NAMES AND IDENTITIES IN THE HONG KONG CULTURAL SUPERMARKET

Gordon Mathews

Gordon Mathews is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

There is, as of this writing, little more than a year left before the transfer of Hong Kong from British to Chinese rule. Hong Kong newspaper headlines in recent months have trumpeted the latest developments in this transition, from the triumph of pro-democracy candidates in Hong Kong's Legislative Council elections, to China's warning to the Hong Kong press to "seriously think about �9 . . their obligations as patriotic journalists, "1 to Great Britain's repeated refusal to grant right of abode to all but a few of Hong Kong's people, to the decision by China to abolish the Legislative Council after July 1, 1997.

Hong Kong media tend to depict July 1, 1997 in purely political terms: as signifying, at least for more Western-influenced media outlets, the potential death of democracy in Hong Kong. 2 It may, indeed, signify that, although not without irony: as one writer recently put it, "[Hong Kong Chinese] democracy advocates deprecate C h i n a . . . Because they say it is totalitarian . . . . They should have stood up long ago to defy colonialism, under which Hong Kong Chinese have been living as second-class citizens until lately.'3 However, the underlying meaning of July 1, 1997 is not only political, but cultural, as I argue in this paper. Hong Kong people's feelings about the coming transition reflect their feelings about their cultural identities as Chinese and yet not Chinese.

Hong Kong's transition is viewed in widely varying ways by Hong Kong's people. "There is no point in concealing the fact that apprehension is the prevailing emotion," held Hong Kong's Eastern Express in a New Year's Day 1996 editorial. Hedging

Dialectical Anthropology 21: 399-419, 1996. �9 1996 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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their bets, 130,000 Hong Kong Chinese queued up in the final week before the deadline to apply for British National Overseas Passports, enabling them to obtain visa-free access to many foreign countries; 4 43 percent of young people said they would emigrate, if they could, before 1997. 5 As against this, another media voice states that "every slanted or pre-empted poll and survey has not been able to keep down the rising voice of the community for a more optimistic attitude towards China; ''6 according to another recent survey, 46 percent of Hong Kong people say they want to become a part of China, the first such poll in Hong Kong's recent history in which more people accept China than do not. 7

"China wants Hong Kong to be the most prosperous Chinese city," Martin Lee, the chairman of the Democratic Party, Hong Kong's most popular political party, has emphasized. "They will [only] tolerate Hong Kong as a Chinese city. They will have control of the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary. They will control the universities and the press." On the other hand, Tsang Yok Sing, a Hong Kong adviser to the Chinese government, argues that, "most people in Hong Kong know they are Chinese. If you ask me, I say it is my country."8 The historical roots of this conflict are clear: Hong Kong's 150 years as a British colony have created the basis for a sense of cultural identity different from that of its huge communist neighbor. China eagerly awaits the return of Hong Kong to "the motherland," thereby bringing to a close the era of colonial outrage it has suffered (a large clock in Beijing's Tiananmen Square counts off the days, hours, minutes, and seconds remaining). Yet many Hong Kong people wonder if they are the children of that motherland.

The problematics of culture and cultural identity in today's world of shifting ethnoscapes and diasporas have been discussed by many anthropologists, 9 but the phenomenology of identity--the ways in which particular culturally shaped selves formulate who culturally they are--is only rarely explored, lO To sketch briefly and crudely such a phenomenology: On the basis of a taken-for- granted, "given" cultural shaping--the shapings of language and of habitus, of all the social and institutional structures that one has internalized as "natural"--selves shape themselves from an array

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of cultural forms that might be called "the cultural supermarket." 11 As Jean-Francois Lyotard has noted, "Eclecticism is the degree zero of contemporary general culture: one listens to reggae, watches a western, eats McDonald's food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner; ''12 as commented a member of a Chinese motorcycle gang, obsessed by Harley Davidsons and the American dream of freedom, " C u l t u r e s . . . are like the dishes on a table. You just pick up what you like.'13 One's choices from the cultural supermarket are deeply influenced by one's given cultural shaping, and also by the array of social and institutional rules one must conform to and the roles one must fit. They are also shaped by the array of competing voices aimed at molding one's mind, from the propaganda of nations, to the blandishments of advertisements and the allure of popular culture, to the pressures of one's immediate social world. For all this, however, selves are neither automatons nor slaves; there remains a degree of individual choice of cultural identity.

This is particularly the case for the people of Hong Kong. Until the 1960s, most Hong Kong residents considered China to be their home; 14 it was not until the late 1960s, when a postwar generation reached adulthood that had only known Hong Kong, that a sense of "Hongkongese" as an autonomous cultural identity emerged. 15 A recent survey showed that 35 perce ,,t of Hong Kong residents consider themselves "Hong Kong peopl, " 30 percent Chinese, and 28 percent Hong Kong Chinese, reflecting the ambiguous mix of cultural identities in Hong Kong at present. 16 However, it may be that most Hong Kong people, immersed in the practicalities of making a living, pay little heed to the blare of competing political agendas in the mass media, attempting to define for them who they are (from the paeans to the motherland of the Hong Kong pro- Beijing newspaper Wen Wei Po to the current Hong Kong government's recent television advertisements on every regular Hong Kong TV station in 1995-1996, pointedly urging citizens to be aware of their human rights). Taxi drivers invariably tell me that 1997 means little to them--mouh chin, msai geng ("if you don't have any money, there is nothing to worry about").

