Coming of Age in Post-Urban Hong Kong: An Eco-critical Approach to Land-writing and Land-filming

Abstract

The formation of a place and community involves both a spatial definition and a coherent narrative of its historical existences. As a small piece of land and a high-density populated place, discussions and imaginations of Hong Kong is often centered upon the various dimensions and multiple meanings of territory or land. From Xi Xi(西西)’s “Marvels of a Floating City” (1986), Wu Xubin (吳煦斌)’s nature writing to independent filmmakers Lai Yan Chi(賴恩慈)’s 1+1 (2010) and Jessey Tsang(曾翠珊)’s Ho Chung Tetralogy (2010-2014), land and nature recur as a motif and is invested by writers and filmmakers to construct beliefs, meanings, and significations for structuring social relations. This ecological focus, unlike the colonial dreamscape of Hong Kong as an economic miracle, allows writers and filmmakers to reflect upon Hong Kong’s transition to post-colonial and post-urban space and era. Projected from a female’s point of view, these four writers and filmmakers examine the notion of land in different moments of crisis before and after the 1997. In this paper, we will examine their conceptualization of nature within urban Hong Kong, and explore the way land becomes a point where environment and urban, local and global, private and public domains clash, negotiate, and fertilize each other. The gendered Hong Kong space represented by the above writers and filmmakers do not conform to the economic and prosperity discourses that has repressed Hong Kong; rather, they guide us to re-experience our affect to nature and land, to celebrate alternate ways of understanding the post-urbanscape, and to open ourselves to potentialities of art and nature. This paper will first investigate the representation of land in literature and cinema in the pre- and post-1997 era. It will then explore the way ecological approaches contributes to the formation of a new eco-centric Hong Kong identity. The paper will conclude by revealing the eco-centric turn in Hong Kong literature and independent cinema can be useful references for Sinophone studies as a whole.