Verbal hygiene in the Hong Kong gay community

World Englishes, Vol. 32, No. 1, pp. 75–92, 2013. 0883-2919

Verbal hygiene in the Hong Kong gay community

RODNEY H. JONES∗

ABSTRACT: This paper explores the status and function of English among gay men in Hong Kongthrough the analysis of postings about English on a popular gay internet forum. The forum, gayhk.com, whilemainly featuring discussions about sex, fashion, entertainment and relationships, also contains a surprisingamount of discussion about the English language, mostly taking the form of what Cameron refers to as‘verbal hygiene’ – the enforcement of language ‘standards’ through the criticism of the language use ofparticular individuals or groups. The analysis of these postings sees them not just as evidence of languageattitudes within the gay community, but also as tools with which Chinese gay men in postcolonial HongKong position themselves in relation to one another, in relation to ‘foreign’ gay men, and in relation to thewider population of Hong Kong.

INTRODUCTION

Gayhk.com is one of the most popular gay websites in Hong Kong, attracting hundreds ofusers per day to its chat rooms, its online dating ads, and its discussion board, which isprovocatively called ‘Toilet Wall.’ The discussion board is in many ways not so differentfrom similar internet forums all over the world, providing users with a place to meetfriends, swap pornographic pictures, and discuss things like politics, fashion and sex.What makes this forum slightly different is that is also serves as a platform for users todiscuss the unlikely topic of English grammar. Sometimes these discussions take the formof participants correcting each other’s grammatical errors:

Information, not information(s) new generation should know proper english grammar (Toilet WallMarch 1, 2005))

Sometimes it takes the form of vicious criticism of each other’s language proficiency:

�� d��,��???��?? ��d�� d��!(When I read your English. I am skeptical about your proficiency in Chinese, English and French. Whatis your level? Form 1? A primary pupil wouldn’t write this kind of English.) (Toilet Wall January 18,2009)

And sometimes it takes the form of complaints about the standard of English in HongKong in general:

∗City University of Hong Kong; Dept of English, Tat Chee Avenue, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong. E-mail: [email protected]

C© 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

76 Rodney H. Jones

��(��)��,��1��(In Hong Kong, we speak Cantonese mixed with incorrectly pronounced English words. We can’tcommunicate effectively in English. If you ask a Hong Kong person to write an English letter, there willbe a mistake in every sentence.) (Toilet Wall August 1, 2005)

This paper takes this phenomenon as the starting point for an exploration of the role of theEnglish language in the articulation of gay identity in postcolonial Hong Kong. It will focusnot just on gay men’s attitudes towards English, but also on the function of metalinguisticdiscourse – talk about English – in the negotiation of status within the gay community and inconstructing community identity in relation to the larger society. Discourse about languagestandards and linguistic correctness, as Milroy and Milroy (1999), point out, can havewide ranging consequences for individuals and groups, often resulting in stigmatizationand economic and social discrimination. Metalinguistic discourse is almost always aboutmore than just language. It often has an ideological dimension, reflecting broader notionsabout what is right and wrong, normal and abnormal, moral and immoral, and reflectingunderlying power relations in a society. It also often has an identity dimension, functioningas a way for people to claim and impute membership in different social groups and tostrategically position themselves in interactions (Jaworski, Coupland and Galasinski 1998;Silverstein 1992).

From a broader perspective, concerns about linguistic correctness are part of what havecome to be called ‘language ideologies’ (Silverstein 1979; Woolard 1992; Woolard andSchieffelin 1994), the systematic ways in which language use is invested with political,economic, social or moral significance. The focus of those concerned with languageideologies is on how certain languages, language varieties, linguistic styles, and evenparticular words or phrases come to index larger systems of belief (Silverstein 2003),values and power relationships. As Woolard and Schieffelin (1994: 55–6) put it:

Ideologies of language are significant for social as well as linguistic analysis because they are not onlyabout language. Rather, such ideologies envision and enact links of language to group and personalidentity, to aesthetics, to morality, and to epistemology.

There has been particular interest in language ideologies in colonial and postcolonialsocieties, where metalinguistic discourse often becomes a covert means of working throughissues of power, race, cultural identity, and the historical burdens of colonialism. Numerousscholars have focused both on how notions of language standards and linguistic correctnesshave been used as a means of defining and controlling colonial subjects, and on howthe non-standard linguistic practices of those subjects sometimes serve to challenge theideological and political dominance of colonizers (see for example Fabian 1986; Silverstein1992). Individuals in such contexts, however, often use metalinguistic discourse in morenuanced and strategic ways to, for example, display or deny allegiance to various ethnic,cultural or political groups or advance particular political or economic agendas. In HongKong, for example, discourse about English and ‘English standards’ is often used asa rhetorical tool in public dissuasions of Hong Kong’s cultural identity and economiccompetitiveness (Lin 1997; Bolton 2002).

Metalinguistic discourse, of course, takes many different forms, from the languagelinguists invent to talk about language to ‘folk linguistic’ explanations about why certain


Verbal hygiene in the Hong Kong gay community 77

people talk differently (Niedzielski and Preston 2000). The form of metalinguistic discourseI will be primarily concerned with here is what Cameron (1995) calls verbal hygiene –discourse about the ‘correctness’ of the language spoken or written by certain individualsor groups. According to Cameron, verbal hygiene fulfills a number of important politicaland social functions for those who engage in it. First of all, it often provides an indirect wayto talk about other things like race, class and morality. Cameron and Bourne (1989), forexample, observe that, in British political discourse, ‘grammar’ is often used as a metaphorfor ‘order,’ ‘tradition,’ and ‘authority.’ Related to this is its function of demarcatingboundaries between groups, separating ‘us’ from ‘them.’ It is common to acknowledge therole of verbal hygiene in exclusion and discrimination. Cameron, however, stresses that italso plays a role in fostering inclusion, in creating in-group solidarity and helping peoplefeel like they belong to a particular community. Finally, Cameron notes that practicesof verbal hygiene are often associated with pleasure. People find it fun to nitpick aboutgrammar and to rail about falling standards, which accounts for the popularity of booksand newspaper columns dedicated to these practices.

