Canto Cutie - Volume 2

the ongoing push and pull and si! and
flow of capital and human bodies, with
the non-sovereign city as their conduit.
To be a Hong Konger, then, to me
means to be an inhabitant of a dream
that others are dreaming. But there are
so many alternative Hong Kongs being
dreamt of from within the dream, too!
If Hong Kong is the presence of empire
and capitalism, what might Hong Kong
be in the absence of empire and
capitalism? If it could, what would
Hong Kong be a!er empire and
capitalism?
I am not a Hong Konger, but where
Hong Kongers are from, I am from, too
—and where Hong Kongers are going,
so may I. So, the answers to these
questions matter a lot to me. Together,
let’s dream ourselves to a Hong Kong
lucid.
—
“Dreaming Hong Kong” has to do with
nation-states, their borders and border
policies, and gestures towards the
necessary discourse of indigeneity,
place, and belonging for diasporic
people. The histories of empire and
capitalism in Asia by Asians and non-
Asians alike have made indigeneity not
even a question for many Sino people
to meaningfully contemplate as part of
our identities. I myself am denied twice
at the nation-state level—once by a
Chinese regime that sees me as a
homeland threat because of my
divergent and permissive stance on
Chinese heterogeneities, and again by
a US regime that sees me as a
homeland threat because of my alien,
and specifically Chinese, heritage. By
both empires, I am forbidden from
expressing Asian or Chinese identity
specifically in relationship to land, or
claiming place or belonging at all. My
impulse in this work, then, is to be
retroactively preemptive, using my
repetition at both ends of the piece that
I am not a Hong Konger as a double
negative that lets me tenuously claim
Hong Kong even as I technically deny it
to myself twice. Against the backdrop
of nation-states and the long arc of
history, this is my little ode to Hong
Kong and my small Cantonese history.
Ursula K. Le Guin has these words for
us: “We live in capitalism, its power
seems inescapable—but then, so did the
divine right of kings.” Right now, we
also live in nation-states, and their
power over people certainly feel
inescapable as well. But even though in
this long moment I am discouraged, I
know to work to cultivate strength and
find company with fellow people
whose nationalities are also diasporic.
By diasporic nationality, I mean that
although my technical nationality is a
US one, my place of belonging is
actually not any land, but is the
psychic space I work to nurture and
create together with other diasporic
people—in my case, Chinese,
Cantonese, and/or otherwise Sino
people. We are our own proof of worlds
where the nation-state is not primary
and does not reign supreme, and that a
world after empires can exist, because
we are attempting to dream it.