ASIA 325 (25W): Displacement of Our Lives - Personal Responses of Displacement to Song of Exile (1989)

ASIA 325: Hong Kong Cinema

ASIA 325 (25W): Displacement of Our Lives – Personal Responses of Displacement to Song of Exile (1989)
By Alisha Hickson, Cecilia Hou, Soon Hung Loo, and Tianyang Pei

Project Rationale:

“Based on this understanding, our group decided to create an ethnographic creative project in the form of a story map to document our personal and familial experiences of displacement. We chose this medium because displacement itself is closely tied to space, movement, memory, routes, and emotional mapping. Compared with a purely written essay, a storymap can present changes in each person’s geographical location more clearly and directly, while the combination of map-based narration, text, and images allow visual representation to merge with emotional expression. In this way, displacement is no longer merely a theme to be described, but becomes an experience that can be seen, traced, and perceived through spatial form.

Through this format, we hope to reorganize those seemingly scattered and ordinary personal and family stories so that they may reveal broader socio-cultural meanings. In the stories of the four of us, displacement takes different forms: it can appear as systemic exclusion and cultural alienation in the process of migration; as the gradual fading of language and cultural inheritance across generations; as silence, self withdrawal, and difficulties of expression caused by linguistic difference in cross-cultural environments; and as shame, misunderstanding, and suppression tied to racial, gendered, or queer identities, as well as the growing emotional distance and fractures within families caused by migration, secrecy, long-term separation, and misaligned life experiences. Although these experiences take place in different historical contexts, family structures, and stages of life, they all point to a shared feeling: that people are not always able to find stable and complete belonging in a single place, a single relationship, or a single identity.”

ASIA 325: Hong Kong Cinema

ASIA 325 (25W): Song of the Fish – A Short Film Inspired by Song of the Exile (1990)
By Joshua Gonzaga, Genevieve Christie, Tim Liang, Justin Zhao, and Jonathan Hsu

Project Rationale:

“Our project, Song of the Fish, is a short film (3:15) that reinterprets Ann Hui’s Song of the Exile (1990) through a single sustained metaphor: the experience of exile rendered as a goldfish living in a plastic bag, carried through environments it can see but never inhabit. In the first part, the fish is kept by a well-meaning but oblivious companion (Person A), who carries it through a restaurant and a social gathering at UBC, spaces where the fish is physically present but fundamentally excluded. In the second, the fish’s human child tries to reverse this, actively entering the fish’s world by visiting a pet store, standing in the shower beside it, and wading into the pool where the fish was first found.
The goal is to make visible what Hui’s film communicates psychologically. In Song of the Exile, Aiko’s displacement is interior, shown through silence, strained conversations, and careful framing rather than stated outright. Our film makes that condition literal: a fish cannot breathe the air around it, cannot eat the food offered to it, cannot join the conversation. The bag becomes a portable border, always present, always separating.
…The challenge was making something that works as analysis, not just as a cute metaphor. We tried to ground every choice in something specific from Song of the Exile, the framing, the music, the two-part structure, so the film earns its argument rather than just illustrating it. The goldfish works, we think, because it makes exile’s hardest quality to see. Its invisibility to everyone not experiencing it, impossible to ignore. You cannot look at a fish in a bag and fail to see the barrier.”

ASIA 324: Literature of Hong Kong

What’s in My Bag? Inspired by Xixi’s “Marvels of a Floating City”
By Kaitlyn Jang, James Lau, Ashley Lee, Victoria Liwen, and Yingxi (KiKi) Yang

Project Rationale:

“”What’s in My Bag?” is a contemporary format similar to the popular trend on social media, which can effectively shorten the distance between the audience and fictional characters. It allows us to enter and reconstruct the world of the Floating City from the inside out, rather than simply observing it from a distance.

Based on this approach, we came up with our main research question: What characters and personal belongings do we choose? How do they reflect the characters’ identities, memories, and emotions, while also reflecting the overall culture and psychological characteristics of the floating city?

We chose to create characters through different artistic approaches through drawing and paper cutting. Creating different characters inspired by Xi Xi’s work allowed each individual member to interact with the text and present their own interpretation of the work while maintaining the connections with the themes of the story. This approach allowed us to highlight the uniqueness of each character while expressing collective and personal readings of the story. To further expand on the individuality of the characters, we use the items in the bag to indicate which era the character belongs to. Our creative medium allowed each member to maintain the fantastical element of Xi Xi’ s work and embrace her surrealist elements. We thought by creating imagery it would be a good reflection of how Xi Xi uses visual metaphors in her work.”