In this paper I will focus on how in the Hong Kong gay community talk about linguisticcorrectness often serves as a subterfuge for discussions of class and ‘taste,’ how it isused to exclude or delegitimize certain people, and how it is used to distinguish thecommunity from the wider society and claim a kind of sub-cultural superiority. I willalso, examine how acts of verbal hygiene function pragmatically in specific interactionsto strategically position interlocutors both within the ‘interaction order’ (Goffman 1983)and within broader ‘moral orders’ (Davies and Harre 1990) and ‘orders of indexicality’(Silverstein 2003).

‘GAY ENGLISH’

I should emphasize that when I use the phrase ‘gay community’ I am not positing anyintrinsic relationships between linguistic behavior and sexual behavior, nor do I regard‘gayness’ as an essential characteristic of individuals or a culturally universal social cate-gory. Rather, I conceive of the ‘gay community’ as an ‘imagined community’ (Anderson1991; Jones 2007), uniquely constructed through discourse in different cultural and histor-ical contexts. In the past twenty years there has been considerable interest in what has cometo be known as ‘gay English.’ Most of the early work in this area focused on describing thesupposedly special features of the language used by gay men (see for example Chesebro1981; Leap 1996). This approach, however, has been widely criticized for its simplisticview of social identity (see for example Cameron and Kulick 2003). More recent work hasfocused less on identifying some characteristically ‘gay English’ and more on exploringthe ways gay men use language strategically to construct their identities in various socialcontexts.

Of particular interest is the growing body of work on how English is appropriated as atool for ‘being gay’ in societies in which it is not the first language. The papers in Leapand Boellstorff (2004), for example, explore the way gay men in places like France, Israel,Cuba, South Africa and Asia appropriate and transform English in strategic ways to enactresistance to local cultural norms, and the papers in the special issue of World Englishespublished in 1998 on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) language also focuson the creative ways gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgendered people use language indifferent English speaking settings around the world (see Leap 1998).


78 Rodney H. Jones

The emphasis of most of this work, however, is on hybridity and localization – phe-nomena like ‘code-mixing’ and what Provencher (2004) calls ‘gay English creole.’ Whileexamples of hybridity, such as Chinese-English code-mixing, can also be found in abun-dance in the language of Hong Kong gay men (and, indeed of Hong Kong people ingeneral), that is not what I am interested in in this paper. Rather, I will focus on the wayHong Kong gay men orient themselves not towards some localized hybrid ‘gay English,’but towards ‘standard English,’ what one poster on the internet forum I examine calls thelanguage of ‘Oxford and Cambridge publications’ (see below). It is identification withthe normative standard rather than a localized variety or sub-cultural argot, which, in thiscontext, is seen by participants as a marker of ‘gayness.’ Perhaps more relevant to thisstudy, then, is work on English language learning by gay men (see for example Nelson2009). In a study of English learning by gay Korean men, for example, King (2008) foundin his participants not just strong motivation to learn ‘good English,’ but also a beliefthat being gay made it easier for them to do so. One reason for this was that their sexualidentities gave them channels of access to native English speakers that non-gay men did nothave. At the same time, the attractiveness of the ‘Western gay lifestyle’ and the possibilityof someday traveling to or living in the West increased their motivation to learn Englishas a gateway to that lifestyle. For these men, King argues, learning English constituted aninvestment in ‘an imagined global community of gay men.’

One final strand of research which is relevant to this study is work on the role of theinternet in the emergence of gay communities, especially in places like Asia (see forexample Berry, Martin and Yue 2003, Binnie 2004, Jones 2005a). The important thingto note here is not just the role that the internet has played in the spread of ‘global gayculture’ (Altman 1996), but also the role that English has played on the internet, especiallyin its early days. In fact, Binnie observes that, while the internet has created new social andsexual opportunities for gay men in places like Asia, there remains a ‘linguistic hegemony’which limits access for many men. ‘The ability to speak English,’ he writes, ‘is a precursoror given within many online communities and thus renders these spaces exclusive’ (Binnie2004: 46). My own work on the role of the internet in the lives of Hong Kong gay men(Jones 2005a; 2005b) shows that, while Chinese language sites have proliferated in recentyears, English remains an important language online, partly because of the efficiency withwhich it can be typed in contexts such as chat rooms, partly because of the access it givesto the international community of gay men, and partly because of the cultural cachet itcarries. This last reason is particularly evident in the data I present here in which, althoughparticipants mostly use Chinese or ‘mixed code’ to communicate, their comments reveal astrong allegiance to English.

