An accidental culture

IF you walk around a Chinese cemetery in Hong Kong, you will be struck by two things. One is that none of the graves is very old. Until 1951, when the border between China and Hong Kong was closed, the ashes of the dead were sent back to lie with the ancestors on the mainland. And the other is that, at first sight, no one seems to have been born in Hong Kong.

On the tombstones, when the place of origin of the dead person is identified, it is almost invariably a village on the mainland: where you came from was a matter of ancestry, not of birth. And only very recently have the ethnic Chinese who make up the vast bulk of the territory's population begun to accept that it might be possible to come from Hong Kong.

And yet, at midnight on June 30th, when the Union Jack comes down and the red flag of the People's Republic of China is raised, there will be a strange feeling that neither one flag nor the other represents the identity of the place. For the great paradox of the historic handover is that Hong Kong is being redefined as Chinese just at the moment when its own distinctive and vibrant culture has begun to emerge. This anomalous place, this odd margin between East and West, has in the last decade acquired a cultural and artistic life of its own. The danger is that in the ritual exchange of flags and empires, that extraordinary fact may be overlooked.

According to Christine Lo, an elected member of the Legislative Council which will be dissolved by the Chinese, "a Hong Kong identity has been slowly emerging since the 1960s. If one looks back on the art work, posters, products, films and so on of that time, we begin to see a Hong Kong identity. I think today many people would say not `I am Chinese' but `I am from Hong Kong'. They happen to be Chinese, but they come from here." The question now is whether, along with the belated recognition of human rights and political freedoms, that cultural identity will be threatened by the return to Chinese sovereignty.

For most of its history after the island was seized by the British in 1841, Hong Kong was seen by the British and Chinese alike as a place without a culture. For the British, it was a place to make as much money as possible in as short a time as possible. For the Chinese, it was a reminder of humiliation, a physical symbol of the power of the barbarian West. For traditionalists, it was a source of contamination and corruption. For Communists, it was the living image of capitalist decadence.

And for many of its own inhabitants who came as penniless refugees, the struggle to survive left little room for art.

There were, of course, writers and intellectuals among the millions of refugees who poured into Hong Kong during and after the Chinese civil war of the late 1940s. But as Leung Ping Kwan Hong Kong's leading poet, explains, "the first generation of writers here would be those arriving from the mainland, from Shanghai or Canton, because of what happened in 1949. Most of the subject matters they wrote about would be the feelings of immigrants as they first arrive in Hong Kong, a kind of nostalgic feeling about the mainland, about their past and so on.

"So even if they wrote about Hong Kong, they liked to make a comparison with what happened in the past. Traditional values, family values, are really very prominent in the work of those writers. Anything western, or anything from the city, from Hong Kong itself, is rendered as negative, as something flippant. The focus is always on the past they are thinking of the day they will go back."

Hong Kong did have a history of film-making but there was for a long time a division between two conflicting styles. "Film," says Choi Po King, one of Hong Kong's leading intellectuals, "was new to Chinese culture in the early 20th century, but it was taken up by two groups the Shanghainese and the Chinese in Hong Kong. Those were the most westernised cities. In the 1930s, with the oncoming Japanese invasion, a lot of underground Communists came to Hong Kong to make films about the resistance. This tradition of educating the masses through film was very visible here in the 1950s and 1960s."

After the Communists came to power on the mainland, the Shanghai studios - most notably that of Run Run Shaw - were re-located in Hong Kong. As Leung Ping Kwan, Hong Kong's leading poet and also a film critic explains, the local industry and the Shanghai studios existed in an uneasy tension, the former producing films in the Cantonese dialect and the latter in Mandarin. "And sometimes the Cantonese films will go more towards a leftist ideology of making films about poor people, living conditions and so on, while the Mandarin film will be more influenced by Hollywood. For a time, there were different kinds of audience going to these films as well."

This split, he says, lasted until the 1960s, when television began to shape a unified Hong Kong popular culture. "It was only in the late 1960s with the popularisation of TV - which uses Cantonese as the main medium, and which in a way unified the kind of dialect popular in Hong Kong - that the conflict between the two styles ended."

For Choi Po King, too, the development of television was a critical aspect of Hong Kong's cultural awakening. "I think, Hong Kong made a world record in the 1970s in having first-run drama series five nights a week," she says. "There are not many places in the world where you find that."

Another big factor in the emergence of a distinctive Hong Kong popular culture was the development of what is called Cantopop. The local music industry had depended on cover versions of American, British and Japanese songs. But record producers began to realise that there was a market for songs in Cantonese. On the one hand, however, there were few local songwriters, while on the other it was almost impossible to translate imported songs directly into Cantonese without changing the music. A strange hybrid - borrowed tunes with entirely original Cantonese lyrics was born, and continues to hold a large segment of the Hong Kong market.

"For the first time you had songs in Cantonese that that did not sound like Shanghainese pop songs of the 1930s and 1940s" says Choi Po King," says Choi Po King. "We had Cantonese songs before, but they either sounded like Cantonese opera songs of the traditional type, or the tunes were those from Shanghai before the Communists came. In the late 1970s, early 1980s, we suddenly had Hong Kong-styled songs. Even if the tunes were cover versions, the Cantonese lyrics themselves ring a bell and they were the attraction."

