Selina Lai-Henderson on Mark Twain in China

Dr. Selina Lai-Henderson, Research Assistant Professor in the American Studies Programme, published Mark Twain in China with Stanford University Press in 2015.

Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835–1910) has had an intriguing relationship with China that is not as widely known as it should be. Although he never visited the country, he played a significant role in speaking for the Chinese people both at home and abroad. After his death, his Chinese adventures did not come to an end, for his body of works continued to travel through China in translation throughout the twentieth century. Were Twain alive today, he would be elated to know that he is widely studied and admired there, and that Adventures of Huckleberry Finn alone has gone through no less than ninety different Chinese translations, traversing China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Looking at Twain in various Chinese contexts—his response to events involving the American Chinese community and to the Chinese across the Pacific, his posthumous journey through translation, and China's reception of the author and his work, Mark Twain in China points to the repercussions of Twain in a global theater. It highlights the cultural specificity of concepts such as "race," "nation," and "empire," and helps us rethink their alternative legacies in countries with dramatically different racial and cultural dynamics from the United States.

Please click on the following link for more information on the publisher's page: http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=24051

K-Popular: Kim Su-yun and Korean Studies Programme

Hong Kong’s seemingly insatiable demand for all things Korean is having some positive knock-on effects for HKU’s Korean Studies programme. The classes are so popular that supply cannot keep up with demand.

In 2012 Dr Su Yun Kim arrived to head up the programme and expand its focus from just language to combined language and area studies. Demand was strong and rising so she got approval to double staff and student numbers, to six staff and about 600 students today. But that has still not been enough. Nearly one of every two course applicants is turned away. Further growth in both staff and student numbers is therefore planned.

“This boom in popularity is probably a combination of two things,” she said. “First, we offer the only Korean Studies programme in Hong Kong, which I was quite shocked to discover when I came here because of all the connections between Hong Kong and Korea. And second, the popularity of Korean culture has attracted more students.

“Students come into our classes thinking Korean pop music (K-pop) is cool, and they know all these little phrases from Korean dramas. What we’re doing in this programme is turning that interest around and saying, look at the Korean family dynamic. There may be some similarities with Hong Kong’s, but the gender issues are different. This leads to discussions about things like family relationships, the history of Korean patriarchy and Confucian tradition. We can still focus on K-pop – one student did a capstone research paper on it – but it has to be done from an academic perspective.”

A window and a mirror

Ms Chen Ting, a first-year Arts student, was one of those whose interest sprang from Korean pop music and television dramas. On arriving at HKU, she decided out of curiosity to take a course in Korean language. Now she wants to major in Korean Studies. “I want to study the history and culture and know more deeply about Korea. I have started to think of having a career related to Korea after I graduate,” she said.

For Ms Vivian Chui Wai-lam, also a first-year Arts student, Korean Studies was a major reason why she decided to study at HKU. Her interest began with K-pop six years ago and has led to a fascination with everything about the country. “This course is deepening our knowledge about Korean culture, society, history and customs and helping us to recognise the differences between Korean culture and our own,” she said.

This is one of the goals of the programme – to provide both a window into another world and a mirror to reflect on. Dr Kim experienced something similar herself when she studied French in her native Korea. That led her to become more interested in French literature and culture, and to discover to her surprise that France was an imperialist country – something that resonates in Korea given its occupation last century by Japan.

“Learning about a foreign country, whether it’s Korea or Japan or France, makes you think about your own society. It gives you a better understanding of who you are and where you’ve come from.

“This semester I have been focussing on social change and social movements. Student consciousness was very important in Korea in the 1970s and 1980s, and there are even elements of it there today. My Hong Kong students have responded to that – they went through the Umbrella Movement last year, so they have a better understanding of these things now.”

Research is a focus, too

Apart from teaching undergraduates, Dr Kim is also advancing knowledge about Korea through a research postgraduate programme and her own scholarly work. She recently was awarded a General Research Fund Early Career Scheme Award to look at romance and family themes in popular Korean fiction in the last century. This genre has been ignored by scholars because it is not ‘high fiction’, but it thrived during Korea’s colonisation when overtly political themes were taboo. Dr Kim wants to trace its influence on modern Korean film and drama.

