Meera Vijayann talks with NER contributor May-lee Chai about her essay “Hong Kong, Mon Amour” from issue 45.4’s special feature “Chungking Express at 30: Rewatching Wong Kar Wai.”
Meera Vijayann: In your essay “Hong Kong, Mon Amour” you write about what you call the “impossible conundrum”—how people are constantly trying to escape one idea of home and belonging for another. You traveled to Hong Kong to escape American racism at a time when people in Hong Kong were emigrating in droves to escape Chinese authoritarianism. A lot of immigrants are forced to make these difficult choices. What compelled you to examine this complexity after so many years?
May-lee Chai: Frankly speaking, I am often still thinking about where is home. San Francisco is the closest to “home” I’ve ever felt, but the waves of anti-Asian violence and Sinophobic rhetoric of the COVID era made me once again question whether any place in the US can truly feel safe and “home-like.” During this period, I had to report eleven hate incidents that I experienced to StopAAPIHate, an organization cofounded by one of my colleagues at San Francisco State to keep track of anti-Asian incidents and crimes. It’s been rough because so many politicians are actively using hate speech and xenophobic tropes, including the current President.
MV: You meticulously wove undertones of class into “Hong Kong, Mon Amour.” You write about how people in Hong Kong were impeccably groomed and fashion-forward and had more economic resources, and how this influenced your sense of self. As a result, you decide to spend money on an expensive haircut. Talk to us about the symbolism of that moment—
MLC: What was interesting for me to witness was how stylish Hong Kong people were regardless of class! In those days, Hong Kong was the center of a lot of global clothing manufacturing. Many companies outsourced work to Hong Kong-based sewing factories, so the local population had access to the world’s fashions in advance and at a cheap cost (before the markup). So Hong Kong people looked very, very fashionable!
In terms of my decision to spend money on myself—the expensive haircut in the fancy hotel—I wanted to invest in myself. I’d learned to put myself last. I’d been bullied in school after my family moved to a racist, white supremacist community in South Dakota when I was twelve. I was told I was “freakish-looking,” and it was exhausting to hear this on a daily basis. Plus, no one in those small Midwestern towns could cut my hair. Beauty was hard to attain. But by the end of my sojourn in Hong Kong, I saw the possibility of having pride in my Chinese appearance, and I decided it was worth the investment to let this skilled woman work her magic on my hair.
MV: And lastly, there is grief. It’s almost as if watching Wong Kar Wai’s Chungking Express in San Francisco allowed you to come full circle and find closure in your identity. Why does his work speak to you?
MLC: Wong Kar Wai’s Chungking Express has two interesting contrasting portraits of women in Hong Kong: Faye Wong’s food stand clerk and Brigitte Lin’s smuggler. Neither of them represent me or my life experiences per se, but they’re so cool and imaginatively rendered, and the actresses are so charismatic. Because the physical setting and time period dovetail with my time in Hong Kong, the film evoked strong emotions and memories that were at first very hard for me to name. The grief that you mention is there, too—for youth and for Hong Kong in that particular moment, which has passed. We can’t ever return to that moment, except in memory . . . and in this film.
MV: What are you reading now? Which writers have influenced your work?
MLC: Every writer I’ve ever read has influenced me in one way or another! It’s hard to pick just one or two. In writing this essay, I was thinking about Ding Ling, a Chinese woman writer who rose to fame in the 1920s and 1930s whose work I first read in college, just before I went to Hong Kong. Her most well known work is a novella, Miss Sophia’s Diary, about a young woman who goes to Beijing to find herself. She takes on this non-Chinese name inspired by a Russian revolutionary. She writes about her daily activities and her relationships. That’s the plot of the whole novella. Ding Ling was an early feminist writer and was very popular, but then later she was imprisoned and tortured during the Cultural Revolution because of her feminist critiques of patriarchy under Mao.
I was also thinking of Marguerite Duras, whose novels I discovered in college, who often wrote about women with complicated identities who are trying to find themselves and make sense of their own history. For example, in her novel The Lover and her screenplay for Hiroshima Mon Amour, Duras’s characters are grappling with the personal repercussions of larger political violence—the French colonization of Vietnam and Cambodia, and the Nazi occupation of France and the atomic bombing of Japan by the United States, respectively. Duras makes these themes intimate and personal but never didactic. She’s an exquisite writer.
As for a writer I’m reading right now, again there are so many! One example: I am teaching V. V. Ganeshananthan’s Brotherless Night in my MFA seminar this semester. It’s a historical novel set during the Sri Lankan civil war, and it shows how women must come together to keep a record of the war as a form of accountability as atrocities accumulate. It’s a feminist novel with unforgettable characters—a love story, a war story. I can’t stop thinking about it. And I think its themes, in particular the reverberations of political violence over time, are only too relevant right now.
May-lee Chai is the author of eleven books of fiction, nonfiction, and translation, including her short story collections Tomorrow in Shanghai (Blair, 2022), a New York Times Editor’s Choice, and Useful Phrases for Immigrants (Blair, 2018), recipient of an American Book Award. She teaches in the MFA program in creative writing at San Francisco State University. Her writing has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and an Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, been named a Kiriyama Prize Notable Book, and been the recipient of an honorable mention from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights Book Awards.
Meera Vijayann, a nonfiction reader for NER, is an essayist and writer based in Seattle, Washington. She is currently working on her debut novel.
Photo of May-lee Chai courtesy of Bob Hsiang Photography