BEING GAY IN HONG KONG

During most of the colonial period male homosexuality was illegal in Hong Kong underthe Offences against the Person Ordinance. In 1991, sexual acts between consenting maleadults were decriminalized. Coming shortly after the signing of the Sino-British JointDeclaration for the transfer of sovereignty of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic ofChina in 1984, the public debate around decriminalization became a site of struggle forthe definition of what it meant to be ‘Chinese,’ with some local Chinese portraying thedecriminalization of homosexual acts as contrary to ‘traditional Chinese values.’ This



portrayal was particularity ironic given that the prohibitions against homosexual acts in theterritory had their roots in 19th century British Colonial law rather than ‘traditional Chinesevalues.’ Nevertheless, this portrayal illustrates the fact that for many Hong Kongers at thattime, being ‘gay’ was synonymous with being ‘foreign.’ Even within the gay community,the most visible and vocal members at that time were invariably expatriates. This is perhapsnot surprising since these were the members of the community who often had the leastto lose from such visibility. Chou (2000: 85) observes that at that time gay identity wasseen almost as a privilege reserved for those who spoke English. ‘The prerequisites forpassing for gay,’ he writes, ‘were that one had to possess minimum command of Englishand knowledge of Western gay culture. Those who were elderly or working class did notseem to qualify as gay.’

For gay Chinese men themselves, entry into the ‘Western gay community’ through theadoption of Western culture and finding a foreign boyfriend, often offered a means ofescape from the restrictions placed on their personal freedom by familial obligations andsocietal conservatism, and, of course, learning English was an important tool to accomplishthis. Like the Korean gay men in King’s (2009) study, English for Hong Kong gay men atthat time not only symbolized affiliation with an ‘imagined community’ of gay men, butalso constituted a practical tool with which to gain access to that community. This oftenresulted in situations of unequal power relationships in which younger, economically de-pendent Chinese men gravitated towards older, more economically privileged expatriates,reproducing colonial relations of dominance and paternalism. In my study of gay personalads in the 1990s (Jones 2000), for example, I observed that Western authors seeking Asianpartners tended to describe themselves using words denoting social, economic, or sexualdominance like ‘mature’ ‘caring,’ ‘professional,’ and ‘well-endowed,’ while Asian authorsseeking Western partners were more likely to describe themselves using words denotingdependence or passivity such as ‘slim,’ ‘young,’ and ‘boy’ (see also Kong2002).

As the 1990s progressed, gay men in Hong Kong became more and more exposed toglobal gay culture and the individualistic ideology of the global LGBT liberation move-ment. They also witnessed a proliferation of commercial venues like bars, discos andsaunas catering to their needs and interests as local businesspeople became aware of thepower of the ‘pink dollar.’ By the mid-1990s, male homosexual identity was becoming, inHo’s (1995: 87) words, ‘a more “marketable” label and product . . . associated with beingWestern, liberal, avant-garde, members of a special-minority.’ While English still played animportant role in this identity, its function was less as a tool to obtain a foreign boyfriendand more as one to increase one’s status and ‘market value’ on the increasingly trendylocal gay scene. After Hong Kong’s return to China in 1997 and into the new millennium,Hong Kong gay men began to more strongly assert their ‘Chinese’ identity, evidencedby the Tongzhi movement of the late 1990s (Chinese Tongzhi Conference 1996), whichself-consciously positioned itself as an alternative to Western models of GLBT liberation,the growth of Chinese language gay websites, and a general decline in the status previ-ously associated with having a Western boyfriend. In many ways this new ‘postcolonialsensibility’ of Hong Kong gay men drew upon postcolonial critical theory and modelsof identity politics circulating through university departments of English and Sociologystarting in the late 1990s. Central to this sensibility was a resistance to the ‘the role ofservitude . . . assigned to Asian men’ in ‘Western gay culture’ (Wat 1996:73). As one ofthe respondents in Ho and Tsang’s (2000: 307) study said:


80 Rodney H. Jones

In the old days we often came across older Westerners with young Chinese boys. Small ‘ducks’ wereseen queuing for Westerners in gay hangouts . . . Now it is less so. Chinese gay men have learned to bemore prideful. They are not as ready to play the small ducks. They are well educated. They do not haveto depend on the Westerners anymore.

The high status of English, however, has survived this postcolonial sensibility. Englishhas continued to be seen as a marker of education, sophistication and economic prosperitywithin the community. In fact, proficiency in English is also in some ways a prerequisitefor participation in the very postcolonial discourse that continues to produce critiques oflinguistic and cultural imperialism.

THE SOCIOLINGUISTICS OF ENGLISH IN HONG KONG

The growth of the gay community and the evolution of the status of English in it whichI described above occurred against the backdrop of the broader sociolinguistic situation inthe territory. Up until the 1980s most observers described a diglossic situation in whichEnglish was the official language of the government, law and education and Cantonese wasused in everyday life. Since 1990 when it became an official language along with English,the status of Cantonese has increased considerably, and since 1997, the role of Putonghua,the official language of the People’s Republic of China, has also grown. The current officialgovernment policy is to promote bi-literacy in Chinese and English, and trilingualism inEnglish, Cantonese and Putonghua. Despite the increased status of Cantonese, the mothertongue of most Hong Kong citizens, and the growing role of Putonghua, the role of Englishin Hong Kong has far from declined. According to official census reports, the number ofpeople claiming knowledge of English has grown steadily in the past half century. A recentsociolinguistic survey (Bacon-Shone and Bolton 2008) showed that whereas in 1983 only6.4 per cent of respondents claimed to speak English ‘quite well,’ ‘well’ or ‘very well,’ by2003 this number had increased to 43 per cent.

