Intersections of Art: Hong Kong (?)
Reflections by Christy Tam, amateur writer and photo editor
I’m akin to a mole rat, I think. A mole rat who has bolted through a maze of shiny vents and poured herself into the professional’s room, before smashing into a peeling wheely chair. The humans hear my crash, and they know I am here, and they know I am powerful.
“What have you got for us this week, Christy?”, they sigh.
I grin. I reach into my sack. It is very dark and very deep so I have to dig around a bit, but I brush against it, and-
“Aha!”
Photos courtesy of Christy Tam
I slam my sacrifice to the glass table. It is an amateurishly edited film-noiresque photo of me, one tit out, holding a chopstick masked as a Holly Golightly cigarette holder. The background is a slightly fuzzy alteration of a 2017 portrait of Lana Del Rey by James Saccenti. Behind me, a hot white halo glowers, wrapping my beige-painted face and rosary in a sheen of pearly mucus.
“Art,” I huff.
“No,” they screech, and they howl, because I was born a girl in Hong Kong to a Vietnamese immigrant mother and a local Chinese father, so I was always caught between languages, and instead found comfort in the visual to express myself, “No!”
“Why not?” I shrink (I am still very young in this fantasy).
“You didn’t use any professional programs, did you? And you aren’t, say, studying art, are you? Focus on actual school. Besides, why would you be the subject of art? You are fat and unattractive.”
Photo courtesy of Christy Tam
Some of the humans chortle- not all of them, but enough to make me feel more mole rat than person by the second. It is very important to be good at school and to have professional prospects in Hong Kong. It is also very important to be pretty. There are medicines for mole rats to puke a few pounds and adverts for superstar tutors who would whip a mole rat into shape.
“What awful makeup,” one human says. It sounds suspiciously like a family member, “Too bold. You look too westernized.”
I do not say anything- family dictates all in Hong Kong. But the words hitch beneath my tongue, some mumble jumble of English curses and Cantonese slander. Never Chinese enough, the daughter of a black sheep in áo dài, this genetic foreignity my Vietnamese matriarch spread to me, fostered by my enrollment in an English-speaking school too. So this is how I grew: Mostly Chinese, but also, “Canadian-British-Australian-Western”, as my school teachers were. And then, Vietnamese, yet displaced from Vietnam, never having visited my mother’s hometown and so missing half my ancestral roots. In a turbulence of feeling rejected from cultures galore, came the adolescent want for identity. So strong was it that I searched for a space where I could scream this is me! me , me, me! -
Photo courtesy of Christy Tam
I found that space on the internet. Much unlike the torrential blend of internationality around me, cyberculture saw my weird self-portraits in gothic face paint, my poems lamenting the rumbling rage of suicidality, and my elaborate edits of spiders and spirals. It saw, and said “This is your space. You can draw as many shapes and colors on your face as you’d like. You can write about feeling rotten. You can make silly pictures of the macabre. All this, though the culture here would prefer you bareface and quiet on your much-taboo disorders. Also-do all this fat and happy. Pose in pictures with your breasts prominent, and reject the gawky bags of skirts the stores here sell to fat girls to hide their bodies. Just have fun!”
Photo courtesy of Christy Tam
The power available internet sharing gave me! It encouraged me to make a great many things rejectable by the standards I grew up with in Hong Kong. Death is a mum topic here, but I am fascinated with bones and decay, and so often feature them in my edits and writing. Amidst cultural insistence on female sexual purity, I found comfort in fetishwear, decorating fishnets with rhinestones and leaning towards black sweeps of eyeliner in mimicry of leatherwear. Where I had gaps in what and who I was in the most cultural sense, I bridged with creations that never found a space in any of the spheres of self I was stuffed into.
This is not to say that I have been provocative through my “art” for amusement’s sake, or that I dislike my own culture .I have never rejected my culture. The bits and pieces of the immediate world I had soaked up are splurged back into the things I make- amongst other things, Qipao, Tang dynasty poems, and Cantonese opera, those delicate arts of tradition, consistently find themselves sneaking themselves back into my box of inspirations, and regardless, I exist primarily as a (albeit western-vietnamese) Hong Konger. No, instead, it is just that my art has been affected by my immediate culture by existing as a shameful thing to the community I grew up with, and thus has become an increasingly online entity. Older generations may lament the creation of a web-self, claiming inauthenticity. Consider that the web-self is comparatively detached to the prerequisite of locality for acceptance, and thus, expands networks for sad girls with garish tastes and a jumble of tongues in their mouths who wanted to make violent, ugly things.
Of course, none of what I make is revolutionary, but all of it is Christy. Nowadays, that suits me just fine.
