famous “reverse hallucination” — not
seeing what is there, what concerns us is an empathetic way of seeing: “I see you
are not there” (Abbas, 1997, p. 6). In the mundane spaces of the tram, the old
tenement houses and the reclaimed land portrayed in the selected films, I argue
that the haunted perceiver shares Gordon’s empathy when he or she comes into
contact with the half-seen and disappearing humans.
The semantic double of the Freudian uncanny is translated visually in the
context of Hong Kong cinema into the unhomely home that predominantly
embodies the contradictory sense of being Chinese in a space of diaspora such
as Hong Kong.4 However, it must be asserted that this sense of contradiction has
undergone many mutations. Since the originary Chinese identity is constructed
on the premise of blood-tie relationship, the genres of the family romance and
romantic story mixed with horror or fantastic elements provide the natural
habitats for the embodiment of the “spatial uncanny”. In fact, as generally
known, the 1997 handover has been imagined as an extended family romance
of a highly politicized nature. At one point in the history of Hong Kong, the
natal tropes of biological and foster mothers were favoured by cultural critics,

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 On Spectral Mutations 173

writers, filmmakers and even historians who wrote on Hong Kong history (see
Cheung, 2001). As the spectral city that I have invoked is an aesthetic category
that is inseparable from spatiality — namely the domestic and the urban spaces
— the discussion of the mutation of identity in this case will require us to pay
due attention to the lived experience associated with built space, especially that
of the domestic space. In the following discussion, the three versions of the
spectral city are linked to two major types of interior space: the old tenement
houses and the modern residential high-rises. A historicized view of the spectral
city will need to be explored in the concrete context of Hong Kong’s residential
housing. This unhomely home, however, is always a metonym of the spectral
city; the former deals with claustrophobia while the latter opens itself up to the
agoraphobic space of the urban. Apart from the banal angst of feeling homeless
and rootless in a modern life-world, the trope of the spectral city in Hong Kong
cinema opens up ways in which we can write a meta-history of space of Hong
Kong through the analysis of genres such as crime thriller, melodrama and the
story of growing up.

The Spectres of the Past in the Tenement Houses

Hui’s The Secret heralded the coming of age of the first-generation Hong Kong
citizens after the Communist revolution in China in 1949. Historian David Faure
rightly calls this group of film practitioners and others “the generation of the
1970s”. This time was characterized by the growth of a clearly distinguishable
Hong Kong local identity, although historians might always trace this sense
of localness to as early as the late 1800s (Carroll, 2007, p. 167). Unlike their
predecessors who were Chinese sojourners in Hong Kong, they are “Hong
Kong people of Chinese descent” (Faure, 1997). Their Western-style education,
their cosmopolitan outlook, their “indigenous” experience of growing up in a
British colony and their ambiguously distanced relationship with the People’s
Republic of China (PRC) shaped the way they perceive colonial modernity
as more intimate and relevant to their sense of identity-making. This process
reveals how colonialism as a form of globalization is always accompanied by
its modernizing power to transform the natives by alienating them from their
cultural traditions. This process of cultural transformation is less coercive
domination than colonial hegemony. As John Carroll, aptly puts it:

This was not a matter of a Hong Kong identity trickling down from the top. Rather,
this sense of belonging was shaped by several factors, among them Hong Kong’s
rising economic prosperity, its closer ties with China, and the efforts of the colonial
government to foster a sense of local identity. (Carroll, 2007, p. 168)

