In college, I took an elective course on a whim to fill time called “human interface design”. The class was unrelated to my degree of study, and was barely even relevant to me in any way, but the serendipity of this whim gave me what turned into my very favorite experience at school. The course covered how every-day products are designed, and how material goods are inherently shaped by their makers. Key examples like the refrigerator and automobile were used as chapter headings, but there were countless fascinating examples of how we design things to best fit their users. The primary tenant of these principles is tradition - the first car maker made their vehicle look one way, so all future cars look the same. There is no fundamental reason that the automobile even needs to be shaped how it is, they were only copying what they knew in the horse-drawn carriage. The earliest cars even had wooden horseheads on the front, just to draw subconscious similarities. Modern electric cars still feature front grilles, a feature that is entirely non-functional. We organize and maintain these objects internally, grouping them together simply because they feel the same, not caring at all if the feel is important from a practical standpoint. The same is true in virtual design (surely we have moved past the need for a floppy disk icon representing save?). The same principles are true in film, in which we feel the need to follow a standard way of creation that only exists because the last person did it. A narrative, a set of characters, beginnings, ends and middles, these are what film is.
Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-Wai challenges this notion - rather than continue to define the medium by its predecessor, his catalog is full of works that are confusingly discordant. Multiple distinct storylines, non-continuous timelines and the use of his setting in a way that behaves more like a character than the actors themselves personify his work, a collection of films that singlehandedly created modern Hong Kong cinema. My favorite of these is his 1994 film Chungking Express, a film that looks at two citizens and how the environment of Hong Kong moves them through life. The narratives are never entirely isolated, touching each other in ways that are never outwardly obvious, and moving through time in non-traditional, circuitous fashion. The film is undeniably gorgeous, promoting the grimy glamour of Hong Kong in the 90s, but it is even more impactful from a narrative standpoint. Chungking Express serves as a perfect representation of a nation in question, and of a people in constant uncertainty, a love letter to the nation that Wong calls home. Through time, through space, and through the self - fundamental tenants of reality - this film gives insight beyond the interface. We are thrown head-first into the details, the textures, and the unmistakable singularity of the fingerprint of Hong Kong, through a lens that only Wong Kar-Wai can pilot. I will walk through those layers one-by-one, exploring just how closely connected this film is to the story of an entire nation, and to the souls of all within it.
Collective Anxiety
Hong Kong in the 1990s was a place of immeasurable stress. The complex and winding history of the East Asian nation is far, far too convoluted for any reasonable dedication in this medium, but the basics are enough to begin to convey. Originally a colony under British rule following the Opium Wars in the 1840s, the region grew quickly under the capitalist economic systems of the west. The current expansion of Hong Kong began to be recognizable in 1898, the year in which the United Kingdom established a 99-year “lease” on the territory - a length of time that was essentially endless for anyone at the time. No one at the signing of the lease would be around to see its ending, and they could never possibly imagine just how different the world would be by then. Skyscrapers, automobiles, electronic banking and the overwhelming enclosure of society by the internet were not even dreams in the eyes of 19th century Hong Kongers, but are hallmarks of what is now one of the world’s biggest and most modern cities today.
As the end of the lease approached, 1997 became a looming date on the calendar. Anxiety and uncertainty, so much uncertainty, tainted every single aspect of daily life. In a moment, Hong Kong would be transferred from English dominion back to the hands of China, a nation that has experienced just as much growth and change as its island-bound subjects it would soon govern. It is hard to imagine just how alien this life was - knowing that soon, closer every day, every single thing around you would change, is just mind-blowing. The administrative, simple changes began to take shape early on - the adoption of a flag, the renaming of any reference to “Royal” or “Kingdom” into more Chinese-influenced structures, and the slow migration of more and more Chinese government officials were easy enough to adapt to. The anxiety came about in a much more subtle way, the subconscious worry about political structures and elections, the complete unknown of how two economies that could not be more different would merge, and the silent but important distancing from the west that Hong Kong would undertake, these things were on the mind of every citizen in 1990s Hong Kong.
This anxiety, this waiting, is crystallized perfectly by Wong Kar-Wai in a number of his films, but none better than Chungking Express. The film is broken up into two distinct anthologies, the first of which follows police officer He Qiwu. His girlfriend, May, breaks up with him in April, but he just can’t quite accept it yet. Every day, like clockwork, he goes to a convenience store to buy canned pineapples, not finalizing his purchases until he finds a can that expires on May 1st, celebrating both her name, and He Qiwu’s birthday. When that long-awaited date comes, if May has not returned, he will accept her earnestness in leaving. At the start of this mission, May 1st might as well be the year 3000 - an entire month full of days, full of hours and minutes and seconds, all stained with waiting. May 1st may never come for all we know, but his entire life is centered around this date. Things around him continue to be unstable, his job, the city itself, but he can only focus on May 1st. Like the lease of Hong Kong, the end comes closer than we realize, even as it stares us in the face. Throughout this waiting, this remarkably fast and begrudgingly slow waiting, it is clear that she is not coming back. Still, He Qiwu persists - he must prepare, it is almost in his DNA to follow this contract. Day after day, he buys pineapples, never losing sight of the end and how he can be ready for it.
