The name Hong Kong as “Fragrant 香 Habour 港” was of Chinese origin, but it was the British who applied the name to the whole island, which makes one wonder what kind of fragrance it is that appeals to both colonialities. In the very unprecedented historical situation where Hong Kong finds itself being caught in the middle of the East-West colonialism, there is a desperate attempt to grope for its own voice, however unfamiliar or clichéd it may sound. Yet, for a city agitating over its own identity whilst remaining entrapped between the nostalgia for a whitewashed colonial past and a growing skepticism towards an almost alien motherland, plus an increasing sense of self-awareness towards this floating city which is under the threat of being erased by a more and more insistently globalizing and homogeneous space, Hong Kong has ‘a story that is hard to tell’ (Leung, 3).

 

  As there are many voices singing in chorus, be it economic, political or historical, adding to the complexity to the story of Hong Kong, how to write about Hong Kong so that even the marginalized voices could be heard therefore presents a local challenge. Some Hong Kong writers such as Leung Ping-Kwan, under the pen name of Ye Si, had emerged from ‘a perpetual state of transition’ (Cheung, 2) and were keen on searching for a narrative/language that speaks for its convoluted history and complicated cultural identity. The quotidian and cultural milieu are used as a starting point to reflect upon the issues of the post-handover and global state in the imaginary space of the stage and props of the everyday, through ‘find[ing] ways to use the constraining order of the place and language’ (de Certeau, 30) that sets out to creating or recreating networks of relationships for establishing cultural identities and forging meaningful memory.  

 

  Leung demonstrates ‘a unique poetics of quotidianism of the everyday’ (Cheung, 3) by, on the one hand, reminding us of the intractable power politics and the possible consequence of passive consumption in his work; on the other hand, ‘using’ the tactics of consumption to stimulate an alternative thinking to the unevenness bound by modern urbanity. He tactically weaves a tapestry of verses with threads of “weak” images, ranging from food to street, revealing how one flustered with the incessant mass consumption can ‘select fragments taken from the vast ensembles of production in order to compose new stories with them’ (de Certeau, 35).  In “Tea-coffee” (yuanyang), food and beverage is a theme pivotal to the materiality of the everyday life. Tea-coffee, the mixing of an English-style coffee with milk tea, has been a long-standing example of creolization of food culture under a creative process. Leung uses tea-coffee as a symbol to represent the uniqueness of Hong Kong cultural identity ― hybridity:  

 

Tea, fragrant and strong, made from

five different blends, in cotton bags or legendary

stockings ― tender, all-encompassing, gathering ―

brewed in hot water and poured into a teapot, its taste

varying subtly with the time in water steeped.

Can that fine art be maintained? Pour the tea

into a cup of coffee, will the aroma of one

interfere with, wash out the other? Or will the other

keep its flavour: roadside food stalls

streetwise and worldly from its daily stoves

mixed with a dash of daily gossips and good sense,

hard-working, a little sloppy… an indescribable taste. 

(Wong and Ng, 153)

 

  What is riveting is that the milk tea itself is double-hybrid― the tea has first been brewed in a local style of ‘legendary stockings’ with milk, perfectly mixed in with a harmonious taste of ‘tender, all-encompassing, gathering’. When milk tea and coffee are brewed and served in ‘roadside food stalls’, ‘streetwise’ with ‘a dash of daily gossips and good sense’, they neither ‘wash out the other’ or ‘keep its flavour’. Rather, their respective aromas intersect to become a third entity, as Leung puts it, ‘an indescribable taste’. 

 

  “Tea-coffee” exemplifies how ordinary people take advantage of the resistance of the everyday in order to work out their identity in relation to the rapid development of interconnections between the city and its motherland and also the integration of Hong Kong into the world community. Oscillating between both visibly powerful cultures, resistance is ‘both a preservative and a creation of something new’ (Highmore, 153) for Hong Kong people to reappropriate the two existing comestibles (i.e. tea and coffee) into something that is born of difference and otherness, entangled within neighborhood relationships that are nurtured through a sense of dailiness, forming ‘tactical trajectories’ in which tea-coffee dealing with Western colonialism is presumably emblematic, but also a creative manipulator in charge of reconfiguring the fragments in a ‘new story’.

