Seed and Sediment:
On Memory, Hope, and Hong Kong

Christina Yuen Zi Chung

The short film Season of the End opens with Wong Ching and Lau Ho-chi, a pair of protestors in Hong Kong, sifting through the remains of a fellow protestor’s bulldozed home. The duo carefully preserves broken household objects, lifting ceramic shards out of the debris with tweezers and collecting pieces of concrete in glass jars. While the city’s bright lights and skyscrapers remain tall and gleaming, the Hong Kong that immediately surrounds Wong and Lau is vacant and crumbling. Quietly, the duo fixates on indexing, boxing, vacuum-sealing, and bottling food scraps, soap, and photographs, until “[g]radually, there were more specimens than objects left in the city.”[1] The process of specimen-making—a meticulous process that suspends objects in a moment in time, a limbo state of stasis for study and archival purposes—surfaces a set of philosophical tensions for Lau. While he lives as a human being, the inevitable trajectory towards death means that the fate of becoming an inanimate, dead object looms over his living days. Lau eventually asks Wong to take their work to its logical and inevitable conclusion: by turning him into a specimen as well. A sorrowful but loving montage unfolds after Wong reluctantly agrees. She collects his sweat droplets, gathers samples of his hair, and observes him through a peephole as he sits in an adjacent room, ingesting coagulant, effectively embalming himself. Later, in what appears to be a moment of reanimation, Lau rises from his seat and speaks to Wong through a locked door, telling her that he feels younger and that he had woken from a very long dream. He tugs at the doorknob, angrily urging Wong to open the door, and raises a hatchet to break down the wall…

Directed by Wong Fei-pang, Season of the End is one of four short films featured in the anthology movie Ten Years (2015). Dressed in pallid and desaturated tones, this story departs from the other three short films that openly ruminate on the ways authoritarian rule could unfold in Hong Kong. Instead of focusing on structures of political oppression, Season of the End turns to the affective aftermath of Hong Kong’s turmoil, speaking in coded terms about what comes after revolutionary fervor. It is somber, meditative, and brimming with an abject hopelessness that unfurls slowly throughout. For a film that was released a year after the 2014 Umbrella Movement, which by then was already characterized by some as a “failed movement,” the hopelessness of Season of the End found emotional resonance with protestors and supporters of the movement. Yet, beyond offering emotional catharsis, one can also read a script of hope buried amidst the rubble of despair.

Given the events that have transpired in Hong Kong since 2015, hope and the movie Ten Years have both become painful subjects. The enactment of the National Security Law (NSL) in June 2020 has concretized authoritarian rule in Hong Kong, realizing the fears that animated Ten Years as well as the city’s contemporary protest movements.[2] While the filmmakers of Ten Years had projected that some rendition of this future could arrive within a decade after the making of the film, few, if any, could have predicted such a drastic turn of events only six years after the Umbrella Movement of 2014. Mass protests and legislative bids for democracy and self-determination have effectively been quashed since the enactment of the NSL. Fresh news of arrests, warrants issued, and alleged violations of the NSL emerge with increasing frequency. Hong Kong’s pro-democracy legislators have either been summarily dismissed from their positions or have resigned in solidarity. The city government budget for the 2021–2022 period reflects a tripling in funding for police equipment and an increase in its prison management budget,[3] exhibiting an overt and concerted effort to maintain the government’s hold over the city and limit the possibility for large-scale protest to re-emerge.

