On 24 June 2021, Hong Kong's Apple Daily reached its final chapter. Its last front-page headline read: "Hongkongers grieve in the rain — we'll buy Apple." It was as if it had already foreseen that the paper's passing would become a collective trauma for the people of Hong Kong. In the past, Hong Kong rarely examined the post-extradition-bill era through a psychological lens, and when it did, attention fell mostly on the mental health of individuals. Discussion from a socio-political psychology perspective has been rarer still. In truth, psychology has long produced a substantial body of research on how collective trauma shakes the psychological condition of society as a whole — and on how we might intervene at the social level to help a community heal. Taking the closure of Apple Daily as a case in point, this article offers a first introduction to the theories and findings psychology has built up around political violence and collective trauma.
Cultural bereavement and historical trauma
In his research, Eisenbruch (1991) noted that across the Western world's experience of providing psychological care to migrants and refugees, many practitioners found that the existing guiding theories and therapeutic frameworks failed to address the problem. Beyond the matter of cultural difference, migrants and refugees displayed a distinctive grief response that Western nations had never imagined. Eisenbruch found that migrants and refugees responded to the loss of their homeland's culture in a way that resembled mourning a deceased loved one, and so he proposed a new concept to capture this grief response: cultural bereavement. He defined cultural bereavement as "the experience of the uprooted person — or group — resulting from loss of social structures, cultural values and self-identity…" (p.674), adding that, because of differences in individual culture and circumstance, different groups would grieve differently.
A similar concept is historical trauma: a "collective complex trauma" borne by a group that shares a common identity or affiliation ("a collective complex trauma inflicted on a group of peoples who share a specific group identity or affiliation.", p.320) (Evans-Campbell, 2008). "Complex trauma" differs from ordinary trauma: it is not triggered by a single event, but is the psychological shadow produced by harm accumulated over many years. And historical loss — the loss of one's original culture, people, even land — can give rise to historical trauma (Armenta et al., 2016).
Evans-Campbell's research points out that historical trauma affects a group on three levels: the individual, the family and the community. If we apply the theories above to unpack what losing Apple Daily means for Hongkongers as a group, it can be divided into three parts:
1) Apple Daily as historical loss
2) How the closure of Apple Daily affects Hong Kong's historical trauma
3) What the closure of Apple Daily reveals: Hongkongers are living through cultural bereavement
1) Apple Daily as historical loss
Here we can begin with sociology's social construction theory. Some things — money, for instance — carry no inherent meaning or value: a piece of paper is just a piece of paper, but once the various members of a society agree to grant it importance and value, that paper becomes currency. In Cooley's (1902) classic sociological theory, the looking-glass self, "self-identity" is a product constructed by society — that is, the impression others hold of "me" forms the "self" that I perceive.
Over these past few years, the public projected onto Apple Daily all manner of meanings and imaginings. It was no longer merely a newspaper; it became a vessel carrying the values of a community. In this way Apple Daily became one element of the collective's cultural identity. In sociology's terms, an element of cultural identity is "something within an imagined community that connects its members"; in psychology's terms, cultural identity is part of what constitutes one's self-perception (I speak Cantonese; I am a Hongkonger).
To put it plainly, the purpose of the theories above is to explain why a single thing (Apple Daily, for example) can become part of our self-identity. So losing Apple Daily is like a people losing its own language: a part of one's self-identity is lost, and this becomes a "historical loss".
2) How the closure of Apple Daily affects Hong Kong's historical trauma
The Apple Daily affair was not Hong Kong's first political censorship; for many people, the political pressure of the past two years had already left a deep wound. The Apple Daily affair was like rubbing salt into that wound. In other words, the oppression and pressure we feel do not stem from the paper's closure alone, but from an entire historical trauma.
Confronting an entire historical trauma is precisely what gives so many mental health practitioners a headache. It is not like ordinary post-traumatic stress disorder (Post-traumatic Stress Disorder), where you treat that one trauma and you're done. You can say, "The earthquake is over; you are safe now," but you cannot tell Hongkongers that the dark days have passed and that all is safe now.
The trauma is borne collectively, yet its effects are deeply personal. In Adolescents and war: How youth deal with political violence, Slone (2009) notes that when it comes to collective trauma caused by the wider environment, every person feels it differently. Take a single car accident: the person involved, that person's friends and family, the bystanders at the scene, and those who later read about it in the news — each of them experiences a different trauma. This has constrained much of the research on collective trauma, because it is difficult to distinguish each person's role and point of view.
But a lack of research does not mean a lack of a problem. Collective trauma truly exists among us and is genuinely affecting us; only the degree of its impact varies from person to person. I believe this unprecedented sense of historical loss arises from the great deal of trauma over these two years that we have never worked through. People's sorrow stems from the social situation; Apple Daily has only magnified that feeling.
