Hong Kong Cinema Raised Us, But Nobody Ever Filmed Your Mother

We talk endlessly about preserving Hong Kong. Usually we mean streets and buildings, not people.

Hong Kong cinema did something remarkable. It sealed in an era's streets, speech, humour, melodrama and tempo.

If you want to know what Mong Kok looked like in the eighties, there is footage. If you want to know how people answered the phone, argued, or said it doesn't matter, that is all there too.

So Hong Kong has an unusually complete public memory. The problem is the word public.

Your family is not in it

Film recorded how an era worked. It did not record how your grandmother worked.

Did she work in a factory, and in which trade? How did the family get from a squatter hut to public housing? Which of her brothers never made it down to Hong Kong? No film answers any of that.

Public memory preserves what was shared. The part specific to your family will not be preserved by any institution, because to them it is not history, it is a private matter.

"That village has since been entirely demolished, skyscrapers standing where it once was."

The village in that sentence is in no film anywhere. It exists in one person's memory.

Preservation, in Hong Kong, usually means buildings

When Hong Kongers talk about preservation we mean tenements, markets, neon, the Star Ferry. All of it worth keeping.

But when a building goes, there are still photographs, drawings, press coverage. When a person goes unrecorded, there is nothing at all. Not even a bad copy.

We say constantly that Hong Kong is disappearing piece by piece. The piece disappearing fastest is people.

You are your family's director

It does not have to look good. You do not need to film their face. The voice is enough.

One question a week is fifty-two recordings a year. Inside those fifty-two is how your grandmother speaks, how she laughs, and how she talks about her own mother.

Hong Kong cinema did this for the city. For your family, exactly one person can start the camera.