The NSL and its crushing effects are particularly painful as they have come on the heels of the 2019 Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement (also known as the Anti-ELAB Movement)—the largest public protest Hong Kong had ever seen. Gesturing to the atmosphere of hope and the abundance of resistance at the height of the Anti-ELAB Movement in 2019, protestors had once referred to the mass outpouring of protest actions as “flowers blooming everywhere” (遍地開花). These “flowers” had evidently grown from the seeds sown in 2014. Hongkongers exercised their muscle memory of protest and made adaptations based on the tactics and limitations of the 2014 movement. This resulted in the formation of more robust and agile communication systems as well as a decentralized, leaderless movement that opted for a tactic of mobility rather than a tactic of occupation. Perhaps the most powerful visual representation of how the Umbrella Movement became the seedbed for the Anti-ELAB Movement was the Lennon Walls that blossomed across Hong Kong—and indeed around the world—as the movement gained traction in the summer months of 2019. In 2014, Hong Kong’s Lennon Wall had been a single large-scale display of colorful sticky notes that adorned the façade of the government headquarters building; in 2019, sticky notes filled with messages of protest, solidarity, and hope for Hong Kong’s future emerged on far-flung walls, digital screens,[4] tunnels, as well as flyover walkways across the city and its diasporic locales.[5] These colorful seeds of hope were ephemeral but resilient throughout the movement, as attempts to destroy Lennon Walls were met with swift resurgences. The walls gradually receded from view when the COVID-19 pandemic began to rage, replacing activity, hope, and protest with lockdowns, burnout, and arrests.

By early February 2020, only scant signs of protest were visible in the streets of Hong Kong. While small posters and minor scrawls of graffiti clung to pillars and the corners of some public façades, the signature spread of sticky note–filled Lennon Walls were only occasionally found at “yellow shops”[6] and less visible parts of the city. Broken sidewalks that once gave up their bricks to make barricades for protestors had been patched over with concrete, and larger protest slogans that had been emblazoned onto Hong Kong’s walls were covered over with paint. These practices of erasure were highlighted in Hong Kong artist Giraffe Leung Lok Hei’s series of works titled Paper Over the Cracks (2020), in which the artist outlined the acts of erasure with bright yellow tape and provided them with wall text captioning. One caption reads:

 粉飾太平 #14
Paper over the cracks #14
2019–2020
油漆 Paint
Hong Kong Government
香港政府
1300 x 2930 mm[7]

As others took inspiration from Leung and followed suit to find and “frame” these acts of erasure, the development of this art series expressed a clear and simple message: Hong Kong remembers.

Under the boot of the NSL, these acts of remembrance may seem weak and futile, but they attest to how Hongkongers have survived a culture of erasure under the rapaciousness of neoliberal capitalism that colonization set into motion. Hong Kong scholar Ackbar Abbas once characterized the city’s culture as a “culture of disappearance,” one which cultivates a specific Hong Kong identity that is “a subjectivity that is coaxed into being by the disappearance of old cultural bearings and orientations.”[8] What is acknowledged but not explicitly explored in Abbas’ text is the culture of erasure that accompanies the culture of disappearance experienced by the city’s residents. Hong Kong’s brand of political economy is dependent upon erasure, as the government’s auctioning of land and the bulldozing of landmarks, villages, and older buildings breed opportunity for lucrative new developments to rise. Collusion between the Hong Kong government and real estate property tycoons is part of the city’s colonial legacy and has been well-documented in books such as Alice Poon’s Land and the Ruling Class of Hong Kong (2011). Functioning as the city’s largest land supplier, the Hong Kong government manufactures a scarcity of land supply in order to drive up demand and prices. The costs are ultimately borne by Hong Kong’s residents, who pay exorbitant property, rental, and management costs to real estate property developers. These property developers then profit further from building luxurious private housing developments and commercial complexes on razed land purchased from the government.[9] A culture of disappearance emerges as this cycle repeats; the government marks cultural landmarks and places of collective memory for destruction, and real estate tycoons build over these sites with haste, wiping them from view. In an always disappearing city that is erased over and over for profit, building and sustaining grassroots archives is a near-impossible task.

