LGBTQ History — A Summer’s End - Hong Kong 1986 | 《夏天的一天》

When we began our project, we worried about the authenticity of the story’s premise. We wanted to create a lesbian love story set in Hong Kong in the 1980s. We did not want our story to be anachronistic. We wanted it to be a believable and realistic love story. We had to do our research.

Historical accounts of lesbian love in Chinese culture were few and hard to find. However, we cannot take the absence of evidence as an absence its existence. Rather, it is more likely that such accounts had been ignored or overlooked. We have to understand that written record is generally skewed to the biases and prejudices of those chronicling history and their understanding of culture and society.

Southern China was a particular area with rich history. In one district of Guangdong, starting in the late Ming dynasty and early Qing dynasty the flourishing silk industry provided the opportunity for Shun Tak women to live independently outside of patrilineal society and traditional family structures. At the time, the silk industry was primarily a women dominated industry. Women could refuse marriage and instead work in silk factories to support themselves. These women were called “self-combing women (自梳女).” It was a cultural custom where a woman would refuse marriage, swearing (heterosexual) celibacy. Some of these self-combing women lived in communes, pooling their resources for social outings, retirement, and would even adopt daughters from poorer households. There are articles suggesting that some of the relationships between these women were romantic and sexual. Following the collapse of the silk industry in the 1920s, many of these self-combing women went to Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Singapore to find work as domestic servants. Self-combing women cannot be described in an exclusively lesbian context. Rather, they were women who wished to live outside traditional family structures. Sexuality was another part of it.

It is not entirely presumptive to say that Chinese culture is conservative. Sexuality was a private matter. It was not something to be discussed openly out of politeness. Though attitudes towards women’s independence may have been progressive for its time for a certain group of people, it is not as if such progressive attitudes extended to every region of Southern China and to the topic of LGBT rights. Following colonial British law, homosexual activity was a crime in Hong Kong until it was decriminalized in 1991. The topic of same-sex marriage is still considered a controversial subject in Hong Kong. Public attitude remains overall ambivalent in legalizing same-sex marriage and improving LGBT conditions. Hong Kong media, while frank in subject matter and sexual ambiguity, there exists a cognitive dissonance with how gender norms and sexuality is understood and depicted in the media. Stars such as Anita Mui, Leslie Cheung, and Brigitte Lin had played gender and sexually ambiguous roles in film e.g. Swordsman, Peking Opera Blues, He’s the Woman, She’s a Man, and Farewell My Concubine. Stanley Kwan’s Yang ± Yin: Gender in Chinese Cinema is an interesting documentary that explores this subject in depth.

It is entirely possible that many queer women in Southern China (and the entire world) lived quiet but beautifully fulfilled lives. And likely the inverse was true in that there were as many cases where societal pressures and discrimination caused tragedy and suffering for LGBT people. What we wish to do with A Summer’s End is to acknowledge and contribute a little bit to this heritage and history.