When you are wandering on Sai Yeung Choi Street South near
the St Valentine’s Day, you look up and discover that there is a big screen and
you find a lot of messages like these,
Maggie,
I
love you forever!
John
Ah Sze,
Without
you,
What
is the meaning of living in the world?
Ah
Ming
Honey,
I
will cook for you in the whole life!
Darling
Maggie,
If
equal affection cannot be,
Let
the more loving one be me!
Silly
Michael
Timothy,
Although
you are so cruel to me,
I
will wait for you for my whole life!
Rachel
When different people see the mentioned messages, they will
have different feeling. If you are Maggie whom John is writing to, you may feel
so touching although most of my friends and I would not be happy if we were
Maggie. Perhaps you may be curious that whether John and Silly Michael are
writing to the same Maggie. If you have two friends called Rachel and Timothy,
you would probably phone to Rachel to ask whether she has bought such a period
to say something to Timothy. If your girlfriend is called Ah Sze and you have a
friend called Ah Ming, you would probably be thinking that whether your friend
wants to court your girl. If you have broken up with your sweetheart recently,
most likely you would say “Shit!” to the messages.
Yet, why would we have these kinds of feeling towards the
messages shown on the big screen? Generally speaking, most of us believe that
the street of a city is a public space and love is to a certain extent private.
When I see somebody saying “I love you” to Maggie through a big screen, this
boundary is already blurred. Or should I say that in a contemporary city like
Hong Kong, there is even no such binary boundary. When you see Ah Ming saying
something to Ah Sze, you would relate the “public” to your “private” life that
your girlfriend is called Ah Sze. In such case, the so-called “public” and
“private” are interacting with each other in the context of a city space. Or
shall we speak in another method that we are struggling some “private” space in
a “public” space? Or we are just pretending we can keep our “privacy” in a
“public” city space because the whole city is filled with “strangers”?
Love is an interesting text. Love is assumed to be “private”.
Yet the lover’s discourse is always “public” because of the shared code and
shared experience in the city. In this sense, showing your love to your
sweetheart or not sweetheart in the city space is actually really “public” in
the context that we are using “public” lover’s discourse in a “public space” although
we always pretend that it is not so public. I remember that when I wanted to
kiss my ex-girlfriend on the street, she would pull me to somewhere darker. Did
she really believe that nobody could see? Or did she pretend that less people
would see if we were kissing in a darker place? Or were we actually a kind of
show off? How “private” were our kissing?
Maggie, I love you forever! Who is Maggie? A singular
particular person? Or just a shared code in the city?
February
16, 2005