Category: Past Events

私人浴室：張愛玲小說中自我、性別與身體的對話空間

分享嘉賓 Speaker: 楊佳嫻 教授 Prof. YANG Chia-Hsien (Dept. of Chinese Literature, National Tsing Hua University)

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

日期時間 Date & Time: April 24, 2025 (Thu) 16:30-18:00pm (HKT)
語言 Language: 普通話/國語 Mandarin
地點 Venue: CPD-3.28, Central Podium Level 3, The Jockey Club Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU
授課模式 Delivery Mode: Face-to-face & Online

摘要 Abstract:
張愛玲小說最著名的浴室場景，大約是〈紅玫瑰與白玫瑰〉裡，佟振保在浴室裡撿起紅玫瑰的頭髮而宛如通電，白玫瑰因為便秘而能名正言順地在浴室裡獨處，慾望和汙穢，都由同一種空間承擔。而自《小團圓》面世以來，母親蕊秋趁女兒九莉洗澡時衝進浴室「檢查體格」，以此來窺視、判斷她是否真有風流之事，也使讀者對於張愛玲筆下糾纏的母女情結有了更進一層認識。其實浴室場景在張愛玲小說中隨處可見，立基於上海自來水建設與現代日常衛生觀念的逐漸普及、都會中上階級寓所把浴室作為空間規畫的一部分。私人浴室在張愛玲小說的空間敘事中起什麼樣的作用？她所擅長的婚戀與家庭題材，浴室扮演什麼樣的角色？此一富含階層與性別意涵的空間，值得張愛玲的讀者們深入探索。

The private washroom is a key site in Eileen Chang’s fiction where innermost desires and personal secrets are often revealed and staged. Poignant examples abound, including Chang’s early short story “Red Rose and White Rose” and her later novel Little Reunions. Chang’s early descriptions of the intimate space, in particular, are set against the rapid infrastructure building in Republican-era Shanghai, where the concept of everyday hygiene was popularized, and the modernized washroom became a fixture in upscale urban dwellings. This talk uses this intimate space as an entry point to take another look at Chang’s classic narratives on love, marriage, and family life.

講者簡介 About the Speaker:
楊佳嫻，國立台灣大學中國文學博士。現任國立清華大學中文系副教授。曾擔任臺北詩歌節協同策展人多年。著有詩集《金烏》等四部，散文與評論集《以脆弱冶金》等六部，主編或合編有《刺與浪：跨世代台灣同志散文讀本》等文選多部。另有學術著作《懸崖上的花園：太平洋戰爭時期上海文學場域》、《方舟上的日子：台灣眷村文學》。

Dr. YANG Chia-Hsien is Associate Professor of Chinese Literature at National Tsing Hua University of Taiwan. As a scholar, she has published works on Shanghai literature of the war era and Taiwanese military-village narratives. As a prolific writer and poet, she has authored four books of poetry and six collections of prose. She was a long-time curator of the annual Taipei poetry festival and has edited several anthologies of contemporary Taiwanese prose and poetry.

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)

雪泥鴻爪：五〇年代張愛玲的香港生涯

分享嘉賓 Speaker: Mr. XIE Youkun 謝有坤 先生 (「張迷客廳」博主)

與談人 Discussants:
Prof. Nicole HUANG 黃心村 教授 (Dept. of Comparative Literature, HKU)
Prof. LEUNG Mo Ling 梁慕靈 教授 (School of Arts and Social Sciences, HKMU)

日期時間 Date & Time: April 23, 2025 (Wed) 16:30-18:00pm (HKT)
語言 Language: Putonghua 普通話 
地點 Venue: CPD-1.24, Central Podium Level 1, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU
授課模式 Delivery Mode: Face-to-face & Online

摘要 Abstract:
一九五二年，張愛玲離滬赴港，在三年的短暫停留中，她不僅譯介多部西方經典，更以雙語寫作《秧歌》、《赤地之戀》，就發表數量論，創作力正值最盛。作為冷戰背景下的大時代初代離散者，張愛玲此階段人生，向來神秘、低調且充滿爭議。本次講座將勾連歷史檔案的文獻考證，與小說原型後人訪談，梳理張愛玲在港生活軌跡和創作脈絡。通過發掘張愛玲交遊圈，首度披露其與杜月笙家族的隱秘聯繫、與香港美國新聞處的合作細節等。並藉盤點她的文學創作、發掘她的未竟嘗試，以及這段經歷對後期電影劇本與紅學考據的影響，為張愛玲後半生文學轉型提供新的理解角度。

