In the Mood for Love (花樣年華)
By Charmaine Yu
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Set in 1962 British Hong Kong, Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love (2000) follows
Mr. Chow and Mrs. Su who rent rooms in adjacent apartments. Despite both being married to their respective spouses, the two neighbours share a mutual knowledge that their partners have begun an affair with each other. Left alone for long periods of time due to their spouses’ ‘overtime shifts’ and ‘business trips,’ Mr. Chow and Mrs. Su spend an increasing amount of time together. Eventually, they develop a deep affection for one another, yet, they do not allow their feelings to go any further. Through stolen glances and stifled dialogue, Wong ultimately reminds viewers that love is painful and indistinct. We were watching Wong Kar-wai on our television at home—back in Hong Kong. I still remember how it flooded our faces with bluish tones in the dark, our figures already flickering like ghosts. We sat and watched the screen in a bubble-wrapped limbo of unreality: the moment suspended in a liquid that’s gooey, or fossilized in a mausoleum where a sign reads “Look but do not touch.” As Alicia Elliot observes, there is a shared experience of “knowing you can never again re-enter the time and space you left, knowing you have lost access to that possible future forever, knowing your home will change without you, knowing you will change without your home.” With each passing moment, the warm neon signs on Nathan Road gradually shift to garish LED lights. I suppose the fantastical fluorescents that wash over your retinas, etherizing the worries behind them, would eventually be driven out by something cheaper, quicker, and easier. I suppose the old walk-up buildings that have housed the dreamers of the city for decades will all become demolished and replaced with banks and condos with a skyline view. I suppose one day I’ll look into the mirror and spot pools of wrinkles on my forehead, each one embedded and intertwined with memory and time. Memories and times that were lived away from home. In Cantonese, “我想你” means I miss you. However, the word “想,” which in this context would mean “miss,” can also mean “think” or “want”. I miss you. I think of you. I want you. It’s true that missing something does require a combination of thinking about it and wanting it. Despite the aching that comes with the act of missing, the possibility of only thinking of home without wanting it anymore leaves an unexpected gaping feeling in the chest—like running down the stairs only to miss a step and have the breath knocked out of you as your spine receives the shock of each descending bump. What will become of me if I begin to think of home more than I want home? Can I still call it home if I no longer feel a twinge in the heart every time I say its name? Will I still be the same person if I finally make peace with what is lost? As soft rain mumbles in the distance of the night, Mr. Chow admits that he couldn’t quite pinpoint the moment he fell in love with Mrs. Su. “Feelings can creep up just like that” he confessed, with his face hung low and half-hidden in shadow. These feelings of love do, in fact, creep up in the most unassuming moments—a candle that burns the same scent of vanilla as the mall you’d frequent as a child, putting on a sweater that you haven’t worn since you were sixteen, or sitting on a new couch in the small hours of midnight as you watched Wong Kar-wai compose his love letter to Hong Kong. Now I watch Wong Kar-wai on the television here—here in Toronto. Similar to how Jessica Johns recalls her experience of moving away from home, “I feel the sad for hours before I can cry. Like I left a part of myself behind the dreams. I feel split in two, severed, alone.” I let myself be hypnotized by the kaleidoscope of colours projected on the screen as it flashed back to the vertigo pulse and the candy chroma; the zig-zag streets and the boat ship orchestra. Concentrating on the sounds that the big black box gives to me—the cicadas crying below the banyan trees or the distant chatters among the tetris-ing traffic—I could pretend that I’m still that girl who ran across the asphalt ground through the sticky summer heat, struck in awe by the intense privilege yet profound sadness of it all. Leaving his estranged wife and taking a job in Singapore, Mr. Chow, voice strained with anxiety as if the stitches that were holding everything together were slowly unravelling at its seams, asks Mrs. Su if she would want to leave the city with him. She agrees, but for reasons not explicitly known, she does not make the flight when the day comes. In Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood, the childhood friend of the narrator pleads “I want you always to remember me. Will you remember that I existed and that I stood next to you here like this?”