Category: Past Events

「你們看了笑，我真高興極了」：張愛玲與喜劇片

分享嘉賓 Speaker: Dr. Miki KAWAMOTO 河本美紀 (華語電影史研究者)

主持人 Moderator: Prof. LIN Pei-yin 林姵吟 教授 (School of Chinese, HKU)

日期時間 Date & Time: March 31, 2026 (Tue) 17:00-18:30pm (HKT)
語言 Language: 普通話 Putonghua
地點 Venue: CBA, G/F, Chow Yei Ching Building, Main Campus, HKU
講座模式 Delivery Mode: Face-to-face ONLY (no recording)

摘要 Abstract:
張愛玲的小說以蒼涼為基調，她本人也常給人冷酷、悲觀、孤獨的印象，然而她卻深愛喜劇。從小就迷戀好萊塢電影與卡通，甚至幻想學習動畫製作，將電影視為亂世生活中明亮的慰藉。她為電懋創作了約20部劇本，大多是很輕快的浪漫喜劇，融入好萊塢神經喜劇的元素，這些喜劇片為1950-60年代的香港國語片注入活潑生氣，在華語圈大受歡迎。張愛玲的喜劇劇本刻意避開小說中那種蒼涼感，採用俏皮對白與大團圓結局，充分展現了她內心調皮、樂觀、可愛的一面。她曾在信中對好友宋淇與鄺文美說：「你們看了笑，我真高興極了」，流露出純粹的喜悅。這種出乎意料的一面，不僅來自她個人對電影的熱愛，也挑戰了中國文化中悲劇至上的傳統思維。張愛玲編寫的喜劇片讓我們得以重新認識她多面的魅力。

Eileen Chang’s fiction is often characterized by a tone of bleakness, and she herself frequently gives the impression of being cold, pessimistic, and lonely. Yet she deeply loved comedy. From childhood, she was fascinated by Hollywood feature and animation films, even fantasizing about learning animation production. She regarded the cinematic medium as a luminous solace amidst chaotic era. She wrote about 20 screenplays for MP&GI, mostly romantic comedies, with elements of Hollywood screwball comedy. These works injected lively energy into Hong Kong’s Mandarin films of the 1950s and 1960s, gaining popularity throughout the Chinese-speaking world. Eileen Chang’s comedy scripts deliberately avoided the bleakness found in her fiction, using instead witty dialogues and happy endings that fully revealed the playful, optimistic, and endearing side of her inner self. In a letter to her close friends Stephen and Mae Soong, she wrote: “I’m so glad you laughed at it,” showing pure joy. This unexpected aspect of her work not only comes from her personal passion for cinema, but also challenges the traditional Chinese cultural emphasis on tragedy. The comedies written by Eileen Chang allow us to rediscover her multifaceted charm.

講者簡介 About the Speaker:
河本美紀  日本大阪大學語言文化學博士，現任教於九州大學、福岡大學。主要研究領域為華語文學與華語電影。著有《張愛玲的電影史》（印刻出版社，2025）、《張愛玲的映畫史》（關西學院大學出版會，2023）。學術論文曾收錄於林幸謙主編《張愛玲：傳奇・性別・系譜》、陳子善編《重讀張愛玲》等專書。目前從事香港文學研究，論文包括〈香港中的日本：近年香港文學中的集體記憶〉（刊載於《野草 增刊號 香港文學特集》，2026）。譯有麥樹堅〈千年獸與千年詞〉（收錄於青野繁治監修《擴散的語言：當代華語文學選集》，朋友書店，2025）。

Dr. Miki KAWAMOTO obtained her Ph.D. in Language and Culture, Osaka University, Japan. Currently, she is teaching at Kyushu University and Fukuoka University. Her main research areas include Sinophone literature and film. Her published works include Film History of Eileen Chang (INK, 2025), Film History of Eileen Chang (Japanese edition) (Kwansei Gakuin University Press, 2023). Her academic contributions include papers in Lim Chin Chown (ed.), Eileen Chang: Legend, Gender, Genealogy, and Chen Zishan (ed.), Rereading Eileen Chang, among others. Currently she is engaged with research on Hong Kong literature. Publications in this area include “Japan Inside Hong Kong: Collective Memory in Contemporary Hong Kong Literature” (Yaso, Special Issue: Hong Kong Literature Feature, 2006), and a translation of Mak Shu-kin’s “The 1000 Beasts and the 1000 Words” (in Spreading Words: A Modern Sinophone Literature Anthology, supervised by Shigeharu Aono, Hoyu Shoten, 2025).