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For others, however--particularly such figures as journalists, politicians, and university teachers, who have the luxury of being able to ponder such questions--the issue of cultural identity and what will happen to that identity after 1997 looms large. One recent survey reports that the more educated a person is, the more likely she is to be worried about what happens to Hong Kong after 1997.17 To explore the question of cultural identity in the shadow of 1997, I interviewed at length in English thirty-two teachers, graduate students, and alumni from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. The Chinese University is a fascinating institution, culturally, in that it was explicitly founded for the sake of learning in Chinese (classes are conducted in Cantonese, Mandarin, or English, unlike the University of Hong Kong, with its colonial background and classes invariably conducted in English); it continues to be chosen by some students for its "Chineseness." Yet it has a student body fully English-speaking and a faculty almost all of whom have Ph.D.s obtained abroad. In this sense, the Chinese University, in particular, embodies the acute contradictions in Hong Kong identity; the people I interviewed, Hong Kong's educational elite, were highly concerned about who they are culturally and who they may become or be compelled to become in the future. Before analyzing their formulations of identity, however, let us first approach the issue of identity through a broader and more obvious window, that of names.

Language and Names as a Window Into Identity

It is hardly surprising that the people I interviewed know English, given the structure of the Hong Kong educational system. "English, not Chinese, is the main medium of instruction in 94 percent o f . . . secondary schools "lg In fact, in most classes of these secondary schools, only the textbooks are in English, with teachers mixing in English terms with their Cantonese explication. "The fact that students are being forced to learn in a non-native tongue in Hong Kong is an extremely rare practice. I wonder if you could find it anywhere else on earth," the critic of Hong Kong

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education, Tso Kai-lok, has said. 19 But as a teacher at Chinese University commented, "Students usually don't complain about learning English because they feel it's important in fmding a good job in the future. That English is the language of the colonizer never bothers people. They think about more practical matters." A major question Hong Kong education faces with the coming of 1997 is what the relation of Mandarin--to Cantonese speakers, "half a foreign language"--will be to Cantonese and English in the future .20

Courses at the Chinese University are taught in any of three languages, as earlier noted, but the conversation of students is in Cantonese, peppered with English words. However, the large majority address one another by Western names--often by names more or less mundane (Shirley, Evelyn, Leo, Ronald, Joanne), but sometimes by names with considerable flair: Cyrus, Jocasta, Carlos, Saville, Wellington, Almond, Apple, Myth, and Freedom, among many others. Most people first get English names in secondary school; typically, they are required in their English classes to choose names for themselves. Sometimes these chosen names are close in pronunciation to one's given Chinese name--Ka-mei becomes Carmen, Ai-lai Alice, and Heng-shi Henry--but often they bear no relation to those names. The woman who calls herself Jocasta specifically chose it from her readings of Greek mythology. Another calls herself Kelly because of her admiration for Grace Kelly; still another Hoffmann ,after Tales of Hoffmann (so he claims--although I suspect that Dustin may have been more on his mind than Offenbach). Another calls himself La Coste, after the expensive clothing brand of which he is enamored. By the same token, a woman abandoned her English name of Wendy after she realized that it was held by a well-known fast food chain: "I 'm not a hamburger!" she said.

The interesting issue here is not simply that students adopt Western names, but that they tend to make those names a part of themselves, sometimes registering them on their Hong Kong identity cards, and probably using those names in college and in their future workplace. Students estimate that some 70-80 percent of their friends go by Western, rather than Chinese, given names.

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The remaining 20-30 percent generally say that they could not find a Western name that they liked; but as one said, "I don't like always having to explain to my friends why I don't have a Western name." (I spoke with only one student who claimed to have forsaken his English name for a larger cultural or political reason: as he said, "I 'm Chinese. What do I need a Western name for?" For the rest, a political level of explanation never arose.) Because names, unless they are registered, are matters only of convention, they may be changed easily enough. One woman went from Pamela to Vivian at age sixteen because she felt that the new name better suited her character; once her friends all used her new name, she had indeed become Vivian. In high school, many students, particularly boys, go by Chinese nicknames, but by college most go by Western names instead. (Indeed, one person told me of how relieved he was to leave behind his secondary school nickname of ch~uhng g~ng luk, "giraffe," bestowed upon him for his habit of craning his neck to eye girls, and come to college, to use his more dignified Western name.) In the workplace, most people in white- collar positions go by Western names, regardless of whether their work brings them in contact with English speakers. In this sense, the use of Western names in college may be a sort of socialization into the world of work.

