A Note to U-beater

In respect to your question: "culture, high or low, elite or mass?" I answer: I mentioned Tian Kong Xiao Shuo, as well as the meticulousness of the newsreporter; whether these bits of culture be "high or low," "elite or mass," I believe you can fairly decide. Can't you?

But I should also like to remind you of the renewed invitation. If you cannot find those answers to the Difficulties and Contradiction, let readers know, so that I need not offer a third invitation. Thank you.

"culture"

culture, high or low, elite or mass?

Some Preliminary Reflections

The author of this article offered some very good reflections and suggestions, on a subject, which has drawn almost all the attention on this Forum of late. The subject is of particular interest to this place; and eager souls, or activists, have offered no less readily their version of things to the reader. I said their version, because we do not hear, for instance, how those policemen involved in the clearing of the protest viewed the incident, even though their voices, being not reported on the major newspapers either, should no less be deemed rarely heard of.

A number of propositions recur in most of the comments, propositions which many commentators would readily take for given; I mean: that HK people want a sense of history; that the preservation of cultural artifacts is the hallmark of a modern metropolitan; that the want of historical sense is a product of colonial rule and education; that the recent Star Ferry Incident reveals perfectly the want of de-colonialization in this place; etc.

Such recounting of the incident, as well here as in the major essays on the Mingpao Forum Page, fits it readily into a colonial/post-colonial discourse. But how much such a discourse helps illuminate the incident, except that it might echo readily the sort of language which many readers here are used to speaking, I cannot quite tell. Let me start my reflections with a few questions.

HK, this little city, had experienced no less upheaval in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, than any other part of the world, with people coming and going, settling and enterprising, making revolutions and making money, broadcasting traditional Chinese tales and importing Beatles and suchlike; they who had suffered so much in the wars of 1937-1945, or the political movements and purges early under the People's Republic, had come to HK with a sense of history, I dare say, no less strong, if not indeed stronger, than most of them involved in the Star Ferry incident of late; and they who had grown up in this little city, who had, from their childhood forth, listened to Tian Kong Xiao Shuo and watched the various kinds of TV programs, much reflective of local life and culture (but connected in most cases with the historical experience of the Southern China cultural sphere), had likewise a strong sense of history, a sense which did not express itself on textbooks, but in the way these souls related their experience to the past, to little things in the collective memory.

When I look back to the 30s, or 40s, or 50s and 60s, I do not find a widespread want of historical sense; but, quite the contrary, a strong sense of continuity, both spatial (connected with the Mainland) and temporal (connected with events in the past). Tradition was alive and well; artistic creation flourishing; and cultural evolution not viewed as antagonistic to social development, even if that development entailed demolitions. People were deeply historical; but their sense of history was not concentrated on one or two artifacts; nor did they protest so much against the demolition of this or that (partly, you might say, because they were under colonial rule; but more significantly they, finding their tradition alive and well, were not afraid to see one old building replaced by a new one, continuity being not thereby destroyed). When a tradition is living, demolition and innovation are rarely deemed a threat to it.

If what I pointed to is partly right, then, reader, I would you reflect, whether a strong sense of history must needs lead to a strong urge to preserve tangible things. If what is to be preserved, respected, or even revived, is a set of memories accompanying a way of living, a set of images and values, allusions and judgments, the sustaining of which being at the heart of any talk of cultural continuity; if this be so, then why, I would wonder, are we today no less ready to mark this or that old-fashioned, trying to distance ourselves therefrom, if not even to ridicule it tacitly, while, in another place, finding ourselves so enthusiastically embracing an old (indeed, one might say, old-fashioned) artifact?

Words fail to express my deep nostalgia for an era, when even a newsreporter for sports news (he having recently published a book entitled "The Ball is Round") would endeavor to pronounce every word as correctly as he could, imposing on himself a standard, which today not very many students would. I have mentioned Tian Kong Xiao Shuo; who today would look back to that wonderful achievement, to that wonderful era of cultural prosperity, with the express aim of emulating it? If culture it is, that we want to preserve, then culture, we should say, is not just touristically a collection of artifacts, to be kept, catalogued, and made an object of study. One can preserve all the artifacts, while, knowingly or not, killing the very soul of a culture; and the soul is always the most intangible (and fragile) part.

Many commentators have an inexplicable desire to take colonial rule as the root cause of all evils observable today, including, as their prime example, the want of a sense of history in this little city. Yet, if they permit the phrase "sense of history" to cover more than the sheer desire to preserve artifacts, these commentators, I am quite sure, would easily detect what they said wanting in the many generations who had dwelled here, up until, perhaps, the 80s.

On the whole, I gather that users of the phrase "sense of history" have looked too particularly at one quarter of life, at one set of things, and, so looking, appealed too quickly to a well-developed discourse (colonial/post-colonial), which happens to be a very fashionable set of labels today among cultural studies people. If we may confidently say, that there must be such British civil servants, as would give not a single thought to preserving cultural artifacts, we probably should be somewhat more meticulous, before saying straightway, that the seeming unwillingness of HK AOs to do the same must be the fruit of colonial indoctrination.

These are preliminary reflections, unworthy yet of an independent essay; though, still, I should like to register them here, perhaps trying them out on a few interested souls.

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A Note to U-beater

"culture"

Some Preliminary Reflections

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