She is also part of a project with Dr Lin Peiyin of the School of Chinese and co-authors in Japan and the United States to compare the film and literature of Taiwan and Korea. Both countries were colonised by the Japanese and later came under strong American influence. The project recently received funding from the Louis Cha Fund in the Faculty of Arts, and its goal echoes that of her Korean Studies programme: “We want to compare and see what is similar and what is different,” Dr Kim said.

See original article at: http://www4.hku.hk/pubunit/Bulletin/2015_May_Vol.16_No.2/teaching_learning/page2.html

Peter Cunich and Old Hong Kong

Peter Cunich’s latest book, Old Hong Kong, combines a stunning collection of photographic images of colonial Hong Kong from the FormAsia Collection with a descriptive text offering fresh insights into the early history of Hong Kong. Many of these images have never been published before, so they add significantly to our knowledge of Hong Kong’s built environment and social milieu from the 1860s to the early 1940s, but they also create numerous problems of identification and interpretation. 

Peter Cunich has been teaching history at the University of Hong Kong since 1993, but his first visit to the then British colony was during an airline stopover in 1986. Although his main field of research is late medieval and early modern English history, he has taken a keen interest in the history of Hong Kong and European missionary activity in China. He is currently Director of the HKU Centenary History Project, spending much of his spare time researching and writing the second volume of his definitive history of the University.

(Photo Source: FormAsia Books)

Information from "Old Hong Kong Book Talk" presented by HKU Libraries Book Talk Series: http://lib.hku.hk/newsblog/?p=462

Please click on the following link for publisher's page: http://www.formasiabooks.com/orderbooks/books/index.php?id=75

Lifting the Veil on China under Mao: Frank Dikötter and People's Trilogy

One of the University's most high-profile research outputs has come from Chair Professor of Humanities Frank Dikötter. The Dutch historian, who arrived as a Distinguished Visiting Professor in 2004, has spent more than a quarter of a century researching modern China and has published several critically acclaimed books on the subject. But it is his People's Trilogy, a series on the impact of communism on the country, that is changing the way historians look at 20th-century China.

With unrestricted access to little-used local, county and provincial archives, Dikötter made his mark with the first book of the trilogy, Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, documenting how at least 45 million people died in the largely man-made famine of 1958-62. It won Britain's most prestigious book award for non-fiction, the Samuel Johnson Prize, and was also a HKU Research Output Prize winner.

His second book in the trilogy, The Tragedy of Liberation, challenges the view that the birth of the People's Republic heralded a benign period after years of civil war with Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists and occupation by the Japanese. It details how Mao Zedong and the Communists consolidated their hold on power after the end of World War II to 1957 through a systematic wave of terror that included the confiscation of all property, the incitement of neighbours to kill each other and quotas for official executions, paving the way for the disastrous Great Leap Forward. Published in 2013, it has been well received all around the world, creating much anticipation for the final part of the trilogy on the horrors of Cultural Revolution.

(Text reproduced from Faculty of Arts 100: A Century in Words and Images.)

Please click on the following link to access the publisher's page:

Mao's Great Famine: http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/maos-great-famine-9780747595083/

The Tragedy of Liberation: http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/the-tragedy-of-liberation-9781620403471/

Wang Aihe and Painters' Secret Community during the Cultural Revolution

It's hard to imagine how doing a still-life painting of something as serene as a peach blossom in a vase can be called an act of counter-revolution, but that's the risk Dr Wang Aihe took every time she painted with her friends in the last years of the Mao Zedong era. Long before Wang joined the School of Chinese, she spent several years at the latter end of the Cultural Revolution as a member of an underground collective of young artists known as the Wuming (No Name) group in Beijing.

The group was formed spontaneously and comprised artists from different social classes, occupations and educational backgrounds. Their clandestine meetings were in direct contravention of the ban on free association and their individualistic work was a challenge to the orthodoxy of the day, which demanded that art represent and serve the state. Many of them sunned the social realist style prevalent at the time in favour of Western styles of painting.

