All of these oval shapes slant slightly at the same angle and look very similar, suggesting Wong’s deliberate use of them as punctuations in this film.
Alongside the protagonists’ physical journeys, we are thus shown their symbolic journeying through all these sluggish twists and turns in a nested spiral. This initially coincides with the ideas of scholars such as Teo and Tambling, who might find that the film has a negative tone. Nevertheless, the rigidity may prompt the protagonists (and indirectly, the Hong Kong Chinese diaspora whom they represent) to take another track when they are readjusting themselves to the surroundings in order to resume flexibility, when their identity is still in a ‘becoming’ state/stage.
3.4. Cinematic Journeys and Journeying: Summary
Song of the Exile, Days of Being Wild, and Happy Together narrate the stories of difficult human relationships through the protagonists’ physical journeys and, more provocatively, their symbolic journeying in the films. They project imageries to assure us that mobility would help those who are stuck in their circumstances to change their perspectives in looking at the issues on hand, and hopefully to resolve them.
Flashbacks in Song of the Exile deepen our understanding of the past of Hueyin and her mother with respect to the 1970s present and the more recent present of Hueyin when she is recounting this story in voice-over. Without a definitely identified ‘homeland’, Hueyin’s own subjectivity becomes the new frame of reference for her to make sense of this world. It may, however, obstruct her to think of other poses to resolve her problems. The circuitous, episodic narrative structure of Days of Being Wild could eliminate this trouble of meta-subjectivity when all the protagonists assume in relay the lead role of their own episodes. The drawback of this
individualistic attitude is that they lack strong connections that they long for, albeit fearfully, building with others. Happy Together shows us mainly Fai’s side of the story in his suffocating relationship with Wing. The loose closure of the stifling, spiral narrative structure nonetheless symbolically sets him free in the end.
4.INSIGHTS INTO HONG KONGERS’IDENTITY QUEST DURING TRANSITION:ALTERABILITY
We have just discussed the cinematic journeys and journeying as represented in Song of the Exile,
Days of Being Wild, and Happy Together. By exploring the theme of journey and journeying in their films, directors Hui and Wong capture a fact of lives that concerned Hong Kongers before the political reunification with China, namely whether Hong Kong was their real ‘home’ and whether it was still worth staying behind when they could not see the future clearly. I have discussed earlier that such worries came from Hong Kongers’ intricate relationship with ‘China’ and their trouble in locating a fixed, imagined, idealized ‘homeland’. This has resulted in their feeling of alienation for ‘China’ among other sentimentalities. Inclusively, I have identified it as Hong Kongers’ situational, diasporic consciousness. Such awareness has directly led Hong Kongers’ to develop a fragile sense of belonging to their place of residence in Hong Kong.
In this section, I will evaluate what these cinematic imageries of population outward movement from Hong Kong would mean to Hong Kongers’ identity quest during transition and I will conclude that as long as Hong Kongers were adjusting their standpoints, their transitional self was likely to change incessantly.
Let us return to diagram 2 in the introduction to this chapter. If identity is a matter of ‘becoming’ in Hall’s sense, it follows that when Hong Kongers were deciding to emigrate before 1997, they
had devised an additional ‘safety valve’ in their self-construction process. It is not so much to control their own destinies with the choices of staying away from trouble, as to replenish themselves with viewpoints to resolve their self dilemmas. Such a ‘safety valve’ would exist in the journeying period (as in diagram 2) during which myriad variables emerged to affect people’s thinking and enabled them to continue re-defining and re-modifying their stances. The journeying of this group of ethnic Chinese living in Hong Kong may not only reflect the actual physical journeys that they would take. It may also embrace the decision-making process (with psychological and emotional aspects) that they had to go through when pondering their stay in or departure from Hong Kong. Although the additional factors emerging during the journeying period would create another kind of disturbance, I would tend to consider them as effectively empowering the people to liberate their visions.
Cinematic imageries of actual human mobility and symbolic travel, in this case, help us envisage some of these unpredictable elements in the journeying period. For example, Song of the Exile
with its flashbacks evokes a forgotten past to which the protagonists were oblivious. Days of Being Wild disrupts the norm of the linear storytelling method with its episodes, thereby bringing us multiple experiences of different protagonists. Happy Together, with its compact, spiral structure and repetitions, allows us to enjoy the complete freedom of route choices when it finally arrives.
By inference, as long as the figurative journeying period persists with people’s continuous self- readjustment in relation to the Handover transition, Hong Kongers’ sense of being is likely to go into a state of deferring the ultimate signification of self, as in Derrida’s ‘différance’, and thus arguably remain altering.
5.CHAPTER CONCLUSION
In this chapter, I examined one of the possible features of self-construction during transition – alterability – by referring to the specific case of Hong Kong in facing the impending Handover. Built on my argument that I established in Chapter 1 for the situational, diasporic consciousness of this group of Chinese, I realized that the emigration waves from Hong Kong in the 1990s indicated more than what mere figures told us about these émigrés’ displacement. Human geographical mobility suggested how they came to terms with their changing identity by actively finding ways to resolve their difficulties when they did not have a fixed, imagined, idealized ‘homeland’ to crystallize their sense of affiliation.
I therefore aligned several concepts, including ‘displacement’, ‘sojourn’, ‘exile’, ‘migration’, ‘nomadism’, ‘diaspora’, and ‘journey and journeying’ to interpret such human mobility from Hong Kong. As most of these concepts are reliant on other contestable concepts such as ‘home’ and ‘homeland’ to make sense, I argued that ‘journey and journeying’, in suggesting changes of vantage points along the way of people’ movement, would be more stimulating in helping us to contemplate the significance and implication of Hong Kongers’ recent emigration.
Through closely examining three pre-Handover Hong Kong films, Song of the Exile, Days of Being Wild and Happy Together in terms of the thematic, and in particular, the narrative functions of physical journeys and allegorical journeying in film, I established how vantage points could be added to make a difference during Hong Kongers’ identity construction process. This included Hui employing flashbacks in Song of the Exile to enrich the story texture and enhance our / the protagonists’ understanding of the past and the present, and Wong using episodes in Days of Being Wild and spiral structure in Happy Together respectively to suggest