Attitudes towards English in Hong Kong have also undergone a transformation in thelast 30 years. In a study of Hong Kong secondary school students’ attitudes towardsEnglish conducted in the late 1970s, Pierson, Fu and Lee (1980) found that although mostrespondents recognized the practical value of English, they regarded it as the language of‘foreigners’ and in some respects felt uncomfortable and even ‘unpatriotic’ when speakingit. A similar study conducted in 1993 by Pennington and Yue, however, suggested thatthis had changed, with respondents reporting that using English had no negative effects ontheir sense of Chinese identity. The most recent language attitudes study in Hong Kong,conducted by Lai (2004: 470) found that not only had Putonghua not replaced English asthe major second language, but that Hong Kongers felt a certain ‘sense of ownership’ overEnglish. ‘It is rather surprising,’ she writes,

to find students expressing stronger integrative orientation toward English (the colonizers’ language)than toward Putonghua (the national language of their motherland). As revealed in this survey, the mostlikely reason is that English is always equated with high education, intelligence, and westernizationwhereas Putonghua is not.

To a large degree, knowledge of English in Hong Kong has become a ‘marker of amiddle class identity’ and upward mobility (Bolton 2003: 117). Li (2000) takes the current



status of English as evidence that Hong Kong people are not passive victims of linguisticimperialism, but rather active language pragmatists who have embraced English primarilybecause of its ‘market value.’

Along with the increase in the general status of English and the number of peopleclaiming to be able to use it, Hong Kong has also, however, witnessed what Bolton (2003)refers to as a growing ‘complaint discourse’ about ‘falling standards’ of English (see alsoLin 1997), a discourse that manifests in newspaper opinion pieces lamenting the decline inEnglish ability among students, in statements of businesspeople bemoaning the languageproficiency of their employees, in speeches by politicians expressing anxiety about HongKong’s economic competitiveness, and even, as we have seen above, in discussions betweengay men on the internet. As much as English has become a marker of ‘Hong Kong identity,’so has complaining about English standards. In many ways, then, the phenomenon of verbalhygiene among gay men that I address in this paper is a reflection of the attitudes of thewider population. At the same time, as I will argue below, the ‘discourse of complaint’about English standards plays a special role in the construction of gay identity in HongKong, functioning not just to align community values to those of the wider society, butalso to make distinctions between gay men and the rest of the population.

THE DATA

The data for this study come from the popular gay internet forum ‘Toilet Wall’ whichis part of the website Gayhk.com. This forum is pitched primarily at local users and themain language is Chinese – usually the colloquial variety of written Cantonese popularin Hong Kong. Users also occasionally post in English. Posts to the forum from the fiveyears between 1 January 2005 and 31 December 2009 were searched for occurrences ofthe word ‘English,’ its Chinese equivalent (��) along with related words like ‘gram-mar,’ ‘vocabulary,’ and ‘accent,’ and their Chinese translations. After sorting through theresults, 87 threads with clear instances of metalinguistic discourse related to English wereidentified.

Although my main concern here is not with code choice but rather with what peoplesay about English, it is useful to note the language posters used to talk about English. Ananalysis of all of the 1,005 posts in the 87 threads reveals that 18 per cent of them werewritten in English, 53 per cent were written in ‘pure’ Chinese, and 29 per cent were writtenin ‘mixed code’ consisting of Chinese with English lexis mixed in. A similar analysis of106 posts on all topics from a single day shows that 15 per cent were written in English,58 per cent were written in Chinese, and 27 per cent were written in Chinese with Englishwords mixed into it. In other words, just because posters were talking about English didnot mean they were using English much more than they normally did on the forum.

The metalinguistic discourse I found took many forms. Sometimes posters were solicit-ing or offering advice on specific points of grammar or pronunciation or on how to learnEnglish more effectively. At other times they were soliciting or offering services as Englishteachers or editors. At still other times, they engaged in more general discussions aboutEnglish dealing with issues like the difference between American and British English andwhich nationalities speak the ‘best’ English in Asia, a category which I call ‘lay linguis-tics.’ By far the most frequent form that metalinguistic discourse took in my data wasverbal hygiene – which I define as cases of posters explicitly correcting or criticizing thelinguistic performance of an individual or group. Other more minor forms of metalinguistic


82 Rodney H. Jones

Figure 1. Types of metalinguistic discourse.

discourse included things like discussions of people’s performance on public examinationsand English language cultural products like music and television shows. Sometimes morethan one form appeared in a single thread. In the excerpt below, for example, the poster’soffer of his services as a translator engenders an act of verbal hygiene from another user.

Anybody needs somebody fluent in English?It’s summer time, I’m waiting for my exam results to be sent back. I’m looking to earn a little extra cash,anyone need a person that is fluent in both Chinese and English to translate anything?——–Please consult someone who is good at English first, then re-write your advertisement (Toilet Wall June1, 2009).

Figure 1 shows the relative distribution of these different forms of metalinguistic discoursein my data by number of threads (bearing in mind that some threads contained multipleforms).

FINDINGS

The instances of verbal hygiene collected from this forum occur in a wide range ofconversational contexts from discussions about sex to requests for information. In the con-versation below, an innocent request for information about the qualifications for becominga Cathay Pacific flight attendant elicits a language lesson:

CK crew wanna be has questions——-It’s much more important to have better English, man.CK won’t hire people who can’t speak proper English.



Wanna = Want toWanna be has (Want to be has???) ??? (Toilet Wall April 7, 2006).

What is interesting about this and many other posts is that they enforce a ‘hyper-correct’version of written English, which prohibits informal slang expressions (like ‘wannabe’),even when these are quite ‘native-like.’ This is even more striking considering that thewritten Chinese that most posters use – an extremely colloquial form of written Cantonese –is never criticized. One poster, in fact, draws an explicit comparison between the kind ofEnglish and the kind of Chinese that should be used on the forum: Chinese can be ‘normal,’but English should be ‘proper.’

