GEND2008 Week 12: Theory & practice in/beyond Hong Kong and “Asia”

This is a lecture written for the final meeting of my queer theory class at HKU to go along with my article “Grief, Translation, and the ‘Asian American Woman’ in Hong Kong” (2022) and the description of a new project to bring my queer feminist classroom from Hong Kong to those in the U.S., Japan, and elsewhere. Many students were unable to make it to class due to illness and other reasons, so it is uploaded here. It might be something for other students of mine to read but isn’t particularly written for anyone else besides them and myself.

Introduction

What are ways for us to envision care? How do we do so through this week’s theme, titled “Theory and practice in/beyond Hong Kong and ‘Asia?’”

“What does it mean to shift our ideas of access and care (whether it’s disability, childcare, economic access, or many more) from an individual chore, an unfortunate cost of having an unfortunate body, to a collective responsibility that’s maybe even more deeply joyful?

“What does it mean for our movements? Our communities/fam? Ourselves and our lived experience of disability and chronic illness?

“What does it mean to wrestle with these ideas of softness and strength, vulnerability, pride, asking for help, and not — all of which are so deeply raced and classed and gendered?

“If collective access is revolutionary love without charity, how do we learn to love each other? How do we learn to do this love work of collective care that lifts us instead of abandons us, that grapples with all the deep ways in which care is complicated?” (33)

First, I would like to make clear what this lecture is not about. We could discuss care from the perspective of crip theory, which combines queer theory and disability studies. Crip theory calls for us to reimagine the terms of queer thought; building on the concept of compulsory heterosexuality, we can consider compulsory able-bodiedness. Queer and feminist disability justice might not center at all on academia and research. Poet Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s book Care Work is about her experiences of trying to put care into practice along with others who are sick or disabled, queer and trans racial minorities in the United States.

Up until now, I have done queer feminist work that has not centered around a framework of “care.” And so what I want to share with you today is about my work that is not, but also really is, about care. Queer theory, in many ways, is about identity and intimacy; my two pieces of writing that you read for today are my queer theory in the making. How do I theorize — in concrete terms related to Hong Kong and our lives here, your time spent in my classroom — what it means to encounter and possibly try to be there for one another?

To make this a discussion about care, coming from an honest place, I had to consider how to prepare in a way that would be meaningful but also relatively gentle on me as well. So, I looked at the word count but did not time my lecture while doing a run-through, because it is physically tiring. My explanation of the readings is not comprehensive either.

Also, today’s lecture is very much about me. But I want to make clear: This is an invitation to you. By talking about my positionality, by sharing about my experience in Hong Kong, how I care about teaching, how my care is connected those of you here but also many others not here: I am talking about us. My story is really about us. And I am opening myself up to you to try to create a space where you can open yourself up as well — if not today in this classroom, in writing later to me, or perhaps to someone, somewhere, in some other way.

My lecture today is about ideas central to this class: You can use it to better understand Butler’s work, intersectionality and positionality, the politics of language, problems of solidarity and coalition-building, what the “local” is about, and so on. But my way of caring for myself was to write it in a way that felt deeply meaningful for myself on a personal level, too. I hope that you, too, will find this lecture one that works well to conclude our queer theory class this semester.

“Grief, Translation, and the ‘Asian American Woman’ in Hong Kong” (2022)

To some extent, every class I teach is about translation, the transnational, and crossing borders and boundaries. That year, my first year teaching at HKU, was difficult and heart-wrenching. Under such circumstances, how can one talk about transnational solidarity? Why should one care about individuals or groups distant from Hong Kong? Perhaps for many students: When one is full of pain from what is happening in one’s own home, there is nothing convincing about abstract calls for empathy and solidarity.

