What Is Hong Kong?

To answer this question, it is usual to begin by explaining how Hong Kong came into being from a historical point of view. As succinctly noted by John Carroll, while the Chinese Government officially holds that ‘Hong Kong has been part of the territory of China since ancient times,’ until recently, British historians ‘generally dismissed the idea of Hong Kong as having any real history until the British arrived’. It was just a ‘barren island’, or to borrow Richard Hughes’ often-cited term, just a ‘borrowed place living on borrowed time’ – ‘Hong Kong did not exist, so it was necessary to invent it.’ Regarding this assessment, Carroll cited the example of James Hayes, historian and former colonial official, noting that ‘the island was certainly well-established in settler communities long before 1841’. That said, I would rather take up the question from a different perspective, which may seem out of the blue. Refuting Hughes’ concept of ‘borrowed time, borrowed place’, renowned Hong Kong author Kai-cheung Dung has argued that ‘space and time can never be borrowed’: ‘I and many others like me simply don't accept this description of the place where we live’ because ‘we belong to the space-time that is ours. Nobody lends it to us and we don't borrow it from anybody.’ Two years older than Dung and having grown up in Hong Kong with a similar background, I share his view completely. Hong Kong has been commonly known as a barren rock, a Chinese fishing village, an imperial outpost, a capitalist metropolis, a city between worlds and a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of China under the unprecedented ‘one country, two systems’ framework.

In its heyday in the 1970s and 1980s, Cantopop defined the look, feel and – with its lush, ultra-refined production values – even the sound of Chinese cool.

The Making of a New Epoch

1984 was an important year in the history of Hong Kong, as I have argued elsewhere. A taxi strike, during which angry drivers ‘occupied’ main roads to protest against a proposed steep increase in registration and license fees, triggered a night of rioting in Mong Kok, the busiest district in Hong Kong, on 13 January. It was the first major riot since 1967 in the territory. In fact, the social unrests plaguing it had been brewing for years. The early 1980s was a time of uncertainty for the city and its people, as their future after 1997 was still under negotiation. The infamous tumble of Margaret Thatcher, the then Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, on the steps of the Great Hall of the People after her meeting with Deng Xiaoping, the then leader of the People's Republic of China, in Beijing on 24 September 1982 was seen as presaging the fall of British governance in Hong Kong. The people's confidence in the city's future hung by a thread, and subsequently the stock and property markets plummeted to rock bottom. The Sino-British Joint Declaration was formally signed by the People's Republic of China and the United Kingdom on 19 December 1984, and Hong Kong people finally faced the reality that the then British colony's return to its motherland in 1997 was inevitable.

The spread of television represented the birth of an art form which introduced a new sensibility into Hong Kong society.

A New Kind of Collective Sensibility

While there have been studies that contested ‘the notion that television has a powerful identity-conferring ability’, Eric Kit-wai Ma has noted in his research on Hong Kong television that ‘in the light of the Hong Kong case, these studies can only reach the conclusion that television is not an effective agency for realizing cultural imperatives when imposed from above.’ Given the distinctive history of Hong Kong, those studies may not be totally applicable. As Ma further argued:

Although the history of Hong Kong television can be traced back to the 1950s, when Rediffusion Television (RTV) – operated by Rediffusion (Hong Kong) Limited, a subsidiary of Rediffusion in the UK – launched paytelevision service in 1957, Hong Kong audiences did not have free-to-air television until the Television Broadcasting Company (TVB) launched it in 1967. During its early years, TVB relied heavily on foreign-purchased dramas until the localization of its productions was gradually completed in the mid-1970s. Meanwhile, RTV turned free-to-air in April 1973, and Commercial Television (CTV), the third free-to-air television station in Hong Kong, was founded later in 1975. The Hong Kong television industry changed ‘from a monopoly to a tripartite dominion’.

Thanks to these magazines, I can consume a city like any other packaged product.