After all, English is not our first language. Learning and using in the proper way would be better. (Butyou will also see that when I write in Chinese I use normal Hong Kong Style Chinese) (Toilet WallNovember 22, 2006).

Many posts exhibit expressions of what Milroy and Milroy (1999: 17) call the ‘ideologyof standardization,’ the belief that the ‘standard’ variety of a language is more logical,precise, and appropriate than other varieties, regardless of the context of its use:

I always insist on writing properly even when it’s just an informal email with a friend. Every writingopportunity is a way to practice. If we slacken, our second language will only deteriorate (Toilet WallMay 29, 2009).

The two examples above not only illustrate a theory of language which separates meaningfrom context, but also a theory of language learning which is quite common in HongKong (Tsui and Bunton, 2000), the idea that mastery of formal (written) language shouldprecede mastery of other varieties, and that using informal registers threatens one’s abilityto learn ‘proper’ English. What constitutes ‘proper’ English for most of these posters is thevariety associated with ‘authoritative’ texts and exemplified in the British literary canon.One poster, giving advice on how best to learn English, puts it this way:

��,��,��,��,Oxford� Cambridge��,��,��,Charles Dickens�Jane Austen�George Orwell��

(To learn better English, the key is to read more. Read selectively. Read authoritative books. To learngrammar, read Oxford or Cambridge publications. The ordinary grammar books cannot guarantee quality.Avoid them. As for the classics, we can read Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, George Orwell.) (Toilet WallMay 11, 2006).

Along with this orientation towards the ‘standard’ English of ‘Oxford or Cambridgepublications’ is a marginalization of other ‘world Englishes’ and of those who speak them.In response to a poster advertising his services as an English teacher, for example, anotherposter writes: ‘You made some mistakes in your post, your English is horrible. You must bean Indian or a Pakistani!’ (Toilet Wall 8 June 2009). Most significantly, this marginalizationextends to Hong Kong English, which is sometimes denigrated as ‘Chinglish’:

I (this means ‘me, myself and I’) believe whenever possible, Hong Kong people should try to write inproper English. The more ‘Chinglish’ people write, the lesser chance people can improve their English.


84 Rodney H. Jones

After a while, they may accept their ‘Hong Kong Style’ English as the ‘proper’ English (Toilet WallNovember 22, 2006)

In the past thirty years there has been increasing recognition among academics of whatBolton (2002) calls the ‘autonomy and creativity’ of Hong Kong English and an increas-ing orientation by local Hong Kongers to an endonormative model of pronunciation. Intheir 1990 study of the Hong Kong accent, Bolton and Kwok cite Lethbridge’s (1980)use of the term ‘Hong Kong man’ to refer to the new class of confident local young(male) professionals that arose in Hong Kong in the 1980s. One of the most interestingfindings from Bolton and Kwok’s study was that while the vast majority of female uni-versity students they surveyed gravitated towards the prestige British accent, nearly halfof the male students chose a Hong Kong accent as their model. For these male partici-pants, ‘Hong Kong man’ should talk more like Jackie Chan or Chow Yuen-fat, not PrinceCharles.

‘Gay Hong Kong man,’ however, at least in this decade, seems less enamored of theHong Kong accent. In response to the suggestion that Hong Kongers should speak theirown variety of English just like Singaporeans, one poster writes:

��.��.��.��.��.��.��.��.��0��(Sure it’s no problem. If you want to speak in a Hong Kong style, no matter how bad it sounds, that’syour problem. You’re the one who loses face. It doesn’t affect others. It is just like appearance. If you aregood looking, you live. If you are not good looking, you still live. If I were you. I would put a better faceon things) (Toilet Wall August 9, 2007)

Just because posters do not orient towards an endonormative standard, however, doesnot mean that their view of ‘proper’ English is entirely exonormative. In fact, the Englishof ‘Caucasians,’ ‘foreigners’ and ‘native-speakers’ is almost as much a target of criticismas Hong Kong English. One poster writes, for example:

��d��Foreigner’s English is not necessarily completely accurate (Toilet Wall 25 November 2006).

Similarly, in the post below a person who advertises for a ‘GWM’ (gay white man) toteach him English is reminded that not all ‘white guys’ speak good English.

I want to learn more in my English in oral and listening. Hope to find a private tutor. Prefer GWM. Thx.—–Prefer “white dudes”? Not all while[sic] guys speak English. Even tho they do doesn’t mean they speakgood English. It’s like . . . all Asians know kung-fu (Toilet Wall August 19, 2008).

Finally, there is throughout these discussions, both implicitly and explicitly, the notion thatspeaking ‘proper’ English is an important part of enacting a ‘legitimate’ gay identity. Asone poster puts it:

��gay��(Very few gays speak poor English) (Toilet Wall August12, 2005).



And another advises:

If you want people to know you are a quality gay, you better learn good English (Toilet Wall April 3,2007).

As with many instances of verbal hygiene discussed by Cameron, the verbal hygieneon this forum is used primarily to draw group boundaries. ‘Proper’ English is a tool formaking distinctions between ‘true’ English speakers and speakers of ‘defective’ varietieslike Pakistani English. It is also used to make distinctions between the ‘masses’ of HongKongers and the ‘elite’ who follow the ‘authoritative’ grammar of Oxford and Cambridgepublications. Finally, it is a tool for distinguishing who is an ‘authentic’ or ‘quality’ gay(Jones 2007) and who is not. The kinds of distinctions drawn by the use of verbal hygieneon this site, however, while evoking ethnicity, class, education, and mortality, seem in theend to be primarily focused on the notions of ‘style,’ ‘taste,’ and ‘appearance.’ ‘Proper’English is almost never praised for its practical value – as a ticket to a better job, forexample – as it is in mainstream media in Hong Kong, but rather almost entirely for itssymbolic value, as a way to project a certain ‘image.’