And so, how does one translate writing by “women of color” in the U.S. such as Anzaldúa and Lorde to have it tell us something about our experiences in Hong Kong? Here, where the majority is Han Chinese and East Asians have clear racial privilege, how do we understand the fear of women in the U.S. targeted for physical violence when marked as “Asian?” A “woman of color” in the U.S. — sexualized, infantilized, and treated as intellectually inferior — might be part of the ethnic/racial majority in Hong Kong, where she could live a life never considering her privilege.

The racial hierarchy in Hong Kong involves white supremacy and the elevation of English through the legacy of colonialism, such that the Cantonese-speaking, ethnically Chinese majority might experience unspoken resentment. It involves blatant discrimination against Southeast and South Asians, and xenophobia against mainland Chinese, as the mainland increasingly exerts its force over Hong Kong. After arriving in 2020, I slowly began to piece together the dynamics of race, colonialism, and authoritarianism.

From the start, I came to Hong Kong intending to do whatever I could for my students as a queer and feminist teacher. But how did I find myself transformed? What does it mean for identities to come into being? As we know, identities are often imposed upon us by structural forces beyond our control; for example, gender is produced through the repetition of norms in a regulatory regime. However, if identity is not simply a given, we know that the possibility of transformation also exists, possibly in ways that are life-giving for us and even for others.

If we take my story as an example, my “new” identities created through my encounter with Hong Kong, with my students here, might be described in this way — race: my new status as ethnic “majority” coupled with my racial trauma as Asian American; gender and sexuality: my decision to be vocal as a queer woman; and politics: my grappling with “Chinese” identity, my Taiwanese identity, and my tentative identity as a Hongkonger.

To some extent, identity is not a matter of agency; often, for better or worse, you might not feel that you have a choice, and you might be angry if someone suggests that you do. But it is an important cliché to say “the personal is political.” An identity can be something that you can choose not to acknowledge, that can barely exist for you, or that is taken or stolen from you. But also, sometimes you have the agency to identify in specific ways, to bring an identity to the surface, to let it come forth, for yourself or for others. In my case, these identities are important for the following reasons:

• I choose to recognize my place as part of the ethnically Chinese majority in Hong Kong out of solidarity with ethnic minorities here. I have lived in different parts of the U.S., Japan, and the Netherlands. In Hong Kong, it is my ethical responsibility to strategically utilize my privilege. How can I teach on racism to ethnically Chinese Hong Kong and mainland students? How can I directly voice my criticism?
• I choose to be Asian American to better understand and act in solidarity with other women under this umbrella identity, and to acknowledge my own trauma from being female and Asian in white-, male-dominated settings. I recognize this because sometimes I have thought that I am crazy, but the accumulation of “small” experiences of sexism, racism, and internalized misogyny among other women — emotional abuse and power harassment — is enough to drive someone crazy.
• I choose to be openly queer in front of my students in Hong Kong, because none of you take it for granted. At small, prestigious colleges in the US, upper-class white students often expect professors — especially those who are female — to give; institutions pressure professors to treat students as “customers” demanding emotional labor. Even queer students I met were sometimes racist and sexist. In Hong Kong, students do not demand my emotional labor; the university does not care at all. Many of you come into my classes looking for a safe space to be queer and feminist and to learn about yourselves. And so it is my pleasure to make that space for you, and to be one of the few openly queer female professors you will meet in Hong Kong.
• I choose to be “Chinese” because I have never been able to escape this identity, but I recognize how I can be connected to others through Chinese languages and experiences of collective trauma. For me, “Chinese” means to learn how to read and perhaps even write Chinese more fluently; it also means learning enough Cantonese to listen to the voices of more Hongkongers.
• I am Taiwanese, despite having a waishengren 外省人 background, because I condemn the violence of White Terror in Taiwan and believe in the unique potential of Taiwan as a space. I love the everyday spaces of Taiwan, the freedom with which Chinese is used there, and the queer and feminist politics that thrive there.
• Tentatively, I am a “Hongkonger,” or I would say, I am a part of Hong Kong: I cannot claim years of experience living here, nor am I a Hong Kong studies scholar. But if you read my writing, you should know how I care about Hong Kong.