Birth of a City Magazine

In the 1970s, Hong Kong gradually developed into a cosmopolitan city as a result of its rapid economic growth. As the media and entertainment industry grew exponentially in Hong Kong in this decade of changes, there were more and more channels for multimedia stardom. Rising stars spawned new trends among fans who emulated their styles – from fashion to hairstyles – and increased demand for cultural industries products and consumption goods offered new opportunities for magazine journalism. Although there were some magazines such as Ming Pao Weekly and youth journals such as The Chinese Student Weekly and The 70's Biweekly, Hong Kong was yet to have a city magazine at that time. ‘City and regional magazines have always fitted uncomfortably into traditional imaginings of magazine journalism,’ as noted by Miglena Sternadori and Susan Currie Sivek, and ‘their function often is to promote a positive image of their areas and construct a cheerful local identity – comfortable environs for both readers and advertisers.’ Seeing a niche market opportunity, young pioneers Koon-Chung Chan (aka John Chan), Peter Dunn, Henry Wu, and Joseph Yau founded a city magazine originally entitled The Tabloid [Haowai] in September 1976.

According to Chan, the idea to produce The Tabloid could be traced back to The Chinese Student Weekly, The 70's Biweekly, and The Youth Weekly. Influenced by the ‘counter-culture’ of those publications, The Village Voice and other similar publications left a deep impression on Chan while pursuing further studies in Boston in 1974.

Why are we often nostalgic for the 1980s? It is because it was similar to our adolescence.

In the Prime of Youth

After the Television Broadcasts Limited (TVB)-inspired The House of 72 Tenants (1973), a remake of a 1963 film of the same title, unexpectedly grossed HK$5.6 million and broke the then box office record set by Bruce Lee's Enter the Dragon (1972), Cantonese cinema seemed to bounce back from rock bottom low in a market dominated by English and Mandarin films – there were no Cantonese film productions in Hong Kong in 1972. As this was the only Cantonese production out of the ninety-four Hong Kong films released in 1973, it was indeed a pleasant surprise for Cantonese pop culture. It also successfully brought Cantonese films back to Hong Kong cinema. In 1974, out of a total of 101 Hong Kong films, twenty-one were Cantonese productions. The highest-grossing films were Cantonese productions, including the monumental Games Gamblers Play (1974) by the Hui Brothers – Michael Hui and Sam Hui. Even with the success of some Cantonese films, ‘Hong Kong's film industry was still regarded as somewhat depressed’ in the mid-1970s, ‘particularly by young filmmakers who had just returned to the territory after graduating from film schools overseas’. Besides the Hui Brothers’ Cantonese comedies and kind of language-neutral wave of kung fu films triggered by Bruce Lee (his films were dubbed into Mandarin when they premiered in Hong Kong in the early 1970s), Hong Kong cinema had still yet to find new impetus in terms of talents and film genres. It was therefore believed that the Hong Kong film industry had reached a stage of shortage, and a new crop was yet to come.

They came to dance, but ended up getting an education.

Dance, But Not As Usual

As mentioned in the Prologue, dancing symbolized the lifestyle of Hong Kong with the saying ‘horse racing and dancing will continue, and capitalist lifestyle will remain unchanged,’ in which dancing referred to dancing at nightclubs – a nightlife that showcased the city's success in the capitalist world-economy. Besides the dancing that would continue after 1997 according to Deng Xiaoping, some other dancing venues became chic trendsetters of not only the territory but also neighbouring regions. While the never-sleeping city saw big spenders in money-squandering ‘hostess’ nightclubs, disco was also seen as a kind of dance that shaped another dimension of Hong Kong's nightlife in the 1980s. Derived from ‘discotheque’, a type of dance-oriented nightclub that first appeared in the 1960s, disco became not just the preeminent form of dance music but also a culture of nightlife in Hong Kong in the late 1970s. In the aftermath of Saturday Night Fever (1977; premiered in Hong Kong in 1978), the disco wave was triggered in the territory, which later proved to be important in propelling pop idols to stardom. If nightlife was ‘one of society's few sanctioned antidotes to the monotony of the day-to-day, or what the French call le quotidian’, then disco as another kind of dancing in Hong Kong made the nightlife of this never-sleeping city even more diverse and fascinating. Interestingly, if nightclub dancing was seen as representing the lifestyle that was promised not to change after the handover in 1997, nightlife at trendy discos evinced a quickly developing pop style that uplifted the city throughout the decade.

