Cinematic Remembrances: Ordinary Heroes and Little Cheung

Abstract

The 1990s saw the end of colonial rule in Hong Kong and the city’s accelerated development into a ‘global city’, where Western and Chinese capital vied for both profit and prestige in the run-up to 1997. This prospect and the accompanying social and political misgivings provided a frame of reference and subject matter for some filmmakers to reflect on issues of local history and identity. As I have pointed out in the ‘Introduction’, the search for a local identity has largely remained an unfinished project. In the post-1997 milieu, ‘Hong Kong identity’ is still debated in film criticism and critical writings on Hong Kong as an indicator of the territory’s, and the film industry’s, ongoing negotiation with China and the socioeconomic transformations brought on by globalization.¹ The complexity of local identity articulation in Hong Kong is effectively summed up in Michelle Tsung-yi Huang’s study on the global city with reference to Fruit Chan’s Little Cheung (1999): unlike most other post-colonial cultures, the lack of a ‘native place’ (xiangtu) as a stronghold for resistance has left the old cityspace being the only possible ‘native place archetype’, which also necessitates a remapping of ‘native place’ on to the larger geopolitics of global space.² In this connection, recent theorizations of contemporary identity politics have shed light on the constructed nature of all identities, and Judith Butler’s idea of ‘performativity’ has further put gender and other identity norms into question.³