I have talked about identities here that are not specifically “queer.” But you can consider the politics of identifying as transgender, non-binary, gay, lesbian, asexual, a straight queer, or — simply — queer. How do these identities or positionalities shape how you exist alongside others, including in solidarity? And how do other identities — as Asian American or Canadian, Hongkonger, Chinese, queer or not, racial/ethnic minority or not, everything else — mean something when we are talking about queer and feminist solidarity and struggle?

“Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something.”

“To grieve, and to make grief itself into a resource for politics, is not to be resigned to inaction, but it may be understood as the slow process by which we develop a point of identification with suffering itself.”

“I cannot muster the ‘we’ except by finding the way in which I am tied to ‘you,’ by trying to translate but finding that my own language must break up and yield if I am to know you. You are what I gain through this disorientation and loss.”

The most difficult parts of my essay involve my citations of Butler, but as students of my queer theory class, you are already partway there. From reading Butler on performativity, you know that identity is not stable or fixed. In Precarious Life, Butler writes about what happens when we experience grief or loss. If you remember the worst moments of your life, you might recall how you could not control your overwhelming pain. You could not keep it together enough to go through life as normal; things that you usually did without thinking suddenly felt impossible. Maybe you felt disoriented, struggling to focus on what was happening in front/around you. You feel such pain that your very sense of who you are — why you are there, what you are doing, where you are headed in the future — might fall apart. Nothing feels certain anymore.

Terrible kinds of grief happen for many reasons: Some of them seem to come out of nowhere, while others are clearly an accumulation of small injuries that slowly build up in everyday life. Maybe you experienced hurt that you always pushed to the back of your mind, before it suddenly resurfaced violently. Grief and injury might involve the loss of an individual person; the trauma of having one’s gender identity denied; sexual violence; racism that you experience day after day but that no one around you admits is real; other silences imposed by different institutions and by the general indifference of people around you; the lifelong agony of having one’s home threatened and/or slowly torn apart by greater forces. If I did not mention the form of grief or hurt that you have experienced, please understand that it is not because I am denying it. There are just too many kinds to list.

But I cited Butler to say that grief and loss can also bring us together in unexpectedly powerful ways: moments that might be fleeting and feel very small but that we somehow keep with us long into the future. If we have fallen apart, left vulnerable in our pain, unable to operate with usual forms of common sense — this might also do away with our common sense about the people with whom we can share our grief, those who deserve our empathy and kindness, who might be able to offer us something in return.

Queer theory, in many ways, is about doing away with common sense about how we relate to one another. We do not need to experience the “same” pain; sometimes pain resonates in ways that can help us heal together. Sometimes we need each other — on different sides of various injuries — in order to heal.

Some of what didn’t make it to the article is this: That semester, I owed a debt to the ethnic minority students in the class, who often made me feel less alone as an Asian American struggling to teach about racism and xenophobia. During the class that day on Zoom, after I gave my lecture on the Atlanta shootings, a South Asian student — who usually had her camera off — turned it on to speak. She told me that what I had done was incredible; I had made it okay for everyone in the class to be vulnerable. After class, several other South Asian ethnic minority students wrote to me to say thank you.

It was true; after that class, something was visibly different in the air. Something had softened. I trusted my students, and some of them must have trusted me. One student told me later that this class saved her by pulling her out of her depression; another student said that it helped heal her personal trauma. Several ethnic minority and mainland students wrote to say that they were no longer as angry at Hong Kong. After learning about dynamics of race, colonialism, and language in Hong Kong, they could better understand the pain of Cantonese-speaking Hongkongers, despite their experiences of racism and xenophobia.

I was only a Taiwanese American who had just arrived in Hong Kong, and all of these students had lived here for longer than I had. But somehow I was the one to help show them the painful, complicated ways in which different forms of structural injustice teach people in Hong Kong to be unkind. In many ways throughout the semester, I did this by sharing grief with them: my “own” grief that one time, but often my different kind of grief, over what I felt seeing (or sensing) their experiences and what was happening to Hong Kong.

