Writing the Ethnic Self in Hong Kong

Languaging the Upper-Middle-Class Woman in Xu Xi’s The Unwalled City

Abstract

In the last decade, Hong Kong has witnessed a surge of social movements that has directed attention to the increasing ideological conflict between the city and mainland China. Underlying the political unrest is, arguably, a dichotomy of perceived values embodied in terms such as culture, identity, language and community building. This has led to Hong Kong being primarily seen as a subaltern agent fighting against its neo-colonial „master“—mainland China—in an essentializing political discourse popular among many youths and middle-class professions within the city. This paper attempts to apply a literary lens to the political situation, thereby re-contextualizing Hong Kong‘s coloniality within a power structure informed by Chinese nationalism, Western imperialism, and localism. This act dismantles the reductive Hong Kong–China dichotomy and calls for a more complicated view of contemporary Hong Kong‘s relationship with mainland China. Centering on two female characters with bifurcated ethnic roots in the novel The Unwalled City (2001) by Hong Kong native Anglophone
writer Xu Xi, this paper highlights how ethnicity and gender intersect to shape the local subject. The literary analysis focuses on how language is utilized to articulate the two female characters’ dilemmas, which themselves shed light on the broader ethnic and gender hierarchies that are heavily present in the local Chinese community. In doing so, the paper seeks to reveal the peculiar cultural dynamics at play underneath the façade of Hong Kong’s cosmopolitan constitution. Ultimately, the paper aims to demonstrate the affective and subversive agency of local Anglophone literature in offering an alternative set of critical reflections on how Hong Kong can pursue liberal values via an advancement of culturally diverse demographics.