ABSTRACT
East meets West, which is often a romanticized pseudonym for Hong Kong (for example, David Faure’s A Documentary History of Hong Kong in 1997), represents a narrative reversal of coercive mating of orientalism with colonialism, with opium den replaced by neoliberal skyscrapers hiding its “Global South” side in slums dispersed around the high Gini-metropolis. The day zero – July 1, 1997 – signifies the assertion of certainty that “The North” (or, as it is called in Hong Kong, The Grandfather) replaces the “West” (The Queen), and “East” (oriental relic of “Chinese-ness”) must be absorbed into “The North,” a communist–capitalist–conversative hybrid China, remaining X as “anything but … N.” This “X” sometimes represents itself as anti-North, sometimes is the relic of a non-existent “paradise Western colony,” and sometimes even with city-state ideology that “here is the origin of the East lost,” but ultimately, a hyper-reality that was rooted in the pursuit of desired object a. This chapter will illustrate how ancient Chinese philosophy “The school of name” (led by Gongsun Longzi in circa 300 bc), which proposed that “a white horse is not a horse” (fuzziness between unitary and differentiation) could be applied to critical psychology in the formation of a “Hong Kong is not China” discourse (X vs. N) in post-2014 Umbrella Movement Hong Kong. This will be juxtaposed with Lacan’s discourse on separtition (a state of not-yet separated but already parted) (Seminar X, L’angoisse, 1962–1963). The chapter describes how “social psychology” in local institutions of Hong Kong received funding to create a mirage of “post-colonial” Hong Kong by swiftly stealing “Hong Kong identification” (projects funded pre-1997) to projects that blame the curse of “blockage of upward mobility” with the ultimate “solution” as “house ownership,” which is called “youth-identity priority theme-based projects.” In this way, this covers up the issue of the “birth of Hong Konger” by providing a “solution” that “sons” must be “incorporated” by the “grandfather.” The creation of “Name of Grandfather,” which is not formed by “killing of the father” but “ascension of the father,” becomes a symbol that not only exists in the common Hong Kong language as a metaphor, but a concrete “Grand-Other” (not only big, but “Grand”). In this case, refusal to be incorporated (psychologists call this “social cleavage,” the roots of all disharmony which should be cursed) is a primal sin, which (ironically) is resisted by the social movements that adopted the colonial fantasy as the resistance to the Grandfather. The chapter concludes with Freud’s quote, “Wo Es war, soll Ich werden” (wherever the “other” is, the “I” will return).