This event is held as part of the New Directions in Eileen Chang Studies Lecture Series |
張愛玲研究新方向講座系列 
Co-hosted by School of Chinese and Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Co-sponsored by Louis Cha Fund for Chinese studies & East/West studies in the Faculty
& Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC)

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Speaker:
Tamara Chin, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, Brown University

Moderator:
Daniel Elam, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Thursday, March 26, 2026
Time: 4:00 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: Faculty Lounge (Room 430), 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU

The study of language contact lacked prestige in traditional Philology. In China and Europe, philologists partitioned the past into distinct national languages. This talk asks how historical interactions across languages became a recognized modern research object. It revisits the discovery in Dunhuang of a multilingual cave library of ancient texts, and examines the post-Opium War and Cold War politics through which linguistic experts made language contact meaningful.

Tamara Chin is an associate professor of comparative literature at Brown University and author of Savage Exchange: Han Imperialism, Chinese Literary Style, and the Economic Imagination (Harvard 2014; trans. 野蛮交换：汉帝国的扩张、文学风格与经济想象 forthcoming); and The Silk Road Idea: Ancient Contact in the Modern Human Sciences, 1870-1970 (forthcoming 2026).

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Discussants:
Georgios Halkias, Glorious Sun Professor in Buddhist Studies & Director, Centre of Buddhist Studies, HKU
Catherine Hardie, Assistant Professor in Buddhist Studies, Centre of Buddhist Studies, HKU
Crystal Kwok, Lecturer and Filmmaker, Department of History, HKU

Moderator: Ji Li, Associate professor, Department of History, HKU

Date: Friday, March 20, 2026
Time: 2:30-5:00 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: LE1, (Library Extension), Main Campus, The University of Hong Kong

The award-winning 2023 documentary Ani Bond: Choying Drolma follows the inspirational journey of the “rock-star” Nepali nun Ani Choying Drolma. Fleeing an abusive father, the thirteen-year-old Ani sought refuge in a Tibetan Buddhist monastery where the nuns taught her to sing. Her stunning voice captured the attention of a visiting American musician who brought her singing to global attention. Ani Choying Drolma has used her international fame to campaign for girls’ education and, in 2000, she established a modern school for novice nuns, Arya Tara, in Kathmandu. Several of the girls, who come from some of the poorest and most remote areas of Nepal, share their stories in the documentary. Despite her achievements, the trauma of Ani Choying’s past continues to haunt her and, in an effort to confront it, the film sees her fulfill her father’s dying wish and travel to his hometown in Qinghai, China.

Directors Fen Jennifer Lin and Shan Bai spent seven years bringing Ani Choying Drolma’s astounding story to the screen. The documentary won the NETPAC Award for the Best Asian/Pacific Film and the Audience Award for Documentary at the 39th Warsaw International Film Festival, as well as Best Documentary Feature and Best Music and Sound at the 13th China Academy Awards of Documentary Film. Bai Shan is an independent director and producer. Fen Jennifer Lin is a media sociologist and a documentary filmmaker. She is Professor of Media and Communication and serves as Associate Vice President (Global Strategies) and Director of ArtX Hong Kong Institute at the City University of Hong Kong. She has written extensively and bilingually on media and political communication, information governance, state-society relations, China’s technology and innovation system, and social and cultural change. She obtained her BA in Economics from Peking University, MS in Statistics, and PhD in Sociology from the University of Chicago. For more on the film, visit https://youtube.com/@f.jenniferlin5671?si=9gMhkL1v_rQN942Q

This event is held as part of the course GLAS2141: Women and Gender in Asia, with the support of the Department of History, the Committee on Gender Equity and Diversity (CGED), the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC), and the Centre of Buddhist Studies in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Hong Kong.

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Speaker:
Emily Yu Zong, Assistant Professor, Department of Humanities and Creative Writing, Hong Kong Baptist University

Discussants:
Kwai-Cheung Lo, Professor and Department Chair of Humanities and Creative Writing, Hong Kong Baptist University
Winnie Yee, MALCS Programme Coordinator, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Moderator:
Alvin K. Wong, Associate Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Tuesday, March 17, 2026
Time: 4:30 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: Room MBG07, G/F, Main Building, HKU

In Planetarity from Below, Emily Yu Zong questions the coloniality of modern freedom by examining migration as an ecological process. Through a translocal analysis of migration literature and film across Australia, North America, and China, she shows how these works reimagine freedom not simply as individual assimilation but as unruly and collaborative survival with animals, waters, minerals, waste, and technology. Moving environmental ethics beyond individual morality, Zong advances a worldmaking method of planetarity from below—attending to everyday, situated, and borderland ecological “doing” and “commoning” that widen cracks in modern colonial systems to reveal a migrant cosmopolitics beyond human exceptionalism.

