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Yiu-Wai Chu, Hong Kong Pop Culture in the 1980s: A Decade of Splendour, Asian Visual Cultures series, Amsterdam University Press, 2023. 305 pgs.
While my previous two reviews on East Asian pop culture cover entries written by various academics, this exploration of Hong Kong pop culture in the 1980s is written by Professor Stephen Yiu-Wai Chu of the School of Chinese at the University of Hong Kong.
Chu follows Stuart Hallβs definition of pop culture as commercially produced, profit-driven mass entertainment. Generally, pop culture covers what you see and hear in the mall and your living room: blockbuster movies instead of arthouse films, pop music instead of classical, and primetime dramas instead of documentaries.
Chu adds three more categories: fashion, disco, and magazines. In the epilogue, instead of a conclusion, he puts in football, which is a part of life of Hong Kong, but unfortunately not glamorous or unisex enough to be included in the main discussion.
The book starts with the promise of Deng Xiaoping of a Hong Kong under China: horse racing and dancing as usual. The Peopleβs Republic itself had come a long way since the Cultural Revolution and dancing had become an acceptable activity in China by 1987. Deng, of course, was referring to the glitzy nightlife, the capitalist way of life that Hong Kong was famous of.
While dancing is universal, horse racing is a particularly British pastime and vehicle for gambling. By the 20th century, horse racing in Hong Kong was no longer about betting and fancy hats, but also charity. By the 1970s, horse races in Hong Kong transcended races and classes, united Europeans and Asians in betting and rooting for star jockeys and trainers, whether they were Chinese Hongkongers like Derek Tai-chi Cheng and Brian Ping-chee Kan or the Australians Gary and George Moore.
Eventually the Special Administrative Region nurtures horse racing to this day, even amid the early 2020s pandemic. Sha Tin Racecourse still holds a dozen world class Group One races annually, and the Hong Kong Jockey Club remains one of the largest charity donors worldwide.
While Chu focuses on discotheques, in the Prologue he discusses the Japanese-style Club Volvo (later renamed Club Bboss for the obvious reason), which was rumoured to be backed by China after the deputy director of Xinhua News Agency Li Chuwenβat the time the de facto representative of Beijing in Hong Kongβattended the opening night and the βred capitalistβ Huang Guangying repeated Dengβs message during the ribbon-cutting ceremony.
Those are the stories from the 30-page Prologue, which is then followed by an Introduction of the same length. Several protagonists appear across the book. You might recognise Chow Yun-fat on the cover, but making more frequent appearances throughout the book are the singers Anita Mui, Danny Chan, and Leslie Cheung.
As happened elsewhere, 20th century singers also got famous from their TV appearances. Television in Hong Kong is synonymous with TVB, especially in the Chinese-speaking world, but in the 1970s TVB had tough competition from CTV and RTV. After CTV closed down in 1978, RTV led the innovation of primetime dramas by moving from martial arts to modern romance and then the New Wave, which featured edgy themes like sadomasochism (I Accuse), malpractice (Coma), and genres such as the political thriller (Newark File).
Chan and Cheung won TVB and RTV music contests respectively before they got their first TV roles in the late 1970s, while Mui, who dropped out of middle school to sing on the streets, won TVBβs New Talent Singing Awards in 1982. TVB hired her to sing its theme songs, including dubbed Japanese dramas. Maggie Cheung, the face of other books reviewed here, signed a contract with TVB in 1984 after coming second in the Miss Hong Kong Pageant a year earlier.
The supremacy of TVB had been established by the mid-1980s and it aimed to rule the whole Pacific Ocean, helped by the new technologies of VCRs, satellite dishes, and intercontinental travel that led the Hong Kong diaspora to North America, Australia, Europe, and Southeast Asia.
TVB International was established in 1982 and a third of TVB content was exported. TVB programmes were the primary Chinese television shows for Chinese communities worldwide, to the point that Hong Kong Cantonese became the cool language to learn for Malaysian Chinese.
