Abstract
Let me begin with a question: What is a Research Assistant (RA) for? According to different recruitment postings, an RA has to be, at least, a bachelor degree holder in a related academic area, acquainted with basic knowledge and understandings of a specific subject so as to help facilitate the research. Besides, in this particular assistantship, s/he has to be proficient in Chinese and English, or sometimes in another dialect (e.g. Mandarin) in order to help draft reports, prepare documents, write up literature reviews and communicate well with other research team members.
I’m quite ashamed to tell anyone I have been an RA for the past two years as I have failed to carry out any of the aforementioned job duties throughout my employment period. Even worse, the longest and best organized text I have written is what you are now reading. This piece also happens to be the last task I have to complete before my contract officially ends. So, what the hell have I been doing for two years?
The only expression I can think of to describe the fact that I have got this RA job is: “I’m so damn lucky.” I graduated from the School of Creative Media, the City University of Hong Kong, in 2007. It so happened that Dr Petula Sik Ying Ho had an RGC grant from the University of Hong Kong to carry out a study of the lives of middle-aged Hong Kong women (The Second Spring: Roads taken and not taken by middle-aged Hong Kong women). It, again, so happened that my tutor at that time, Mr Wesley Tang, introduced me to Sik Ying. After a simple, casual, and very brief conversation in a coffee shop in Central, which I would say was the first and only job interview I have been through, I, magically, got employed after three months, after Sik Ying returned from Japan with a broken wrist (see the Introduction by Sik Ying Ho).
Sik Ying stated and explained clearly what kind of RA she was looking for during our coffee shop meeting. She no longer only wanted to produce academic journal papers and articles as core research outcomes, but wanted to try making short videos and using them as tools to represent research findings. However, without much knowledge about video production, she had to find someone who had received training in making videos as her assistant. To be frank, I was quite shocked when she told me she knew nearly nothing about making videos. What gave her the courage to work on something she was unfamiliar with? And to work it out with a person she barely knew?
Sik Ying is an academic, and I had trained to be an artist. We were not quite destined to work with one another, and that’s why I really find it “magical” that we ended up working together. In reviewing what we’ve developed/created/done/gone through over the past two years, I’m quite sure that you will agree that it truly was a “miracle” that we were able to make and see all that we have.
The two of us have now produced more than 30 short films, and there will be many more to come. All these videos have been made with a mini-DV camera, with natural lighting, sometimes with tripod but most of the time without one. We visited different parts of Hong Kong by public transport to interview informants. We now have a collection of over 300 short DV tapes – over 18,000 minutes of video footage. With limited help from friends and family, we have managed to take our creations to various academic conferences and meetings, presenting them to scholars and artists from all over the world.
As mentioned earlier, I can’t really identify myself as an RA, but I don’t think I am just an RA. In 2008, we labeled ourselves ‘The Sik Ying Ho & Jolene Mok Productions’, with Sik Ying Ho as director, producer and interviewer and Jolene Mok as videographer, editor and executive producer. My opinions have been adopted and my voice has been heard. This is really not something I, or anyone, would have expected. I am, definitely, being treated as a co-partner instead of just an RA.
For the ‘Second Spring’ project, we interviewed middle-aged Hong Kong women concerning their living experiences and life stories. Sik Ying has interviewed 22 informants and I have helped to videotape every single interview. At first, I didn’t realize how important it was for me to be there, other than to operate the camera, but then Sik Ying asked nearly every interviewee to give me advice in case I encountered difficult life choices. When they were asked to give me, a 24-year-old woman, advice, they were unbelievably articulate, even more so than when they were trying to tell their personal stories.
Furthermore, Sik Ying also asked me to give feedback to the interviewees concerning their stories. To my surprise, all the interviewees showed tolerance in listening to me and most of them responded immediately to what I said. These were not casual chit-chats but serious conversations. Normally, intergenerational dialogues are direct conversations between seniors and juniors, often with the older generation passing on their wisdom and legacies to their juniors, less often with the younger generation presenting provocative new thoughts to their seniors. But in the ‘Second Spring’ project, communication was in both directions, and this is what has made every encounter unique.
