Traveling Nostalgia: Kowloon Walled City in the World

Abstract

Kowloon Walled City was a Chinese enclave-slum in the British colonial Hong Kong and demolished in 1994. Despite of its disappearance, it was considered a site of collective nostalgia and a lost heritage that represented the local history and culture since the 2000s. However, it did not only denote a nostalgia referring to the domestic past, as the existence of foreign gazes can also be observed. In developing a critical discussion of the formation of nostalgia for Kowloon Walled City in the globalised environment, I developed a conceptual tool "travelling nostalgia" to explore the trajectory of nostalgia as a form of transcultural memory network. I found that the memory of the Walled City has travelled to Japan and Western countries since the 1980s. The city memory has been reinterpreted in a different context and again mediated to another society that the process made the Walled City become an urban metaphor in the global culture. The foreign gazes filled the gap of local memory by preserving visual information of the city and provided an alternative approach for Hongkongers to reimage the past and conceive the future through the interpretation in cultural recreations. The nostalgia for Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong is a network constructed by the return of global circulated memory and the respond to social changes in the contemporary time. It is a rediscovery of forgotten memory and also an exploration of alternative identity through the eyes of others.