Goodbye, See You Again, Victoria East

On the last page of Eric Carle’s Draw Me a Star, the author writes in the last sentence, ‘I had a beginning for a book, and an ending. The middle was easy!’

Goodbye Victoria East (2021-2022) is a sequel to Victoria East (2017). Before the extended creation came into existence, a beginning and an end had already emerged in my mind. The beginning is a scene from Wong Kar-wai’s As Tears Go By: Fly (played by Jacky Cheung) tosses an air conditioner, still in its cardboard box, intended to be a present for his mother,into the bay facing Tiu Keng Ling (‘Victoria East’ is Tseung Kwan O, its English name is ‘Junk Bay’). The end is Wong Hin-yan’s song Spitting Against the Wind. 

As for the middle, I didn’t give it much thought. I directly bring in the three figures involved in the social movements that took place near the land and waters of ‘Victoria East’ in recent years. The three figures, ‘The Swimmer’, ‘The Sea-Crosser’, and ‘The Fallen’, are incorporated into Goodbye Victoria East in an attempt to extend the time of 2017. In Chan Chi-tak’s book Di Wen Zi: A Record of Place and Literature (地文誌), Tiu Keng Ling is vividly described, ‘Tiu Keng Ling is a space where dreams converge and time halts. This space of convergence and halting is Hong Kong: a space where things are held up and the meaning of time for a whole generation is involuntarily halted and canceled.’

The cardboard box Fly tosses into the sea is an object rejected by his own mother; the song Spitting Against the Wind is a small but contemptuous confrontational behaviour. The lyrics goes ‘On the same sea, let’s not talk about not being about to turn back’. Goodbye, See You Again! – it’s a farewell or a reunion. ‘That hug is but dispensable’. On the opposite shore, the luminous sign on a cruiser dazzlingly displays ‘Hello! Beautiful Hong Kong Dream’.