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 174 Esther M. K. Cheung

The haunted city in The Secret clearly allegorizes the haunting feeling one
has at a moment of dissociation from unwanted cultural traditions. Such cultural
traditions are portrayed in association with symbols of superstition, fear and
madness. The spectres from the past, which are thus menacing and threatening,
haunt the modernized and Westernized young men and women who hang
around in the old and obsolete districts of Hong Kong (Figures 10.1 and 10.2).
Furthermore, this sense of cultural distancing from China cannot be divorced
from the Cold War dynamics and the socioeconomic differences between
Hong Kong and the PRC after 1949, although at this time the fear of the onset
of the 1997 handover was not yet widely felt. The binary opposition between
the modernized, capitalistic Hong Kong and the culturally and economically
backward China is translated cinematically into the clash between modernity
and superstition. The film portrays how Ming (played by Sylvia Chang),
a Westernized nurse, tries to solve the heinous murder of her friend Li Yuen
(Chiu Ah-chi) after seeing the ghostly Li frequent her former abode. It turns out
that Li is not a ghost, but has been driven out of her mind by her unfortunate
circumstances. She becomes pregnant, and finds out that her boyfriend is seeing
another woman. To her, this situation is an impasse. After killing her boyfriend,
she goes into hiding, and plays the role of a ghostly figure haunting her old
neighbourhood. As a victim of the outmoded tradition, Li is also a symptom of
that tradition. She is perceived by the people in the neighbourhood as a ghostly
figure, but the meaning she symptomatically signifies is incomprehensible and
undecipherable to her neighbours. While the feeling of fear and awe caused
by superstition is meant to be exorcised and demystified by Ming’s scientism,
rationality and modernity, Ming is more complicated than the archetype of a
rational detective. Able to make clear and sound judgments, she is also caring,
sensitive and courageous. The film shows how the murder case is objectively
analyzed by the rational and scientific detectives; nevertheless, the final
revelation cannot be achieved without Ming’s intuition and humane concern for
her neighbours. The film shows that she is constantly inspired by involuntary
memories, which give the text a non-linear structure. Very much like a spectral
analyst, Ming is an empathetic perceiver who echoes Gordon: “I see you are not
there.” She is haunted not in the sense of being scared but rather in being drawn
into a structure of feeling through which she can recognize the meaning of what
is missing and ghostly.
In an essay on Hong Kong’s New Wave, Law Kar observes that the cinema
can be understood historically in connection with the global, activist and
counter-culture movements (Law, 2001). When anti-establishment movements
were emerging around the world in the 1960s and 1970s, Hong Kong filmmakers
such as Ann Hui, Allen Fong and Tsui Hark were also developing a strong

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 On Spectral Mutations 175

Figure 10.1 The Secret: The film opens Figure 10.2 The Secret: Young Li Yuen
with an image of burning an offering to (right, Chiu Ah-chi) bends her knee to
the deceased. Grandma (Lai Cheuk-cheuk) on the
latter’s birthday.

sense of social consciousness. In Hui’s films in particular, one can observe an

impressive ensemble of humane and resilient, if not strong, female characters
whose independence of mind challenges the authority of traditional culture.
Viewers familiar with Hui’s films may connect Ming to Hueyin in Song of
the Exile /《客途秋恨》(1990) as well as the ordinary middle-aged housewives
in Summer Snow /《女人四十》(1994) and in Hui’s most recent film The Way We
Are /《天水圍的日與夜》(2008).
The haunting homely space in The Secret was shot in the old tenement houses
of the Western district in Hong Kong. Many of these houses were built before
or during World War II to accommodate the influx of refugees and immigrants
from mainland China. The tenement houses are also known as tong lau (唐樓) in
Cantonese, which literally denotes residential blocks of a unique Chinese style.
Little attention was paid to health, sanitation and safety regulations. Many of
these buildings were clearly older than the rapidly and quickly built public
housing estates that were constructed for similar reasons in the early 1950s (see
Fong and Chik, 1993). When Hui made the film in the 1970s, these tenement
houses were already old enough to be perfect locations for creating a sense of
spookiness, but in fact their existence can be considered as “a culmination of a
series of historic forces” resulting from the economic developments of Hong
Kong, World War II, “as well as the influx of Chinese migrants to Hong Kong”
(see Urban Renewal Authority, 2009a). These domestic spaces literally belong to
what Faure calls the “sojourners in Hong Kong”; they also become the spatial
embodiment of the residues of family and cultural history that no one wants.
The use of dark spaces in the film noir style not only clouds our understanding
of what truth is, but also evokes threat and dread. Dark space is the harbinger
of the unseen, which erodes our sense of security. The photograph of Li Yuen,

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 176 Esther M. K. Cheung

the supposed victim, as a lingering presence in the darkened interior, haunts the
audience as much as the people in the neighbourhood (Figure 10.3). Darkness
is not simply the total absence of light, but also signifies the lack of distinction
of inside and outside. These unhomely home spaces are metonymic of the
agoraphobic uncanny open space. Not only do the sight and sound of a bamboo-
pole seller in the open city space indicate the haunting presence of the past; the
dingy alleys and street corners where images are half-seen are also extremely
spectral in nature (Figures 10.4 and 10.5). As noted earlier, the lack of knowledge
of the truth is challenged by the modernity of the new generation, represented
by Ming, who finally solves the murder case. Although the tenement houses
might have created a sense of Chineseness in the new generation because they
are the domestic spaces where they grew up, they have been used in the film for
their association with imprisonment, backwardness and madness to designate
a clear sense of “de-sinicization”. In other words, these spaces have been used
to represent the gradual process of British colonial hegemony through which a
sense of distancing from “China” as a cultural and political entity is produced.

Figure 10.3 The Secret: Li’s portrait is highlighted in the

darkened interior of the old tenement house.

Figure 10.4 The Secret: A seller of clothes- Figure 10.5 The Secret: An alley in the
drying bamboo poles on the street. Western district.

