Unruly Comparison is a paradigm-shifting book in the comparative studies of queer Hong Kong literature, culture and cinema as well as the emerging discipline of Hong Kong studies. For decades, scholars and journalists have framed their discussions by positing Hong Kong as a globalized capitalist city and a site of contention between China’s sovereign authority and British colonialism. For Wong, such an approach often ends up restricting one’s understanding of Hong Kong within a China-centric perspective. When it comes to queering Hong Kong, the existing scholarship either imposes Eurocentric frameworks onto their studies or (re)articulates Hong Kong’s queer phenomena in relation to those in Mainland China or other Sinophone regions (p. 135). If so, what can the studies of queer Hong Kong offer to the local community itself, to regional studies, and to queer and trans studies?

To answer this question, Wong proposes a method called “unruly comparison.” The term “unruly” comes from the title of an art exhibition in Hong Kong in late January 2021. This exhibition was curated by the New York-based queer artist and scholar Tse Ka-Man. Tse in turn adopted their title from Gayatri Gopinath’s book Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora (Duke University Press, 2018). For Wong, every individual can be seen as an embodiment of an intersection of geopolitical connections and tensions, modes of marginalization and oppression, conflicting values of gender and sexuality, traces of histories, bodies of knowledge, and forms of power. These interactions of forces and intensities do not neatly fall into such binaries as China and Europe, tradition and modernity, or even norm and anomy. Rather, they are multifaceted, multilayered, and unruly or even messy. If so, the queer community in Hong Kong and the city at large can be seen as an assemblage of values, ideas, lived experiences, thoughts and feelings that intersect and interact with each other in an uneven and unruly manner.

Unruly comparison, as a method of queering Hong Kong, can therefore serve as a model of studying other similar regions that have been impacted by postcolonialism and global capitalism. Yet, instead of trapping one’s analysis within postcolonialism and capitalism (again, forces that are in themselves Euro-American-centric and China-centric), one can begin to appreciate the nuances and graininess of the lived experiences of these communities and individuals. Wong further argues that Hong Kong itself is a “protean site for exemplifying racial, gender, class, and queer incommensurability and differences internally” (pp. 135–136).

Such internal complexity in turn enables one to see how individuals and local communities are intertwined with communities in other regions of the global south. For example, in chapter four, Wong compares the cinematic representations of Southeast Asian domestic and factory workers in Hong Kong commercial feature films and independent documentaries, independent documentaries in Taiwan, and magazines published by queer Filipinas in Hong Kong. In so doing, Wong is able to scrutinize how their working conditions are in themselves shaped by the economic and racial hierarchies within the Global South, Hong Kong and Taiwan’s self-perceptions as global capitalist hubs, the unchallenged designation of Southeast Asian women as providers of domestic and affective labour (even by self-proclaimed liberal white and Han-Chinese feminists), and migration as a medium of queer connections (pp. 87–114). For me, this chapter truly exemplifies how queer and trans studies can interrupt the existing practice – among both scholars and activists – of comparing queer Asia by measuring it solely against Euro-American queer normativity. Instead, one can begin to make south–south connections by using the local individuals and communities as nodes of intensities.

Wong’s effort of making south–south connections challenges not only the Han-Chinese-centric or even Cantonese-centric understanding of Hong Kong as well as the very notion of queer Sinophone studies. Wong takes Shu-mei Shih’s definition of the Sinophone as “a network of places of cultural production outside China and on the margins of China and Chineseness, where a historical process of heterogenizing and localizing of continental Chinese culture has been taking place for several centuries” (Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific, University of California Press, 2007, p. 4). By taking this very definition as his point of departure, Wong circumvents Shih’s original intention to examine literature, cinema and culture that employ the Chinese language as a medium. This in turn justifies his use of the case studies in chapter four, some of which employ the English language as their medium of expression. Wong therefore proves that an in-depth study of queer Sinophone, with an appreciation of its inter-linguistic, inter-cultural and inter-regional unruliness, must move beyond the notion that Chineseness is only negotiated via Chinese-language cultural practices. In other words, the “queerness” of queer Sinophone challenges the very linguistic homogeneity of Chineseness.

In Unruly Comparison, Wong engages with many theoretical works in queer and trans studies, Hong Kong and Sinophone studies, as well as cultural studies. Yet, strategically, Wong resists turning “unruly comparison” into a prescriptive framework. Instead, he conducts insightful close readings of texts and allows the term to define itself in relation to the cultural praxes themselves. His method therefore stays true to the idea of queerness and trans* as processes of becoming that resist definition and respect the fact that intersectionality always challenges any prescriptive relationships between power and knowledge. These case studies include Wong Bik-wan’s queer feminist novel Portraits of Martyred Women (1999), Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together (1997), Scud’s Permanent Residence (2009), Jun Li’s Tracey (2018), Mimi Wong’s A Woman is a Woman (2019), the case studies on queer Southeast Asian women I have mentioned earlier, as well as many other works that challenge our ideas of queer Hong Kong and queer Sinophone. I do believe that Wong’s book is a paradigm-shifting work, by offering a new critical infrastructure to address the unruliness of queer Hong Kong and queer Sinophone.