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Hong Kong, a rootless city, a "floating city".
This is the "borrowed time, borrowed city", which was originally a "guest way" for tens of millions of people, but this guest way eventually became a place for many people to settle.
Xu Anhua is one of them.
Born in Anshan, Liaoning Province, she lived with her grandparents in Macau as a child and moved to Hong Kong at the age of 5 to attend secondary school and university in Hong Kong. He received his Master of Arts in English and Comparative Literature from the University of Hong Kong in 1972, then went to London to study film, returned to Hong Kong in 1975, worked in television, and then became a member of the Hong Kong New Wave.
It is worth mentioning that Xu Anhua's mother is Japanese.
Mainland-Macao-Hong Kong-Britain-Japan, this complex mixture of nationalities, homelands, and identities enables Xu Anhua to think better and deeper about the "hometown" issue.
This kind of thinking has a deep imprint on her film works, such as "The Story of Hu Yue", "Tracking the Extreme Road", "Running to the Fury Sea", etc., all expressing a rootless identity dilemma and the pain of homeless separation.
What can fully reflect Xu Anhua's doubts and reflections on the "place of origin" and the myth of hometown and home is her semi-autobiographical film below-
"Kertu Autumn Hate"
The film was released in 1990 and starred Lu Xiaofen and Maggie Cheung, with a Douban score of 8.5 points.
As Stuart Hall puts it: Identity is not concerned with what we are, but with what we are going to be; identity is not solidified, static, but eternally in a state of flow, negotiation.
In the work "Ketu Autumn Hate", Xu Anhua provides a perspective on the relationship between China, Hong Kong and the United Kingdom through the delicate depiction of the transformation of the relationship between a pair of mothers.
At this particular point in time in 1990, the themes of cross-cultural alienation, inter-ethnic marriage, intergenerational negotiation and reconciliation, and divided loyalty resonate with the return of the colony of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty in 1997.
It is worth mentioning that several Hong Kong films that came out at about the same time as "Ketu Autumn Hate", such as Kwan Kam Peng's "Man in New York" (1989), Luo Zhuoyao's "Season of Love in Other Places" (1990), and Chen Yaocheng's "Ukiyo-e Love" (1992), also expressed a strong sense of loss to the hometown.
The protagonist, Xiao En, a Hong Kong native, is about to graduate with a master's degree in the Uk.
Through fragmentary fragments of life, the film implicitly hints at Xiao'en's awkward position as a colonized other.
At the bar, two of Shawn's British friends were dancing and dancing, leaving her alone on the couch smoking a cigarette.
She applied for a job at the BBC at the same time as a friend, and a friend who was British successfully received an interview invitation, but Xiao En was rejected.
Before the interview with his friend, Xiao En took off the necklace around his neck to give her good luck, and the friend said in surprise: "This thing has a mysterious oriental color!" ”
Hong Kong was colonized by the British for 156 years, and Xiao En has already obtained British citizenship, but she is still looked at and examined as an Oriental, and still cannot be treated equally.
Xiao En's experience in the UK can be said to be a reflection on the relationship between the UK and Hong Kong by Hui Anhua.
For a long time, British colonial rule in Hong Kong has been instrumental, and there has always been a clear and artificial binary distinction between the colonial ruling class and Hong Kong's local society.
Although more than half of Hong Kong's population is British nationality, there is no right to stay in the Uk, but the UK cannot move to the UK without a visa.
Xiao En's disappointment with Britain in "Ker Tu Qiu Hate" may correspond to the frustration and powerlessness of Hong Kongers who were betrayed by the British in the late 1980s, and it is also a response to the political and social tensions in the colonies in the late 1980s and 1990s.
After understanding this, Xiao En resolutely returned to Hong Kong to attend his sister's wedding.
Xiao'en's mother was Japanese, and she met Xiao'en's father in The Northeast after World War II, when Xiao'en's father was a Kuomintang interpreter.
Due to the civil war between the Kuomintang and the Communists, Xiao'en's grandparents and mother had to move from Guangzhou to Macau.
In Macau, the young Xiao En is closer to her grandparents, and her mother is unusually silent and serious because she cannot speak Chinese, and the mother and daughter are not close.
My grandfather, who was born in Chinese medicine, even though he was in Macau (which had not yet returned at that time), still missed his hometown.
Dressed in a Chinese-style robe, he told Xiao'en about his origins, taught her to memorize Tang poems and Song poems, and taught her not to forget her roots.
Grandpa always felt that Macau was just a guest road, and he had to embark on the road back to his hometown.
From the late 1970s to the early 1990s, the "China Syndrome" proposed by Hong Kong film critic Lee Chun-tao has profoundly influenced Hong Kong films, and almost all thinking about Hong Kong's local identity needs to deal with the issue of "Chineseness".
As Hui anhua said: "If we are stripped away from China, history has no meaning, and only in contrast to Chinese culture can we define Hong Kong culture." This cannot be discussed in isolation. ”
His grandfather, who was worried about his motherland, was finally able to return to Guangzhou in the 1960s, but at this time the mainland was shrouded in the shadow of the cultural movement.
Even if his grandfather wanted to send Xiao En a copy of song words, he had to be interrogated by the creeps for a whole day before being released.
It was precisely because of this interrogation that my grandfather suffered a stroke and his physical condition took a sharp turn for a while.
Grandfather was rejected by China, just as Xiao'en was rejected by the British.