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 On Spectral Mutations 177

A strong sense of “home at Hong Kong mentality” was interpellated, especially

after the 1967 riots, through the colonial government’s systematic programmes
of industrialization and modernization (Carroll, 2007, p. 172).

The Sense of Homelessness in the Residential High-Rises

If the feeling of de-sinicization in The Secret finds its spatial habitat in the old
tenement houses, the modern residential high-rises in Kwan’s Rouge provide
a powerful meta-historical interpretation of the haunted house in Hong Kong
cultural imaginary. These ghostly spaces of the residential high-rises were
conjured up when the spectre of 1997 loomed large in the 1980s and 1990s.
As a supernatural melodrama of romance and lost history, Rouge follows
a high-class courtesan of the 1930s, Fleur (Anita Mui), as she returns from
the underworld to look for her love, Twelfth Master Chan Chen-pang (Leslie
Cheung). As Abbas remarks, the film weaves Hong Kong’s history into the
stories of romantic relationships, showing how “the supernatural is suspended in
favor of the uncanny”. The ghost genre is only utilized as a source of inspiration
(Abbas, 1997, p. 41). Caught in a doomed relationship, the lovers decide to
commit suicide in order to be with each other. However, Fleur discovers that
she is alone in the underworld and, after waiting for fifty years, returns to the
world of the living to search for her love. She receives help with her quest from a
pair of journalists. Yuen (Alex Man) and his feisty, occasionally jealous girlfriend
Ah Chor (Emily Chu) begin to reflect upon their own relationship as they come
to know more about Fleur’s past romance. Fleur discovers that the city has
mutated as much as its inhabitants have (Figure 10.6): the pleasure house where

Figure 10.6 Rouge: Fleur (Anita Mui) comes back to Shek Tong
Tsui, the notorious red-light district of pre-war Hong Kong, in
the hope of meeting Twelfth Master.

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 178 Esther M. K. Cheung

she worked has now become a kindergarten. Her search for her love yields the
most ironic result, as she finally discovers that Chen-pang survived the suicide
attempt.
Produced after the signing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984
which sealed the political fate of Hong Kong, Rouge is often considered a
nostalgia film. Critics agree that the film explores how nostalgia as a sentiment
of looking backward is temporally anticipatory of a great change in the future
and, at the same time, culturally symptomatic of the anxiety bound up with
this anticipation (Chan, 2000). Some have discussed how the double temporal
structure and non-linear temporality in the film provide ways in which
reflections of history are made (see Abbas, 1997, p. 42; Chow, 1998). Nostalgia
here is closer to what Svetlana Boym calls “reflective nostalgia” (Boym, 2001,
pp. 49–55), a term she uses to denote the critical reflection of the past with
the emphasis on rupture and uprootedness, unlike “restorative nostalgia”,
which pays attention to community building and continuity. Although the
beautiful past in Fleur’s remembrances is in part romanticized, and there is
also a clear intention to build up our identification with the ghost’s perspective,
nostalgia is reflective and critical because ghosts are employed to provoke our
understanding of how a disappearing site evokes the melancholic sense of love
at last sight/site (Eng, 1993, p. 75). No doubt the present world is portrayed
as boring and unimaginative; it is a space where love is rather practical. Yuen
and Chor are in love but constantly display a mutual reluctance to commit fully
to each other. However, the past is not romanticized and idealized. The older
world is subject to principles of class and hierarchy, as well as distrust and self-
deception. Twelfth Master’s parents oppose the young couple’s romance and
propose solutions through which marriage is negotiated in monetary terms.
Fleur’s passion for her lover is genuine and strong, but she demonstrates a
lack of trust and self-deceptive possessiveness when she puts sleeping pills in
the opium to ensure Twelfth Master’s death. One critic even observes that her
decision to return to the world of the living confirms her earlier sense of distrust
for her lover. When Twelfth Master’s survival as an ageing “wreck” at the end
of the film proves to be “a form of punishment for not keeping faith”, it is an
ironic moment of revelation not only for the revenant but also for the living
(Abbas, 1997, p. 44). While this ironic ending naturally suggests that weakness
and wrong judgment are inevitable even in great love, the total disappearance
of her lover’s romantic image is also a form of punishment for her which leads
to her final illumination. In this case, nostalgia is not depicted as a yearning
for a bygone era but is closer to a sense of melancholic loss that laments the
fleeting present that will come to pass. The ghost, like other spectral tropes in
the film such as the tram and traditional Chinese opera, embodies “a strong