When all is said and done, what exactly has this collective trauma affected?
Although Evans-Campbell's theory notes that the effects of collective trauma differ across different events and different cultures, past research on collective trauma has nonetheless pointed to some common effects. Somasundaram's (2014) study reviewed a body of earlier research on collective trauma and summarised the impact of collective trauma on a community in terms of the social: social processes, interpersonal networks, interpersonal relationships, institutions, functioning, interaction, customs, capital and resources. In other words, collective trauma can tear apart the social fabric. As for the practical effects, here we cite a study from northern Sri Lanka to illustrate: after living through collective trauma, the local population became more dependent, passive, silent, lacking in leadership, distrustful and suspicious (Somasundaram, 2007). As for Hong Kong, the social fabric already made fragile by the events surrounding the extradition bill was further torn apart by the closure of Apple Daily. For instance, the public no longer trusts those in power, to the point that any trust at all is now built on everyone sharing the same political stance.
3) What the closure of Apple Daily reveals: Hongkongers are living through cultural bereavement
Across the sweep of history, Hongkongers have so often had to face the departure of collective memories, and with each loss there is always a sense that something in the heart is missing. We have all felt this feeling, yet it seems very few people stop to unpack it. To pick up where the article opened: this sense of loss is called cultural bereavement, a response akin to mourning a deceased loved one. When cultural bereavement becomes an everyday experience, this feeling of grief comes to pervade society. And precisely because cultural history forms our self-identity, ongoing cultural bereavement makes us lose confidence in our own identity, or brings an immense sense of helplessness. This may go some way to explaining the situation behind the recent wave of emigration.
Hongkongers often talk about emigrating, but in the past — apart from the years right around 1997 — not many people actually decided to leave. At least there was never anything resembling today's "fleeing" scenes. People are used to living within their own comfort zone, but to migrate is to set down one's former life completely — not merely to step out of the comfort zone, but to shatter it, placing oneself in an unfamiliar environment. So the concept of cultural bereavement is, much of the time, used to describe the situation of migrants or refugees, rather than applied to local people. But over these past two years — or even over the past twenty-odd years — Hong Kong has changed so vastly that, for those who emigrate, cultural bereavement no longer factors into the decision, because whether they stay or go, these things seem destined to be lost.
The most frightening thing about cultural bereavement is not the sense of loss, but that a community loses the things that connect its members to one another. One of the main functions of collective memory is to build and maintain social identity (Hirschberger, 2018). Although historical or collective trauma does not necessarily destroy a group's identity — some now say, for example, "Hongkongers are a people connected by hardship" — if this trauma stems from cultural bereavement, then I believe that when these traumas can only be passed on by word of mouth and cannot be shared openly, it means the identity of Hongkongers is coming to an end.
As Eisenbruch put it, the concept of cultural bereavement is in fact deeply important when addressing the psychological state of refugees and migrants. Because so often, unease and anxiety also stem from one's former life and culture, and not solely from an individual experience or psychological condition. To try to understand these people through the lens of modern psychiatry would miss the mark entirely. And precisely for this reason, when we set out to address Hongkongers' collective trauma, rather than focusing on what each individual has been through over these two years, we might do better to explore how cultural factors have shaped the identity of "Hongkongers". Only then can we understand how Hongkongers' self-identity affects the psychological condition of the individual.
This article has touched lightly on concepts and theories related to collective trauma, using them to reason through where the sorrow of the Apple Daily affair comes from, and to extend that to how it further affects the collective trauma of these past two years.
References
Armenta, B. E., Whitbeck, L. B., & Habecker, P. N. (2016). The Historical Loss Scale: Longitudinal measurement equivalence and prospective links to anxiety among North American indigenous adolescents. Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, 22(1), 1.
Cooley, C. H. (1902). Looking-glass self. The production of reality: Essays and readings on social interaction, 6, 126-128.
Evans-Campbell, T. (2008). Historical trauma in American Indian/Native Alaska communities: A multilevel framework for exploring impacts on individuals, families, and communities. Journal of interpersonal violence, 23(3), 316-338.
Eisenbruch, M. (1991). From post-traumatic stress disorder to cultural bereavement: Diagnosis of Southeast Asian refugees. Social Science & Medicine, 33(6), 673-680.
Hirschberger, G. (2018). Collective trauma and the social construction of meaning. Frontiers in psychology, 9, 1441.
Slone, M. (2009). Growing up in Israel: Lessons on understanding the effects of political violence on children. Adolescents and war: How youth deal with political violence, 81-104.
Somasundaram, D. (2007). Collective trauma in northern Sri Lanka: a qualitative psychosocial-ecological study. International journal of mental health systems, 1(1), 1-27.
Somasundaram, D. (2014). Addressing collective trauma: Conceptualisations and interventions. Intervention, 12(1), 43-60.
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