Ka Lee Wong is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of East Asian Languages & Cultures at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include the dialectic relationship between language and identity in transnational Chinese media.
“Localism” (本土) has been a key word in the discourse of Hong Kong that indicates efforts to configure a unique sense of local identity and history. While unspecified in English, “localism” in Chinese, 本土, which is a combination of 本 (origin) and 土 (earth), highlights a land-oriented mentality. Certainly, the issue regarding land is at the core of everyday struggles among the locals, who must make ends meet in a highly urbanized city with the most expensive housing in the world. Yet, this focus on land obscures the understanding of the history and culture Hong Kong in relation to the ocean. After all, other than the land border connecting the city to China, Hong Kong is oceanic in the sense that it is a peninsula with a constellation of islands facing an open sea. This paper attempts to assess the possibility of mapping the discourse of Hong Kong in the existing oceanic and island studies by focusing on two documentaries about the rediscovery of Cantonese singing traditions in two local outlying islands. In Ballad of the Shore (岸上漁歌) and Rhymes of Shui Hau (水口婆浪的山歌), both released in 2017, Ma Chi-hang and Fredie Chan tell two stories about folk songs sung by farmers and fishermen in two coastal villages in Lautau Island (大嶼山) and Tap Mun Island (塔門). Coincidentally, these two documentaries both feature the filmmakers’ painstaking process of understanding and transcribing the mountain songs (山歌) and fishermen’s songs (漁歌), sung in Weitau Wa (圍頭話) and Shui Wa (水話), which are two diminishing varieties of Hong Kong Cantonese. Inspired by Huang Yu-ting’s discussion of the positionally of Taiwan literature in terms of archipelagos as well as Brian Bernards’ interrogation of the South Seas and the convergence of diasporic and native cultures in China and Southeast Asia, I aim to situate my examination of the media about Hong Kong Cantonese island singing traditions in the oceanic network of different regions in Asia, illuminating the intricate problem concerning who is the local/native/indigenous Cantonese in Hong Kong.