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 On Spectral Mutations 179

notion of spatiotemporal nonsynchronism” in which different aspects of social

life of different temporalities coexist in a discontinuous present (Lim, 2001,
p. 288). Reflective nostalgia in Rouge works in this manner to show us critically
the romance of the present through the tale of the past. Fleur and Twelfth
Master’s emotional relationship is less a mirror of reflection than a ghostly
image of epiphany for the modern lovers. In such a changing space, the old and
the new seem to merge with each other to eradicate differences.
There has been much discussion about the complex portrayal of history in
the film. Abbas, for example, sees the ghost as a figure carving out “a space of
otherness” in the present, as if to bring the two realms together in “a historical
montage” (Abbas, 1997, p. 41). Bliss Lim, with a different vocabulary, expounds
on the palimpsestic nature of history by referring to the way Fleur sees a
glimpse of the vanished Tai Ping Theatre in the reflective glass outside a modern
shopping mall. In the language of photographic technology, I would add that
the old and new are more like images of double exposure. What has yet to be
explored in regard to these ghostly urban spaces is the socioeconomic origin
of this aesthetic dimension. This question naturally brings us to the relation
between the spectator as a textual construct and the actual viewers when the
film was released. In the film, the activities of the contingent and fleeting present
take place in the mundane, haunted spaces of Hong Kong modern high-rises —
both the commercial and residential blocks. These everyday locations of work
and love for middle-class people are also ghostly habitations frequented by the
beautiful courtesan from the underworld (Figures 10.7 and 10.8).

Figure 10.7 Rouge: Fleur appears

in Yuen’s (Alex Man’s) newspaper
office.

Figure 10.8 Rouge: Fleur stays in

Yuen’s home.

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 180 Esther M. K. Cheung

We can see that these architectural spaces in the film belong to a modern-day
Hong Kong middle-class couple who are naturally involved in contemporary
forms of the service industry such as journalism and the media. While these
residential high-rises are literal homes for many Hong Kong inhabitants, the way
in which these spaces can be appropriated textually as unhomely and ghostly
can be partly explained with reference to economism. For those viewers who are
sensitive to the relation between base and superstructure, the spectral qualities
of their lived spaces correspond indirectly to the spectral flows of finance capital
in a global city. Architecture, as Fredric Jameson observes, is not only the symbol
of capital but also the very concrete site of finance capital (1998). With this
neo-Marxist view of the political unconscious, Hong Kong’s living space can
be imagined in association with a sense of homelessness. Whether in colonial
or postcolonial times, the Hong Kong government has always been the sole
supplier of land and the ultimate landowner, with the exception of some land in
the New Territories. Home ownership is not the equivalent of land ownership.
A substantial number of the Hong Kong urban inhabitants thus share a similar
feeling to that noted by Karl Marx in the Economic and Philosophical Notebook of
1844: everyone inhabits a dwelling that they cannot regard as home. The rent
system makes one feel that: “‘Here I am at home’ — but where instead he finds
himself in someone else’s house, in the house of a stranger who always watches
him and throws him out if he does not pay his rent” (cited in Vidler, 1992, p. 5).
This is especially true in regard to the owners of private housing who have to
mortgage their flats and are subject to high and speculative property prices. It has
therefore been taken for granted that young, middle-class Hong Kong couples,
who do not qualify for public housing and welfare, have to work diligently all
their lives to possess a private home. When the market was overheated during
the 1990s, some even spent more than 70 per cent of their incomes on mortgages
and home acquisition. And some became owners of “negative assets”, in the
sense that if they had sold their homes they would owe the bank more than the
price of the property. As well-known as the commercial high-rises that define
Hong Kong’s famous Victoria skyline, the real estate market has been an index
of Hong Kong’s economy for a long time. It has generated huge revenues for
land developers, property investors and agencies, until information technology
and logistics businesses have recently begun to contest its leadership. Space is
scarce in Hong Kong but it can always be exploited for profit.
The socioeconomic aspects of the inhabitants’ life-world are never separable
from its political dimension. The lamentation of and reflection on a fleeting
present in the film seem to echo Hong Kong people’s desire to maintain their
capitalistic way of life in the wake of the transition to a different political state
after 1997. While this desire was shared by a great majority, it was only upper and

