Issues surrounding childhood and portrayals of children repeatedly appeared in Hong Kong cinema during the early 1950s, in both the Cantonese and Mandarin film industries. They served as a metaphor for a changing, migratory society. In order to understand this metaphor more fully before examining individual films, it is first necessary to outline the cultural and political mechanisms associated with the establishment of the metropolis’s borders and the administrative division of territories. These processes had a significant impact upon perceptions of community in Hong Kong.
This context is particularly important because The Kid contains the motif of leaving Hong Kong and symbolically returning to China: a movement across a border that, at the time the film was made, was only beginning to acquire a new political, social and emotional significance.
Hong Kong’s Borders
The demarcation of the colony’s border was connected with the beginning of the Cold War in the region and its intensification in 1949 following the establishment of Communist China. The conflict was both a result and a cause of changing relations between China, Britain and the United States. The fluctuations in those relations, in turn, affected cultural and social antagonisms among Hong Kong’s inhabitants.
Earlier, during the initial phase of the British colony’s existence, the movement of people and goods had essentially been unrestricted. For the authorities, utilitarian and pragmatic considerations were more important than territorial or national ones. Hong Kong’s coloniality was therefore more ambiguous than that of other British colonies. Although the Treaty of Nanking in 1842 separated the city from the state of which it had previously formed a part, commercial considerations required contacts between the colony and China to remain open and unobstructed.
The British Foreign Secretary at the time, Lord Palmerston, openly stated that this ‘barren rock’ was the best location for a port facilitating trade between China and foreign countries. Consequently, until the 1950s the movement of people and goods between China and Hong Kong remained largely unrestricted. In this context, Danny Weng-kit Chan, a scholar of Hong Kong Studies, observes that Hong Kong possessed a deeply rooted separation between commerce and conceptions of the homeland. As long as commercial activity and access to resources remained undisturbed, geopolitical ambiguity could persist unchanged for a considerable period of time.
The situation changed after the Second World War with the mass influx of migrants and refugees from mainland China. This brought Hong Kong’s population to unprecedented levels, placed pressure upon the everyday lives of its existing inhabitants, reduced the resources available to individual residents and eventually led to the introduction of border controls between Hong Kong and China during the 1950s.
China’s new Communist authorities responded by implementing border controls of their own, which resulted in a wave of illegal migration that continued until the 1980 abolition of the Touch Base Policy.
All this consolidated Hong Kong’s borders, removing the ambiguity that had previously characterised the colony. In other words, ethnically, linguistically and culturally Hong Kong remained part of China, but formally it was separated from it and administered by Britain. During the 1950s, Hong Kong’s border was jointly sealed by the British colonial authorities and the Communist government of China. It was at this point that Hong Kong became a colony in the fullest sense of the term.
This also transformed the character of the colony as an important port. With the demarcation of borders, changes of government and the intensification of the Cold War, the flow of goods ceased to be unrestricted and instead became dependent upon the actions of China, Britain and the United States. Hong Kong effectively became a passive participant in this rivalry while simultaneously serving as the site of its own internal conflicts and contradictions.
According to David Faure, the colony found itself in the gap between the ‘big Cold War’ and the ‘small Cold War’. Rivalries between the left and right continued within its territory, producing a condition sometimes described as a ‘periphery on the periphery of the Cold War’.
Hong Kong was also characterised by an ambiguous conception of statehood and nationhood. On the one hand, its inhabitants continued to express their ‘Chineseness’ through ethnic origins and cultural practices. On the other, these practices were not directly connected with the forms and content of the colony’s cultural production.
As a result, Hong Kong’s cultural imagination remained remarkably free and unconstrained. According to Danny Weng-kit Chan, the absence of integration or homogenisation based upon nationalism meant that balancing and coordination became the colony’s only viable political and cultural strategies.
Communists and supporters of the Kuomintang competed with one another on virtually every level, yet Hong Kong remained a space of mutual borrowing and coordination, revealing considerable cultural and economic creativity. In other words, the border separating China from Hong Kong, or communism from capitalism, did not prevent ideologies from permeating one another, but at the same time did not allow Hong Kong to be transformed into a homogeneous space. This provided the colony with diversity and openness.
Historian Wang Gungwu wrote in this context:
‘Chinese people from different regions and backgrounds could pursue in Hong Kong the aims that had brought them south. In addition to industrial and commercial activities, politics and ideology, these also included the development of local communities, spiritual civilisation, culture and the arts. In fact, the city fostered a sense of Chinese identity that did not have to be subordinated to an established conception of the state.’