While TVB tapes were sought-after in Singapore and San Francisco, Hong Kong youth left their couches to seek new electronic entertainments in the shape of karaoke, arcade games, and movie rentals. After all, an export-oriented TVB created predictable sequels and formulae designed for international viewers looking for their ideal Hong Kong.
Another arching theme of the book is how anxious Hongkongers were about their future in the 1980s (fears which have now proven to be right). The United Kingdom might have held onto the Falkland Islands, but it was not in the position to keep Hong Kong, as symbolised by Margaret Thatcher slipping on the steps of the Great Hall of the People in Beijing in 1982.
A taxi strike turned into a riot in Mong Kok in January 1984, and Hongkongers bitterly joked that they would become boat people to North America just like the Vietnamese asylum seekers who were attempting to get into Hong Kong at that time. Filmmaker Tsui Hark, who was born in Saigon, addressed this anxiety with his and John Wooβs A Better Tomorrow trilogy βABT3, which he directed, is subtitled Love and Death in Saigon, while Chow Yun-fat plays a Hong Kong migrant in New York City in ABT2.
On the other hand, the Pacific was experiencing an economic boom and political optimism in the 1980s, and Hong Kong became the foremost Asian city, more accessible and more cosmopolitan than Tokyo. More than TVB videos, Hong Kong action movies flew across the ocean and Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung, Michelle Yeoh, and Sam Hui became international icons of Hong Kong. Aces Go Places indeed.
In line with the subtitle of this book, Hong Kong in the 1980s was a place of splendour. Atlantic fashion editors might not be interested in Jackie Chan and Anita Mui, but they were interested in Nylonkong. Even to this day, Singapore, which has replaced Hong Kong as the Asian centre of trade and events, is still not associated with fashion and style.
Chu credited two names that turned Hong Kong from a garment producer into the Milan of the East: Joyce Ma and Michael Ying. Ma started her Joyce Boutique from her familyβs Wing On department store, before moving to the Mandarin Hotel and opening her flagship store at New World Tower in 1979. She imported European and Japanese designer labels; these labels put Hong Kong as their business centre in Asia, and Ma received cultural honours from Italy and France in return. By 2010, Joyce Boutique knew that the way to survive the 21st century was to do business with China.
While Joyce catered to the rich, Esprit was the label for the youth. Michael Ying founded the Esprit Far East Group with Susie and Doug Tompkins and bought the Tompkinsβ shares after they divorced. Espritβs Hing Fat Street store in Causeway Bay became a pilgrimage for local youth in the 1980s, who took the storeβs free shuttle buses between Central, Admiralty, Causeway Bay and the store.
Chu sees the store as the synthesis of cool Hong Kong: Espritβs creative director was Tina Liu, a former actress who edited City Magazine. The music director was Andrew Bull, Hong Kongβs trendiest DJ. Being an Esprit sales assistant was the dream job of a Hong Kong student.
The bubble peaked in the mid-1990s, when Esprit was listed at the Stock Exchange and Ying married the Taiwanese actress Brigitte Lin. It survived the handover and the Asian Financial Crisis, but not the Great Recession and the coming of fast fashion in the early 2010s, and certainly not the COVID-19 pandemic. Joyce Boutique Holdings was also delisted from the HKSE in April 2020.
Our heroes, Chan and Cheung, both wore Esprit sweatshirts in their films as well as Joyceβs armoury of Armani and Kenzo. Mui, meanwhile, collaborated with local designer Eddie Lau, who shaped her image as the Madonna of the East. She was also a muse of John Galliano, the creative director of Dior in the 1990s, and wore Gallianoβs wedding dresses for her final concerts in 2003.