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 On Spectral Mutations 181

upper-middle class people who could afford to emigrate. For those who chose
to stay, dealing with a mutating, haunted city was an everyday necessity. At
this disjointed time, residing in this city is also a moment of historical reflection.
Rouge provides such a moment of “profane illumination” where the spectator
is sutured to assume a viewing position to flirt with and scrutinize history. The
film begins with a series of fascinating shots showing Fleur doing her make-
up (Figures 10.9 and 10.10). Director Stanley Kwan and his crew have made a
significant departure from Lee Bik-wah’s (Li Bihua) original novel by shifting
the narrative focus from the male narrator Yuen to Fleur. The film begins with an
intense process of involving the viewers. It is also through this process that the
ghost is presented both as subject and object, seeing herself being seen, as Rey
Chow observes with interesting insight. Like the situation of a dreaming subject,
she argues, the ghost is both the perceiver and the perceived (1998, p. 137).
In light of what I term “spectral analysis”, historical reflection is generated
in an extremely complex manner. Throughout the film, both the modern
couple’s and our understanding of the past tale are mediated through the
revenant’s journey of self-understanding and narrativization. The famous scene
in which Twelfth Master and Fleur fall in love at first sight is spellbinding.
However, our view is not completely limited by it. The textual process through
which identification and dis-identification are made is constantly invoked.
Both Yuen and Chor play the role of the I-see-you-are-not-there perceivers with
a combination of fascination and criticism, sympathy and scrutiny, as well as
restorative and reflective nostalgia. Their mixed attitude suggests that history
is nuanced and complex, awaiting the perceiver’s passionate engagement and
cautious interpretation.

Figure 10.9 Rouge: Fleur doing her

makeup.

Figure 10.10 Rouge: Fleur doing her

makeup.

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 182 Esther M. K. Cheung

The Palimpsests of History in the Old Tenement Houses

While Rouge evokes nostalgia at an earlier stage in the transitional period to

1997, Chan’s Little Cheung comes to grips with the ethos of postcolonial Hong
Kong, which is in close relation to China in a postsocialist era. As the third part
of Chan’s “1997 Trilogy” /《九七三部曲》, the film represents a new chapter
after Made in Hong Kong /《香港製造》(1997) and The Longest Summer /《去年
煙花特別多》(1998), in which themes of death and amnesia predominate. The
film shows the production of new subjectivities and the waning significance of
traditional culture by parallelling the mundane everyday life of Little Cheung
(Yiu Yuet-ming) with the death of the well-known opera actor Sun Ma Si Cheng
(Brother Cheung). In this story of growing up, Hong Kong’s cultural space is
complicated and defined by an array of characters and their shared and yet
different sense of homelessness. This is a space witnessing the disappearance of
the older generation, the old buildings and the old neighbourhoods. In light of the
recent debates and developments after the Star Ferry Pier and Queen’s Pier saga,
the word “disappearance” may be replaced by terms such as “revitalization” or
“reincarnation” to echo our spectral vocabulary. As the voiceover by Fan (Mak
Wai-fan) tells us, “the people living in the old Hong Kong buildings have a lot
of stories” (Figure 10.11). Unlike the old buildings in The Secret that signify the
backward, unwanted cultural tradition, the dwelling spaces in Little Cheung are
occupied by at least four groups of people: the older generation of Hong Kong
Chinese who were once refugees from China, their descendants, the migrant
workers and the so-called new immigrants. In a later film, Durian Durian /《榴
槤飄飄》(2000), the sex workers from mainland China emerge as a fifth category
of occupants of such spaces. In these cases, the old tenement houses in our meta-
history of space return less as the haunting repressed than as sites of subjectivities,
where palimpsests of history are crafted. Their differential histories are non-
chronological, being shaped and brought together by various types of visible and
invisible cultural flows — people, capital, ideas, images, sex, desire and media.
Despite their different backgrounds, the characters are somehow uprooted and
alienated from their immediate environment. The fact that the film features how
Little Cheung develops intimate relationships with border-crossers such as the
illegal immigrant Fan and Filipina maid Armi suggests subtle changes in their
emotional world in the midst of such a floating landscape. These vibrant cross-
cultural flows between the two places have been escalating since postsocialism
gathered momentum after 1989 in mainland China. The return of sovereignty
over Hong Kong to China, including the establishment of the CEPA (Closer
Economic Partnership Agreement), undoubtedly provided a crucial impetus
for the shaping of this landscape. However, one doubts very much whether

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 On Spectral Mutations 183

Figure 10.11 Little Cheung: Little Cheung (Yiu Yuet-ming)

recalls Grandma’s stories in the old tenement house.

