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Alvin K. Wong, "Unruly Comparison: Queerness, Hong Kong, and the Sinophone" (Duke UP, 2025)
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- [00:00]
A
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- [01:07]
B
Welcome back to New Books in East Asian Studies, a podcast on the New Books Network. My name is Sarah Bramau Ramos and I am one of the hosts on the channel. And I'm here today with Alvin K. Wong to talk about his new book, Unruly Comparison Queerness Hong Kong and the Sinophone. This came out in 2025 with Duke University Press, and it examines queerness in Hong K through a transdisciplinary analysis of Sinophone literature, cinema and visual culture. So the book brings together a really wide range of material, including photo series, independent films, documentaries, literature, and quite a bit more. And it uses all of this to rethink what Sinophone studies looks like, how Hong Kong fits within this, and what it means to do comparative work. So with that, Alvin, welcome to the New Books Network.
- [02:09]
C
Sarah, thanks for having me. I'm really happy to share with the wider public about my new book.
- [02:16]
B
Great. So we always start at the beginning, with your beginning. So how did you come to be in comparative literature?
- [02:26]
C
That's an interesting question. And it's always kind of difficult to narrate one intellectual trajectory, but I think I have a complex and interesting path to share. I started majoring in English and Women Studies. At that time, it's still called Women's Studies, not Women and Gender Studies yet at University of California, Davis. And it's a really wonderful campus. I have a lot of fond memories.
- [03:03]
B
It.
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C
And also that was two years after I immigrated to the US So I was still at that moment perfecting my English language. I thought, you know, majoring in English is a way to do it, you know. And I'm really into reading literature and increasingly drawn to theory. And at that time, I was, you know, I was interested in gender and sexuality in the early modern drama and theater and play in the English department side. But then I was really drawn to the kind of exciting scholarship on queer diaspora and transnational sexuality studies at Women's Studies at UC Davis. At that time, many people were there, such as Gayatri Gopunov, who is a leading figure in Queer Diaspora Studies, but also folks like Karen Kaplan, who came later to Davis. So that really was what kind of shaped my feminist and queer intellectual trajectory. And it was only till very end of my undergrad years when I began writing my honor thesis. And I get really drawn to Wong Kar Wai's films, particularly Happy Together, which has its own kind of diasporic queer elements in it. And I was drawn to the intersection of queer theory and psychoanalysis. So I wrote another thesis on that film. And then it gives me. So that was my queer Hong Kong kind of Sinophone beginning. And then it was during grad school that I start focusing more on shaping my knowledge and my scholarly trajectory in modern Chinese literature and film and feminism, queer theory. So in a way, I think my intellectual interest in feminist and queer studies remain the same. But the approach that I have taken to it has shift throughout. From the beginning, more firmly rooted in modern Chinese literature and humanities, to now more invested in disrupting some of the entrenched assumptions in Area Studies and China Studies and through queer Sinophone own theory and then Comparative literature seems to be perfect discipline for somebody like me who doesn't fit within conventional strictures of Area Studies, East Asian Languages and Literature, or Women and Gender Studies, sometimes in very North American articulation of Women and Gender Studies, they might not know how to study a place like Hong Kong, or they might not even be able to see the intricacy and difference between Sinophone Studies and China Studies. So I would say that complet actually is a home for me in that sense.
- [06:38]
B
I mean, there's so much in your answer that I'm hoping we're going to return to. So the disrupting the Hong Kong, possibly even happy Together. The film that you mentioned, as it does appear in your book as well. But before we get there, I wanted to ask you a little bit about the acknowledgments in your book because you mention a number of different people who helped you see this book to completion. And I guess I was wondering, you mentioned different mentors and I suppose I'm curious about what were some of the things that people did that helped bring this book about. I'm sort of less asking about the who and more the what. Like in what ways did people kind of help you in this project?