The main content of the film lies in the process of the originally estranged Xiao'en accompanying his mother to return to Japan to visit his family.
Xiao'en's mother, Aoi, has been staying in China since marrying Xiao'en's father, thinking about her hometown day and night.
When in Macau, Aoi always ate her own Japanese food alone and silently, and was said by her mother-in-law to be "raw and cold" and it was not easy to refute;
In Hong Kong, she loves to watch movies starring Japanese movie star Toshiro Mikawa.
At the moment when she first set foot on Japanese soil, Aoiko seemed to have indeed found her hometown.
As she got off the train, looking at the Japanese on the platform, she couldn't help but say to herself in Japanese: "I'm back." ”
After arriving at a small Japanese restaurant, Aoi ordered a lot of authentic Japanese food that she liked to eat, despite the fact that she couldn't actually eat so much.
When she returned home, she met her long-lost teachers, friends and relatives, and everyone sang and danced together and reminisced about the past together.
At a seal shop, Aoi wrote her name for the first time: Aoi Hirano. At this moment, she was no longer a mother, a Japanese daughter-in-law, or Mrs. Zhang, but only herself.
Xiao En, who accompanied her mother, felt great discomfort from the first day she arrived in Japan: she could not understand what others said, and felt like a monkey.
When the mother saw the situation, she said lightly: "Can't stand it for a day?" Then you know how I lived in those years in Macau. ”
During this trip to Japan, Xiao En gradually reconciled with his mother.
She slowly learned how difficult and difficult it is for a foreigner to be in an unfamiliar environment;
My mother was not as serious and cold as in Macau, nor was she as stubborn and wordy as she was in Hong Kong.
When her mother was young, many boys chased her, but the boy she liked rejected her, so she went to China in a huff.
Every time she saw someone, her mother would say in a proud tone, "This is my eldest daughter, who has just returned from her master's degree in England." ”
Xiao En finally knew that her mother had actually always been proud of her and had not been more partial to her sister.
Gradually, Xiao En's mother found that her hometown was already human.
Aoiko's favorite little brother Masahiko, a former member of the Kamikaze Team, is poisoned by militaristic ideas, has been living in war, and stubbornly believes that it is unchaste for her sister to marry Chinese, and the meeting between the two ends in quarrels and injuries.
Aoiko's brother and sister-in-law, in order to reunite with her children and grandchildren in Tokyo, persuaded Aoiko to sell her old mansion in Beppu.
The man who threw off Aoi is now living in a bad state, and his son is still in prison.
Everything she once missed and cherished could not resist the erosion of time and space in the end, and became strange and distant.
When soaking in the hot spring with Xiao'en, Aoi Zi couldn't help but complain that the bath house was too small and inconvenient, and the dishes here were not right, raw and cold, or Guangzhou dishes tasted good, so I wanted to stew a soup to drink.
"Raw and cold" is her mother-in-law's evaluation of the meals cooked by Aoi, and now Aoiko also uses this word to describe the Japanese dishes she once dreamed about, which sounds a little lonely.
Finally, before leaving, Aoiko went to the cemetery and said goodbye to her parents calmly with Chinese — in stark contrast to Aoiko's vivid and excited longing for her hometown in fluent Japanese when she first came to Japan to pay homage to her parents.
Japan's rejection of Aoi made her finally realize the fact that her hometown had been lost forever.
As Edgar Reitzer said, "Homeland is such a thing that if one gets closer and closer to it, one will find that the moment it is about to arrive is gone, it has become nothing."
Britain, Japan, and the mainland rejected Xiao En, his mother, and his grandfather, and Hong Kong's "guest route" eventually became the "way home".
At the end of the film, Xiao En becomes a staff member of the Hong Kong Television Station, and as a journalist, he documents the vigorous "anti-corruption" demonstrations of Hong Kong citizens with his colleagues.
In the end, "Ketu Autumn Hate" uses Xiao En's unique situation to pursue Hong Kong's identity in the triangular relationship of "colonizer, motherland and self".
Hong Kong has become a "negotiated home."
The haunting lyrics in the film: "The cool breeze has faith, the autumn moon is boundless... Today it is difficult to meet on the other side of the day, it is a lonely boat that is silent in the evening, the cool day, you look at the oblique sun to illuminate the double flying swallow, and lean on the canopy window to think quietly. ”
It is the sadness of the loss of the hometown, and the confusion of identity.
The grandfather's words on the sickbed, "Don't be disappointed in China", were quite ambitious, and Xiao En, who was beside him, looked at his sleeping grandfather and shed tears: "Such an old belly, I'm afraid I can no longer bear the weight of this granddaughter." ”
The fate of the three generations of grandchildren seems sad and wandering under the wrapping of politics and history, just like the "floating people" in hong Kong writer Xi xi xi's "Floating City Zhiyi" who "has no wings, so it cannot fly, it can only float, and it does not talk to each other, only silently and solemnly floating".
The weight of "Ketu Autumn Hate" is the real experience of director Xu Anhua, and it is also the deep feeling of screenwriter Wu Nianzhen, and the solid script has a solid foothold under the sincere and delicate interpretation of Lu Xiaofen and Maggie Cheung, two actresses.
Thirty years have passed. We are still searching for the hometown of our dreams, but we have failed again and again.
Perhaps, it is precisely because of the mistakes in the hometown that we frequently look back.
Text/Pippi Film Editorial Department: Tong Yunxi
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