Fractured and Paradoxical — Reading Colonial Hong Kong Identity Through “The World of Suzie Wong”
Abstract
This paper explores Hong Kong identity during colonialism by applying Homi Bhabha’s postcolonial theories to Richard Mason’s novel “The World of Suzie Wong.” The main character, Suzie, is reduced to a fixed stereotype who satisfies the Occident's craving for familiar yet subservient difference by using Baha's fixity, stereotype, and mimicry as the investigative lens. Suzie becomes a metonymic fragment that represents Hong Kong identity as reducible and consumable, with the highly sexualized and infantilized caricature serving as a fetish for the Occidental ego. Then, in order to avoid losing conditional acceptance and protection, she is forced to conform to Western ideals of domesticity through imitation. However, experienced reality brings conflicts and instability that are incompatible with Orientalist ideals, therefore the fanciful Orientalist vision is short-lived. Suzie falls into splitting and ambivalence when she can't live up to the oxymoronic binaries that the Occident expects. Such structural instability attests to how the imposed identity of Hong Kong under colonial rule is neither unified nor sustainable, revealing colonial identity formation as a fragile construct that collapses under lived experience rather than an authentic or viable mode of selfhood.
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