In 1952, Eileen Chang left Shanghai and returned to Hong Kong, where she had previously lived as a college student. Chang’s second residency in Hong Kong lasted for only three years, but it was a period of high creativity. She translated several classic American works into Chinese and wrote two novels in both English and Chinese—The Rice-Sprout Song and Naked Earth. Writing in diaspora in the early Cold War years, Chang kept a low profile. This chapter of her life remains shrouded in mystery and controversy. This lecture will combine archival research with interviews of the descendants of the real-life figures who had inspired Chang’s 1950s fiction writing. The goal is to reconstruct Chang’s activities in 1950s Hong Kong and to explain how she ended up writing what she did. By exploring her social circle, the lecture will reveal for the first time Chang’s previously unknown connections with Du Yuesheng’s clan and the nature of her work for the United States Information Service in Hong Kong. Retracing Chang’s footprints of the three-year period will also shed light on her various unfinished projects, her future screenwriting career, and her later devoted study of the eighteenth-century fiction classic The Story of the Stone.

講者簡介 About the Speaker:
謝有坤，張愛玲研究者，相關成果刊於《讀庫》、《印刻文學生活誌》、《上海書評》、《南方週末》等。自2016年起開設微博「張迷客廳」，持續分享張愛玲史料與資訊。2020年發掘蘇青以張愛玲為原型的小說佚作《朦朧月》，2023年考證發現張愛玲化名“連雲”的作品《上下其髪》，目前正在撰寫張愛玲與蘇青的雙人合傳。

XIE Youkun is an independent researcher who has published widely on Eileen Chang. He is the creator and host of Chinese microblogging (Weibo) site “The Eileen Chang Fan Club,” where he has been consistently sharing findings from his devoted textual and archival research on Chang since 2016. Dubbed “a walking encyclopedia of Eileen Chang,” Xie has galvanized around his internet presence a fast-growing community of avid Chang readers of several generations and from a diverse range of backgrounds. In 2020, Xie unearthed a novel titled Hazy Moon, penned by Chang’s fellow 1940s Shanghai woman writer Su Qing, in which a character was based on Chang’s life. In 2023, Xie’s archival research led him to the discovery of a previously unknown pseudonym used by Chang—Lianyun. Xie is currently working on a biography that features both Eileen Chang and Su Qing.

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)

Speaker: Frederico Vidal, Visiting PhD Candidate in Comparative Literature, HKU

Respondent: Hongwei Bao, Associate Professor in Media Studies, University of Nottingham
Moderator: Alvin K. Wong, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Wednesday, April 16, 2025
Time: 4.30 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: Room 436, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU and on Zoom

Despite its heavily explicit content, the sexual episodes within 北京故事 (1996) are not present in mere service of shock value. These erotic descriptions – a trademark of 同志文学, a subversive genre circulated online – advance the plot and hold symbolic significance, laying bare the characters’ motivations and frame of mind. Aside from this, these scenes further advocate for the humanisation of homosexuals, which at the time of writing the novel was still deemed a crime under the Hooliganism Law and a disease under the Chinese Classification of Mental Disorders.

By exploring the broader significance of these lurid scenes, it is possible to look beyond the initial disquiet caused by the novel and delve into the elements that perpetuated its characters and narrative beyond the decade of its inception.

Frederico Vidal is a PhD student in Gender Studies at NOVA University of Lisbon, Portugal. He has conducted research on Queer China through literature, with a particular focus on 同志文学. He holds a scholarship from the Scientific and Cultural Centre of Macau and the Foundation for Science and Technology. His MA thesis on the sexually explicit novel 北京故事 (1996) earned him the Orient Foundation Award and the Jorge Álvares Foundation Scholarship.