This use of Western names seems in large part a legacy of colonialism; but the nuances of these names make them particularly useful within Hong Kong social relations. The use of full Chinese names connotes formality; the use of given Chinese names connotes intimacy, "like a parent talking to her children, or like you're dating," as a teaching assistant said. Western first names enable a feeling of friendliness without intimacy: they are well- suited to educational or commercial settings where superficial harmony is important, but where deep human relations might get in the way of the business at hand. Most students, however, simply say that Chinese names are "old-fashioned," for use at home. One woman related how once when her friend called her at home and asked for her by her Western name, her parents were flustered, not knowing that name. She keeps wholly separate the Western-named part of her identity and the Chinese-named part of her

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identity--and never the twain shall meet, except in embarrassing phone calls when separate social worlds collide.

All of this seems to be cultural imperialism: Western names the stuff of mass-mediated glamour, sophisticated friendships and white-collar work, Chinese names the province of uneducated parents. But my students resolutely refuse to see their names in this way. A graduate student told of how she and several friends had gone to meet a well-known American scholar, and had introduced themselves by their Western names. The American was taken aback: were they all victims of colonialism? The Hong Kong students were in turn taken aback by the American's vehemence. "At first I thought that maybe that American woman was right. But later, when I reflected upon it, I realized that I 'd been living with my Western name most of my life; why should I reject it? If my Chinese name is part of my identity, so is my Western name. Why should I give that up?" She knows full well the history of British colonialism in Hong Kong and the impact of American cultural imperialism upon the world. But she sees her Western name not as her personal submission to that history, but as an authentic part of herself, hardly less real a part of herself than her Chinese name.

And this is the way that virtually all the Hong Kong Chinese I interviewed saw their different names: as separate, legitimate parts of themselves. Chinese names, for most, connote one's family, and the intimacy and hierarchy that family entails. Western names, chosen by oneself, connote one's individual, egalitarian relations to others within a wider, public world. Within Hong Kong society, names are particularly malleable: one person, who had had several different names and nicknames in his life, Chinese and Western, said that "names are just like suits of clothes. You take off one and put on another, that's all." This malleability will perhaps increase after 1997, in that the Mandarin pronunciation of Chinese names differs from Cantonese pronunciation--Hong Kong Chinese will have names in three languages instead of two, and the political choice of names will become complicated accordingly. (This is more subtly the case in written language. Cantonese and Mandarin written language is largely common; but Mainland China uses simplified Chinese characters, as Hong Kong does not. Thus, the

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way in which one writes one's name in Chinese may become, at least to some degree, a political statement.)

For the brief time being, however, it seems that the Western and Chinese names one holds signify a cultural division of what are commonly thought of as "Western individualism" and "Chinese familialism;" this division, however stereotypical, is what young, educated Hong Kong Chinese seem to adhere to in their use of names. But this division was made more complex in the interviews I conducted about senses of cultural identity, as I will now discuss.

Hong Kong Identity and "Chineseness"

I conducted interviews with thirty-two faculty, graduate students, or alumni of the Chinese University for two-four hours each, people who were, as a group, both highly self-conscious about the question of cultural identity in Hong Kong and highly ambiguous as to where their own identities lay. I asked them about their names and arrived at the above analysis, in part on the basis of what they told me. (I do not report on their own choices of names, for fear of compromising their anonymity.) I used their bifurcation of names as a starting point for asking them about their lives, and probing about their senses of cultural identity, including such questions as, "Do you consider yourself more Chinese or Hongkongese? What's the meaning of 'Chinese'? 'Hongkongese'? ' W e s t e r n ' ? . . . Even though you speak Cantonese as your native tongue, you were educated largely in English. How do you feel about this? Do you feel that your identity has been ' co lon i zed ' ? . . . How has your sense of identity shifted in recent years? How do you think your sense of who you are and your expression to others of who you are may shift after 1997? "21

About half considered themselves Hongkongese, and half considered themselves Chinese. But even those who asserted their Chineseness most fervently expressed little liking for the current Chinese government. "I love China, but not the Chinese government; ... . When I say my country, it is always China, but China as a whole, including Hong Kong and Taiwan . . . ;"

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"China for me is culture, history, language, and race; it's not what the Chinese government says." Leo Ou-fan Lee discusses how, for the Chinese intellectuals who fled China after Tiananmen Square, "nation and state became separate entities in their minds; it is the Chinese nation, instead of the state, that remains the central object of their loyalty "22- and this seems to apply as well to the people I interviewed, whose "China" transcends any government's claims to define "China."