This calls to mind Bourdieu’s (1984) notion of la distinction, the idea that individualsoften depict their social status and distance themselves from ‘lower’ classes throughthe expression of aesthetic dispositions. The chief tools in such strategies of distinctionare ‘symbolic goods’ like clothing, art, literature, and, of course, language. The power ofaesthetic dispositions in creating distinctions, says Bourdieu, is that they are often portrayedas somehow ‘innate’ to certain groups. From this point of view, the perception that ‘veryfew gays speak poor English’ can be seen less as a statement about the linguistic aptitudeof gay men and more as a statement about their ‘innate’ sense of ‘style,’ reinforcing thepopular link between male homosexuality and ‘taste’ promoted both in gay communitiesand in popular culture.

Verbal hygiene and ‘positioning’

Acts of verbal hygiene do not just function to claim and impute group membership andestablish distinctions between groups. They are also important interactional tools throughwhich people negotiate their status and power in conversations. Davies and Harre (1990)note that whenever we converse we position ourselves and our interlocutors as characters inthe ongoing ‘storylines’ that we produce through our interactions. These local ‘storylines’are always somehow related to broader ‘cultural storylines’ and ultimately to particularideas about the moral order of society (ideologies). When a man opens a door for a woman,for example, he is not just displaying politeness or power, but also situating himself andher in a larger cultural narrative about the relationship between men and women, and theparties involved interpret the action based on these narratives. The man, for example, mightinterpret his action within a ‘storyline’ of chivalry and take it to be positive, whereas thewoman might interpret it within a ‘storyline’ of chauvinism and take it to be negative.The important thing about Davies and Harre’s model is that individuals in interactionare not conditioned by their cultures, but rather evoke ‘cultural storylines’ strategicallyto negotiate material or symbolic advantages for themselves or the groups to which theybelong. In the instances of verbal hygiene in my data participants evoke two important‘cultural storylines,’ both of which I mentioned above: the ‘falling standards storyline’


86 Rodney H. Jones

of the decline of English in Hong Kong, and the ‘colonialist sexual storyline’ of theservile Chinese boy and patriarchal foreign man. The way posters use these two narrativesand position themselves and the gay community as a whole within them reveals muchabout how verbal hygiene functions on this forum and why posters are so preoccupiedwith it.

Remarks about the ‘falling standards of English in Hong Kong’ serve as tools with whichposters position themselves and others in the local storylines of particular interactions,by, for example, attacking or challenging their interlocutors’ opinions or status in thecommunity. In the following excerpt a poster defends himself after having his grammarcorrected, which elicits from another poster an evocation of the ‘falling standards storyline’:

language is for communication. If understood, it is ok. Why ‘members’ are always very stubborn. Theyshould go to visit British Council’s website and not here loh!—–With such attitude like yours, no wonder the standard of English, or the standard of everything isdeteriorating in Hong Kong (Toilet Wall March 13, 2009).

As in many of the examples cited by Cameron, poor grammar is associated not just with adeterioration of language standards, but with a deterioration of ‘the standard of everything.’The next excerpt is an example of a more extended tirade:

��?��90%��‘Fruit Chan,’ ‘Apple Wong’ ‘Money Lee,’ ‘CityAu Yeung’��,�� stephen,william��d��(��)��(��),100��98�� CNN, BBC��

(Nearly 90% of Hong Kong people don’t understand English. For instance, they choose weird Englishnames like Fruit Chan, Apple Wong, Money Lee, City Au Yeung. This shows the limitation of HongKongers’ English ability. They avoid common English names like stephen and william and choose weirdnames and become laughing stocks. Everyone knows that only HK people would use these weird names.When HK people watch films in English, they have to follow the Chinese subtitles (including those whograduated from English schools). Ninety-eight out of 100 HK people can’t communicate effectively inEnglish and they don’t even understand CNN or BBC news.) (Toilet Wall August 25, 2005).

In evoking the ‘falling standards storyline,’ posters do not just position themselves inrelation to other posters whose grammar they are criticizing, but also in relation to the‘general public,’ whose English standards are ‘deteriorating.’ As in the examples above, theprimary criticism of Hong Kong people’s English focuses more on ‘style’ than substance(for example, the names they choose). The evocation of the ‘falling standards storyline,’however, is not just an act of distinction, separating those who adopt it from ‘nearly 90%’of Hong Kong people.’ It is also an act of what Bucholtz and Hall (2005) call ‘authoriza-tion,’ aligning the posters to authoritative voices of ‘quality’ and ‘rectitude.’ This strategybears some resemblance to the political strategy of gays and lesbians in Mainland China,who sometimes appropriate the rhetoric of ‘quality’ and ‘civilization’ from governmentpropaganda to portray themselves as promoters ‘traditional values’ and legitimate ‘culturalcitizens’ (Jones 2007). This repudiation of Hong Kong English, however, is not, as onemight expect, accompanied by an orientation towards native speakers. Whereas postersevoke the ‘falling standards’ storyline to draw distinctions between themselves and other



Hong Kongers, they evoke the ‘colonialist sexual storyline’ to draw distinctions betweenthemselves and those who pander to foreigners.