Metaphor is a tricky mistress to seduce, and creating an understanding through self-realization is not as easily done as it is said. Wong might be the very best at it. On May 1st, He Qiwu finally wakes up at the end of his metaphorical lease, ready to hand himself over to the next chapter, the chapter without May. Of course, he can’t escape her entirely - he has built his entire life in one short month as a shrine to her return. He opens, one by one, all thirty cans of pineapple, and eats every single piece. He Qiwu fights sickness and sadness over the rest of his brief time on screen, and the visuals of Wong Kar-Wai begin to overtake the clear macroscopic narrative. Shaky cameras, close encounters and strange flashbacks color a kaleidoscopic life, making it entirely unclear what, or when, we are. Stumbling through a neon city as the blurriness of food poisoning takes hold, Wong makes sure we feel just as unstable as the society around us. He Qiwu, in so many ways, is Hong Kong - even today, existing as a Chinese administrative region, the marks of the past can never be removed. The architecture of anachronism characterizes a remarkably beautiful city, never showing clearly if they are at the forefront of the 2000s or silently homaging the ways of the ancients. Their transition was meant as a full handover, a full return to a society that is as stark a contrast from the only known way of life, yet both remain in conflict. A Chinese city, operating in a Western capitalist system, schools that fight between Mandarin in English as their primary language of teaching, and a people that are being pulled by it all - this is Hong Kong. All this waiting, all this anxiety for the moment, it never goes away in an instant. We wait, and wait, and wait, all for the day. For May 1st, for 1997, and when it comes, we expect catharsis. Instead, seemingly forever, what remains is only that turbulent anxiety of change.
Spatial Rend
As much as Hong Kong is characterized by the winding thread of time, it might be known even better for the encapsulating formation of space. Best personified by places like the Kowloon Walled City, an almost dystopian place of unfathomable density, the entirety of Hong Kong is just remarkably tightly packed. Proximity defines the film itself, in which the close encounters of strangers and friends are the motive beats of life’s story. So often in this film, characters pass within fractions of centimeters of one another. This space is not meant as an entry for conflict or even claustrophobia - it is the opening to a world of possibility. Meeting a lover by bumping into them, finding an old friend in a crowded market or finding yourself through a sliver of reflection in a sea of televisions, this is what closeness can do. Chungking Express emphasizes this in a way that no other film does, showing how Hong Kong, singularly and uniquely, fosters the human connection through space.
There is no stronger catalyst for this space than love, the central emotion of so many films. We are hard-coded to find love in people, to find love in our surroundings and the things that make us who we are. Hong Kong is, if nothing else, a city of love - this closeness means that everyone and everything are swimming the urban pond of possibility every day and every night, ready for the roll of the dice. We see this closeness in ways both physical and visual, as Wong expertly peers into cramped hallways and through skewed windows. We never see our characters in full frame, only through the openings that the city allows. The geometry shapes how we watch, and shapes the love that can form only out of this natural oddity. He Qiwu in our first story shares this love in ways we are familiar with - the love of material goods and architecture, the love of a lost partner, and new love in a chance encounter. He approaches a blonde woman at a bar, a woman that brushed by him just nights ago as she escaped a drug-trafficking mission gone sour, not knowing just how close their paths intersected. For a single night, they brushed within a centimeter of one another, and life has brought their arcs into tangent once again. They spend the night together, sharing take-out food, shoe shine and stories, before she leaves early in the morning. We see her shoot and kill the drug baron who set her up, just as He Qiwu gets a message on his pager - “May 1st. Happy Birthday”.
Their paths might never cross again, we don’t know, but they did on the two nights we get to see. These encounters, these brushes with destiny, are part of the central mindset of Hong Kong. We are set on our path, one that is winding and wayward, bound to bump into the arcs of so many others. Our friends, our partners, our loved ones and enemies, where we live and go to school, these are never set on undisturbed routes. The bumpers of life push and pull us into new opportunities that shape who we are and what we are meant to be, sending us into directions we never knew existed. We met He Qiwu as a newly-single police officer, and watch as he gets pushed into a close encounter with the underworld of Hong Kong, a romantic one-night-stand with a woman whose name he will never know, and awkward conversations with the cashier at his favorite fast-food stall. In 1997, Hong Kong faced this same push-and-pull, being dragged through 100 years of British rule into a Chinese sunrise, experiencing the tangential approach of two cultures that sent the island group into an erratic path of orbit that is hard to nail down in any way. Of course, this liftoff is never final - Hong Kong was just writing the end of its prologue, beginning a new chapter that would only be one of many. Wong Kar-Wai, in the same way, beautifully transitions his film to show just how deep the layers go, letting his camera drift away from He Qiwu as we now follow the fast-food cashier in our second story. The transition is sudden but it is so obviously connected, irreversibly tangled in a city wrapped in the same webs of proximity.