But even when divested of the hegemonizing claims of political regimes, "Chineseness" was ambiguous for the people I interviewed. "Chineseness" as "race" was unsustainable for most, in that they well knew that one may be of Chinese origin, and yet wholly ignorant of China. "Chineseness" as language was problematic in that their native tongue is unintelligible to a billion Chinese to the north. Some held to "Chineseness" as land, but recoiled from that land at present. The majority associated "Chineseness" with a cultural tradition most frequently identified as Confucianism; 23 but several of them saw this cultural home as a prison. "Chineseness," said one woman, means "being obedient, submissive to parents," a set of values from which she had spent her life trying to escape, but that remained with her all the same. "My father felt that I never showed enough respect--I always talked back to him. Yes, I feel guilty now that he's dead: a lot . . . . All he wanted was to make sure that his children could have good lives." A man who had been proclaiming the value of what he saw as traditional Chinese culture-- "What does it mean to be Chinese? Our moral standards"--suddenly burst out: "I never said I liked Confucianism; I said this is Chinese! . . .You learn to be submissive even though the government is wrong. If your father asks you to do something morally bad, you have to listen to him--that 's rotten! But this is Chinese! What is inherited from many, many years, you cannot change it."

For these people, "China" is a cultural home from which they cannot escape; but for others, paradoxically, "China" is a cultural home to which they cannot return. "I feel like an abandoned child. I don't know who my mother is, but there's this longing to go back to her," stated one person. But when she briefly made a physical

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return, visiting south China, she was repelled by what she experienced: not just the poverty and unsophistication, but her own lack of fitting in--she was very obviously a foreigner, as she had long understood intellectually, but not in her heart. 24 A young man stated his enforced alienation from his "Chineseness" even more explicitly: "If I could have chosen to be born anywhere, it would have been in a small traditional village in China five hundred years ago, where I know nothing about the outside world. Yes, I'd prefer to be ignorant. I 'm corrupted by Western education, individualism. If I hadn't been exposed to these values, I'd be more traditional, more trusting; but those values have shaped my mind."

The root of this paradox is the nature of Hong Kong as a Chinese, yet non-Chinese, society. "Hong Kong is China," writes Richard Hughes; "Hong Kong is Chinese in many ways . . . . yet it is also evident that Hong Kong . . . has developed its unique identity and culture," writes Choi Po-king; "Hong Kong is not a Chinese city, although more than ninety-seven percent of its population are ethnic Chinese," writes Nai Wang Kwok. 25 Hong Kong mass media often discuss Hong Kong as a mixture of "Chineseness and internationalization"--or of, in the tourist brochure cliche, "East and West"--and the people I interviewed often seemed to echo this: "Hong Kong is a mixture of Chineseness, and Westernness, and so am I;" "Hong Kong is not totally Chinese but not totally Western, either. It's part of this and part of that." Those I interviewed who struggle with "Chineseness" as "obedience . . . filial p i e t y . . , submissiveness" often locate their personal ideal in what they see as a "Western individualism" that, shackled by "Chineseness," they feel they cannot fully attain. Those I interviewed who see "China" as a home to which they cannot return may view their shackles not as "Chinese" but as "Western" and particularly, what they see as the "Western individualism" they have unwittingly imbibed. "Hong Kong Chinese," one man glumly intoned, "can't ever really be Chinese."

Some were perfectly happy not to be "Chinese;" as one woman said, "I 'm quite proud of being a Westernized Chinese . . . . Mainland Chinese people aren't c ivi l ized! . . . Because Hong Kong

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has been colonized, it is civilized." (Indeed, mainland Chinese who come to Hong Kong are widely scorned for their unfashionable dress, donned without benefit of Bourdieuan distinction.) Others, paradoxically, characterized themselves and Hong Kong by Chineseness, but a Chineseness that China now lacks: "In Hong Kong, people still respect their elders, in China, they don't anymore: money has become everything." (Indeed, many people I interviewed, particularly unmarried women, gave a sizable portion of their income each month--often 30 percent or more--to their parents, to express their sense of filial obligation.) Hong Kong, in this view, is what contemporary China is not--China is the great other--and only Hong Kong remains "Chinese."

But the question "What is Chineseness?" remains. A few of those I interviewed well recognized the difficulty of the term; as one person said, "I don't know what Chineseness is--there are many different cultures in China;" as another, a social scientist, said, "I only use 'Chinese' in quotation marks." This was sometimes echoed in the media. An article in the newspaper Ming Pao asked "How many Chinas are there?," answering "not just the PRC and the Republic of C h i n a . . . but also the poems of the Tang and Sung dynasties . . . . There are different images of China in different people's minds. ,,26 Indeed, who can sum up in a single label four thousand years of history and philosophy and a billion people of every stripe? But for most, "China," stripped of its cultural complexity, was the shorthand label for a part of themselves--trusting, obedient, filial--to which some felt they could not return and which others felt they could not leave.

Hong Kong Identity and "Westernness"

The people who identified themselves as Hongkongese often did so on the basis of the obvious fact that they were born and raised in Hong Kong; this small territory, they felt, not a vast China they had hardly even seen, was the only home they knew. But Hong Kong, in its colonial past and present, in the historical shallowness of its sense of identity, and in the transitoriness of much of its

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population, seemed for some to be a fragile soil in which to locate cultural identity. "Hong Kong people are pragmatic and rootless," said one person�9 "In school, we don't study anything about national identity, citizenship, civics�9 This encourages its citizens to live primarily for their and their families' financial well-being: "Hong Kong people live for nothing but money . . . . They're pushy, materialist, greedy," as another said. This was seen by one woman in positive terms: "The best thing in Hong Kong is that we can make lots of money here. Money is important because money means choice . . . . We are free to be whatever we want to be."

