Having grown up in both Hong Kong and Johannesburg, Acty Tang is a man of two worlds.
Having spent his childhood years in Hong Kong at the crux of modernity and tradition, his Eastern memories are of the mid-autumn festival against a backdrop of soaring high rises. Becoming a Jo’burg teenager and South African adult has only deepened his interest in his past.
Inscrutable is an intimate work in which he explores his ‘intercultural” nature and history.
‘It’s such a ‘naf’ word, but I really am intercultural; I’m made of two worlds put together,” said last year’s Standard Bank Young Artist winner for Dance.
‘I’m a lot of in-betweens— I can’t place myself comfortably as a son of Chinese soil, but inevitably I am Chinese. This is the push and pull I’m dealing with.”
Tang finds it humorous that, even though he feels at home, he still stands out, especially in Grahamstown, where people have called him ‘Jackie Lee” (an amalgam of Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee).
Originally, Tang was invited to create a piece for Rhodes University’s China Week in 2008, which saw the introduction of a new language programme.
‘I chose to question what it means to learn a language,” he explained. The mystique of the Chinese alphabet’s characters is an interesting thing, said Tang. ‘People will tattoo themselves with it even if it actually says ‘Chinese take-away’.”
Tang is intrigued by the West’s strange fascination with his former home. Inscrutable ponders our presumptions: the yellow peril or a sleeping dragon?
‘Humans need to acknowledge and tell stories of trauma and atrocity, and that’s something South Africans can relate to,” he said. Language, said Tang, has a historical and cultural burden and in Inscrutable he wanted to shift this debate from the lofty realm of academia into a more personal terrain.
His family has carried its own cultural and historical burden. His father suffered under the Mao regime when he grew up on mainland China. Tang can still remember the panicked sounds his father made as he slept through nightmares of his former life.
After the Tiananmen Square massacre, Hong Kong ‘got jittery” and the Tang family immigrated to South Africa. ‘I remember landing at what was then Jan Smuts airport, driving along 11th Avenue and thinking ‘there’s so much space here’.”
After a seventeen-year absence Tang has returned to Hong Kong several times in the past few years. ‘It’s nice to be in a place where I don’t stick out,” he said. He will soon be leaving South Africa again to spend two years in Hong Kong where he will continue to create and perform.
This piece is from Cue Online, a project of Rhodes University’s New Media Lab.