“Globality becomes a phantastic space (Ahmed, 337)” – as Hong Kong is situated at the nexus of global flows, the city positions itself straddling East and West, with mixed Chinese history and British heritage that contributes to its ghostly and perplexing identity. Meanwhile, the city also holds the quotidian element for the local people to explore not only the shifting cultural relationships between Hong Kong and China, Hong Kong and the West and Hong Kong as a distinct locality, but also the urban identity as a site of imagination and/or constraint. In particular, amidst the 1997 handover and the growing intersection between the global currents and local realities, the sense of anxiety and disorientation comes to terms with identity at a critical historical juncture, where the formation of identity emerges “as a kind of unsettled space, or an unresolved question in that space, between a number of intersecting discourses… Identity is a process, identity is split. Identity is not a fixed point but an ambivalent point. (Hall, 9)”. Identity in this sense is always making through difference and not unified. For migrants, they must redefine and reconstruct themselves and their sense of identity in relation to a new setting. Flip the coin over, this comes to a critical question: what if they can’t?

 

  Increasingly, the Hong Kong films and literary works saw an emergence of the use of violence appearing as a fundamental narrative element, that is closely tinged with political intentions leading up to the city’s reintegration with China. The presentation of violence is steeped in a crisis of consciousness triggered by a sense of apocalyptic impending doom and the fragmented temporality in an evolving urban topography. The violence here, is not merely the reining up of excessive use of violence, but “the exploration of the representation of violence in literature that forms an aesthetic experience upon spectators. This aesthetic experience is hence systematized into the formation of principles, values and ethos[1].” In other words, the portrayal of violence is stylized, enabling the spectators to connect between the stigma of violent images and the cultural and emotional issues.

  Under the fulcrum of aestheticization of violence, the notion of uncanny ties to the creation of a repressed feeling during the process of forming and recognizing identity. In Losing the City, Wong Bik Wan’s protagonist, Chan Lo Yuen’s ruthless murder has proved that not every fairytale has a happy ending: the Chan’s who tries to escape the uncertainty from 1997 through fleeing, only to be bound by “the return of the familiar as the unfamiliar (Ashley, 159)”, in a victimizing position. The uncanny arises from the murder scene juxtaposing ironically with bloodshed and quotidian: 

 

The scrawny woman’s eyes were still open, as if she was watching television, and there was a child-like look of absorption on her face. She was sitting there prim and proper, her head had been smashed and the brains were trickling down her forehead… The eldest girl was slumped over her desk. She had been drawing when the back of her head was smashed open by a hard object. (208-201)

 

  A thrust away from the epicenter of the nightmare of 1997 inspires a transnational journey for the Chan’s. Nonetheless, only after they settled down in Calgary, San Francisco and Toronto had they realized they were just “out of the frying pan into another frying pan (221)”. The process of migration forms estrangement to Chan, which stems from the doubling of uncanny: all its negative traits associated in the search of at-homeness have been suppressed; all those utopian, diasporic dreams, wishes, hopes are suppressed by the reality principle and the encounter with societal changes. However, this repression, fueled by the continuous dislocation and emotionally detachment, has erupted into violence – the family was killed during daily chores when Mei was watching TV whilst the children were drawing. Their dead postures feed on a similarity: one suggesting that they will continue this lifeless and conflicting life hereafter may find it rhetorical to believe that they are now filled with blood and flesh, just to be turning into a real lifeless and banal corpse, in perpetuity. 

 

  Perhaps a time bomb had been set ever since they made the diasporic decision, and it is about to explode when Mei is feeding her children with raw chicken heart, cow spleen and pig liver, covering their mouths with blood. Albeit less violent, this image gives rise to a variety of meta-emotions that is mainly uncomfortable and anxious. Mei believes that eating animals’ entrails can drive away evil, as “the curse of death is upon [them] (221)”. Patently, the mind of Mei is locked into a turbulent experience during the transnational migration. Given that the locality permeates into senses such as smells and hears (Ahmed, 341), for Mei, she can only smell blood and hear her children’s crying. In such, the curse she refers to is from their inability to form a useful identity with a particular place as their bodies fail to reinhabit to it. In Canada and America, they feel “a solid sense of loneliness and fear (223)” as outsiders meanwhile returning to their hometown, they wait for nothing but a grim and deadening future, in this ever-changing city to which identities and themselves are lost. 