It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.

Fashioning the City

Fashion and lifestyle are effective benchmarks against which the image of a metropolitan city is measured. Fred Davis cited the above as the epigraph of the first chapter of his Fashion, Culture, and Identity, in which he begins with this statement: ‘That the clothes we wear make a statement is a statement that in this age of heightened self-consciousness has virtually become a cliché.’ While Davis was referring to the relationship between fashion and the cultural identity of individuals, his statement perfectly fits that of cities as well. Usually New York, Paris, London, Milan, and Tokyo top the familiar list of cities that conjure up the image of high fashion, and a ‘big city look’ is deemed as revealing a certain distinctive type of metropolitan chic. Hong Kong has taken pride in being compared with these global cities. For example, when the January 2008 issue of TIME magazine (Asia Edition) coined the term ‘Nylonkong’ to tell the stories of the three connected cites that ‘drive the global economy’, Donald Tsang, the then Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR), considered Hong Kong as playing a similar role in Asia as New York in North America and London in Europe, echoing the term ‘Nylonkong’. As Richard Florida argued in his Who's Your City?, however, ‘personal’ characteristics are pertinent factors that make a city attractive in the age of the global economy. Whether Hong Kong could develop its own distinctive characteristics was much more important than the term itself.

The concept and structure of this book were partially inspired by Leo Ou-fan Lee's City between Worlds: My Hong Kong, in which the author walked in the city, trying to ‘find out what indeed is (or was) there, in Hong Kong's past, that may still shed light on its culture today’. According to Lee, a long-time Hong Kong resident, the city means quite different things to different groups of people: the natives who grew up there and experienced it as the context for everyday life, the expatriates who came to work in its robust finance centre, the British who created the colonial face of the city, and the urban and global residents whose emerging consciousness encompassed and transcended that of the previous groups. Lee had chosen to look at his Hong Kong from this perspective: ‘voicing opinions, wherever possible, on behalf of a Chinese community whose members have not chosen to write about their city in English’. ‘Each chapter presents a slice of the city's history and culture,’ in addition, ‘called up by the streets, sites, and artifacts themselves, and by association with literature and film.’ Taking this as the critical backdrop, the chapters in this book – structured around walking tours – were conceived to touch on different ‘slices’ of Hong Kong pop culture in the 1980s:

Nothing was impossible in the 1980s, but at the same time many other future possibilities were buried.

The Golden Decade: Gone for Good?

At the beginning of this book, I argued that it was necessary to articulate one's personal belonging. Personally, I do not have anything fascinating to write about, but the city where I was born and grew up does. What I watched, listened to, and read, and where I (window) shopped and saw people dancing are very well worth recording. As previously mentioned, my recordings in this book were partially inspired by Leo Ou-fan Lee's City Between Worlds: My Hong Kong. I cannot agree more with Didi Kirsten Tatlow on what she said in her review of this book: ‘Anecdotes and vignettes pepper Lee's book. Yet this is no elegiac history of a colony-that-was; rather, his gentle, personal musings read more like a declaration of love for a city full of contradictions.’ Unlike Leo Lee's stance of ‘the fl.neur chronicling the life of a beloved city’, though, I looked back at the 1980s as a time when the economy as well as the pop culture of my Hong Kong flourished on an unprecedented scale. In a special feature on the 1980s published by Ming Pao Weekly in November 2016, the editor made the remark quoted in the epigraph, which perfectly summed up the gains and losses of the decade in which Hong Kong cultural industries had ‘the magical Midas Touch’.