As earlier noted, many of the people I interviewed characterized Hong Kong identity as involving some kind of mixture of "Chineseness" and "Westernness." The statement "We are free to be whatever we want to be" may be interpreted as the freedom to compose one's identity in terms of both these realms�9 This freedom may be severely constrained by one's institutional and social worlds, and perhaps, too, by one's sense of liminality: of being neither "Western" nor "Chinese," and thus adrift, with no basis for the shaping of oneself, but for a vague sense of a cultural identity that one can never fully attain. But this woman, proclaiming her freedom, seems to sense no such loss: money buys the means through which she can create herself, whether in terms "Chinese," "Western," or anything else. We have discussed Chineseness as a shorthand label for "obed ience . . . filial piety �9 . . submissiveness;" let us now discuss the other component of this shorthand labeling.

Just as "Chineseness" was seen as a realm separate from the claims of the current Chinese state, so, too, "Westernness" was seen as more than simply a function of the colonial government of Hong Kong; but the fact of colonization could hardly be forgotten. Some people bristled with indignation as they recalled their schooling; one man remembered his fury when in middle school, his world history textbook called the Opium War--in which China was forced by Great Britain to allow the importation of opium and the drug addiction of its people--a "trade war," as if to obfuscate the sordid circumstances of Hong Kong's founding. Others expressed an appreciation for their colonial education: "When I

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was in high school, once I thought, 'Was the Opium War really bad?' Without the Opium War, Hong Kong wouldn't be like it is today." "If I hadn't received a Western education, if I hadn't been able to read English books, I wouldn't have become a feminist � 9 I wouldn't have become the person I am now." This argument is regularly waged in the mass media (to take just one example, a recent newspaper column claims that "the Hong Kong Chinese forget how they have suffered from colonialism, and still think that the British are good.'27 Colonial education may, again, represent either liberation or imprisonment, enlightenment or brainwashing, depending on one's underlying sense of who one is: a sense shaped in part by the degree to which one's colonial education has "stuck." But "Westem" for the people I interviewed transcended the colonial, to serve as a general adjective for individually- oriented values and behavior. Statements such as "she's so Western" meant not simply that she spoke English--the most readily apparent marker of "Westernness"--but also that she was not "obedient," but acted as she herself wished. The basis for such statements was often the experience of being a student in the United States: "Americans are so individualistic! I found that it's easy to talk to them, but after that, it's like you don't even know them." "In America, I saw that Americans really operate by the values of independence and free choice. But it goes too far." As these statements indicate, "Westernness" in this sense, too, was viewed with ambiguity. As one person put it, damning "Westernness" with faint praise, "People in the West have more freedom. Even the violence in American movies: Hong Kong people admire that because it shows individuality. Violence is a form of personal expression that's tolerated in the West." But despite this ambiguity, it seems that in the binary shorthand pair of "Western" and "Chinese," "Western" is what looms largest. "Hong Kong has a worship of the West," one person stated, and cited her father as "a classic example" of such worship: "When crimes happen in America, he'll say, 'See what's happened? They've become so liberal! Everything's breaking down!' But he still thinks that the moon is bigger in the U.S., that life is better there."

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And this leads to "Westemness" in its largest sense: comprising not any particular society, but as if the entire world beyond "China." Many people I interviewed seemed to believe in a universality of "Western" values, as opposed to a particular "Chineseness." "Human rights are universal," said most, as opposed to the Chinese government's view that Western nations are "assuming superiority and imposing their o w n . . , standards [of human rights] on other countries without considering these countries' different history, cultural background, and social conditions. "2s "Gender equality is a universal principle," said several, despite a Chinese tradition denying such equality. Consider in this regard the following statement:

All people are born equal: That's a fact. It is central to the teachings of Marsilius of Padua, John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau and others. It's embodied in the Magna Carta. It's spelled out in the U.S. Declaration of Independence . . . . So, it is a universal proposition that all people should be treated equally, regardless of gender, age, skin colour, or sexual orientation . . . . Nevertheless, in Hong Kong the problem of sexual discrimination is enormous. The Confucian tradition of male dominance perpetuates the problem. 29

It is, in this st~/fe~ent, only Western thinkers and documents that are cited to demonstrate the "universal proposition" of equality. "The Confucian tradition" is held as being outside that "universal proposition." Despite the fact that Confucianism has been a global historical force (and certainly many thousands of times more people in the world have read Confucius than have read Marsilius of Padua), it is in this statement relegated to the provincial margins: "Westernness" is universally true; "Confucianism" and "Chineseness" particularly deluded.