The demarcation of the border pushed Hong Kong towards a process of cultural reconstruction whose influence remains visible to this day. The creation of clearly defined borders contributed to the emergence of a sense of community.
Geography played an important role in its formation. Although the territory was a British colony, it was situated far from Britain, while neighbouring China and sharing cultural practices with it. This position allowed a new form of Chineseness to begin germinating in Hong Kong, one that would fully blossom during the 1970s.
The conception of childhood present in films from the early 1950s reflected Hong Kong’s struggles with colonialism and the problems of community.
Childhood on Screen
Danny Weng-kit Chan writes that child characters in cinema constructed an imagined community within a complex society, encompassing reflection upon and questioning of both home and homeland. He also points out that children constitute a group with little social power, particularly when they are the children of migrants and refugees. This allowed them to express ideas of and longing for a homeland. At the same time, by growing up within a colonial system, they could embody a critique of colonial society.
The colony’s commercially driven history meant that ambiguity regarding national and political belonging was deeply rooted within society. Consequently, after the establishment of the border between China and Hong Kong, class divisions between refugees and local inhabitants, and between the poor and wealthy, came to the surface.
Children were therefore used to depict experiences that contributed to a sense of community, but also poverty, hunger and exclusion, thereby providing a critique of the colony’s culture and politics.
Unlike the classical Western model of the coming-of-age narrative, which frequently emphasises the protagonist’s individualisation, Hong Kong films about childhood in the early 1950s concentrated primarily upon questions of coloniality and national identity. In films such as The Kid, growing up is primarily subordinated to class divisions.
In the West, the coming-of-age process is a site where the past collides with the future; in Hong Kong, it is a collision between the present and the past. Childhood—particularly under the conditions of the Cold War during the 1950s—frequently became a point of departure for exploring ideas of community while simultaneously criticising or challenging them.
It questioned politics, ethnicity, identities and other forms of belonging. It also exposed the sources of social injustice and searched for hope of providing children with a better existence—and consequently for the maturation of society itself and its political system.
The Kid – Information and Preliminary Discussion
The Kid
Alternative titles: Kid Cheung, My Son A-Chang
(Xì lù xiáng)
Director: Fung Fung
Screenplay: Tso Kea
Cinematography: Yuen Tsang-sam
Music: no info
Asst. director: no info
Studio: Datong Film Company
Premiere: 31.05.1950
Cast: Bruce Lee, Yee Chau-shui, Lee Hoi-chuen, Fung Fung, Yuen Po-wan, Fung So-bor and others.
The Kid is an adaptation of Yuen Po-wan’s popular comic strip. Yuen also appeared in the film as Sha Chen-Chiu, the factory owner’s son who covets his father’s fortune. The production therefore emerged at the intersection of several elements of contemporary Hong Kong popular culture: comics and cinema, as well as the popular genres of social melodrama and urban satire.
Yuen’s comic was widely read in the colony at the time and, according to 100 Must-See Hong Kong Movies, a booklet published by the Hong Kong Film Archive, The Kid is a faithful adaptation, particularly in its social dimension: its criticism of the wealthy and its sympathy towards workers and the poor.
The film’s protagonist is an orphaned boy named Cheung (Bruce Lee), who lives with his uncle Ho (Yee Chau-Shui) and Ho’s two children. One day, the boy inadvertently helps the gangster Flying Knife Lee (Fung Fung, who also directed the film). Fascinated by the criminal’s charisma and street code, he soon begins to dream of joining the gang himself.
In stark contrast to the world of slums and poverty stands the hypocritical world of the wealthy, represented primarily by factory owner Hung Pak-Ho (Lee Hoi-Chuen, Bruce Lee’s father).
Before the war, Fung Fung had been a popular actor in Cantonese cinema. He was born in Guangdong in 1916 and moved to the colony in 1930. He worked for, among others, the Lianhua and Grandview studios. After the war, he returned to acting, and in 1950 made his directorial debut with Miss Lau and the Arrogant Chiu, another adaptation of a comic by Yuen Po-Wan.
Outside Hong Kong, The Kid is known primarily because it features Bruce Lee in his first leading role. For this reason, it is one of the few Hong Kong films about childhood from the early 1950s that remains relatively widely available internationally.
As a child actor, Lee appears remarkably charismatic and energetic. He began appearing in Cantonese films in 1948, but achieved greater recognition through his roles in The Kid and In the Face of Demolition (1953). The Kid was also his first film in which he appeared alongside his father.