the impact of postsocialism will always bring about a “borderless world” in

which strangers encounter one another and transcend their differences, like the
film imaginary in Little Cheung where characters of non-kin relations develop
friendships and intimacy.
As with the other living spaces discussed above, the old tenements are
frequented by surreal and ghostly intruders. The difference in film style lies in
Chan’s mixed use of documentary realism and surrealism. When the surreal
intrudes at kairotic times, what Michel de Certeau calls “the mythical texts”
of the city are being written (1998, pp. 133–43). In the first instance, Grandma
narrates to Cheung the story of his elder brother Hang’s birth in their old Chinese
apartment. As a missing figure who was expelled by his parents because of his
recalcitrant behaviour, Hang is only half seen, and emerges as an image rather
than as a full-blown character. He exists in Grandma’s storytelling as miraculous
and fantastical because his birth trails a blood path in the old tenement house
(Figure 10.12). However a miraculous birth that is only legendary does not
always yield a fruitful life. The second surreal moment arrives after Little
Cheung’s Grandma has passed away. Towards the end of the film, Grandma is
also half seen and is vanishing in her old abode (Figure 10.13). Speaking serenely,
she expresses her wish to be gone from this complicated world. Hang signifies
the disaffected youth whose destiny is to embark on a journey of death trips,
very much like Chan’s characters Moon and Ga Suen in Made in Hong Kong and
The Longest Summer respectively. Grandma represents the older generation who,
like the old traditions and neighbourhoods, are gradually erased from people’s
memory. The surreal always intrudes at a disjointed time — or, more precisely
in these cases, we can say that the ghostly always returns with a story to tell. It is

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 184 Esther M. K. Cheung

Figure 10.12 Little Cheung: A stream of blood appears on the

floor when Grandma recounts the birth of Little Cheung’s elder
brother.

Figure 10.13 Little Cheung: Grandma (Chiu Sun-yau) gradually

vanishes.

storytelling as a form of meta-history that allows their deadly journeys of no return

to return as the repressed in the space of the film narrative.
The stories that the above characters write through their spatial experience
in the old tenement houses are metonymic of other spatial narratives. These
surreal scenes remind the audience of an earlier collage of documentary and
realistic images of the old neighbourhoods in Mong Kok, Yau Ma Tei and
Sham Shui Po: the old grocery store is still intact but foreshadowing its own
disappearance in a post-industrial city where the new post-fordist mode of
flexible accumulation is practised widely (in ParknShop and 7-Eleven, and so
on) (Figure 10.14); the coffin shop associated with death does not suggest its

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 On Spectral Mutations 185

own extinction but serves as a broader metaphor for what persist as cultural
residues in the space of a fast-moving city (Figure 10.15); the ruinous façade of
an old tenement building readily suggests its imminent collapse (Figure 10.16).
Among these exterior spaces, the Filipina migrant workers’ gathering in the
reclaimed, transitory land of the Central district suggests the significance of
interstitial spaces in a city of drastic transition (Figure 10.17). As Henri Lefebvre
argues, being a subject involves accepting “a role and a function”, which implies
“a location, a place, a society, a position” that we can call “space” (1991, pp. 182–
83). Through his films, Chan claims the subject speaking position to articulate
his visions of Hong Kong to create a moment of “dis-alienation” that Lefebvre
suggests. Situating his subjects in the quotidian space of the city offers them an
opportunity to “recognize for themselves” their right to a city that has forgotten
their existence (1991, p. 35).
Unlike the haunted spaces in The Secret, the old tenement houses are
mundane, ordinary, unattractive and familiar spaces without an acute feeling
of dread and fear. They do not emphasize the intellectual, critical spirit of
the former where scientism and rationality seek to expel the backward
elements of the Chinese cultural tradition. They are the quotidian spaces
being subject to constant erasure by forces of urbanization and modernization.
Chan’s subsequent films return constantly to similar spaces of erasure. In
Durian Durian (2000), the prostitute Xiao Yan (Qin Hailu) from Northeast
China frequents the streets of Mong Kok (Figure 10.18); Tai Hom village slums
portrayed in Hollywood, Hong Kong /《香港有個荷里活》(2001) are literally
ghostly spaces (Figure 10.19); and the derelict low-cost housing estates in
Dumplings /《餃子》(2004) have become sites for secret trafficking of desire
(Figure 10.20). These disappearing spaces constitute what I would call “the
spectral landscape” of the ghostly city which, in my view, is more haunting than
haunted.
To link Little Cheung to Hong Kong’s urban development and global
connection is a productive discourse. Since the 1997 handover, there has been
a growing need in Hong Kong society to use history and preservation to create
a sense of belonging. Officially, the Hong Kong SAR government has been
inculcating such a discourse within the larger framework of Chinese nationalism
and Hong Kong’s global dream.5 In the Hong Kong Museum of History, the
exhibit entitled “The Hong Kong Story” confirms the linear success story of the
city, showing its miraculous transformation from a fishing village to a world-
class metropolis. The display ends with the handover and with the city’s re-entry
into Chinese political reality, suggesting a need to negotiate with the discourse
of Chinese nationalism in Hong Kong. At the same time, the Urban Renewal
Authority (URA) has been working actively to “create quality and vibrant urban

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 186 Esther M. K. Cheung

Figure 10.14 Little Cheung: An old grocery.

Figure 10.15 Little Cheung: A coffin shop.

Figure 10.16 Little Cheung: The

exterior of Little Cheung’s house
in Mong Kok.

