"I wish you a good harvest" can only be "I wish you a good harvest".
In the classic fox spirit stories we have seen, the fox spirits as the main characters often maintain a relative ambiguity, and it is this relative ambiguity that makes their roles deeply rooted in the hearts of the people. They seem to be unfettered outside the social order, but they are quite vulnerable to the real sanctions who represent the order. Many stories can confirm this point of view. For example , the girl of the fox demon in "Yingning" is innocent and loves to laugh, but she has to succumb to the social order after the defendant is sent to the government . In "Guang Yi Ji", the fox girl marries He Lanjin In Ming's family, he tried every means to win the favor of his family, but he was beaten to death in the end . On the other hand, fox spirits are also relatively less destructive among spirits, and even the "destruction" caused by them has been questioned today: "What is charm?" However, such a role is mostly placed in one In such a sinful situation, only a few can become a good story.
Let's go back to the formation of this image, the early fox spirit stories can hardly be separated from the concept of order, generally in the form of fox spirits appearing - social order is broken - fox spirits are eliminated - social order is restored. This kind of structure, here, the appearance of fox spirits directly indicates a group that is not accepted by society, they have not left their own history, but they appear in the history of others all the time. They are a group that has not had its own history, or a group that has been deprived of its own history. Such a group has different names under the pen of different researchers. Mary Douglas regards them as "marge" (Marge) , James C. Scott wanted to unearth a "Infropolitics" among them, and based solely on their research the Subaltern Study was formed . In cultural studies, the story of the fox spirit is not only related to folklore and gods and monsters, but also a history written by its creator and its prototype. And these histories clearly point to their archetypes, producing a kind of intertextuality.
Marginalized communities, refugees, barbarians, and prostitutes, in the past were often regarded as dirty, filthy, and criminal groups. As the governed rather than the governors, they were sometimes the creators of fox spirit stories. Sometimes it's the background of the story. The refugees endowed the fox spirit with a metaphor of chaos, danger, and turmoil, and the heterogeneity of the barbarians was transferred to the fox spirit, not to mention prostitutes . Prostitutes and vixen became synonymous . From this aspect, we can cut into the relationship between Liang's father and Yan's mother in the story. Is the battle between the ghost exorcist and the fox really out of a sense of justice? In fact, it is just a hopeless pursuit of each other by marginal groups. From this point of view, the ghost exorcists actually have more in common with the fox spirits than their employers, the big businessmen. In fact, this aspect can also be further confirmed from the composition of the creators of the historical ghost stories. The fact that Yan and Liang came together would not be particularly abrupt.
If the transformation that Liang later witnessed was a mechanical and social transformation, the transformation that occurred in him and Yan was a more profound transformation. In pre-modern, or villages where magic did exist, ghost exorcists and fox spirits were at least partially able to find their place, not completely uninvolved, but the advent of change and modernity made them at least for a while Become a partless person, in other words, stripped from the identity of the governed. During this time, the exorcist no longer has ghosts to remove, and the fox spirit no longer has the mana that can change and jump. It was not until later that they were forced to be proletarianized, Liang became a mechanic, and Yan was forced to sell her femininity and return to the system of order and governance. This is just a kind of reverie: modernity makes the gods and monsters fade out and strip off from social life, and at the same time brings about the exit of the professions related to gods and monsters . Disappeared together, and the railroad destroying dragon veins and mana is just one metaphor.
In Hong Kong in the second half of the story, although the imagination of creating fox spirits has died down in soot, airships and automata, the underlying politics still exists. Hong Kong has always been a focal point for literary and artistic creation, where colonial scenarios, modernity issues and identities intersect. Hong Kong in "Good Harvest" almost strips away its hybridity, reducing the story to the binary opposition between Liang and Yan and the British colonists, while placing the modernity scene in it. Although silk punk Hong Kong and dualistic Hong Kong lack the charm of real Hong Kong, they are also an excellent stage. Here, Yan's body is rudely replaced by machinery. Behind the prostheticization, the same question is raised: "Who am I?" , so she was forced to ask "Who am I?" , and the problem Yan faced was that the body she relied on was deprived and forced to give, and she also encountered such confusion and confusion. However, the imagination of the resisting subject has not been cut off, and modernity has even gained new wings for this. Politics from the bottom and the colonized gave birth to new imaginations, thus shaping the imagination of the resisters. rebels.
The imagination of the rebels is inherited from the imagination of the past, and this imagination is the kind of attachment that drives us. To say that this imagination is false, an illusion wrapped in zero-degree technology, is a big mistake, because all the past exists in the imagination. If we want to truly declare ourselves to be the producer of modernity, it is always unavoidable to link our own memory with our "then". If there is really any difference, it is that this "then" will always Not a past in the historical sense, but a past that we set up to advertise a different past than today.
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