intro to this proj
I grew up with songs from the Hong Kong Golden Age (1970's-1990's): Roman Tam, Leslie Cheung, Jenny Tseng, Anita Mui, Tat Ming Pair. As someone with no understanding of spoken Cantonese, I always viewed Cantopop as a way to connect with my Cantonese mother, and as a symbol of an unreachable heritage.
Recently, I began to more critically examine the history of Hong Kong cinema and music. What I thought connected me to my mother is instead connecting me to a history of Sinospheric queerness: Roman Tam performed in drag, Leslie Cheung had a boyfriend of twenty years and pushed for more androgyny in his acting roles, Susanna Kwan refused to marry a man because she loved a woman, Tat Ming Pair individually came out as gay.
As a queer artist of Chinese descent, I suddenly found a heritage. There were people like me! Just as Leslie Cheung and Tat Ming Pair first turned to Western icons such as David Bowie for artistic inspiration, I first "learned to be queer" by watching and imitating white people. Just as the Golden Age artists sought to bring the geopolitical to the level of the personal with art practice--to make the world tangible and therefore mutable with their music, to carve out a place for themselves amidst the terrifying indeterminacy of the geopolitical--so too do I.
I relate so viscerally to the artists of the Hong Kong Golden Age because, as a Chinese American, I too occupy a geopolitically liminal identity between two global superpowers. Hong Kong in the 1970's-1990's was facing its imminent return to mainland China from a century of British rule. HK Golden Age art, therefore, both arose from and fought against the powerlessness that came with this unique set of geopolitical conditions. Queerness was and continues to be integral to the political subversiveness of Cantopop; the sociopolitical conditions of 1970's-1990's Hong Kong, in turn, shaped queerness in HK. I firmly believe that geopolitically liminal identities (Chinese American-ness, Hong Kong-ness) are from where we might imagine new conceptions of futures and selves, challenge predominant national narratives and identities, and (at the very least) create banger art. I think the artists of the Golden Age knew this, too.
I'm a second-generation Chinese American, so my distance from China and the Sinosphere is diasporic, generational, and spatial. I am passably fluent in simplified Chinese, but do not understand most Cantonese, and have a lot of difficulty reading traditional Chinese. Nor am I a trained translator; my practice prioritizes placing the English-translated lyrics in conversation with each other in the same way that they were placed in conversation in their Cantonese original. This involves a lot of historical research: into broader Chinese history, into the British music scene of the 1970's-1990's, into Cantonese and Hong Kong history.
My knowledge of Cantonese and Canto culture comes from my mother, who grew up in Guangdong. Although Guangdong and HK share variations of a language, their cultures and histories are extraordinarily different. As an individual of Guangdong heritage, I spent much of my life enjoying HK art without needing or thinking to engage with the sociopolitical and queer histories behind them. As a guest to Hong Kong culture and history, I'm therefore committed to educating myself re: the sociopolitical and historical contexts that inform Hong Kong art, as well as the nuances of Cantonese that are already lost on me as I translate from simplified Chinese. I understand this is a matter of great geopolitical urgency, with the mainland's erasure of Cantonese culture and language. I also understand that any act of translation is fundamentally an act of distortion, informed by my upbringings and biases. I'm always down to talk and learn!
P.S. If anyone knows how to edit bios on Spotify, let me know immediately, because there is next to nothing for Cantopop artists.