Emily Yu Zong is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities and Creative Writing at Hong Kong Baptist University. Her research focuses on Asian diasporic literature, environmental humanities, media theory, and science and technology studies. She is the author of Planetarity from Below: Decolonial Ecopoetics of Migration and Diaspora (University of Michigan Press, 2026 – visit the UMP website for a 30% discount – code UMWEB30) and co-editor of Decolonial Asian Diasporic Ecocriticism, a forthcoming special issue of ARIEL.

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A Book Reading and Conversation

Speaker:
Sean Meighoo, Associate Professor and Chair of Comparative Literature, Emory University

Moderator:
Alvin K. Wong, Associate Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Thursday, March 5, 2026
Time: 5:00 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: Room 436, 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU

In Postcolonial Derrida, Sean Meighoo argues that Derrida’s philosophical work offers us an incisive engagement with the issues of colonialism, race, migration, and diaspora that distinguish postcolonial theory as such. Critically reading some of Derrida’s most famous texts in addition to some of his lesser-known ones, Meighoo brings Derrida into conversation with a diverse range of anticolonial and postcolonial thinkers and writers from the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia as well as African American and French feminist thinkers and writers including Toni Morrison, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Hélène Cixous, V.S. Naipaul, Nelson Mandela, M.K. Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Sean Meighoo is Associate Professor and Chair of Comparative Literature at Emory University. He is author of The End of the West and Other Cautionary Tales (Columbia UP, 2016) and Postcolonial Derrida (Edinburgh UP, 2026). Meighoo’s work has also appeared in the journals Small Axe, Cultural Critique, Journal for Critical Animal Studies, Humanimalia, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, Journal of World Philosophies, and Derrida Today, as well as in the volumes Nation Dance: Religion, Identity, and Cultural Difference in the Caribbean (Indiana UP, 2001) and Beastly Morality: Animals as Ethical Agents (Columbia UP, 2015).

For updates on future events hosted by the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures, please visit https://www.csgc.hku.hk/

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Moderator: Crystal Kwok, Department of History, HKU

Date: Thursday, March 5, 2026
Time: 4:00 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: MB217, 2/F, Main Building, The University of Hong Kong

Emma Pei Yin is an Australian-Chinese writer and editor. Her debut novel, When Sleeping Women Wake, has been published globally, translated into multiple languages. It was longlisted for the ARA Historical Novel Prize (2025) and shortlisted for the Australian Indie Book Awards (2026). The novel follow the lives of three women caught up the turmoil of the Second Sino-Japanese War: the First Wife of the Tang family, Mingzhu, who leads a sheltered and lonely existence in Shanghai, her daughter Qiang, and her devoted maid, Biyu. In 1941, they flee to Hong Kong, but when the Japanese army invade, the three women are scattered.

Emma Pei Yin explores how histories of sex work, sexual coercion and gendered labour are often lived not through clarity or explanation, but through pressure, routine and silence—particularly in wartime contexts. Drawing on her novel When Sleeping Women Wake and the work of writers including Iris Chang, Lisa See, Jing-Jing Lee, and Lynn Bracht, Emma will examine how shifts in daily life and relationships can function as historical clues rather than missing pieces of the record. The workshop will discuss different approaches to representing sexual violence and coerced labour, including the use of restraint, implication and attention to consequence. There will also be a short, low-pressure writing and reflection exercise that invite participants to think carefully about how history first shows up in ordinary life. No prior writing experience is required, and participants are not expected to share their work.

This workshop is held as part of the course HIST2219: History through Sex Work, with the support of the Department of History, the Committee on Gender Equity and Diversity (CGED), and the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC) in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Hong Kong. Emma Pei Yin appears courtesy of the Hong Kong International Literary Festival.

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Speaker: Stephen Legg, Professor of Historical Geography, University of Nottingham

Moderator: Daniel Elam, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Friday, January 30, 2026
Time: 5:00 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: Faculty Lounge (Room 430), 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU

In this presentation, I will reflect on my past, recent, and future work exploring the geographies of colonialism and anticolonialism. I will open with a summary of my 2007 book, Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities, which explored three landscapes of ordering which united New and Old Delhi as the capital of British rule in colonial India. I will also reflect on the intellectual moment from which this work emerged (geographer’s engagement with the latter-Foucault, postcolonial theory, and urban studies). Second, I will summarise my 2025 book, Spaces of Anticolonialism, which complements and supplements the first work, by exploring spaces of anticolonial struggle in Delhi in periods of protest mass-movement but also in everyday spaces of political mobilisation. Here, I reflect on ongoing debates regarding geographies of “resistance,” the decolonial, and the nature of the city. Finally, I will share ongoing research regarding the synergies between global urban history and global urban studies, and ask what “anticolonial urbanism” might be, what it could contribute, and how we might explore it comparatively between South, Southeast and East Asia.