This belief in the universality of "Westernness" was also reflected in the musings of several social scientists. "Even now, I 'm not sure whether social science is universal or only Western," said one. But his research showed how Chinese people are lacking in independent moral judgment, and do not think in a sufficiently independent way--thus, do not measure up to what he saw as a universal standard. Another reported on her surprise at seeing

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Hong Kong parents after returning from the United States: "In Hong Kong, spanking with a rod and yelling at your kids used to be normal family practice, but these are bad parenting skills." But in her next breath, this universal judgment becomes a cultural one: "I was shocked to return to Hong Kong and f'md that I had adopted the Western style of parent-child communication, that you've got to express your feelings, talk things out in an egalitarian relationship." For this woman, "Western values" come close to being "universal values," but she pulls back from making that equation unequivocally.

The content of this universalism seems clear. "All people should be treated equally; .... individual moral judgment is what is lacking in Chinese; .... respect for children as individuals is lacking in Hong Kong." What is, or should be, universal, these statements seem to say, is respect for the individual, a respect thought to be present in the West and lacking in China. Again, we have a binary distinction: China : West :: provincialism : universalism :: familialism : individualism. Most of the people I interviewed seemed to know full well that these labels do not apply to reality's complexities; they knew full well that there are a multiplicity of "Chinas," and a multiplicity of "Wests," that these labels, again, can only be used in quotes. Yet they used those labels anyway. Why? How could such intelligent people as they use such simple, stereotypical labels to bifurcate the world?

Names and Identities in the Cultural Supermarket

For a long time, the above question confused me. Perhaps, I wondered, the collision of the myths of China as the center of the world with the West as the center of the world, with the West as (temporary) victor, had led to the bifurcation of the world in their dual, unequal terms. Eventually, however, I realized that the matter was rather simpler: "Westernness" and "Chineseness," as used by the people I interviewed, did not primarily refer to different geographical areas and historical traditions, but rather, to categories of choice in the cultural supermarket. The meanings of

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"individualism" and "familialism" assigned to these labels do, of course, correlate with cultural traditions commonly associated with "the West" and "China," but the people who used these terms hardly meant to evoke such traditions with these terms. Rather, they sought to label and, thus, master the array of personal choices before them in their lives.

Hong Kong's cultural supermarket offers numerous potential identities--the people I interviewed could, if they chose, fit the model of Oxbridge gentleman or woman, filial son or daughter, fervent Chinese patriot, devout Christian, or fashionably Foucault- invoking intellectual, among many other identities; indeed, some were no doubt several of these at different times and places and in different social milieux. But these multiple choices of identity may be categorized under the two broad rubrics of "Western," connoting the pursuit of one's own happiness and self-realization, and "Chinese," connoting filial piety and respect for hierarchy and authority. These categories can be easily enough linked to such cultural documents as the American Declaration of Independence, and the Analects of Confucius; but they transcend those documents, and the cultural traditions from which they come. They are, finally, no more than the aisle signs in a supermarket, full of socially conditioned personal choices as to who one might be and how one might live.

But the very fact that one can choose under these two signs indicates the cultural priority of one over the other. Selves in Hong Kong choose their identities as "Western" and "Chinese" from the cultural supermarket, but the very fact that they make such choices is evidence of the triumph of what they categorize as "Western." This is shown in the musings of the young man earlier referred to: "I 'm corrupted by Western education, individualism. If I hadn't been exposed to these values, I 'd be more traditional, more trusting; but those values have shaped my mind." This man realizes that he cannot escape "Western individualism"--he has no choice but to choose from the cultural supermarket as to whether he is "Chinese" or "Western," but the mere fact of choice already has made him irrevocably "Western." We have seen how concepts of human rights, of gender equality, and of social science may lead

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to a sense that principles of individuality and equality are universal; but the sensed universality of those principles may be even more fundamentally a function of the extraordinary consumer capitalism that has swept the globe, and the related explosion of information, enabling "Western" individual choice. This is late modernity's universal cornucopia and solvent, bearing in Hong Kong the inaccurate shorthand label "Western."

I discussed at the start of this paper the given and chosen levels of self. The "given" in Hong Kong is ambiguously split: one learns Cantonese at home, English in school; one is educated to have little civic attachment. Their diverse shapings between "China" and "West" leave the people I interviewed betwixt and between, "Western" seeking to be "Chinese," "Chinese" seeking to be "Western;" as several said, "I don't know who I am, culturally. I have no home." From such a bifurcated vacuum of the culturally given, the people I interviewed choose themselves, aided by education and money, from the cornucopia of choices around them: "We are free to be whatever we want to be." Of course the freedom this woman extols is largely illusory, for one's choices are mediated by the constraints and pressures of fashion, family, state, and marketplace. But she is at least partially free to believe as she wishes about herself, to create, within the only partially mediated privacy of her mind, her own sense of identity.