Since that class, I have thought about what made it work. I might always remember this class, and I think some of these students will, too.

Part of what I learned might be described in the following way: Much of this does not seem to be about anything “queer” or “feminist.” But too often, in gender studies classes here, students end up pretending that these other identities do not matter. We talk about intersectionality but without talking about the kinds of intersectionality that mean the most, that hurt us most deeply and lead to walls between us and others. And because we do not talk about what is most difficult, we also do not talk about how love and care can cross these boundaries. If we begin to care for our wounds, we can also make room to care for those of others; we can know better how to do so because we know what it means to hurt.

As a teacher, how can I open spaces up to these conversations in ways that are gentle and warm for students, despite how they require courage?

Let us acknowledge that healing and solidarity often do not happen. It takes courage, time, energy, patience, and constant learning; kindness is also something that one needs to practice in order to do better. We might say, why does it matter when most people around us will never give a f*ck? Many mainland Chinese feminists have no sense of solidarity with Hongkongers or Taiwanese. Some Hongkongers will always despise mainland Chinese; they will continue to treat South and Southeast Asians as inferior and lower-class. Many Asian American women have no interest in what is happening with women in Asia in places such as Hong Kong or mainland China.

José: “Practicing educated hope, participating in a mode of revolutionary consciousness, is not simply conforming to one group’s doxa at the expense of another’s. Practicing educated hope is the enactment of a critique function. It is not about announcing the way things ought to be, but, instead, imagining what things could be.”

— from Lisa Duggan and José Esteban Muñoz, “Hope and hopelessness: a dialogue”

However, this queer theory class is not about practical solutions. It is about imagining what we might assume is impossible. It is precisely about what José Esteban Muñoz and Lisa Duggan discuss as “educated hope” — how we might dare to risk hope.

Maybe some students are simply leading happy lives (in this case, please excuse this entire lecture). But for the rest of you, as I wrote in my article, “If a life without grief was never possible anyway, then I will grieve together with those in/of Hong Kong” — all the students who happen to make it into my classroom each semester. This is one way of interpreting Sara Ahmed’s take on unhappiness: If we are going to be unhappy anyhow, I would rather be unhappy together with you. Let us learn about each other’s unhappiness in order to create something else together.

Queer feminist care in my classrooms & my project

In my teaching, there also exists kindness, healing, generosity, and even love. Queer theory, or queer studies, can be about a lot of things. But the version that I most often teach you is about love and care in a political sense, tied to queer and feminist practices of critique, imagination, and learning. In this context, theory and critique matter because they lead to better ways, more ways, to imagine love, or intimacies. By practice, I mean seeing theory as connected to the everyday and how we live out in the world.

As a literary and cultural studies scholar, especially trained in Japanese studies, there are all sorts of ways that I can talk to you about queer intimacies. Partly for that reason, I brought these books here today {gestures towards stacks of books in the corner of classroom}: BL and yuri 百合 manga, depicting same-sex romantic and sexual attraction; fiction centering queer women by Taiwanese author Li Kotomi 李琴峰; poetry by queer poets; zines on queer topics; and more, in Japanese, English, and Chinese.

I brought these plushes with me, too {picks up Sumikko Gurashi cat plush from next to Rilakkuma plush phone stand}, because I was thinking about softness as a kind of queer feeling, sensation, and intimacy. There is nothing inherently queer about Sumikko Gurashi or other Sanrio/San-X characters; they often do little to challenge gender, sexual, or other norms. But they can go along with certain queer feminist practices of care and kindness. Sumikko Gurashi — a penguin (maybe), a polar bear, a weed, a tonkatsu crumb, this cat here, and others — are defined by shyness and a lack of self-confidence. They are tiny, small, and imaginatively created. They go against capitalist productivity (recall Audre Lorde on the “erotic”), i.e. I assume that most people are not that successful in life while hiding in a corner.