I do not want to preach or glorify the importance of intergenerational dialogues, but to encourage everyone to understand themselves through listening to other people’s stories. Every single woman, young and old, has struggled to search for her sense of self. I would like to take this chance to point out the importance of reinventing and re-exploring oneself through other people’s life stories. I have learnt a lot from these middle-aged women, including from my mother, who was one of the interviewees. I would like to present my experiences of talking to these older women, and to encourage such inter-generational dialogues.
Apart from the unique experiences of the conversations with all the interviewees, Sik Ying and I have developed a bond through talking and listening relentlessly to each other about all aspects of life. As the two of us are so used to documenting other women’s stories, we realize that our own stories should also be treated carefully. We started commenting on everything we experienced together, and immediately responding to each other’s comments. Sik Ying has been a very precious co-partner and even though she may hold different points of view on various experiences than I do, we are able to respect and identify with one another. Our mutual sensitivity to each other’s frame of reference has developed into a new way to produce knowledge.
For each video, there should be a targeted audience. For all the videos we have made, we want the core audience to be the protagonists themselves, since they had had the courage to be interviewed and videotaped. And when we bring up the question of whom we should show these videos to, “young women” is always their preference. Although the videos are not tailor made for young women, I feel that young women are the ones who can best appreciate them.
In presenting to young women these middle-aged women’s views on happiness, sexuality and life goals, and by analyzing these views in the contexts of personal and social transitions, these videos can be good materials as part of education concerning love, marriage and sex. However, I don’t think these videos establish any standard for young women to follow. In fact, they show a variety of possible pathways young women may encounter in their search for self. It is more that these videos open up a platform for discussions among different generations, so to generate meaningful dialogue and monologues for personal growth.
For me, it has been a particularly strange experience to deal with so many middle-aged women over the past two years. As a video editor, I have had to expose myself to middle-aged women’s images and to review their stories. For an ordinary young woman, her mother is the most influential middle-aged woman in her life in helping her to construct her own world. Whenever I meet and then re-encounter interviewees in person or on screen, I can’t help thinking that they look and sound similar to my own mother. I then realize they all can be ‘mothering’ figures for me.
In dealing with my own mom and when dealing with all these mothering figures, I have to say that they almost suffocated me. Mothers serve as models for, and the bases for the concept of, women, and there is no way for girls to escape from being influenced by their mothers. However, we often have to reject what our mothers have done in order to construct our own lives, even though we can never get rid of the influences our mothers have had on us. This is why, when there were more than one mothering figure all of a sudden, appearing in my fragile little world, I just felt overwhelmed.
The situation became worse when I dragged my mother into this project by asking her to be one of the research participants. If not for this project, I don’t think I would ever have come across such a good setting and opportunity to hear my mother’s presentation of her stories and thoughts on different things, including her feelings towards, and expectations of, her daughters.
I am very impressed by my mother’s courage and willingness to share her stories with Sik Ying, who is her daughter’s boss and yet a “stranger” to her. I am grateful for her support and faith in me in allowing us to videotape an entire interview, even though she was hesitant at first. The most vivid part of the interview was the end, when Sik Ying asked about my mother’s expectations of me, her eldest daughter. To be honest, it felt like attending a “trial” and waiting for the judge’s sentence. The part that struck me most strongly was my mother’s hilarious, yet serious, response to my desire to pursue postgraduate study. She claimed that she had no idea why I was attracted to postgraduate study, as I had already finished a bachelor’s degree years ago, and it didn’t really make much sense to her for me to do a second degree. However, even though she expressed this thought loud and clear, she showed her full support for me over the issue.
This may appear to be very minor issue, but through it I have been able to appreciate better and understand more a mother’s position and capacity. Mothers are, in fact, underdog characters: A mother is assumed to be the loyal, unquestionable provider and supporter – this is her designated role, and, cruelly, there’s no excuse for her not to perform her designated duties. On top of this, she can’t really ask for a reward. So a mother can complain if her kid is not fulfilling her requests or expectations, but very often she just has to respect her kid’s decisions, even if she does not agree with them.
I guess, after all, through alienating myself from my mother by engaging both of us in the refreshing setting of an academic research-based interview, I am able to draw a clearer picture of the mechanism of being a mother, allowing me to judge from a fairer perspective my mother’s choices, and to respect my mother, who has been trying very hard to respect every choice of mine all these years.