- [07:30]
C
Oh, that's such an interesting question. And again is another question that touches on the intercession of the intellectual and the personal. During my undergrad years, I would say that working on both sort of early modern sexualities, like, you know, sexuality studies in the early modern period, but with a kind of critical race studies framework to it, Frances E. Dolan was just a wonderful feminist mentor to me in that sense, and she really trained me to perfect my close skills in close textual analysis. So Fran has been a wonderful mentor to me in that sense. And Gayatri Gopunov was my, as I wrote in the acknowledgement, was my intellectual diva that inspired many of the thinking in this book. Her second book on unruly visions and its focus on visuality and queer regional imaginary is definitely a touchstone for my current for my for my new book. So after with that background training, I think I learned from Gayathrim how to be fierce and how to connect different dots and how to take the useful aspects in different fields in order to come up with my own theoretical intervention. So that's something that I think she always does so beautifully. And during graduate school years I study with. So my dissertation was really on utilizing a queer and feminist approaches to read to analyze Chinese modernities across Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China. So at that time it was kind of this comparative transnational Chinese queer Chinese project. And during those six years at UC San Diego Literature Department, the Chinese film literature scholar Zhang Ying Jing was a wonderful mantra. He was my dissertation co supervisor. And my other co supervisor was Lisa Lo, who's of course very, very groundbreaking scholars in Asian American studies, global humanities, postcolonial theory, and so on and so forth. So again, I think it's just really interesting in how both of the scholarship informs my own that learning from Ying Ching, I learned how to be more methodological about what kind of texts make it to my dissertation. And also now this projects some of the texts and the films I analyze in this book, such as novels or queer cinema. There are some canonical aspect to some of these texts, but other ones might be more kind of emerging work or less canonical. So I think I learned from Ning Jing how to be, how to justify my approach to modern Chinese humanities, giving me that firm grounding in modern Chinese literature and film. And from Lisa, a more kind of global comparative perspective that reckoned with the colonial and late capitalist presence of our time and seeing how our work is always connected to these longer genealogies of coloniality, settler colonialism, late capitalism, in the case of Hong Kong, China, centrism and governmentality. So to be a bit more global, but also to learn from this longer histories.
- [11:59]
B
You were talking there about how this project started a little bit and sort of in sort of a cross, it sounded like, so China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, a little bit sort of cross across the region, at least initially. But in this book, you focus on Hong Kong and you're looking here at literature, cinema, visual media that has come out of Hong Kong, which is a very particular place. It's a place that both of us know in different ways, but it is a place that has been approached and studied in different ways. So as you explain right on page one of your book, and I'll quote from it here, quote, unruly Comparison offers a new model for doing transnational and comparative work in queer theory, area studies and Sinophone studies. It demonstrates how a global, insignificant region like Hong Kong exemplifies an unruliness that exceeds the political forces and epistemological limits of British colonialism, China centrism and global capitalism. And I'll end the quote there. So there's a lot there, but can you explain a little bit of, kind of what is Hong Kong doing for you in this book? How are you approaching Hong Kong? And why is the form of your approach important?
- [13:32]
C
So I think this actually connects to earlier question because I forgot also acknowledge Shumei Shi, who has been a wonderful mentor to me. After I finished my doctoral project, I then took up a position as Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Comparative Literature. So that explains my A Nation to Complete as well. And I started reading Visuality and Identity, Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific by Shu Mei when I was kind of in the middle of my grad school. But that concept hasn't, I mean, wasn't the main working concept in my dissertation, but as I go on in my postdoctoral years and eventually taking up a position as assistant professor in, in Chinese Literature and Film at Underwood International College at Yonsei University in South Korea, that gives me those four years in South Korea Gives me a lot of room to rethink my dissertation and what I want to do for my first book. And I realized that, you know, with the events in the recent last 10 years with the Umbrella movement and the kind of creative energy emerging from Hong Kong, I feel that I'm. And visiting Hong Kong in those four years while working in South Korea, I become more and more attached to it as a place of intellectual interest, but also personal interest. And so my approach to Hong Kong takes up Shu Mei's idea that the Sinophone helps us both to unsettle the China centrism and area studies, but also to look at syntactic language communities across the world. That some of them have been existing in years with sinitic language communities that are settling in places like Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong and so on and so forth, that then they articulate Chineseness that might be critical or that might depart from a nationalist and diasporic long distance framework. So I think Hong Kong allows us to think about comparison in an unruly way that departs from a strictly nationalist framing. And I would say that unruly comparison allows us to see other ways of being and becoming Chinese or deviating from these nationalist frame of Chineseness. In particular, Hong Kong has been theorized in 1990s Post colonial studies on Hong Kong. I'm thinking of Ray Cha's work and her critique of Area studies and oftentimes Hong Kong cinema is her example of thinking about diaspora and the critique of nativism that is linked to Chineseness. And Jin Su's work might be relevant here too. Kind of her critique of linguistic nativity. Akba Abbas work on Hong Kong and his theory on cultural disappearance around the Hangover of 1997. So I take all of these as a point of departure. But rather than saying that Hong Kong escaped our post colonial theory because it never experienced formal decolonization, I argue that after 1997 and especially after 2019, we need new ways of theorizing Hong Kong. And rather than doing east west comparison, queer Hong Kong, queer Sinophone Hong Kong cultures already embodies differences and incommensurable relationship and communities that challenges these conventional model of east west comparison. So once we recognize the racial, gender and sexual differences in commensurability and also solidarities within Hong Kong that also allow us to connect to other parts of the world, other kind of transnational connections that might not come into view if we only see Hong Kong as mediated between British colonialism and Chinese governance. Does that make sense?
