7 - “We Are Alive”: Minor Transnationalism and Yau Ching's Experimental Filmmaking

Summary

“There is a lot to be learned by society about diversity in East Asia.”

—Yau Ching

“How many cycles does one have to go through in order to be human?”

—Hou Wenyi

Abstract

Chapter 7 engages Hong Kong queer filmmaker Yau Ching's non-fictional works, from her earlier experimental short films made in New York to her feature-length collaborative documentary We Are Alive (2010) made with confined delinquent adolescents in Hong Kong, Macau, and Japan. The transformational and comparative project on juvenile delinquency, adolescent femininities and masculinities, and state-sanctioned social conformity offer an instructive case study of minor transnationalism through a queer lens.

Keywords: minor transnationalism, queer experimental film, Hong Kong, diaspora, collaborative documentary, popular media, adolescence in East Asian societies

In fall 2010, Hong Kong queer independent filmmaker Yau Ching, also an associate professor of cultural studies at Lingnan University at the time, presented her multi-year, transborder documentary project, We Are Alive 壞孩子 (2010), at the Taiwan Documentary Film Festival in Taipei. The film, about incarcerated juveniles participating in therapeutic media workshops conducted by Yau in Hong Kong, Macao, and Sapporo, Japan, was nominated for the Asian Vision Award. While there, she was interviewed by the Taipei-based eRenlai Magazine: Pan-Asia Magazine of Cultural, Social andSpiritual Concerns. When asked, “What were you trying to show about these ‘bad’ kids?” Yau replied, “I didn't really show the kids, to be exact. The kids showed themselves.” Later she stresses the point again, “It wasn’t really a documentary by me, but a collaborative process between me and the workshop participants.” Like Wen Hui and Jasmine Lee discussed in the preceding chapters, Yau's documentary practices are process-centered and decidedly inter-subjective, fostering alternative kinship and historical, social imagination from conscious feminist perspectives. While she shares Wen’s experimental cross-platform approaches as a multimedia artist, the strong Sinophone invocations in her work are akin to Lee's sensitive explorations of the nature and meaning of homeland in the modern world divided by empires, nation-states, wealth, power, and other related borders and institutions.

Wen's and Lee's intimate documentaries are focused on women, often elderly women and their place in family and society, whereas Yau's film praxis articulates a sophisticated and provocative queer cosmopolitanism, also informing her creative and academic writings.