Although Hong Kong’s Government Records Service archives public records, the absence of legislation that would protect its materials from destruction speak to Hong Kong’s tendency towards erasure in its governmental practices.[10] Artistic, activist, and other grassroots efforts may have formed to create archives of the people, but high rental costs and a scarcity of space limit the act of archiving and, by extension, the possibility for remembrance.[11] In other words, the prospects of preserving seeds of hope through acts of collecting, indexing, and archiving the stories and paraphernalia of Hong Kong’s protests—thus suspending this moment in time between life and death, presence and erasure—are diminished under these conditions. The anxiety produced through the cultures of erasure and disappearance undergird the short film Season of the End, as it drives its central characters to pursue their almost monomaniacal quest to preserve and make specimens of every object they can find. In a similar vein, digital archives of the 2019 Anti-ELAB Movement mushroomed as the protests went on, fueled by a lucid awareness of how the powers that be in Hong Kong have wielded their bulldozers, and how necessary it is to document and remember in the face of authoritarian dictates and imminent erasure. However, the blocking of HKChronicles.com and censorship threats on platforms such as Wikipedia[12] have called into question the recourses remaining for Hongkongers to pursue archiving, especially when the government and corporate giants preside over access to key resources in the city.[13] With the history and collective memory of protest at risk of erasure, how does hope survive?

In The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, Latin American studies and performance studies scholar Diana Taylor intervenes into the overrepresentation of text and the archive, which have deep historical links to Western colonialism. Her work illuminates the sphere of performance and repertoire, which is closely connected to texts and archives of writing but is often occluded by the privileging of writing over other embodied forms of knowledge transmission. Though performances are ephemeral in nature, they can nevertheless powerfully retain, transmit, and create knowledge through embodied, rehearsed practices. Taylor writes:

Civic disobedience, resistance, citizenship, gender, ethnicity, and sexual identity, for example, are rehearsed and performed daily in the public sphere. To understand these as performance suggests that performance also functions as an epistemology. Embodied practice, along with and bound up with other cultural practices, offers a way of knowing.[14]

Performances of civic disobedience, resistance, and transmissions of knowledge are visible in the protest practices of the 2019 Anti-ELAB Movement. The tactics utilized in 2019 emerged from the ways of knowing formed in preceding acts of civil disobedience. These performances are witnessed in the ritual of placing flowers at the entrance of the Prince Edward subway station in Hong Kong, which has been re-performed repeatedly since August 31, 2019.[15]This is heard in the recitations of dates that have become part of a familiar refrain for many Hongkongers: 

七二一 （7/21）
八三一 （8/31）
一零一 （10/1）
一一一一/雙十一/殤十一 （11/11）[16]

Though digital archives may be blocked from view, protest slogans painted over, and protest rituals banned, these acts of erasure nevertheless leave traces—a sedimentary layer—that can be located through embodied practices and knowledges. As Giraffe Leung Lok Hei’s Paper Over the Cracks demonstrates, erasure inadvertently produces a record of what came before, which resurfaces in its ghostly form through Leung’s performance of “framing” absences to gesture to what was lost. Though erasure is a common tactic of oppression, enduring legacies of resistance forged by Indigenous communities, queer communities, and other marginalized groups also stand testament to the fact that the project of erasure often fails, and its effects are not absolute. What can no longer be touched, inscribed, or spoken aloud is transmuted into memories and practices held deep within the body, actualizing its presence through affect and ritual. This process produces what Indigenous scholar Dian Million calls “felt theory,” which posits that emotions are a form of knowledge that is distilled from collective memory and can guide future performances of resistance.[17]

Lau Ho-chi’s act of self-embalming in Season of the End belongs to the realm of performance and embodied practices that draws upon deep emotional wells and reveals the sediment of memory incurred by erasure. By making himself into a specimen after the bulldozing and crumbling of his Hong Kong, Lau fixes that moment in time within his body. He makes himself into an archival object that hovers between life and death, that bears witness and refuses to forget the version of the city that he once knew. Similarly, by filling the present with the past through reciting the refrain of Anti-ELAB dates and reperforming moments of protest, Hongkongers are etching specific moments within their bodies, holding onto the affective knowledge of what they have witnessed. Their refusal to forget attempts to stave off the permanent erasure of a version of Hong Kong—one teeming with possibility for self-determination and change—which took center stage in 2019. Although open displays of protest and of public hope may have receded from view, Season of the End reminds us that hope in Hong Kong operates through both seed and sediment. What is seen and what can no longer be seen are both imbued with memory. Muscle memory, spoken memory, and diasporic memory may lie dormant, but they will continue to tug at locked doors and break down walls when reawakened.