- [18:46]
B
No, no, it does. I mean, one of the points that you make is that it opens up this space for Sor south south comparison. And you do that in your book. I mean, that comes through very, very clearly. I'm thinking in particular of chapters three and four. But you tease that out and sort of point to that throughout the book in particular. Right. That is something that is opened up for you through this idea of unruly comparison that you engage in the book. So I think it makes a lot of sense.
- [19:25]
C
Thanks for seeing that intervention. And it's always nice to see how people from adjacent fields or sometimes even folks who might not have. Well, in your case, of course, you're trained in Chinese studies and in a critique of kind of Han centric history and so on and so forth. But you've been folks outside of our feel how they might see that my book is making sense to them.
- [19:59]
B
That is always the uncertain fear when writing. Right. How is someone else going to read this and will it also make sense to them? While we're talking about origins and things that you're drawing on, I really wanted to ask you about the art exhibition that you mention in the book. You talk about going to this art exhibition in January 2021. So for listeners who might not have yet read your book, can you explain a little bit about what that experience was like for you and how that kind of informed the book itself?
- [20:46]
C
Yeah, so I was really writing this book, I think chapter one of the book on Queer Archive and the Undoing of a Masculinist Version of Hong Kong History. I started writing that when I gave a job talk at HKU back in 2018. So I really earnestly started writing the book around 2018, I would say. But 2019 sort of change everything. You know, I was already working in Hong Kong and just the protests and the social movement and the kind of creative energy that emerged from it. The diasporic writer, poets who. Who left Hong Kong after that, the National Security Law that came into place in the summer of 2020. So I was a bit puzzled and I was, I have to say I would at the same time trying to keep up with my productivity and keep writing and publishing, but also trying to reorient myself around 2021, 2020. And I came across this art exhibition and I thought it's just a really intriguing way in which. Because the curator is called Ze Khamen and she's actually based at a new school, I believe, and she herself engages with her own body and trans photography. And so as a queer diasporic Hong Kong artist and she has connection to all these younger generation of queer and trans artists in Hong Kong Kong. So in a way, some of the photos and some of the video installation from Unruly Visions that was created at WMA Gallery in central the financial district, some of them have subtle connections to 2019 and the social movement, Some of them don't. You kind of have to make creative connections to it. And speaking to the two photos that I included in the introduction, one is from the Black collection with a young man, blind photos, sitting on the top of the building with blood drifting from his body. I mean, it's so it's both obvious but also subtle because you can already make the connection to the protests and to the bloody confrontation between the police and citizens and protesters. But it say nothing about what's the contents of that visual protests. Right. And then the second photograph is actually. Is actually done by Hong Kong Baptist University student journalist reporter, who at one point was reporting on the protests happening in the mall. And later on he was arrested. And then after that experience, he created this photograph called where have youe? Where are you going? Where have you been? And it shows trans femme cross dressers staring back at a young male protester in mask. And you see that young male protester icon in a lot of news reporting. But this time, Nelson Dun Chapman, the artist, inserts a queer trans Jake as a historical witness and in a way also queering what's been reported about the social movement. Right. It's. It's a way of, and I quote from Nicholas Misor's work, the right to look is a way of reckoning with the colonial gaze and in this case, the state authorities gaze as well by staring back at us, the viewer, but also those who care about Hong Kong and living in Hong Kong at the moment. So I just thought that was one beautiful way to put together artists. But also showing how these queer visuality and these unruly modes of visuality help us think about the historical presence differently.