 

  Violence, whether brutal or subtle, disrupts the equilibrium of the tranquility which “parasites” under the shadow of an identity crisis. The aesthetic of violence in Wong’s work holding liable to the mincing of blood and quotidian therefore highlights the fact that the problem of identity is deformed, gradual and cumulative –  at a point when Chan cannot “carry this love-cross anymore (212)”, the fragmentary vision of reality turns a daily routine into domestic tragedy. 

 

  Another violence appears in the aesthetic use of music after the mayhem. The rhythm of the brutality is disrupted by a discordant sound that oscillates between the real and the unreal – the murderer’s state of mind “breaks with the conventional world… and the knocking at the gate is the correlate of the re-entry from aesthetic hyperreality back into mundane reality (Black, 50)”. This aesthetic hyperreality is found in Chan, who after slaughtering his family, was found nonchalantly listening attentively to the soothing music piece, Bach’s ‘Suite for Unaccompanied Cello, No.1 in G’ with “a look of peace and radiation on his face, like that of a Christian” (208). However, Chan confessed that the act of listening to Bach was “unbearably painful (208)”, adding rationality to his aesthetic hyperreality. This contrast is due to an experience of rupture after the liberation of a repressed psyche, allowing a temporary blurring between his dream[2] and the real world. 

 

  In Pang Ho-cheung’s Dream Home (2010), Cheng Lai-sheung, who is unable to afford her dream home, listens to punk music after going into a horrendous murder frenzy. In a similar vein, art and violence coalescing into one unforgettable aesthetic experience, which happens in the familiar place, home, in both works, have led up to two confrontations to the identity issues: failure and success. Both Chan and Cheng failed to construct identity in this all-encompassing city – the migration from Hong Kong to Calgary, Toronto, San Francisco and finally back to Hong Kong, has left the Chan’s vulnerable with rootlessness and nothingness; while Cheng’s hope of earning enough money to buy her dream apartment has been squashed by the unrealistically sky-rocketing property prices, and so does her identity as “Hongkonger”, as reflected in her monologue: Why should I suffer? Why can’t I find a place[3] for myself in this city? In facing the loss of identity, “destruction was all (221)”. Both doomed protagonists resort to violence, marking the depravity that ennobles the loss of hope and humanity. This can alternatively be rendered as their success, though in a mockery way – Chan alleviates his family from suffering in a lost city where no meaning of life can be envisioned; Cheng can, in the end, move into an affordable room with four blocks. Thus, music, does not only have a cathartic effect on aestheticizing the act of violence and but also provides an immediate and celebrative outlet for their antisocial impulses.

 

  The feeling of belonging to a home, is “sentimentalized as a space of belonging (Ahmed, 341)”. Being at home is a matter of how one feels or how one might fail to feel. In Wong’s work, the Chan’s are the victims who fail to feel “home”. They hold transient identities and are repeatedly bewildered by the estrangement of the familiar and the familiarization of strangeness during migration. The violence, tinged with the aesthetics of blunt nonchalance and music, obfuscates the boundaries between the familiar and the strange – when the return of the repressed and long-forgotten feeling compels Chan to recognize his fragmented and split subjectivities, violence becomes the possible euthanasia for the unbearable pain haunted by the long-rooted inability to form an identity to a space.

 

 

 

A poem for the lonely spirits who cannot find home:

 

Love is imagined but pain is real

gore and blood summon the deepest despair

among the weary unanswered prayer

only to find my vesture in blood and body still

 

the soul finds itself alone

in the delirious fantasy of a diasporic dream

All the sweet thoughts one lives on seem

to vanish into an ebony tombstone

 

[1] Wong, Nim-yan. A Study of the ‘Aesthetic of Violence’ in Wong Bik-wan’s Novels. The Graduate School of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Department of Chinese Language and Literature, Mphil Thesis, 1999. [own translation]

[2] Chan had been dreaming of killing his wife and waking up in a cold sweat. The unreal finally becomes the real.

[3] The “place” has a double meaning: a physical space and her sense of belonging.