Brains in a Jar
The second anthology of Chungking Express follows a new police officer, known to us only as Cop 663, and looks at his own versions of love and change in Hong Kong. He too has recently been broken up with, this time by a flight attendant who was always on-the-go. In a society full of coming and going, it still feels jarring for 663 to have a partner who is never home, and his loneliness is amplified night by night as he witnesses budding romances under the neon lights of the city. He is a regular at a fast food stall in Chungking Mansions, a building that serves as both the setting and namesake for the film, where he is introduced to the new cashier, Faye. Serving originally as a simple background character for He Qiwu, Faye takes center stage for 663 as the two quickly begin a remarkably strange, semi-parasocial relationship. As the flight attendant tries to return keys to 663’s apartment at the only place she can think to find him, his favorite fast-food restaurant, Faye takes them in his stead. Rather than return them to the officer, or even tell him, she begins to enter his apartment on a routine basis. The purpose is not burglary or theft, it is to simply clean. She organizes his loose belongings, ogling over the various knick-knacks and trinkets that give the space character. She wipes and cleans every surface imaginable, often being forced into hiding when he returns from work early. It takes some time for him to even notice, thinking that his loneliness and depression has led him to mania.
Naturally, Faye’s sanitizing escapades are eventually discovered - 663 walks in on her in the apartment and realizes what has been going on, but welcomes to possibility of romance. This relationship is the centerpiece of the film, but we only see the outward expression of emotion between the two for this brief moment. Every action, every line of dialogue between them, has been shrouded in the strange perception of romance. For Faye, she fully knows him, and everything about him - and why wouldn’t she? She has spent weeks in his apartment, carefully crafting the only space he can call his, all without an ounce of awareness on the part of 663. He barely even knows her name, let alone the fact that she has spent all her energy on curing his loneliness. In so many ways, we all face this challenge of identity, not just for ourselves but for how we view others. Our idea of self, of personalization is nothing but unique. No other person, no matter how close, will ever truly know us how we know ourselves. It is an identity shaped by millions of others, influenced by everything around us, but it is the only one that we can really be sure of.
The final chapter of Chungking Express is one of melancholy - 663 arranges a date with Faye, hoping to capitalize on the opportunity presented, but she never shows. In a twist of irony, she has become a flight attendant and has left Hong Kong, only leaving her former muse a napkin with a date one year from today. More waiting, more anxiety, all leading up to an ending that is far from an ending. Time passes and people change, but the moments between are what makes us whole. We see the big moments, the first dates and the goodbyes, but they are only emotional because of what surrounds them. The brushes with strangers, the views of absurdities that we will never witness again, the hustle and bustle of billions of flight paths all intersecting, this is what Wong wants us to focus on. The future is always uncertain, we can not know what will come next, but the past in its violent ways will send us cascading into a life beyond our wildest imagination. Just like the grille on the electric car, we can’t help ourselves - we have to wear the past on our sleeve, whether we like it or not, because it feels natural. Without the carriage there is no automobile, and without the past there is no us.
Hong Kong, even today, has a convoluted sense of identity - one country, two systems is the defining principle of a place truly like no other. The future of this magical place is entirely unknown, but it has become the center of intrigue purely because of its wayward journey into the 21st century. The anxiety of the handover did not end when the clock struck midnight, and the trajectory of a nation is being adjusted every single day. It is something we all experience, lives of turmoil and redirection through love, loss and identity, knowing only for sure that we have ourselves. The time and space of our lives are the very fabric of physical being, yet they penetrate into our unseeable psyche in ways that only reveal themselves long after. The careful incidental craftwork of passing conversations, of foggy sunrises and surprises rainstorms, and of precious moments that disappear as fast as they come, this is what makes us human. We may never see the stranger at the coffee shop again, never bump into the same person on the train, but these serendipitous encounters should be valued. Hong Kong has faced peril before and will face it again, but these incidental moments, the collisions of daily life, shape a world of true beauty unlike any other. There is no better setting for a story of humanity than this, one shaped entirely by incidence. Chungking Express is riddled with these small expressions of life, turning the camera down unknown paths and through an immeasurable sea of oddity, leaving us with more questions than we will ever enter with. Perhaps though, that is the point, the entire purpose for being. How can we worry about the ending, about the anticipation of the concrete, when we know it will always change? Every conversation, every encounter, they all send us in directions we never expected. We can’t possibly stop to worry or question, we are just along for the ride, on aimless routes plunging into the future with uncertainty, holding headstrong in the only way we know how - forward.