- [25:54]
B
And also, of course, the. Yeah, of course. And also I suppose the historical legacy a little bit. I mean, I was fascinated by this idea as you were talking about writing this book. And then 2019 happens and then 2020 in Hong Kong. And I imagine, I'm going to guess maybe at one point this book might have been titled something like Hong Kong since 2019. Or I can imagine it might have. I can imagine in different versions of this project that might have started in 2019 with media, with images produced after. Right, but you've done a really interesting job of pulling together materials from Hong Kong, about Hong Kong both before and after, right this moment that is very typically now at least understood or maybe assumed, especially by those not in Hong Kong, to have been a complete rupture, a complete break. But you've kind of done a really interesting job of bridging this very informative.
- [26:58]
C
Or.
- [27:00]
B
A year that stands out, shall we say, in Hong Kong's history in a really interesting way. Right. Not sidelining or confining it to this particular moment, but forcing us to think of it in the wider context, which at least I particularly appreciated.
- [27:19]
C
Well, just responding to your really smart reading of the book. Again, it's one of those things after you have written the book and then how people see it. And it also helped me to think about the intervention retrospectively. I think that's beside my engagement with theorists in world literature, such as, for example, engaged with the work of YG Demok and her notions of deep time, Peng Che's notion of worlding and postcolonial literature as a possibility of rupturing late capitalist temporality. Now that I think about it, you're totally right that this could have been written as a book that simply about 19, as this kind of queer rupture and organizing texts that only have clear references to the social movement or to the umbrella movement, and that have been a very useful book to teach a class on social movement and cultural production, so on and so forth. But I think you're absolutely right that in Both focusing on 2019 as a point of departure and then opening up to others spatial and temporal coordinates, scales, I'm able to pull in, for example, in chapter one, I. So each chapter is really organized around a concept and how the unruly comparison approach opens up and destabilize the concept. So chapter one, I was very concerned with the question of archive and recent years there are theories on queer archive. Right. So I engages with work by Anne Stoller, Anjali Arondica, of course, with Derrida as well. And I look not at 2019, but World War II and the Japanese occupations and the kind of conventional narrations about Hong Kong modernity that emerges after the war, the baby boomer generation. And then you have after the leftist riots in 1967, then Hong Kong sort of took off, economically speaking. So how do we actually disrupt that masculineness and very economically over determined narrative. So I look to writers that thematizes these queer intimacies, lesbian desire, male homoeroticism as a frame to tell the Hong Kong story. So one big one, Huan Binyun's novel Lie Nu Tu Portraits of Martyr Women. It turns to three generations of female center narratives in the second person, not the first or third person narrative perspective to look at the survival of women under historical atrocities. So World War II. But also she has a section on women workers working in plastic flower industries and how they carry out legal lesbian romance at night. And I juxtapose it with Ma Ga Fai's novel, Ma Jia Hui's Long TOU Feng Wei, Once Upon a Time in Hong Kong. And that story really infuses and disrupts masculine Hong Kong modernity. By turning to Maga fights as an author, he discovered a photo of his grandfather seafaring and having a possible male lover despite being married. So that's a queer family story. And then from there opening it up to a story of Mafia Gan leader called Lok Nam Choi and his affair, his homoerotic affair with the Scottish officer David Morrison. And from there we see the kind of colonial complicity they enter into that relationship, both for erotic but for political purposes. They get information on British side and also from possible Japanese infiltrations at that moment during World War II, where you have multiple political and colonial alliances. So queer desire become a way to ruptures conventional archives, but also open up all these other inter imperial forces. And so in that chapters again I'm performing and I'm really comparison because I guess people can put Magafai and Wang Beg Wan together in the sense that both of them are pretty well respected Hong Kong writer. But I'll also sort of compare them with a film about lesbian eroticism in the Guangdong regions and the kind of minor transnational migrations of the two women's lovers in a film called Intimate Zi Shu, which is. Which refers to the hair, the self calmed women who sustain themselves and never marry. And they are based in Shunde from the Canton region. So in a way, you know, I put film and literary works together in order to rethink the possibility of a queer archive.
- [33:15]
B
I mean, you've done such a wonderful job there of sort of laying bare kind of how it is that you're doing unruly comparison in the book. So thank you for that. I'm actually curious though to use this as an opportunity to ask you to talk a little bit about the selection process, because I imagine you pull on this idea of queer scavenger methodology at some point in your introduction, which I just loved. But so thinking about how it is that you kind of pulled things together, I guess I'm curious about what your thought process was with it or did anything get left out as you were trying to pull together comparisons, moments of rupture, unruly comparisons that both made sense and that were interesting to you and that did what you wanted them to do. What was that a process? Did that work on first draft every time or kind of. I'm curious if you could talk a little bit about what that experience was like for you.