When I sent out Jolene’s essay for review, one reviewer, Dr Helen Leung, wrote back:
This essay, written by one of the filmmakers, provides a rich and thoughtful reflection on an artist’s collaboration with an academic researcher. Most interesting is her discussion of her gradual and sometimes unwitting “crossing over” into the participants’ experience. Because of the author’s role in the film project, this essay stands apart from others that are penned by viewers of the films. As such, the absence of the voice of Mok’s collaborator in the project seems glaring. I suggest revising the essay into a dialogue between Mok and Ho and placing it at the beginning of the section, followed by the other essays that respond to the film project.
In response to Helen’s comments, I share my experience as Jolene’s collaborator. I wrote this short piece in August 2011:
For all the time that we have known each other, Jolene and I have always been proud of our alliance, the way we can talk about everything, the way we can travel together for so many trips and conferences all over the world and for all the adventures and good times we had in making more than 30 films together. Our conversations and engagement with each other have developed into a new way to produce films and develop knowledge. Most of the time we had a lot of fun and rewarding experiences of understanding each other’s frame of reference, but of course we also had our challenging moments, which I will detail below.
When I first employed Jolene as my RA, I just wanted to find someone who could help me with my work. I would, of course, try to be a good boss, non-exploitative and somewhat egalitarian. I had some romantic ideas about inter-generational and inter-disciplinary collaborations, largely informed by some feminist ideals. However, my main goal was to have Jolene work for me and do the jobs that I wanted her to do.
In the preparation of the conference and in response to one of Dr Melissa Cahnman-Taylor’s questions about the making of these films, I felt I was being forced to reflect on our roles in the project in having to explain them to others at the conference. Melissa wrote,
I am intrigued by Dr Sik Ying’s project that uses arts-based research methodologies (documentary film) to illuminate aspects of middle-class, middle-aged women’s experiences, shedding light and focus on subjects that are all too often invisible world-wide. My first thoughts and questions are in relation to the making of these films, the collaborations they entail, and the pursuit of artistic as well as scholarly quality in their production. Having not yet viewed the films, I am eager to learn more about them. Specifically I raise questions about the collaborations mentioned (with a “young film graduate”) and how a scholar and artist work together to create a project that renders subjects in powerful and meaningful ways.
What has been the role of Jolene in all this? If I had not found an RA with a degree in creative media, how could I even have dared to think about making films? I was confronted by the question of defining the ownership of these films. In the discussion, Dr Tsang Ka Tat suggested the option of setting up a group/company, using our names.
I was thrilled by the name of The Sik Ying Ho & Jolene Mok Productions and decided that we would add a small experiment to the ongoing exploration of documentary films, which to me turned out to be one of the most challenging experiences of my academic career. Little did I know the cost of the experiment and where it would take me, as I had not heard much about this topic in the world of social research. Ultimately, this has turned out to be one of the most important learning opportunities for me, both in this research project and in my life as a middle-aged female academic, or scholar/artist/film-maker, who wanted to explore the possibility of a relatively egalitarian partnership with her RA.
After the creation of The Sik Ying Ho & Jolene Mok Productions, the distance between us became even less. I, for a short period of time, was not able to justify how I could act as a friendly, caring figure as well as being a friend and a partner in the project. We were lucky to have had a ‘honeymoon period’ long enough to allow us to find out what we could do together before we had to go through some less pleasant negotiations.
I remember the experience of interviewing Jolene and hearing her comments on the middle-aged women interviewees as “working too hard”, “trying a little too hard”, and on how “being lazy is a source of happiness” for her and people of her generation. I see more clearly how women of the younger generation seem to know better how to enjoy life while women of my generation are bounded by a set of slightly different work ethics. It is interesting to see how this has been one of the important themes in our encounters. We are both hardworking and want to be professional, but I am always the one who worries a bit too much and is often quite demanding. Thus there were moments of tension.
As the boss/authority figure, I wanted to give instructions and to see that things were done quickly, and this was not as easy as in most employer-employee relationships. There was, of course, always a gap between expectations and results. However, as a partner/collaborator, it was necessary for me to respect her views and her pace, and not to boss her around. During all this time, I had to remind myself that she was just 24, and that it is very difficult for a young woman to wake up before noon! When she was tired, she was really tired and would throw a temper tantrum! She did not have the skill or the capacity to postpone the gratification of her needs, as a woman in her 50 s could.