Among the remaining cast members, Yee Chau-Shui and Fung So-Bor are particularly worthy of attention. Yee was an important comedian and actor within the Cantonese entertainment industry. Fung So-Bor, meanwhile, was director Fung Fung’s daughter and made her debut in the film under discussion.
She was not given a large role, but appears extremely natural on screen. Hong Kong cinema audiences were very fond of child stars, which was one of the factors that contributed to her subsequent popularity. So-Bor did not, however, achieve the same degree of success as her younger sister, Fung Bo-Bo, who became one of the biggest child stars of Hong Kong cinema during the 1960s.
The Kid was made during an extremely prolific period for the Cantonese film industry. At the time, its dominant forms included wuxia shenguai, wenyi pian, comedies, adaptations of popular novels and the so-called airwave novels.
Fung’s film belongs to a category combining adaptation—in this case of a comic—with social drama and comedy. It is therefore entirely different from the prestigious Mandarin superproduction Sorrows of the Forbidden City (1948), discussed earlier, as well as from Cantonese martial-arts films about Wong Fei-Hung.
The Kid is thoroughly local and urban, rooted in the contemporary slums and focused upon immediate social problems. As such, it is highly representative of the realist strand of contemporary Cantonese cinema.
Its important status is confirmed by its inclusion in the 100 Must-See Hong Kong Movies programme, as well as by its repeated screenings in various programmes devoted to the history of Hong Kong cinema and the careers of Bruce Lee and Fung So-Bor.
The Kid – A Brief Analysis
The film begins with a prologue declaring:
‘From the same piece of steel, one can make a weapon of war that will destroy the world, but one can also build a machine that serves production and benefits humanity.’
This immediately establishes opposing moral positions and class divisions.
Cheung Chai is an orphan raised by his uncle Ho, who also supports two children of his own. As a teacher, he earns very little, leaving the entire family in difficult circumstances. Ho—also through his profession—expresses the conviction that education alone is capable of overcoming class divisions and, on a broader level, the restrictions of colonial society.
The film is hardly subtle in its depiction of these divisions, which manifest themselves at almost every turn. Because of his poverty and refugee status, Cheung is mocked and bullied by his classmates at school, eventually causing him to abandon his education.
He subsequently wanders the streets and earns money by looking after a comic-book stall. The streets of Hong Kong become, for both him and the viewer, a space in which different social classes intersect and new experiences are acquired.
An important character in the film is Hung Pak-Ho, the owner of a local factory. Although he initially promises to help the community by establishing a free school, he is in reality a calculating and cruel man who desires publicity and recognition.
For the sake of self-promotion, he visits the poor neighbourhood in which Cheung lives. There, he is robbed by Flying Knife Lee and his associates, who form a local gang. Cheung witnesses the incident and helps Lee evade the police. Eventually, he joins the gang himself and begins supporting himself through robbery and extortion.
Among the objects stolen by Lee is a gold necklace belonging to Hung’s daughter, So Mui. Uncle Ho decides to help recover the jewellery, which possesses sentimental value for Mui.
From this point onwards, the moral and class distinctions begin to blur. Flying Knife is a thief, but his actions stem from social injustice, extreme poverty and a desire to help other impoverished residents.
After Ho recovers the necklace, Hung—under his daughter’s influence—employs him as So Mui’s private tutor and as his household secretary. This, in turn, allows the film to develop its portrait of Hung.
He proves to be a greedy and heartless capitalist hiding behind the mask of a philanthropist. Ho’s employment is far from easy: Hung barely pays him, forces him to work at night as well, and Hung’s wife continually harasses him.
Ho nevertheless manages to find employment for Cheung at the factory. Through the child’s perspective, viewers are consequently introduced to the workers’ difficult circumstances. Among them is the employee Lui Wai, who is harassed and sexually molested by Hung’s son.
The Kid uncompromisingly presents the upper classes, particularly the wealthy, as a morally corrupt milieu that exploits the poor both physically—including a strong suggestion of the rape of women—and psychologically.
After witnessing all these injustices, Cheung ultimately decides to become Flying Knife’s disciple and fight against class oppression.
The production presents a pattern that will also appear in other films from the 1950s discussed in the Panorama of Hong Kong and Taiwanese Cinema. Living in metropolitan Hong Kong, Cheung crosses numerous social boundaries. In the streets, at school and in the factory, he witnesses class divisions as well as economic, social and moral problems.
Moreover, there is little indication that the colony makes any significant distinction between its treatment of children and adults; class hierarchies are more important than any other consideration.