Of course, a Sumikko Gurashi plush is meant to be touched and held. By itself, it is simply an object. This week, several groups of students have already stopped by my office and dealt with the plushes and animal cushions on my couch. All of these are meant to offer comfort and visual pleasure; at the same time, they are definitely kind of in the way. Some students ignore the plushes; a few will politely, carefully place them safely to the side. This week, one former student — without asking — naturally picked one up and began to stroke it while listening to me talk. Another one happily picked one up; I moved the rest out of the way; he asked for them back.

I have another story about students and Sanrio characters: Cinnamoroll is a white puppy who was born above the clouds high up in the sky. Cinnamoroll, apparently, is gendered male despite not exhibiting visible signs of normative masculinity. His favorite pastime is napping, and his favorite food is cinnamon rolls. As a queer studies scholar, I would agree that Cinnamoroll lends himself to a reading as genderqueer. We can accept the official narrative that Cinnamoroll is gendered male while imagining that Cinnamoroll has a much more complex sense of self not shared with the general public; this is the power of a queer reading.

But I became a fan of Cinnamoroll through my former student’s love for this character, after I stopped “officially” being her teacher. I learned that she liked Cinnamoroll and sent her images that I happened to see of adorable Cinnamoroll cookies or cakes. We chatted on WhatsApp using Cinnamoroll stickers, too. At the time, I was often ill but avoided mentioning anything for a long time, before I finally did.

We think about teachers (ideally) being the ones to care for students. It is not easy for someone young to see that someone older — who has shaped their worldview, possibly even given them hope and conviction to face the world — is suffering. I am still learning what it means that I might stop being someone’s teacher “officially” but always somehow keep on being their teacher anyway, even though I am just a person. It is painful for me to hurt a friend by making them worry, but it feels devastating and unforgivable to hurt a student with whom I am close — in any way at all.

Sometimes I try to think through these issues in a semi-public way, and recently I wrote: “I don’t think it is mutually exclusive to be a queer feminist killjoy who hates authoritarianism, misogyny, transphobia, homophobia, colonialism, imperialism, white liberal bullshit, racism, xenophobia, ableism, capitalism, and all other forms of discrimination & oppression as I have tried to understand them better each day — and who wants to love unconditionally.”

Actually, I do not believe a good model of queer and feminist care is based on unconditional love, even as I constantly experience guilt and worry over how I am unable to achieve such a goal. It is simpler but not good for me if I put everything on myself in terms of how care and love — as well as hurt — unfold between two people.

In its better and more refined form, with a kind of reparative reading, this sentiment of unconditional love might be one in which we are curious, generous, and meticulous about our gratitude for what others have to offer us. Sometimes others want to offer us something but can’t; sometimes we ask for something that others cannot give. There are many in-between situations as well. But I want to say to this former student: Thank you for Cinnamoroll, for all the moments that I was simply comforted because of Cinnamoroll stickers, cat pictures, and everything else — small yet warm and sustaining — that you shared with me. Your love was expressed in many ways that mattered.

Queer theory can be something as simple as recognizing what we are given in life that saves us in small ways, despite how most of the world does not truly acknowledge these connections. People talk about teacher-student relationships in terms of stereotypical notions of teaching and mentorship, or problems of power relations; more queer work needs to be done on the nuances of intimacies and feelings that circulate around teaching and are not bad.

Thank you to students in this class for the many moments when you comforted me, perhaps without thinking. I am probably missing things, but for example:

• the several “likes” on my YouTube lecture recordings;
• how a few of you make eye contact when I give lectures;
• the way a cluster of you often laugh when I say something kind of funny;
• how you write long, thoughtful reflections on your worksheet even though you know you don’t have to;
• how you say thank you and ask me how I’m doing when I ask you;
• how you write politely to explain why you’ll be late or can’t attend class, even if a single week’s attendance is just a small thing;
• the way you chat before running out of the classroom;
• how I problematized what you said, i.e. “criticized” you, but you reflected seriously;
• how you hugged my plushes during our meeting.