- [34:27]
C
So you can imagine, you know, for everybody who writing first book and you know, running against timeline of the inner track kind of tenure clock, I was being very a bit strategic in thinking, okay, what are some parts that I can reuse from my dissertation? And I would say the one part that really remained from the dissertation was my interest in Wang Bing Wu and Huan Biyun as Hong Kong, as a queer Sinophone writer. Of course, she writes about Hong Kong in most of her novels, but and in some of her other work, she also talks about Macau. So I've written a piece on another novel that maybe she published it in 2014, I forgot. It's called L. It's called Children of Darkness, which is a kind of follow up to Lian Yu to Portraits of Martyr Women. So I realized that one big one can stay on in this project because she really enables any reader to reimagine Hong Kong modernity from a feminist perspective. You can do so much with her work, sort of bottom up history. You can find inspiration from it. So chapter one. And then I put Magafai in it because of his engagement with kind of writing a homoerotic impression of Hong Kong modernity and with intimates. I must be writing it for another. I think I wrote it it in another journal article, right? Maybe Lesbian study. And then for chapter two, I also wrote a version of it for another edited volume, Sociologist who Want. It's on transnational sexualities. And I talk about. Wait, that's chapter three, actually. So chapter two, the focus on Scud as a queer independent filmmaker. I wrote that chapter for a book I co edited with Howard Chang called Keywords in Queer Sinophone Study. And I was interested in queer cinema after Wong Kar Wai and Stanley Kwan that is not so obsessed with 1997, but instead turns out these other worldly geographies. So I talk about in chapter two, in Scud's film called Permanent Resident, when the lovers have a fight, one of them take a kind of sex tourism to Bangkok and then go on to Gaza and to kind of Israel, Palestine, to these other geographies, few minor transnational scale. And then in chapter three, as you mentioned I look at trans photography and legal cases and unpack the global. The trans global representations in films such as Tracy and A Woman Is a Woman. Again, Tracy is a more commercial art house film. A Woman is a Woman circulates more in terms of film festival and university screening circuits. So in that chapter I wrote one early version of it for another edited volume as well. That's for the edited volume on transnational sexualities. And so I think every invitation when you write on queer theory in Hong Kong, it's both move. It's an interesting intersection that does not fit within kind of people who are interested in queer film and culture in mainland China and this kind of socialist legacy. But in terms of Hong Kong, I think it offers an alternative perspective because Hong Kong is both post colonial and global and late capitalist. So all of these invitations to write book chapters and journal articles help me think about how my thinking evolves. And when I'm writing the book, I try to build on what I have written, but also inserting new parts that would make sense for a book like this. So on the chapter on trans globalities and the intersection of the law and film and activism, I look at Mimi Wang who was a producer for A Woman is a a trans narrative between a non binary high schooler and a trans woman who deal with the difficulties of coming out to her husband who's transphobic and how that film spirals into human library workshops called Transcendence featuring trans photographies of everyday trans individuals who deal with all kinds of discrimination in everyday life. So that was created by Mimi Wang, the film producer. And I attended the workshop. I translated some parts of a non Chinese speaking salvation audience. And I keep in touch with Mimi when I was writing this book. So I would say that the process of writing also connects me to all these incommensurable and parts of queer communities to migrant domestic workers organization. In chapter four, one of the leader of Field Guys Association, Mars, she provided me with kind of background history of that trans butch organization that works for the interests of queer migrant domestic worker results, but also queer Filipino women in Hong Kong in general. So that's my process. It's a bit unruly, it's a bit idiosyncratic, but it also evolves as I connect myself to these different communities.