Speaker: Chenshu Zhou, Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Studies, University of Pennsylvania

Moderator: Zoe Meng Jiang, Post-Doctoral Fellow, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Friday, April 11, 2025
Time: 4:00 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: Room 436, 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU

This talk expands on the popular notion of “screen time” to think about the time one spends on consuming screen-based media (e.g. cinema, television, digital media) as a crucial interface linking modern everyday life to political economies. How much time should screens take up in people’s lives? How to determine when screen consumption is productive, and when it becomes a waste of time? Through two seemingly unrelated case studies, itinerant film exhibition during the Great Leap Forward Movement (1958-1962) and contemporary online live streaming, I show how the management of screen time negotiates dominant paradigms of productivity across different historical periods.

Chenshu Zhou (she/her) is Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of the award-winning book Cinema Off Screen: Moviegoing in Socialist China (University of California Press, 2021).

Speaker: Kwai-Cheung Lo, Professor and Department Chair of Humanities and Creative Writing, Hong Kong Baptist University

Moderator: Jean Ma, Mr. and Mrs. Hung Hing-Ying Professor in the Arts, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Friday, March 28, 2025
Time: 4:30 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: Room 436, 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU

Ethnic Minority Cinema in China’s Nation-State Building examines how cinematic productions about non-Han ethnic minorities are related to China’s nation-state building project from the early Republican era of the 1920s to the early twenty-first century. The representations of ethnic minorities, created by both Han and non-Han filmmakers, are grasped as part of an ecosystem in which the cultures, values, and life practices of non-Han ethnic minorities are closely entwined with environmental issues and politics. These representations became a site in which state authorities, Han and non-Han communities, and foreign agencies compete and interact under the context of building and imagining the Chinese nation-state.

Kwai-Cheung Lo is Professor and Department Chair of Humanities and Creative Writing at Hong Kong Baptist University. His latest publications include Ethnic Minority Cinema in China’s Nation-State Building (University of Michigan Press, 2025) and the edited volume Entangled Waterscapes in Asia (Brill, 2025).

Speakers:
Wang Hui (汪晖), Professor in the Department of Chinese and Department of History, and Director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Humanities and Social Sciences, Tsinghua University
Huang Ping (黃平), Director of the Centre for Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and Executive Vice President of the Chinese Institute of Hong Kong (a CASS think tank based in the SAR)
Wang Pei (汪沛),  Assistant Professor, History and Culture Program, School of Chinese, HKU
Daniel Vukovich (胡德), Professor (cultural studies) and Chair of  Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Thursday, March 27, 2025
Time: 4:00–6:30 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: Room 436, 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU

This symposium-discussion will turn on recent work by Wang Hui (汪晖) of Tsinghua University, who is visiting HKU as a Distinguished Professor in the School of Chinese and as an external, advisory board member for CHAGS. We’ll discuss his recent work on politics, economics, history, and ‘theory’ as well as some of the many issues it (along with others’ work) raises for the analysis of modern and contemporary China from a global perspective. Professor Wang’s work, itself globally recognized and debated, lies at the heart of the four basic research themes of our research hub: The Conjuncture: The World in/and China; Tradition and Contemporary China; Borders, Identities, Citizens; and Global Culture (culture defined broadly, as ‘thought’ or 文化  or 人文). More specifically, his work helps us think through the ‘ends’ of revolution as well as empire; of politics and related theory after the 1990s (and the 20^th century); of the new and old global conjuncture (including hot and cold wars); the fate of political representation; and the challenge of producing knowledge about ‘China and the world’ whilst outflanking a too-easy universalism or exceptionalism.

Selected texts and bios are available beforehand for discussion and dialogue at [https://www.csgc.hku.hk/selected-texts-by-wang-hui/]. Participants are expected to have read some or all of them (or related works). The symposium will begin with some remarks from Professor Wang followed by brief commentaries from Professor Vukovich, Professor Huang Ping (黃平), Professor Wang Pei (汪沛), and others.

This event is co-organised by the China, Humanities, and Global Studies (CHAGS) Cross-Faculty Research Hub, the School of Chinese, and the School of Humanities, Faculty of Arts, The University of Hong Kong.

