SUMMER 2022

On a black-orchid June night in Providence, I loaded Wong Kar Wai’s 1994 film Chungking Express—or as we on the Mainland coast like to say, Wáng Jiāwèi’s Chóngqìng Sēnlín—on my laptop, wanting a cleanse of sorts. Newly smoked by the fish-eyed nihilism of Fallen Angels (1995), I had been looking for a lighter-toned palette. I wanted to watch something by Wong that contained hope but that was still touched by the same powerful urban physics that sent his shadowy young people into all varieties of fates.

I had recently ended a call with my mother from overseas. Journalistically, she narrated to me how things had been hard in Shanghai. Pale sheafs of romaine coming in rotten, nighttime monsoons, outages throwing heavily peopled subways into the subterranean black, radiation therapy eating all the moisture from her mouth. Freedom wore a volatile sheen as COVID policies loosened on twenty-five million holed-up people.

I wondered what it looked like, the Shanghai Wong emigrated from, the British Hong Kong he shored up on in the mid-1960s. He escaped from what would become the decade that robbed my family’s previous generation of education. He escaped to what he mustn’t have known at the time was a city teeming with halfway people who spoke a new, forbidding vernacular. I wonder when he knew that film would be the art to lead him into the world, as if a river out to sea.

My mother asked me how I was. Wáwa ne?

I knew well enough how capable I was, an anxious daughter abroad, of bringing her grief. I did not tell her I woke up every morning crushed by the distance, kilometers in thousands, between me and the nearest person who might grieve if I died. I did not tell her I agitated over my body each time I saw my skin, that my period had thinned to nothing from the stress. I grew nauseated by water. I sobbed at the first sight of an evening sky. I whiled away hours by a window overlooking the brightest, seediest street in the city, thinking about my pulse rate, my inadequacy, my next thirty years of this life. I did not tell her my fingers came away from my thoughts mutilated.

Instead, I told her I was learning a lot from the lab where I was working over the summer. How ovarian cancer cells shape-shifted under a microscope. How to spot a primordial follicle, the earliest iteration of a human egg. I told her how, out of homesickness, I had taken to remaking the dishes of my younger life each night. Chili pork stir-fry, bah kut teh, eight-treasure rice pudding, each one more disfigured than the last, due to how few of these ingredients I could find at a Stop & Shop. I told her, there’s this handsome guy at school, we talked for eight hours one night and I’m about to watch this movie from a director he likes. Don’t worry, mā, I’m fine in a foreign country by myself. For eighteen months. I love you. Hanging up now. Bāi-bāi.

Distressed strings surfed up in bass behind moving shots of Hong Kong’s architectural clutter. I found Chungking Express much unlike Fallen Angels, where lazy percussion swung completely devoid of melody. We begin in the dark, I put in my notes, harder still to see every next thing. 

I found the bifurcated narrative awkward, the major characters confusing, and Wong’s storytelling too wistful. I hopped on Letterboxd and rated the film three and a half stars.

SUMMER 2023

As part of the weekly arthouse ritual Minh invented for the break, we will watch Chungking Express tonight. Minh of the eight-hour calls, who has a beautiful name and a darkroom for a brain. Into his eyes, roomy like an otter’s, you can almost spy film developing. We eat a meal of imperfectly nostalgic recipes, and over bowls of congee we consider, not for the first time, what we’d name a pet or a first child. Juno. Beckett. Oscar. He loves it when a language puts the surname first, like Wong Kar Wai or Tarr Béla. The fridge is joyful with aging fruits, tubs of honeyed Greek yogurt, and sealed aromatics brought from the Asian store a half-hour RIPTA ride away.

I save news of remission from home that came four months ago and turn it over in my mouth like a lozenge, willing it not to dissolve. Over a WeChat call that day, my mother fastened red thread around my father’s wrist and brought the phone close to show me the golden rabbit charm—for it is finally our year, the Year of the Rabbit. I once willed my skin to turn to jade and my bones to cinnabar. Cinnabar belongs to a class of oxidized mercury ores, the stuff the ancient Chinese ate looking for immortality. Since then, I have learned to seek out lesser things that are no less rare.

We lie down in bed. Between us, 1990s Hong Kong emerges amid a turbulent symphony I only half recollect. He Qiwu (Cop 223, played by Kaneshiro Takeshi) chases crime in a smear of motion. Minh, the WKW buff, says the Woman in Blonde Wig (Brigitte Lin/Lin Ching-hsia) is supposed to be a gender-bend of the Fallen Angels hitman, Wong Chi-Ming (Leon Lai/Lai Ming). People like to point out tonal differences between Wong Kar Wai’s films, he says, but they’re all reiterations of one another. This self-contained universe is populated by the same recursive tropes: young people who play fast and loose with their lives, who deliberately put themselves in uncertainty as if looking for deliverance. For Wong Chi-Ming of Fallen Angels, or Yuddy (Leslie Cheung/Cheung Kwok-wing) of Days of Being Wild, or Wah (Andy Lau/Lau Tak-wah) of As Tears Go By, deliverance looks like death. But deliverance could also be absolution. Love. Permission to look a thing—a tumor, a distended stomach, a lover—in the eye, and let the noise in your heart just be.

We watch Cop 663 (Tony Leung/Leung Chiu-wai) land toy airplanes on the Air Hostess’s (Valerie Chow/Chow Kar-ling) backside after they have sex. A little later, Faye (Wong Fei) ushers in doleful riffs that blow cool colors over the rest of the film. She runs the food stall that 663 frequents, commanding the surrounding linoleum tones. An intricate, meager world, but entirely hers.

As an emigrant, maybe Wong fixated not on any one city, but on the helpless dynamism of any city that is confronted with time. As if the place itself is a living thing, responsive to rainy seasons, politicians, and the earliest signs of air after an ancient lockdown, just as much as a person is responsive to a question. The only worlds, it seems, are those that closely surround us: a food stall’s tiling at dusk, plastic hangings and plants in a washroom, the thick glow by a bar.

Feels like all the young people are entangled in this anonymity, is what Minh says. 

But even if you’re stricken by something or you’re nothing at all, you still have the power to make what’s around you your own, is what I realize. Even if it’s just pavement or air. 

It feels like I’ve somehow stolen into the film’s sanctum and fingered its heartstrings as one would a harp. I smell Minh’s skin beside me. Fond thoughts fill my head as Faye breaks into 663’s home. In her pink cleaning gloves, she gets to know him like a call coming from inside the house. Her voice trills like in that old song of hers my mother and I loved about brainseas and heartfields. I miss my family. I miss the me they made. The feeling sustains across 7,346 miles and twenty years, bigger than any empire at any point in history.

A few months ago, Minh likened us to butter clarified on a warm pan surface. My fascination with Achilles and Patroclus brought me to the idea that the highest form of love is to fuse so far that you become each other. I think of Neruda’s seventeenth love sonnet, about one person’s eyes closing with the other person’s dreams. I remember folding Minh’s briefs in his dorm for the first time when he was downstairs throwing out the trash, turning them right side out, feeling as if I was every woman in his life, surrounding him so much I could be within him.

Every time Faye breaks into 663’s rooms, repopulating his aquarium, wringing out his rags, she’s shouldering through his veins into the rear chambers of his heart. The insides of a love purely hers, even if the love prefers, even just for now, to remain anonymous.

We close the film that took a year and ninety minutes to make a home in my heart, the film that taught me to be puzzled, unafraid, and wanting all that is deserved. Our eighth-floor window looks out into a little American city, dark and deep. Minh gets up to rummage in the fridge light. I’m laughing in reply to something he’s said. ■

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