- [41:31]
B
Yeah, and I mean I imagine and the book is kind of the result of that, that it is, as you were talking about it, this process of amassing and amassing and amassing and amassing. But that process enables you to pull in some really fascinating Material. I mean, I'm really very glad that you highlighted some of the sources that you talk about in all of the chapters, but in particular chapter four, I just want to highlight this chapter because you talk about some really fascinating documentaries in this chapter. Documentaries that have to do with like, beauty pageants and labor disputes. And you have some amazing stills in both this chapter and chapter three from the films and the documentaries that you're pulling on. So, I mean, I just want to sort of. I can't quite underscore this enough. There's a lot of really interesting material here. I spent a lot of time reading your book and then googling and looking up what you were talking about, what you were mentioning. A lot of time looking at film trailers for a lot of the really, really interesting material that you're pulling on. So thank you for sending me down so many rabbit holes as I was reading your book. But I do want to make sure we have time to talk about chapter five, which I guess is the last chapter, the last body chapter in your book. And this chapter five, Trespassing the Sinophone Bor Fruit Chance Prostitute Trilogy is the title. And so this filmmaker, this is a filmmaker whose films have appeared in other chapters as well. They appear in chapter four, but you are looking at three films in this chapter and how they represent sex workers in particular and how they sort of embody border crossing queerness. So as with all of the chapters in your book, there's a lot going on. But within this, is there a particular film that you want to highlight or particular themes that you really want to stress?
- [43:43]
C
Sure. That's wonderful questions, and I think it's a. It's a question that actually is quite relevant for folks who teach Hong Kong cinema. For Chan, people might assign his 1997 film May in Hong Kong. It's really his brick for Fu with leftover film stocks and supported by another famous Hong Kong actor, Andy Lau, who funded his first film. And then so sort of for Chan, made these film. He tends to produce film in a trilogy. So he has a Hong Kong trilogy that makes a lot of these, like dark humor and metaphors, national allegories of Hong Kong returning to Chinese governance, and the kind of marginal communities within Hong Kong that might be overshadowed by these larger historical processes. And then with the Prostitute trilogy, I think a lot of people have written on a former colleague called Wendy Gan. She has written a book on durian, Durian for the Hong Kong Cinema series at HKU Press. So folks who are interested in the representation of sex worker in Hong Kong cinema can look at that book. And my former colleague Gina Marchetti, she has written on sex work and Hong Kong cinema. I think Durian. Durian. It's come across on the radar of a lot of Chinese and Hong Kong film scholar Hollywood Hong Kong is on the radar of folks who wants to analyze Hong Kong as a global city that embodies a certain anxiety about its own status as a global city that doesn't have a national identity in terms of decolonization. This kind of post colonial city that is now part of Chinese governance. So Peng Cheh has written on Hollywood Hong Kong and my intervention is to look at, is to answer the questions of Sinophone studies. Some scholars have critiqued Sinophone studies and that's mostly a few. That is invested by Hong Kong and Taiwan and scholars interested in Tibet and Xinjiang. It's a field that is overly ideologically, overly determined, that it's always about critiquing China and China centrism. I think that's an unfair judgment of Sinoform studies. In fact, one of the most useful aspects of Sinoform studies and David Dori Wan actually agree with this is to look at differences and modes of resistance and how Sinophone writers and filmmakers engage with minor and marginal articulations of Chinese. And I think for Chen's films such as the three husband, the 2018, the final part of the trilogy really does that because it focuses on kind of on a sex worker who has connection to the Thangka people. So she lives on a boat, but she is kind of controlled by her father who was her first husband. So there's a incest in this film. And then she come across construction workers who is her third husband, who is so infatuated after having sex with her on the boats that he wants to buy her out to bail her out from this life of prostitution. But eventually she realizes that she is so attached to having sex on the boats that she is unable to have to derive pleasure fully when she lives on land. So this film offers a queer articulations of existing in between land and the sea. And it makes a lot of allusion to Luo Teng Lu Ting, which is a half human, half fish, half folklore. A mythological figure in Hong Kong that has its own rebellious genealogy in pre modern Chinese history to Lantau island in Hong Kong. So I see the trilogy in particular 3 husband, as a border crossing film that also articulates this non human centric notions of queerness through a perverse representation of femininity. So the sex worker figure might not Be immediately queer. But the way in which she unsettles these national allegory of Hong Kong being part of China or Hong Kong mediated between the three husbands, which could be British colonialism, Chinese Wu and global capitalism. So. So that's kind of my way of reading the film that it evokes the national allegory, the Fred Jameson's framework, but it also undoes it. Right. It does not allow the totalizing power to homogenize our interpretations of the film or of Hong Kong itself.