But this freedom may soon be coming to a close. For the people I interviewed, 1997 signifies the potential limiting of choice--1997 may mean that the shelves of the cultural supermarket become less laden with possibilities: the cupboard may become bare. "Hong Kong Chinese are unique, but maybe we will become just a name in the history books," one person said. "At the moment we're still protected; but when the British go, Hong Kong identity will die out." Another, citing Chinese claims that Hong Kong is afflicted with "spiritual pollution," said, "After 1997, if I continue to live in Hong Kong my identity will be suppressed." As the Hong Kong legislator Emily Lau has stated, "China has no respect for freedom, especially freedom of the mind; .... Eventually, I expect to be arrested.-30

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Hong Kong newspaper articles, as well as some of the people I interviewed, often take a more optimistic line. One article depicts an emigrant from Hong Kong returning after 1997 to find its splendors undiminished: "It's the 25th of December, 1999, in Tsim Sha Tsui [downtown Hong Kong]. I haven't seen such a colorful Christmas in many years"31--the Christmas displays that now light up Hong Kong harbor will remain as bright as ever, the article suggests, as will too, by implication, the freedom to enjoy the cultural supermarket to the full, in all its proffered splendors. But the majority of those I interviewed remained quite pessimistic about the future of Hong Kong. The cultural supermarket involves, for many of the people I interviewed, its own particular tyranny: a coerced rootlessness; an alienation from any cultural home. But this, they felt, is preferable to the coerced cultural home that 1997 may bring. Having eaten the apple of cultural choice, they seek no return to any monocultural Chinese Eden.

Notes

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2.

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4.

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6.

7.

Sam Mok and Jimmy Cheung, "Press Advised of Patriotism Tenets," Eastern Express (Hong Kong), November 28, 1995. To a surprising degree, the English-language and Chinese-language presses in Hong Kong agree in their analyses of Hong Kong's present and future; there is no clear linguistic fault line to be found. The exception to this is Hong Kong's pro-Beijing Chinese newspapers, which have relatively low circulations. In this paper, I use mostly sources in English-language periodicals to discuss current events in Hong Kong, and sources in Chinese-language periodicals to discuss questions of identity. J. Wong, "Happy Medium Seen for Future." Letters to the Editor, Eastern Express, April 4, 1996. Leung Wai-rnan "Gwgdfa daaihm~n j~un lings~h gwgtanbai." (The door to naturalization closes at midnight) Sing Tao Daily (newspaper), April 1, 1996. The Economist, "Turning Back the Clock in 1997," January 6, 1996. Alan Castro, "Releasing Shackles While Strengthening Bonds," "Castro on Sunday" Column, Sunday HongKong Standard, February 25, 1996. Wai-kong Fung, "Public Softens Stance on Handover but Rights Fears Remain," The South China Morning Post, February 17, 1996. The apparent discrepancy in survey findings discussed in this paragraph

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10.

11.

12.

13. 14.

15.

16.

reflect in part the particular time at which the different surveys were conducted: Hong Kong public opinion has had several jittery ups and downs over the past six months, largely in response to pronouncements from China as to Hong Kong's future. However, beyond their timing, I interpret these surveys as reflecting the ambivalence that many of Hong Kong's people feel toward their coming shift in political masters. Those who are able to get foreign passports often do so "just in case;" many of those who cannot, declare themselves Chinese and hope for the best. Both quotations in this paragraph are from Edward A. Gargan, "China's Cloud Over Hong Kong: Is '97 Here?" The New York Times International, July 5, 1995. See, for example, Arjun Appadurai, "Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy," Jonathan Friedman, "Being in the World: Globalization and Localization," and Ulf Hannerz, "Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture," in M. Featherstone, ed., Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization, and Modernity (London: Sage, 1990), Jonathan Friedman, Cultural Identity and Global Process (London: Sage, 1992), Ulf Hannerz, Cultural Complexity: Studies in the Social Organization of Meaning (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), James Clifford, "Diasporas," Cultural Anthropology vol. 9, no. 3 (1994), pp. 302-338. Two of the few examples that I know of are Anthony P Cohen, Self- Consciousness: An Alternative Anthropology of Identity (Routledge: London. 1994), p. 133-167, and Gordon Mathews, What Makes Life Worth Living? How Japanese and Americans Make Sense of Their Worlds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 207-231. I thought I had coined this phrase, until I found it in Stuart Hall's essay, "The Question of Cultural Identity," in S. Hall, D. Held, and T. McGrew, eds., Modernity and Its Futures (London: The Open University 1992), p. 303. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, trans. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 76. Joel Forrester, "Harley Dreams," Eastern Express, September 20, 1994. Nai Wang Kwok, Hong Kong Braves 1997 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Christian Institute, 1994), p. 24. It is in part a testimony to the newness of the concept that there is no generally accepted English equivalent to the Cantonese H~ungg6ngyb.hn. "Hongkongers" and "Hongkongese" are both in use, with the former term perhaps carrying with it the implicit sense of belonging to a larger entity (Hongkongers being Chinese as New Yorkers are American) and the latter term carrying no such sense (Hongkongese as opposed to Chinese). My own usage is meant to reflect no such implications. As reported in Alex Lo, "Growing Number Prefer to be Identified as 'Chinese.'" Eastern Express, February 17-18, 1996. These survey

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17.

