A fluid culture : the evolvement of southbound writers' Hong Kong narratives = 流動的文化 : 南移作家的香港敘述之嬗變

Abstract

The historical phenomenon of writers successively moving southward from Mainland China to Hong Kong manifests the fluidity of Hong Kong culture in a significant way. This dissertation investigates the five largescale immigration booms from the 20th Century to the present and reviews the notion of “writers emigrating from the Mainland to Hong Kong” accepted by academia. It then constructs a new theory of southbound writers from the perspective of mobility. Three generations (from the late 1940s to 2022) of southbound writers are analyzed. The first generation refers to those who immigrated to Hong Kong in the 1950s or around 1949 and afterward. The Cultural Revolution as well as the Reform and Open-up policy in China thereafter drove the second batch of immigrants in the 1970s and 1980s. Now Hong Kong is in the third wave of southbound boom, while a group of writers called “new Hong Kong people” has made their mark in society since 1997. Employing comparative studies and close reading, this dissertation explores how those southbound authors’ writing motivation and emotional belongings help prove their homogeneity in recognizing the characteristics of Hong Kong culture (the so-called “Hongkongness”) during the process of their trans-regional movements, enabling us to reconstruct the imaginary relationship between southbound writers and Hong Kong literature. With the emergence of issues surrounding identity and intergeneration, southbound writers’ personal feeling of being in mobile situations becomes enriched. Finally, this dissertation explores how the selected author’ Hong Kong narratives have changed and contributed to the fluidity of Hong Kong culture.