One criticism often leveled against those perceived to have poor English is that theirmotivation for speaking English is not ‘authentic,’ but rather simply a tool to attract aforeign boyfriend. The following example is another response to the poster who advertiseshis services as an English translator (see above).

� d�� . . .�� d�� sugar daddy� ��,��

��

(You have such a low English level but you still have the guts to look for customers. Maybe you can findsome gweilo sugar daddy. You might even earn more.) (Toilet Wall June 8, 2009).

Here poor English is seen as a symbol of servitude to the white man. Those who speakimproper English are unable to ‘linguistically support themselves,’ and so are reduced tofinding a foreign ‘sugar daddy.’ In the next example, a poster trying to contact a whiteman he met in the gym is accused of ‘cheapening himself’ in front of foreigners, partiallybecause of his poor grammar.

Meeting you at CWB Physical (you are a gwm)I met you today at the changing room today around 3:15 pm. You were a tall gwm, and have a pair ofgreat eyes You were standing in front of the locker, looking at me, and I was coming out from the bathingcabinet. We have a long eye contact, and at that time my heart is beating so fast . . . I really hope I canmeet you again. If you were that guy, can you send your email to: XXXXXXX——–Don’t really understand you guys, why always make yourself so cheap in front of gwms? And yourgrammar . . . .��(shameful) . . . so embarrassing (Toilet Wall July 10, 2008).

Perhaps the greatest wrath, however, is reserved for English speakers who ‘pretend’ to beforeigners. While, as seen from the examples above, indulging in a Hong Kong accent isseen as unacceptable, even less acceptable is assuming an ‘inauthentic’ foreign accent:

��HK� ��, ��,��,�ABC,��,��ABC,��D��(��)��, ��, ��, ��ABC��?��,��?��,��,��,D��garage��!(I’ve found that many people who are educated overseas, when they come back, they think they areso big. Pretentious. They pretend to be great, pretend to be ABCs. When they say some phrases in anAmerican accent, they think they are ABCs. But when I speak more than a couple sentences with them,their (HK) accent appears. They show their weakness. They don’t know they have shown their weakness.Even if you’re an ABC or white, so what? You’re just a human being. Still you work for me, cut my hair,drive me. White men just repaired the door of my garage and toilet.) (Toilet Wall December 3, 2008)

Taken together, these two storylines work to align those who evoke them with neitherthe local nor the foreign, but rather as occupying a kind of cultural ‘third space’ in which‘proper’ English is seen as a symbol of freedom both from local norms and customs andfrom dependence on foreigners.


88 Rodney H. Jones

Dissenters

There are, of course, dissenters to this regime of verbal hygiene who, in response to themetalinguistic discourse of their peers produce a kind of ‘meta-metalinguistic discourse,’a discourse that criticizes linguistic ‘nitpicking and being a grammar Nazi’ (March 12,2005). Even as they criticize this practice, however, they reinforce its status as a definingpractice of gay men in Hong Kong:

So hilarious! Don’t know why whenever there is a topic about English, all the ‘members’ are so eager tocriticize each other and pretend to be an English specialist. The English native speakers will not give afucking care!——–��gay��(Yes! This is a special characteristic of Hong Kong gays) (Toilet Wall June 11, 2009).�,��(��) ��in fact, only tongzhi in Hong Kong will criticize the language proficiency of others (Toilet Wall March12, 2009).

Some posters, in fact, use criticism of verbal hygiene in the same way others use verbalhygiene itself, as a tool to portray their interlocutors as uneducated, provincial, and lackingin ‘taste’ and sophistication. In the following example a poster makes creative use ofunconventional spelling reminiscent of global hip-hop style to accuse other posters ofbeing out of fashion:

Sorry for hijacking this thread. But I gotta say somthinPickin on someone typo mistake is so lame. Kant believe still even exist.Inglish is one of da tools fo communicate. Je dun care wat people write. Why shou I? As lon as je get damessage and dats enough.In case you haf missed dis out. Now people are using wat they kalled Globish.HALO? (Toilet Wall March 2, 2006).

CONCLUSION

Before going on to theorize about the reasons for the phenomenon described above,it is important to acknowledge the limitations of this research. Given that data for thisstudy come from only one internet forum, it is obviously difficult to generalize thesefindings. At the same time, the prevalence of verbal hygiene and the high value placed onstandard English evidenced in this particular sub-community of internet users conformswith observations made by a number of social scientists regarding the attitudes of gay mentowards English in Hong Kong (see for example Ho 1992; Chou 2000; Kong 2002). It isalso a phenomenon I have observed myself in informal conversations with local gay men.Most importantly, a number of the posters on the forum describe this behavior as prevalentamong ‘tongzhi in Hong Kong’ beyond the context of this forum (see above). Therefore,while it might be difficult to claim that such verbal hygiene is a widespread practice acrossall sectors of the community, it is justified to regard the behavior of the men quoted aboveas an example of the orientation of many gay men in Hong Kong to English, and of howthis orientation is sometimes used strategically for claiming individual and sub-culturalidentity.



There are a number of possible ways to interpret the obsession of many of the posterson this internet forum with ‘proper’ English. One might, for example, take a postcolonialreading, positing that gay men in Hong Kong have internalized the values of the ‘foreignoppressor’ and are using verbal hygiene to reproduce the ethnic and class distinctions ofthe colonial past within their own community. This interpretation would be consistent withfeminist readings of the communication patterns of marginalized groups in which the lesspowerful gain power through valorizing the rules imposed on them by their oppressors(see for example Kramarae 1981). Given the role of verbal hygiene not just in repudiatinglocal norms but also in repudiating foreigners and those who pander to them, such areading is ultimately unsatisfactory. Neither can it be seen as an act of creative resistanceagainst foreign norms, as when English has become a site of hybridity in other postcolonialcontexts (Bhabha 1985), since the variety of English these posters orient towards is thestandard variety of ‘Oxford’ and ‘Cambridge’ rather than a local hybrid variety.

