4 - Seeking The Past from Eyes of Others: Nostalgia for Kowloon Walled City in Post-handover Hong Kong

Presentation Abstract
Despite many accounts regarding nostalgia as a distortion of history and a closure of memory, which eventually exerts a negative effect on social development, recent scholarship regarding memory as subject matter sees it as a process of meaning creation involving selections, interpretations, and connections of memories and experience that allows us to rework the relation with the world. However, what is usually being focused on is the articulation of different memories on the domestic level, the fact that nostalgia can be a transcultural practice of remembering is widely neglected.
Through the case of Kowloon Walled City, a slum city demolished in 1994, I show how nostalgia in Hong Kong is formed transnationally and made available by memory travels. After the handover, the collective memory of places disappearing or disappearing has gradually become a matter for Hong Kong society, while the Walled City is one of the representative objects of reminiscence. Due to the lack of record of the appearance of the city and the lives inside, things about the Walled City, whether fictional or non-fictional, such as photo books, movies, animations, and novels created by foreigners, are considered important sources of memory. Foreign gazes preserved local memories, endorsed cultural values, and provided materials to develop an alternative understanding of the past. The example of Kowloon Walled City shows that in the age of globalisation, nostalgia can go beyond the idealisation of the domestic past and plays an active process of value creation through transcultural and transnational communications.