The late scholar Dr Esther Cheung Mei-kwan (1958–2015) specialised in Hong Kong literature and cinema. Through iconic Hong Kong films, she uncovered the city’s complex and contradictory emotions, offering insights into how creative works are deeply intertwined with the eras that produce them. From The Secret and Rouge to Made in Hong Kong and Little Cheung, and from Centre Stage and Comrades: Almost a Love Story to Everlasting Regret and Echoes of the Rainbow, this collection of essays assembles a ghostly and enchanting portrait of a city through the images and sounds of its films.
Cheung’s “hauntological criticism” is not strictly about ghost films; it does not necessarily involve spirits or spectres. Instead, it refers to the eerie, melancholic atmosphere that pervades the soundscapes and spaces of these films. Since the 1980s, crises have shadowed Hong Kong, and what Cheung terms “haunting” represents the suppressed anxieties of a city in turmoil. The six essays in this collection explore the emotions depicted in films as responses to the crises of their time, shedding light on the social and personal challenges of those periods.
“In Love with Music” reflects on identity issues stemming from the 1997 Handover, using the mediums of nanyin and Teresa Teng’s pop songs; “Do We Hear the City” examines the disembodied voices in films to address the challenges posed by urban openness and mobility; “Shanghai Phantoms” listens for the “discordant notes of Hong Kong” within Stanley Kwan’s Shanghai Trilogy, imagining the dialogue between the two cities as a conversation between the living and the dead; “In Search of the Ghostly in Context” traces the history of public housing and its representation in film and television, extending the discussion to rarely addressed class issues; “On Spectral Mutations” investigates domestic spaces in three films spanning two decades, exploring how globalisation and urban transformation influence spatial narratives; and “The Urban Maze” delves into the love of place in post-2000 films, showing how a new wave of localist cinema responds to the emerging emotional structures of the post-Handover era.
Cheung’s reflections on cinema allow us to view Hong Kong films from a fresh perspective, offering deeper insights into the city itself. The research directions she proposed—such as historicisation, hauntological analysis, affection studies, and the revelations of everyday life—remain highly relevant for analysing contemporary Hong Kong cinema. Were she still with us, one can only imagine the profound and thought-provoking critiques she would offer on the films of recent years.
Author: Esther Cheung Mei-kwan
Editor and translator: Siu Heng
Editor: Enoch Yee-lok Tam
Art & Design: Kathy Wong
Edition: First edition, Janurary 2020
ISBN: 978-988-74161-5-9
DOI: https://doi.org/10.70783/uncannycity
Price: HK$108
Language: Complex Chinese
Content
Preface 1: The Melancholy Ghost Watching from Above / Au Kwok-keung
Preface 2: Remembering You As You Were, Cheung Mei-kwan! / Stpehen Chu Yiu-wai
Introduction: The Historical Ghosts of Hong Kong Cinema / Siu Heng
1 In Love with Music: Memory, Identity and Music in Hong Kong’s Diasporic Films
2 Do We Hear the City? Voices of the Stranger in Hong Kong Cinema
3 Shanghai Phantoms: The Dialogue Between Two Cities in Stanley Kwan’s Films
4 In Search of the Ghostly in Context
5 On Spectral Mutations: The Ghostly City in The Secret, Rouge and Little Cheung
6 The Urban Maze: Crisis and Topography in Hong Kong Cinema
Bibliography
Chinese-English Glossary
Index
Translator’s Note: A Letter to the Haunting You / Siu Heng
About the author
Esther Cheung Mei-kwan
Educated in Hong Kong and the US, she taught for many years in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong, serving as the Head of Department from 2007 to 2014. Her research and teaching interests included Hong Kong culture, visual culture, urban and globalisation studies, cultural theory, film, and literature.
She authored and edited works such as Images Hong Kong: Selected Poems of Leung Ping-kwan, Searching for Independent Landscapes in Hong Kong Cinema, Fruit Chan’s Made in Hong Kong
, and The Cinematic Memories of Stanley Kwan. She also co-edited publications including A Companion to Hong Kong Cinema, Hong Kong Screenscapes: From the New Wave to the Digital Frontier, Crossing Boundaries: Readings in Hong Kong Cinema, and Hong Kong Literature@Cultural Studies.
In addition, she curated a collection of essays on urban studies, Sabaong’s Urban Wanderings, contributed columns to Ming Pao Century Edition, and published a personal essay collection, Ghostly Tales Written on the Window Frame.
Dr Cheung passed away from cancer in February 2015.
About the translator
Siu Heng
A senior arts administrator and editor with over tweenty years of experience across education, culture, arts, and film. Born in Hong Kong in the 1970s, they graduated from the Commercial Radio DJ Training Programme before earning a Bachelor of Arts in Translation and Comparative Literature and a Master of Arts in Literary and Cultural Studies from the University of Hong Kong.
During their undergraduate studies, they took several courses taught by Dr Cheung Mei-kwan and later completed a master’s thesis on Fruit Chan’s films under her supervision. They co-authored Sabaong’s Urban Wanderings with Dr Cheung and other classmates and served as the editor of Cinematic Fireworks, a collection of materials from Dr Cheung’s film courses.
Currently a member of the Hong Kong Film Critics Society, they were also the winner of the Youth Literary Award in the Translation category.
Praises and Reviews
This book is a collection of essays on Hong Kong cinema by scholar Esther Cheung, written between 2008 and her untimely passing in 2015. It includes her groundbreaking concept of “crisis cinema,” her “hauntological criticism” focusing on soundscapes rather than ghostly apparitions, her spatial studies juxtaposing cinematic aesthetics with Hong Kong public housing, and her reflections on Hong Kong identity, history, and memory. The six essays are exemplary works within the field of Chinese-language film studies. Although a compilation, the essays are thematically interlinked, forming a cohesive narrative. One cannot help but feel that this research is about Hong Kong itself, conducted by someone born of the city.
This translation and editing project aims to establish a framework for analysing Hong Kong cinema—hauntological analysis or hauntological criticism—inviting more Chinese readers to reflect on how and why, since the late 1970s, Hong Kong films have consistently conveyed a pervasive sense of crisis, feelings of displacement and rootlessness, and haunting visions of ruins.
Esther Cheung observed that Rouge features elements such as trams and Cantonese opera, which evoke hauntological associations. She interpreted this as a coexistence of different eras and layers of life within a fractured present, creating a state of “temporal asynchrony.” The film’s nostalgia is not a yearning to retrieve a bygone era but rather a melancholic awareness of the fleeting nature of the present moment.
While this book centres on film studies, it also highlights the core strengths of Mei-kwan’s scholarly work, representing an extension and evolution of her academic logic and theoretical framework. The themes of crisis cities, hauntological criticism, and sound as a medium address crucial yet underexplored issues in Hong Kong cultural studies. Her reflections on these topics are profoundly insightful, and the theoretical energy is truly remarkable.