. How strange it is that the existence of the city you call home, and in many ways is like a childhood friend, doesn’t cease to continue without your presence. The footsteps made in the soil by the tattered high-tops you refused to throw out throughout high school have faded into nothingness, the bauhinias planted in the garden where you’ve embarked on the greatest detective adventures have wilted, and the names that you and your friends graffitied by the harbour as a pathetic attempt of permanence have already been painted over. “This is not the same neighbourhood I left all those years ago. Time passes and spaces change, whether you’re there to witness it or not,” Elliot mourns. The evidence of you in the city washes away as the tides erode the cliffs. Three years later, back in Hong Kong, Su visits her former neighbour who is just about to emigrate to the U.S. and decides to rent their newly vacant room. Secretly curious about the whereabouts of Mr. Chow, Su asks who is living in the adjacent apartment. She fights back watering eyes as she is told that an unknown family lives there. Not long later, Chow also visits his former landlord, whom he does not realize has already emigrated. He asks about the family next door, and the new owner tells him that a woman and her son are now living there—unaware that it is Mrs. Su. As he leaves the old walk-up building that witnessed the very genesis of their blossoming romance, he lingers in front of the neighbouring door, seemingly deciding whether or not to knock. He does not. He walks away. The screen projects the tagline, “That era has passed, nothing that belongs to it exists anymore,” against a black background. It sounds a lot more poetic in its original Chinese form; things tend to get lost in translation. Wong Kar-wai on my television—I watched while well aware that these optic enigmas live only inside the 42-inch glass. Just a squishy button and a gentle press would empty the canvas to a static screen. And, I wouldn’t be able to do anything but watch as the colours collapse at my feet. It was nearing three in the morning, but I didn’t dare to peel my eyes away, afraid I’d forget everything. Forget how the streets by the Mid-Level escalators always smelled of chamomile tea, forget how the tides of Victoria Harbour rose and fell like soft breath; forget how the skyscrapers in Admiralty would glow blue and silver against the starless night. When Murakami’s protagonist recounts his memories as a young adult, he laments, “Writing from memory like this, I often feel a pang of dread. What if I've forgotten the most important thing? What if somewhere inside me there is a dark limbo where all the truly important memories are heaped and slowly turning into mud?”. So, I wrestled against my reddening eyes and let the colours sink in like rice paper and watercolours until the soft bustling of streetcars and office-goers told me that it was time to go to sleep. While dining with a friend, Chow explains that in older times, when a person had a secret, they could go atop a mountain, make a hollow in a tree, and whisper into it before covering it with mud. At the end of the film, Chow visits Angkor Wat in Cambodia. He walks up to the ancient walls and raises his lips. A beat passes. Finally, he whispers a secret unknown to the viewers. He plugs it with mud and the film fades to black as we watch his shrinking figure disappear—his gait a little lighter from what he has surrendered. The final tagline reads “He remembers those vanished years. As though looking through a dusty window pane, the past is something he could see, but not touch. And everything he sees is blurred and indistinct.” I remember how I stared at the screen with glassy eyes, re-reading and re-reading the final sentence, refusing to believe the end was here. Yet, if there’s anything I’ve learned in my time away from home, it’s that endings tend to sneak up on you—one day you’re in one city and suddenly you’re in another; one day you’re surrounded by childhood friends and the next you’re sitting with people you don’t know the last names of. Closure is a luxury that not everybody is lucky enough to be awarded. When Toronto’s spring had silently crept into the once-frosted air, I would find myself in the shade of a tree on campus. Hung above me would be a canopy of leaves on Spadina and College, cascading filtered spots of sunshine on my skin as they sang their rustling symphony. Murakami’s protagonist confesses to his childhood friend, “I miss you terribly sometimes, but in general, I go on living with all the energy I can muster.” Every day, he gets up, brushes his teeth, eats breakfast, changes his clothes, and arrives at the university telling himself, “OK, let's make this day another good one.” With the heartache that he feels for his friend, I realized that I, too, felt very much the same for the city I call home. Every day, I got up, brushed my teeth, ate breakfast, changed my clothes, and arrived at university despite this inarticulate yet lingering depth of vagrancy. I looked up at the tree that held me in its gentle shadow and felt the urge to make a hollow in its trunk to put down the things that keep me up at night. But I did not, knowing that while I could surrender the secret from my lips, I was not so sure I could find the strength to seal it away forever. Instead, I just thought of the possible things I would say. Serenaded by the sounds of this city, I let my eyes unfocus from the space around me—and everything began to bleed into something blurred and indistinct. 完。  Charmaine Yu is currently an undergraduate student at the University of Toronto studying
English and Political Science. She is a member of Trinity College’s BIPOC Writing circle, an associate editor at the Trinity Review, and recently received a mentorship grant from the Writers’ Union of Canada. Canadian-born but Hong Kong-raised, she enjoys exploring themes of multiculturalism, nostalgia, and life in the city. |