 

  As there is no grounded authentic identity available in the tumult of a political time, the cultural identity of Hong Kong, in Hall’s words, is a matter of ‘being and becoming’ (225) that belongs to the past (colonialism) and the future (post-colonialism and globalization). The recuperation of everyday life, while constantly engaged in working through of the past and future, therefore deals with the fragmentation and hybridity of Hong Kong’s unsettled identity and patchwork memories: 

 

Tactics draw on different temporalities from those that dominate the present and that this is analogous to the assertion in psychoanalysis of the continuation of the past in the present (Highmore, 164).

 

  Because no identity and memory is pure in Hong Kong, the local, in ‘the absence of a proper locus’ (de Certeau, 37), makes ways to recreate an indescribable taste and smell out of the origins and crown this indescribability as personally and collectively unique to their Hong Kong story. Echoed with Harootunian’s idea of having an alternative optic to view a fragmented history, the everyday is ‘the site of practices that point to its open-endedness, incompletion, and multi-accentuality’ (Chaplin, 12).

 

  Another poem, “In Ap-liu Street”, however provides a minor tale of the fragmented feeling amidst the consuming world that shapes the everyday life of Hong Kong. Ap-liu street, located in Sham Shui Po, was originally known for raising ducks before suburbanization. The street is now a flea market where one can find new or used electronic components, spare parts for appliances, and even the most once-in-a-blue-moon antiques:

 

We came to get the picture we had in mind 

and wound up here after several turns. 

You can buy all kinds of accessories here. 

 

The art of consumption becomes a way of inscribing the disoriented and old everyday objects such as television and cassette tape into narratives of memory, which forms as a site of resistance:

 

Here are images of “The Pearl of the Orient” in casual disarray. 

What were you saying? Through the metallic eye of the lens 

I see both ends of an axle unattached, 

many discarded cog-wheels at the mouth of your mine. 

Is that an alarm clock ringing in your ears? My intestines are 

cassette tapes, and on sale here. 

It’s been so long. Who will come and turn us on? 

Adjust the antennae and make our pictures clear?

 

  The images of Hong Kong placed in disarray, the abandoned television sets assuming a human voice to plead for a new life by asking passersby to ‘turn us on…and make our pictures clear’ have lashed out a critical voice over the fleeing memory in this amnesiac city undergoing face-lifting. As Ma notes:

 

In fact, there is something highly political to people’s memories: we tend to remember only the history of the victors. Those who hold on to the memory of the losers’ history do so at the risk of their lives, because winning and losing are not the same as the outcome of a fair soccer match.

 

  We tend to look at the city from the glorifying perspective, notwithstanding, this flawed memory first, does not take the victims into account, and second, decays due to the mere passage of time. In a similar vein, Ann Hui’s female protagonist, Kwai in The Way We Are, also faces the same fate of being forgotten ― sacrificing her life for her family as well as the economic development of Hong Kong and lamentably lagging behind. Here, the television sets and the images of old Hong Kong, the heroic belongings once the local boasts of having, represent the distortion of memory through the replacement of time, and alteration of memories that fit in with the recreated cultural practice, to the point at which the previous memory is subsequently becoming ‘surplus images of the city’ as the poem continues: 

 

Surplus images of the city are discarded with the garbage. 

Piled high together they smell to high heaven. 

Who needs so many things? To be sure, I don’t. 

You buy designer clothes to save your shaky nerves,

throbbing lungs held in paper bags, flesh hidden in oil cloth. 

Shrines and old tires hidden by the merry-go-round. 

The camera looks around, gorging on imagery: 

Hard deals are in progress everywhere on the Island. 

I pay with my heart and get surplus sockets every time. 

A rusty cooker, an irregular wok. 

Big sales draw you in and again you’re caught in whirls of dusty wire. 