This semester, I was worried that I was doing a disservice to my students. Perhaps someone else should have taught this queer theory class from the start, someone who would not have missed so many classes due to illness and could get your paper grades back to you sooner. We already had fewer meetings compared to the class from last year; our time together was cut even shorter because I couldn’t make it into the classroom. I feel that I am only starting to get to know you.

But thank you for helping me feel — despite all of this — that you are maybe glad to be in this class, somehow conveying this even when you are sleep-deprived and exhausted. Maybe I will continue to know some of you after this class, too. Thank you for being warm in small ways that made it easier for me to get through the semester. Especially since moving to Hong Kong, I have experienced how teaching brings warmth and sometimes love to my life.

For today’s class, I shared with you my project tentatively titled “Openings: our queer feminist Hong Kong — A border-crossing practice of teaching, healing, & solidarity 一個教學，療癒，連帶性的跨國實踐.”

To clarify: This project does go along with a new book project, but in and of itself, it does not count for anything in the university. I can do it and still fail to get promotion and remain at HKU; it does not “count” for my CV, and I will get paid very little if anything.

If you read carefully, you can see how daunting this project might be. Each time, I will share about my experiences teaching in Hong Kong but will continually revise my lecture and workshop plan based on the audience, the host, and the space. It will differ according to city and between countries; I will play around with how to use English, Mandarin, Japanese, and (hopefully) someday Cantonese in my lecture and how we run the event.

Most colleagues are likely silently confused by why I am doing such a time-consuming endeavor; they possibly find it ridiculous and crazy. I thought up this project around December last year; you can think about the timing. As I wrote in my message to students, I have rarely felt that I belong to a community — I am often on the periphery. But this project is part of my experiment wanting to risk hope that being a bridge or translator is not just tiring but maybe also full of “good surprises”, too, in Sedgwick’s words.

What has made me stronger over time has been the fact that, the more that I care for others — as a queer feminist, as a teacher — the easier it is for me to stay grounded in the everyday, the easier it is for me to be okay. I know that my care for students is not unconditional, per se, because I trust that I will receive something back. I know that nothing will be perfect, but something beautiful will always happen anyway.

My trust — my theory and practice of queer feminisms through pedagogy — comes from both in and beyond Hong Kong: I trust students in this class because of students I have encountered in other classes at HKU. My first semester, I was sometimes hurt when most students almost never spoke in class; I gradually learned to wait through this silence, because there are many kinds of silences, and students show me in other ways how they care. I tell you when I think you’re wrong, because other students have taught me that many of you are sincere and thoughtful enough to hear it. I want to gently push you to discuss uncomfortable topics — or at least begin to reflect on them — because of the “De-colonising Gender” class that I taught two years ago.

I designed this border-crossing teaching project — which might take place in cities in the U.S. and Japan, possibly in the U.K. — to share what I have felt and learned from the “De-colonising Gender” class but also other classes here. When students in these other cities and countries encounter me, if they learn something important, if they feel healed by what I share in that space, it is because I bring experiences of teaching you, what you have given me as my students. Before I taught in Hong Kong, I taught in different places in the U.S. and in Japan; I met students there who have mattered, too, in changing who I am and how I see the world. Their belief in me helped bring me to Hong Kong.

When I think about queer and feminist care through teaching — how we make each other’s lives better in small and big ways (when society tells us to care most about families related by blood and romantic partners)— I think of myself as part of a bigger constellation, a minor yet beautiful network in which students from various stages of my life are connected not just to me but to each other. I hope that in the future — even without me, when I am not there, when I am gone someday — my students somehow encounter each other in the world. I am always living somewhere on the border between hope and hopelessness, but I have not regretted teaching, dreaming, and hoping in all of these ways.

Thank you for being my students this semester.