Stephen Legg is Professor of Historical Geography at the University of Nottingham. His research centres on the geographies of late-colonialism, with a particular focus on British-Indian relations in the interwar period. His monographs include Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities (2007); Prostitution and the Ends of Empire: Scale, Governmentalities and Interwar India (2014); Round Table Conference Geographies: Constituting Colonial India in Interwar London (2023); and Spaces of Anticolonialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities (2025). He is currently editor-in-chief of the Journal of Historical Geography.

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Film Screening & Post-Screening Discussion “Dream Home”

Film: Dream Home 維多利亞壹號
Date: 22 January 2026 (Thursday)
Time: 18:30 – 21:30 Hong Kong Time
Venue: Rayson Huang Theatre, Main Campus, HKU 香港大學黃麗松講堂
Guest Speakers: Josie Ho 何超儀, Conroy Chan 陳子聰

Moderators: Dr. Derek Lam 林瀚光博士， Dr. Fiona Law 羅玉華博士

Language (Post-Screening Discussion): Cantonese 廣東話

Please note: This film is classified as Category III and is restricted to persons aged 18 or above.

About the Film
Cheng Lai-sheung (played by Josie Ho), who comes from a poor family, dreams of one day living in a luxurious high-end residence. The upscale development “Victoria One” is her ideal home. To afford an apartment there, she works multiple jobs and even risks selling her company’s confidential information. After great effort, she finally manages to pay the deposit, but the seller withdraws the property from the market after prices rise again. When she sees her lifelong dream of home ownership shattered, Lai-sheung snaps and embarks on a brutal, bloody campaign of revenge…
Trailer: https://youtu.be/s0GyWR0XxNo?si=tR0vnHrD79-AqhNZ

The event is co-organized by the Department of Comparative Literature, the MA in Literary and Cultural Studies (MALCS), the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC) at the University of Hong Kong, and MOViE MOViE.

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Speaker:
Alex K. Gearin, Assistant Professor, Medical Ethics and Humanities Unit, HKUMed

Discussants:
Teresa Kuan, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, CUHK
Gordon Mathews, Emeritus Professor, Department of Anthropology, CUHK

Moderator:
Alvin K. Wong, Associate Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Monday, January 19, 2026
Time: 4:00 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: Room 436, 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU

Wonder is naturally elusive. Part thought, part emotion, it unsettles our understanding. While scientists frame “psychedelic wonder” as a universal therapeutic mechanism, the experiences these substances inspire are neither culturally uniform nor universally understood as healing. Drawing on his book Global Ayahuasca (Stanford University Press, 2024), Alex K. Gearin challenges the romanticized view of ayahuasca as simply an Indigenous remedy for modern life. Instead, fieldwork reveals that its wonder is mobilized for diverse ends, from strengthening decolonial identity and facilitating urbanization in the Peruvian Amazon to improving entrepreneurial mastery in metropolitan China. These variations suggest that for many, the mystery of psychedelic wonder lies not in a critical escape from modernity but in a greater mastery over it.

Alex K. Gearin is a medical anthropologist specializing in the intersections of mental health, cultural beliefs, and psychedelic medicine. He serves as Assistant Professor and Deputy Director of the Medical Ethics and Humanities Unit, School of Clinical Medicine, The University of Hong Kong.

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Speaker: Sheldon Lu, Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature, University of California, Davis

Moderator: Beth Harper, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Thursday, December 11, 2025
Time: 2:30 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: Faculty Lounge (Room 430), 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU

This lecture offers a survey of the evolution of East-West comparative literary studies in the past decades. It begins with comparative poetics, schools of comparative literature, methods of parallel study. We pay attention to the subsequent rise of third-world literature and postcolonial study. In the twenty-first century, world literature and world-systems theory present new opportunities for innovative comparative studies. This lecture gives an account of such changes, continuity, and innovation. At the same time, it points out some possible strengths and blind spots associated with each of these trends.

Sheldon Lu is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California at Davis. He has served as the Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature and Founding Director of Film Studies Program at UC Davis. His scholarship and teaching lie at the intersection of literary studies, visual studies, film studies, China studies, and cultural theory. He is the author and editor of some 15 books in English and Chinese. His recent monographs include Contemporary Chinese Cinema and Visual Culture: Envisioning the Nation (2021) and Lyric Poetry and Solidarity Society in Hong Kong in the 1950s 一九五〇年代香港詞壇與堅社 (2022).

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