On occasion, I’ve wanted to write about subjects that don’t quite fit into the Hong Kong (and more generally Asian)-centered focus championed by the main site, LoveHKFilm.com, so to rectify this issue, I’ve created “Gwailo Corner.” Now, don’t worry; only about 1 in 10 posts will carry the “Gwailo Corner” moniker, as I’ll be primarily interested in Asian-related cinema, comic books, video games, toys, and the like, as I’ve always been.

Even so, the truth of the matter is that I just want to create a venue on this site to talk about the next Inception or Avatar — big pop cultural phenomena that I’ve got an opinion on and would guess even Hong Kong cinema fans might be interested in discussing. After all, in real life, most people don’t limit their movie interests to a single nation, genre, and/or language. In that respect, “Gwailo Corner” is space for these kinds of discussions — about subtext, politics, and interpretation.

Now, I know the name isn’t perfect. After all, the Cantonese term Gwailo (鬼佬) has often been translated into English as “foreign devil” and has come to mean “white person” in common parlance — sometimes disparagingly, sometimes not. However you personally take “gwailo” to mean, I haven’t chosen it as a way to insult our white readers (I am, after all, half of white person myself), and I don’t mean to suggest that the focus of the posts marked “Gwailo Corner” are somehow for “whites only.” Instead, I just thought it would be a funny, self-deprecatory title for the occasional column that doesn’t focus on stuff coming out of the Asian continent. That’s all.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 1st, 2011 at 5:20 pm and is filed under Gwailo Corner. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.