Another way to look at this practice is simply as reflective of attitudes towards Englishin Hong Kong as a whole. Just as in the general public, attitudes towards English haveevolved from the 1980s, when it was seen as the language of ‘foreigners,’ to the 1990swhen it was seen as a language of ‘upward and outward mobility’ (Lai 2004: 472), to thepresent when it has taken on the role as a marker not of foreignness but of Hong Kongidentity, in the gay community the status of English has evolved from being a tool for entryinto ‘foreign’ gay culture in the 1980s, to a symbol of modernity and ‘market value’ in the1990s, to, at the present time, a distinctive marker of Hong Kong gay culture. While thisinterpretation helps to explain the attitudes towards English found on this forum, it doesnot account for how these posters use verbal hygiene to construct and maintain variousaspects of gay identity.

A better reading is one that sees these acts of verbal hygiene as instances of strategicaction through which gay men in Hong Kong negotiate their identities both in relation tolocal ‘straight’ culture and to ‘foreign’ gay culture.’ Bucholtz and Hall (2005) posit thatsocial identities are relationally constructed through three basic strategies of positioningthe self in relation to others: ‘distinction’ – the practice of drawing boundaries betweengroups and individuals; ‘authorization’ – the use of power or the ‘voice of authority’ tolegitimate certain identities; and ‘authentication’ – a strategy that constructs some identityperformances as legitimate and others a matter of deception and imposture. All three ofthese strategies are evident in the examples of verbal hygiene cited above.

Through criticizing and correcting the English of others, these men practice distinctionby distinguishing themselves not just from other (presumably straight) Hong Kongers butalso from foreigners and those who learn (imperfect) English in order to attract them. Bytaking on the role of linguistic arbiters and assuming the audacious right to regulate otherpeople’s speech, they essentially take ownership over English, appropriating the mantel ofauthority from the very mainstream that has long marginalized them. And by criticizingimperfect speakers of English as ‘cheap,’ ‘unfashionable’ and ‘dishonest’ they appropriate‘proper’ English as a marker of ‘authentic’ gay identity. Like other Hong Kongers, then,Hong Kong gay men are not ‘passive victims of linguist imperialism’ but ‘active languagepragmatists’ (Li 2000) who use language and discourse about language in strategic andcreative ways.

At the same time, such a reading would be incomplete without considering how thislinguistic behavior fits in with other aspects of community identity, and how local linguis-tic practices draw upon broader transcultural flows of value and ideology. It is here where


90 Rodney H. Jones

Silverstein’s (2003) notion of ‘orders of indexicality’ becomes useful. Linguistic phenom-ena are not, says Sliverstein, in themselves ideological, but rather take their ideologicalvalue from the way they fit into and index larger systems of value.

According to Kong (2004: 6), gay men in Hong Kong under the postcolonial administra-tion have not been enthusiastic about pursing political remedies to social marginalization.Rather, cultural space has become the site of practices aimed at disrupting hegemonic het-erosexuality through small acts of ‘micro-resistance against societal domination’. Centralto these acts is the accumulation of what he calls ‘embodied cultural capital’ in the formof, for example, expensive consumer products and hyper-masculine ‘gym-fit’ physiques.In a sense, the ‘queering’ of English by Hong Kong gay men can be seen another exampleof such ‘embodied capital.’ Kong’s insight, however, hints at a much more important fact:that the cultural capital of ‘good English’ comes in part from its place in a consolation ofeconomic, aesthetic and cultural values which includes these other acts of consumerism,fashion and body modification. In other words, these ‘acts of micro-resistance’ are notseparate from one another, but work together to invoke an ‘order of indexicality’ inwhich the modern gay bourgeois subject can be imagined. The imagination of this subjectis an important strategy for gay men to gain legitimation and combat marginalization inconsumerist societies like Hong Kong. At the same time, it is a strategy that itself marginal-izes gay men who have no access to expensive consumer brands, gym memberships, oreducational opportunities to master ‘the English of Oxford and Cambridge publications.’(Jones 2007; Binnie 2011; Heaphy 2011).

This indexical order in Hong Kong, of course, is a reflection of broader neo-liberalvalues that have played a part not just in the globalization of English as a language ofthe ‘elite’ (see for example, Thurlow and Jaworski 2006), but also in the globalizationof ‘Western’ gay identities as symbols of modernity and freedom (Altman 1996; Binnie2004). What this analysis reveals, then, is the importance of looking at acts of verbalhygiene on multiple levels, both in terms of local negotiations of power and identity, and inthe context of broader cultural and transcultural orders of indexicality. In this case, whilenotions of correct English have been appropriated by these men to do some very ‘localwork’ in the context of their personal relationships and in the construction of sub-culturalidentity in Hong Kong, this work is only possible because of the way English is alreadysituated in the broader neo-liberal project of globalization. In other words, ‘small actsof ‘micro-resistance against societal domination’ (Kong 2004: 6) on the local level aresometimes predicated on and perpetuate broader systems of domination and inequality onthe global level.

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(Received 13 June 2012)


Verbal hygiene in the Hong Kong gay community

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