Paper short abstract:

How have Japanese war orphans remaining in Mainland China been represented in terms of their mobility across East Asia? How is their subjectivity shown in the film Song of Exile? And how do these orphans fit into the postcolonial discourse between China and Japan, and between Hong Kong and Britain?

Paper long abstract:

Thousands of Japanese war orphans were left behind in northeastern China (formerly a Japanese colony known as "Manchukuo") during the massive repatriation effort in 1945. De-imperialization and decolonization led to the geographical reconfiguration of Japan’s former colonies and mainland Japan after war’s end. But while the existence of these orphans has received attention, scholarship has tended to overlook the more subtle phenomenon of diasporas and displacement of certain Japanese war orphans throughout East Asia (and beyond). The semi-autobiographical film Song of Exile (1990), made by Ann Hui, acclaimed director of the Hong Kong New Wave, is a timely yet understudied intervention in this issue. In the wake of globalization, Chen Guangxing has proposed "Asia as Method" (2010), which aims to sort out local and trans-regional movements in Asia and to pursue decolonization as well as de-imperialization efforts stalled by the Cold War. Based on Chen's theory, Zhang Zhen reexamines the film archives of the Asian region and presents the concept of the "orphan imagination" (2022), which reorients the colonial "Orphan of Asia" in Wu Zhuoliu's novel to a geocultural Asian orphan consciousness in the context of post-colonialism and the Cold War.

In this paper, I argue that Song of Exile is also a vital film to include in this Asian orphan consciousness. I explore how the film's protagonist, based on the mixed Chinese and Japanese director herself, creates a trans-Asia narrative arising from her own movement between Hong Kong, Japan, mainland China and the UK, and how the film uses her story to discuss decolonization at the point when the Cold War had just ended. The characters' search for their homeland is also a process of losing it: the protagonist with her imaginary homeland, "Manchuria" (now Northeast China), and the mother with Japan, as well as the characters' gradual shift from a relatively stable identity to a wandering sense of orphanhood. Ann Hui successfully incorporates a sense of displacement and a nuanced view of orphanhood, showing her concern for marginalized minority groups and creating more visual space for the "orphans" in society though this autobiographical film.