Me and the dragon: a lyrical engagement with the politics of Chineseness

Nationalistic songs are not rare in the pop music tradition of Hong Kong: from the anthemic, heroic-sounding songs as well as sentimental, folkish ballads, generally known as ‘minzu gequ’, in the 1970s and 1980s, to what I would call the neominzu gequ reinvented in trendier R in 2005 I penned one. This essay is an inquiry of how ‘I’ have been dealing with issues of Chineseness through the pop lyrics I have created during the ‘re-nationalization’ process of Hong Kong. Employing the tactics of writing against the grain and writing with a twist, I try to trouble dominant narratives on Chineseness. A central theme of this essay is to resist simplicity, to resist certain political or ideological attempts to simplify and nullify complexity into certain dominant narratives - by mobilizing the autobiographical ‘I’, in this case, embodied in the duality of cultural studies student-cum-producer. An autobiographical approach is adopted as a response to two major issues of cultural studies: the danger of theoreticism and the question ‘What do cultural studies do’. This essay is a chronicle of how I, a lyrical writer, try to write what I have read from cultural studies into a cultural product. It is also an occasion to interpellate me, a cultural studies student, to read the product back into cultural studies.