同學少年都不見——鉤續張愛玲閨蜜的傳奇

分享嘉賓 Speaker: Mr. LIM Fong Wei 林方偉  (Senior Correspondent at Lianhe Zaobao)

主持人 Moderator: Prof. Nicole HUANG 黃心村 (Dept. of Comparative Literature, HKU)

日期時間 Date & Time: March 26, 2025 (Wed) 16:30-18:00pm (HKT)
語言 Language: Putonghua 普通話 
地點 Venue: CPD-1.24, Central Podium Level 1, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

摘要 Abstract:
她們的情誼始於港大。回到上海後，張愛玲在孤島文壇一炮而紅，與她形影不離的同校閨蜜，法蒂瑪 · 莫希甸也受到矚目。張愛玲為活潑風趣的法蒂瑪取名“炎櫻”，用生動的筆觸將她寫進自己的文章裏。於是，炎櫻成了一位活色生香的張氏人物，虛虛實實，其知名度不遜於白流蘇、曹七巧等張愛玲所創造的小說人物。然而，兩人赴美後漸行漸遠，炎櫻像是被作者拋棄的一個人物，從張愛玲的文字消失無蹤。恢復法蒂瑪的身分以後，她去了哪兒？張迷研究者林方偉從一個蛛絲馬跡接到下一個線索，鉤出法蒂瑪的行蹤，延續她活色生香的“傳奇”。

Their friendship was a bond forged in The University of Hong Kong. Fatima Mohideen and Eileen Chang were inseparable friends at the height of Chang’s early career in Shanghai. Vividly portrayed and rechristened by Chang as Yanying (炎樱), the vivacious Fatima became a character, as well as a media personality, who was just as, if not more captivating than any of Chang’s renowned fictional characters. However, this changed when they grew apart after moving to the US. Fatima vanished from Chang’s writings, like a character the writer had abandoned. Whatever happened to Fatima? Through meticulous investigation, researcher Lim Fong Wei continued Fatima’s “legend” and found a satisfying closure for one of Chang’s most beloved “characters”.

講者簡介 About the Speaker:
林方偉，新加坡《聯合早報》高級資深記者，業餘文學偵探（“張探社探長”）、譯者、編者、小說作者與編劇，近年鉤沉、挖掘張愛玲與劉以鬯不為人知的事蹟。自2019年起，解碼一系列張愛玲母親黃逸梵的事蹟後，“張探社”便蒸蒸日上。張愛玲故事未完——完不了。

Lim Fong Wei is a senior correspondent at Singapore’s national Chinese newspaper Lianhe Zaobao. He is also a translator, editor, fiction and screenplay writer, and a literary sleuth most interested in the lives and works of Eileen Chang and Liu Yichang, particularly seen through the lens of Malaya. In 2019, his “sleuthing” achieved a breakthrough after a series of discovery of Chang’s mother, Yvonne Whang’s late years in Malaya and the UK.

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)

Speaker: Yang Yao (姚洋), Liberal Arts Chair Professor at the China Center for Economic Research (CCER) and the National School of Development (NSD), Peking University

Moderator: Daniel Vukovich, Professor and Chair, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Friday, March 21, 2025
Time: 4:00 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: Faculty Lounge (4.30), 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU

Political meritocracy guided China’s bureaucratic monarchy in the past and is still the main institution for the CCP’s personnel management today. The existing studies resort to history to defend it. In this talk, Professor Yang Yao, based on his book Good Governance: Insights from the Confucian State (coauthored with Zizhong Qin), will present his construction of a philosophical foundation for political meritocracy. For Confucians, human nature is diverse, fluid, and moldable, and it critically depends on one’s own perfection as to which stage of the sagehood one can achieve. In addition, hierarchies are necessary for state governance and higher positions need to be filled by people with higher levels of qualification. This approach enlarges the potential for political meritocracy to provide universal values for state governance in other parts of the world.

Yang Yao (姚洋) is a Liberal Arts Chair Professor at the China Center for Economic Research (CCER) and the National School of Development (NSD), Peking University. He currently serves as the editor of CCER’s house journal “China Economic Quarterly.” He was the dean of the NSD from November 2012 to January 2024. He chairs the China Economic Annual Conference, the Foundation of Modern Economics, and the supervision committee of CF40, and is a member of China Economist 50 Forum. His research interests include new political economy, economic transition and development in China and political philosophy. He has published more than a hundred research papers in international and domestic journals including China Social Sciences, the American Economic Review, and the American Political Science Review. He has published or edited more than a dozen books on political economy and philosophy, and economic development in China. He is also a prolific writer for magazines and newspapers, including the Financial Times and the Project Syndicate.

