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This chapter continues the focus on the intersection between diaspora and intimacy by exploring the teaching of the film in Australia as part of the political pedagogy of critical multiculturalism. It illustrates how Song of the Exile cultivates a transcultural literacy that challenges the hegemonic currency of neoliberal multicultural education. It starts by presenting a critical introduction to the role of film as a form of public pedagogy, and problematizes the inclusion of Hong Kong cinema in a pluralist multicultural curriculum. It then demonstrates the minor cinema of Song of the Exile through its diasporic film distribution in Australia. In addition, it reveals how the minor cinema of Song of the Exile is deployed in a site-specific encounter for transcultural literacy. Moreover, the film is critically described as a performative text for border pedagogy. It is shown how a deconstructive pedagogical critical practice is possible by considering the diasporic circulation of the film as an excentric, oppositional, and decentred formation that speaks directly to the exigency of Hong Kong modernity.

Song of the Exile was released in Hong Kong from 27 April 1990 to 16 May 1990, and grossed over HK$3,071,212 (MPIA 1990). Produced by Cos Group and distributed by Golden Harvest, the film consolidated the career of the director, Ann On-wah Hui, Hong Kong's “most influential director in the 80s” and “one of Asia's premium directors”. This book specifically analyzes her ninth film, Song of the Exile, undoubtedly one of her finest. This film is based on Hui's semi-autobiographical story about a daughter coming to terms with her mother's Japanese identity. It also approaches this film through several features of Hong Kong cinema as diasporic cinema. An overview of the chapters included in this book is given. It is hoped that this book can show how the border cinema of Song of the Exile, as a practice of representation and a representation of practice, can articulate an alternative Hong Kong modernity as a new form of public pedagogy central to the ethics of its re-turn.

This chapter addresses the ethics of re-turn by exploring the genre of the film and its politics of memory. It first examines the film in its historical context to map the key styles of her female authorship. It then addresses the textual authorship by approaching the film text through the framework of postcolonial feminist autobiographical cinema. It further reviews the female authorship by considering the film as melodrama. As postcolonial feminist autobiographical cinema and melodrama, Song of the Exile returns to the sites of the family home and memory to rewrite master narratives. Moreover, it emphasizes this as a narrative of re-turn by investigating the intimate histories that are inscribed in this space. For Hong Kong, the film's practices of re-turn provide an ethics to consider its current political transition as an ethics of self-fashioning and co-existence that confronts the honesty of its diasporic yet intimate relationship to the motherland, China.