Figure 10.17 Little Cheung: A Filipina migrant

workers’ gathering in the Central district.

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 On Spectral Mutations 187

Figure 10.18 Durian Durian: Xiao Yan (Qin

Hailu) in Portland Street, Mong Kok.

Figure 10.19 Hollywood, Hong Kong: A ghostly

image of Tai Hom Village.

Figure 10.20 Dumplings: Mrs Li (Miriam Yeung)

goes to the old Shek Kip Mei estate for the special
dumplings.

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 188 Esther M. K. Cheung

living in Hong Kong — a better home in a world-class city” and “to preserve by
maintaining and restoring buildings of historical and architectural value, and to
sustain local characteristics” (see Urban Renewal Authority, 2009b). Among the
many revitalization projects involving old tenement houses, the most famous
are the “Blue Houses” in Wan Chai (see Hong Kong Housing Society, 2009).
As cultural heritage industries, such government-initiated activities are often
challenged by the two networks that set the conditions for an urban aesthetic.
De Certeau calls them gestures and narratives (1998, pp. 133–43). The NGOs’
critiques of the government’s urban redevelopment projects often aim to assert
the gestural importance of the urban landscape.6 They refuse to comply with
the government’s attempt to fetishize and museumize neighbourhoods; instead
they believe that revitalization of old houses would be meaningless without the
inhabitants and their neighbourhood relations and lived experience. The true
archives of the city should refer to “the past that is selected and reused according
to present custom” (p. 141), as well as that enlivened by the ordinary inhabitants.
On a different note, a film such as Little Cheung belongs to what de Certeau calls
“narratives” tracing out “memories that no longer have a place — childhoods,
genealogical traditions, timeless events” (p. 142). When dealing with the latter,
the spectral approach developed in this chapter is not only pertinent but also
revitalizing.

Towards the Shaping of a Spectral Vision of a Hong Kong Style

The cinematic spectral city finds its echoes in Hong Kong literature of the
same period. Dung Kai-cheung’s intriguing short story “Yong Cheng Jie xing
shuai shi” (The Rise and Fall of Wing Shing Street) is a shining example. Since
a discussion of this text would require another essay, I refer to an interesting
excerpt from the story to close this discussion of the spectral city.
The story takes place in one of Hong Kong’s old, derelict tenement houses
in Hong Kong. It begins with You Xin, a returnee from Canada in the mid-1990s,
meditating upon the relations among personal, familial, social and national
histories. In his haunted apartment in Wing Lok Street in the Western district
of Hong Kong, he seeks illumination from the mundane space of everyday life.
At the beginning of the story, he is portrayed as a hybrid trope of Chinese and
Western literary traditions through which we can observe that a spectral vision
of a unique Hong Kong style is in the making. In a first-person narrative voice,
he laments nostalgically the passing of time:

In solitude, the empty nocturnal wind envelops the street. There is not a single soul,
not even a falling leaf. In this fast-paced city, it is just another ordinary street. This is

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 On Spectral Mutations 189

Wing Lok Street; it isn’t my long dreamed-of Wing Shing Street. I am not dreaming.
I always wish I could enter Wing Shing Street one day, traversing upon its traces of
prosperity. In my reverie, I imagine myself becoming a poet, ascending the tall tower
and lamenting the passing of time. (Has the song been sung? Oh yes, it starts like
this, “The cool faithful wind keeps its promise in a boundless moonlit night”.) Wing
Lok Street has now become a mundane, quotidian street but it looks quite erotic
even after nightfall when its make-up is washed away. (Dung, 1997, pp. 299–300,
my translation)

After this initial meditation on the melancholic search of the ghostly Wing
Shing Street, which literally means “The Street of Everlasting Prosperity”, You
Xin narrates his erotic relationship with a ghostly companion in his haunted
apartment. Dung’s surrealism, like the spectral landscape in Hong Kong
cinema, is presented as if it were self-evident and taken for granted. The familiar
archetypical reference to the haunted scholar in Liaozhai zhiyi (Strange Tales from a
Chinese Studio), written by Pu Songling (1640–1715), merges later with the image
of the poet-writer “ascending the tall tower”. This well-known image of the poet
climbing a tall building comes from Yan Shu’s poetry:

Last night the west wind shrivelled the green-clad trees,

Alone I climb the high tower
To gaze my fill along the road to the horizon.