They produced thousands of paintings but apart from a series of secretive exhibitions, little was known or recorded about the artists until 2010, when Wang put together a 13-volume publication and online database of their work. It also includes autobiographical essays by the artists on the historical and social contexts in which the paintings were produced. The 13 bilingual volumes help provide an important insight into the counter-culture of the day, and mark an important step in the research of modern Chinese art history.

(Text reproduced from Faculty of Arts 100: A Century in Words and Images.)

Please click on the following link to access the publisher's page: http://www.hkupress.org/Common/Reader/Products/ShowProduct.jsp?Pid=1&Version=0&Cid=16&Charset=iso-8859-1&page=-1&key=9789888028344

Adams Bodomo on Africans in China

As an African arriving in Hong Kong in 1997 to teach at the University, Dr Adams Bodomo had to get used to being stared at in the streets by people who were not accustomed to seeing a black face. Today, Africans in Hong Kong are still a relatively rare sight, but their numbers throughout the rest of China have grown into a migration phenomenon since the turn of the millennium. So much so that Bodomo, as Associate Professor of Linguistics and African Studies at the School of Humanities, devoted much of his time to researching the subject. In 2012 he published Africans in China: A Sociocultural Study and Its Implications on Africa-China Relations.

The pioneering book has become a must-read for the growing number of scholars in the field and made Bodomo the go-to consultant worldwide for discussions or analysis on Africans in China. There has long been an African presence in China, but it began to grow significantly in the late 1990s as China forged numerous connections with African countries to secure oil to fuel its booming economy. These connections encouraged the flow of African migrants to China, a trend that was increased by China's admission to the World Trade Organisation in 2001. The vast majority are in the country to buy goods and return home, but more and more are staying to set up business. One of the most evident examples of this is in Guangzhou, home to many of the factories that produce the kinds of goods in demand in the African market. There are so many black Africans living there today, writes Bodomo in the book, that part of the city has been nicknamed "Chocolate City".

(Text reproduced from Faculty of Arts 100: A Century in Words and Images.)

Please click on the following link to access the publisher's page: http://www.cambriapress.com/cambriapress.cfm?template=4&bid=487

Hong Kong History Made Accessible: John Carroll's Concise History of Hong Kong

With its heady mix of Eastern and Western influences, a colonial past and a new role as gateway to China, Hong Kong continues to fascinate and perplex observers. Professor John Carroll's intention, when he wrote A Concise History of Hong Kong (Rowman and Littlefield/HKUP 2007), was to provide undergraduates and general readers with a short, accessible overview that combined elements of political, social and cultural history. He also wanted to present this history, not solely from a British point of view as many other works have done, but from a more balanced perspective, as well as to look at the legacies - both good and bad - of colonial rule and the challenges and advantages of reintegration with China. Based on the work of other scholars and on Carroll's own research, the book is presented in a very readable way and explores Hong Kong's unique identity. The resulting work is an accessible and engrossing narrative that details the remarkable history of this fascinating place from the early 1800s through to 2005.

Over HKU's first century, other History professors have also devoted time to chronicling the past of this great city and its first university. They include George Endacott, who was responsible in 1946 for the post-war re-establishment of the History Department where he continued to teach for some 16 years, and who wrote the first comprehensive history of Hong Kong titled simply A History of Hong Kong, first published in 1958. Over the past 25 years, Dr Elizabeth Sinn has written important books on the Tung Wah Hospital, the Bank of East Asia and Chinese emigration to California. In 2012 Dr Peter Cunich published the first of a two-part history of HKU, A History of the University of Hong Kong, Volume 1, 1911-1945, to mark the University's centenary and he is currently completing Volume 2. Meanwhile, Dr. K.W. Fung in the School of Chinese is preparing a Chinese history of HKU, Virtues and Intellect in Unity: A Centennial History of the University of Hong Kong 1911-2011.

(Text reproduced from Faculty of Arts 100: A Century in Words and Images.)

Please click on the following link to access the publishers' page:

Rowman and Littlefield: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9780742534223/A-Concise-History-of-Hong-Kong

HKUP: http://www.hkupress.org/Common/Reader/Products/ShowProduct.jsp?Pid=1&Cid=16&key=9789622098787