As pop music, film and television took on a distinctive flavour, so they began to reflect a sense of difference between Chinese culture in Hong Kong and that on the mainland. "The way most people in Hong Kong would distinguish themselves from people in China is that Hong Kong is 98 per cent urban and China is about 65 or 70 per cent rural, so the popular Hong Kong stereotype of the mainlander is kind of your rural cousin, the hick from the sticks who's just off the farm and who comes to the sophisticated city," says Michael de Golyer, a sociologist at the Baptist University.

"So in the films and TV shows from the 1960s onwards, you have this stereotype of the mainlander who comes to Hong Kong and the city sharpies take him from all he's worth. Occasionally, they give it a twist where the old country guy, in his wisdom, figures out how to take the sharpies."

Movies have become so important to Hong Kong's culture that in some respects they have taken the place of history as a repository of the collective memory. "There has been a tendency a fad, these past few years for directors to make the same movies that had been made in the 1950s or 1960s, and to try to parody them or totally recast them in a new way," says Choi Po King. "You could name 10 in the last three or four years.

It is almost as if, with the approach of the handover, they are trying to fix a cultural history of Hong Kong. These are people in their forties looking back to their childhood days, the black and white films they saw in the 1960s. But I think more than that there must be a quest for identity, but which this time is not Chinese identity. This time it's Hong Kong identity. And the 1960s is the only time this post-war generation could go back to.

"You can't go back earlier," she says, Let's say there hadn't been a Communist revolution in China, you probably would be able to go back to your home village on the mainland and find it relatively unchanged for 120 years. But you couldn't now, because it's a totally different China. You go back and you don't know it at all.

So if we, the post-war generation, wanted to seek for our identity, the only tangible things that we can hold on to are the places we grew up in. And even those are mostly pulled down because of urban redevelopment. So we are left with films and reminiscences."

The Chinese bookshops in Hong Kong are, accordingly, full of memoirs of the housing estates of the 1960s, of old film posters, of photographic records, of essays on identity. Choi Po King is herself compiling a recollection of life in a night school for women workers in the 1970s. "We can only explain all this by the fact that this post-war generation has now shifted its loyalty from a vague cultural memory of rural China to an urban industrialised Hong Kong as they know it," she says.

The glow of nostalgia has, however, a tinge of fear. There is, of course, anxiety about whether China will allow for the kind of freedom of expression that is necessary for a distinctive culture to thrive. But there is also, more insidiously, a division within Hong Kong itself between those who want to preserve that culture and those who want it to merge with Chinese values.

"There is a group here who want to keep that distinct Hong Kong identity. But then of course there is another group, which could well be bigger, who would say `No, no, we're ethnically Chinese, we are Chinese nationals, we are also culturally Chinese and some of these values which come from America, Britain, Japan, should really be changed back to where we were in 1842," says the political and cultural commentator T.S. Tsim. "So you have at the back of it this awareness of Chinese cultural values and those values will come to the fore, and the battle will be between the Hong Kong identity and the Chinese identity.

"In the longer run, I think, Chinese identity will win out, but we cannot be precise on how long that will take."

The battleground for that struggle may well be language. Cantonese, which has been crucial in the formation of a Hong Kong culture, will be replaced as the official language after June 30th by Mandarin. "It's going to be a very serious factor for Hong Kong people because the language has been behind the media industries that have represented or even crystallised the Hong Kong culture as we know it, and without it I don't think there's much we would have to go on," Choi Po King predicts. "Obviously, in songs, or TV or films, it's very much the language that matters and the Cantonese in Hong Kong has evolved over the last decade such that it's not the same as the dialect spoken in Canton. It's such a living language that it's the anchor of our identity. Now, there's a strong pressure on various sides to make schools adopt Mandarin This nationalistic feeling, which is so much backed up by the state force of Beijing, has so many resources that it's very difficult for us to resist. I don't think it would be an easy battle."

"If Mandarin is forced to be used as the only official language and in an arbitrary way used to replace Cantonese, then a lot of the popular culture may not survive like it is now," says poet Leung Ping Kwan. "We are not just defending one particular dialect, but a certain lifestyle, a certain attitude, and behind it a certain culture, which is similar to Chinese culture in many ways, but also has its own special characteristics. What we are arguing about is whether this alternative perspective could still be seen or read or discussed, whether there can continue to be a kind of dialogue or whether we have to be silent."

Some in Hong Kong are pessimistic about the territory's chances of preserving the culture that it has been given by an accident of history. T. S. Tsim is among them: "In the long run, Hong Kong will be subsumed under the immensity that is China and Chinese cultural norms," he says. I've often heard people say it is Hong Kong that will change China and not the other way around. I'm very sceptical that that will happen, because we're talking about six million people versus 1.2 billion. The odds are against it. It's taken Hong Kong a long time to come to this cultural fusion. It will not take as long for Chinese values to reassert themselves.

Christine Lo, on the other hand, believes China itself will have to fallow where Hong Kong has led, towards an open, modern culture. "People in China talk a lot about or 5,000 years of continuous history and what a glorious culture we have. But so what? What did that do to us? We were still stomped all over by western powers in the 19th century - from which we are obviously still recovering. That is basically China's problem in the 19th century, she became weak because she chose to shut herself off culturally. Why would we want to do that again in the 21st century?"