新作坊

Globalizing Local Identity: Hong Kong Style Yumcha in Australia

摘要：

This paper examines the practice of yumcha among Chinese in Sydney. As a generic term imported into the city, yumcha has gone beyond its basic form of food consumption, and has been widely used as occasions of reinforcing family, business and other forms of social relations. More importantly, it is constructed in popular discourse as a symbol of Hong Kong culture, vaguely defined. Yumcha has become one of the most important means for the Chinese in Sydney in their attempt to identify themselves with Hong Kong the metropolis. It is observed that whether in time-space, form and stucture, yumcha here imitates the Hong Kong genre. For many, especially those who originated from Hong Kong, ＂Hong Kong style yunwha＂(gongsik yumcha) becomes the archetypal institution that re-creates for them a Hong Kong outside of Hong Kong, and extends their local heunggongyan identity globally along with the Hong Kong diaspora. This paper traces the forms of eating related to yumcha as practised in Sydney, Australia against the background of immigrant life and mentality. I propose that through participation in the configuration of Hong Kong style yumcha (gongsik yumcha, p: gangshi yincha) and an intertwined set of popular beliefs, recent immigrants from Hong Kong put their insistence on a heunggongyan (＂Hong Kong people＂, p: xianggangren) identity into everyday praxis. Such practice resulted in the globalization of a local identity as it established a sense of a diasporic Hong Kong community in Sydney that was linked in multiple networks with Hong Kong the parent culture. These everyday praxes of Hong Kong immigrants constitute part of a global neo-Cantonese culture with Hong Kong as the center. In the process of globalization, ironically the metropolitan Hong Kong identity that was characterized as inclusive and open to change, became transformed into an exclusive and enduring tradition to be preserved and guarded. This paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between July 1996 and July 1997. Observations were done in Chinese restaurants mainly in metropolitan Sydney. I also interviewed immigrant families from Hong Kong. most of whom arrived after 1990, and took part in their family activities. Hong Kong style Cantonese dotted with English remained the lingua franca throughout fieldwork.