Professor Yao was awarded the 2008 and 2014 Sun Yefang Award in Economic Science, the 2008 and 2010 Pu Shan Award in International Economics, and the 2008 Zhang Peigang Award in Development Economics. He was named the Best Teacher by the PKU Student Union in 2006 and the Best Advisor by the PKU Graduate Students Union in 2017. He is a fellow of the International Economic Association (2024).

Professor Yao obtained a BS in geography in 1986 and an MS in economics in 1989, both from Peking University, and his PhD in development economics from the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1996.

This event is co-organised by the China, Humanities, and Global Studies (CHAGS) Cross-Faculty Research Hub and the School of Humanities, Faculty of Arts, The University of Hong Kong.

Speaker: Laia Ventayol, Visiting PhD Candidate in Comparative Literature, HKU

Respondent: Winnie Yee, MALCS Programme Coordinator, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Moderator: Daniel Elam, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Thursday, March 20, 2025
Time: 5:30 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: KK202, 2/F, K.K. Leung Building, Main Campus, HKU

The ultimate negotiations on the Law of the Sea took place from 1973 to 1982 in New York. Within the research group Ocean Crime Narratives (PI Marta Puxan-Oliva), based at the University of the Balearic Islands, we take an interdisciplinary perspective on ocean environmental harm and crime narratives emerging since this historical event. How do discourses in the cultural and scientific arenas jointly create conceptions, arguments and ideas underpinning current international policies and policy negotiations around environmental crime and harm at sea?

With a background in visual arts, my focus within the group is on materiality at sea. How is materiality framed in Western epistemology? Does object theory apply to plastic pollution? Is noise pollution seen as materiality at sea? Taiwanese author Wu Ming-Yi’s acclaimed 2011 work The Man with the Compound Eyes narrates a contemporary fiction around the Pacific Garbage Patch. Accompanying the novel, this talk relates to waste management research and ecology policy making in Hong Kong.

Laia Ventayol is a visiting PhD Candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. Ventayol studied Fine Arts at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste Nürnberg in Germany and Comparative Literature at the Universitat de Barcelona. In constant tandem with her research, she works as a visual artist mostly between Spain and Germany. Among different acknowledgments, she participated in the 2022 International AIR Program at the Seoul Museum of Art.

Speaker: Suzy Kim, Professor of Korean History, Rutgers University

Moderator: Su Yun Kim, Associate Professor, Korean Studies, HKU

Date: Thursday, March 6, 2025
Time: 4:30 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: Room 436, 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU

While both feminism and pacifism may appear to have stagnated in the 1950s with the rise of Cold War domesticity and McCarthyism, the Korean War galvanized women to promote women’s rights in the context of the first global peace campaign during the Cold War. Recuperating the erasure of North Korean women from this movement, this talk excavates buried histories of Cold War sutures to show how leftist women tried to bridge the Cold War divide through maternalist strategies. Socialist feminism in the context of a global peace movement facilitated a productive understanding of “difference” toward a transversal politics of solidarity. The talk weaves together the women’s press with photographs and archival film footage to contemplate their use in transnational movements of resistance and solidarity, both then and now. 

Suzy Kim is a historian and author of the prize-winning book Everyday Life in the North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950 (Cornell 2013). She holds a PhD from the University of Chicago, and teaches at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey in New Brunswick, USA. Her latest book Among Women across Worlds: North Korea in the Global Cold War (Cornell 2023) was completed with the support of the Fulbright Program and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is senior editor of positions: asia critique, and serves on the editorial boards of Journal of Korean Studies and Yŏsŏng kwa yŏksa [Women and History], the journal of the Korean Association of Women’s History.

This event is co-organised by the Korean Studies Programme, School of Modern Languages and Cultures, the Women’s Studies Research Centre (WSRC), and the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC), Department of Comparative Literature, at the University of Hong Kong.