- [50:03]
B
So it unsettles many things on many levels. As you were just sort of unpacking there, you know, I was thinking, you know, with border crossing and unsettling. That all comes through very, very strongly in this chapter, Chapter five. But it also comes through very strongly in your epilogue, which is where I want to move. You've read the epilogue, of course. So there in this part, you touch on another film, Drifting, which came out in 2021 and is fascinating in many other ways. Many great clips available online. You also touch on a fascinating poem, fricatives, which I'm highlighting here, touching on here, because that also very much unsettles, but I suppose in some ways around the issue of language. It touches on and brings out the idea of language, national boundaries, imbuing, embodying language as well in a very, very, again, clear and strong way. But I guess I'm curious about, with this epilogue, why did you decide to end your book here? I mean, I imagine you could have ended with many, many other pieces. I'm sure you could have ended with different films, different poems, different literature. What was it about these pieces or this, you know, the moments that they're touching on this very unsettled ending that you've chosen. Why did you decide to pick this as your point to end your book?
- [51:41]
C
It's amazing that you read everything so clearly and I feel like, you know, more the interventions of a book and, you know, yeah, I think at that moment when I was concluding, I could have just conclude in a very usual academic way of restating my main argument and sort of what the implication is for the field that I'm addressing, such as Hong Kong studies, Sinophone studies and area studies and queer theory. But I wanted the epilogue and the conclusion to.
- [52:24]
B
To.
- [52:27]
C
Materialize, to bring into focus another way of doing unruly comparison and to sort of bring also our historical political present up to date. And Jun Lee is a filmmaker that may that produce Tracy, the Tran melodrama film that has its own minor transnational theme that I talk about in chapter Three I return to him because later on I think it's in 2020, maybe in 2020, right. He produced the film Drifting, even though it's a film about the homeless communities in Samshui Po and Samshoi Bo is a working class community that also a lot of non Han Chinese, such as South Asian communities, live in some Shui Po. And it's an interesting neighborhood in and of its own. But the film looks at protagonist Brother Fei, who after he's released from the prison, has all of his belongings confiscated by the police. And there's one line from the film when, during his confrontation that when he yell at the police, the police yell back at him and say, we police don't need you to teach us how to do our job properly. And this is. This line recurs a lot during 2019 when the police tell the protester to back off, to mind your own business. So the film, it's obviously has all these kind of allegory and allusion to the social movement, but in not only focus on the homeless community, but also how Brother Phi forms an intimate bond with a young man who has mental illness and who's been wedding on the street. It also shows how Bruterfy lives in the homeless community with women, with Chan Mui, who was a former sex worker. And eventually Chen Mui moves into a public housing with another older woman called Auntie Lan. So they. There's a kind of lesbian intimate kind of undertone to the wow. And more centrally, there is a kind of leader in the homeless community called Master, who's been separated from his son, is a Vietnamese. The character is a Vietnamese older man who is separated from his son who's now in Norway. So there's a Vietnamese, there's. There's a kind of illusion representation of the Vietnamese diaspora in Hong Kong as well. So the film is about homelessness, but it's also about internal unsettling and homelessness and sort of diasporic dispersion after 2019. And the critique of the police states from the perspective of the marginal community. So then the film itself already performs this unruly compari by conjuring this undercomment across race, gender, class and nationalities. So it helps me think about how poets like Eric Gibb, who think about a speaker who is a young Hong Kong boy who is now immigrate, who now migrated to the UK and sort of having this moment of sexual awakening and having sex in a Chinese Cantonese restaurant with possibly a white man. And so there's an interracial desire there of a Hong Kong young man having queer sex in former imperial centers such as Britain, all the while keeping updated to the police, the news about protesters who is now dispersed across the world. So the police makes allusions to the process of learning English and the process of sexual awakening, and also remembering the social movement from the. From the queer Hong Kong diaspora. So it's about unsettlement, right? It's about displacement and the undoing of the queer self abroad. So the internal unsettling and the queer diasporic unsettling brings these two texts together in a way, I think help us rethink Chineseness, Hong Kong identity, queer desire, and the Sinophone in this unruly comparative way. So I just thought it was. It was a nice way for me to conclude my. To end the book, but also to perform the three interventions that I make in the book in a more kind of affective way, in a more kind of moving way.
