I'm Louis, a Year 2 postgraduate student majoring in the English Studies in the Faculty of Arts, the University of Hong Kong.  I am also a degree-holder of the Bachelor of Arts from the same University in the 1990s, majoring in the Japanese Studies.  My minor subjects included the English Studies, the American Studies, Psychology and Hong Kong Culture.

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In 2018, I joined the MA postgraduate programme in the English Studies.  My two-year study covers two introductory courses including literature and cross-cultural theories and language and communication.  Other courses include modernism, Shakespearean plays and world productions, English varieties and politics in English.  In the final capstone research experience, my essay focuses on the representations of subjectivity in transhuman narratives presented in Rana Dasgupta's Tokyo Cancelled and Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me, a new book I started reading in this semester.  My creative project is a multi-media webpage compiling transhuman/cyborg images in the contemporary culture ranging from films to fictions, and from videogames to sports.  Annotations are supported by pictures and videos, and if possible, explained in more depth with citations from the cultural critics and the postmodern theorists.  The topic of transhumanism is something that I have never read about in the past two years (not even heard of until the term is introduced by Dr. H. Hwang when commenting my proposed thesis statement).  Indeed, the idea of transhumanism intrigues me a lot.  So, what inspires me to envision this postmodern condition?

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Back in 1980s, my early years exposed to the mediated culture, I was mesmerized by watching a Japanese animation Galaxy Express (Ginga Tetsudō) 999 or better known as 銀河鐵道999 in Chinese, created by a famous manga artist Matsumoto Reiji松本零士.  The story is set in a high-tech future in which humans have learned how to transfer their minds and emotions with perfect fidelity into mechanical bodies.  To achieve immortality, the protagonist Tetsuro struggles to get a pass to board the Galaxy Express 999, a space train that lands on Earth once a year.  Along the way, Tetsuro has met people, both human and non-human, living and machine.  To his dismay, he realizes that a machine body isn't a perfect solution to all the problems.  He sees poverty and hunger, violence and chaos.  The story ends with an anti-climax - destructing and disillusioning TV fans who dream of a cybernetic body that never dies.  Tetsuro rejects his long-awaited plan for mechanical modification when he reaches the final stop for the Galaxy Express 999.  He is disheartened to see the dehumanized mechanized civilization and boards another space train for a never-ending exploration.  This resonates the conclusion of my essay that human rationality usually succumbs to the radical technoscientific changes in the postmodern reality.

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Guess this is my repressed Freudian unconscious and it's time to have a way out of its defence mechanism...