昨夜西風凋碧樹，獨上高樓，望盡天涯路。 (cited in Wang, 1977, p. 50)

In the Chinese literary tradition, the acquisition of a panoramic, grand

vision is what Wang Guowei’s Renjian cihua (Poetic Remarks in the Human World)
refers to as the first state of enlightened vision in intellectual pursuit. Dung’s
narrative brings forth echoes of the Chinese visions when he alludes directly to
Yan Shu’s poetry. Interestingly this literary trope takes a surprising twist when
attention is shifted to the profane space of a vanished Hong Kong street. Wing
Shing Street, with its feminized image, is associated with the ghostly woman in
his apartment. As in a dream, the flirtation with the ghostly woman is not unlike
what one does with history. According to the narrator’s research, and known to
any modern-day Hong Kong inhabitant, the street has completely disappeared
from the map of Hong Kong. Between waking and dreaming, the city, like a
ghostly woman, acquires a gendered vision to render a typical melancholic
sentiment that Western readers find in the lyric poetry by Charles Baudelaire.
While the nostalgic bird in Baudelaire’s “The Swan” may be dissimilar to
the ghostly companion in Dung’s narrative, the melancholic sentiment is
comparable. The Chinese poet-scholar’s spectral vision is then expanded by the
humane, compassionate concern for the exiles, the uprooted and the homeless
echoing with the ineradicable heaviness of memories in Baudelaire’s poem:

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 190 Esther M. K. Cheung

Paris changes, but nothing of my melancholy

Gives way. Foundations, scaffoldings, tackle and blocks,
And the old suburbs drift off into allegory,
While my frailest memories take on the weight of rocks.
(Baudelaire, 1989, pp. 109–11)

The lines of the nanyin song (Southern tune) “Ke Tu Qiu Hen” (translated
literally as “Melancholy on an Autumn Trip”), which are embedded in the above
translation as well as throughout the entire story as palimpsestic intertexts,
sound out the theme song of this spectral, exilic symphony: “The cool faithful
wind keeps its promise in a boundless moonlit night”. This is a spellbinding
song that has drawn many souls together, including Twelfth Master and Fleur
in Rouge, who fall in love with each other at first sight.
In this disenchanted postmodern world, the re-enchantment of a spectral
vision elicits a Benjaminian “profane illumination” that allows us to see
connections and analogies between inconceivable and disconnected events and
moments. Perhaps we can join Benjamin by saying that “the reader, the thinker,
the loiter, the flâneur”, “the dreamer”, and “ourselves in solitude” will form an
exciting array of “illuminati” in the quotidian space of the city. Although the
traditional Chinese literati do not share the profane Benjaminian flâneur’s critique
of commodity culture, their vision of decipherment on the tall tower captures a
breathtaking panorama of an endless landscape. After all, isn’t spectral analysis
an intellectual practice of an engaging, politicized kind? Will this spectral vision
include Wang’s second state of intellectual pursuit, which is characterized by
deep thought?

My clothes grow daily more loose, yet care I not.

For you am I thus wasting away in sorrow and pain.

衣帶漸寬終不悔，為伊消得人憔悴。 (Wang, 1977, p. 50)7

What is more, how can we make sense of the third state which emphasizes the
arrival of a moment of epiphany?

I sought her in the crowd a hundred, a thousand times.

Suddenly with a turn of the head [I saw her],
That one there where the lamplight was fading.

眾裡尋他千百度，驀然回首。 (Wang, 1977, p. 50)8

With such a hybrid trope of “illuminati” in film and literature, can we formulate
a spectral vision of a Hong Kong style?

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 On Spectral Mutations 191

Epilogue

The spectral city enables haunting as an epistemology to help us demystify

the hidden reality. The return of the repressed might not always frighten us, as
Freud suggests. After all, being “canny” means being shrewd and being able to
know; spectral analysis confronts the prefix “un” in the spatial uncanny; it is a
kind of cultural criticism which relies on the assumption that the ghostly is an
antidote to mystification.
The spectral city in this chapter is an aesthetic category that cannot be
contained only in the ghost story, as I argue elsewhere (Cheung, 2004, p. 368).
It corresponds to a dislocated affect produced by the transforming perception
of the mutating urban environment, which has an intimate relationship with its
own material, economic dimension. In brief, it is a meeting place of textuality and
materiality. It is not confined by a particular genre but can be identified by a finite
ensemble of formalistic elements. These include a mise-en-scène of contradictions
of light/dark, absence/presence, past/present, victim/hero, identification/
distancing, danger/security, as well as “the return of the familiar as the
unfamiliar”. Between waking and dreaming, such contradictions are translated
into non-linear spectral time, montage of differential spaces, and images of
double exposure in an urban dreamscape. The spectral city, which is constituted
by the incessant flows of people, money, images, media and technology, is in
my view clearly an overdetermined cinematic trope that transmogrifies in the
history of Hong Kong. It is a short and concise one that is inseparable from
the city’s complex experiences of colonialism and postcolonialism as well as
interactions with globalism and postsocialism. Yet, so much has happened in a
compressed space of a few decades that perhaps a concise meta-history is not
enough.

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