![]() The opening strings pose a keening question that will never be answered, even as they start a cascading decline to meet the ambling drums and fluttering xylophone. I recently spent about an hour searching online for the version of Xavier Cugat’s “Perfidia” that appears in Wong Kar-wai’s Days of Being Wild and 2046. Right before the bus went into the Lion Rock tunnel, I remember him asking, “So, is memory cheap in Hong Kong?” One of my classmates was a stocky Texan football player who was preoccupied with buying new accessories for his digital camera, like larger-storage SD cards. They were also planning to take us to HK’s famed discount electronics markets. As good Hong Kongers, our student hosts had planned an eating itinerary that went past mere gluttony to verge on force-feeding. We zoomed past the container ports of Kwai Tsing and the cemetery of Tsuen Wan and the hillsides covered with palm trees and dripping banyans. For all the Hong Kong cinema and pop culture I had absorbed over the years, nothing had prepared me for how green it was, how the islands were so definitively islands. We were loaded onto a bus that wound through the industrial and tropical mountains on the way to the university. Dazed, we stumbled off the 17-hour red-eye into the gleaming terminal, happy to have made it but our bodies feeling flat, like cotton threaded with caffeine. I was traveling with seven fellow Yale students and one faculty advisor as part of an exchange symposium with the Chinese University of Hong Kong. In the spring of 2003, I landed at Chek Lap Kok airport for the first time. And then just gray clouds against the black, and an anti-climactic silence.” A ghostly echo of the foreign cannon-fire across the harbor, on another dark night, that would have started this whole process in motion. The rest was, as I wrote for a French magazine at the time: “more puffs of light and color, more booms and crackles. Flames suddenly outlined the words for “Chinese people,” but in the Mainland’s simplified, not Hong Kong’s traditional, characters. We saw the pyrotechnic feat we had heard rumors about earlier, but assumed was impossible. ![]() That night, I stood with artists and friends on the 20th-floor rooftop of my flat in Causeway Bay, watching the fireworks bursting pink, orange, teal above Victoria Harbor. Escher-like skybridges connecting business towers in Admiralty, all the way to Central. We walked farther than I ever had in Hong Kong before-past the shopping malls of Causeway Bay, under the M.C. But it was a strange new perspective to be smack in the middle of it, walking where normally cars raced on the temporarily-blocked-off streets of the march route. I already had observed other mass demonstrations in Hong Kong, like the annual June 4th vigil held to commemorate the Tiananmen Square “incident”, and I had learned that there were deep ties between the city’s art and its activism. I was saddled with a massive banner that I held aloft on poles with a Chinese-Canadian curator friend to march down Hennessy Road, alongside protesters of every stripe: sex workers advocating for better protection, environmentalists, Falun Gong. ![]() It was filtered, like my whole Hong Kong experience, through the art community.Ī gallery had organized a mobile show in which five Hong Kong and five Mainland artists created banners to be carried by friends of the gallery during the march. I had already been living in Hong Kong for three years, and eagerly anticipated this historic landmark for my adopted home. “You aren't missing anything.”īut when it comes to Hong Kong, I miss everything.įor the tenth anniversary on July 1, 2007, I was in Victoria Park under a hot, overcast sky. That it was stormy and humid, that protesters were being kept away from the parade route, that nobody cared about the anniversary anyway. I Whatsapped and WeChatted with a few friends, who confirmed what they had been telling me all along, and why I didn’t end up making the trip to be there. This year it marked 20 years since Hong Kong’s “handover” back to China. I scrolled through Instagram and Twitter and Facebook, for a moment tuning out the endless horror show of my own country, and noting only the posts from Hong Kong friends, journalists, and artists who were or deliberately were not celebrating the July 1st national holiday. On the evening of June 30, 2017, I was in Los Angeles, but wished I was in Hong Kong, where it was already the next day. At its best, maybe art can serve as a form of “episodic buffer” for a community or a culture. In the leading model of memory used by cognitive scientists, there’s something called the “episodic buffer.” It was added in the year 2000 to explain a gap between the “phonological loop” and the “visuospatial sketchpad.” It is said to “link visual, auditory, and sensory information for a brief period of time,” until it is needed by the Central Executive memory.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |