Plenty of films from Hong Kong and China deal with crossing borders and taking up a life in a strange, new place. But to Dr Esther Yau, a scholar of these films and a migrant herself (she spent 26 years in Los Angeles before returning to Hong Kong a few years ago), what has been missing is a more authentic voice.

Earlier this year she launched a project, Migration and Memory, to help young migrants tap into that voice and express themselves in words and images.

“These personal stories make up what we can call cultural memory,” Dr Yau said. “The disruption and tensions of the migration experience make it easy to become silent about that experience or be locked into feelings of homesickness or nostalgia or cultural alienation. We want to recognise the value of these individuals who are not socially prominent but whose stories make up a rich and varied layer of cultural memory in this city.”

Examples of cultural memory include what it means to leave grandparents behind, or to return to one’s home village and find that modernisation and development have erased favourite places from childhood. It also encompasses the experience of getting to know a new city and its places and people.

“We’re trying to elicit not just the memories of moving, but the before and after, and what sense people make of it,” said Dr Yau, who is Associate Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature.

Learning to express themselves

The project was delivered this spring using HKU student volunteers who were trained by Dr Yau and her team to help draw out young people’s memories and encourage them to express these in a creative way.

Workshops were organised for primary and secondary school students in collaboration with Neighbourhood Advice Action Council centres in Tai Po and Tung Chung, where there are large numbers of migrant families.

Each group was given two two-hour sessions where they played games, such as imagining the migration of a certain fruit to Hong Kong, interviewed each other to understand different cultures, and used different materials to express their own memories. A six-year-old boy, for instance, made a paper horn because he remembered his father playing the musical instrument in Indonesia before they came to Hong Kong.

Others wrote poems or prose about their migration stories, in Chinese or English, and simply the production of these was revealing.

“The older students in particular did not like to talk about their experiences in China in the workshops and it was only when they wrote creatively that they revealed where they came from. It seems they wanted to be seen to be like everybody else, and they saw it as a stigma to be new or different,” Dr Yau said.

Sharing contributes to a ‘cultural memory’

Selections of the participants’ work have been posted on a special website to make them accessible to the public and to get people thinking about migration in all its forms. The contributions range from the personal to the allegorical, and some have been created in collaboration with parents.

Other members of the community have also been welcome to submit work. For instance, one man, Bong, writes about moving to the UK as a child, returning to Hong Kong as an adult, and wanting to return to the UK again. Another poster, Dreamy, writes thoughtful poems about changes going on in Hong Kong society.

Members of the public are welcome to submit their own migration memories, Dr Yau said. The website will be up until next summer and it will be updated with new entries several times before then.

The material will also be used in a course she teaches on film culture, which covers the concept of migration memory.

“These creations are a resource when you consider the relationship between offscreen memory and onscreen memory. They give you the perspective of people who are learning to express themselves in a way which may be fragmented and not very polished but embodies their experiences.

“We’re creating a public space for the inclusion, sharing and celebration of migration experiences and I believe this will enrich the long-term development of Hong Kong’s cultural memory,” she said.■

The ‘Migration Memory and Our Hong Kong’ website is at http://www.complit.hku.hk/hkmmcn/