The differences and conflicts that Cheung confronts or witnesses appear to have no solution. Although The Kid resolves some of its narrative threads happily, Ho and Cheung are ultimately forced to leave Hong Kong and return to China.
This ending is interesting for several reasons.
Firstly, it reverses the endings found in Mandarin cinema, particularly during the second half of the 1950s, which depict movement in the opposite direction: from China to Hong Kong. Cantonese cinema, meanwhile, returned more frequently to older, traditional values.
Secondly, this form of representation is the opposite of the classical portrayal of childhood, or even of progress itself, in which the future is expected to be better than the present and the past. In The Kid, hope—connected with growing up—is sought in the past, through a return to one’s roots.
The characters do not, however, return to the real China, but to an imagined, idealised vision of it.
Thirdly, the film’s representation of ‘China’ is itself interesting. It consists of rural spaces stretching towards the horizon with remarkably few dwellings. These are presented in a long shot that makes them appear simultaneously close to and distant from the characters positioned at the centre of the frame.
At this point, it is worth recalling the stereotypical perception of Hong Kong prevalent in contemporary China, which described the metropolis as a ‘cultural desert’: a place that had experienced no form of cultural renewal comparable, for example, to the May Fourth Movement in pre-war China.
The Kid appears to reflect this perception and, indeed, goes even further, containing the pessimistic observation that even contemporary Hong Kong is not following a path that offers any hope of escaping its social and cultural problems.
The colony’s class system is presented as impossible to overcome, hence the film’s clearly expressed desire to move towards an imagined and idealised (Chinese) past. Only leaving Hong Kong appears to constitute movement towards liberation.
To summarise, in Hong Kong cinema—as in its literature—the subject of childhood provided a pretext for depicting the social environment. The process of growing up was directly connected with poverty, overcrowding, housing conditions, interpersonal relationships, employment, education and so forth.
Film protagonists were forced to confront enormous adversity and were frequently alone in doing so.
As Danny Weng-kit Chan observes:
‘The individualistic subjectivity valued in the Western coming-of-age novel—manifested, for instance, in resisting social norms through one’s own strength or transforming the process of growing up into a transcendental life experience—rarely appears in either Hong Kong films or literary works of the 1950s. […] The central question of Hong Kong’s imaginings of childhood instead became how to confront the inevitable devastation caused by class hierarchy.’
The Kid – Personal Impressions
To conclude my discussion of the film, I would like to switch very briefly into review mode.
Despite addressing important problems and occupying a significant place within Cantonese cinema, The Kid unfortunately suffers from several substantial weaknesses. The greatest of these is its extremely black-and-white moral division, which frequently makes the film feel like a naive and simplistic morality play.
As a production made on a small budget, it also possesses relatively limited sets that never allow us to forget that we are watching studio spaces. The film acquires greater significance for the viewer only if they are able to appreciate its social contexts and its importance within the history of Cantonese cinema.
For viewers uninterested in the history of Hong Kong cinema or the development of Bruce Lee’s career, The Kid may therefore appear excessively simple and moralising.
Given the appropriate introduction, however, it reveals a considerably more interesting side. As a film about a child forced to move between school, the streets, the factory and a gang, it becomes one of the more vivid records of how early-1950s Cantonese cinema attempted to describe the social tensions of post-war Hong Kong.
In preparing this text I used the following source:
Danny Weng-kit Chan, 冷戰的寓言：邊界、童年與五十年代初香港電影 [Allegories of the Cold War: Borders, Childhood and Hong Kong Cinema in the Early 1950s], in 文化研究季刊 (Cultural Studies Quarterly), no. 163, Cultural Studies Association, Taiwan, pp. 30–50.
Translation of the Poster Text
At the top of the poster:
The cult comic strip from Hong Kong’s leading newspapers comes to the silver screen!
Below the title are details concerning the filmmakers and actors. Further down, two promotional slogans are written vertically:
- In the North there is Sanmao; in the South there is Sai Lo Cheung!
- Both are people afflicted by the same bitter fate; please extend to them a hand of compassion.
Sanmao is an iconic character from Zhang Leping’s Shanghai comic strips: a homeless orphan with three hairs on his head, who became a symbol of the suffering and survival of China’s working class.
The second slogan contains the phrase 同是淪落人 (tóng shì lúnluò rén), an allusion to Bai Juyi’s famous Tang-dynasty poem Pipa Xing (Song of the Pipa), which contains the celebrated line:
We are both wanderers at the ends of the earth.
The use of this phrase was intended to evoke a powerful sense of empathy among viewers towards the widespread poverty and the plight of street children in post-war Hong Kong.