Endnotes

[1] Ten Years (00:31:12).
[2] Even prior to 2014, Hong Kong had experienced wave after wave of public, mass-scale protest. Its contemporary era of protest is often said to have begun in 2003, when 500,000 people in Hong Kong marched on July 1st to protest the proposed Article 23, a law that would have given the Hong Kong government power to target groups and acts deemed subversive, seditious, or treasonous towards the mainland Chinese Central People’s Government. Since then, other milestone protests include the 2012 Anti–Mandatory National Education protests and the 2014 Umbrella Movement protest.
[3] Candice Chau, “Hong Kong Budget 2021: Police Equipment Funding to Triple and Prison Management budget to Increase,” Hong Kong Free Press, February 25, 2021, https://hongkongfp.com/2021/02/25/hong-kong-budget-2021-police-equipment-funding-to-triple-and-prison-management-budget-to-increase/.
[4] Rachel Cheung, Twitter post, February 1, 2020, 9:46pm, https://twitter.com/rachel_cheung1/status/1223845141447733248.
[5] Kris Cheng and Holmes Chan, “In Pictures: ‘Lennon Wall’ Message Boards Appear Across Hong Kong Districts in Support of Anti-Extradition Bill Protesters,” Hong Kong Free Press, July 9, 2019, https://hongkongfp.com/2019/07/09/pictures-lennon-wall-message-boards-appear-across-hong-kong-districts-support-anti-extradition-law-protesters/.
[6] A term used to refer to shops and eateries that professed support for the Anti-ELAB Movement.
[7] Kelly Ho, “Giraffe Leung: The Artist Who Framed the Scars Left by Months-Long Protests in Hong Kong,” Hong Kong Free Press, April 12, 2020, https://hongkongfp.com/2020/04/12/giraffe-leung-the-artist-who-framed-the-scars-left-by-months-long-protests-in-hong-kong/.
[8] Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 11.
[9] Alice Poon and Brian Ng, “How Real Estate Hegemony Looms behind Hong Kong’s Unrest,” Lausan, November 6, 2019, https://lausan.hk/2019/how-real-estate-hegemony-looms-behind-hong-kongs-unrest-an-interview-with-alice-poon/.
[10] Venus Wu, “Hong Kong’s vanishing archives and the battle to preserve history,” Reuters, September 5, 2017: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hongkong-anniversary-archives/hong-kongs-vanishing-archives-and-the-battle-to-preserve-history-idUSKCN1BH0OY.
[11] Amy Qin, “Keeping Hong Kong Protest Art Alive Means Not Mothballing it,” The New York Times, May 13, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/14/arts/international/in-hong-kong-preserving-mementos-of-a-protest-movement.html.
[12] The Hong Kong Free Press has reported that Hongkongers who are attempting to preserve information and narratives of the Anti-ELAB protests face the threat of being reported to the national security police hotline by pro-Beijing parties. More details can be found in Selina Cheng, “Wikipedia Wars: How Hongkongers and Mainland Chinese are Battling to Set the Narrative,” Hong Kong Free Press, July 11, 2021, https://hongkongfp.com/2021/07/11/wikipedia-wars-how-hongkongers-and-mainland-chinese-are-battling-to-set-the-narrative/.
[13] Jessie Pang, “Hong Kong Censorship Debate Grows as Internet Firm Says Can Block ‘Illegal Acts,’” Reuters, January 15, 2021, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hong-kong-security-censorship/hong-kong-censorship-debate-grows-as-internet-firm-says-can-block-illegal-acts-idUSKBN29K0ZM.
[14] Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 3 (emphasis in original).
[15] These public re-performances have been stopped and deterred by the police in Hong Kong and, subsequent to June 2020, effectively banned due to the threat of the NSL.
[16] These mark dates of significance in the timeline of the Anti-ELAB Movement: days when protestors were violently attacked and maimed.
[17] Dian Million, “Felt Theory: An Indigenous Feminist Approach to Affect and History,” Wicazo Sa Review 24 no. 2 (2009), 53–76.

Published Summer, 2021