18.

19. 20. 21.

22.

numbers, too, have shifted in recent years: the number of Hong Kong people considering themselves to be Chinese has risen from 22 percent to 30 percent since 1993 (Wai-kong Fung, "Public Softens Stance on Handover but Rights Fears Remain," The South China Morning Post, February 17, 1996). As reported in Michael E. DeGolyer, "A Collision of Cultures: Systemic Conflict in Hong Kong's Future with China," in D. McMillen and M. DeGolyer, eds., One Culture, Many Systems: Politics in the Reunification of China (Hong Kong: The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press 1993), p. 281. This concern is also undoubtedly correlated with income--the higher the income, the greater the concern about 1997. Herbert Pierson, "Cantonese, English, or Putongbua--Unresolved Communicative Issues in Hong Kong's Future," in Gerald A. Postiglione, ed., Education and Society in Hong Kong: Toward One Country and Two Systems. (New York: M.E. Sharpe 1992, reprinted 1994, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.), p. 190. Felix Lo, "Mother's Tongue is Best." Eastern Express, March 21, 1995. Pierson, "Cantonese, English, or Putonghua," p. 187. Allow me briefly to discuss methodology. My questions were relatively abstract; but judging from the intensity with which most of the people I interviewed answered them, I am confident that the ambiguity they expressed was due not to the abstraction of my questions, but to their own senses of ambiguity as to who, culturally, they are. It must be remembered that the very brief quotations from the people I interviewed are taken from the context of lengthy personal conversations; this is a distortion, but it also makes this article readable. The interviews were mediated by my ethnicity, as a white American, and my language, as an English speaker (my informants' English being substantially better than my Cantonese). Were I Chinese and interviewing in Mandarin, or Hong Kong Chinese interviewing in Cantonese, the replies I received to my questions might have been different--although the people I interviewed steadfastly denied this. As many analysts have noted--Erving Goffman, in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1959) and Charlotte Linde, in Life Stories: The Creation of Coherence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), self- presentation, if not self, is ever shifting in accordance with different social circumstances and interlocutors; while the people I spoke with may have been absolutely frank in what they told me, still, what they said was shaped by the circumstances of our interviews. I, finally, cannot know the relation of my interviewees' self-presentations to their own ongoing senses of self; but I believe that the gap between the two is small enough that I can indeed discuss their senses of cultural identity in this paper. Leo Ou-fan Lee, "On the Margins Chinese Discourse; Some Thoughts on the Cultural Meaning of the of the Periphery," in Tu Wei-ming, ed.,

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24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

The Living Tree: The Changing Meaning of Being Chinese Today (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1994). p. 235. Taoism, that other great Chinese philosophical tradition, was mentioned by only one of the people I interviewed as signifying "Chineseness." That Confucianism and not Taoism is characterized as "Chinese" is congruent with my eventual conclusion in this paper; if "Chineseness" and "Westernness" finally represent no more than aisle signs in the cultural supermarket, then Taoism's tradition of mystical individualism will only confuse the clarity of the stark opposition of these terms. A recent newspaper article (Chun-wai Tse, Faat fhh ch~hng colunm, Ming Pao, March 6, 1996) discusses how for Hong Kong businesspeople, "the more their contact with China, the more they realize that, although they themselves are Chinese, their ways of thinking, their characters, their styles, are completely different from those of mainland Chinese." Richard Hughes, Borrowed Place, Borrowed Time (Second Edition, London: Andre Deutsch, 1976), pp. 9-10; Choi Po-king, "Introduction," in P. Choi and L. Ho,.eds., The Other Hong Kong Report 1993 (Hong Kong: The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 1993), p. xxxiii; Nai Wang Kwok, Hong Kong Braves 1997, p. 111. Sehk Keih [pen name], "Ydmh dbsiti go Junggwok?" (How many Chinas are there?), Ming Pao (newspaper), Dec. 8, 1994. Yat-ping Chan, "Junggwoky~m" (Chineseness), in 17n n3ahm deih bak column, Ming Pao, March 6, 1995. Eastern Express, "'Human Rights' Mask Racism," (Report from Xinhua, The New China News Agency), February 8, 1995. Clarence Tsui, "Discrimination Should Be Shunned," "From the Editor" page, Varsity Magazine, Department of Journalism and Communications, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, January 1995. This magazine is published by students of that department; I cite it here because it says in bald form what some of those I interviewed clearly seemed to assume but did not go so far as to directly state. The first of these statements is quoted in Keith Richburg, "Fearful Press in Hong Kong Toes China's Hard Line," International Herald Tribune, March 30, 1995; the second is quoted in The Economist, "Turning Back the Clock in 1997," January 6, 1996.\31.