As argued by Tony Kushner, in writing the history of refugees we must ensure that refugee voices are not silenced. In the words of Liisa Malkki: ‘in universalizing particular displaced people into ‘refugees’ – in abstracting their predicaments from specific political, historical, cultural contexts – humanitarian practices tend to silence refugees’. In bringing refugee voices to the fore, it is important to recognise that the experience of refugees and representations of them, whether in the media, books or in museums, often have very little in common. By virtue of their temporariness or statelessness, refugees are often marginal figures who rarely shape dominant images of them.[1] Refugee identities are constantly constructed and re-constructed, labelled and re-labelled. Wildly oscillating portrayals of refugees in the media flip flop between the imagery of Angels and Devils – of those ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ of aid – narratives that continue today in the United Kingdom, especially in light of the draconian measures to deport refugees to Rwanda.
With regards to Hong Kong – its ambivalent relationship with refugees has been obscured by the city’s portrayal as a place of ‘welcome’, a representation that has been extended to other refugee groups, particularly Vietnamese refugees who arrived in the 1970s and 80s and were known as ‘boat people’. Such representations ignore the public attitudes of the time which were often hostile to refugees. Vietnamese refugees were viewed unsympathetically as economic migrants prone to communal in-fighting in the cramped detention centres in which they were detained.
For more information on the history of Vietnamese refugees in Hong Kong, read this article in Zolima City magazine.
[1] Kushner, Tony, Remembering Refugees, 1 – 2
A Borrowed Place 