I look all over and don’t see one square deal.

 

  The street known for its technological bric-a-bracs and heap-loads of used gadgets is an exotic wasteland of futuristic imaginings gone wrong. Contrary to “Tea-coffee”, the ways of consumption in Ap-liu street such as purchasing the quotidian staples which are associated with pejoratives ― ‘surplus rockets’, ‘rusty cooker’ and ‘irregular wok’ and ‘dusty wires’ are just raw deals because ordinary people fail to grasp their capability of bringing about a mutation in a symbolic order within the repetitive everyday world. The drifting of these homeless pieces parallels that of the inhabitants (also the consumers) who are transformed into immigrants, signifying the fluidity and temporality in their cultural identity and constant quest for permanence and belonging with rampant opportunism that may ‘save your shaky nerves’. 

 

  The material of clothes ― wools and flannels, silks and velvets ― used to weave the story of the collaging voices of Hong Kong:

 

You shoot away down the street, caught in the musty net of wools and flannels.

Here used to be the fabric market, full of glamorous designs. 

Silks and velvets. All for the various costumes in which 

you could play any number of totes, tell different stories. 

 

  People in the past could effectively cut loose from the static power that circumscribed their functioning and formed affective memory and relationship. However, now most are in a quandary about how much autonomy they have to carve and preserve their identity stranded in between Westernization: 

 

You say maybe this place was a famous duck farm, 

And now it’s a packed arcade, a paradise of accessories. 

You’re looking for a chair as a European garden prop. 

The owner says you have to buy the lot, including the useless pieces.

 

  Without rooting in Chinese or Western culture, Hong Kong does not have, or has not created, any distinct culture. Although some may combine the fragments and be through an indefinite plurality of meanings to create something unknown in the space so organized, this continued fragility is a result of those who are blindly receptive to the coercive force of ‘looking for a chair as European garden prop’, in other words, integrating into the European culture, without acknowledging how the overlooked objects of everyday life can come along with a sense of uncanny, as to what Walter Benjamin calls, ‘profane illumination’. 

 

  Hong Kong literature, in particular, poetry, does not only produce circulation of objects through everyday happenings to stimulate imagination but also allows us to live on borrowed time and space. In Leung’s work, the use of everyday can be a new form of reciprocity to memory and identity as well as disenchantment that forces consumers to linger on invisible ruins. Most importantly, as Hong Kong is still politically on borrowed time, while opening itself to the globe, it remains as a city riddled with counter-intuitive anomalies. The sand in the hourglass is running out, the next question may therefore be: how can Hong Kong literature find a new way to reconcile this perplexing fragrance in the next 20-30 years within this order?

 

​

 

Works Cited

 

Chaplin, Sarah. Japanese Love Hotels: A Cultural History. Routledge, 2007, pp. 12.

De Certeau, Michel. 

 

Cheung, Esther M. K. “Introduction to the new edition: New Ends in a City of Transition.” City at the End of Time: Poems by Leung Ping-kwan. Ed. Esther M. K. Cheung. Trans. Gordon T. Osing and Leung Ping-Kwan. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. 2012, pp.1–3.

 

de Certeau, Michel. “‘Making Do’: Uses and Tactics.” The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 1984, pp.29-42.

 

Hall, Stuart. Cultural Identity and Diaspora: Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. Lawarence and Wishart, 1990, pp. 225. 

 

Highmore, Ben. “Michel de Certeau’s Poetics of Everyday Life.” Everyday Life and Cultural Theory. London & New York: Routledge. 2002, pp.153-164.

 

Leung, Ping-kwan. City at the End of Time. Hong Kong University Press, 2012, pp. 93. 

 

Leung, Ping-kwan. The Story of Hong Kong. Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 3.

 

Wong, Mary & Better Ng Eds. Leung Ping-kwan: A Retrospective. Hong Kong: Leisure and Cultural Services Department, 2014, pp. 153. 

 

Texts for Discussion:

“Tea-coffee” and “In Ap-liu Street” by Leung Ping-kwan