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Historically, the enthusiasm for the “translation of culture” is observed in the Chinese importation of Buddhism, then Christianity and Western science, then Western political philosophy and popular literature, and with the most profound impact on the nation, “Soviet and other revolutionary literature in the 1930s”, which eventually paved the way for the communist victory in the civil war and the establishment of the socialist state.[1] Granted that translation is a means to attain spiritual and political enlightenment in these historical instances, this paper examines, following the observation of a respected cultural critic of Hong Kong, the ways in which translation has likewise been “aspirational” practice that is instrumental in shaping the self-identity, valued to this day, of “modern” Hong Kong and its people.[2] The point of reference is Hong Kong society in the 1960s, which was remarkably open to the popular cultural products of the capitalist West so we could copy and “invent” our own. It was apparently a “translation” of culture that went beyond the verbal, and the result was arguably our transformation into a “culture of translation”.[3] My thesis is that this culture of translation is self-fashioning, and revealing not only in the epical sense, but more importantly, of our current p [1] See Eva Hung and David Pollard, “Chinese Tradition’ in Mona Baker (ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies (New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 365-376. [2] Matthew Turner, “60s/90s: Dissolving the People” in Pun Ngai and Yee Lai-man (ed.), Narrating Hong Kong Culture and Identity (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 2003). The essay first appeared in the collage book Hong Kong Sixties Designing Identity published by the Hong Kong Arts Centre in 1995. It has been widely quoted since by renowned scholars, such as Rey Chow in The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), pp. 84-94; and Leo Lee Ou-fan in “Postscript: Hong Kong – a reflective overview” for the Special Issue of Postcolonial Studies (Vol. 10, No. 4, 2007) on the 10th anniversary of Hong Kong’s handover, p. 500. [3] Ibid., p. 35.