The Festive Double: Reading the Image of Home in the Chinese New Year Films by Jeff Lau and Wong Kar-wai / Dr. Fiona Yuk-wa Law

New Year is a time for fun; it is also the time to plan ahead what one should do in the near future. Chinese New Year is a time both for fun and resuming the Chinese tradition passed on us from the ancestors. In addition to enjoying a variety of food, having a few days’ holiday and paying annual visit to relatives and friends, going to the movie-theatre to watch a spectacular blockbuster or farcical comedy is one of the most popular family activities during this important holiday, especially during the last decades when shops did not open during the Chinese New Year. This is also the time when bunches of local-made Chinese New Year films, or hesuipian (賀歲片), are shown. Laughter and happiness are the objectives of making and watching the Chinese New Year films in the local society. In this paper, I am going to look at what is beyond the laughter and emotional uplifting. I would suggest that the image of home and the homecoming motif are the hidden or unconscious agendas that local audiences have been seeking in their watching experience. In the context of Hong Kong, such a collective film-watching experience in this specific festive time has generated an imagined Chineseness that is persistent in helping to construct a cultural identity, especially before 1997. While I had in other occasions focused on the articulations of Chineseness, here I am framing my presentation on the image of home in the films by Jeff Lau and Wong Kar-wai.[1]