Hong Kong identity, as pointed out by Abbas, was not a necessity to build up before the news of handover to China. Partially speaking, Hong Kong identity’s rising up has some intension to isolate itself from both Britain and China, which is not necessary before the fundamental change in its soveriegnity affiliation. Therefore, the motivation or destination of the establishment of Hong Kong identity is ambiguous and ambivalent.
However, approaches to establish Hong Kong identity, including a sum of actions to preserving architectures, is kind of vague and ironic according to Abbas. A city is a complex meaning, and people could analyse a city from various perspectives. However, when we are going to depict a city through some representatives or categories, the city could only enforce itself to fit into some models, which inevitably causes some biases. Mathematically, if we want to make a set (city in this case) perfectly partitioned by some principles, the principles should satisfy requirements of equivalence relations. This also applies in this Hong Kong case, where we are not sure whether the particular representatives are satisfying equivalence relations, and hence we could not say this depicts all of the city. Many things would be eclipsed or dwarfed by some particular points that we draw out and emphasize in representing Hong Kong.
At a possibly pessimistic point of view, preservation may never protect the history and memory. It’s simply a re-creation by the people in the coming ages, and the history will just faded out and finally described as “disappeared”.
Yalun, Li 3035532777
You have synthesized Abbas’ piece well, and I appreciate how you apply the Mathematics concepts to explain the situation in Hong Kong. I am looking for how this concept could add another layer of meaning to the text, apart from serving as an explanation.
In the searching of identity, a lot of parties were involved: the colonizer had their colonial narrative, while the business sector prioritized economic gains… Motivations were definitely different, and ambiguous, as you mention. Yet, I would question, if Abbas is only trying to point out the pessimism in preservation (in your last paragraph)? In fact, he did give examples of more successful conservation projects in Hong Kong to counter the ‘placeless’ and the ‘anonymous’ in the section ‘What Is Hong Kong Architecture’. I guess we could also read his text as a ‘toolkit’ to learn how to evaluate, or even safeguard, the disappearance of culture.