One of the most memorable encounters with Jolene took place in Paris. Coming out of the Pompidou Centre Paris after watching some exhibitions, I was inspired and thrilled and wanted to discuss how we could improve on the ballet scenes in Marriage as a Package Tour (
) as soon as we sat down. Jolene was probably tired after the visit and she was really annoyed and so she said, ‘Why do you have to force yourself to make sense of what you have seen like this? It is not in my training and in my habit to say what I have learnt immediately after seeing something. I believe in allowing things to sink in. Art-making is not like that!’ Subsequently, we had a heated argument about the different schools of thought about art-making. I don’t remember how we each lost and won at different parts of the long discussion, I only remember it as quite an emotional exchange, with each side unwilling to shut up and go some place else. Sometimes, when I expected Jolene to respond and contribute as my ideal partner, I was disappointed. What’s new? It is not so much the fact that she would challenge me, but that sometimes she did not have the energy or ability to respond and understand my concerns at the moment. When she feared that she could not deliver what I wanted from her, she would turn defensive in the discussions and make me look stupid and demanding. We fought like a couple! It reminds me of some of the most horrible fights I had with my ex-boyfriends. For a long time, I have always been proud to be able to avoid engaging in such types of fight with a boyfriend or anyone only to find that I have to argue with such intensity with such a kid! Or was I being too intense as a partner? Who could be my partner? How I wish that Jolene would sometimes remember that I am actually her boss!
There are other things that are even harder to admit. When I felt that I had given the RA/partner all the resources, ideas and space she needed to do what she had never imagined she could do, I expected her to show her gratitude – but as what? As a partner? A daughter? How should partners express their gratitude to each other? How much is enough? After having to argue with Jolene like a couple, I do expect her to be grateful to me like a daughter!
On various occasions of screening “24”, I waited for her to give me some recognition of my role in the film, which she had directed, in the ending credits. I also expected her to say something about how she felt about ‘being promoted’ to the role of a director in our production company and having been given the time to do her own work. I hated myself for allowing this desire for recognition to get in the way of enjoying the film and the discussion. It has taken some time for me to recover from this state of confusion, and I thought to myself that, after all, this was not really a working partner relationship. What was this partnership, or any partnership, about? This experiment, after all, was not a partnership between an academic and her RA, but almost like a mother–daughter relationship! I had to learn to be a mother! When I looked as myself as a mother and think like a mother with the humility of an ‘underdog’, things just got better!
Maybe there are other ways of being partners, but in my experience this has been the only way I know to make things work – one has to be a mother at heart and a friend on the surface, as many modern mothers try to do. I often felt better about myself when I asked myself, “Would I do more for Jolene if she were my niece or my own daughter?” Probably not much! Who on earth would automatically have a share of all my properties – every film that I have made – even after she had left her job? With a mother’s heart, I feel more capable of giving! I complain about Jolene to my friends sometimes, but I love her more than I was able to before.
I have never been a mother, but as Jolene has written
Mothers are, in fact, underdog characters: a mother is assumed to be the loyal, unquestionable provider and supporter – this is her designated role, and, cruelly, there’s no excuse for her not to perform her designated duties. On top of this, she can’t really ask for a reward. Very well said indeed!
In countless ways, Jolene and I have undergone a most exciting and life-changing adventure through our relationship and our partnership in this project. Above all, I thank her for giving me the opportunity to experiment and understand the pain and joys of having an RA as a partner and the challenge of trying to subvert the hierarchy between a professor and her RA!
However, there is something that still bothers me. If the nature of the experiment was to ‘subvert the hierarchy between a professor and her RA’, the proposed solution of some sort of mother–daughter model is just not good enough! I have been thinking for some time why this is not good enough. If this collaboration with Jolene has been an experiment to explore new possibilities of subverting power hierarchies, maybe we have only just begun, and so there is no way I can feel a nice closure! Maybe, like all relationships, ours has to be open to changes, especially because our partnership also started as an experiment. Even if there is no better model than a mother–daughter model to resolve the tension involved, we should know, from our own personal experiences, that mother–daughter relationships do change! Maybe we have to keep reorganizing our initial findings at this stage and open our hearts so that we can create new rules and see the emergence of some new models, making good use of what we have already learnt from this unique partnership.
On the eve of her leaving Hong Kong for her MFA studies at Duke University to learn about experimental documentary, I wish her all the best and hope that our paths will cross again so that we can continue to find new ways to be partners for the rest of our days!