Nobody is sure if Deng Xiaoping thought about the older ballroom dancing when he promised that dancing would remain in Chinaβs Hong Kong, or if he was thinking of disco. Like elsewhere, disco fever hit Hong Kong after Saturday Night Fever, and all the five-star hotels offered their own venues to become the rendezvous point for the rich and famous, from Eddie Lau to Imelda Marcos and Sir Run Run Shaw, and TVB made Disco Fever starring Alan Tam and Chow Yun-fat.
Gordon Huthart, on the other hand, was looking for a Studio 54-style disco that welcomed gay people like him, so he opened Disco Disco in Lan Kwai Fong, a secluded part of Central. Its reputation made βdisco discoβ slang to describe gay people, but unlike the hotel discos (which didnβt make it into the 1980s), Disco Disco was a place that not only brought together people of different sexual orientations but also those of different races. It was a place where Asians and Westerners could mingle. Its only condition of entry was to be stylish. Its success convinced Western investors like Christian Rhomberg and Allan Zeman to turn Lan Kwai Fong into a new nightlife quarter, rivalling Kowloonβs Tsim Sha Tsui.
Both venues were viable for the stars, and instead of Club Volvo/Bboss, Andrew Bullβs Canton Disco emerged as Disco Discoβs strongest rival. A favourite of Hollywood stars, it was where Kylie Minogue honed her transformation from soap opera star to stage diva, and British pop bands like Swing Out Sister and Bananarama performed there. And, fulfilling Dengβs promise, Jackie Chan even brought Chinese Olympians Li Ning and Lou Yun into the club. Bull moved with the times, closed his disco and moved into concert promotion in the 1990s; even so, the Canton Disco Facebook Group still has almost 3000 members.
Tragically, the protagonists of this book are no longer with us. Danny Chan was found unconscious on 18 May 1992 and was in a coma for 17 months before died at the age of 35 on 25 October 1993; 2003 was a horrible year for Hong Kong, not only because of SARS but also due to the loss of Leslie Chung on 1 April and Anita Mui on 30 December.
Their decade of splendour was also Hong Kongβs decade of splendour when anxiety was drowned by excesses and pride. The journeys of our stars, full of grit and glory, personify the journey of the city itself. Professor Chu refuses to end with a conclusion, and instead uses the rise and fall of his favourite football club Seiko SA as the epilogue. Sponsored by Stelux Holdings, which imported Seiko watches to Thailand and Hong Kong, Seiko dominated Hong Kong football in the early 1980s with a mixture of hometown heroes and memorable foreigners with their own Cantonese nicknames. In short, it was a time when Hong Kong was very comfortable with its cosmopolitan, if not colonial nature, and ironically the Hong KOng Football Associationβs attempt to localise the leagueβinstead of relying on foreign players and coachesβended the clubβs history.
To this day, Gen X and early Millennials often debate which decade is better, the 1980s or the 1990s. Professor Chu repeats several times in the book that the 1990s were βthe best of times, the worst of timesβ. He argues that, besides the handover and the financial crisis, the Four Heavenly Kings, for example, had their songs and movies standardised, setting the decline of Cantopop and Hong Kong films compared to the now dominant Mandopop and Chinese films. After all, China has mixed communist governance with capitalism, making the dichotomy of βMaoist Beijingβ and βCapitalist Hong Kongβ irrelevant in the 21st century.
This is a demanding academic book. Despite its neat categories, Professor Chu understandably cannot resist telling the stories with all the names while also discussing the whole theories. The pictures, on the other hand, come slowly then rapidly as the book progresses, from the fashion stores to the covers of City Magazine over the years. Whether youβre a Hongkonger or not, this is an emotional walk down memory lane, through the mythical decade some can only imagine, or grasp from old photos and memorabilia, and which others have experienced like it was yesterday.
How to cite: Rustan, Mario. βEsprit of the City: Yiu-Wai Chuβs Hong Kong Pop Culture in the 1980s.β Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 24 Apr. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/04/24/pop-culture.
Mario Rustan is a writer and reviewer living in Bandung, Indonesia. [All contributions by Mario Rustan.]
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