ifcbaby

Unfinished Returns

29 October 2023

Why is the measure of love the temperance that follows its loss? I have been thinking about this since 2016 when Karina wrote in her tinyletter. Last month, coming home from a trip and walking the eight minutes from the pier to my door, I thought, what’s the point of starting over anywhere? It gets worse every year, people said about the muggy summer. When the expats on the island post their space heaters for sale on facebook marketplace with the caption “must-have for Hong Kong winters”, I don’t believe them. I also didn’t believe the real estate agent when he said “we don’t have winters in Hong Kong anymore” when he showed me the flat I would end up taking. The flat faces the northwest, the short end of the cardinal stick. The afternoons are too warm in the summer, and the north wind would hit my windows in the face, if we still have winters here.

Coming home from a trip gives you the luxury of truth about how you really feel about the place. Sometimes it’s just good to know and there is no need to act on the feeling. At Para Site, Billy Kwok had a piece about Yu Man Hon, a boy who has not come home since 2000. An LED map of Shenzhen took up half a wall in the gallery, overlaid with polaroid photos of alleged sightings of Yu Man Hon taken by his mother over the years since the boy went missing in 2000. Somehow, after losing his mother at an MTR station, the then-15-year-old Yu Man Hon, autistic with the IQ level of a toddler and without any travel documents in hand, managed to slip across immigration control at the Shenzhen border into the mainland. Following a series of incompetent border administration and bureaucratic tragedy by the police on both sides of the border, Yu Man Hon vanished into the mainland and has not come home since. His mother has not given up on asking questions.

“Missing Boy Captivates Hong Kong”, the Washington Post used as a headline back then, for the case “highlights the strains” of One Country Two Systems embodied by the peculiar Shenzhen-Hong Kong border that deviates from common international border practices. But as Billy said in an interview, the real question was the liability of human security as a collateral of colonial displacement: “The British had only been gone three years, and we were very sensitive to how people from either side would cross the border. Moreover, since our knowledge of China was shallow, we wondered if we could still find someone after they went to China.” If he is still alive, Yu Man Hon would be 38 years old this year.

Yu Man Hon’s missing case belongs to the same category of cognitive watersheds that include fake soy sauce, toxic baby formula, SARS, Leslie Cheung’s suicide, and Carrie Lam. It means something if you remembered what it was like when you received the news. The weight of Yu Man Hon felt in his absence is the mental mass of borders, maps, and their psychic functions. On this map, the mainland is represented as mentally uncharted territory, a blackhole that swallows the contours of a known world: democracy, the rule of law, cosmopolitanism, prosperity, liberal modernity. Even after decades of deepening infrastructural integration and cross-border human flow for all kinds of reasons, what would it take for anyone to cross a psychic border of superstructural differences? Even if the National Security Law hadn’t passed, wechat pay and alipay will still become more and more widely used everywhere. A friend just said it the other day: “Hong Kong will die not because of NSL, but because of capitalism.” Of course, when we say Hong Kong, we mean Hong Kong as we know it.

Imagine: capitalism as the end of imagination. Imagine anyone boycotting cross-border Taobao.

On the other side, from Shenzhen’s point of view, “Hong Kong remains an abstract sign that does not require concrete understanding, and a hypothetical destination that fuels the desire to maintain mobility”. Yu Man Hon’s unreturn is the counterpoint to the narrative of border mobility as moral source and achievement.

Because the humidity fucks up my sleep, I rotate between three apps on my phone until the stimulation of banal repetition wears me out. My Xiaohongshu explore tab feeds me endless Hong Kong travel guides that take on a tactical vocabulary with a sense of compression and urgency native to social media tourism. There must be something perversely normal about the strange pleasure of mimesis. What do all these people see in the city that I am not seeing?

Somehow I am not going out as much anymore because I can never tell if it’s going to be a 2-hour wait for a table or if there are only going to be two other tables the whole night, which will then make me worry about the economy. Are we more mad about the way the government has ruined the city or the way influencer behaviour is ruining the city? It’s hard to say. The cool thing about a capitalist society is there are many other bars to choose from. But should we mourn what we have lost? What do we expect when we expect anything to stay the same for us?

I understand the rage of being forced an image of what you know intimately through someone else’s consumption—of power or of capital—anything that accumulatively transforms or changes the landscape without your participation. It has less to do with the idealism of what we want things to look like than the material reality of what kind of choices are available to us. It is actually really hard to be moved to action by the things that we cannot see, let alone imagine. This is why artists are valued for what they do, imagining the future as a kind of love that could have moved mountains, in Stanley Cavell’s (unchanging) words.

Somehow there is no shame in wanting what can be consumed. Asking for something without a list price, on the other hand, can end up embarrassing.

A few Sundays ago, Cici Wu showed her earlier work The Unfinished Return of Yu Man Hon at M+, the first time the video work has been screened in a cinema setting. She had asked the former child actor who had played the little boy in Edward Yang’s Yi Yi to play Yu Man Hon in this filmic interpretation of his imaginary return home. The retrieval of his memory becomes a structuring force in the film: the return becomes both an act of retrieving, the space in which this retrieving occurs, and the memory that is retrieved. This memory (and the light and the camera) hovers around the border zone at Lowu, between Hong Kong and Shenzhen. What we don’t see is the actual act of crossing the border, even though the narrator’s trilingual flashes of recognition attempt to bridge the gaps.

I have to think about this city in relation to the other cities that came before it because my return to the city had seemed like a choice. Diaspora is not always about choice, but the meanings we make of it are often betrayals of our other conscious values—what we make of love, for example, or what we think language can or cannot do. How can migratory movements be captured as more than moral source and achievement when the privileges of disporic identities materially outweigh any existential shame?

Just because something is unspoken doesn’t mean that it cannot be spoken for. My scientific mind wants to weed out ambiguity and formlessness for the sake of the formless. But when I tried to explain to a friend about how I feel about moving back to Hong Kong, I could only say, Love is not the right word. Love doesn’t even come close. Maybe what I meant was, don’t bring emotions into this. As someone from the mainland who moved to Hong Kong ten years ago because she really liked Hong Kong, she understood.

That afternoon at M+ ended with a projection of Stan Brakhage’s Mothlight in 16mm. Return to pure light. Return to pure form. And then the clicking train of the reel ended and the screen turned to black. For a moment, I thought, for whatever it’s worth, this is still a place where you can see Stan Brakhage’s Mothlight in 16mm. That’s kind of beautiful.