In Search for Authenticity and Not Wanting to Lie and Not wanting to Tell the Truth.

Riding with Hong Kong Street Racers: Entry 2

When I was in college, I met some middle class black men who spent a lot of time pretending to be gangsters, trying to find the “real” black experience. I didn’t know them very well, but I couldn’t really understand why they bothered to hang out with completely horrible people who lived in their house and used them for money and held over them that they weren’t really black and that their parents were rich and sold out or something.

But now as I explore why I even wanted to do this documentary, no, as I explore what it is that went wrong with the way I was making this film, I realized it became some sort of personal search for authenticity and my Chinese roots. It stopped being about “them” the whole thing started being about me. About me trying to learn a culture I was unfamiliar with, about me looking for what it was about them that was like me. How maybe who I am is not “white” or “western” it’s just who I am, and it’s who they are too.

I think.

Maybe.

It will be a while yet before I get to the bottom of this.

But hell I am going to try.

I think about the people who I know read this blog. Well, firstly it’s in English, so that says something about the audience in the first place. But I do know that from the few emails I get, it’s often Chinese kids who live in other countries who get really involved in it, they feel I am letting them into the world they too would like to find out. I get emails from people telling my some of my ramblings match their feelings or that I am remind them of home. I don’t know if I really remind them of home, but that I went on a search that was similar to the ones that maybe they would try to find too.

Fuck, most of the time I am about as Chinese as some kid that grew up in the middle of nowhere. I really don’t understand the culture well. I didn’t even grow up with Chinese people. My mom remarried and put me in an English school up in the hill. I was the only Chinese kid in the whole class, all my teachers were white, my friend were from Sri Lanka, India, Italy, Korea and England. Forget the fact that I happened to live in Hong Kong, the only Chinese people I knew were my family, like one neighbor and the people who served me in restaurants.

My reading Chinese sucks. I can barely navigate a menu. Forget the fact I spent most of my life in this city. I can’t read the paper and until about two years ago, I couldn’t really watch a Chinese movie and not read subtitles. Actually, make that until I started riding with the Illegal car racers, I could hardly speak my own language. I didn’t know what the hell they were saying to me or each other for months and months.

And now I can. A few months ago, I got so mad at them that I called a friend up and started busting out the most virile Chinese swear words in between what I was trying to tell her. I was sitting in a tram too and the whole car just stared at me, couldn’t really put together my being with what was spewing out of my mouth. I speak pretty low down English really. I swear a lot, it had everything to do with working in some pretty interesting places in my life and who I hung with, but that’s another story for some other time, but until then I spoke this complete old fashioned Chinese, hyper polite, no street slang because the only people I ever knew who spoke Cantonese were my family.

Even my friend who grew up here, completely Chinese, couldn’t believe what was coming out of my mouth. Fuck them cunt, asshole, dick, what they fuck.. etc. etc.. language not even used by the women in the street racing culture, as the roles are so defined. But it was this strange moment for me, when I could speak like that. It was a good moment for me in some ways. I was happy I learnt to swear like some guy from the street. It was some weird badge of getting to know something that previously was not open to me.

When I first got back to Hong Kong after years of being away. I was pretty frustrated because people would be rude to me and I would have to keep my mouth shut. As by the time I translated what I was trying to say from English back to Chinese the moment was gone. And for a person who was always quick with the insults, it truly drove me insane because I was close to being mute.

Anyway, so here I am thinking tonight that maybe this whole thing had very little to do with the high minded idea of capturing a street culture for the audience, it had everything about my search for authenticity. The street culture I walk pass every day and wasn’t allowed in because of all these personal reasons.

It’s a pretty stupid reason if you think about it. Even if I did speak perfect Cantonese, and even if my mom didn’t remarry a white guy, I probably would never have gotten with this crowd anyway. Even if I was as Chinese as Chinese could be, just where I grew up, who my family is and where I would have gone to school, this would still not be the world I grew up in. There is something skewed.

Maybe it has something to do with the damn movies. Just that the only way I could get close to Chinese culture was through Hong Kong movies and there really are three kinds. Stupid comedies, Love stories and triad movies, and lets be honest, the best ones are have always been the gangster movies, about brotherhood, about money, about revenge. And it all got glamorized in my little head. So when I decided I wanted to make a documentary about Hong Kong, I went with that. At least that’s what I started to look for while making the film. I was looking for my John Woo, my Andy Lau, my Chau Yun Fat. Forgetting it’s all been prettified for commercial consumption. Duh.

And that now I am faced with the not so pretty realities, I don’t really want to continue. I wanted to be part of the myth making rather than the person who breaks through and tell the truth. Why would I want to do that? It’s not very pretty and part of how we deal with the unpleasant things in life is make it palatable. Make the horrible parts of life glamorous. That’s why those “Gou Wak Gei” (Young Triads) movie makes so much money. How all these kids flock to it because it makes their rather unpleasant lives look better. Give these guys some pride in what they do. And I am not sure if I want to sit here and record it all and play it back to them or anyone else.

Sure, if I was a good documentary maker and a good journalist I would want to search for the truth. But maybe I am not. I don’t even profess to be. I just wanted to make something cool, or at least at some point as I felt the friendships developing I wanted to make them cool to give something back.

And as I get more into their lives, I realize it isn’t all that, and I have to lie to make them look cool. I have to not show the hours and hours of boredom involved in this, and I have to bend everything to make them look glamorous. I might as well start doing fiction. So I can’t lie to myself, and I don’t want to tell the truth. So here we are. Stuck in the middle of a hard place and a rock. Thus NO FILM. Argh. Nightmare.