- [57:56]
B
Instead of, as you alluded to as you started your answer there in the very standard, traditional way of recapping everything, or at least recapping everything you've said before, you've kind of gone out with new material, even more material than what you've covered in the other body chapters of your book. So in that sense, it's a very, very effective ending. It ends with really, again, intriguing material, really interesting readings, and for me personally, lots to search for as I was reading your work. So thank you for ending your book in the way that you have. I, for one, very much enjoyed it. But now that you finished concluding the book and you finished this project, which, as we were talking about the beginning, you have been working on for a while and pulling on different things, working on other things at the same time. But now that this book is done, because it is done, it is out in the world. So it's kind of. It's finished, it's completed. Now that this project is done, what are you working on next? Or what is occupying your mind at the moment?
- [59:25]
C
Right now, I have one forthcoming article on the Lu Tin figure that I mentioned, the half human, half fish figure. So this is a kind of queer Sinophone representation of queer ecologies. I look at the Lotang figure and like how art's creator represents the figure as walking on barren land. So pairing this mythological creature with the British colonial history of Hong Kong and this very usual colonial way of looking at colony as undeveloped, but also full of potential for development. And I trace how that figure of the low ting has metamorphosis in, like Stephen Chow's film the Mermaid. But also I also include three Husband in my analysis. And so thinking through Low Ting as a way to imagine human non human entanglement, to rethink the developmentalist narrative of Hong Kong modernity. And also to imagine ecological future not always predicated on saving the future for the next generation, which is a very heteronormative investment. This is a kind of queer Sinophone ecology project that I still need to develop. So one, the floating part, it's coming out in Diacritics the journal in a special issue called Queer Environs. So that part is done, but I might developed it into a full book manuscript on queer Sinophone ecologies. Another project is Queer Sinophone Visuality and Looking at. So instead of focusing on after 1997 and also 2019, I'm looking at the backstory of these queer filmmakers, arts creator and visual artists who started making films and visual installations around the mid-1980s. So Yahoo Fan Yuan Fan is a key figure. He has produced films such as Prince of Tears, it's a film about the White terror in Taiwan. But he has also produced films such as Buga street, which reimagines the 1950s in Singapore as a time full of trans sexuality. And he has also produced a film on boys love. He's like one of the pioneer of boys love in Hong Kong cinema called Bishao Nen, which is a Japanese kanji that. That. That carries the meanings of love between young boys. So he's a queer filmmaker, but he also was a big name as a photographer. He has done photograph, a very sexy photograph of Bridget Lynn, Leslie Chan, Maggie Chan, all of these big stars from Hong Kong. So I'm reading him and his work alongside with Alan Powell, who. Who has produced a lot of deeply personal and imaginative videos, short videos, some of them longer in 1980s Hong Kong that engages with question of Hong Kong identity, the anxiety of Hong Kong returning to China around 1984 that started the discussion the Sino British Joint Declaration. And she's also instrumental to the visions of M as a Museum. So she's still engaged with a lot of that work. And I think a lot of people have analyzed the lesbian filmmaker and poet Yao Cheng, but not enough people and scholars have analyzed Alan Powell. So in a way I'm tracing the representation of minor articulation of Chineseness, non nationalist articulations of Hong Kong identity starting in the 1980s and sort of providing another queer genealogy of queer Sinophone visuality. And again bring. I think it's. It sort of carries on this queer unruly comparative aspects by bringing these artists that you wouldn't think they would fit together. So in the later project I want to bring in Scotty so who again is born in Hong Kong, but now is making a lot of these trans experimental performance based in Australia. And so there's the kind of queer Hong Kong, Australia connection to trans performance as well. So this project is newly funded by the bioresearch grants in Hong Kong. So that would give me some time off and some supports from research assistant to help me really bring this project into fruition. So I'm excited about it.
- [65:02]
B
Great. I mean, it sounds like you're bringing in new material but still keeping a lot of, a lot of what comes through in this book. So you touched on already the sort of unruly comparison, of course, queer, queer studies, queer material, all of that, and of course bringing Sinophone studies into different directions and sort of pulling on again, disparate fields, disparate disciplines, as you kind of do so. So I'm excited to hear more about and to hopefully read the projects that you just talked on there in a few years once they are, you know, successfully funded through completion. So best of luck with that. Congratulations, of course, on having finished this book and this project and thank you for taking the time to talk with me about it today.
- [66:02]
C
Thanks, Sarah, for inviting me to talk about my new book, Unruly Comparison and sharing it with the wider community. And I look forward to keeping in touch with you and sharing my work in the future.
- [66:17]
B
I will hold you to that.